Passive revolution


Passive revolution is a term coined by Italian politician and philosopher Antonio Gramsci during the interwar period in Italy. Gramsci coined the term to refer to a significant change that is not an abrupt one, but a slow and gradual metamorphosis which could take years or generations to accomplish.
Gramsci uses "passive revolution" in a variety of contexts with slightly different meanings. The primary usage is to contrast the passive transformation of bourgeois society in 19th-century Italy with the active revolutionary process of the bourgeoisie in France. However, Gramsci also associates Italian fascism with the notion of passive revolution.
Passive revolution is a transformation of the political and institutional structures without strong social processes. Gramsci also uses the term for the mutations of the structures of capitalist economic production that he recognizes primarily in the development of the United States factory system of the 1920s and 1930s. Besides this usage of the term, "passive revolution" as a descriptive tool of historical analysis, Gramsci seems to employ it like a suggestion as path for struggle. In a society subsumed within capital, the only way Gramsci can see to make a revolution is a relatively "passive" one through the institutions of civil society.