‘Authoritarian resilience’ as passive revolution: a Gramscian interpretation of counter-revolution in Egypt

ABSTRACT

After a renewed scholarly interest in the politics of revolution and societal transformation following the uprisings of 2011, the defeat of the revolutionary tide in the MENA region has drawn attention to the dynamic of counter-revolution and authoritarian resilience. I criticise binary approaches to the process of regime restoration in the region. I argue that ‘authoritarian resilience’ should be interpreted in terms of Gramsci’s concept of ‘passive revolution’. I explain that this concept should be used not as a regime typology, but as an analytical ‘criterion of interpretation’, revealing the capacities and constraints of elites to deflect popular initiative and restructure historical blocs from above. Through the prism of passive revolution ‘the regime’ appears not as the constant factor, but as one of the forces that constitutes and is constituted by revolutionary struggle. I look concretely at the process of revolution and counter-revolution in Egypt between 2011 and 2013, disentangling the 18 Days of the uprising from the subsequent ‘counter-revolution in democratic form’ and the coda of the military-led ‘counter-revolution from below’.

KEYWORDS:

• Authoritarianism
• counter-revolution
• Egypt
• Gramsci
• revolution
• Tahrir

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Gramsci appears to expand the concept of passive revolution from a specific interpretation of the unique process of Italian unification to a general methodological tool to understand the constitution and reconstitution of capitalist states (Morton 2007, 2010). It becomes a container for different meanings: revolutions from above; state-led development; ‘molecular modifications’; technocratic solutions to hegemony; displacements of subaltern agency; co-optation; corruption; and war. Gramsci does not offer a clearly delineated definition of passive revolution, which leads, according to Callinicos (2010), to an over-extension of the concept. Callinicos recognises the usefulness of passive revolution as a specific type of bourgeois revolution: a theoretically enriched version of the earlier concept of ‘revolution from above’. He concedes that capitalist reconstitutions such as Fascism and Fordism could be interpreted within a broad conceptual framework of passive revolution as ‘socio-political processes in which revolution-inducing strains are at once displaced and at least partially fulfilled’ (Callinicos 2010, 498). In Italy’s case, through the mediation of Fascist dictatorship opposing fractions of capital were forcefully united in a more or less stable state and social instability was pacified (Gramsci 1971, 269–270; Q15 §18). Despite the bourgeoisie’s inability to govern, its class rule continued.

However, Callinicos underlines that, whereas the transition from pre-capitalist states to bourgeois societies in the nineteenth century implied a qualitative, systemic transformation, Fascism, Fordism, and, more recently, neoliberalism merely reconfigured existing capitalist relations. Moreover, Fascism and neoliberalism are restorations that do not move capitalism forward (Callinicos 2010, 503). Similarly, Coutinho (2012, 156–161) distinguishes between passive revolution and counter-reformation, claiming that in the neoliberal age the restoration/dialectic is absent, because the suppression of the welfare state and workers’ rights represent a historical step backward – a full restoration instead of a revolution-restoration.

I have argued (De Smet 2016, 2018) that these criticisms mistake passive revolution for an incoherent theory of capitalist state formation and reconfiguration, while its function is directly political: a research program to understand the conditions and dynamics of various forms of counter-revolution and revolutionary displacement. The observation that Gramsci ‘stretched’ his concept of passive revolution from the Risorgimento to the historical constitution and reconstitution of capitalism is misleading. Callinicos recognises that passive revolution already existed in Gramsci’s thought in a ‘practical state’ before its first appearance in his fourth prison notebook (Q4 §57), but he confines it to Gramsci’s early comments on the Risorgimento (Callinicos 2010, 492). Yet the concept was already present as a problematic in Gramsci’s writings on the ‘Southern question’ (Morton 2010, 326) and in his study of Fascism (Hoare and Smith in Gramsci 1971, 45). Gramsci’s discussion of the Risorgimento was not a purely historical study, but a conceptual mediation to comprehend the urgent political issues of his own time: the failure of the 1919–1920 struggles of the biennio rosso; the subsequent Fascist reconfiguration of Italian capitalism (cf. Gramsci 1971, 119; Q10I §9); and ‘the search for an adequate theory of proletarian hegemony’ (Thomas 2009, 136). Hence the notion of passive revolution was from its inception ‘over-extended’.

This over-extension is only problematic, however, when passive revolution is deployed as a taxonomic concept for elite-driven modernization. Instead of such a theory of ‘modernization from above’ (against Allinson 2019; Alexander and Naguib 2018; Tansel 2018) passive revolution functions as a ‘criterion of interpretation’ (Gramsci 1971, 114; Q15 §62): a methodological searchlight that reveals the agency, agility, and adaptability of dominant groups, which are able to survive systemic crises. Explaining the success of, for example, the neoliberal project requires an appreciation of its capacity to forcefully solve problems of Fordist accumulation and to appropriate subaltern concerns of individual freedom, identity, and autonomy – thereby displacing grassroots labour protests, new social movements, civil rights activism, and anti-war protests (Barfuss 2008). While the concept of hegemony investigates strategies and discourses that offer the subaltern political, social, and cultural inclusion in the state, passive revolution represents its antipode, exploring the driving forces and strategies behind the obstruction of such inclusion – the ‘blocked dialectic’ of revolution (Buci-Glucksmann 1980, 315; Gramsci 1971, 110; Q15 §11).