Gramsci’s ‘passive revolution’ concept remained internally ambiguous and unstable

Evidence

Although Gramsci condemns explicitly any advocacy of “passive revolution” as a programme, his use of the term is often ambiguous. This is especially the case where he tentatively relates it to “war of position”, itself by no means a consistent or univocal concept in Gramsci’s writing (see introduction to “State and Civil Society”). — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 380

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes the instability of the term from the outset — a caution against treating ‘passive revolution’ and ‘war of position’ as fixed tools.
• XREF: Useful epistemic hygiene for the toolkit: the concept Gramsci deploys against Croce/Fascism is itself contested, mirroring how ‘hegemony’ and ‘common sense’ are also unstable terms to be carried carefully into Islamophobia readings.

Related

• Gramsci applies passive revolution to the fascist regime itself (similarity 0.81)
• Passive revolution denotes either revolution without masses or molecular hidden change (similarity 0.80)
• Caesarism describes compromise regimes without equating fascism with capitalism (similarity 0.79)
• Passive revolutions suppress some contradictions only to spawn new ones (similarity 0.79)
• Gramsci’s war of position replaces zero-sum war of manoeuvre in cultural politics (similarity 0.78)
• Gramsci’s strategy rejected a post-fascist democratic phase as impossible and unstable (similarity 0.78)