Uneven Developments, Combined: The First World War and Marxist Theories of Revolution

Cataclysm 1914The First World War and the Making of

Modern World Politics

Edited by

Alexander Anievas

LEIDEN | BOSTON

This is a digital offfprint for restricted use only | © 2015 Koninklijke Brill NV

Contents

Acknowledgements ixList of Contributors x

The First World War and the Making of Modern World Politics 1Alexander Anievas

Part 1Kladderadatsch! Capitalism, Empire, and Imperialism in the Making and Aftermath of World War i

1 Germany, the Fischer Controversy, and the Context of War: Rethinking German Imperialism, 1880–1914 23

Geofff Eley

2 War, Defeat, and the Urgency of Lebensraum: German Imperialism from the Second Empire to the Third Reich 47

Shelley Baranowski

3 Capitalist Peace or Capitalist War? The July Crisis Revisited 66Adam Tooze

4 Marxist Theory and the Origins of the First World War 96Alexander Anievas

5 The Expansion of the Japanese Empire and the Rise of the Global Agrarian Question after the First World War 144

Wendy Matsumura

6 War and Social Revolution: World War I and the ‘Great Transformation’ 174

Sandra Halperin


viii contents

Part 2Reconfĳigurations: Revolution and Culture after 1914

7 European Intellectuals and the First World War: Trauma and New Cleavages 201

Enzo Traverso

8 Art after War: Experience, Poverty and the Crystal Utopia 216Esther Leslie

9 ‘America’s Belgium’: W.E.B. Du Bois on Race, Class, and the Origins of World War I 236

Alberto Toscano

10 World War I, the October Revolution and Marxism’s Reception in the West and East 258

Domenico Losurdo

11 Uneven Developments, Combined: The First World War and Marxist Theories of Revolution 280

Peter D. Thomas

12 The First World War, Classical Marxism and the End of the Bourgeois Revolution in Europe 302

Neil Davidson

13 ‘The New Era of War and Revolution’: Lenin, Kautsky, Hegel and the Outbreak of World War I 366

Lars T. Lih

Bibliography 413Index 460


This is a digital offfprint for restricted use only | © 2015 Koninklijke Brill NV© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004262683_013

chapter 11

Uneven Developments, Combined: The First World War and Marxist Theories of Revolution

Peter D. Thomas

Introduction

The First World War was a major formative moment in the development and refĳinement of Marxist theory and socialist strategy. Marxists found themselves unable to respond to the horrors of imperialist war with previously elaborated concepts; as a theoretical tradition, Marxism was profoundly transformed by the concrete political problems that were thrown up amidst the turmoil of the cataclysm that began in 1914.1 In particular, the betrayals of the ostensibly ‘revolutionary’ Social Democratic movement prompted a profound rethinking of the concept of revolution itself, from Lenin’s return to Hegel in the early years of the war, the intense debates among the Bolsheviks in the interregnum between February and October 1917, the long drawn out process of the tragi-cally defeated German Revolution, to the foundation of the Third Communist International in 1919 and beyond.2 A formulation from Lukács’s homage to the recently deceased Lenin in 1924 succinctly captures the determining coordi-nates of this development: ‘the actuality of the revolution’, in its imminence and efffĳicacy, retroacted upon the concept of revolution to produce a new understanding of the nature of, and possibilities for, socio-political transfor-mation in the epoch of high imperialism.3

In this chapter, I examine the strategic political thought of two key Marxist fĳigures of the period, Leon Trotsky and Antonio Gramsci, both of whom formu-lated novel Marxist theories in the interwar period, with their respective theo-ries of permanent revolution and passive revolution. While Trotsky had already formulated the coordinates for his dialectically constitutive theories of perma-nent revolution and uneven and combined development in the crucible of the

1 As discussed in the introduction to this collection.2 For an analysis of the impact of Lenin’s reading of Hegel on his concept of revolution and

Marxist theory more generally, see Anderson 2007, Balibar 2007 and Kouvelakis 2007a. See Lih’s contribution to this volume for a powerful case against the ‘Hegelist’ interpretation.

3 Lukács 1970, p. 11.

281Uneven Developments: WWI and Marxist Theories of Revolution


war-generated Russian Revolution of 1905–7, it was not until after the outbreak of the First World War and, particularly, after the Bolshevik Revolution, that he thought to fĳind both confĳirmation of the correctness of his theory, and a socialist strategy that might be appropriate to other similarly ‘late-developing’ societies. It was thus only in the changed conditions of international political space that emerged from the First World War that Trotsky was able to extend and to generalise his concepts, which had originally been focused primarily on the particular, ‘exceptional’ case of Tsarist Russia. In this sense, the First World War represents a watershed in Trotsky’s political and theoretical development, and his fully elaborated concept of permanent revolution can only be under-stood in the context of the transformations that it produced.

For Antonio Gramsci, on the other hand, the war’s efffects on both capi-talist development and the organisational forms of the internationalist socialist movement also entailed a rethinking of revolutionary theory and strategy.4 Gramsci famously greeted the Bolshevik Revolution as a ‘Revolution against Capital ’. Breaking with the ‘normal course of events’, the Bolsheviks had responded to what Marx ‘could not predict’: ‘the war in Europe’, ‘three years of unspeakable sufffering and unspeakable hardship’, a war which had aroused in Russia the unprecedented ‘popular collective will’ that had made the Revolution.5 It was the defeat of the other revolutionary movements that emerged from the war years, however, that was decisive for Gramsci’s rethink-ing of the concept of revolution, as it was also for the broader international communist movement.6 With the rise of fascism in Italy and the generalised ‘stabilisation’ of international capitalism in the post-War period, Gramsci argued that there had been a transition from a ‘war of movement’ to a ‘war of position’.7 Following his imprisonment in the late 1920s, Gramsci worked in his Prison Notebooks to develop a distinctive concept of ‘passive revolution’ to describe the changed geopolitical and domestic conditions of revolution-ary politics. As in the case of Trotsky, Gramsci’s renovation of Marxist theo-ries of revolution occurs within the coordinates established by the new state system and tempo of capitalist development that emerged from the First World War.

4 On the impact of the First World War on Gramsci’s development from ‘socialism to commu-nism’, see Rapone 2011.

5 Gramsci 1994, pp. 39–40.6 Eley 2002, pp. 154–6.7 Gramsci 1975, Q 10I, § 9. Gramsci signalled the precise date as 1921 – the year of both the rise

of fascism in Italy and the transition to the nep in the Soviet Union.

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The concepts of passive revolution and permanent revolution, just as the theories of Gramsci and Trotsky more generally, have sometimes been thought to represent fundamentally opposed orientations. As I will argue in this chap-ter, however, thinking these concepts together, in terms both of their response to the socio-economic and political consequences of the First World War, and of their shared attempt to inherit and transform key elements of previous Marxist concepts of revolution, allows us to discern certain common elements in their novel formulations, at the same time as it highlights the diffferent stra-tegic consequences that flow from them.

Permanent Revolution

Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution and its complement and theoreti-cal precondition, the theory of uneven and combined development, was fĳirst sketched out in the course of the war-induced fĳirst Russian Revolution in a series of articles and analyses, culminating in Results and Prospects (1906).8 It was also designed as an intervention into a debate then underway in the ranks of international Social Democracy, focused on the Russian experience, regarding the natures and temporal relations of ‘bourgeois’ (democratic) and ‘proletarian’ (socialist) revolutions.9 However, it was only after the October Revolution of 1917, which Trotsky claimed constituted a ‘vindication’ of his original perspective on the Russian case, and, increasingly, under the pres-sure of polemics in the factional struggle that resulted in his exile from the Soviet Union and isolation in the international communist movement, that he moved to elaborate his theory into a more general strategic perspective, with particular relevance for other ‘late-developing’ societies. In the introduction to The Permanent Revolution, published in 1930 as a sequel to and defence of the earlier Results and Prospects, Trotsky provided the following succinct outline of the ‘constituent elements of the theory of the permanent revolution’:

8 See Trotsky 1969. In that text, however, Trotsky does not use the term ‘permanent revolution’ [permanentnaya revolyutsiya], but rather, its Russian ‘ordinary language’ equivalent, ‘unin-terrupted revolution’ [niepreryvnaya revolyutsiya]. The two terms were often used synony-mously in the Russian Marxist debates in this period. See Knei-Paz 1979, p. 152, and Day and Gaido 2009, p. 449.

9 See Day and Gaido 2009 for a compilation of the key contributions to this discussion. For a critical perspective on the ensuing debate, see Lih 2012.



The permanent revolution, in the sense which Marx attached to this con-cept, means a revolution which makes no compromise with any single form of class rule, which does not stop at the democratic stage, which goes over to socialist measures and to war against reaction from without; that is, a revolution whose every successive stage is rooted in the pre-ceding one and which can end only in the complete liquidation of class society.10

He further distinguished ‘three lines of thought that are united in this theory’. First, it ‘embraces the problem of the transition from the democratic revo-lution to the socialist’ revolution.11 In other words, the theory of permanent revolution rejects the historiosophical schema that has often been ascribed to Marxism, according to which there is a ‘pattern of historical development’, in which a bourgeois revolution establishes a ‘democratic’ form of govern-ment, which then becomes the foundation for the eventual transformation of form into content by the proletariat in the process of a socialist revolution, which would establish, fĳinally, an ‘authentic’ democracy, or a socialist society. Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution, at least in its most developed form, is a theory that attempts to think the immanence of each revolution to the other, in a synchronic rather than diachronic fashion.

Second, permanent revolution signifĳies the process of continual transfor-mation and renovation of society in the socialist revolution, as ‘constant inter-nal struggle’, of ‘revolutions in economy, technique, science, the family, morals and everyday life [that] develop in complex reciprocal action and do not allow society to achieve equilibrium’.12 Necessarily, Trotsky argues, this process takes on a political (and not merely social) character, insofar as it develops through, or is enacted by, ‘collisions’ between various groups in the society.13 Permanent revolution thus involves a continuous dialectical interaction between the social and the political, in which transformations on one ‘terrain’ are consoli-dated and in turn contested on the other.

Third, the theory of permanent revolution is premised upon the necessarily international character of the socialist revolution, which in turn presupposes the necessarily international character of the capitalist mode of production and its creation and extension of a world market. It ‘flows’, Trotsky argues, ‘from the present state of the economy and the social structure of humanity’, as

10 Trotsky 1969 pp. 130–1.11 Trotsky 1969 p. 131.12 Trotsky 1969 p. 132.13 Trotsky 1969 p. 132.

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a ‘theoretical and political reflection of the character of the world economy’.14 Permanent revolution, that is, is ‘permanent’ also because it is a revolution-ary process that overflows the boundaries of individual countries. It therefore fĳinds both its presupposition and conclusion in the notion of world revolution, itself determined by a maturation of the conflict of productive forces and rela-tions of production in the global capitalist mode of production, as an increas-ingly articulated and internally diffferentiated totality. A ‘national revolution’, Trotsky states, ‘is not [or rather, in an imperialist system of competing and mutually dependent states, as forms of organisation of markets, cannot be] a self-contained whole; it is only a link in the international chain. The interna-tional revolution constitutes a permanent process, despite temporary declines and ebbs’.15

Trotsky thus argued that the possibility of permanent revolution is founded upon socio-economic turmoil and transformations, but is only ‘ratifĳied’, or ‘historically confĳirmed’, at the level of fundamental political transformations, which in turn redefĳine the socio-economic relations that are their necessary conditions. It involves simultaneously a ‘permanence’ or continuity of trans-formative relations at the level of state and governmental forms (bourgeois-democratic to socialist), at the level of the dialectical relation of the social and the political (social transformations giving rise to political struggles, and vice versa) and at the level of the national-international (the interlock-ing of discrete social formations in a global economico-political totality). In other words, permanent revolution is ultimately – or ‘in the last instance’ – an implicitly political theory of revolution (as opposed to an ‘economic’ or ‘socio-logical’ one), because it necessarily points towards a theory of organisation of the revolutionary forces that would be able to coordinate relations between revolutionary struggles in the history of a specifĳic national formation, and their insertion in and overdetermination by an international mode of produc-tion and state system.16

14 Trotsky 1969, p. 133.15 Trotsky 1969, p. 133.16 I thus partially disagree with Knei-Paz when he argues that ‘if what [Trotsky] believed

about Russian workers was true, then the theory of permanent revolution had no need to take undue account of the organizational instrument which would set the mechanism of the revolution in motion – the workers themselves . . . were the instrument, the agent and the vehicle, of social change’ (1979, p. 172). Trotsky’s fully developed theory does have clear organisational implications, in the necessity of a mediating instance between trans-formations in diffferent sectors of society, though this arguably was not fully articulated in Trotsky’s writings before 1930.



Uneven and Combined Development

Signifĳicantly, then, interpretations of the theory of permanent revolution have often focused overwhelmingly on the fĳirst and third of Trotsky’s three ‘lines of thought’, exhibiting a relative neglect of the second. This is to say that there has been comparatively little attention dedicated to an analysis of its specifĳicity as a ‘political’ process, in preference for a focus on the more strictly ‘economic’ the-ory that forms its presupposition, namely, the theory of ‘uneven and combined development’. Indeed, the theories of uneven and combined development and of permanent revolution are often taken to be virtually synonymous, with the latter representing the logical conclusion of the former.17 With the reconfĳigu-ration and extension of the capitalist world market in the period following what Arno Mayer has suggested was efffectively a ‘second thirty years war’,18 as national liberation movements and decolonisation movements gave way to the full integration of previously peripheral or excluded social formations into the circuits of Western capitalist accumulation, the relevance of a theory such as uneven and combined development that seeks to think the simultaneous inter-national integration and distinction continuously produced and reproduced by the capitalist mode of production only increased. Arguably, it is the analytical fertility of this concept that constituted one of the main reasons for the appeal of Trotsky’s thought in the post-World War ii period, producing some remarkable theoretical syntheses.19 Nor has the explanatory power of this theory waned in recent years; the last decade of Marxist theory at an international level has wit-nessed an ongoing debate that seeks to think the contemporary relevance of the theory of uneven and combined development as a prescient analysis of the fun-damental dynamics of the capitalist mode of production that have returned to predominance in the latest round of globalisation.20 Some of these discussions have even productively attempted to think the extent to which Gramsci also can be characterised as a theorist of the simultaneously uneven and combined nature of capitalist development, which actively produces the anachronisms

17 For an example of this tendency, see Dunn and Radice 2006. Despite the promise of the title (100 Years of Permanent Revolution), most of the contributions to the volume are instead focused primarily on the theory of uneven and combined development. For an attempt to think the political implications of the theory of uneven and combined devel-opment, focused on the status of ‘the international’, see Anievas’s chapter in this volume.

18 See in particular Mayer 1981.19 See, e.g., Mandel 1975. For critical reflections on the theory, see van der Linden 2007.20 For representative examples, see Rosenberg 2005; Allinson and Anievas 2009; Davidson

2006.

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that allow its instances of ‘progress’ to maintain their economic and political predominance.21

With some rare exceptions, however, the properly ‘political’ dimension of the theory of permanent revolution – that is, its status as a theory of transfor-mative political practice, and its specifĳic form as a revolution, in relation to the myriad of other forms of modern revolution – has remained relatively under-developed. Permanent revolution, that is, is thought to emerge almost ‘organi-cally’ from the theory of uneven and combined development, in a well-known model of ‘deriving’ the political from the socio-economic, or of ‘reducing’ the former to a (more or less) automatic expression of the latter. In particular, the status of the revolution as ‘permanent’ for Trotsky has often been assumed to refer, simply and exhaustively, to the ‘uninterrupted’ or even ‘continuous’ nature of the revolution, as an immediate transition from the ‘democratic’ to the ‘socialist’ revolution.22 As one of its most eloquent defenders, Michael Löwy, has argued, Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution involves ‘the unin-terrupted transition from the democratic to socialist revolution’; it was pre-mised on the possibility of transforming the bourgeois-democratic revolution into a proletarian-socialist revolution by means of workers’ protagonism in the revolutionary process.23

There are many of Trotsky’s formulations, both in Results and Prospects and in The Permanent Revolution, which can be read in this optic. He argues, for instance, in fundamental agreement with the radical-democratic position championed by Marx and Engels in the Manifesto of the Communist Party, that ‘[d]emocracy . . . is only a direct prelude to the socialist revolution. Each is bound to the other by an unbroken chain’. Thus, there is established between the dem-ocratic revolution and the socialist reconstruction of society a permanent state of revolutionary development.24 The focus upon the uninterrupted nature of the permanent revolution clearly possesses great analytical strength in terms of understanding not only the types of revolutions that emerged directly out of the experiences of the First World War, such as the Russian Revolution and, in a

21 See, e.g., Morton 2007.22 As already noted, permanent and uninterrupted were used synonymously in the original

discussion in which Trotsky intervened, and this remained his usage. Beyond the claim of temporal immediacy and progression without pause through known stages, however, this identity of terms does not settle the question of the other qualities – structural, insti-tutional and formal – that Trotsky (and other participants in the discussion) ascribed, implicitly or explicitly, to the uninterrupted/permanent revolution.

23 Löwy 1981, p. 1.24 Trotsky 1969, p. 132.



diffferent sense, the German Revolution. It would also seem to be an appropri-ate concept with which to comprehend the other revolutionary movements that, in the wake of October 1917, were determined by the changed geopolitical relations of force of the interwar and post-Second World War years. As Löwy argues in a popular presentation, understood as primarily a theory of the unin-terrupted nature of the revolutionary process, Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution can be argued ‘not only [to have] predicted the general strategy of the October revolution’, but as also providing ‘key insights into the other revolutionary processes which would take place later on, in China, Indochina, Cuba, etc’.25

There are, however, a number of historical and analytical difffĳiculties with this ‘classical’ or ‘traditional’ reading of Trotsky’s theory. First, it implicitly reduces the distance of Trotsky’s theorisation from the typology of diffferent revolutions as instances in a pre-determined sequence with which he, like Lenin (albeit for his own distinct reasons), was at such pains to break.26 If ‘permanent’ is understood as only ‘uninterrupted’, the theory of permanent revolution would not in fact represent a radical break with ‘stagist’ theories of revolution, but rather, their ‘telescoping’ or even ‘compression’.27 It would posit a temporally determined linear sequence (or ‘stages’) of revolutions (from the ‘bourgeois-democratic’ to the ‘proletarian-socialist’), precisely in order to deny it; that is, to advocate moving through quickly, or ‘leaping over’, a stage in order to attain to a more ‘advanced’ position in the linear sequence, or a ‘higher’ stage of development.28 What is thereby lost is Trotsky’s emphasis that per-manent revolution represents a fundamental rejection of the notion of stages as such, in the defĳinition of a qualitatively new type of revolution (neither

25 Löwy 2006.26 Under the pressure of polemics waged in the factional struggle of the late 1920s, and in

response to Radek’s abandonment of Trotsky’s position, Trotsky claimed in 1930 that Lenin’s notion of a ‘growing over’ of the bourgeois revolution into the socialist revolution in 1917 represented the ‘same idea’ as that of an uninterrupted, permanent revolution. See Trotsky 1969, p. 136. Arguably, however, Lenin’s conception of the distinctiveness of the sit-uation of ‘dual power’ in the Russian revolutionary process in 1917 still involved a concep-tion of stages that was incompatible with Trotsky’s fully developed theory. See Lenin 1964, pp. 55–92.

27 Draper (1978, p. 175) uses the term ‘telescoping’ in relation to Engels’s assessment of Germany in the Vormärz. Larsson (1970, p. 31) argues for a Marxist conception of ‘com-pressed’ development. Löwy (1981, p. 3) concedes that the texts of Marx and Engels con-tain both ‘stagist’ and ‘permanentist’ concepts of permanent revolution, with the latter constituting the decisive innovation that was taken up by Trotsky.

28 This is the argument of van Ree 2013. See, in particular, p. 546.

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‘ bourgeois-democratic’ nor even ‘proletarian-socialist’, if the latter is under-stood as necessarily founded upon the former), corresponding to the changed balance of class forces and political possibilities in the epoch of imperialism. Trotsky’s argument is that the generalised possibility of permanent revolution involves a redefĳinition of the historical tasks of a process of fundamental socio-political transformation, and their likely agents. Democratic reforms instituted by a workers’ government, for instance, are integrally linked to questions of property ownership at the level of what Hegel and Marx characterised as civil society in a way that bourgeois-democratic reforms limited to the Hegelian sphere of political society are not. Trotsky’s proposal should therefore not be reduced to the equation ‘permanent revolution = bourgeois revolution (politi-cal society) + proletarian revolution (civil society) in a short time span’. Rather, it should be comprehended as indicating the emergence of a qualitatively new type of revolution in the early twentieth century, irreducible to the sum of its supposed historical parts, which placed the division between civil and political societies itself in question.

Second, the analytic-descriptive strengths gained by a solely temporal understanding of permanent revolution might quickly turn into a profound weakness, when we come to consider its capacity for contemporary and future prediction and assessment. As a model of the ‘temporal fusion’ of the bour-geois and socialist revolutions, permanent revolution may help to analyse the many revolutions of the twentieth century that struggled against pre- or proto-bourgeois states, and in which the possibility of a direct transition to a social-ist reconstruction of national social formations, on the basis of their presence in a fundamentally international capitalist system, was historically posed. The struggles for national liberation that were one of the major (even when indirect) consequences of the permanent mobilisation of the fĳirst half of the twentieth century are the most striking examples. It may even help us, today, to identify some of the challenges confronting contemporary movements in north Africa and the Arab world, among others, against authoritarian states, though a characterisation of them as prior to a properly ‘bourgeois’ revolution could only be maintained at the risk of an Orientalist flattening out of the real histories of revolution and counter-revolution in the twentieth century.29 It is more difffĳicult, however, to see how such a theory could help to coordinate rev-olutionary action in the contemporary all too bourgeois and formally demo-cratic ‘West’, where no such transition is on the agenda. Permanent revolution

29 For representative attempts to analyse recent transformations in the Arab world in par-ticular in relation to the concept of permanent revolution, see Bush 2011 and Michael-Matsas 2011.



would thus appear as relevant to a largely previous phase of the development of the capitalist mode of production and its state system, a historical aberra-tion that emerged with the First World War and gradually lost its propulsive force in the wake of the Second.30

Third, and perhaps most problematically, a ‘traditionalist’ reading of the permanent revolution that focuses only on its temporal dimensions, conceived as the political reflection of the contradictions of uneven and combined devel-opment, fails to indicate what it would mean concretely, in terms of politi-cal forms and institutions, to make the revolution ‘permanent’. Does not a call for ‘uninterrupted’, ‘continuous’ revolution without further qualifĳication run the risk of falling into precisely the position that the young Marx, in On the

Jewish Question, had criticised for its inability to grasp the dialectical relation between social transformation and its political coordination, comprehension and consolidation? Like many of their contemporaries, drawing upon tradi-tions of revolutionary rhetoric deriving from the French Revolution and its legacies, Marx and Engels deployed, explicitly and arguably implicitly, a variety of concepts of permanent revolution in the 1840s, though without providing any single formulation or defĳinition of it.31 In particular, although the phrase itself does not appear there, the Manifesto of the Communist Party has seemed to many later scholars to provide a precedent for the notion of permanent revolution as a telescoping of bourgeois-democratic and proletarian-socialist/communist revolutions into a unitary, short-term process.32 At the time of the composition of On the Jewish Question (late 1843), however, Marx’s discussion of permanent revolution drew attention to one of the immanent limits and

30 See Davidson 2010 and 2012, particularly pp. 621–9, and Davidson’s chapter in this volume for critical reflections in this direction, with a distinctive conception of the historical sta-tus of ‘bourgeois revolution’.

31 Explicit uses of the phrase ‘permanent revolution’ (and ‘revolution in permanence’) include, among others, passages in ‘On the Jewish Question’, The Holy Family, The Class

Struggles in France and the March 1850 ‘Address’ to the Communist League. See Marx and Engels 1975–2005, Vol. 3, pp. 155–6; Vol. 4, p. 123; Vol. 10, p. 127; Vol. 10, pp. 281, 287. The phrase was regularly invoked by other radicals in the years straddling 1848; see, e.g., Proudhon’s ‘Toast to the Revolution’ of 14 October 1848 (Proudhon 1969, p. 158).

32 The claim for the ‘implicit’ presence of the concept in the Manifesto, as indeed in other texts by Marx and Engels of a later date, recalls a more general methodological challenge regarding anachronism and the relation between words and concepts in the history of political thought: namely, to what extent is it legitimate – and legitimate for what ends – to seek for the ‘seeds’ or ‘component parts’ of a theory or concept in texts composed before said theory or concept was explicitly formulated, particularly in texts in which the words or phrases themselves do not appear?

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attendant risks of thinking revolutionary transformations in terms of a contin-uous, uninterrupted sequence. Reflecting on the contradictions of the process of radicalisation of the Jacobins, and the denouement of the Terror in particu-lar, Marx noted that

in periods when the political state as such is born violently out of civil society, when political liberation is the form in which men strive to achieve their liberation, the state can and must go as far as the abolition of

religion, the destruction of religion. But it can do so only in the same way that it proceeds to the abolition of private property, to the maximum, to confĳiscation, to progressive taxation, just as it goes as far as the abolition of life, the guillotine . . . [I]t can achieve this only by coming into violent contradiction with its own conditions of life, only by declaring the revo-lution to be permanent.33

As Marx noted, this version of the ‘permanence’ of revolution (in truth, its fetishism, as end in itself) ends up exhausting itself, or devouring its own children, in the classical formulation. It is unable to think the necessity of the immanence of the forms of emancipatory politics to their socio-economic content. In order to avoid such ‘terroristic’ or even ‘adventuristic’ conclusions, it is necessary to think concretely the necessary political mediations that could sustain a process of uninterrupted revolution, in the ‘constant internal strug-gle’ and ‘complex reciprocal action’ between the socio-economic and politi-cal, as Trotsky had argued.34 It was precisely such a theory of revolutionary organisation that Antonio Gramsci attempted to develop in his own distinctive reformulation of Marxist theories of revolution in the interwar period.

Passive Revolution

Gramsci’s concept of ‘passive revolution’ was fĳirst sketched out in a series of successive drafts in the late 1920s and early 1930s in the texts that became known as the Prison Notebooks, written after his incarceration by the Fascists, but only published in the post-Second World War period. While the concept of ‘hegemony’ began to be discussed already in the 1950s, it was not until the late 1970s that the closely related concept of passive revolution, and its distinctive-ness in comparison to other Marxist theories of revolution, began to be widely

33 Marx and Engels 1975–2005, Vol. 3, pp. 155–6.34 Trotsky 1969, p. 132.



recognised.35 A certain interpretation of the concept of passive revolution was central to the proposals of so-called Eurocommunism, exerting an influence upon the terms of debate of the ‘crisis of Marxism’ and the later transition to various post-Marxisms. In the uk in the 1980s, reformulated in the notion of ‘regressive modernisation’, it was deployed by Stuart Hall to describe the project of Thatcherism.36 In Germany, the concept has played a prominent role in the theorisations of post-Fordism and neoliberalism by fĳigures such as Wolfgang Fritz Haug, Mario Candeias and Jan Rehmann, among many others.37 In recent Gramscian philological studies, particularly in Italy, Mexico and Brazil, the concept and its contemporary signifĳicance as an analysis of neo-liberalism has been variously reconstructed or contested by scholars such as Frosini, Kanoussi and Coutinho.38 More recently, the concept has also been deployed in debates regarding state formation and the international political economy, giving rise to conflicting interpretations regarding both the meaning of the concept and its relevance to the contemporary world.39

As the above abbreviated list of interpretations might suggest, however, there are many diffferent versions of the theory of passive revolution, ranging from pessimistic, ultimately status-quo afffĳirming, system theories, to perspec-tives that attempt to use it to identify possibilities for de-passifying mobilisa-tion. Furthermore, precisely as interpretations, they were elaborated in very diffferent historical periods from that of Gramsci’s, and thus arguably were at least overdetermined by the political and theoretical debates and interests of those conjunctures, giving rise to their diffferent emphases. What, then, was Gramsci’s original formulation of this concept, in his historical context? As with all of Gramsci’s concepts, it is necessary to study the development of this concept in what one of Gramsci’s most attentive readers, Gianni Francioni, has described as the ‘dialectical laboratory’ of the Prison Notebooks.40 Rather than a defĳinitive statement or concluded analysis, Gramsci offfered the outlines of a research project whose constitutive incompletion was centrally related to his strategic considerations in this period.

35 On the history of the reception of the concept of passive revolution, see Frosini 2007 and Liguori 2012.

36 Hall 1988.37 Haug 2006; Candeias 2004; Rehmann 1998.38 Frosini 2012; Kanoussi 2000; Coutinho 2012.39 See the special issue of Capital & Class edited by Adam Morton (2010), which includes a

range of historical and geographical contributions.40 Francioni 1984.

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In the early phases of his research, in late 1929 and 1930, Gramsci appropri-ated the concept of passive revolution from Vincenzo Cuoco, the historian of the failed Neapolitan Revolution of 1799. Gramsci transformed the concept, in the fĳirst instance, in order to provide an analysis of the distinctive features of the Italian Risorgimento, which he argued was characterised by a failure to construct a coherent hegemonic project. In this context, the term passive revolution was used to describe the ‘historical fact of the absence of popu-lar initiative in the development of Italian history’, embodied in the role of the moderates in the Risorgimento in actively preventing popular initiative in an organised political form. In particular, Gramsci pointed to the lack of the radical-popular ‘Jacobin moment’ that had distinguished the experience of the French Revolution. The formation of the modern Italian nation state, according to Gramsci, had been a ‘revolution without revolution’, or in other terms, a ‘royal conquest’ and not ‘popular movement’.41 It was a transforma-tion of political forms undertaken by elites, garbed in the rhetoric of previous revolutionary movements, but without the extensive involvement of subaltern classes that had led to the placing in question of social and economic relations in earlier transformations.

However, it soon became clear to Gramsci that the concept could have a more general signifĳicance as a criterion of historical research into periods and countries that had been similarly lacking in an impetus to modernity from below. Thus, in a second extension of the concept, undertaken from late 1930 onwards, Gramsci used it to describe the process of socio-political modernisa-tion of other European nation states with experiences similar to those of Italy.42 Foremost among these was Bismarckian Germany, similarly characterised by transformations of the political forms of a society that nevertheless failed to place in question their socio-economic contents. Here Gramsci’s concept has undergone expansion by means of the identifĳication of substantial similari-ties between the class content of these diffferent national experiences, despite

41 The decisive note is Gramsci 1975, Q 1, § 44. Gramsci originally used the term ‘revolution without revolution’, adding ‘passive revolution’ at a later date in the margins. Elsewhere, he employed the term ‘ “royal conquest” and not popular movement’ (Q 3, §40). ‘The his-torical fact of the absence of popular initiative in the development of Italian history, and the fact that “progress” would be verifĳied as the reaction of the dominant classes to the sporadic and disorganic rebellion of the popular masses with “restorations” that compre-hend some parts of the popular demands, thus “progressive restorations” or “revolutions-restorations” or even “passive revolutions” ’ (Q 8, § 25).

42 ‘The concept of passive revolution seems to me to be exact not only for Italy, but also for other countries that modernise the State by means of a series of reforms or national wars, without passing through the political revolution of the radical Jacobin type’ (Q 4, § 57).



their apparent diffferences. Passive revolution, as in the fĳirst instance, contin-ues to refer to a specifĳic historical event or ensemble of events.

In yet a third moment, particularly in early 1932, Gramsci asked whether the concept of passive revolution might have a more general validity, as descriptive of an entire historical period in Europe as a whole: roughly, a period he char-acterised as the Restoration that followed upon the exhaustion of the ener-gies that had driven the French Revolution, beginning in 1848 with the defeat of the Europe-wide workers’ revolts, but intensifying after the defeat of the Paris Commune. In this version, passive revolution comes to signify the pacify-ing and incorporating nature assumed by bourgeois hegemony as such in the epoch of imperialism, extending across and beyond the First World War to the emergence of fascism, the ‘current form’ of passive revolution in the 1920s and 1930s. In 1932, Gramsci even extended his analysis of the passive revolution beyond its contemporary forms in the ‘West’ – of fascism and Americanism, or Fordism – to detect its nefarious hand at work even in the ‘East’, in the home of international revolution, the ussr itself.

The term ‘revolution’ in this third version still refers to the capacity of the ruling class still to deliver substantive and real historical gains, producing real social transformations that could be comprehended, formally at least, as pro-gressive; the term ‘passive’ continues to denote the attempt to produce these transformations without the extensive involvement of subaltern classes as classes, but by means of molecular absorption of their leading elements into an already established hegemonic project (the mechanism of ‘transformism’, fĳirst in ‘molecular’ and then in corporative forms).43 However, passive revolu-tion, as a concept, no longer seems to refer primarily to a particular recognis-able event. Rather, in this fĳinal usage, passive revolution has taken on a more general signifĳicance, as a logic of (a certain type) of modernisation.

The development of the concept of passive revolution would thus seem, according to the textual analysis thus far, to involve a gradual shift of empha-sis from the substantive to the adjective. Beginning as a further development of the Communist Manifesto’s characterisation of the bourgeoisie as ‘a most revolutionary class’ – though in Gramsci’s version placing greater emphasis upon the political forms and institutions of modernity, alongside and beyond Marx and Engels’s analysis of the immense transformations in the world of production – Gramsci’s concept would seem to conclude in a dystopian vision of modernity as continual degeneration, an ‘iron cage’ of ‘rationalisation’, in the Weberian sense. Passive revolution, that is, would seem to be a ‘revolu-tion’ only in name, or rather, its exact antithesis. Rather than a theory of the

43 See, e.g., Gramsci 1975, Q 13, §7.

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uninterrupted transformation of the existing state of afffairs, as in Trotsky’s concept, Gramsci’s passive revolution would appear to describe a process of the uninterrupted consolidation and ossifĳication of the ruling order. As a refĳined mechanism and political programme for the passifĳication of popular initiatives, passive revolution would be the whimper rather than the bang with which the heroic modern age of revolutions arrives at its terminus.

Permanent Revolution in the Prison Notebooks

Such a dystopian reading, however, would neglect the complementary con-ceptual developments that Gramsci undertakes in relation to the concept of permanent revolution, conducted at the same time as and in parallel to his research on passive revolution. Crucially, these developments take place directly in relation to Trotsky’s theory.44 Famously, Gramsci discussed Trotsky’s theory in a way that seems to indicate total rejection, giving rise to analyses that posit these theorists as committed to fundamentally opposed – ‘Eastern’ versus ‘Western’ – orientations.45 Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution is variously characterised in the Prison Notebooks as a ‘literary and intellec-tualistic label’, possibly a mere ‘political reflection of the theory of war of manoeuvre’, ‘cosmopolitan – i.e. superfĳicially national and superfĳicially West-ern or European’, like French syndicalist and Rosa Luxemburg’s theories of the Mass Strike, ultimately depending upon a suspect ‘theory of spontaneity’.46 Trotsky himself, in a number of other highly overdetermined passages in the Prison Notebooks, is singled out for a disparaging critique: ‘in one way or another [he] can be considered the political theorist of frontal attack in a period in which it only leads to defeats’.47 Finally, in the context of a discus-sion of the national-international nexus, the theory of permanent revolution is characterised as a reversion to, rather than break with, the evolutionary ‘ortho-doxy’ (in truth, the perspective of the revisionist current around Bernstein) of the Second International:

44 It is signifĳicant that the fĳirst note in which Gramsci discusses the concept of hegemony in the Prison Notebooks (Q 1, § 44), and to which he later adds the concept of passive revolu-tion, concludes with a discussion of the concept of permanent revolution and a critique of what Gramsci took to be Trotsky’s version of it.

45 See, e.g., Saccarelli 2007.46 Gramsci 1975, Q 7, § 16.47 Gramsci 1975, Q 6, § 138.



The theoretical weaknesses of this modern form of the old mechani-cism are masked by the general theory of permanent revolution, which is nothing but a generic forecast presented as a dogma, and which demol-ishes itself, due to the fact that it is not actually manifested.48

As Frank Rosengarten has noted, much of Gramsci’s polemic is not only unfair, but also at times close to a puzzling misattribution.49 For it was pre-cisely Trotsky who led the Third International’s critique of ‘theories of frontal attack in a period in which it only leads to defeats’, particularly in relation to adventurism and revolutionary impatience in the German Revolution.50 In many respects, the positions that Gramsci criticises are in fact the exact oppo-site of those upheld by Trotsky, nowhere more so than in terms of his non- mechanist conception of permanent revolution as the dialectical integration of the national and international in the specifĳicity of a particular conjuncture.

The reasons for Gramsci’s almost deliberate misreading of Trotsky’s posi-tion are multiple and overdetermined. Previous political disagreements during Gramsci’s period in Moscow may have played a role, as might the influence of the caricatures of Trotsky’s theories that were current in the international com-munist movement in the late 1920s. The suggestion of Trotsky’s impatience or adventurism might possibly have resulted from a conflation in Gramsci’s mind of the positions of Trotsky and those of another early opponent of Stalin in the Communist International, the former head of the Italian Communist Party Bordiga, from whose intransigent ultra-leftist politics Gramsci had broken only after intense debates in Moscow at the 4th Congress (ironically, under the influence, among others, of Trotsky himself). Nevertheless, whatever the pre-dominant reason, Gramsci’s continuous rejection of Trotsky’s notion of per-manent revolution, as an untimely and utopian war of movement, would seem to leave little space for any reconciliation with the conceptual coordinates of his own theory of passive revolution, to which the theory of hegemony, as a complex and articulated war of position, was designed as a response.

Furthermore, in a number of instances, Gramsci seems to reject not merely Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution, but the notion of permanent revolu-tion as such, including the concept employed by Marx and Engels. Describing the extension of the passive revolution on a European scale in the wake of the

48 Gramsci 1975, Q 14, § 68.49 Rosengarten 1984–5.50 See Bianchi 2008, particularly pp. 199–252, for an important attempt to rethink Gramsci’s

metaphors of war of position/war of movement in relation to Trotsky.

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defeat of the Paris Commune and the consolidation of what he described as the bourgeois ‘integral state’, Gramsci argued that

in the period after 1870, with the colonial expansion of Europe, all these elements change. The internal and international organisational relations of the State become more complex and massive, and the Forty-Eightist formula of the ‘Permanent Revolution’ is expanded and superseded in political science by the formula of ‘civil hegemony’.51

In other notes, however, Gramsci suggests that the theory of hegemony he had developed, following Lenin, was itself in a certain sense a theory of ‘permanent revolution’, and thus an alternative to and indeed in competition with Trotsky’s concept. This rivalry would in fact seem to constitute the fundamental theo-retical (as opposed to personal or political) reasons that motivate his critique: Gramsci held that Trotsky, unlike Lenin, had misunderstood Marx and Engels’s references to the permanence of the revolution in their historical context, and had consequently been unable to undertake a coherent ‘ actualisation’ of the theory in the specifĳic conditions of the post-First World War conjuncture. In early 1930, he argued that

With respect to the ‘Jacobin’ slogan formulated in 1848–9 by Marx in relation to Germany, its complex fortunes are worth studying. Taken up again, systematised, developed, intellectualised by the Parvus-Bronstein group, it proved inert and inefffective in 1905, and subsequently. It had become an abstract thing, belonging in the scientist’s cabinet. The ten-dency which opposed it in this literary form, and indeed did not use it on purpose, applied it in fact in a form which adhered to actual, con-crete, living history, adapted to the time and the place; as something that sprang from all the pores of the particular society which had to be trans-formed; as the alliance of two social groups with the hegemony of the urban group.

In one case, you had the Jacobin temperament without an adequate political content; in the second, a Jacobin temperament and content derived from the new historical relations, and not from a literary and intellectualistic label.52

51 Gramsci 1975, Q 13, § 7, my italics. Superare, here rendered as ‘to supersede’, is the standard Italian translation of Hegel’s aufheben. Gramsci seems here to envisage a similar relation of preserving negation.

52 Gramsci 1975, Q 1, § 44.



In May 1932, he extended this argument, claiming that

the greatest modern theoretician of the philosophy of praxis, on the ter-rain of political struggle and organisation and with a political terminol-ogy – in opposition to the various ‘economistic’ tendencies – revalued the front of cultural struggle and constructed the doctrine of hegemony as a complement to the theory of the State-as-force, and as the actual form of the Forty-Eightist doctrine of ‘permanent revolution’.53

What did Gramsci understand by the ‘Forty-Eightist’ doctrine of permanent revolution? And in what sense could its ‘actual form’ be regarded as the ‘doc-trine of hegemony?’

The Revolution in Permanence

Like Marx and Engels themselves, Gramsci had critically reflected upon both the limitations and strengths of the Jacobin notion and practice of ‘permanent revolution’ and its inheritance by the ‘men of 48’. As in Marx’s critique in On the

Jewish Question, the limitations of this concept seemed to consist for Gramsci in the notion of the escalation of a political process of transformation that did not take into account the necessity of mediating instances that could ground such a process in a real reorganisation of socio-economic relations at the level of civil society.54 It was precisely such an understanding of the ‘permanence’ of the revolution that Gramsci held had been ‘superseded’ by the increasing complexity of social and political mediating instances in the ‘trenches’ of civil society after 1848. Furthermore, he thought to have found such a weakness also in what he characterised as Trotsky’s ‘abstract’ theory. The strengths of the Jacobin example for Gramsci, on the other hand, resided in its elaboration of a structured political process that posed the question of the organisation of relations of force capable of transcending the given divisions of interests in a social formation – permanence understood not simply as continuous tempo-ral development, but also as endurance, in an almost Machiavellian sense. It was this dimension of the ‘Forty-Eightist’ doctrine of permanent revolution

53 Gramsci 1975, Q10i,§ 12. The ‘greatest modern theoretician of the philosophy of praxis’ is a reference to Lenin.

54 See in particular Q 1, §48, where Gramsci notes the class limits of the Jacobin programme, particularly in relation to the Le Chapelier law of 1791, limiting forms of popular political organisation.

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that Gramsci argued had been inherited – ‘expanded and superseded’ – in the formula of ‘civil hegemony’, particularly as it was then later developed in the debates of the Bolsheviks both before and after the October Revolution.55

A precedent for this understanding can arguably also be found in the texts of Marx and Engels, in their reflections on the experience of 1848 and its after-math. In that case, however, they do not use the phrase ‘permanent revolution’ in the same way as they had done in the years of the Vormärz, like many other radicals whose imaginations were fĳired by the thought of repeating, or restag-ing, the continuous transformations of the most radical years of the French Revolution. An almost indiscernible and seemingly inessential semantic dif-ference signals the shift to a related, but nevertheless distinct, new concept: namely, the notion of ‘the revolution in permanence’, not as an historical description, but as a programmatic imperative.

In the work of Marx and Engels, the slogan of ‘the revolution in permanence’ represents simultaneously a rupture and a refoundation.56 It breaks with the political perspective they had pursued in the lead up to the Revolutions of 1848; namely, the possibility of an (albeit temporary) alliance between the prole-tarians and the ‘most revolutionary class’, in the words of the Manifesto, of the bourgeoisie. According to this scenario, a class alliance of the democratic aspirations of a progressive bourgeoisie and the desires for socio-economic transformation of a nascent proletariat would engage in a struggle against the remnants of the absolutist state, proposing a rational programme of political modernisation. In the case of the ‘late-developing’ Germany in particular, a bourgeois-democratic revolution would be but the immediate prelude to a proletarian-communist revolution efffecting a deep-going socio-economic transformation. It was this model of the ‘telescoping’ or ‘compression’ of two revolutions into one continuous process that, as we have seen, was taken up and further developed by Trotsky.

The experience of 1848 and its aftermath, however, convinced Marx and Engels that such an alliance was no longer viable. In Germany in particular, the bourgeoisie had compromised with the anti-democratic elements of the old order, making the previous stagist conception of a bourgeois ‘prelude’ to a pro-letarian revolution no longer tenable. At the most, democratic petty bourgeois

55 For a discussion of the varied uses of permanent revolution in Gramsci, with a focus on its political meaning for the entire Prison Notebooks project, see Frosini 2009, pp. 32–9 in particular.

56 For the most extensive philologically grounded analysis of the development of this con-cept in the late 1840s in Marx and Engels’s work, see Draper 1978, pp. 169–263, 591–5, 599–612.



forces might be expected to stage a limited political revolution, which would close down, rather than open further, the possibility for more radical transfor-mations. Marx and Engels responded by refounding their understanding of rev-olution on the terrain of an independent working-class political programme. Tentatively suggested throughout 1849, the decisive transition occurred in the ‘Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League’ in March of 1850. Much more than a ‘sequel’ to the Manifesto of the Communist Party, as it has sometimes been understood, this brief speech represents instead its post-revolutionary Aufhebung. Marx and Engels declared the need for the workers’ movement

to make the revolution permanent until all the more or less propertied classes have been driven from their ruling positions, until the proletariat has conquered state power and . . . has progressed sufffĳiciently far – not only in one country but in all the leading countries of the world – that competition between the proletarians of these countries ceases and at least the decisive forces of production are concentrated in the hands of the workers.57

They further specifĳied the conjunctural dimensions of this analysis: in a period in which the revolutionary energies of 1848 were being dissipated or demo-bilised by a now much less revolutionary, if not reactionary, bourgeoisie and their petty bourgeois ‘replacement’, the workers’ movement needed to resist any attempt to ‘disband’, ‘dismiss’ or ‘retire’ the revolution. In particular, at the sign of an upsurge in revolutionary struggle, the Communist League should advocate that

the workers, as far as it is at all possible, must oppose bourgeois attempts at pacifĳication and force the democrats to carry out their terrorist phrases. They must work to ensure that the immediate revolutionary excitement is not suddenly suppressed after the victory. On the contrary, it must be sustained as long as possible.58

Such a continuous or uninterrupted revolutionary process, however, could only be sustained if the workers’ movement were organised independently around a series of policies corresponding to its class interests – in particular, a consistent attack upon private property in the means of production. Marx and

57 Marx and Engels 1975–2005, Vol. 10, p. 281.58 Marx and Engels 1975–2005, Vol. 10, p. 286.

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Engels could thus conclude that the ‘battle-cry’ of the proletariat should be: ‘The Revolution in Permanence!’59

This performative strategy recalls one of the constant elements in the radi-calisation of diffferent waves of the ‘long French Revolution’: from the Tennis Court Oath of 1789 refusing to disperse the assembled Third Estate, to the dec-larations of the sectional assemblies throughout 1793 in particular that they would remain sitting ‘in permanence’, the phrase was used to signify the inten-tion to remain constituted as a politically active public body, not reduced to the ‘rights’ of passive citizenship.60 Indeed, the declaration of permanence itself constituted a political act, insofar as it claimed the right to public exis-tence with no regard for an authorising fĳigure or instance other than its own declaration. To remain ‘in permanence’ here connoted not simply a continu-ous temporal development, or lack of interruption: an imminence of the revolutionary process. Even more crucially, it pointed to a self-constituted institutional endurance of the assembled movement, which found its grounds of legitimacy in its own act of defĳiant assembly; the immanence of the revolu-tionary form to its content.

Marx and Engels’s ‘actualisation’ of this performative strategy with their call for the ‘revolution in permanence’ in 1850 was thus not simply a repetition of their previously outlined theory of revolution as a compression of historical stages, or fusion of diffferent types of revolution. Nor can it be reduced to a val-iant last-ditch attempt to rally the exhausted revolutionary forces of the Forty-Eighters, with an exhortation to rise up ‘once more unto the breach’. It was also, more fundamentally, the call for the enduring constitution of the working-class movement as an independent political force, organised around the indepen-dent political objectives corresponding to its class interests and simultane-ously those of socio-political transformation itself. There is no indication that Marx and Engels ever abandoned this perspective, despite the political defeats and setbacks that soon followed in the early 1850s; on the contrary, its terms were deepened and developed in particular in relation to the events of the Paris Commune, and even retroacted upon later memories of their political positions in the early 1840s itself.61 It was as an inheritance of such an under-standing of the permanence of the revolution that Gramsci elaborated his concept of hegemony, and in particular, the specifĳicity of working-class hege-monic politics embodied in his Machiavellian fĳigure of the ‘modern Prince’, as

59 Marx and Engels 1975–2005, Vol. 10, p. 287.60 See Sewell 1988.61 For a pointed analysis of the role of permanent revolution in Marx’s reflections on the

Commune, in particular, see Kouvelakis 2007b.



a counter to the consolidated structural form of bourgeois hegemony of his time: the passive revolution.

Conclusion

Gramsci and Trotsky both responded to the challenges of the changed coor-dinates of the post-First World War conjuncture by elaborating novel concep-tions of revolution. Signifĳicantly, both did so by attempting to ground their proposals in an interpretation of a central concept of revolution in the prior Marxist tradition: the permanent revolution, or the revolution in permanence. In the case of Trotsky, the result was a sophisticated theory that seemed to be able to account for the contours of revolutionary movements responding to the modernisation drives that marked the interwar years, and particularly the wave of anti-colonial and national liberation struggles after the Second World War. As in 1905 and again in 1917, it seemed that socio-economic and political modernisation might coincide and place the possibility of a direct transition to socialism fĳirmly on the agenda. Gramsci’s concept of passive revolution, on the other hand, provided a detailed account of the ruling class strategies deployed in order to prevent any such synchronisation of the political and socio- economic. As an analysis of European state formation in the late nineteenth century, it provided a powerful narrative to explain the conditions of possibil-ity both for the emergence of the Fascist regime in Italy, and for the absorption of oppositional movements into the existing political order that marked social democracy in the interwar years. Yet both theories were marked by, if not con-signed to, their times, in a way that places in doubt their continuing relevance today. As the international capitalist mode of production mutated again after the long post-Second World War boom, Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolu-tion, if not that of uneven and combined development, arguably began to lose some of both its strategic relevance, and analytic capacity to explain the politi-cal reasons for failures of revolutionary movements to remain ‘in permanence’. Gramsci’s theory of passive revolution, for its part, seems to have sufffered an inverted fate: the more its analytical capacity to explain the political forms and foundations of bourgeois hegemony is emphasised, the more difffĳicult it seems to think of the political practices that might be able to break out of such an ‘iron cage’. It is perhaps in the dialectic between Trotsky and Gramsci’s distinc-tive concepts, between the time and form, imminence and immanence, of the revolutionary movement, that similar attempts to actualise the strengths of Marxist theories of revolutions today might be able to begin.

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Uneven Developments, Combined: The First World War and Marxist Theories of Revolution

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