Ruling classes absorb and neutralize subversive movements through transformism

Evidence

If you study all Italian history since 1815, you will see that a small ruling group has succeeded in methodically absorbing into its own ambit the entire political personnel thrown up by the various, originally subversive, mass movements. From 1860 to 1876 the Mazzinian and Garibaldine Action Party was absorbed by the Monarchy, leaving only an insignificant residue which lived on as the Republican Party, but whose significance was more folk-loristic than historico-political. The phenomenon was called ‘transformism’, but it was not an isolated phenomenon; it was an organic process which, in the formation of the ruling class, replaced what in France had happened in the Revolution and under Napoleon, and in England under Cromwell. Indeed, even after 1876 the process continued, molecularly. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 2079

Categorization

• DEFINE: ‘Transformism’ is the key concept here — the mechanism by which the ruling class absorbs opposition personnel into its own ranks, a foundational Gramscian notion for later hegemony analyses.
• XREF: Directly prefigures Gramsci’s passive revolution concept (discussed elsewhere in this volume) and connects to how co-optation neutralizes opposition — the same dynamic later Islamophobia readings will see in how mainstream anti-Muslim discourse absorbs and domesticates critique. — connects to: Spiritual and countercultural protest gets absorbed harmlessly by the system; The ruling classes abandoned constitutional restraint while Social Democrats kept obeying it — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 956; Extra-parliamentary civil disobedience is justified when bourgeois democracy blocks qualitative change — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2672 (+3 more)