I welcome Jon Beasley-Murray’s reply, ‘A bit of a leap’, to my rejoinder ‘Machiavelli, Gramsci, Althusser and Us’ that is centred around his blog post ‘Machiavelli and Us’. Through these engagements clarity may come to the fore as well as new moments of rupture that can open up politics afresh. In response, my initial aim is to rectify certain errors in Beasley-Murray’s representation of the debate. More substantively, my aim is to reaffirm precisely how both Beasley-Murray’s reading of Althusser and Gramsci is problematic in his original blog post and in his book Posthegemony, which received an Honorable Mention for the Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize.
Posts tagged: Perry Anderson
Passive Revolution or Counter-reformation?: A View from Latin America
The publication of Carlos Nelson Coutinho’s Gramsci’s Political Thought in the Historical Materialism Book Series by Brill [2012] provides a wonderful opportunity to draw some attention to the debates on Gramsci in Latin America. This particular book is a translation of Gramsci: Um estudo sobre su pensamento politico [1999] and is an essential window through which to view debates in and beyond Brazil. It is written by one of the most hugely important intellectual figures in Latin America producing studies on Gramsci whose company would also include José Aricó, Juan Carlos Portantiero, or Dora Kanoussi, to name a few. Its publication in translation represents a really positive and agenda-setting attempt by the editorial board of the Historical Materialism Book Series to bring Latin American texts to a wider Anglophone audience and is to be much applauded. The appearance of Carlos Nelson Coutinho’s work in English leads the way in this respect and my hope is that additional texts in this series and others will follow. Notably, Verso also recently published Emir Sader’s The New Mole: Paths of the Latin American Left [2012]. What can engaging work from a Latin American context offer to past and present Gramsci debates?
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?
