Gramsci's Revolutions: Passive and Permanent

Abstract

Antonio Gramsci's notion of “passive revolution” has often been understood as a distinctive historical narrative, political concept, or theory of state formation. This article proposes to consider it instead as a “heuristic formula” within the “lexical architecture” of the Prison Notebooks. Based upon a diachronic and contextualist analysis of the usage of the formula, I argue that Gramsci's research on passive revolution emerged as a critical element within the development of his own distinctive conception of the “sublation” and “actualization” of the slogan of “the revolution in permanence.” Attending to this dialectical relationship allows the political and strategic dimensions of passive revolution to be highlighted, and suggests new paths of research for the debate about its analytic fertility and contemporary relevance.

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“…O conceito também tem sido utilizado em escala internacional para a leitura de fenômenos sociais e políticos contemporâneos (cf. Del Roio, 2014Roberts, 2018;Roccu, 2017;Thomas, 2018) 1 . A formulação original do conceito de revolução passiva por Gramsci vincula-se à análise dos processos de formação dos Estados nacionais europeus como reação à Revolução Francesa e ao seu caráter nacional-popular (Q.…”

Gramsci, the Relativity of the Integral State-Society, and the COVID-19 Interregnum

“… 4. Gramsci used this term (of Cuoco) in 27 notes written between late 1930 and early 1935 (Thomas, 2020: 117). But he himself stretched the concept three times (see Callinicos, 2010: 59; Gramsci, 1971: 109, 2007: 252). …”