The Limits of Sociological Marxism?: Adam David Morton

Historical Materialism 21.
1 (2013) 129158
brill.com/hima
The Limits of Sociological Marxism?

Adam David Morton*
University of Nottingham adam.morton@nottingham.ac.uk
Abstract Within the agenda of historical-materialist theory and practice Sociological Marxism has delivered a compelling perspective on how to explore and link the analysis of civil society, the state, and the economy within an explicit focus on class exploitation, emancipation, and rich ethnography. This article situates a major analysis of state formation, the rise of the Justice and Development Party (AKP), and the growth of a broader Islamist movement in Turkey within the main current of Sociological Marxism. It does so in order to critically examine the rather bold revision of the theory of hegemony at the heart of Cihan Tuals Passive Revolution: Absorbing the Islamic Challenge to Capitalism, which posits the separate interaction of political society, civil society and the state in theorising hegemonic politics in Turkey. My contention is that the revision of hegemony that this analysis offers and its state-theoretical commitments are deeply problematic due to the reliance on what I term ontological exteriority, meaning the treatment of state, civil society and the economy as always-already separate spheres. The focus of the critique then moves toward highlighting a frustrating lack of direct engagement with Antonio Gramscis writings in this disquisition on hegemony and passive revolution, which has important political consequences. While praise for certain aspects of ethnographic and spatial analysis is raised, it is argued that any account of the reordering of hegemony and the restructuring of spatial-temporal contexts of capital accumulation through conditions of passive revolution also needs to draw from a more sophisticated state theory, a direct reading of Gramsci, and broader scalar analysis of spatial relations and uneven development under capitalism. Keywords Gramsci, passive revolution, hegemony, spatial relations, uneven development, state-civil society relations, Turkey, Sociological Marxism
*An earlier version of this article was presented at the conference Religion, Civil Society and Political Society in Gramsci (79 October 2011), stanbul/Bykada. A longer version was first published in the Turkish journal Praksis, No. 27 (2012). Thanks are owed to all those that provided feedback, points of engagement, and criticism whilst the usual disclaimers apply. The feedback of Alex Anievas, Peter Thomas and that of the peer reviewers at Historical Materialism improved the article. I would also like to especially thank C. Burak Tansel for his outstanding research assistance in sourcing and translating specific articles in Turkish relevant to this article. I look forward to witnessing the realisation of his own PhD research on la longue dure of passive revolution and state formation in Turkey.
Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2013 DOI: 10.1163/1569206X-12341284
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A.D. Morton / Historical Materialism 21.1 (2013) 129158
The seesaw of uneven development in Turkey under neoliberal restructuring has led to unprecedented recent growth. After a sharp contraction in 2009, the economy is currently in the top three of the G20 club for rapid growth, the rise in Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in 2010 was 8.9%, nominal wage growth has hit 18% a year, domestic demand is rising by approximately 25%, and credit growth is between 30 and 40%. Perhaps in order to absorb the surplus value that capitalism perpetually produces in the search for ever more profit, urbanisation and public works projects are continuing at a rapid pace. Recep Tayyip Erdoan has announced projects including three nuclear power plants in a country designated as one of the most seismically active in the world; revealed a blueprint to build two new cities; proposed hydropower plans to realise a target of installing 4,000 hydroelectric schemes by 2023, despite the expropriation of land, the forced migration this entails and the flooding of ancient cities such as Hasankeyf; and pronounced his crazy project: Canal Istanbul. The demands of surplus absorption through urbanisation will, however, meet stern forthcoming tests with the current-account deficit widening to $7.7 billion (2011) from $4.4 billion (2010) and expected to rise to 8% of GDP by 2012; with Turkey holding the highest rate of unemployment in the OECD at 56% of the workforce; and with annual growth needed to reach at least 5% just to keep unemployment under control. The contradictions of uneven development are increasingly coupled with the escalation of authoritarianism and nationalism in Turkey with the Adalet ve Kalknma Partisi [AKP: Justice and Development Party] mobilising riot police against student demonstrators and trade unionists the latter notably including the long-lasting TEKEL workers protest1 as well as conducting its military campaign against the Kurds and cracking down on press freedom, all of which might destabilise ongoing membership negotiations with the European Union. Yet, how might this swirl of contemporary factors be situated within an historical perspective and be given broader meaning within the history of modern state formation in Turkey? How would a deeper analysis of events in Turkey seek to combat recourse to the actions of great politicians, like Erdoan, and more resolutely affirm the centrality of social processes in shaping both continuity and change in the landscape of popular struggle and state power in Turkey? This article engages with Cihan Tuals Passive Revolution: Absorbing the Islamic Challenge to Capitalism, which aims to make sense of the AKP as a social force and embed it within wider discussions of state theory and historical sociology, debates on capitalist development, the social production of space and urbanisation, and how best to build comparative analysis and engage in theory
1.See zuurlu 2011.
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construction when approaching local processes through ethnographic research connected to broader developments on a world scale. At the heart of the book is therefore a focus on the challenges posed by the rise of the AKP and its broadly Islamist movement in Turkey. This is achieved by analysing transformations in the district of Sultanbeyli in Istanbul that was at the forefront of Islamisation moves in Istanbul in the 1990s with links to forerunners of the AKP. Tual has therefore produced a major contribution to debates on the constantly constructed and contested process of the reproduction of hegemony in Turkey, which links the organisational forms of the state to elements of everyday life in civil society. In doing so, he develops a hegemonic theory of politics as a major alternative to competing frames of reference in the existing literature of modernisation theory, political economy, social-movement theory, state theory and civil-society approaches that have largely shaped historical sociology in its diverse hues over recent decades. Claiming to draw from the writings of Antonio Gramsci, Tual argues that this hegemonic perspective enables him to transcend the binary dualisms configuring conventional understandings of the transitions and pathways to modernity. His aim is to weave together a focus on the role of the state in the making of the AKP with attention to everyday dimensions of political and economic power in civil society. As a result, his approach highlights processes of articulation through which identities emerge, social integration is enacted, and civil-society agents are constituted.2 Hence, in the organisational forms of the AKP, Islamic mobilisation is the reconstitution of hegemony as a response to organic crises.3 Elsewhere, this is similarly crafted as a focus on the mobilisation of AKP hegemony that, since 2002, has enacted processes of neoliberalisation in which all major classes could see something for themselves in the party, which was, in the classical sense, a potentially hegemonic capitalist project.4 At the same time, however, what is termed secularist hegemony on some occasions, or at other moments state-led hegemony in absorbing the demands, strategies and institutions of popular mass-movements, is ultimately recognised as a passive revolution in shaping the reproduction of power relations. Tual explains this concept as an examination of how processes of potentially revolutionary transformation are incorporated into an existing order to lead to the absorption of challenging, or radical, demands. As Tual states, in a passive revolution popular sectors are mobilised with revolutionary discourses and strategies only to reinforce existing patterns of domination. He contends that moderate Islam is the culmination of a long process of passive revolution as a result of which erstwhile radicals
2.See also De Leon, Desai and Tual 2009. 3.Tual 2009, p. 24. 4.Tual 2007, pp. 20, 23.
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and their followers are brought into the fold of neoliberalism, secularism, and Western domination.5 In the form of the AKP, then, the Turkish ruling bloc has reasserted its hegemony through the passive revolution of the past decades: integrating and demobilising the provincial bourgeoisie and religious communities, while maintaining its control. The AKP is the main agent of this revolution-restoration absorbing aspects of radical Islam.6 Given that Tuals book is a major statement of ethnographic research in tracing the transformations of urban governance in the district of Sultanbeyli, as well as a significant contribution to theorising hegemonic politics, it merits sustained attention. This is because of its vital focus on the establishment of secularist hegemony in Turkey, by linking the economy, state, and civil society in tracing the challenge of Islamism and its absorption.7 In this manner, Tual has embarked on an audacious attempt to challenge readers by providing original ethnographic insights as well as stimulating theoretical reconceptualisations. Yet there is much with which one can also disagree, not the least the purported success of the theoretical revisions offered and the degree to which the redefinition of hegemony is convincing. In order to focus on the richness of Passive Revolution, my argument is divided into three main sections and a conclusion. In the first section my aim is to situate the book within a broader configuration of literature known as Sociological Marxism to which Tual, through his methodological attachments and key distinctions on state theory, makes a key contribution. In line with a chief proponent of Sociological Marxism, Michael Burawoy, Tual argues that political society is a fundamental bridge between civil society and state, as it constructs and propagates the project that binds them.8 Political society is therefore posited as an arena of political parties, social movements, and leadership forms that is the missing link in studies on hegemony attempting to analyse its interactions with civil society and the state. In confirming the status of these interacting spheres, Tual states that, the way political society develops and the way it interacts with civil society, the economy, and the state have several implications for social stability and change.9 This is a major and rather bold revision of the theory of hegemony that posits the interaction of political society, civil society and the state as always-already separate spheres which are then combined.
5.Tual 2009, pp. 4, 312. Note that the Turkish edition carries a slightly different emphasis in its subtitle, see Tual 2010. 6.Tual 2007, p. 34. 7.Tual 2009, p. 33. 8.See Burawoy 2003 and Tual 2009, pp. 2431 and 270, n. 15, emphasis added. 9.Tual 2009, p. 262.
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My contention is that this revision of hegemony and its redefinition of political society, civil society and the state is deeply problematic as it contains these spheres in what I term a relationship of ontological exteriority. This means holding the spheres of political society, civil society, and the state as alwaysalready separate and then interacting realms. As a hallmark of Sociological Marxism, it is this commitment to ontological exteriority that marks the revision of the theory of hegemony and leads to a misinterpretation of the core of Gramscis reconnaissance of the terrain of the state that has profound consequences. Given that Tuals book is presented as a major revision of the analysis of hegemony there is much at stake, then, in terms of the success of the theoretical framework. The focus then moves in the second section to offering my own understanding of Gramsci in order to clarify better the relationship between hegemony and passive revolution. My concern here is that Tual all too infrequently offers the opportunity to explore an interpretative understanding of hegemony and its points of contact and difference with passive revolution. More pointedly, Tuals disquisition on hegemony and passive revolution is lacking a large degree of textual engagement and exegetical clarity. Indeed, for a book that hangs on boldly claiming to offer a better conceptualisation10 of hegemony, one finds a frustrating lack of direct textual reference to the Prison Notebooks. As I will argue, this striking absence of any direct engagement with Gramsci also has important political consequences, which are missed by not also examining Gramscis theory of the integral state and the richness this brings to discussions on state theory, hegemony and passive revolution. In the third section a productive meeting-point is afforded by Tual on how to understand state space and the practices and experiences entailed in the construction of the spatial dimension of passive revolution. The changing meaning of the production of space and the primary role of the modern state is revealed as one of the major assets of this study on the logic of passive revolution. It is argued that these issues raise the significance of also asserting the need to deliver broader analysis of the wider scales of uneven development under capitalism in Turkey beyond the spatial arbiters of Istanbul. The wider socio-spatial features of uneven development should accompany any account of the reordering of hegemony and the restructuring of contexts of capital accumulation through conditions of passive revolution. My argument then concludes with a call for greater candor from scholars in self-reflexively highlighting their own hermeneutic approach when reading Gramsci.
10.Tual 2009, p. 24.
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Sociological Marxism and reflexive science As already indicated, one of the central postulates of Sociological Marxism is that civil society exists alongside but distinct from the state and the economy. A goal of Sociological Marxism is thus to undertake a complementary analysis of civil society under capitalism and to trace the interrelation of state, economy, and civil society. More specifically, four postulates delineate Sociological Marxism: (1) civil society is not a timeless notion but a specific historical product of European capitalism in the late nineteenth century; (2) civil society is not an autonomous realm suspended in a fluid of spontaneous value-consensus, hence a focus on the relations between state and civil society: it would be wrong to assume that society has an integrity and coherence of its own; (3) civil society is both acting to stabilise capitalism and provides a terrain for transcending capitalism; and (4) there is an antipathy towards utilitarianism and totalitarianism prevalent in civil society that provides weapons of critique in challenging capitalism.11 Throughout an analysis of successive periods of history, Sociological Marxism thus provides a perspective on the connection of society to capitalism, specifically exploring the boundaries of civil society with the state and economy. Overall, an agenda for Sociological Marxism is therefore established by arguing that society occupies a specific institutional space within capitalism between economy and state, which, as outlined above, is the main point of contact with Tuals own advances within this literature.12 At the centrepiece of this understanding of state-civil society relations, however, is also a theory of capitalism as a particular form of class exploitation. An exploitation-centred and relational concept of class is presented, rooted in the social relations of production, and projected through the analysis of contemporary society.13 Class relations and the dynamics surrounding the reproduction and transformation of capitalist forms thus constitute the foundation of Sociological Marxism. For Michael Burawoy and Erik Olin Wright, elaborating a repertoire of class practices that constitute the contradictory social reproduction of capitalism is their core endeavour.14 Conspicuously, it is the intellectual figure of Gramsci from his signature concept of hegemony and his understanding of state and civil society to his development of the now influential notion of passive revolution who, provides the foundations, if in a relatively fragmentary form, of a Sociological Marxism.15
11. Burawoy 2003, pp. 199200. 12.Burawoy 2003, p. 198; Tual 2009, pp. 2431. 13.Wright 2005, pp. 5, 30. 14.Burawoy and Wright 2001. 15.Burawoy and Wright 2001, p. 462, n. 9.
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A further recognisable characteristic of Sociological Marxism is the development of a reflexive model of science that can be employed in tracking really existing complexes of state-civil society relations. Departing from positivist social science, Michael Burawoy has made a path-breaking contribution to an alternative critical theory of explanatory and interpretive practices that enables the exploration of broad historical patterns alongside an embeddedness in ethnographic local processes. This reflexive model of science is known as the extended case method that situates the researcher as a participant observer within the context of research.16 Specifically, for Burawoy, this reflexive mode of knowledge concentrates on four techniques: (1) intervention: theory is grasped as constitutive of the social world and in dialogue with itself; (2) process: based on collecting multiple experiences of a single case and aggregating them into wider social processes; (3) structuration: moving beyond immediate social processes to delineate the social forces that impress on an ethnographic locale; and (4) reconstruction: emphasising the specificity of experiences whilst still recognising the contribution a specific case might make, in a generative sense, to shaping the theory. The extended case method applies reflective science to ethnography in order to extract the general from the unique, to move from the micro to the macro, and to connect the present to the past.17 Moreover, what is particularly attractive about the extended case method is that it then promotes a comparative strategy, not by causally connecting separate cases reduced to a universal law, but by internally connecting cases to each other within wider social determinations. The point of this methodological digression is to highlight the agendasetting development of the extended case method in Tuals ethnography of Sultanbeyli in Istanbul and the merits of delivering such analysis in order to reconstruct theoretical assumptions.18 Sultanbeyli has its own specific urbanspatial place within the broader frame of reference of neoliberal urbanisation and modern architecture in Turkey.19 The depth of analysis delivered by Tual on these struggles over the spatial form of the city inclusive of different social relations, the class relations of Islamism, forms of reproductive work, gender relations, and expressions of consciousness, architectural symbolism, and alternative ways of living will be conveyed later. More broadly, within the wider postulates of Sociological Marxism there is also the astute recognition that Gramscis momentous, theoretical breakthrough lay in his periodising of
16.Burawoy 1998; Burawoy, Blum, George, Gille, Gowan, Haney, Klawiter, Lopez, Riain and Thayer 2000; Burawoy 2009. 17.Burawoy 1998, pp. 5, 1416; Burawoy 2005, p. 11; Burawoy 2009, pp. 3844. 18.See Tual 2009, pp. 1213. 19.See Bozdoan and Akcan 2012, pp. 23942.
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capitalism, notably through his elaboration of civil society and its connections to an expansive state.20 Indeed, within Gramscis deliberations on state and civil society, evident in the Prison Notebooks, there is a focus on the expansion of the structures of state organisation, the complexes of associations in civil society, the role of trade-union and party-organisational forms, and the extension of parliamentarism that are all noted as indicative of the modern world.21 In the period after 1870, with the colonial expansion of Europe, all these elements change, wrote Gramsci, the internal and international organisational relations of the state become more complex and massive.22 Yet to argue that Gramsci in his writings on state-civil society relations avoids the question of the origins of the formation of civil society and its links to the expansion and extension of the modern state would be an oversight. Nevertheless, Burawoy has stated that Gramscis specific account of civil society has little comprehension of its genesis, why it might appear in some nations and not in others, and that Gramsci has surprisingly little to say about its origins.23 The boldness of this postulate, however, can be revealed as remiss on two counts. First, there is Gramscis own, rather uncharacteristic but clear and concise commentary in the Prison Notebooks:
What is called public opinion is tightly connected to political hegemony; in other words, it is the point of contact between civil society and political society, between consent and force. When the state wants to embark on an action that is not popular, it starts to create in advance the public opinion that is required; in other words, it organises and centralises certain elements of civil society. History of public opinion: naturally, elements of public opinion have always existed, even in the Asiatic satrapies, but public opinion as we think of it today was born on the eve of the collapse of the absolutist state, that is, during the period when the new bourgeois class was engaged in the struggle for political hegemony and the conquest of power. Public opinion is the political content of the publics political will that can be dissentient; therefore, there is a struggle for the monopoly of the organs of public opinion newspapers, political parties, parliament so that only one force will
20.Burawoy 2003, p. 211; Burawoy 2012, p. 192. 21. Gramsci 1971, p. 220: Q1327 (19324). It should be noted that I follow a specific convention associated with citing the Prison Notebooks. In addition to giving the reference to the selected anthologies, the notebook number (Q), section (), and notebook date accompanies all citations, to enable the reader to trace their specific collocation. The concordance table used is that compiled by Marcus Green and is available at the website of the International Gramsci Society, <http://www.internationalgramscisociety.org>. 22.Gramsci 1971, p. 243: Q137 (19324). 23.Burawoy 2003, pp. 213, 214.
A.D. Morton / Historical Materialism 21.1 (2013) 129158 mould public opinion and hence the political will of the nation, while reducing the dissenters to individual and disconnected specks of dust.24
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This is not an isolated comment, a fragment, written as some prcis of further thinking on the modern state that was never completed or accomplished. Instead, there is a profound recognition elsewhere of the birth of the modern state and its distinction from medieval society and absolutist regimes. Equally pivotal is how this tracking of the correlates of class power within civil society (or the associations of private and public) are woven together in the state and in the world political system, in critical dialogue with Hegels dialectic.25 One of the foremost motifs running throughout the entire Prison Notebooks is therefore an understanding of the social basis of hegemony exercised across state-civil society relations and how the reduction and limitation of the modern state to actions in political society is dismissed as a misconceived doctrine of statolatry.26 Second, within the extant literature on Gramsci, his writings have been developed precisely in an attempt to historicise different types of state and processes of class formation constitutive of civil society.27 For Kees van der Pijl, Gramscis thought is pertinent in tracing a distinction between a Lockean pattern of states based on a self-regulating civil society in an advanced capitalist heartland, and a Hobbesian complex of developmental contender states, where the social sphere is confiscated by dominant state power.28 The privileged terrain of social action in Lockean states is an emancipated civil society that is facilitated a wider margin of self-regulation. As Gramsci puts it, the state here actively aims to construct within the shell of political society a complex and well-articulated civil society in which the individual governs himself, provided that his self-government does not enter into conflict with political society but becomes, rather, its normal continuation, its organic complement.29 This is contrasted by van der Pijl with the process of class formation in the Hobbesian pattern that is governed by a political strategy to conquer the terrain of power via the state. Under such conditions, state power
24.Gramsci 2007, p. 213: Q783 (19302). For more detail on Gramscis theorising of political modernity and the origins of capitalism in terms of feudal crisis, agrarian class structures and the rise of specific social property relations, see Morton 2005; Morton 2007, Chapter 3. My Unravelling Gramsci: Hegemony and Passive Revolution in the Global Political Economy has also been translated into Turkish, see Morton 2011b. 25.Gramsci 2007, p. 187: Q735 (19302). 26.Gramsci 2007, p. 310: Q8130 (19312). 27.See Cox 1981, pp. 1358; Cox 1983, pp. 1629. 28.van der Pijl 1993, pp. 23740; van der Pijl 1998, pp. 6483. 29.Gramsci 2007, p. 310: Q8130 (19312).
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becomes subject to bureaucratisation, society is confiscated by the state and state power turned against anyone resisting it.30 The historical focus is then on which social forces have constituted a process of developmental catch-up under state auspices. As will be discussed below, a more protracted or molecular course of state and class formation then ensues through the process of passive revolution. In Gramscis words: There is a passive revolution involved in the fact that... relatively far-reaching modifications are being introduced into the countrys economic structure... in competition with the more advanced industrial formations of countries which monopolise raw materials and have accumulated massive capital sums.31 Evident, then, in and beyond Gramsci is an emphasis on the historicisation of different state forms or a periodisation of the origins of the modern state. Further, there is a generative understanding of civil society not as a separate sphere in opposition to the state but as an element in dialectical unity with political society. Gramsci quite clearly spells this out by formulating the issue around the identity-distinction of civil society and political society within the aims of the state.32 In transcending statolatry, this came to be famously rendered by Gramsci as State = political society + civil society, in other words hegemony protected by the armour of coercion.33 The question left begging is, then, what is made of this locus classicus within the hegemonic perspective and alternative conceptualisation of political articulation manifest in Tuals book? One can assert, critically, that actually very little is evident of this sort of engagement. Tual develops in his own nomenclature a hegemonic perspective that he boldly claims will offer a better conceptualisation of the linkages between state and society than Gramscis theory of hegemony. This revision defines hegemony as: (1) the organisation of consent for domination and inequality (2) through a specific articulation of everyday life, space, and the economy with certain patterns of authority (3) under a certain leadership, that (4) forges unity out of disparity.34 The domain linking the state and civil society, for Tual, is defined as political society. I define political society, to cite him specifically, as the sphere where society organises to shape state policies but also to define the nature of the state and political unity.35 More explicitly, Political society is a fundamental bridge between civil society and
30.van der Pijl 1998, p. 79. 31. Gramsci 1971, pp. 11920: Q10I9 (19325). 32.Gramsci 2007, p. 317: Q8142 (19312). 33.Gramsci 2007, p. 75: Q688 (19302). 34.Tual 2009, p. 24. 35.Tual 2009, p. 25.
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state, as it constructs and propagates the project that binds them.36 The social configuration of political society is therefore posited as the missing link between civil society and the state. Rather than understanding the dialectical unity of a state-civil society complex, there is a privileging of political society in Tuals study and then a focus on its separate interactions with civil society, the state, and the economy. The locus classicus of Gramscis succinct statetheoretical expression, noted above, is therefore rent asunder. Instead, on the basis of Tuals intervention, it could be rendered differently to account for these various forms of interaction to become hegemony = political society + civil society + state + economy. As a consequence, we are told that situating the possibility of a passive revolution in the context of an analysis of interactions between political society, civil society, the economy, and the state can inform us about routes of change within a reigning hegemonic project.37 The problem is that without demonstrating the deficiencies, or establishing the clear criteria in virtue of which this conceptualisation is in some sense better, it is difficult to discern how this is a departure from Gramscis core ideas on the state and hegemony. What are the epistemological criteria for establishing this better conceptualisation in terms of, for example, better consistency, or more coherence, or greater comprehensiveness, or wider scope? If it is accepted that we cannot stand apart from the theory that forms the basis of our own values and understandings, then a clear notion of better theory is not so easy to establish. More controversially, this revision of hegemony could actually be considered as nothing more than a rehashing of the old dynamics of hegemony. The key difference, however, is that the theoretical matrix offers, in a disaggregate manner, the constitutive conditions of hegemonic struggle, which are presented as separate and then combined. The problem with this state theorising is its commitment to ontological exteriority, or the element of separateness that it regards as the basis of the relationship between the state and civil society that runs contrary to the philosophy of internal relations distinctive to historical materialism.38 This commitment to ontological exteriority can be further criticised on two substantive counts. First, Tual can be accurately reproached for a lack of direct engagement with Gramsci, meaning the textual theory and contextual practice of the Marxist thinker, as well as a neglect of the commentaries, debates, and contending interpretations surrounding his legacy. Put bluntly, there is no reading of Gramsci offered or developed. Despite my best endeavours, I could not find one direct paginated textual reference to, or reference to a general page range
36.Tual 2009, p. 270, n. 15. 37.Tual 2009, p. 263. 38.See Ollman 1976 and, for further development, Bieler and Morton 2008.
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within, the Prison Notebooks throughout the entire book.39 This is important in a monograph that not only purports to deliver original insights on Islamic mobilisation but also innovative theoretical reconstruction. After all, Passive Revolution harks directly back to Antonio Gramscis eponymous development of the influential concept that is passive revolution. So, surely, one would anticipate more direct textual engagement? The concern, then, is that an interpretation by proxy is produced that fails to avoid exegetical mistakes or outright distortion.40 As Burawoy himself forewarns in his development of Sociological Marxism: Too often the writings of Gramsci... have been ravaged like the carcasses of dead bodies the most useful parts ripped from their meaning-giving integument and transplanted into ailing theories.41 To develop this first additional point further, it is important to raise some specific questions about method and hermeneutic understanding in approaching the reading of texts. In terms recently proposed by Tony Burns, the reading of a text is an endeavour at the most elementary point of engagement in an attempt to develop understanding, assuming that it can be understood in different ways. Flowing from this starting position, three approaches to reading a text can then be distinguished in producing an approach to hermeneutic understanding, which involve establishing meaning by interpretation, by appropriation, and by negotiation.42 In brief, meaning by interpretation is an attempt to understand a particular text as the author of that text understood it herself based on someone seeking the truth in relation to the meaning of the text in question. Second, meaning by appropriation means that the ideas of an author are taken up and used by the reader for purposes of their own without the motivation or desire to offer a truthful interpretation of the text. The act of appropriation is an intentional hermeneutic manoeuvre. Additionally, according to Burns, if an appropriation of a text were presented as an interpretation of it then it would be rejected by the vast majority of scholars working within the field, or even all of them, as being false or invalid.43 Third, establishing meaning by negotiation represents a compromise, perhaps, between interpretation and appropriation or a theoretical synthesis of the two. From this point of view, the hermeneutic act is always an historical enterprise and therefore there is an acceptance that the meaning which is given to texts
39.This loose practice of reading and appropriation is further evident in a subsequent article on Turkeys and Egypts passive revolutionary processes, see Tual 2012a. 40.The key phrase is from Wood 1986, p. 55, n. 15. 41. Burawoy 2003, p. 201. 42.Burns 2011a, pp. 1326. 43.Burns 2011a, p. 16.
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written in the past can and will alter. Negotiation represents in effect some sort of dialogue between the author of the text and its reader. Drawing from these conceptual distinctions, when disputes between competing interpretations of texts arise these may be evaluated on the basis of recourse to the text. As a result, misinterpretations of texts are possible rather than misreadings. Further, an appropriation of a text can be revealed as a selective reading of a text whereby the ideas of the author are taken up by appropriators and used by them for purposes of their own. Such readings reflect the interests and concerns of the appropriator and not necessarily those of the author.44 The import of these conceptual distinctions into the current discussion is critical. After all, when approaching Gramscis texts readers should be clear in their own minds about which of these activities they are performing interpreting, appropriating, or negotiating in developing a reading of Gramsci. My argument is that without any clarity on the sort of reading being produced, one is left dissatisfied about the strength of Tuals claims, the veracity of the weaknesses purported to be evident in Gramsci, or the merits offered by the better conceptualisation of hegemony. This is even more the case if, due to the lack of his textual engagement, one sees Tual engaging in the act of producing meaning by appropriation, which results in the radical altering of the meaning of concepts. To uphold the fundamental separation of the categories of political society, civil society, and state could be a valid appropriation of Gramscis state theory. But it would be a dubious interpretation of the text. Obviating any strict adherence to meaning by interpretation, or the notion of essential meaning, a more suitable approach would be to place emphasis on meaning by interpretation, demonstrating dialogue between author, text and context, which adheres to exegetical rigour and accuracy while acknowledging that certain elements are immanent in the text and need to be related to the changing concrete terrain of history.45 However, without clarity on what sort of reading is being produced, literature too often misconstrues Gramsci on the state and civil society while invoking him to bolster incompatible basic theses. In accord with Joseph Buttigieg, I contend that this view of the separateness of the state and civil society also gives rise to politically disabling misdiagnoses of the operations of power and of the resilience of the very forces one presumably wants to combat.46 As Gramsci put it, in a manner that directly speaks to Tuals book, in politics, the error stems from an inaccurate understanding of the nature of the state (in the full sense: dictatorship + hegemony), which results in
44.Burns 2011b, p. 317. 45.Gramsci 1971, p. 450: Q1128 (19323); and see Morton 2007, pp. 1538. 46.Buttigieg 2005, pp. 367.
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underestimating the adversary and his fighting organisation.47 Rather than novel theory reconstruction, the limited textual engagement with Gramsci evident in Passive Revolution actually produces a misinterpretation of the Prison Notebooks and therefore an ill-informed theoretical matrix. Second, the revised theory of hegemony is also connected to an ambivalent situatedness within a revision of the work of Max Weber. This revision of Weber will be based on decentering authority, emphasising locality, and integrating the agency of the subjugated into the analysis while also situating authority in the general context of hegemony.48 There are several problems with this state theorising, notwithstanding notable attempts to focus on supposed complementarities within Weberian Marxism.49 Primarily, the state itself is regarded as a discrete institutional category, a reified thing, which exists in a relationship of exteriority to society. For Weber, all states can be classified on the basis of the level of autonomous separation of their administrative staff from the organisation of political power. In the contemporary state modern development begins with this separation alongside how it is successful in seeking to monopolise the legitimate use of physical force as a means of domination within a territory.50 For Tual, state and society are similarly taken as autonomous, albeit mutually interacting, entities in such a way that results in their juxtaposition and obscures their complex character. The problem of ontological exteriority is therefore faced once again. Most significantly, the inner connection between state (politics) and civil society (economics) is rent asunder by this state theorising. For sure, as alar Keyder makes clear, the state is a concept with an unequivocal referent in the Turkish context.51 But, concurrent with Emrah Gker, the evident danger in Passive Revolution is a falling back into the archaic metatheoretical disease blighting Turkish political science, namely the state versus civil society discourse.52 This means that the apparent separation of the economic and political cannot be problematised or, most crucially, related to an understanding of capitalism.53 Put most strongly, there is a failure to conceive of the state as a form of capitalist social relations, as an aspect of the social relations of production, predicated upon the reproduction of class-relevant antagonisms and exploitation. The transformation of social practices and identities involved in the changing nature of sovereignty,
47.Gramsci 2007, p. 117: Q6155 (19302). 48.Tual 2009, p. 27. 49.Lwy 1996. 50.Weber 2009, pp. 823. 51. Keyder 2004, p. 65. 52.Gker 2010. 53.Wood 1995, pp. 316.
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including class(-relevant) struggle, thus becomes dissolved within a liberal pluralist competitive arena. After all, in concurrence with Herbert Marcuses reading, whilst Max Weber analysed processes of industrialisation, he did not seek to root these within the structure of capitalism itself, so that his analysis became the formal analysis of domination.54 As a result, what is missing is a more relational approach to state power that can recognise the internal link between modern state formation and capitalism. The separations drawn by Tual between political society + civil society + state + economy within his study of the establishment of secularist hegemony in Turkey cannot therefore reveal the locus of class-driven power relations in production a core trait of Sociological Marxism that would provide coherence to its explanations. This is not to collapse into a position of class-reductionism. Instead, I am troubled in Tuals book by something that Raymond Williams long ago articulated: an antipathy towards determinism that has led to an all-too-easy acceptance of arguments about totality, or one can add contingency, which exclude the facts of social intention and the domination of a particular class.55 The above weaknesses are all equally evident in Tuals disquisition on the condition of hegemony and its points of contact and difference with passive revolution, to which attention will now turn in more detail. Revisiting Gramsci: hegemony and passive revolution It is not the task of this article to present a definitive survey and definitional statement of all the different modes of passive revolution articulated by Gramsci and his interpreters.56 As a basic pointer, though, lest confusion reign about my own understanding of the condition and concept, a few clarificatory remarks need to be made. The passive revolution syntagma captures the attempt to establish the political rule of capital and how processes of state formation are embedded in the circumstances of uneven and combined development.57 Capitalism is a world historical phenomenon and its uneven development, Gramsci stated, means that individual nations cannot be at the same level of economic development at the same time.58 For the present discussion, the concept of passive revolution can be summarised as referring to instances in which aspects of the social relations of capitalist development
54.Marcuse 1968, pp. 210, 215. 55.Williams 1980, p. 36 56.But see Morton 2010. 57.See Morton 2007, pp. 6373; Morton 2011a. 58.Gramsci 1977, p. 69.
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are either instituted and/or expanded, resulting in both revolutionary rupture and a restoration of social relations. It can emphasise progressive aspects of historical change during revolutionary upheaval that become undermined, resulting in the reconstitution of social relations but within new forms of capitalist order. According to Gramsci, after the French Revolution (1789), the emergent bourgeoisie there was able to present itself as an integral state, with all the intellectual and moral forces that were necessary and adequate to the task of organising a complete and perfect society.59 In contrast to this instance of state formation, other European countries went through a passive revolution in which the old feudal classes were not destroyed but maintained a political role through state power. As Gramsci detailed:
[The] birth of the modern European states [proceeded] by successive waves of reform rather than by revolutionary explosions like the original French one. The successive waves were made up of a combination of social struggles, interventions from above of the enlightened monarchy type, and national wars... restoration becomes the first policy whereby social struggles find sufficiently elastic frameworks to allow the bourgeoisie to gain power without dramatic upheavals, without the French machinery of terror... The old feudal classes are demoted from their dominant position to a governing one, but are not eliminated, nor is there any attempt to liquidate them as an organic whole.60
There is therefore a dialectic of revolution and restoration that becomes blocked in a situation of passive revolution as neither the old nor the new class forces become hegemonic.61 The problem, Gramsci stated, is to see whether in the dialectic of revolution/restoration it is revolution or restoration which predominates.62 It is important to retain this emphasis on the struggle-driven contradictions of both revolution and restoration in instances of passive revolution shaping the modern world.63 To be clear, a passive revolution does not refer to an inert, literally passive, course of action. The process of a passive revolution can be violent and brutal, the outcome neither predetermined nor inevitable. How are some of these initial coordinates of passive revolution developed in understanding the dynamics of hegemonys reproduction in Turkey? Tual refers to how an extant hegemony absorbs the demands, strategies and institutions of popular mass-movements and comments on how revolutionary
59.Gramsci 2007, p. 9: Q610 (19302). 60.Gramsci 1971, p. 115: Q10II61 (19325). 61. Buci-Glucksmann 1980, p. 315. 62.Gramsci 1971, p. 219: Q1327 (19324). 63.See Riley and Desai 2007.
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transformation in such instances is avoided. Tual therefore recognises the process of incorporation of revolutionary movements into existing systems as a passive revolution. According to Gramsci, Tual writes, western European states underwent a passive revolution during 18151870. This transformation mainly consisted of bourgeois empowerment without popular participation and economic loss of privilege for the aristocracy without its total extinction.64 Yet it is disappointing to find no textual support for or substantiation of this understanding of passive revolution, especially given that it misses the element of popular politics from below. Drawing on the distinctions drawn in the previous section, this view is more on the terrain of an appropriation of a text (radically altering the meaning of concepts) rather than a negotiation with the text (establishing dialogue between the text and new meaning-producing contexts). For sure, Tual notes, even though Gramsci has laid the foundations for the idea of passive revolution, he has not written more than a few pages on the topic.65 But this seems a rather odd approach to reading (interpreting, appropriating, or negotiating) the Prison Notebooks and one that is counter to any meaningful understanding of his practical theory. The weight of this point becomes highly significant when Tual aims to trace the constitution of secularist hegemony in Turkey and then the rearticulation of Islam and neoliberalism as a passive revolution. The problem emerges, as a result of a lack of textual engagement with the Prison Notebooks, that clarity on the meaning of hegemony and passive revolution is never delivered. At different stages the reader is informed that the focus is on secularist hegemony and the Islamist challenge; the constitution of state-led hegemony and Islamisation in Turkey; the role of MSADs hegemony the Association of Independent Industrialists and Businessmen in integrating state and civil society; and a focus on the naturalisation of market relations through the incompleteness of capitalist hegemony and neoliberal hegemony.66 But is the historical path and struggle of hegemony simply coterminous with conditions of passive revolution? How can one recognise different variations of hegemony that may prevail in a social order, or shifts in the threshold of power between consensual and coercive means? What are the different practices constituting state-led and popular struggles over the construction, renewal, and contestation of hegemony and passive revolution? It is very difficult to discern any lucidity on these crucial questions in Tuals exposition on passive revolution. The crux of the issue might perhaps lie behind Tuals ambition to address the context of Turkish Islamisms development over the last century, linked
64.Tual 2009, p. 32. 65.Tual 2009, p. 32. 66.Tual 2009, pp. 8, 36, 222, 230, 232.
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to the last decades of Ottoman Empire and the establishment of the Turkish Republic in 1923, but without addressing the historical sociology of state formation stemming from the founding of modern Turkey. As Tual admits, a full blown history of the republic is not provided.67 But, surely, readers need some of the detail of this historical sociology of Turkey and the emergence of the modern state through the transition from the Ottoman Empire to its founding as a republic? A more detailed critical engagement with debates in Turkish historiography on the legacy of the Ottoman Empire, the emergence of the Turkish Republic and capitalist development, or historical-sociological deliberations on revolutions from above would have been welcomed.68 A serious omission is evident in the lack of attention cast upon scholarship that has detailed a broader succession of processes of passive revolution in the history of republican Turkey.69 As it stands, there is a partial tracing of the national context of the Islamic challenge since the 1980s in the shadow of a military intervention in 1980 [that] institutionalised religion so as to expand the hegemonic reach of the regime.70 This means the piecemeal introduction of religious dimensions into cultural life as well as the implementation of neoliberalisation processes that also provoked counter-responses of resistance. But can a military intervention, the definition par excellence of coercive domination, be adequately described as hegemonic? Is there not a conflation here, even a fundamental contradiction, of Gramscis understanding of power relations? As Tual himself declares, the state vacillated between repression and containment between the 1950s and the 1980s.71 It is a conceptual stretch, indeed, to then describe this as a process of hegemonic articulation. As Ahmet nsel has spotted, by failing to reveal the agents of passive revolution, manifest in the actual actions of the bourgeoisie of the country absorbing and neutralising mass-participation by capitalism, then the implementation of passive revolution becomes somewhat groundless.72 Perhaps a more expansive periodisation of passive revolution informing the transition to modern politics in Turkey and its long process of culmination was needed. The consequences of reducing the transition to neoliberalism in Turkey as an instance of passive revolution at the neglect of its more ruptural entrance into modernity, following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the continuities and contrasts this entailed, may be profound. More nuance is displayed in Galip Yalmans departure from reifying
67.Tual 2009, p. 272, n. 1. 68.See, for example, Glalp 1994; Keyder 1987; nc 2003; Trimberger 1978; or Zrcher 1992. 69.Yalman 2002. 70.Tual 2009, p. 40. 71. Tual 2009, p. 40. 72.nsel 2011.
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analyses of the Ottoman-Turkish state to highlight the failure of the tatiste project in constructing an integral state, thereby effectively brandishing it as a passive revolution, having lacked an organic relationship between leaders and the masses.73 The AKPs articulation with neoliberalism might then be recognised as the latest phase in the Turkish experience of passive revolution. Through the AKP, authoritarianism is articulated and reproduced as part of neoliberal restructuring, due to the Turkish bourgeoisie being far from integrally hegemonic, ensuring continuities in terms of state-class relations.74 These factors become particularly acute in the comparative perspective that Tual wants to inject towards the end of the book. Writing before the uprisings of the Arab Spring, Tual asks: Is the passive revolution unique to Turkey in the Middle East?... Is there a possibility of passive revolution in other countries?.75 This question is cast over the cases of Turkey (described as a secular state ruled by democratising ex-Islamists through which the AKP has come to dominate political society), Egypt (described as an authoritarian secularist state opposed by a broad-based Islamic movement marked by radical socio-political groups), and Iran (described as an authoritarian Islamic state unable to foster consent marked by quasi-parties and charismatic leadership traits). In the case of Egypt, although the overall regimes strategy is regarded as akin to a passive revolution, this is deemed a blocked route. It is argued that the central node of Islamic society in Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood (MB), has witnessed the partial inclusion of radicals and repression. Yet Tual holds that there was no hegemonic combination of Islamic activists, thus signalling the limits of Islamic hegemony in Egypt. As a result, he argues, radicalism came as a handy excuse for the regime to block a passive revolutionary route.76 But if the pathway to passive revolution is blocked and the constitution of hegemony is weak and not in evidence then how was political rule articulated in Egypt? How is the trajectory of historical and contemporary state formation in Egypt captured in this context by a hegemonic theory of politics? If hegemony does not apply to certain
73.Yalman 2002, p. 33. 74.See Yalman 2009. 75.Tual 2009, p. 235. But see how Tual (Tual 2011, 2012b) usefully questions whether Egypts future pathway out of the Arab Spring might be a restoration along the lines of the Turkish model in the form of passive revolutionaries such as Mohamed Morsi narrowing the agenda and demands of the revolution. Similarly, Morton (Morton 2011c) focuses on the Arab revolutions that pose anew some venerable questions of revolutionary transformation, not least whether they will result in fundamental changes to economic life in the region or a passive revolutionary restoration of the old political order whereby state machines remain significantly intact, a process continually in development and subject to change and challenge. 76.Tual 2009, p. 255.
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sections of radical fundamentalists, and the passive revolutionary road to state transformation was blocked, then how were the terms of state power formed? The theoretical conflation and confusion of hegemony and passive revolution reveal manifold problems of historical interpretation in providing clarity on state formation processes in, for example, Turkey or Egypt, which are commonly confronted with an impasse between contending class forces, or a lack of any established bourgeois hegemony. How, then, are the social relations of capitalist development commonly set in train in conditions of passive revolution? My own negotiation with the concept of passive revolution that follows offers a ground-clearing exercise on the condition of passive revolution. The aim is to present some pointers for future debate on how best to regard passive revolution as a counterpart to a situation of hegemony, or perhaps how to view the two concepts as marking end-points on a continuum.77 In more detail, the term passive revolution itself is a derivative and modified borrowing and was developed to directly refer to the Risorgimento movement culminating in the unification of Italy in 18601.78 Yet Gramsci also extended the term through an historical methodology to refer to nineteenth century liberalconstitutionalist movements as a whole; to the post-Napoleonic restoration (181548); as well as to the restorations following the social upheaval of World War I culminating in the rise of Fascism. Passive revolution therefore generally refers to the epoch of bourgeois revolution involving social upheaval or overthrow of an existing political order leading to the creation of state power as well as the reorganisation of capitalism. All history from 1815 onwards, wrote Gramsci, ...shows the efforts of the traditional classes to prevent the formation of a collective will... and to maintain economic-corporate power in an international system of passive equilibrium.79 Gramsci therefore came to the conclusion that: The important thing is to analyse more profoundly the significance of a Piedmont-type function in passive revolutions i.e. the fact that a state replaces the local social groups in leading a struggle of renewal. It is one of the cases in which these groups have the function of domination without that of leadership: dictatorship without hegemony.80 The epoch of passive revolution is therefore a reflection of modern state formation set within inherited territorial and geopolitical conditions. It is also linked to wider deliberations on state and civil society evident in the Prison Notebooks, the expansion of the structures of state organisation linked to the complexes
77.See Cox 1983, p. 167; Gill 2008, p. 58. 78.See Macciocchi 1975, pp. 11214; Thomas 2009, pp. 13357. 79.Gramsci 1971, p. 132: Q131 (19324). 80.Gramsci 1971, pp. 1056: Q1559 (1933).
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of associations in civil society, which are all issues posed for modern states.81 Hence Gramscis notion of the integral state is a more fruitful approach to grasping the class dynamics of capital accumulation than, for example, the statolatry view, criticised above.82 In this sense political unity was deeply related to the social bases of the state in class, religious-secular, and territorial terms and to the concomitant articulation between political and civil society to form the state in its integral sense.83 An organic relation between state and civil society, through the development of active consensus alongside a variable mix of force, is emblematic of the relational articulation of hegemony.84 Instead, in a situation of passive revolution, the important thing is to analyse more profoundly... the fact that a state replaces the local social groups in leading a struggle of renewal.85 Here there is a statisation of civil society in the Hobbesian manner outlined earlier when the ruling class is unable to fully integrate the people through conditions of hegemony.86 However, it is important to recognise that, for Gramsci, hegemonic processes were to be carefully distinguished from, albeit related to, conditions of passive revolution. To concur with Hugues Portellis adroit synopsis: There is no social system where consensus serves as the sole basis of hegemony, nor a state where the same social group can maintain durably its domination on the basis of pure coercion.87 The shifting sands of hegemonic situations always have to be situated in the dynamics of historical development, but at a general level at least three intersecting gradations can be distinguished:88 (1) i ntegral hegemony based on an organic relationship between rulers and ruled: referring to how the normal exercise of hegemony on the now classical terrain of the parliamentary regime is characterised by the combination of force and consent, which balance each other reciprocally, without force predominating excessively over consent;89 (2) decadent hegemony indicating the ideological decay of a ruling power bloc with fragile cultural and political integration: between coercion and force stands corruption/fraud (which is characteristic of certain situations
81. Gramsci 1971, p. 243: Q137 (19324). 82.Gramsci 1971, p. 239: Q6155 (19302); see Thomas 2009, pp. 13741. 83.Jessop 2008, p. 113. 84.See Morton 2007, pp. 8794. 85.Gramsci 1971, pp. 1056: Q1559 (1933). 86.See Portelli 1973, p. 33; van der Pijl 1998, pp. 7983. 87.Portelli 1973, p. 30. 88.See Morton 2011a, pp. 1824; and Femia 1981, pp. 3550. 89.Gramsci 1971, p. 80, n. 49: Q1924 (19345).
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when it is hard to exercise the hegemonic function and when the use of force is too risky;90 and (3) minimal hegemony based on hegemonic activity but where state power became merely an aspect of the function of domination, indicative of the condition of passive revolution: the state-coercion element superintends the hegemonic activity.91 For postcolonial states confronted with the impasse of uneven development, or a blocked dialectic of revolution-restoration, the more common route to the modern world is therefore through the passive revolutionary road based on a minimal hegemony. These are some of the basic contours of passive revolution. It should be added that there are at least two different but linked processes to the condition of passive revolution, articled by Gramsci in a draft note as early as 19302. These are, first, with reference to a revolution without mass-participation, or a revolution from above, elite-engineered social and political reform that draws on foreign capital and associated ideas while lacking a national-popular base. Passive revolution here describes the historical fact of the absence of popular initiative in the development of Italian history.92 At the same time, however, the notion of passive revolution should not be limited to this understanding. It is equally used in a linked but alternate, second, sense to capture how a revolutionary form of political transformation is pressed into a conservative project of restoration while lacking a radical national-popular Jacobin moment. It refers here to the fact that progress occurs as the reaction of the dominant classes to the sporadic and incoherent rebelliousness of the popular masses a reaction consisting of restorations that agree to some part of the popular demands and are therefore progressive restorations, or revolutionsrestorations, or even passive revolutions.93 In this second associated sense, passive revolution is linked to insurrectionary mass-mobilisation from below while such class demands are restricted so that changes in the world of production are accommodated within the current social formation.94 Definitionally, then, one can envisage on the basis of this reading of Gramsci how Stuart Hall distinguishes between a passive revolution from above
90.Gramsci 1971, p. 80, n. 4: Q1924 (19345). 91. Gramsci 1971, p. 59: Q1924 (19345); Gramsci 2007, p. 75: Q688 (19302). 92.Gramsci 2007, p. 252: Q825 (19302). It should be commented such a draft note in the Prison Notebooks now falls into the common categorisation of an A-text, to be distinguished from B-texts that exist in only one version, or C-texts that consist of material derived from previous drafts. 93.Gramsci 2007, p. 252: Q825 (19312). 94.Sassoon 1987, p. 207; see also Femia 1981, p. 260, n. 74.
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committed to the confiscation of the state as an instrument of transformation across ideological, religious, philosophical, and juridical fields and a passive revolution from below as a technique of statecraft which an emergent bourgeois class may deploy by drawing in subaltern social classes while establishing a new state on the basis of the institution of capitalism.95 Delineating these nuances of passive revolution, the various gradations of hegemony, and instances where the state-coercive element becomes the armour protecting a minimal hegemony, would offer insights germane to Sociological Marxism, as Burawoy admits, and thus to post-revolutionary conjunctures of modern state formation where the subsequent watchword has been a long restoration.96 The founding of the secular Turkish republic in 1923, from the remnants of the Ottoman Empire, might then be the most apposite point of departure to consider the processes that strengthened the emergence of capitalism and the onset of passive revolution. That these elements of theoretical nuance and historical specificity have been missed in Tuals treatment of passive revolution is of further detriment to the overall contribution and appeal of the book. State space One of the strongest aspects of Tuals focus on the absorption of Islamism into neoliberalism in Turkey is the attention cast upon the role of space in the making of hegemony and passive revolution. Under Erdoans leadership, the AKP has engaged in a transformation of state space, including the demolition of Ottoman buildings, the reconstruction of ersatz versions, and proposals to re-convert Hagia Sophia into a mosque and to build another mosque in the centre of Taksim Square. How the modern state in Turkey binds itself to space, of course, has a long history.97 From 1839, the Ottoman reorganisation of the Tanzimat era aimed to create a modern capital for the Empire that could compete with Paris or London.98 However, Tuals study of Istanbul specifically delves into what Henri Lefebvre would recognise as the hierarchisation of space: how hierarchies within the city-form are the basis of power relations and thus how inequalities become socially constituted. Power is hierarchised
95.Hall 1980, p. 182. 96.On his ethnography of social transformations, Burawoy (Burawoy 2009, p. 264) has stated that he would have done well to have adopted and adapted Gramscis concept of passive revolution. 97.See Bozdoan and Akcan 2012 on the architecture of revolution and building for the modern state. 98.Tual 2008, p. 66.
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in a way that represents spatially the economic and social hierarchy, dominant sectors and subordinate sectors.99 With a focus on the urban district of Sultanbeyli, the notion of place as social construct in Istanbul is examined in order to trace the changing meaning of the production of place within the spatial configuration of the state: Architecture and the layout of streets; imagined or real boundaries between neighbourhoods, restaurants, cafs, and rooms in an apartment; and the strategic location of buildings, parks, places of worship, and other symbolic sites all speak the language of power.100 The result is a richly textured ethnography of the politics of place construction in Istanbul that ranges across material practices, representational experiences, and symbolic activities in the organisation of space relations. The spatial dimension of passive revolution is present on at least two fronts. First, in terms of the Islamic production of urban space in civil society: transfiguring social space albeit within limits that were reached by the end of the twentieth century. This involved an array of features, whether it be the articulation of bodily comportment with space, through the appropriation of tie-wearing alongside the removal of shoes in public spaces, or whether it be through the production of new sites for agitation and organisation. The latter entailed the establishment of teahouses in addition to mosques, the usual spatial focus of Islamic mobilisation. Islamism instituted a particular urban spatial structure that fed back into the movement and facilitated mobilisation by providing new resources.101 The second spatial dimension of passive revolution is traced in terms of the AKP absorption of elements of Islamic space to pave the way for further neoliberalisation in civil society: the AKP legalised and commercialised urban space as well as transformed the use of social space and spatial symbolism, including the modern refashioning of boulevards in Sultanbeyli; the demolition of a municipal building to dismantle explicitly Islamic architectural symbols; and the reconfiguring of gendered relations in urban space. The AKPs new official urban discourse emphasised aesthetics, consumption, urban consciousness, and appearance, in contradistinction to purely commercial interests, shantytowns, and ugliness.102 As Ahmet Bekmen has recognised, the significance of this work is in the ability to explicate how passive revolution is spatio-temporally constructed, as opposed to conventional historiographies of Turkey that read state formation in a homogenously empty time-space context.103
99.Lefebvre 2009, pp. 2434. 100.Tual 2009, p. 30. 101. Tual 2009, p. 119. 102.Tual 2009, p. 208. 103.Bekmen 2011.
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The point of departure for this excursus into the construction of state space and place is, once again, Gramscis writings on the role of space and hegemony. According to Tual, while Gramsci paid a lot of attention to spatial boundaries (especially in his exploration of the meaning of the divide between Italys south and north, which is central to his analysis of Italy), he did not make use of space into a central part of his theorisation (unless we are talking about international space, the difference between East and West).104 But this license to dismiss Gramsci as a spatial theorist is far from accurate and reveals a further missed opportunity to link the core focus on passive revolution to theoretical resources that would have afforded rich insights into the spatial logics and uneven geographies of the state.105 Edward Soja edges somewhat closer with his insight that, in Gramsci, a spatial problematic was not explicitly raised as such, but its foundations were clearly evident in the spatial relations embedded in the social formation and in the particularities of place, location, and territorial community.106 Most strikingly exact, though, is Edward Saids sensitivity in recognising and asserting that Gramsci had a spatial and temporal sense of specificity, locality, and identity that contemplated an essentially geographical, territorial apprehension of human history and society.107 Turning to Gramsci, he directly reminds us that, within conditions of passive revolution, it is important to recognise that state formation is further complicated by the existence within every state of several structurally diverse territorial sectors.108 Gramsci further adds that recognising how the material structure of ideology explicitly referring to the social function performed by the built environment, including architecture, street layouts, and even street names shapes social power would also inculcate the habit of assessing the forces of agency in society with greater caution and precision.109 My point here is that these missed insights could then have enabled a focus with greater caution and precision on how the built environment and modern state space in Turkey appears as a palimpsest of landscapes fashioned according to the dictates of different stages of uneven geographical development. The creation of a built environment, in David Harveys framing, obligates us to consider place and spatial arrangements as specific attributes of the capitalist mode of production.110
104.Tual 2009, p. 272, n. 29. 105.See Ekers, Hart, Kipfer and Loftus (eds.) 2012. 106.Soja 1989, pp. 8990; see also Jessop 2006. 107.Said 2001, p. 464. 108.Gramsci 1971, p. 182: Q1317 (19324). 109.Gramsci 1996, p. 53: Q349 (1930). 110.Harvey 2007, p. 235.
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The contradictions of space are such that the absolute space of monuments, buildings, or mosques and the relative space of everyday life have to be embedded within the broader history of uneven geographical development.111 A task perhaps beyond the ken of Passive Revolution is, then, the construction of a broader scalar analysis of spatial relations and uneven geographical development under capitalism in Turkey. Among other things, this could have situated and revealed the specificity of Sultanbeyli within the significance and evolution of state functions (local, regional, national and supra-national), the progression and forms of urbanisation across Turkey, broader territorial and regional configurations of class alliances, the role of militarism, and the realisation of surplus value through built environment projects throughout the country, which are all conditioned by the uneven geographical development of capitalism. Within the condition of passive revolution there exist emulative molecular changes which in fact progressively modify the pre-existing composition of forces, and hence become the matrix of new changes.112 The debate on the general unfolding of the condition of passive revolution and the retracing of the restoration and/or reconstitution of class power in Turkey, impelled through mechanisms of uneven geographical development, has therefore only just begun. Conclusion: The candour of making Gramsci groan? In recently surveying a new phase in the use of Gramscis ideas and writings, it has been remarked by Marcus Green and Peter Ives that one might hope for a turn away from the all-too-common invocation of Gramsci in vague repetitions of compelling but general motifs.113 My assessment of Tuals book Passive Revolution has been that it delivers the beginnings of a compelling analysis but equally suffers from a vague invocation of Gramsci that undermines its potential. Centrally, this appraisal has been made by arguing that there are problems and shortcomings linked to the distinction and separation of political society from the way it interacts with civil society, the economy, and the state that are held as separate spheres. While there is much merit in the wider project of Sociological Marxism, there is a shared state-theoretical commitment that is equally limited in taking for granted the ontological exteriority of state and civil society, including its focus on envisioning real utopias.114 Furthermore, in
111. See Lefebvre 1991. 112.Gramsci 1971, p. 109: Q1511 (1933). 113.Green and Ives 2011, pp. 2823. 114.See Wright 2010 and Ruccio 2011.
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Tuals reading of Gramsci my argument has demonstrated the importance of seriously considering ones own engagement with a text. One consequence is then the hermeneutic position that is produced in terms of establishing meaning by interpretation, appropriation, or negotiation. As Gramsci reminds us, the distinction between political society and civil society can only be merely methodological, since in actual reality civil society and state are one and the same.115 The impulse to neglect the dialectical unity of state and civil society within the theory of the integral state places limits on the core strengths of Sociological Marxism as well as the contribution of Passive Revolution to kindred debates. My argument has also shown how the vague appropriation of Gramsci equally undermines a more nuanced negotiation with his thought and an understanding of the continuum of hegemony and passive revolution. Famously, Michel Foucault once pronounced that the only valid tribute to the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche was to use it, to deform it, to make it groan and protest rather than adhere to any faithfulness to the text, as this was not his interest.116 It might be time for such candour to become commonplace across Gramsci studies. Alternatively, it might now be an apposite moment to provide greater clarity and self-reflexiveness on what method or hermeneutic approach one actually adopts when engaging with Gramsci, rather than missing the opportunity to enter into dialogue with his texts by way of negotiation in the present. References
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The Limits of Sociological Marxism?: Adam David Morton

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Historical Materialism 21.

The Limits of Sociological Marxism?

University of Nottingham adam.morton@nottingham.ac.uk

A.D. Morton / Historical Materialism 21.1 (2013) 129158

A.D. Morton / Historical Materialism 21.1 (2013) 129158

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A.D. Morton / Historical Materialism 21.1 (2013) 129158

10.Tual 2009, p. 24.

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A.D. Morton / Historical Materialism 21.1 (2013) 129158

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A.D. Morton / Historical Materialism 21.1 (2013) 129158

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A.D. Morton / Historical Materialism 21.1 (2013) 129158

A.D. Morton / Historical Materialism 21.1 (2013) 129158

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A.D. Morton / Historical Materialism 21.1 (2013) 129158

A.D. Morton / Historical Materialism 21.1 (2013) 129158

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