Having thus illustrated the bases for the dual structure of time in the Prison Notebooks, we can now turn to the concept that Gramsci uses to analyse the temporal nature of duration as characterized by the hegemonic force that prevails, operating as a ‘temporal unifying device’.
The concept in question is that of passive revolution. As often is the case in the Prison Notebooks, Gramsci does not coin a new word out of nothing. Instead, he utilizes a concept previously formulated by others and shifts its meaning,34 thus formulating a new concept in practice (a process in keeping with the linguistic observations on the historicity of language and against its artificiality).
As previously mentioned (Chapter 3, section ‘Bureaucracy and officials: Gramsci and Weber’), Gramsci takes the term from the Historical Essay on the Neapolitan Revolution of 1799 by Vincenzo Cuoco, where the expression indicated the absence of popular involvement in the revolution due to the gap between the leaders and the people. Italy’s political ‘moderates’ – as Gramsci calls the diverse members of the ranks of Italian liberalism who were behind the unification of Italy – based a precise political programme around the concept of passive revolution, transforming it into a political strategy, into their hegemonic and pedagogic action vis-à-vis the other forces of the Risorgimento.
By taking a broader view, Gramsci pointed out that Cuoco used this expression to indicate the development of ‘countries that modernize the State through a series of reforms or national wars without undergoing a political revolution of a radical-Jacobin type’.35 Thus, the French Revolution, which established a clean break with the feudal past, was compared with the passive revolutions witnessed in the other European States, in which:
the needs that found a Jacobin-Napoleonic expression in France were satisfied in small doses, legally, in a reformist manner, thereby managing to safeguard the political and economic positions of the old feudal classes, avoiding agrarian reform and making especially sure that the popular masses did not go through a period of political experience such as occurred in France in the Jacobin era.36
The absence of the masses’ political involvement, together with the slow, partial acceptance of certain revolutionary demands on the part of
the leading groups, may be considered those features of the hegemonic programme known as passive revolution.
According to Gramsci, this manner of historical development, charac-terized by the temporality of duration, conceals a ‘domesticated dialectic because it “mechanically” presupposes that the antithesis should be preserved by the thesis in order not to destroy the dialectical process’.37 The thesis (the hegemonic group) determines the antithesis (the subaltern group) and guides the actions, and eventually incorporates the demands, of such. Thus, the situation that arises is that of ‘historical inertia’, where time flows homogeneously and politics is transformed from subjective action aimed at changing the world to the administration of the existing power structure. The only undisciplined movement that remains in society is the inconsequential (in terms of power) ‘sporadic and incoherent rebelliousness of the popular masses’.38
The unification of Italy is the historical example of this flowing of time.
In his notes on the Risorgimento, Gramsci pointed out the limitations of the Italian democrats (the Action Party) when it came to bringing the masses to the centre of the political stage. These limits were due to the decision to secretly organize groups of ‘Carbonari’, which did not permit the masses to get involved. In doing so, the democrats placed their faith in the episodic temporality of conspirational action. However, Gramsci was also interested in grasping those mechanisms by which the Moderates managed to produce a ‘centripetal hegemonic field’ capable of engulfing the rival leading group, and with it the possibility of a possible alternative unity:
Out of the Action Party and the Moderates, which represented the real
‘subjective forces’ of the Risorgimento? Without a shadow of doubt it was the Moderates, precisely because they were also aware of the role of the Action Party: thanks to this awareness, their ‘subjectivity’ was of a superior and more decisive quality.39
Gramsci continues by arguing that ‘the Action Party was led historically by the Moderates’, who proved ideologically appealing to the Party, and succeeded in controlling, and taking advantage of, the fragmented nature of the Party’s political action. The Moderates managed to impose a unitary temporality because: 1) they ‘represented a relatively homogeneous social group, and hence their leadership underwent relatively limited oscillation’;40 2) they were ‘intellectuals already naturally “condensed” by
the organic nature of their relation to the social groups whose expression they were’ and consequently 3) they ‘exercised a powerful attraction
“spontaneously”, on the whole mass of intellectuals of every degree who existed in the peninsula’.41 The unity of intentions, a close relationship with the social group they represented, and the ‘ideological’ appeal they had for traditional intellectuals: these were the three key characteris-tics in Gramsci’s view. Only an equally coherent force of the same kind could have struggled in the hegemonic field, contending the position of leading group and establishing a different temporality. This counterforce was resoundingly absent: the Action Party 1) ‘did not base itself specifically on any historical class, and the oscillations which its leading organs underwent were resolved, in the last analysis, according to the interests of the Moderates’;42 2) was composed of characters ‘steeped in the traditional rhetoric of Italian literature’,43 who ‘only offered woolly statements, and philosophical allusions’44 to ‘popular masses who were foreign to that cultural tradition’;45 and finally 3) ‘was itself attracted and influenced’ by the Moderate Party, ‘on the one hand, as a result of the atmosphere of intimidation […] and, on the other, because certain of its leading personalities (Garibaldi) had, even if only desultorily (they wavered), a relationship of personal subordination to the Moderate leaders’.46 The Action Party ‘considered as “national” the aristocracy and the landowners, and not the millions of peasants’,47 whereas the French Jacobins, who proved capable of imposing their own temporality on the revolutionary process, ‘strove with determination to ensure a bond between town and country’,48 promoting an agrarian reform that in rural areas permitted the synchronization of two different times: ‘Rural France accepted the hegemony of Paris; in other words, it understood that in order definitively to destroy the old regime it had to make a bloc with the most advanced elements of the Third Estate, and not with the Girondin moderates.’49 The exclusion of the great peasant masses from the newly founded Italian State resulted instead in a territorial and social divide between a South that created savings from the exploitation of the peasants and North that drained these resources to finance industrial development. This is how Gramsci interpreted the onset of the ‘Southern question’: he saw it basically as the failure to synchronize revolutionary developments, thus leaving a contradictory temporal plurality in place within the framework of the dominance of the Moderates.50 This was the time of duration and of passive revolution.
Once the nation had been unified, the process of ‘gradual but continuous absorption’ of democratic leaders was to continue in the form of ‘transformism’, which in this case consisted in ‘the parliamentary expression of this action of intellectual, moral and political hegemony’.51 Transformism operated in this manner not only as the leading classes’
attempt to defend the power structure that had been consolidated with the unification of Italy, but also as a (passive) political dynamic that slowly led to the gradual expansion of the State’s foundations. Thus, transformism became a genuine ‘form of historical development’,52 a form of historical time. Seeing transformism purely as a conservative response, in fact, does not help us grasp Gramsci’s intuition whereby transformism is the parliamentary expression of hegemonic action. In fact, by preserving power relations and the specific interests on the basis of which national unity had been built, transformism also operates as a filter for the new demands of a changing society. The new industrial and financial bourgeoisie is in this way gradually included in the mechanisms of representation of interests within the political system, through the dynamics of inclusion ‘from above’. Thus, transformism renews the basis of the State’s consensus without compromising its power structure, and therefore avoids involving the masses – ‘simultaneously’53 in Gramsci’s words – in the reorganization of the State. The 1882 electoral reform, which extended voting rights on the basis of individuals’ education rather than wealth, may be interpreted in this way.
The school system was also part of the hegemonic project of Italy’s leading classes, through implementation of the only educational plan capable of challenging the ‘“Jesuitical” school’,54 by means of which the Moderates were able to present themselves as the only ‘effective collective force in operation’ during the Risorgimento, thereby limiting the contribution of the Action Party to ‘individual figures […] ten-dentiously exalted in order to incorporate them’, thus breaking their
‘collective ties’.55 Thus, the historical reconstruction of the Risorgimento in schools – its temporal rhythm once again – will aid the construction of a possible national history rooted in moderate values, that will disrupt the formulation of any alternative historical accounts. The historical truth of the Risorgimento was to be that of the Moderates, helped by the fact that the Action Party ‘was incapable of offering any effective alternative to this propaganda which, through the schools, became the official version taught’.56