Organic Crisis, Integral State, Passive Revolution: Twilight of the Neoliberal Order?

A reconnaissance of the 2020 pandemic begins by registering the moments of refusal and supersedure, demonstrating the extent to which it seemed to many to be an organic (transformational) crisis re-ordering neoliberal capitalism’s fundamental elements. Vaccine development and debates over lockdowns illustrate the emergence of a neoliberal integral state, one in which the lines between government, industry and finance are blurred to the point of invisibility. Yet the pandemic also suggests that such states are hobbled as effective organisers of hegemony by their incapacity to safeguard the lives and interests of the people they purportedly represent and to break with imperial patterns of global dominance. Passive revolutionary attempts to contain revolutionary critiques and activism are to be expected; yet they may not succeed, given that the covid-19 pandemic arose from the environmental consequences of the global processes of capitalist accumulation neoliberals defend. The ‘next left’ has an opening, provided it soberly addresses the crisis of the neoliberal order and develops a convincing strategy for overcoming it.

Passive Revolution in Japan: The Restoration of Hegemony under Abe?

This article draws on Gramsci’s theory of passive revolution to explore the second tenure of Japanese Prime Minister Abe Shinzō from 2012 to 2020. It sees the high degree of political stability that Abe achieved as a contrast to the preceding two decades of Japanese politics and asks what accounts for Abe’s success in restoring Liberal Democratic Party’s (LDP) dominance in an era of enduring economic and social crisis. The article argues that Abe executed a strategy of passive revolution that incorporated two “faces”: an “outward” face oriented around consent and an “inward” face rooted in coercion. The former involved economic policies (in particular “Abenomics”) designed to appear capable of resolving chronic economic stagnation, growing inequality and other social and economic problems, restoring popular support for the LDP without undermining conditions for capital accumulation or empowering subaltern classes. In contrast, the latter involved various low-profile security and administrative policies that enabled the Abe government to dramatically increase its power while silencing or disarming potential rivals and critics. The article sees this two-sided strategy of passive revolution as effective in restoring LDP dominance but unlikely to prove the basis for a more expansive hegemony or a resolution to Japan’s organic crisis.

The British and the transfer of power in the Bechuanaland Protectorate: Neo-colonialism or passive revolution?

Deploying the theoretical framework of Italian Marxist thinker, Antonio Gramsci, this article argues that rather than a neo-colonial arrangement, the transfer of power from the British to locals in the Bechuanaland Protectorate (Botswana) could be conceptualized as a passive revolution. This passive revolution, which was triggered by demands for independence by radical nationalists, entailed the formation of a pro-British political party, the Botswana Democratic Party, and transferring power to it in a carefully managed decolonization process. The passive revolution aimed not just at preserving British economic interests in the protectorate but also at state formation for purposes of expanding the capitalist mode of production in the newly independent state. Thus, the transfer of power took place concurrently with the creation of a legitimate capitalist state that served the interests of both the British and the cattle-owning Botswana Democratic Party elite that assumed power at independence. Post-independence, the cattle bourgeois class at the apex of the Botswana Democratic Party embarked upon the construction of hegemony through the creation of an interventionist developmental state that addressed the narrow interests of other classes and groups constituting the post-independence historical bloc. Such hegemony has allowed the Botswana Democratic Party to retain power to the present day.

Platforms of Power

This chapter traces how digital media instruments are used by different factions within the capitalist ruling class to capture and maintain the commanding heights of the American social structure. Drawing upon principles presented earlier in the book, the chapter examines cases where different capitalists pursue different strategies, form different alliances and viciously compete against one another. It examines how progressive neoliberals responded to this challenge in the 2016 and 2020 Democratic primaries and how party officials sought to thwart class struggle 'from below.' The chapter ends by examining how capturing the judiciary can encode a 'passive revolution'.