Passive revolution: A contested concept and a research agenda

By drawing on the conceptual discussions and comparative case studies offered in this volume of Critical Sociology, I will argue that the concept passive revolution is analytically fruitful due to its unique power to capture cases where revolution and restoration are thoroughly entangled. In such cases, the cadres, discourses, policy platforms, and grassroots organizations of popular classes are unevenly absorbed into the existing order. A molecular transformation results from such absorption.

The case studies in this volume clearly show the utility of the concept. Even though there are other legitimate and productive uses of the term, the contributors to this volume study passive revolution as a path distinct from revolution and counter-revolution. The authors diverge on a number of topics, ranging from the role of popular initiative, civil society, and the state in passive revolutions to the hegemonic or non-hegemonic character of the regimes that result from them. Rather than a sign of confusion, I take these disagreements as a solid indicator of the concept’s productivity.

A research program’s strength is measured not by its potential to enforce consensus around a single “truth,” but its power to generate disagreement and debate around new and unexpected findings, which nevertheless reinforce some basic assumptions about how the world works. The divergences between Newman’s, Levenson and Paret’s, and Edwards’ accounts of passive revolutions demonstrate the robustness of the Gramscian paradigm exactly in this way. I also resort to criticisms of the concept by Callinicos (2010), Goodwin (2025), and Harris (this volume) to further underline the strength of the paradigm.

Scholars have debated whether the lack of popular initiative, an exclusive reliance on war of position, and the resulting lack of hegemony are necessary elements of passive revolutions. As we will shortly see, the nature of these debates has led other scholars to question the utility of the concept itself. They also have important implications for broader theories of social change.

Gramsci adopted the concept of passive revolution from Italian thinker Cuoco (Riley and Desai, 2007) and further refined it using Quinet’s formula of revolution-restoration. Sotiris (2022: 17–18) emphasizes that Gramsci self-consciously modified both Cuoco’s and Quinet’s arguments. Cuoco’s original definition of the term appeared to imply lack of popular initiative. There are also several Gramsci passages that emphasize the lack of popular initiative in passive revolutions. Among others, Bieler and Morton (2018) argue that the lack of popular mobilization is indeed a necessary part of passive revolutions. However, as Gramsci refined the term throughout his writings, he integrated popular, revolutionary elements into his redefinition of passive revolution (Sotiris, 2022: 17–18). These new elements also opened the possibility of hegemony arising from a passive revolution. Building on these precedents, Levenson and Paret argue in this volume of Critical Sociology that working-class resistance is a core part of passive revolution (also see Paret, 2022). They criticize a body of work that defines the demobilization of the masses as a core part of the concept.

Another unresolved issue is the relationship between passive revolution, war of position, and civil society. Levenson and Paret take passive revolution and war of position as necessarily linked. They also posit a strong overlap between these and civil society. However, Gramsci was ambiguous and tentative on both fronts. The equivalence he seems to set up between war of position and passive revolution is open to interpretation (e.g., see Sotiris, 2022: 10–11). One of his most classical passages on the topic poses the identification between war of position and passive revolution as a question, and seems to imply that this is a historical possibility, rather than a logical necessity (Gramsci, 1971: 108: Q15, §11). Gramsci also documents many instances where the state leads the process of absorption, even if with ample assistance from civil society.1

On top of these ambiguities, passive revolution has a troubled relationship with Gramsci’s master concept: hegemony. On this issue, there are significant disagreements among contributors to this volume. Edwards, for instance, holds that the result of passive revolution is weak hegemony. Levenson and Paret, by contrast, insist that “For Gramsci, passive revolution is a hegemonic form of politics.”

One way out of these bottlenecks is to avoid rigid definitions or formulations altogether, as Sotiris (2022) and Thomas (2020) suggest. Yet, this stance risks reproducing the suspicions of many scholars regarding the concept. The inconclusive nature of Gramscian debates have led some scholars to argue against the concept itself. In a recent essay, Goodwin (2025) objects to the use of the term, finding it too expansive: There are many cases of containment of mass mobilization through reforms, ranging from numerous 19th century European cases to the New Deal and the American 1960s. Are these all passive revolutions? Doesn’t a concept applied to so many eras lose its purchase?

Callinicos (2010) has more comprehensive, if friendly, suspicions regarding the term. He points out that the overstretch started with Gramsci himself. In his earlier notebooks, Gramsci used the concept to analyze the non-violent and non-abrupt European transformations from feudalism to capitalism. But in later notebooks, he used it to study the maintenance of capitalist domination. Callinicos finds the latter usage less useful. Goodwin similarly accuses Marxists of overstretching Gramsci. According to Goodwin, Gramsci used the concept passive revolution productively only in reference to a long-term, non-revolutionary consolidation of capitalism and elimination of feudal vestiges, but later Gramscians lost this focus.

Callinicos’ suspicions turn into more pointed refutations when it comes to the applications of passive revolution to the postwar era and the late 20th century. He holds that scholars’ study of the Mexican transition to neoliberalism along with the alleged transition from socialism to capitalism in Russia, China, and Poland as passive revolutions entirely miss the mark. In the Mexican transition to neoliberalism, there is no revolutionary threat from below which was absorbed. In the Russian, Chinese and Polish cases, threats from below did not lead to progressive social transformation either. In contrast to these, India’s postwar state capitalism could indeed be studied as a case of passive revolution, but the more prevalent Gramscian studies of India obscure the role of material relations and resort to a version of Gramsci that has hardly any relationship with Marx.

Like Callinicos, Kevan Harris (this volume) argues that the concept of passive revolution could only be used in a restricted way. It is useful as a middle-range concept. But when it tries to account for macro-transformation—more specifically, whether capitalism is blocked or spurred by absorption of popular energies—the concept gets stuck. This is because capitalist development depends not primarily on internal political mechanisms, but more on a polity’s structural place in the world system. I agree with this argument’s emphasis on world-systemic dynamics, as I will further explain in the penultimate section of this piece. However, Harris’ specific framing of the usefulness of the concept risks reducing it to a technical term, akin to (as Harris himself explicates) cooptation and corporatism. Even though like Harris I resort to Arrighi to resolve some of the problems with the concept of passive revolution, I call for a reformulation of its macro-oriented ambitions rather than locking it to the middle range. Unlike the other middle-range concepts Harris lumps passive revolution with, the Gramscian concept is inextricably linked to the question of hegemony, which is, in turn, inseparable from capitalism and anti-capitalism. Nevertheless, Harris is on target when he insists that capitalism and anti-capitalism cannot be severed from their global contexts.

The articles in this volume of Critical Sociology, when read in light of other classical cases of revolution and passive revolution, resolve the difficulties discussed by Callinicos, Goodwin, and Harris. Both Gramsci and the case studies in this volume treat passive revolution as an integration of revolution and counter-revolution, rather than an in-between state, or as an exclusively counter-revolutionary process (as in Goodwin’s rendering of the South African transition). Treating passive revolution as an in-between state would imply a situation where there is no real revolutionary process. An “integration,” by contrast, implies that there was an authentic revolutionary upheaval, but its tools, cadres, and discourse were contradictorily combined with a restoration of existing structures.

Even in his discussion of feudal decline, Gramsci used the concept passive revolution to draw attention to the preservation of privilege, in a transformed way. From 1815 onwards, including transitions to both capitalism and socialism, Gramsci discusses passive revolution as an uneven combination of revolution and counter-revolution. He is at his most creative when he tangentially discusses fascism and Stalinism, but these parts of his analysis are also admittedly the ones hardest to decipher, although there is a sizeable secondary literature on this. For instance, Gramsci used the concept to make sense of fascism’s counter-revolutionary deployment of revolutionary productive techniques (Sotiris, 2022: 8–9; also see Roccu, 2017; Thomas, 2009). Even though Gramsci couldn’t explicitly make this point due to political circumstances, he seems to have perceived Stalinism’s particular brand of socialization as a passive revolution too (Sotiris, 2022; also see Antonini, 2021). Another possibility is that Gramscians are overinterpreting these evasive passages, which were never meant to be published. However, the real issue is not whether Gramscians are loyal to Gramsci—they don’t have to be. Regardless, Goodwin’s and Callinicos’ point regarding overstretch is a serious one Gramscians must confront. Even if fascism, Stalinism, postcolonial maintenance of capitalism, or transitions to neoliberalism are discussed as passive revolutions, the definition of the term must get much more precise than it has been. The articles and the introductory essay in this volume contribute to that endeavor.

In short, emphasizing that passive revolution entails integration of revolution and counter-revolution and underlining its links to the question of hegemony help us speak to rejections and thorough restrictions of the concept. Nevertheless, as the case studies and their implications show, difficulties remain. Still, these are difficulties of a generative kind.

The case studies in this volume should not be expected to resolve all the issues, but they do contribute to the larger debate. The authors have revisited some of the cases already discussed in the literature as major cases of passive revolution (Mexico and South Africa), drawn attention to a marginalized yet extremely important and informative case (Iran), and added another case to the mix (Trinidad and Tobago). The other major cases of passive revolution (Risorgimento, Fascism, Stalinism, AKP’s Turkey, Lula’s Brazil, India) also deserve to be restudied thoroughly with the above questions in mind.

According to Newman, the Mexican passive revolution had two phases: first, peasant and worker mass mobilization during civil war, from 1910 to 1920, and peasant and worker mobilization and increasing coordination under constitutional conditions, from 1920 to 1940. During the civil war era, there were two momentous peasant insurgencies, the one in the north led by Pancho Villa, and the one in the south led by Zapata. These essentially destroyed the capacities of the aristocracy and thereby made a counter-revolutionary route impossible. The two peasant insurgencies perceived each other as temporary allies rather than a bloc. Moreover, Villa’s army lacked any programmatic direction. Zapata’s armies had a vision of agrarian radicalism, which gave them more political salience than the armies of the north, but still no durable and nationwide appeal that could mobilize urban workers.

The workers engaged in strikes. However, far from even imagining a national bloc, they were enlisted to fight the insurgencies and did not see any commonality with them. The key actor was the Constitutionalist generals of the new elite who first mobilized them against the old order as well as against the peasants. As workers radicalized and carried out a general strike in 1916, the new elite repressed them. Even though this alienated workers from the Constitutionalists, workers did not form their own political alternative. The lack of a peasant bloc and workers’ stance made a revolutionary path impossible. The only path remaining was the elites’ uneven mobilization/demobilization of popular forces and ongoing concessions to their demands: a passive revolution.

In the 1920s, during the constitutional phase of the revolution, liberal factions of the aristocracy had insufficient clout to remain in a leading position. The petty bourgeoisie rose to the occasion, first under the leadership of General Obregón. Obregón’s rise to power and his defeat of the liberal-aristocratic option was due precisely to the economic-corporate (i.e., non-political) radicalization of workers’ movements, which put the aristocracy in the defensive. To gain the initiative, Obregón sided with workers, and even deployed some Zapatista forces, dethroning the aristocracy—a process Newman dubs “leadership refinement.”

Workers undertook more strikes and became more political in the 1930s. Several major industrial labor unions were formed. A more radical petty bourgeois-bureaucrat-popular classes coalition, led by Cárdenas, put its stamp on the late 1930s, yielding to land redistribution and nationalization of railroads and the petroleum industry. The first reason behind this, emphasizes Newman, was the radicalization and politicization of the workers’ movement. As importantly, unlike in the 1910s, peasants and workers were more united in their radicalization. From the mid to the late 1930s, there were increasingly more strikes. Three of them (railroads, electricity, oil) were particularly massive. Among these three, oil workers pushed the hardest, demanding nationalization of their companies and workers’ control. Cárdenas tried to tone down their demands, but since he was threatened by counter-revolutionary generals, ultimately opted for a Jacobin approach, siding with workers, which meant he had to give concessions—more leadership refinement. This also required purging moderates, who gradually abandoned their liberalism towards the end of the 1930s and started to side with counter-revolution. If worker and peasant mobilization had persisted, and if they had unified more systematically, the reforms could hypothetically have continued, deepening toward a socialist revolution. In a follow-up article, Newman (Forthcoming) makes the case that urban dynamics served to block this possibility by dividing peasants and workers, ensuring the process stay within the bounds of passive revolution.

South Africa is one of the cases most frequently discussed under the label “passive revolution.” As Levenson and Paret point out, most accounts emphasize the role of the ANC as the main actor of the passive revolution. By contrast, Levenson and Paret draw attention to a core player of the revolutionary process—the United Democratic Front (UDF), as the key actor—upon which the ANC built its strategies. The UDF pursued a strategy of “popular front,” where the bourgeoisie is a central part of the multiclass coalition for democracy, in contrast to “united front” strategies, where the working class takes the lead. The UDF’s toolkit both organized and mobilized the subaltern groups and prepared them for an absorption into the liberal-capitalist order.

Levenson and Paret argue that the 1990s were only the culmination of the passive revolution, which had actually started in the early 1980s, with some processes in action even before that. Key to the whole arc was the ambiguity of a document called the Freedom Charter. This document brought together a multiracial coalition of Marxists and liberals. It had some elements of collective ownership and redistribution, but stopped short of calling for socialism. Marxists interpreted it as a transitional program (i.e., a step towards socialism), whereas liberals saw it as one of national reconstruction. The so-called “Charterism” that resulted from this coalition allowed leaders to rechannel eruptions from below in a non-revolutionary direction.

The ANC went underground in the 1960s, reasoning that the mass uprisings of the 1950s would not come back anytime soon. This reasoning was repudiated by the Soweto uprising of 1976. The ANC stepped back into mass organizing, with the aim of taking the mantle from the Black Consciousness Movement.

Despite the brutal repression of Soweto and Black Consciousness leaders, a new era of mass mobilization began in 1979. Strikes and community/youth protests and organization spread throughout the land in the early 1980s. At this point, both Charterist and anti-Charterist (e.g., Black Consciousness) elements were prominent in the mobilization.

The UDF was established as an outcome of the Charterist wing of the popular mobilization. Its priority was the establishment of a nonracial, democratic state. It overlapped with the ANC, but was not instigated by it. From the outset, the UDF avoided calls for economic transformation, thereby receiving support from even some white industrialists.

Between 1984 and 1987, local livelihood-related protests became more confrontational. The UDF did not lead them, but provided resources. It also made no explicit Charterist claims during these years, which allowed it to appear autonomous from the ANC and gain respect among the protestors. However, as protests grew, the security forces became more repressive. The UDF was decimated as a result. To compensate for its losses, it cooperated more and more with the ANC. In 1987, it officially declared its allegiance to the ANC’s Freedom Charter.

Mobilization persisted between 1988 and 1991, but changed character. Rather than the UDF catching up with the pace of protestors, it streamlined and slowed down rent strikes and other mass action, redirecting the attention of oppressed strata to nationwide negotiations. Black labor followed suit: whereas its organization Federation of South African Trade Unions (FOSATU) prioritized shopfloor organization and militancy before 1985, it gradually shifted towards the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU)—the more “populist” wing of the labor movement. In 1987, it joined the UDF in adopting the Freedom Charter. The UDF was not the only organ of absorption, emphasize the authors: FOSATU and COSATU were also consequential in absorbing militancy to capitalism.

FOSATU dissolved into COSATU. Going against FOSATU’s initial anti-UDF stance, the new COSATU merged its forces with the UDF to establish the MDM (Mass Movement for Democracy). MDM started a historic protest campaign against segregation. Throughout the early 1990s, it also aligned almost all popular forces with the ANC and with business leaders. The UDF dissolved itself in the ANC in 1991, after a short discord between its leaders regarding whether it should remain independent and act as a civic force in reconstructing the country.

The discussion of Trinidad and Tobago as a passive revolution raises many intriguing questions, especially regarding coloniality, its place in Gramscian thought, and the relationship of the latter to Black radical thought. Before 1945, radical working-class movements on these islands stood for not only higher wages and better working conditions, but also national independence. Labor politics and organization were much more radical compared to other colonial cases of the time, including African ones. Nevertheless, they were repressed, disorganized, and also absorbed in the postwar era, enabling the newly founded (1962) independent state to perpetuate not only capitalism but also racial domination and foreign dependence.

Whereas much of both the Gramscian and Black radical scholarship has emphasized the national bourgeoisie, Edwards points out that in many cases the national bourgeoisie was weak and middle classes (petty traders, civil servants, and urban professionals) appeared to lead this process. However, Edwards makes the bold claim that colonial administrators were even bigger players in the process of absorption.

Colonial administrations started to weigh in on labor activism in the 1930s. British labor leaders were summoned to advise administrations regarding how activist energy could be rechanneled to bolster cooperation between labor and capital. Erstwhile radical labor leaders such as Rienzi were incorporated into the “Executive Council,” an initially advisory body serving the Governor. These were the first steps of the passive revolution. Whenever such absorption didn’t work, exclusion kicked in. Another radical labor leader, Butler, and his associates were denied any seats in the Executive Council, especially as this organ went beyond being an advisory body and started to formulate laws.

Despite the ongoing exclusion, repression, and absorption, Butler’s radical labor party and its Hindu allies still received most votes in the early 1950s. They were poised to rule the country in case of independence. The colonial administration therefore postponed independence, even though they deemed it eventually impossible to avoid. The return of dissident historian Williams to the island created unexpected dynamics at this point. The colonists initially detested Williams due to his Black radicalism, fiery anti-white speech, and anti-colonialism. However, the increasingly anti-Hindu attitude of Williams created new racial divides and congealment of party blocs along “African” versus “Hindu Indian” lines. In this process, Williams also catered to some labor activists and incorporated their demands and discourse to his platform, yet another turn in the passive revolution. In a few years, Williams had dropped his initial insistence on non-cooperation with the colonial administration. His party coalesced with whites under the guidance of colonial officers and bureaucrats to gain the effective majority in the legislature. After the new coalition secured the majority, the colonists ultimately granted the islands their independence.

The Iranian case presents further challenges to the Gramscian research agenda. The country experienced three major revolutionary upheavals. The first one, the constitutional revolution of 1905, mostly tackled political rights. The second, Mosaddegh’s nationalization drive, was stronger on the anti-imperialist front, but had political rights and social justice dimensions as well. During the 1979 revolution, by contrast, all dimensions (political rights, anti-imperialism, class, and social justice issues) were fully present. What followed each upheaval were quite different processes and regimes, even though there were meso-level dynamics of incorporation in all of them.

The Pahlavi dynasty that emerged out of the ashes of the constitutional revolution absorbed some revolutionary cadres and policies. But it was largely a stagnant polity until the 1940s. We do not see here the political and class dynamism readily observable in the passive revolutionary cases covered above—Mexico, South Africa, and Trinidad and Tobago. The White Revolution is also distinct from the latter, in that the political dynamism and social-economic development were real, but the absorbed elements played little role when compared to passive revolutionary cases. In other words, the White Revolution was a classic case of revolution from above.

The post-1979 scene is thoroughly different from the post-revolutionary orders of the earlier 20th century in Iran. It is more clearly a case of passive revolution. The old elite was overthrown and the new elite’s rule was only sustainable through episodes of mobilization and demobilization during the following decades, paralleling what happened in Mexico, South Africa, and Trinidad and Tobago. Not only were class relations reshuffled, but popular initiative had a significant impact on how they were, even though the new dominant classes kept them in check overall. Moreover, one dimension of the revolution—its anti-imperialism—was sustained for decades, even if in twisted and manipulative form, distinguishing the post-1979 order sharply from the two former eras, where none of the main pillars of revolution (political, national, social) was retained. This persistence of the revolutionary element helps us classify the decades that followed 1979 as a classic case of restoration-revolution.

Still, the complexity of the picture cannot be appreciated by staying at the national level. The distortion of the anti-imperialist dimension itself requires us to bring in worldwide balances. Unaided by the (defeated) world revolution of the 1960s–1970s, the regime’s anti-imperialism could only be sustained by taking sides in anti-imperialist rivalry. Consequently, Iran cooperated with Russian imperialism in destroying Syria, as one part of a larger process of destructive competition between the declining world hegemon (the United States) and rising powers. Moreover, again in the absence of world revolution, the economy inevitably devolved from a revolutionary corporatism (Harris, 2017; Tuğal, 2016) to a crony capitalism, due both to forbidding sanctions and internal class balances—a process further fueled by the intransigent yet largely counter-revolutionary anti-imperialism of the regime. The interlocking of the national and global, social and economic, popular and elite processes in the Iranian passive revolution necessitates a reconstruction of Gramsci through the world systems perspective.

The case studies in this volume are national. Some of them thoroughly engage with transnational and global dynamics. Yet, the question of the proper unit of analysis should be posed more explicitly. Tackling this question will also allow us to return to objections raised regarding the utility of the very concept of passive revolution.

Arrighi’s Gramscian version of world-systems analysis encourages us to study the entire 20th century as a global passive revolution. Starting in the 19th century, proletarian and anti-colonial revolutions upset the world system. Their condensation into Bolshevism—the proletariat leading the colonized peoples—triggered the rise of a new world hegemon. Americanism—as Wilson’s principles plus Keynesianism/Fordism—expressed a global story of absorption of colonial-national and proletarian radicalism.

Gramsci’s notes certainly prepared the way for this interpretation of world history, as when he took European/global 1917–1923 as an accumulated response to France’s 1789–1793. But he missed the Haitian element in the constitution of the French Revolution as a universal and not simply universalist process, which necessitates an integration of James (1963) and the rest of Black radical thought into the Gramscian paradigm. Without going into the debate regarding French universalism, this is exactly what Edwards (this volume) invites us to do. Arrighi’s globalization of Gramsci is a necessary intervention, but could reach its full potential only if integrated with Black radical thought and other versions of anti-imperialist and postcolonial theorization.

Fanon and others in the Black radical tradition feature prominently in the article by Edwards. Edwards underlines the overlap between Gramsci and Black radical thought, which both point out how middle classes and other elites rechannel popular energies to capture the state for their ends. However, Black radical thought emphasizes the centrality of race to this process, which is undertheorized in Gramsci and Arrighi.2

What are the implications of such world-systemic and anti-imperialist considerations for the case studies offered in this volume? In her concluding paragraphs, Edwards suggests that the passive revolution literature might have neglected the centrality of colonial states in all other colonial cases too. We could even go one step further and entertain the possibility that international agencies, military pacts, global policy orientations, and the like might have a centrality that the passive revolution literature has not perhaps entirely ignored (see Tuğal, 2016) but at least underemphasized in its most theoretical, generalizing statements—not just in the case of colonial states but apparently sovereign states too. IMF, the World Bank, NATO, and the EU were integral to the Turkish passive revolution, for example. Along with the Trinidad and Tobago case as analyzed by Edwards, the Turkish case and Lula-led Brazil (Bianchi and Braga, 2014) demonstrate that national narratives of passive revolution need to be squarely situated in the changing patterns of world hegemony. All these case studies, and the ones offered in this volume, could benefit from further contextualization in Arrighian analysis.

The global contexts and determinants of passive revolutions lead to another consideration. If both the drivers and stories of passive revolutions spill over national boundaries, shouldn’t we avoid treating passive revolutions as national “paths” altogether? As pointed out in the second section above, Thomas and Sotiris urge scholars to treat passive revolution as a modality of politics and a heuristic for analysis, rather than a separate route or even “a moment.” Sotiris forcefully states: “Passive revolution is not a ‘historical phase’ or a ‘historical moment’ and is not a concept limited to historical interpretation of a particular period of Italian or European history. . . . Nor is it part of a ‘typology’ of revolutions. [It is rather] a political-strategic-theoretical node or nexus of questions, a way of thinking rather than a well-defined concept.” Even though this is not the approach used by the authors in this volume (with the partial exception of Harris), it is a viable one. Arrighi’s Gramscianism could also be reinterpreted in this way, rather than serving as a framework regarding macro-determinants that inform national case studies, as I suggested above.

Nevertheless, we should also notice that in the cases covered in the current volume, the passive revolutionary “modalities” have become the predominant ones, that is, passive revolution has congealed into a path. For instance, Newman’s account (this volume and Forthcoming) shows that the 1910s, the 1920s, and more decisively the late 1930s in Mexico witnessed many revolutionary, counter-revolutionary, and passive revolutionary moments and modalities. But it was the entire 3 decades that allow Newman to definitively call the Mexican process a “passive revolution.” This is certainly a contentious claim. Scholars who self-consciously use passive revolution as a “heuristic” would dismiss Goodwin’s objection about the blurred lines between passive revolution, reform, and counterrevolution—but most comparative-historical sociologists will find such dismissal objectionable. By contrast, those who use passive revolution as a path or moment distinct from other paths or moments should in fact get meticulously specific regarding what exactly differentiates passive revolution from straightforward counter-revolution or reformism.

In the cases above, we have seen that passive revolutions involve the absorption of transformative cadres, discourses, policies, and organizations into a broad and persistent process of restoration. This peculiar combination differentiates them from counterrevolutions, such as Pinochet’s Chile, where transformative cadres, policies, and organizations are simply crushed. The passive revolutionary path as specified here is also different from a “radical reformist” one, where transformative cadres and organizations are in control, but they choose to move towards an egalitarian society through piecemeal policy rather than ruptural change. Swedish moves towards socialism, i.e. the Wage-Earner funds developed by Meidner and Hedborg, at the end of the 1970s constitute a classic example of such a path. Both are different from revolutions from above (such as Iran’s White Revolution and Mustafa Kemal’s Turkey in the 1930s), where elites impose changes from above without disturbing the major contours of property and power relations, even though these changes might chip away at some relations of domination. Revolutions from above also witness absorption of some radical cadres and policies (e.g., Mustafa Kemal’s adaptation of planning from the Soviets) but unlike in the case of passive revolutions, polity and society do not undergo shocks such as wholesale integration of organizations that were once thought to be against the entire order. Table 1 presents a simplified condensation of these contrasts.

These processes are differentiated by other indicators as well. For instance, popular initiative is much more central to revolutionary than to radical reformist paths. Moreover, in actual processes these paths all bleed into each other. Relatedly, there is one major problem that the cases in this volume do not seek to resolve: world history has not witnessed a full revolution where a restoration doesn’t ultimately kick in. Even the French, Russian, and Chinese revolutions have ended up restoring elements of capitalism or even pre-capitalist privileges, although scholars disagree on the exact dates when counterrevolution started in each. As Gramsci himself suggested, Stalinism can be interpreted as a passive revolution: integration of the most revolutionary methods and policies with an overall process of restoration. Yet, the restoration had started as early as Trotsky’s integration of Tsarist generals into the Red Army. Hence, some Trotskyists treat 1929 as a cutting date, while for many anarchists 1921 is the point of no return. There is evidence to support both claims. But arguably, revolutionary processes continued after each of these turning points. The Maoism of the Cultural Revolution emerged in a post-Stalin world where restoration appeared to completely take hold over the “socialist” world. This is one reason why early world-systems analysts were fascinated with Mao (see, for example, the initial texts of Wallerstein). Nevertheless, Maoism too failed to resolve the predicament. Radical reformism has also either failed completely or reinforced bourgeois power. Defying both revolution and radical reform, restoration has ultimately won worldwide.

None of this, however, invalidates the concept of passive revolution as such. We again need to look at what predominates in the overall process. In France/Haiti 1789–1794, Russia 1917–1927, and much of China 1949–early 1970s, revolutionary elements are more dominant than the counterrevolutionary ones. (I will at this point suspend comprehensive judgment regarding cases such as the pro-Soviet episodes of the CCP, the Mao years after 1968, and similar cases, to postpone a debate that would require at least several more pages). By contrast, in the cases examined in this volume, revolutionary and counterrevolutionary methods, cadres, policies, and discourses are mobilized explicitly for the purpose of restoration. In other words, it is no easy task to determine when revolution ends and passive revolution starts, but from the standpoint of the Gramscian paradigm this difficulty is only one more energizing call for empirical research.

Having differentiated passive revolutionary from revolutionary, reformist, and counter-revolutionary paths in this way, we need to tackle the other questions raised in the literature regarding civil society/state, popular initiative, and hegemony. Let’s start with the question of civil society and state. Building on precedents, Edwards argues that colonial states and elites have a more central role in the process of passive revolution than formerly recognized in the literature. Whereas most accounts take note of the colonial state’s repressive and resource-based contributions to the passive revolutionary elite, Edwards draws attention to their more creative and sociological participation in the process.3 This is a nice counterpoint to Levenson and Paret’s contention that civil society is the primary mover of the passive revolution. Scholars also need to recognize, however, cases where state-society integration is the crux of the story. The Mexican case as narrated by Newman in this volume and the Turkish case (Tuğal, 2009, 2024) exemplify this possibility. In other words, rather than resolving the debate, the set of cases under consideration redefine the question: Given that civil society, the state, or both could be central to the passive revolutionary process, what are the conditions under which one or the other or both come to define it?

Parallel questions about the “war of position” arise from the contrast between the Mexican and South African cases. Even though Newman does not use these terms, there were many wars of movement unevenly articulated to wars of position during the Mexican passive revolution. Unlike in the South African case, actors who resorted to wars of movement were not shut out from the corridors of power. It was neither the lack of war of movement on the part of subordinate classes nor their reliance on the war of position, but their failure to forge a national-popular bloc of peasants, workers, and rural-urban migrants that undermined the revolution. We therefore need to ask: When and why do passive revolutions feature combinations of wars of position and wars of movement? When do they completely exclude wars of movement and rely solely on wars of position?

More studies of passive revolution are also needed to answer similar questions regarding popular initiative and hegemony. Levenson and Paret’s account takes mobilization as essential to passive revolution. It also posits a link between hegemony and passive revolution, whereas Edwards’ analysis of Trinidad and Tobago shows that a weak hegemony has resulted from passive revolution. In Newman’s discussion of the Mexican case, by contrast, mobilization, demobilization, weak hegemony, and strengthening of hegemony come in cycles throughout 3 decades. His analysis allows us to suspend debates regarding whether one or two among these four is essential for passive revolutions. As a part of a broad comparative agenda, we could differentiate between passive revolutions where mobilization and resistance play the role of the key mechanism versus those where demobilization is core. Interestingly, the Turkish case provides an example where demobilization is the defining element in the first phase of a passive revolution (Tuğal, 2009) whereas mobilization becomes the core element in the second phase (Tuğal, 2024).

Similarly, I suggest that passive revolutions might create more hegemonic regimes, weak hegemonic regimes, and they can also reinforce the lack of hegemony. Or we can see instances of strong and weak hegemony in different phases of a passive revolution. There is no necessary correlation between a passive revolution and hegemony, as the introductory essay of this volume also states. Yet again, the mechanisms linking one to the other should be comparatively studied. The task for future studies, then, is to specify how and why certain kinds of passive revolution lead to strong versus weak hegemony, or a lack thereof.

All this raises one of the thorniest questions regarding the concept passive revolution. Is there a threshold when a passive revolution turns into an actual revolution, or to the contrary, where it lapses into a straightforward counter-revolution? Newman’s (Forthcoming) account frames 1940–1952 as the moment of restoration in the Mexican passive revolution. But couldn’t these years simply be read as a counter-revolution? The same question applies to Emergency Rule in India (Desai, 2012). Even if the concept passive revolution is seen as valid for the Gandhian-Nehruvian decades of the independence movement and the state that came out of it, should Emergency Rule be read as yet another restorative twist in this passive revolution, or—given the dismantlement of socialist-inspired state capitalism—its termination by a counter-revolution? Future studies should further explore these questions.

Where do these overlaps and disagreements between the contributors to this volume leave us? These articles and my synthetic comments should be read as a call for further theorization and comparison, rather than the final word on the dynamics of passive revolutions, or on the status of the concept. Still, the studies here clearly demonstrate the term’s usefulness. Decades of theorization and research have shown that we gain a lot from treating passive revolution as a distinct path, as a moment, and as heuristic or modality. Researchers need to be explicit about which of these they are employing in a particular work, but there is no reason to rule out any of these theoretical options. The diversity of approaches to passive revolution will only boost the Gramscian paradigm, if the stakes are clearly defined. As the world enters a new era of reactionary politics, which frequently rely on progressive-sounding discourses along with post-neoliberal policies and sentiments, the concept passive revolution is likely to find new life rather than receding to the background of scholarship.

Cihan Tuğal https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2794-4488