With all of the kerfuffle in the UK academic world about open access journals−meaning without legal or financial barriers to gain access to publically-funded academic work−and the fudge underway to resolve this in the interests of publishers, Andreas Bieler and I are delighted to announce a new article of ours now available in the Journal of Australian Political Economy (JAPE). This journal publishes peer-reviewed articles and is fully open access. The latest issue includes the annual E. L. Wheelwright Lecture by Susan George, articles on urban political economy, and our joint article on recasting contemporary geopolitics, territorial processes of capitalist accumulation, and spaces of imperialist rivalry. Our article is entitled ‘The will-o’-the-wisp of the transnational state’ and can be freely accessed here.
Posts tagged: Alex Callinicos
Gramscian Horizons
In 2011, I was fortunate enough to be invited to present at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) in Mexico City to participate in a conference on the ‘Uses of Gramsci in Social and Political Theory’ (see ‘Gramsci y el concepto de revolución pasiva’). The proceedings of that event have now been published in an excellent volume entitled Horizontes Gramscianos: Estudios en torno al pensamiento de Antonio Gramsci (UNAM, 2013), edited by Massimo Modonesi. This book, Gramscian Horizons: studies around the thought of Antonio Gramsci, is an important text in furthering the wave of work on Gramsci published in Spanish in and on Latin America, following key works by figures such as Dora Kanoussi, Carlos Nelson Coutinho, Marcos del Roio, José Arico, Juan Carlos Portantiero, Hugues Portelli, and Ronaldo Munck. The book itself carries significant essays inter alia by Fabio Frosini, Guido Liguori, Dora Kannousi, and Carlos Nelson Coutinho.
Permanent Passive Revolution?
Following on from my last post, my purpose in this commentary is to reflect critically on the thesis of passive revolution and whether there is something relatively “permanent” about it as a hallmark of postcolonial state formation. The initiative to do so derives directly from the conclusion to my book Revolution and State in Modern Mexico [2011]. There, it is noted that Antonio Gramsci was acutely drawn in the Prison Notebooks to consider the utility and dangers of the thesis of passive revolution ‘as an interpretation of the Risorgimento, and of every epoch characterised by complex historical upheavals’ leading to the transformation of capitalist modernity. Hence Gramsci casts out a set of reflections in his carceral research on the ‘danger of historical defeatism, i.e. of indifferentism, since the whole way of posing the question may induce a belief in some kind of fatalism’. Can the history of capitalist development in postcolonial states be marked by transformations of permanent passive revolution?
What is this thing called passive revolution?
A number of my current posts have looked at the condition and concept of passive revolution, including the most recent focusing on ‘Spaces of Revolution’. As a result, a post on some of the theoretical and historical sociological contributions of the notion of passive revolution, as developed by Antonio Gramsci, might be a good intellectual backstop for pointers on passive revolution and how best to ‘approach’ the import of passive revolution for understanding state formation, crises in capitalism, and conditions of class struggle. This was also the topic of a significant special issue of Capital & Class, entitled ‘Approaching Passive Revolutions’, which contains various articles including my own on ‘The Continuum of Passive Revolution’.
