German industrialization left feudal classes ruling while the bourgeoisie held economic power

Evidence

In Germany, the movement of 1848 failed as a result of the scanty bourgeois concentration (the Jacobin-type slogan was furnished by the democratic Far Left: “permanent revolution”), and because the question of renewal of the State was intertwined with the national question. The wars of 1864, 1866 and 1870 91 resolved both the national question and, in an intermediate form, the class question: the bourgeoisie obtained economic-industrial power, but the old feudal classes remained as the governing stratum of the political State, with wide corporate privileges in the army, the administration and on the land. Yet at least, if these old classes kept so much importance in Germany and enjoyed so many privileges, they exercised a national function, became the “intellectuals” of the bourgeoisie, with a particular temperament conferred by their caste origin and by tradition. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 484

Categorization

• XREF: This is the classic ‘revolution without revolution’ / passive revolution pattern that Gramsci’s later readers in postcolonial and Islamophobia studies pick up — connects to the idea of incomplete bourgeois transformation.
• DEFINE: Concrete historical instance of what Gramsci elsewhere theorizes as passive revolution — transformative economic change without a corresponding political-class rupture.