Incorporation Without Determination: Iran and the Passive Revolution Problem

• In Event: Passive Revolution in the Postcolony

Abstract

This paper revisits Antonio Gramsci's concept of passive revolution to ask why scholars disagree about its central dynamic, the selective incorporation of oppositional forces by ruling elites and its implications for capitalist development. As it traveled, passive revolution acquired two uses. In one register it describes how elites absorb and redirect opposition. In another it serves as a developmental diagnosis, with some treating incorporation as impeding capitalist development while others frame the same mechanism as a pathway that enable it. Rather than applying the concept to Iran, I use Iranian historiographical disputes as a limiting case of the concept. Across three turning points (the Constitutional Revolution of 1905–11, the oil nationalization crisis of 1951–53, and the 1979 revolution), coalitions fractured as elites incorporated some forces while repressing others, and subsequent interpretations split over what that absorption meant for the country's economic trajectory. The persistence of this split, even where Gramscian vocabulary is absent, shows that the instability of the concept lies in its inference from political sequences to developmental outcomes. Drawing on Giovanni Arrighi's return to the southern question in Italy, I argue that such claims hinge on on what is being compared to what and on a polity's position in the wider world, not on the incorporation episode alone.

Author

• Kevan Harris, University of California-Los Angeles