Passive Revolution and Its Contradictions: Rethinking Early Republican Kurdish Uprisings

A different interpretation of the theoretical significance of Gramsci's elaboration of a theory of politics is that offered by Leonardo Paggi. Paggi suggests that this theory of politics is not limited to typical situation of the Western countries since it throws into a critical light a whole mode of economistic readings of historical materalism and therefore has important implications for Marxist theory in general. In fact, as Paggi points out for Buci-Glucksmann, with the concept of 'passive revolution' Gramsci effectively adds something new to Marx's Preface because he theorises an element which was absent from it: the study of the political form of transition. The identification of marxist philosophy and materialism is considered by Gramsci to be a form of economism and it was because of that Marxism lost its revolutionary character and was recuperated within the problematic of bourgeois philosophy. The category of 'passive revolution' is often used by Gramsci to qualify the most usual form of bourgeoisie hegemony.

Nineteenth-century China was a paradoxical place. On the one hand, significant new voices were determined to undertake reforms that would enable the Qing empire to cope with the powerful West; on the other, the literate public was for the most part equally intent on preserving the old ways. Bringing the World Home sheds new light on China's vibrant cultural life between 1895 and 1919 - a crucial period that marks a watershed between the conservative old regime and the ostensibly iconoclastic Culture of the 1920s. Although generally overlooked in the effort to understand modern Chinese history, the era has much to teach us about cultural accommodation and is characterized by its own unique intellectual life. This original and probing work traces the most significant strands of the new post-1895 discourse, concentrating on the anxieties inherent in a complicated process of cultural transformation. It focuses principally on how the need to accommodate the West was reflected in such landmark novels of the period as Wu Jianren's Strange Events Eyewitnessed in the Past Twenty Years and Zhu Shouju's Tides of the Huangpu, which began serial publication in Shanghai in 1916. The negative tone of these narratives contrasts sharply with the facile optimism that characterizes the many essays on the New Novel appearing in the popular press of the time. Neither iconoclasm nor the wholesale embrace of the new could square the contradicting intellectual demands imposed by the momentous alternatives presenting themselves. Bringing the World Home fruitfully bridges the intellectual and literary history of the late Qing and early Republican era by showing how post-1919 radicalism - in an attempt to obscure the contributions made during the preceding period - obliterated an important legacy of cultural interaction and compromise that holds many lessons for the contemporary world.

This paper examines the key modern infrastructure of telecommunications in early Republican China, through the eyes of a Japanese, Nakayama Ryûji, who served as a telecommunications adviser to the Chinese government from 1913 to 1928. Nakayama's numerous reports and recommendations to his Chinese employer and frequent confidential dispatches to the Japanese government, when read together, constitute a fascinating prism. They not only reveal problems as well as the potential in China's telecommunications sector, they also highlight Japan's efforts to compete with other foreign actors in China through the provision of Japanese equipment, expertise, and loans. While Nakayama strove to shape China's telecommunications development in ways that would, in his view, benefit both China and Japan, his efforts were often undercut by the aggressive actions of the Japanese government in China, such as the infamous Twenty-One Demands. Though promising at first, Japan's influence on China's modernization in the early Republican era came to be more limited, especially when compared with the final decade of the Qing Dynasty. Ultimately, what can be seen through this Japanese prism confirms that the development of an information infrastructure in modern China, as elsewhere, was as much shaped by technological and economic forces as it was influenced by political and diplomatic factors.

This article analyses West German foreign policy towards state terrorism in Chile and Argentina and towards political refugees fleeing these regimes. Pressured by grassroots activists, Willy Brandt's government took a hard stance against the Chilean military junta and established an asylum programme for refugees from Chile. Under Helmut Schmidt, however, the official attitude towards state terrorism changed. West Germany welcomed the military coup in Buenos Aires, accepted the Argentinean junta's position that repressive measures were necessary to fight ‘subversion’, flatly refused to accept any Argentinean political prisoners and approved billions of Deutschmarks worth of weapons sales to the junta. This article argues that Bonn's ambivalence towards state terrorism and uneven interest in human rights was due to the different attitudes of both Social Democratic Chancellors towards economic strategising, grassroots activism and, most importantly, the threat of left-wing terrorism.

Political realism and the quest for political progress

Reviewed by: Marxisms in the 21st Century: critique, crisis and struggles eds. by Michelle Williams and Vishwas Satgar Theodoros Rakopoulos (bio) Michelle Williams and Vishwas Satgar (eds) (2013) Marxisms in the 21st Century: critique, crisis and struggles. Johannesburg: Wits University Press This fascinating and timely book oscillates interestingly between two sets of tensions that the authors –and particularly the editors in the introduction and the conclusion – address in convincing terms. The first tension rises in thinking how do we reconcile a plurality of Marxisms while embracing Marxism as a coherent set of guiding principles, without becoming post-Marxists. The second tension concerns what kind of guiding principles Marxism provides: analytical or political? The varied approaches therefore that Williams suggests in the introduction (12) entail a plurality of meanings to the term Marxism as well as a plural reading of Marxist politics in the light of political developments of the 21st century. The book, if taken as a whole, seems to suggest that it is futile to address this distance of analysis and politics. Most authors thence depart from a situated analytical perspective. We therefore have chapters where there is analysis and critique of Marxism as politics (ANC’s ‘Marxism’ for instance), chapters where there is a critical reading of Marxist analysis (and politics) alongside other traditions (Foucault, feminism, ecology), and chapters where Marxist politics are assessed in the context of new social realities (South Africa’s urban social movements). The contemporary period is then seen as a prism to analyse in sobriety either current affairs in Southern Africa or (mainly unfortunate) events in the African 20th century. For these reasons, this book’s title is indicative of its contributors’ and editors’ intentions: the stress is first on the plural tense of the noun [End Page 133] (Marxisms) and then on the timing: 21st century. However, adapting a plural take that is open-ended comes with responsibility: we should differentiate between ideology and analytical systems. On this note, it would be helpful to decipher what this collection is not. The collection in then not contributing to the ongoing debate involving scholars like Zizek, Badiou, Balibar and others, on new-found Marxism. It is therefore not a philosophical book, as the theoretical contributions are few (Veriava’s chapter stands out in this respect). It is not a strictly politicised book either, and partakes only to a small extent in the Latin American-centred debate for and on ‘socialism for the 21st century’ (although one chapter ends with an Evo Morales quote (162)). The collection is not in a political theory, as much as in a critical policy direction and in its most theoretically driven chapters it decidedly becomes part of what Burawoy (2003; and this volume) calls a sociological Marxism (46). This Marxism, that takes advantage of Gramsci (as per Satgar’s chapter) and Polanyi (as per Burawoy’s chapter) is positioned in civil society. This focus illuminates the book’s relevance, and comes at a crucial time and place in the three ways that the subtitle explains: a time and place of crisis, critique and struggle in civil societies of Africa, and in the global capitalist context. These three themes, organising the material, permeate all three chapters: One. Democratising and Globalising Marxism, Two. Marxism and Left Politics; and Three. Crises of Marxism in Africa and possibilities for the future. An attention to critique is given in Chapters One and Two, while Chapter Three delineates a Marxism for South Africa and from an ‘African’ perspective, as it deploys Marxisms in a framework of the South addressing social and historical patterns of the South. Satgar, taking Gramsci to this Southern trajectory, interestingly notes how the concept of ‘passive revolution’ could help us understand post-apartheid SA (66-67). He urges us to see the historicist Gramsci outside his strictly Italian references, by tracing the argument, for instance, to Cosatu’s policies. His point that ‘all history is world history’ brings Gramsci in dialogue with Wallerstein; it would be interesting to trace this further in a discussion of how notions such as the ‘subaltern’ influenced post-colonial studies, or how this interacts with Eric Wolf’s work on...

Multiple quarrels within and between families in rural southern Malawi mediate an invisible, subterranean process of social differentiation and class formation - a 'hidden history'. The paper argues that conflict over land underlies most of the disputes, is central to the division of matrilineal families and, in turn, to the process of social differentiation and class formation. The disputes have the effect of turning family members into 'strangers', or those who do not belong on the family land. Family oral histories suggest that the matrilineal groups split up ('break' in local metaphor) not only along the cleavages between sisters' daughters (that is, in the second generation of matrilineal segments) but between sisters. A final rupture of a matrilineal family occurs through increasingly bitter quarrels, often including accusations of witchcraft, and the move of a group of sisters to a different area, thereby ceding the matri-family's land to those who remain. The paper concentrates on this 'hidden' process, although it also provides a sketch of some of the key past and present patterns of differentiation in Malawi. The problem in discerning social differentiation and class formation as these take place (rather than post hoc from a long historical viewpoint) is precisely that one is observing things as they happen, the gradual'coming about' of restructured groups. The article argues that property in land is central to long-term processes of agrarian transformation and class formation; briefly outlines significant historical precedents to the contemporary situation in Malawi; and presents detailed family histories to support the argument.

Reviewed by: Conceived in Doubt: Religion and Politics in the New American Nation by Amanda Porterfield, and: An Age of Infidels: The Politics of Religious Controversy in the Early United States by Eric R. Schlereth Jeffrey Thomas Perry (bio) Conceived in Doubt: Religion and Politics in the New American Nation. By Amanda Porterfield. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012. Pp. 264. $40.00 cloth; $7.00 to $32.00 ebook) An Age of Infidels: The Politics of Religious Controversy in the Early United States. By Eric R. Schlereth. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. Pp. 312. $55.00 cloth; $55.00 ebook) Since its publication in 1989, Nathan Hatch’s The Democratization of American Christianity has dominated the religious historiography of the early republican and antebellum periods. Despite scholarly efforts to broaden and complicate his contention that American Christianity became imbued with liberating notions of democracy, Amanda Porterfield laments that Hatch’s “work continues to set the framework” for how historians teach and write about the religion and politics of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries (p. 11). Recent works by Porterfield and Eric R. Schlereth seek to correct Hatch’s narrow focus on the relationship between Christianity and American politics by positing the growth of evangelicalism alongside the bitter partisan struggles of the 1790s and beyond, as well as the influence of widespread societal doubt, disbelief, and deism in the decades following the Revolutionary War. In so doing, each tap into larger epistemological shifts concerning the basis of religious knowledge and the role of religion in the new political order of the early republic. In Conceived in Doubt, Porterfield effectively demonstrates the existence of ubiquitous doubt throughout the young nation in the decades after the Revolutionary War. The breakdown of traditional networks of authority, increased social mobility, demographic transformations, geographic expansion, partisan animosity, and, for many, the popularity of deistic beliefs—exemplified by Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason—all “fed the reservoirs of mistrust” in American life (p. 60). Whereas Christianity and deism as theological stances had co-existed in the immediate-post-Revolutionary period, each was politicized by the partisan skirmishes of the 1790s. During that decade, new levels [End Page 663] and modes of political participation gave rise to a political culture rife with tension as Federalists and Jeffersonians squared off over the structure of American governance and the future of the republic. Alongside and often entangled with these political transformations, “the meaning of religion” and its place in the public order shifted, from the obvious “codependence of religion and civil government” in the colonial setting, to a more “voluntary and individualistic” practice by the turn of the nineteenth century (pp. 6–7). Aligned with Federalist policies, New England religious clerics, especially, derided the radicalism of the French Revolution, insisting that the moral order of the nation should rest upon a firm connection between church and state. Evangelical groups—first the Baptists and later the Methodists—increasingly joined the ranks of the Jeffersonians, embracing libertarian ideology and democratic politics while calling for the complete separation of church and state. Both sides of the religious spectrum, however, waged war upon skepticism, equating it with immorality and licentiousness. Evangelicals grew more adept at “managing and manipulating doubt,” they provided crucial associations between evangelical religion and American identity, “linking idealism about America to evangelical religion” (p. 13). In the end, Porterfield argues that despite its prevalence and influence in American politics, religion was “too complex and inconsistent in its effects to operate as a unifying cultural force” (p. 177). Instead, a culture attuned to national honor “provided cover” for “materialists” like Henry Clay and evangelicals to organize politically. Although dealing with many of the same issues as Porterfield, Schlereth focuses more on infidelity controversies during the early republican era. There was no guarantee, he reminds us in An Age of Infidels, that long-held religious customs would be compatible with a “new republican political order that encouraged suspicion of inherited traditions, institutions, and ideas” (pp. 1–2). Indeed, the deists Schlereth examines encouraged freeing oneself and society from institutions of the past, particularly Christianity. Only in this way could the young nation survive, nurture good citizens, and continue...

This article begins by engaging with some recent attempts to bring the study of the agency of labour into analyses of global capitalism, and argues that these approaches fail to capture the ways in which labour movements impact upon state strategies and, in turn, how this affects the spatial and temporal nature of global capitalist restructuring. Through adopting Antonio Gramsci’s concept of passive revolution, the article shows that whilst China has witnessed a significant degree of spontaneous and unorganised labour unrest, the state has been highly active in seeking to forestall the emergence of a politically conscious organised labour movement in ways that have important implications for the mode of China’s insertion into the international division of labour. In accordance with Gramsci’s framework, this ‘revolution from above’ should be understood within the framework and the specificity of the international states system. Labour struggles, class formation and the role of the state in these processes are conditioned both by geopolitical rivalry and by the demonstrative effects of earlier cases of successful industrialisation, as well as by examples of resultant labour struggles.

Three main ideal-typical forms or types of violence have throughout this book been discerned: private violence, state violence and structural violence. The term ‘private violence’ has been meant to denote both individual and collective forms of personal violence. This category is called ‘private’, especially with reference to its opposition to state violence. In this chapter, these three forms of violence are discussed in their varying empirical forms of appearance, their self-reproducing powers, and their mutual influences. In each of these aspects, comprehensiveness cannot be claimed, but the relations between the three types need to be highlighted, albeit only in a preliminary sense. Next to reviewing existing knowledge concerning the three main forms of violence, it is now crucial to see how these are linked together — it is crucial to unravel the web of connections that exist between them. For the exclusive focus on private or personal violence so often entails a blindness for the workings of state violence and structural violence. And the theory of the state usually loses sight of structural violence and of the active side (other than the mere reactive side) of the state in its violence — political theory here in fact reveals its own political being. In the trias violentiae, the state plays a key role, and ample attention will therefore be devoted to it. For the state is the mediator between private violence and structural violence. At the same time, however, it may be the medium of private violence set off as a result of structural violence, and of structural violence directed against the private sphere. This central place of the state will be further discussed in the following paragraphs.

This paper intends to provide a framework for conceptualizing and interpreting the resilient capacity and adaptability of the Chinese Communist Party to cope with changing political and economic environments and to sustain its hegemony through periods of crises and transformations. Based on an instrumental reading and reflective incorporation of some relevant concepts and discourses of Gramsci’s political theory, the paper aims to facilitate a well-rounded analysis of the CCP’s authoritarian resilience, which is achieved through a continuous process of “passive revolution”. The party’s new hegemony is realized through a reconstituted historical bloc on the basis of convergence of interests and through neutralizing the pressures of various contending forces that might otherwise trigger profound structural transformations. The paper concludes that “authoritarian resilience is one of the strongest enduring features of the CCP’s political culture, characterized by dynamic adaptive skills and greater institutional capacity for political survival.

The ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688–89 has traditionally been celebrated as a momentous constitutional watershed, which signalled that the contest for sovereignty between crown and parliament over the previous century had been decisively resolved in parliament’s favour. But while ‘Liberty and Property’ became a favoured catch-cry for supporters of the revolution, its opponents maintained that they were now ‘arbitrarily robb’d of [their] Liberties’. This chapter considers the repressive measures, including indefinite imprisonment without trial, used against Jacobites and others by post-revolutionary regimes, and the extent to which these may have marked a new departure in state violence against citizens and subjects.

The contemporaneous movements for human rights that Soviet rights defenders and the Black Panthers waged during the 1960s are analysed in a comparative fashion here for the very first time. The book also examines the extra-legal measures that both the KGB and FBI employed to destroy them. The Black Panthers and the Sovietsinnovatively compares Soviet human rights activists’ exposure of the workings of the Soviet police state with the miniature, city-level surveillance police states that the Black Panthers exposed as operating across the United States. It illuminates the legal tactics of counter-surveillance that Soviet rights defenders and the Black Panthers employed as a means of restraining acts of state-sanctioned violence. The book also highlights how the U.S. production of knowledge about Soviet ‘dissidents’ reified white supremacist, anti-communist notions of dissent, human rights, and state violence that facilitated the repression of the Black Panthers and the mass incarceration of African Americans as criminals. Meredith L. Roman disrupts the enduring Cold War binaries of authoritarianism-democracy and oppression-freedom that obscure our understanding of the complex, overlapping histories of these two superpowers. Roman convincingly argues that the Soviet rights defenders and the Black Panthers’ vast documentation of domestic human rights abuses and the repressive measures that they faced for mobilizing to end them serve as an important societal reminder; they reaffirm that genuine democracy and the safeguarding of human rights are incompatible with authoritarian practices,the conditions of racial capitalism, and the ideology of national security.

In the Shadow of the State: The Politics of Denunciation and Panegyric during the Trujillo Regime in the Dominican Republic, 1940-1958

Charles W. Bergquist (1942–2020)