Abstract This article analyses the role of online organic intellectuals in the consolidation of Bolsonarism within Brazil's ongoing neo-liberal order. Drawing on the Gramscian concept of passive revolution, it argues that far-right digital influencers act as key ideological mediators, channelling popular discontent, resentment and anti-systemic affect into cultural and moral narratives that ultimately stabilize the existing political economy. Rather than disrupting neo-liberalism, these figures repackage its legitimacy crisis through nationalist, anti-globalist and culturally conservative frames. The analysis traces this process in Brazil's recent political trajectory, from the gradual exhaustion of Lulism to the rise of Bolsonarism, showing how elite economic interests have been rearticulated through new forms of digital ideological production. By foregrounding the cultural work of Brazil's far-right influencers, the article highlights how neo-liberalism is able to renew itself through its crises. The findings speak to broader trends in contemporary capitalism, offering insight into how far-right media ecosystems help to (re)forge hegemonic stability across other liberal democracies facing similar political circumstances.

This article aims to provide a general characterization of the populism of the 4T in Mexico from a global perspective. To achieve this, we draw on Gramsci’s concept of passive revolution to outline a generic characterization of populism as political and social movements that are part of hegemonic projects, which seek to materialize through the seizure of power at specific historical moments. The current phase of capitalist development is considered as a referential framework, with the neoliberal path as the predominant—though not the only—mode of entrepreneurship adopted by most countries, including Mexico, and its subsequent crisis. These factors are seen as the conditions that have given rise to new forms of international populism and the 4T’s populism, both as attempts to resolve the neoliberal crisis. After analyzing the 4T as a populist passive revolution that seeks to resolve the crisis of the neoliberal path in Mexico through the transformation of the State in a restricted sense—i.e., without productive-social transformation—it is concluded that the loss of the State’s intellectual, institutional, and financial capacities prevents it from generating the general conditions for an accumulation based on knowledge and the exploitation of the specificities of backwardness to promote social development under current historical conditions. Likewise, the concept of passive revolution must be theoretically developed to fully account for international populisms and that of the 4T in Mexico.

This paper examines decolonization in Trinidad and Tobago, focusing on how middle-class-led political parties – primarily divided along African and Indian lines – displaced the labor movement and assumed control of the post-colonial state. The Gramscian concept of passive revolution highlights how middle-class elites demobilize labor and preserve racialized capitalist relations and foreign economic dominance. Drawing on studies of the role of colonial states in decolonization, this paper argues that, in addition to nationalist elites, colonial state officials were central to this process of conservative modernization. In Trinidad and Tobago, the British colonial state actively shaped the passive revolution through strategies of cooptation, incorporation, and manipulation of electoral systems and constitutional structures to protect imperial interests. The findings demonstrate that the passive revolution concept must be “stretched,” as Frantz Fanon suggests, to account for the dynamics of the colonial context.

This article explores the consolidation of Israel’s right wing in the 1960s–1970s as a case for understanding long-term cross-class alliances. Moving beyond standard accounts that emphasize party mergers and ideological shifts, the authors argue that the Israeli right’s emergence as a dominant force was grounded in class mediation and social negotiation. Drawing on Gramsci’s ideas of the ‘historical bloc’ and ‘passive revolution’, the article analyzes the formation of Gahal (Herut – Liberal Bloc) in 1965 as a class-convergent project rather than just a political alliance. The 1966 economic recession – occurring when Gahal was still new – served as a critical juncture, exposing internal contradictions and pushing the party to transform. Initially aligned with bourgeois interests, Gahal began to act as a ‘mediating party’, accommodating the needs of its increasingly diverse support base, including working-class Mizrahi voters. This dialectical shift forced the party leadership to respond to new demands, broadening its appeal and deepening class heterogeneity. The article introduces the concept of the ‘mediating party’ to highlight how political organizations can actively negotiate class tensions. This category helps bridge the gap between abstract theory and institutional practice. The Israeli case thus offers insights into party-building and class compromise relevant to broader comparative political analysis.

ABSTRACT At the end of World War II, the British Empire in Asia found itself in terminal decline. British officials planned for their retreat, but they would not leave before ‘reasonable parties’ could take their place and serve their two key interests: maintaining the extractive capitalist market and ensuring a continued British geo-strategic presence. By doing a comparative study between Burma and Malaya between 1945 and 1948, this article finds that, in both cases, colonial officials preferred anti-immigrant ethnonationalist parties. It argues that the British logic here was the logic of passive revolution. The Myochit Party in Burma and the United Malays National Organization in Malaya both promoted the ‘immigrant problem’ as the foremost issue. Both demonstrated that neither had any interest in reforming extractive capitalism or even in resisting British influence, but simply in replacing the British at the top of the political and economic hierarchy in their countries. Therefore, these parties could retain existing structures while harnessing revolutionary energy into persecuting scapegoats. The article’s intervention is to use the framework of passive revolution to explain why ethnonationalism has been the most successful form of anti-communism in the twentieth century, and to make progress toward explaining its worldwide prevalence today.

Abstract Guided by interviews with key protagonists and extensive archival research, this article reinterprets the escalation of the Colombian armed conflict during the critical period of the 1990s. It rejects conventional characterisations of the war as an ‘internal conflict’ and challenges dominant approaches based on state weakness and economic opportunity. Instead, the article situates the FARC’s rapid expansion against the background of the international political economy, linking the conflict’s escalation to changing social relations of production. Grounded in historical materialism, and particularly drawing on the concepts of uneven and combined development, passive revolution, crisis of authority, and war of movement, the article explains how the Colombian state’s reintegration into global capitalism deepened social fragmentation, displaced subaltern populations, generated new terrains of resistance, and provoked a spreading crisis of authority that the FARC strategically exploited. It is argued that the FARC’s expansion was not a symptom of criminal degeneration but a strategic political response enabled by Colombia’s passive revolutionary transformation within the uneven and combined dynamics of global capitalism. The article contributes to broader debates in security, international political economy, global development, historical sociology, and regional studies, inviting scholars to identify the underlying but not immediately visible dynamics shaping conflict and peace.

This article reconsiders the Gramsci-Mao debate on antifascism through the lens of India’s Emergency (1975–1977), arguing that Gramsci’s theory of passive revolution and Subaltern Studies unique reformulation of passive revolution inadequately theorize fascism as implicated in structures of imperialism. In contrast, Mao’s theory of fascism, and how the Naxalite Movement seized upon it foregrounds the centrality of mass mobilization, anti-imperialism, and Third World revolutionary praxis, offering a vital corrective to Western Marxist limitations. This analysis examines how Indian intellectual movements inspired by Gramsci and by Mao alternately navigated the Emergency, revealing the importance of theories of fascism that see fascism and imperialism as inextricable. By centering anti-imperialist and Global South perspectives, the article advances a critical framework for antifascist praxis that links local struggles to global hierarchies of power, reclaiming antifascist theory for the revolutionary Global South.

This essay contextualizes the role of equity, diversity, inclusion (EDI) paradigms in the Canadian cultural realm through a discussion of Gramsci’s concepts of passive revolution and hegemony. We suggest that a Gramscian reading clarifies the political, economic, and social utility of co-opting cultural difference and related aesthetic practice. We think with Kobena Mercer about how to mobilize the contradictions of diasporic experience to produce an “interpretive model” of SWANA (South West Asia and North Africa) diasporic aesthetics from the “exilic gaze”. We argue that contemporary SWANA diasporic experience in the West is constrained by the “semiotic resources” of neoliberal hegemony. We bring these discussions to bear on a recent example of EDI-as-neoliberal-hegemony in the Canadian context. We think with the artistic intervention of “Boycott Koffler,” a 2021 petition that was organized against a Zionist-backed gallery in Toronto, and an associated art installation that was projected across the Koffler’s exterior walls. In the face of hegemonic rhetorics that want to offer continuity of self and story, we affirm a contradictory position of self-determined, historicized knowledges from a site of rupture and terminal loss.

Abstract This article explores the interconnectedness of diverse critical nodes within global capitalism. The crisis of legitimacy facing the Liberal International Order, combined with the rise of new geopolitical tensions, is analyzed as one facet of a deeper global crisis of hegemony, from which new far-right political forces emerge at the national level. This perspective considers how these seemingly unrelated events constitute a single unitary totality. The analysis begins with the vantage point of “internal” relations, where the crisis of hegemony represents, on a global scale, a crisis in the process of passive revolution. Brazil is discussed as a relevant example, offering insights into the concrete prospects of a global “war of position.” The discussion then shifts to the vantage point of “external” relations, critiquing this perspective as the most explicit manifestation of the same systemic process—a crisis of the Liberal International Order and the geopolitics of rising illiberal states.

This article engages with Colin Crouch’s concept of post-democracy and its emphasis on how economic globalisation serves to undermine democracy and facilitate the exclusion of labour. While insightful, this approach is predicated upon a Western empirical bias that focuses on the temporal transition from the “consensual” Keynesian welfare state under Fordist capitalism towards “coercive” neo-liberalism. This neglects the spatially differentiated nature of experiences of neoliberalism and the latter’s associated political forms. This article’s critique is mobilised through an examination of the labour policy of the liberal Moon Jae-In administration in South Korea. Despite its progressive credentials, the Moon government failed to effectively tackle the increasing neoliberalisation of the country’s labour market or reverse trends of wage polarisation. The emergence of neo-liberal democracy was less a transition from more consensual to coercive forms of rule but the rearticulation of authoritarian practices in novel forms. As an alternative, this article draws on Gramsci’s concept of “passive revolution” as a broader explanation of how, in conditions of uneven and combined development, dominant social groups seek to establish capital’s political rule through revolutions from above as a means of forestalling the emergence of a subaltern collective will that might disrupt the accumulation process.

This paper develops Antonio Gramsci’s distinction between organic and conjunctural terrains to delineate the relationship between imperialism and the polity in Pakistan. A political-economic analysis of the mechanisms and magnitude of unequal exchange and economic drain over the last three and a half decades is carried out through domestic and international data sources. This imperial-economic mooring is then brought into conversation with Pakistan’s contemporary history. It is through this intersection of structure and history that the specific structuring of the political terrain in Pakistan may be elucidated. A Gramscian understanding of passive revolution, conjunctures and their articulation of organic processes helps understand how imperialism conditions punctual shifts in the polity. Such a Gramscian framework also helps move beyond some of the polarised debates in critical social theory when it comes to understanding imperialism and its internality to peripheral social formations.

If South Africa appeared to be on the verge of socialist revolution in the mid-1980s, a decade later the country’s ruling party was presiding over a regime of privatization and the removal of capital controls. At the center of this process was the abolition of apartheid and the rise to power of the African National Congress (ANC). Previous scholarship appropriately characterizes South Africa’s democratic transition as what Gramsci called a ‘passive revolution’ – a strategy of ruling-class self-preservation that leaves the fundamental social structure untouched – but it focuses too heavily on elite maneuvers, including especially the ANC’s bait-and-switch in the final years of apartheid. These maneuvers, we argue, are the tail end of a process that fundamentally revolves around absorption. Central to this earlier moment in South Africa was an umbrella grouping of anti-apartheid forces called the United Democratic Front (UDF). We argue that the UDF represented a linchpin of the passive revolution in South Africa, serving as an organ of absorption , a means of incorporating the increasingly radicalized masses into a reformist political project. Rather than counterposing this ‘from below’ narrative to a passive revolution implemented ‘from above’, however, our account illustrates how passive revolution unfolds through a dialectic between both of these moments, above and below.

Abstract This study explores the reception and development of Antonio Gramsci’s political thought in South Africa, from the apartheid era to the late 2010s. By tracing Gramsci’s influence across academia and working-class organisations, the article argues that his categories emerged in response to intellectuals’ and movements’ needs for transformative praxis in specific historical periods. The paper employs a chronological and thematic framework, tracing how Gramsci’s thought was translated and developed by activist-intellectuals and trade unions during apartheid. It further explores the post-apartheid transition, investigating Gramsci-inspired analysis of neoliberal policies and the use of concepts like hegemony, civil society and, later on, passive revolution to address emerging crises and unmet expectations by the majority of the population. The study underscores Gramsci’s influence and enduring relevance in public debates and in analysing subaltern struggles and transformative potential within South African society.

Revolutions are thoroughly international phenomena that have shaped world-historical development, international orders and political modernity. Recent scholarship foregrounds the consequences of their constitutional politics for world affairs, emancipatory ethos and revolutionaries’ strategic agency, and has raised concerns about the prospects of subaltern self-emancipation in the wake of the Arab Spring. This article presents a study of Myanmar’s Nwe Oo (Spring) Revolution (2021-present), which follows two successive failed revolutions of the negotiated and passive kind, the limitations of which Myanmar’s revolutionaries have learnt from and overcome. Offering a counterpoint to the top-down nature of passive revolutions and predominantly peaceful transitions of negotiated revolutions, their extraordinary struggle for self-determination forces us to reconsider established models of revolution, conceptions of sovereignty and norms of non-violence in mainstream IR. The article argues that Myanmar’s Nwe Oo Revolution bears the promise of redeeming and completing previous revolutions, both inside and outside Myanmar, and even the norm of sovereignty itself: as ultimately grounded in the constituent power of a community to determine the political forms of its own existence, calling it a redemptive revolution to emphasise its distinctiveness and world-historical significance. Through it, the peoples of Myanmar remind the world of several important lessons: about the potential of mass collective action, that the power of dominant classes is not insurmountable and that the grounds of freedom rest on violence. Theirs is a particular moment of a more universal human struggle: for social freedom and political liberation, the predominant response must be solidarity, not non-interference.

Abstract The ongoing debate in organization and management studies regarding the transformation of oligarchic structures through rank‐and‐file participation often overlooks gender dynamics. Drawing from the experience of Argentine women playing football independently, this article argues that promoting gender inequalities and reinforcing masculine stereotypes can preserve class disparities in trade unions. Additionally, it highlights how trade unions, by extending control into women's leisure, can perpetuate oligarchic structures, emphasizing the importance of politicizing leisure as a domain of gender inequalities. In turn, the patriarchal‐oligarchic organization represents a unique form of class and gender domination that reconfigures itself by co‐opting informal solidarity networks.

Steve Ellner deconstructs the argument that Pink Tide governments elected since 2018 are in a state of "passive revolution," having betrayed their progressive roots through concessions to conservative elements and capital. This analysis, Ellner finds, fails to capture the material impacts of Pink Tide governments, their strategic importance, or their potential to pull societies toward a more radical leftist future.

Now We are in Power: The Politics of Passive Revolution in Twenty-First-Century Bolivia by Angus McNelly, and: Cash, Clothes, and Construction: Rethinking Value in Bolivia’s Pluri-Economy by Kate Maclean (review)

This article approaches the rise of a Starmer-led Labour Party as part of the unfolding current conjuncture. It begins from the fragmentation of the electoral alliance around the Conservatives that had for a long time sustained the dominant bloc in the face of proliferating crises and conflicts. It then turns to the question of Labourism and explores what Starmer’s leadership adds to the familiar mixture of co-option and containment of popular disaffection and desire. Four themes stand out: fiscal realism; a ‘value-led’ project; Starmer’s version of managerialism; and the celebration of ‘working people’. At the same time, an emergent set of antagonisms, operating internationally, not least through multiple diasporas, are reworking familiar Labour tensions around ‘race’. Finally, the article returns to wider framings of the conjuncture, through Gramsci’s idea of ‘passive revolution’ and Hart’s exploration of the dominant political responses to popular antagonisms.

Angus McNelly, Now We Are in Power: The Politics of Passive Revolution in Twenty-First-Century Bolivia University of Pittsburgh Press, 2023, 240 pp.

In this article, I argue that the re-emergence of Malthusian limits in the post-war period was universally accepted as a principal challenge to the integrity of the American Century, yet whose solution was refracted through competing ideological frameworks among development experts. In mobilising Gramsci’s theory of organic intellectuals and passive revolution, I offer an in-depth empirical analysis of the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, and the Rockefeller Foundation, both of which largely converged around the consensus on land reform as a means of attenuating the revolutionary potential of peasant grievance. Yet this solution to Malthusian limits became steadily eroded as a function of the contingent outcomes of class struggle and state-formation across the Global South. Through a focused examination of the Rockefeller Foundation’s Mexican Agricultural Program, I show how the eventual decline of land reform in favour of more muscular modes of productivism in the guise of ‘Green Revolution’ technologies did not follow a straight path from networks of Western scientific knowledge to the fields of the Global South but resulted from the contingent transformations across Mexico’s state/society complex, and the ideological contestation among a network of ‘mobile experts’ comprising the fabric of the American Century.