The Gramscian concept of passive revolution: A praxiological research program

The articles in the following symposium represent the latest installments in the passive revolutions literature, which has been inspired by Antonio Gramsci’s unfinished Prison Notebooks. Gramsci defines passive revolutions as cases in which “‘progress’ occurs as the reaction of the dominant classes to the sporadic and incoherent rebelliousness of the popular masses—a reaction consisting of ‘restorations’ that agree to some part of the popular demands” (Gramsci, 2007: 252). Building from this definition and other parts of Gramsci’s work, especially his discussion of Italian political history, the passive revolutions literature has grown into a vibrant field over the last 20 years, displaying an uncanny ability to gain conceptual traction from the European metropole to the postcolonial Global South.

But the passive revolution literature has grown increasingly divided into two branches, some authors focusing on interpreting Gramsci’s writings and others dedicated to empirical analysis.1 The exegetical branch of the literature characterizes passive revolution as a “method of historical interpretation” sensitive to international dynamics (Morton, 2007: 41, emphasis removed) that “stresses relations of forces in social and political antagonism” (Sotiris, 2022: 16; see also Antonini, 2024: 89–90; Bianchi, 2020: 229; Thomas, 2009: 150–152). The empirical branch views passive revolution as a form of social transformation taking place within the capitalist epoch in which political elites either anticipate and preempt popular demands or absorb challenges by adopting some of the demands and/or incorporating some popular leaders into government (McNelly, 2023: 16–17; Paret, 2022: 19–20, 36–37; Riley and Desai, 2007: 816–817; Tuğal, 2009: 32–34).

In the final contribution to the present symposium, Tuğal (this volume) takes stock, including by summarizing the articles. In the present essay, I instead focus on synthesizing the exegetical and empirical branches of the literature into a research program. I do so on the basis of two moves. On the one hand, I draw from the existing literature the idea that there are two types of passive revolution, revolution-from-above and mass mobilization-based varieties. Both types, I argue, contrast with socialist revolution and counterrevolution. On the other hand, I argue that, in Gramsci’s hands, passive revolution reflected a twofold break in analytic method with the stagist theory of revolutions prevalent when he wrote.

Stagist theory posited that “bourgeois revolutions” transpired under feudalism and were led by the capitalist class, and that socialist revolution would take place under advanced capitalism and would be led by the working class. Almost no one subscribes to stagism nowadays, but it was prominent at the time Gramsci wrote. Gramsci’s concept of passive revolution reflected his efforts to extricate his thinking about revolution from stagist theory, taking stagism as its “opposite” (Harris, this volume), much like some of his communist contemporaries (Lukács [1928] 1972: 250–251; Mariátegui, [1928–1929] 2011: 208–209, [1928] 2011: 246, 252). Hence we must understand how Gramsci broke with stagism to understand what he was trying to accomplish in developing the concept of passive revolution. It is also hoped that probing Gramsci’s alternative will help advance contemporary non-stagist theory.

Putting all this together provides the coordinates for a conceptual map of revolution. The map obviously features passive revolutions centrally, but also makes conceptual space for adjacent (counter)revolutionary phenomena, resulting in an overall conceptualization of revolution that is both more integrated and more variegated than the present conceptual literature on revolutions, which often focuses on styles of research, on the one hand, and accepts a revolution-counterrevolution binary, on the other. The binarization is unhelpful (Lawson, 2019: 34), and the map suggests that the concept of passive revolution may help us overcome it (Modonesi, 2019: 92). Moreover, synthesizing the exegetical and empirical passive revolution literatures in this way helps highlight where the contributions to the present symposium fit into a broader research program and indicates some directions for possible future research.

At the time Gramsci wrote, stagism was a prominent way of conceptualizing revolution. This Eurocentric theory posited that a revolution taking place under “feudalism” is a “bourgeois revolution,” in which the bourgeois class ushers in capitalism; and that a revolution under “capitalism” is a “socialist revolution,” in which the working class ushers in communism. Stagists often invoked parts of Marx, especially the 1859 “Preface” to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, where he posited that a new mode of production (objective base) can develop within the framework of an old society until it revolutionizes politics and culture (subjective superstructure) to bring them into harmony with the economy (Marx, 1978b).2

To be sure, not everyone agreed with stagism. Italian neo-idealist philosopher Croce (1914: 77, 78) cast doubt on stagism, reducing it to a “canon of historical interpretation”: economic determinism serves as “a mere instrument” for the analyst, and “may be useful to him in many cases, [but] useless in others.” Yet many intellectuals in the socialist movement, especially the Second International, espoused stagism when Gramsci came of age politically. In essence, they looked back at the French Revolution, saw a “bourgeois revolution” in a “feudal” society, and used this as grounds to posit an analogous transition from capitalism to socialism.

Then came the Russian Revolution. This event forced a reckoning in the socialist movement, at least insofar as it was recognized as a socialist revolution that did not take place in an advanced capitalist society putatively ripe for socialism but in one that was at best a feudal-capitalist mashup. The Bolshevik leaders Lenin ([1917] 1975) and Trotsky ([1906] 1969) clearly did not subscribe to stagism. Gramsci registered the anti-stagist implications of the Russian Revolution immediately (Gramsci, [1917] 1975), joining his Russian comrades in rejecting the idea that history proceeded according to “fixed stages of predictable development” (Gramsci, [1918] 1975: 153).

But Gramsci did not see the Third International rise to the occasion by furnishing an “historical methodology” adequate to the Russian Revolution (Gramsci 1971: 436; see Haug, 2000: 9–10). To the contrary, the new Soviet government soon promoted sociologist Nikolai Bukharin’s (1926: 151–152) positivistic materialism, which displayed an economic-determinism that flew in the face of the Russian Revolution. Gramsci deemed Bukharin’s approach fundamentally deficient since it was based on assumptions of homogenous time and repetition, rendering it incapable of capturing the irregularity and newness essential to revolution (Bianchi, 2020: 76–77).

This is where much of Gramsci’s intellectual project in the Prison Notebooks comes in, including his notes toward the concept of passive revolution (Morton, 2007: 73; Thomas, 2020: 123). Early in his imprisonment, Gramsci translated Marx’s 1859 “Preface” (Bianchi, 2020: 74; Thomas, 2009: 347). He then undertook a sustained critical engagement with it, as many have noted, in his “Notes on Italian History” (Allinson and Anievas, 2010: 471; Antonini, 2024: 85; Bianchi, 2020: 242; Bieler and Morton, 2018: 24; Buci-Glucksmann, 1980: 314; Davidson, 2012: 317; De Felice, 1977: 165–166; De Smet, 2016: 5–6; Roccu, 2017: 539–540; Sassoon, 1980: 209; Sotiris, 2022: 12–3, 15–16; Thomas, 2009: 155–156, 348, 2020: 134–135). The theoretical problem with which Gramsci tussled under the name “passive revolution” was how to conceive of revolution beyond stagism (De Felice, 1977: 197; Kanoussi and Mena, 1985: 88–92; Sassoon, 1980: 216; Sotiris, 2022: 16; Thomas, 2020: 134–135).

Gramsci tried to furnish Marxism with a point of departure other than economic determinism but that did not revert to idealism. He grew convinced that idealist Croce and positivist Bukharin suffered from essentially the same deficiency: they bottomed out in metaphysics (Thomas, 2009: 298, 304). He also grew convinced that a Marxist alternative had to “comprehend . . . its own historical determinateness, as an integral element of its own practice” (Thomas, 2009: 253). Gramsci’s “third way” alternative was the philosophy of praxis. He had translated Marx’s “Theses on Feuerbach” (Marx, 1978c), the ur-text for praxis philosophy (Haug, 2000: 1, 3), along with the 1959 “Preface,” after which “these two texts became a central point of reference for all of Gramsci’s researches” (Thomas, 2009: 246, 247). He engaged the ideas of Italian philosopher Antonio Labriola, who had argued Marx’s philosophy was not reducible to either idealism or positivist materialism (Buci-Glucksmann, 1980: 361; Copenhaver and Copenhaver, 2012: 77–85, 463–483). This enabled Gramsci to develop a philosophical approach adequate to his politics (Bianchi, 2020: 74–75; Haug, 2000: 7–8; Thomas, 2009: 250–306). First, it enabled him to transcend idealist Croce (1914) without accepting positivist-materialist Bukharin (1926). Second, it enabled him to reclaim praxis theory from Fascist philosopher Giovanni Gentile.

Gramsci thought the philosophy of praxis would help to better theorize subject formation, something it was especially well suited for (Thomas, 2009: 254, 301) and that was urgent since it could no longer be sustained that subjects of history were necessarily related to objective class locations. Gramsci adopted the language of “active” and “passive,” according to the presence or absence of subject formation, and categorized the French and Russian revolutions as “active.” Both, he elaborated, hinged on “Jacobinism,” the carrier of the “active” element on the basis of which subject formation took place (Medici, 2004: 114–116). (Insofar as his thinking was an effort to extend Leninism [Anderson, 2017], and had prison censors not been a concern, Gramsci might just as well have used the term “Bolshevism” to denote this “active” element, projecting it anachronistically back in time to characterize the leadership of the French Revolution. But he instead projected “Jacobinism” forward in time, applying it also to the Russian Revolution.)

Crucially, for Gramsci, there was also the possibility that an historical subject would not form—that no “Jacobin” dynamic would take hold—even when putative conditions were ripe. This was the passive revolutionary possibility that, Gramsci (1971: 114) posited, materialized whenever there was an historical upheaval in which “active elements” were not “dominant.” Gramsci conceived of passive revolution in terms of the failure or absence of revolutionary subject formation (De Smet, 2016: 45, 49, 69, 224; Gramsci, 1971: 108–110, 113–114; Sassoon, 1980: 204, 207; Thomas, 2009: 152). He deemed this possibility so important for rethinking revolution that he called back to Croce’s line about stagist economic determinism being a “canon of historical interpretation” by deeming passive revolution also a “criterion of interpretation” (Gramsci, 1971: 114). This suggests that, for Gramsci, the importance of passive revolution was on a par with Marx’s 1959 “Preface.” But it linked back to his praxis theory because the absence of active elements reflected not the absence of objective economic preconditions but the absence of adequate subjective political intervention.

The implications of Gramsci’s praxiological alternative to the stagist theory of subject formation are legion. It implies that the development of class “consciousness” is a mere possibility, the perhaps unlikely one that corresponds to stagism (Gramsci pays tribute to this idea, calling it “good sense”). Gramsci realized there was another possibility; true, the contemporary relations of production might become politicized, as stagism predicts, or, he noted, past forms of domination might prevail or be resuscitated (Bianchi, 2020: 54). In the latter scenario, politics would be at odds with class interest—and this might even be the normal state of affairs (Gramsci’s term for it, “common sense,” could be read to imply as much). Gramsci was far from alone in rejecting the stagist theory of subject formation and in adopting praxis theory instead; in fact, it was arguably an extension of the line of thinking that had guided the leaders of the Russian Revolution (Anderson, 2017). But Gramsci’s reasoning was considerably broader. The emphasis was also different. One could say that whereas Lenin and Trotsky offered new conceptual down payments on the old stagist outcome, socialist revolution, Gramsci’s own non-stagist Marxism came “without guarantees” (Hall, [1986] 2021: 155–156).

Stagism was a synthetic form of historicism, seeking to capture a single, overarching historical process characterized by distinct phases (feudal, capitalist, then communist). But Gramsci (1971: 114–115, 119–120) observed zig-zags rather than a set of stages. Revolutionary eras were followed by non-revolutionary ones: the French Revolution by the Italian Risorgimento, the Russian Revolution by the advent of Italian Fascism (cf. De Felice, 1977: 174). The reason for this lay in the fact that the rulers of the non-revolutionary country, Italy in both cases, learned from the revolutions abroad—the French revolution, then the Russian—and adjusted course accordingly. In appreciating these zig-zags, Gramsci was also appreciating the fact that national cases impacted one another (cf. De Felice, 1977: 180–181; De Smet, 2016: 47; Douet, 2021: pars. 17, 25; Hesketh, 2017: 399). This could be viewed as precocious, for it has since become widely agreed in historical sociology that one must often study dynamics at both the national and the international levels to glean meaningful insights (Burawoy, 1989; McMichael, 1990), perhaps especially in the case of revolutions (Lawson, 2019: 31–26), as Edwards (this volume) also suggests.

Gramsci’s efforts to rethink revolution were especially important because they make conceptual space for revolutions that remain circumscribed to the capitalist mode of production. Gramsci (1971: 109–110) observed that the stagist idea that a new group would emerge from the old society and revolutionize it in its own image oftentimes did not hold up (Buci-Glucksmann, 1980: 315; Filippini, 2016: 115–116; Roccu, 2017: 540, 545; Sassoon, 1980: 211–212). Passive revolution registers the fact that, absent such a class subject, rather than break from capitalism, revolutionary processes may just as well remain within it (De Smet, 2016: 49–51; Thomas, 2009: 156–157). The possibility of passive revolution was the reason Gramsci’s theory of revolution came “without guarantees.” By rejecting stagism but still holding onto the idea that revolutions mark the transitions between different forms of political domination, Gramsci (1971: 117) gestured to an entire research program of truly general relevance (Hesketh, 2017: 400; Sassoon, 1980: 205). Paradoxically, he did so principally in connection with musings on the particularities of Italian history—particularities, that is, when compared with what stagism would predict (Bieler and Morton, 2018: 17, 21; Coutinho, 2012: 101).

First, whereas stagism would lead one to think a bourgeois revolution must be made by the bourgeoisie,3 Gramsci observed that it was actually not the case that a revolution like the French Revolution could be repeated in Italy (Roccu, 2017: 540; Wayne, 2022: 101). A putative outcome of “bourgeois revolution,” political modernization, did come about during the 19th century Risorgimento, but not for the reasons stagism posited.4 Instead of the bourgeois class becoming a subject and carrying out a “bourgeois revolution” against the “feudal” monarchy, the monarchical state was central to the process—even though it took place during the capitalist epoch.5 While it did not conform to the stagist model, the Risorgimento still furthered capitalism in Italy, another outcome stagism would expect.6

This mirrors what is now a prominent analytic approach in historical sociology. Stagism would lead one to think the historical actor giving rise to modern bourgeois society is the bourgeoisie. The Risorgimento represented a comparable modernizing outcome but it came about differently. This was not just a prescient empirical observation. It was also implicitly an analytic move. For analytically, Gramsci observed that stagism’s explanandum (the rise of bourgeois society) matches the case, but its explanans (bourgeois class leadership) does not. In contemporary historical sociology, this is called the “alternative factors” approach, since rather than the theoretically posited factors, a different set of factors led to the outcome of interest (Newman, 2024; see also Ragin, 1987).

Second, Gramsci observed that socialist revolutions did not necessarily take place when the causes stagism posited were present. This was actually a far more important observation for Gramsci—and for many authors who have since applied the concept of passive revolution to cases in which socialistic revolutionary initiatives have somehow been contained—even though he wrote less about it directly. After the assertion of a powerful workers’ movement during the 1919–1920 Two Red Years (Biennio Rosso), Italy saw the advent of Fascism rather than a transition to socialism (Roccu, 2017: 542). Gramsci had reason to be disappointed, not just because the Fascist government threw him in prison but also because this meant Fascism was at odds with the stagist theory of revolution. Working class mobilization did not open a door toward socialism. In disconfirming stagism, Fascism was analogous to the Risorgimento. Gramsci viewed some Fascist economic policies as a response to the Russian Revolution, much as the Risorgimento was a response to the French Revolution (Gramsci, 1971: 118–120).

This disconfirmation also mirrors contemporary historical sociology. Stagist theory would lead one to think the proletariat’s historical role under capitalism is to make a revolution leading to communism. Seen from this perspective, Fascism was a major anomaly: The Italian proletariat was quite socialistic during the Biennio Rosso. But by the mid-1930s, when Gramsci sat rotting in prison, it lined up less and less behind communism and more and more behind Fascism. There were several complex reasons,7 and Gramsci did grapple with some of them. But the details are immaterial to our purposes. Simply in observing the fact, Gramsci was making an epistemic departure from stagism. In essence, he observed that the group stagist theory identified as an historical subject was present, but paradoxically the outcome it posited did not come to fruition. Historical sociologists might call this a “negative case” (Emigh, 1997) since the theory’s explanans (proletarian class mobilization) matches the case while its explanandum (the rise of communist society) does not.

Gramsci referred to both deviations from stagism as “passive revolution” (Coutinho, 2012: 102; Roccu, 2017: 540–543; Sotiris, 2022: 8–10, 20–21; Thomas, 2009: 154 n.55). In deeming both the Risorgimento and Fascism passive revolutions, Gramsci “methodologically authorised” the concept for use in different periods (Coutinho, 2012: 101; see also Antonini, 2024: 89; Thomas, 2009: 150–151). And the focus on multiple periods, in turn, authorized comparison (Brooks and Loftus, 2016: 258–260; Harootunian, 2020: 149–150). However, as Bianchi (2020: 229) notes:

[Gramsci’s] method cannot be confused . . . with vulgar empiricist comparison, that finding a few similarities between different historical events intends inductively, to formulate a “historical law.” The Gramscian analogical method was intended not to affirm “laws” but rather [for] the construction of concepts capable of capturing the complexity of the historical movement.

Gramsci compared because he was interested in Italian political development, for obvious reasons, which did not conform to stagism, and, importantly, because to make sense of its deviations from stagism he had to group and draw distinctions between kinds of cases (Gramsci, 1971: 77–84, 105, 112). But he only got so far.

Since passive revolution reflects a rejection of stagism, rather than a description of something that did happen, the term started out as an “empty signifier” (De Smet, 2016: 68), meaning neither bourgeois revolution nor socialist revolution. This explains why Gramsci referred to it in a variety of ways. He lifted the term “passive revolution” from political theorist Vincenzo Cuoco, changing its meaning to capture these deviations from stagism (Gramsci, 1971: 59, 108).8 There was nothing particularly special about this term; Gramsci used other second-hand terms for the same purpose: “revolution-restoration” (from left-republican historian Edgar Quinet) and “revolution without revolution” (from Jacobin leader Maximilien Robespierre).9

He used all these second-hand terms to distinguish his thinking on revolution from stagism. Since he clearly identifies two episodes of passive revolution in Italian history,10 it is possible to parse Gramsci in terms of two types of passive revolution (Bieler and Morton, 2018: 19; Morton, 2010a: 317–318, 2024: 179; Thomas, 2009: 150–152). Hence it is natural that empirical Gramscians’ contributions fall into two fairly clear classes.

On the one hand are international political economists who tend to apply the term to things that look somewhat like the Risorgimento. This is the revolution-from-above branch of the passive revolutions literature (Davidson, 2012: 316). It could be viewed as a Marxist alternative to Weberian-leaning theories of state formation, insisting that the capitalist state organization is always conditioned by its specific insertion into global capitalism (Morton, 2007: 152).11 (Adjacent categories in Gramsci are the historical bloc and integral state [Thomas, 2009: 100, 137].) Scholars in this tradition have produced insightful research on the formation of the capitalist state through the Anglo-Scottish Union (Davidson, 2010), the U.S. Civil War (Anievas and Waring, 2023), the Confederation of Canada (McKay, 2010), and the Iranian Constitutional Revolution (Pourhamzavi, 2019). The leading edge of this literature lies in investigating the relationship between the global-universal dynamics of capitalism, which most authors conceptualize in terms of Trotsky’s uneven and combined development, and national-particular political events, which they view as passive revolutions (Anievas and Waring, 2023; Bieler and Morton, 2018; Hesketh, 2017), something to which Gramsci (1971: 116–117) alluded. To capture more of the temporality of capitalism, it could be further expanded by reintegrating attention to the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, as Gramsci (1971: 68) also suggested (cf. De Felice, 1977: 207).

On the other hand is a group of critical sociologists and others who tend to apply the term “passive revolution” to episodes of mass mobilization that take place during the capitalist era but fail to catalyze socialist transitions. This branch of the literature takes to heart the idea that “it is a mistake . . . to ignore the revolutionary element embedded in the category of passive revolution” (Antonini, 2021: 139 n. 40), viewing it largely as a matter of mass mobilization, albeit mass mobilization that is ultimately contained. This could be viewed as a Leninist counterpoint to any Sorelian anarcho-syndicalist theory lauding spontaneous revolutionary action, sustaining, in essence, that mass mobilization does not in itself produce communism, since anticommunist political forces can channel it in other directions (cf. Tuğal, 2025: 2641). This group includes insightful work on the challenge and absorption of radical Islam in Turkey (Tuğal, 2009), the advance and domestication of the South African anti-Apartheid struggle (Paret, 2022), and especially the ebbs and flows of Bolivia’s Pink Tide (Hesketh, 2020; Hesketh and Morton, 2014; Hetland, 2023; McNelly, 2023; Webber, 2016). The leading edge of this literature lies in identifying the mechanics of absorption.

In light of these two clusters of the empirical literature, we are left to question whether the processes to which they point are as distinct as the divergent emphases suggest. To be sure, their basic ingredients are certainly not mutually exclusive. Mass mobilization may produce change precisely by compelling elites to undertake a revolution from above; and a revolution from above, even when conceived independently of mass mobilization, is unlikely to succeed in the absence of at least some mobilization of mass support. Hence it seems that each type of passive revolution requires a main ingredient and a secondary ingredient, with the secondary ingredient being the other type’s main ingredient. Hence both ingredients can be seen as components of all passive revolutions. It is perhaps only the ratio between them that marks off the distinct types of passive revolution. Consequently, while there are different types of passive revolutions, they may vary more along a “continuum” than according to a binary (cf. Morton, 2010a).

This points to one way the passive revolutions literature can be further developed. It is possible to locate or relocate a given case along this continuum (Newman, this volume), according its ratio of the basic ingredients of passive revolutions. This goes beyond mere casing. Once we construct an empirical instance of political transformation as a case of passive revolution, we can then proceed to class it in terms of whether it is more of a revolution from above-type or more of a mass mobilization-based passive revolution. In other words, the specifics of the case of study can and should determine which class of empirical research one contributes to. This, in turn, might allow the scholars contributing to the literature on each of these types of passive revolution to engage more with one another along the continuum.

At one level, the type of passive revolution makes little difference to the outcome: both describe capitalist-era revolutions that are fully compatible with capitalism. Gramsci suggested as much in two ways. First, because he only applied the concept to developments after the French Revolution, the political beginning of the epoch of global capitalism, starting by applying it to the Risorgimento. Second, because he considered the advent of Fascism in Italy, later in the capitalist era, to be a case of passive revolution as well (Sotiris, 2022: 8–10, 20–21; Thomas, 2009: 154 n.55).12 Taken together, then, it is clear that Gramsci only applied the term to developments within the capitalist epoch (De Smet, 2016: 65–66). This implies the concept “passive revolution” is historically specific to capitalism. Even when applied to cases of economic incorporation into an expanding capitalist system, the concept applies to major political developments that sit squarely within the capitalist epoch (Hesketh, 2017: 391, 398; Modonesi, 2019: 103–104).

The concept is and should be agnostic about whether passive revolutions drive capitalist development. By definition, passive revolutions do not cut against capitalism; that is what sets them apart from socialist revolutions. But nor do I think they by definition further capitalism. With special reference to Iran, Harris (this volume) addresses the question of whether passive revolution furthers capitalist development, as opposed to being understood as properly political developments. He argues that, in Iran’s modern history, there were several revolutionary episodes after which there was some controlled political incorporation which one might wish to call a “passive revolution”: the Constitutional Revolution (1905–1911), the oil nationalization crisis (1951–1953), and the Islamic Revolution (1979). However, none of them clearly advanced capitalist development. Insofar as advancing capitalism goes, then, the concept “passive revolution” is not very successful; its merit lies instead in directing attention to political incorporation. Political incorporation and capitalist development are not necessarily related: “The same political arrangement can channel accumulation in one conjuncture and choke it in another, not because the arrangement itself has changed but because the relations surrounding it have.”

If in the capitalist era accumulation is fundamentally a matter of interfacing propitiously with the global dynamics of capitalism, we are left with a theoretical question about the relationship between passive revolution and the stagist category of “bourgeois revolution.” Several scholars start with the latter category and suggest passive revolution should be assimilated to it (Callinicos, 2010: 494; Davidson, 2012: 322–323; Hesketh, 2010: 389; Morton, 2010a: 17–18, 2011: 46–47). But many will view this as highly unsatisfactory. The concept “bourgeois revolution” has been the target of so many convincing criticisms that it is by now “unsure about its causal agent, unsure about its results, and unsure about its duration” (Teschke, 2005: 6). Hence I do not think it makes sense to deem “bourgeois revolution” the master category and assimilate passive revolution to it—much less to assimilate still other conceptions of revolution, like permanent revolution, to the unhelpful category of “bourgeois revolution” (e.g., Callinicos, 2010: 495; Davidson, 2012: 302).

It makes much more sense to follow Thomas (2020) in essentially abandoning “bourgeois revolution” in favor of a conceptual division of labor: passive revolution, on the one hand, and “active” or permanent revolution,13 on the other. Permanent revolution is the form of revolution during the capitalist epoch which breaks with this mode of production. Passive revolution is the form of revolution that does not, even though such cases probably always involve some restructuring of capitalism—given they are revolutions, which are by definition significant developments. Taken together, this implies that passive revolutions may further capitalism, but that they are not defined in terms of furthering capitalism (Allinson and Anievas, 2010: 471; Harris, this volume; Riley, 2015: 179). Passive revolution identifies a different kind of process from “bourgeois revolution.”14

Its capaciousness also raises questions about the relationship between passive revolution and Gramsci’s other concepts. Take hegemony. For some, passive revolution marks a point of contrast with the hegemonic modernization putatively characteristic of Europe, or at least France (Chatterjee, 1986: 30, 49; Riley, 2015: 180). For others, however, passive revolution is related, and can sometimes even contribute, to hegemony (Modonesi, 2019: 92; Sotiris, 2022: 18; Thomas, 2009: 146–147). Assuming both positions are valid, we would have to say the concept is agnostic about whether a given passive revolution contributes to hegemony (Callinicos, 2010: 496; Hetland, 2023: 31; Roccu, 2017: 546) much as it is agnostic about whether it contributes to capitalism. A passive revolution is only likely to occur amid a crisis of hegemony of some sort, but may or may not contribute to an hegemonic outcome.15

Both of its agnosticisms constitute reasons to view passive revolution as a style of thought more than a precise concept, and hence to refuse placing it in a typology (Sotiris, 2022: 39). Both help open the concept up. Specifically, they make it readily applicable outside Europe, as the papers in this symposium and elsewhere demonstrate.

But I think it would be unwise to keep adding items to the list of things about which the concept “passive revolution” opts not to take a postion, for this might eventually lead it to become so imprecise as to be meaningless. Passive revolution has already been accused of “concept-stretching” (Callinicos, 2010: 492, 498). Its use in the Mexico literature can serve as an example. Semo (2016: 495–496) considers both the colonial-era Bourbon Reforms (1780–1810) and the independence-era Porfiriato (1880–1910) to be passive revolutions. Morton (2011:33, 94, 113, 121–122) considers the civil war phase of the Mexican Revolution (1910–1920), and the six ensuing decades, to be one big passive revolution. Hesketh (2016) focuses on only the Lázaro Cárdenas era (1934–1940) as a passive revolution. But Semo (2016: 495–496) views the neoliberal era (1982–2012) as another passive revolution. If all these major developments in Mexican history qualify as passive revolutions, one would be right to suspect the term is too capacious. It can and should be defined precisely.

I suggest we build from Modonesi (2019: 104), who calls attention to two of passive revolution’s conceptual boundaries: the “left limit of active revolution” and the “right limit of restoration.” Beyond the left limit is obviously socialist revolution, modeled on the Russian Revolution. Stagism proved completely wrong about socialist revolution.16 This led Gramsci to make passive revolution “the interpretative criterion par excellence,” and thence to view socialist revolution as “an exception” to this baseline (Antonini, 2024: 90). This implies these two kinds of revolution contrast: socialist revolution, if it is to take place, “must have the character of an anti-passive revolution” (Simon, 2015: 50). Hence one way to limit passive revolution’s conceptual range is by juxtaposing it with socialist revolution, as depicted in Table 1.

It is important to be clear about precisely how these different forms of revolution compare and contrast. To do so it might help to distinguish process from outcome. During part of the time they are underway, mass mobilization-driven passive revolutions may resemble socialist revolutions, since they both initially hinge on upheaval (Hesketh and Morton, 2014; Levenson and Paret, this volume; Newman, this volume). As Gramsci (1971: 219) put it, the question is whether “revolution or restoration . . . predominates.” This implies that, at the outset, (some) mass mobilization-driven passive revolutions and some socialist revolutions are essentially identical.17 But the two diverge significantly once the revolutionary process has been underway, making the difference in ultimate outcomes stark: While a given case of passive revolution may or may not further capitalist development, no such case gets to the point of breaking with the capitalist law of value, as a socialist revolution does by definition.18

This brings us to a second contrast: between passive revolution and counterrevolution. Gramsci himself made no efforts to draw a conceptual distinction between them, perhaps because the most horrific counterrevolutions took place only after he had died, leaving this for those of us who wish to proceed in Gramsci’s spirit rather than exclusively on the basis of what he wrote (cf. Morton, 2007: 18). It is important to note that there are some similarities: One of its synonyms, “revolution-restoration,” makes passive revolution sound like revolution followed by counterrevolution (De Smet, 2021: 1086–1092; Wayne, 2022: 102), and it is indeed true that passive revolutions are sometimes reactions to revolutionary initiatives (Modonesi, 2019: 92), much like counterrevolutions (Slater and Smith, 2016). The reason is simple: both constitute reactions because both endeavor to preserve capitalism.

Still, passive revolutions are quite different from counterrevolutions (Coutinho, 2012: 101; Modonesi, 2019: 92). Counterrevolution lies beyond passive revolution’s “right limit” (Modonesi, 2019: 104). The existing literature explores how political parties can feature differently in these two types of revolution.19 But the contrast is actually sharper when we focus instead on repression (something in which partisan paramilitaries may, of course, be involved). Whereas passive revolutions are “restorations” that incorporate progressive demands and/or leaders, rather than relying on wholesale repression, the main kinds of counterrevolution—“posterior” (e.g., the Whites in the Russian Civil War), “pre-emptive” (e.g., Nazism in Weimar Germany),20 and “accessory” counterrevolution (e.g., the Pinochet coup against the Chilean Allende government)—rely on mass repression to shape the political process (Mayer, 1971: 86–101). Concrete combinations of passive revolution and counterrevolution are possible. But the concepts still differ, specifically in terms of the centrality of mass repression. Hence passive revolutions and counterrevolutions are distinct concepts, even though there is variation within each, and even though both reflect efforts to preserve capitalism and thus contrast with socialist revolution.

Taking the foregoing together, the concept of passive revolution is defined according to two dimensions. One axis is composed of Gramsci’s two analytic departures from stagism (anticipating the alternative factors approach and negative case analysis, respectively). The other axis is composed of the two types of passive revolution (the revolution from above-type and mass mobilization-based passive revolutions). Together, these axes define the conceptual range of passive revolution.

Figure 1 depicts this conceptual range. First, it captures passive revolutions per se, running along the passive-revolutionary diagonal from quadrant 1 to quadrant 2. The Risorgimento, the exemplar from quadrant 1, was a revolution from above-type passive revolution, which was the product of alternative factors, not those that stagism claimed drove “bourgeois revolutions.” And Italian Fascism, from quadrant 2, was driven by mass mobilization, making it a negative case vis-à-vis the stagist conception of socialist revolution.

Naturally, the passive-revolutionary diagonal is also able to accommodate other empirical cases, including studies published in and beyond this symposium. Scotland during the British unification (Davidson, 2010) and the Trinidad and Tobago independence movement (Edwards, this volume) could be classed in quadrant 1. Quadrant 2 can also capture other cases. The Mexican Revolution (Newman, this volume) could be classed here. One obvious way to contribute to the passive revolution literature would be to locate more cases in quadrants 1 or 2.

Moreover, since we have identified not just what makes the cases that fit in quadrants 1 and 2 distinct from one another (the ratio of their main ingredients), but what makes them similar as well (the ingredients they share in common), it is also possible to identify cases that lie somewhere along the continuum between 1 and 2, in the “Goldilocks” range (Levenson and Paret, this volume). Arranging more cases along the continuum would help bring the international political economy and critical sociology literatures into closer dialogue, something that is only possible because passive revolution is a capacious concept (meaning its capaciousness is an asset, not a liability). Research of this kind is likely to find a variety of ways quadrant 2 cases become quadrant 1 cases as they unfold—cases in which mass mobilization inspires a revolution from above (Levenson and Paret, this volume). The various pathways from quadrant 2 to quadrant 1 will of course differ qualitatively, although these pathways may cluster by historical period.

Having delineated the concept analytically and typologically, we are in a position to take passive revolution as the baseline category and leverage it toward additional insights. When he wrote that it can be used to interpret “every epoch characterized by complex historical upheavals,” Gramsci (1971: 114) suggested that passive revolution can be used to draw contrasts with adjacent phenomena. The exegetical literature has periodically returned to this idea (Buci-Glucksmann, 1980: 314; Coutinho, 2012: 104; Sotiris, 2022: 15). The remaining quadrants of Figure 1 can help with this. They take us into the conceptual terrain adjacent to passive revolution, showing precisely how a research agenda focused on passive revolution may help conceptualize other “complex historical upheavals.” To do this it will be useful to briefly introduce empirical cases into the discussion.

Quadrant 3 captures cases in which a revolution from above is driven not by traditionalistic state elites who make themselves over into modernizers, as in the Risorgimento, but by modernizing state elites who make themselves over into traditionalists. From the point of view of passive revolution, this is paradoxical, amounting to a negative case vis-à-vis the revolution from above-type of passive revolution. I think it is fair to call it a form of counterrevolution. The Egyptian Arab Spring could be interpreted along these lines. Here was a case in which mass mobilization inspired the modernization-oriented military and the conservative Muslim Brotherhood to assert themselves. While the former distanced itself from the incumbent regime, the Brotherhood advanced Mohamed Morsi as national leader. Once in power, however, he refused to undertake substantive reforms. With his regime discredited, leadership fell to the military, and General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, unleashed wholesale repression to halt the revolutionary process (De Smet, 2016; Said, 2024). The magnitude of this repression sets the Egyptian Arab Spring apart from passive revolutions. So does Sisi’s reorientation of the government from modernization to neo-traditionalism. This may have been necessary for “oppression and exploitation [to] remain the same” as before the Arab Spring (De Smet, 2021: 1093). But it does not fit the mold of the revolution from above-type passive revolution. It can instead be viewed as a case of conservative-led counterrevolution.

Quadrant 4 describes a final type of revolution: cases of mass mobilization-driven revolution in which workers are relatively absent and some putatively non-revolutionary class, like peasants, mobilizes en masse, producing a socialist revolution. This scenario is fairly widely recognized empirically (Moore, 1966; Wolf, 1969). The Chinese Revolution is an example: The Shanghai massacre eliminated the working class from the revolutionary process (Isaacs, 1951); from the Long March onward, especially during the Japanese occupation, mass peasant mobilization mounted, and by 1949 there was a socialistic transition (Karl, 2020).21 How we denote the resulting society is secondary to the fact that stagism fails to capture such a socialist revolution, since alternative factors (peasants, not workers) were decisive in bringing it about. A research program centered on passive revolutions, however, does successfully highlight this “complex historical upheaval,” even though, since it broke with capitalism, the Chinese Revolution, an active revolution, lay beyond passive revolution’s “left limit.”

Hence the conceptual map centering on passive revolution helps to highlight not just the phenomenal range falling along the passive-revolutionary diagonal. It also helps highlight an under-appreciated form of counterrevolution and a major form of socialist revolution. Taken together, this enriches the threefold contrast captured in Table 1 between passive revolution (the absorption of challenges and preservation of capitalism), socialist revolution (challenges that are successful and make inroads against capitalism), and counterrevolution (in which challenges are crushed and capitalism is preserved).

The passive-revolutionary diagonal helps to situate the papers included in this symposium and points to some possible directions for further research. It is perhaps especially important to begin to address the mechanisms of passive revolution, something still very much in process (Tuğal, 2025: 2641). Modonesi (2019: 55–56) provides a useful conceptual scheme to describe the basic mechanics of upheaval: subalternity, the starting condition; antagonism, when the masses weigh into the correlation of forces by advancing their own interests; and autonomy, when (or if) they assert a counter-hegemonic alternative to the dominant class. This scheme helps to distinguish passive revolutions from socialist revolutions; they are cases in which the masses transition from subalternity to antagonism, and then, rather than proceeding to autonomy, as would be characteristic of socialist revolution, they relapse back to subalternity.

Gramsci offered some clues as to what explains passive revolution. He suggested that “molecular changes” in the political system (Gramsci, 1971: 109), otherwise known as concessions, can scramble the political field and enable the existing state to absorb opposition forces, a dynamic that circumvents revolutionary socialist rupture. This is one mechanism behind passive revolution; Gramsci called it “transformism” (trasformismo) (Gramsci, 1971: 58 n. 8). Modonesi (2019: 98–102) suggests that Gramsci’s concept of “Caesarism”—which, like Marx’s concept of “Bonapartism,” involves a powerful figure arising amid a stalemate of contending forces—is another mechanism sometimes behind passive revolution. Considering both mechanisms in terms of the two types of passive revolution, it seems likely that transformism corresponds to the mass mobilization-driven type of passive revolution, whereas Caesarism corresponds to the revolution from above-type.

Gramsci argued that during the Risorgimento, the enlightened monarchical state reacted to popular mobilization by pursuing modernizing reforms. Chatterjee (1986: 50) drew from this line of thinking to posit that passive revolutions are the normal pathway of decolonization. Referencing this thesis, and focusing on the state, Edwards (this volume) makes a powerful case that the colonial state bureaucracy is decisive in ensuring a passive revolution.

This shifts the geographical locus of the elites who respond to mass mobilization from what Gramsci had observed. Prior to the Risorgimento, Austria had controlled the Italian peninsula and a national liberation movement (led by Giuseppe Mazzini then Giuseppe Garibaldi) had emerged only to be defeated, creating a domestic political vacuum. When France challenged Austria militarily, creating a geopolitical opening, Sardinia-Piedmont’s king, Victor Emmanuel II, seized the opportunity. The monarch joined forces with his liberal prime minister, Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour, pressing the latter’s Moderate Party into service to unify Italy.

Whereas in Italy, domestic elites responded to shifts in the geopolitical situation by yielding to reforms that were necessary to limit the scope of change, in Trinidad and Tobago, foreign actors also responded to shifts in the colonial situation to limit the scope of reforms. As Edwards describes, the independence movement involved considerable multiracial working class mobilization, led especially by Tubal Uriah “Buzz” Butler. The colonial state promoted a racial cleavage within the labor movement between Indian and African workers, and repressed Butler and more radical movement leaders, effectively making space for a moderate, Eric Williams, who was preferable to the now-former colonial power. Williams worked to protect capitalist interests in independent Trinidad and Tobago as an African-Indian political division took root and endured in the independent era.

The literature has already observed that geography conditions passive revolution (Gramsci, 1971: 117; Hesketh, 2017; McNelly, 2023; Morton, 2010a). But Edwards shows that passive revolutions’ causes can themselves vary geographically. Intra-elite coordination and conflict were important in both the Risorgimento and Trinbagonian independence, but in the metropolitan case the coordination was domestic (the Sardinian-Piedmontese monarchy and Benso/Cavour’s Moderates) and much of the conflict was international (Sardinia-Piedmont versus Austria), whereas in the case of decolonization the conflict was domestic (the labor movement/Butler versus Williams) and the coordination was international (Britain and Williams). Nevertheless, in both cases, coordination led a renovated elite to pursue some of the reforms the popular classes had demanded. And, in both the Risorgimento and Trinbagonian independence, this obstructed the subaltern classes from themselves taking power.

Where the comparison breaks down is that racism pervaded the Trinbagonian decolonization process. This brings us to the outer limit of Gramsci’s conceptualization of passive revolution, which by definition involves “absorption.” Absorption can of course mean a range of things, from demobilization of the masses to coopting or harnessing mass mobilization for elite ends. But insofar as a case of passive revolution hinges on racism, it has little to do with absorption at all, but instead with exclusion. Edwards invokes Fanon to suggest that the concept has to be stretched to apply to the colonial context—or, inasmuch as it hinges on racist exclusion, it might have to be upgraded, as Tuğal (this volume) suggests, or even abandoned.

Gramsci’s thesis that passive revolutions involve dominant class reactions to incoherent mass mobilization is comparable to a thesis central to social movement studies: that when mass mobilization is able to produce a significant disruption, political elites have to conciliate and make concessions (Piven and Cloward, 1979: 27–29). Newman (this volume) builds on this idea, applying it to the Mexican Revolution. Central to the model is elite conflict, rather than elite coordination; it is this, together with mass mobilization, he argues, that produced what he calls “leadership refinement,” yielding the Mexican Revolution’s major reforms. Since mass mobilization in the Mexican case was increasingly comprised of workers but socialism did not result, the parallel in Gramsci is with Fascism.

Gramsci’s analysis of the Risorgimento did feature the “absorption” of discontent, but it was in his analysis of Fascism, thematically linked to his theory of the “integral state,” that he developed a conception of politics in which the “state” encompasses a range of social forces and, significantly, is thereby able to transfigure and domesticate them through “absorption.” Tuğal (2009: 236–241) conceptualizes such dynamics in his analysis of the Justice and Development Party’s absorption of the Welfare Party and radical Islam in Turkey. McNelly (2023:58–59) also recounts a case of this: Bolivia’s Movement Toward Socialism party used a governmental organization to sideline the more radical social movement actors and thereby coopt the country’s constituent assembly process. But whereas Tuğal (2009: 238) attributes absorption to the exhaustion of radical initiative in Turkey, McNelly (2023: 55–57) attributes the Bolivian government’s cooptive success to the partial fulfillment of movement actors’ demands, or conciliation.

Levenson and Paret (this volume) intervene here in their analysis of the demise of Apartheid. (As noted, they ultimately take a “Goldilocks” position between the revolution from above-type and mass mobilization-driven passive revolutions. But they help with a discussion of the latter because they also posit that “passive revolution actually begins within popular mobilization” and that it is only later that “top-down leadership style” defines it.) They posit that socialist revolution was within the realm of the possible in South Africa, but that it did not come to fruition because the United Democratic Front served as an organ of absorption, underwriting passive revolution instead. Since it was inclusive, the Front was able to absorb discontent; and since it was moderate, it was highly compatible with the African National Congress party. This enabled the Front, along with the Congress of South African Trade Unions, to form the Mass Democratic Movement, which in turn enabled the party to clench national leadership. This defused the challenge to capitalism. With the party’s ascent to power and the end of Apartheid, repression clearly eased and important reforms were forthcoming, so it was by no means a counterrevolution as defined above. But the reforms never broke with capitalism, such that it also contrasted with socialist revolution.

If these case studies are any indication, conciliation and absorptive organs may be some of the basic features of mass mobilization-driven passive revolutions. But note that passive revolution scholars grapple with the absorption of a range of actors, from the labor movement to urban poor groups, which contrasts with Gramsci’s discussion of the absorption of rural unrest during the Risorgimento. On the one hand, the change in the field of application of this key mechanism is a function of its use to study a mass mobilization-based passive revolution. On the other, it is a function of expanding not only the concept’s historical ambit but also its geographic range.

Mexico and South Africa, like Trinidad and Tobago, fall outside Gramsci’s geographic focus on Europe. Use of the concept passive revolution has expanded far beyond Europe (Hesketh, 2017: 406). Not only the work in this symposium, but by now the majority of the empirical research on passive revolutions examines cases from the Global South. Vibrant literatures debate the suitability of passive revolution for analysis of Asia (Chatterjee, 1986; Gray, 2010; Riley and Desai, 2007), Africa (Brooks and Loftus, 2016; Paret, 2022; Satgar, 2008), and perhaps especially Latin America (Brading, 2014; Del Roio, 2012; Ellner, 2024; Gaudichaud et al., 2022; Hesketh and Morton, 2014; Morton, 2011).

From a variables-centered perspective, one might ask what specific conditions pervasive in the Global South contribute to passive revolutions, since it is fairly well established that passive revolutions take place amid dependency of some kind (Morton, 2010a: 332, 2010b, 2011: 59–60; Riley and Desai, 2007: 817). But then again, so do revolutions in general, including socialist revolutions, tend to occur only amid conditions of dependency (Foran, 2005: 18–19) and the political closure characteristic of dependent societies (Goodwin, 2001: 25–27, 47–48). This suggests it is wrong to posit that passive revolution is the normal pathway of decolonization (Chatterjee, 1986: 50); the struggle against colonialism can also segue to socialist revolution (Mandel, 1986: 42).

It might be best to view the geography of passive revolutions from a different angle. For what is striking and perhaps most useful about the passive revolutions literature is that it does not couch its claims in terms of putatively essential differences between the Global North and the Global South. It has long put developments inside Europe side-by-side with ones outside (Riley and Desai, 2007). The concept’s geographic range thus helps to overcome insular thinking (Morton, 2007: 67, 72). As Gramsci (1971: 180) put it, “the theoretical error consists . . .. in making what is a principle of research and interpretation into an ‘historical cause’.” True, passive revolution can accommodate postcolonial and dependent societies. But no, the concept does not involve the assumption that those societies function according to principles alien to colonist and imperialist countries.

By breaking with Eurocentric stagism, passive revolution becomes a concept capturing processes of political change that remain within the social parameters of capitalism rather than within the geographic boundaries of nation states, much less a subset of them. On the one hand, this implies the concept may simultaneously work just as well for iconic political developments in the Great Powers, like the Anglo-Scottish Union (Davidson, 2010) and the U.S. Civil War (Anievas and Waring, 2023), as it does for Latin America, Africa, or Asia, or countries that appear to defy the East/West boundary (Fabry, 2019; Tuğal, 2009). On the other hand, it requires researchers to incorporate a universal perspective encompassing global capitalism into any study of its particular national “seats,” for only this combination is really able to capture passive revolutions (Hesketh, 2017; see also Morton, 2010a: 332).

Gramsci’s concept of passive revolution rejects the old stagist theory of revolutions. The way it does so anticipated two analytic approaches that are now prominent in contemporary historical sociology, negative case analysis and the alternative factors approach. Passive revolutions researchers, following Gramsci, have identified two types of such upheavals, a revolution from above-type and a mass mobilization-driven type, both of which take place during the capitalist epoch and remain circumscribed to it.

Taking the analytical and typological insights together helps map an entire conceptual space. Capturing both the analytic deviations from stagism and the types of passive revolutions together establishes, in the first place, the phenomenal range that the concept passive revolution encompasses. In the second place, the map primes thinking about other kinds of revolutions that have remained somewhat theoretically unmoored given the failures of stagist theory and amid the unhelpful binary of revolution vs. counterrevolution (on this point, see Lawson, 2019: 34; Modonesi, 2019: 92). It allows us to anatomize alternative factors producing, and negative cases of, passive revolution (as Gramsci did). It also reserves conceptual space for alternative factors producing, and negative cases of, socialist revolution and counterrevolution, respectively (as a Gramscian might do). The map therefore combines Gramsci exegesis with insights gleaned from Gramscian empirical research into concrete cases of passive revolution, in addition to being informed by socialist revolution and counterrevolution.

The conceptual map raises questions about causation. Some of them concern the internal mechanics of passive revolutions; articles in this symposium discuss some of the “mechanisms” that seem to populate passive revolutions, from racial divisions to organs of absorption. These findings are only a start, however; more research is needed to determine whether revolution from above-type passive revolutions and mass mobilization-driven ones mostly converge or mostly diverge in their causal mechanics. (Another line of research is needed to determine which of these mechanisms apply to the types of revolution beyond passive revolution’s left and right “limits.”)

A final set of questions concerns the geography of passive revolution. Passive revolutions have been especially ubiquitous outside of Europe, suggesting that the break with Eurocentric stagism has been warranted. But passive revolutions do not exclude Europe. What they do is require conceiving of any given case of passive revolution in terms of both its relationship to national-scale politics in the place of study and to the dynamics of world-scale capitalism—which can be viewed, not incorrectly, as a Euro/America-centric phenomenon. Beyond this, the specific dynamics of passive revolutions await further research.

I would like to thank Zophia Edwards, Chris Hesketh, Angus McNelly, Adam David Morton, Cihan Tuğal, Satnam Virdee, and especially Zachary Levenson for comments on earlier drafts of this article. Helped me not only to avoid embarrassing mistakes, but also to deepen the discussion considerably—although they are in no way responsible for any remaining errors, nor the arguments advanced.