The uneven and combined development of the Meiji Restoration: A passive revolutionary road to capitalist modernity

Abstract

In this article, we examine the utility of Antonio Gramsci’s concept of passive revolution and its relation to Leon Trotsky’s theory of uneven and combined development in analysing the transformational effects of world economy and international relations on ‘late-developing’ societies’ transition to capitalism. Although Gramsci never explicitly linked passive revolution to uneven and combined development, we argue that Trotsky’s theory helps make explicit assumptions present in the Prison Notebooks, but never fully thematised. In turn, we demonstrate that incorporating passive revolution into Trotsky’s theory further illuminates the ontology of class agencies that is often lacking in structuralist approaches to bourgeois revolutions. In illustrating these arguments, we examine the case of Japan’s modern state-formation process, demonstrating how the Meiji Restoration of 1868 can be conceptualised as a passive revolution emerging within the context of the uneven and combined process of social development activated and generalised through the rise of the capitalist world economy.

Passive revolution revisited: From the Prison Notebooks to our ‘great and terrible world’

“…The international is thus best conceived as a necessary but not sufficient condition for passive revolution. This necessary causal role of the international has been outlined by recent literature linking the implicit in Gramsci and the explicit in Trotsky (Allinson & Anievas 2010;Morton 2013). As much as the latter, Gramsci (1977) thought that 'capitalism is a world historical phenomenon and its uneven development means that individual nations cannot be at the same level of development at the same time' (p. 69).…”

“…With reference to Scotland, Neil Davidson (2010) has identified a passive revolution occurring even before Gramsci’s starting point of the Jacobin ‘revolutionary explosion’. Moving closer in time to, but further in space from, Italian Risorgimento, Allinson and Anievas (2010) present the Meiji restoration as a ‘passive revolution under the world-historical conditions of uneven and combined development’ (p. 470), with successful state-led industrialisation identified as its main progressive element. Ian McKay (2010) takes instead successive waves of modernisation in Canada as part of a long passive revolution running from the 1840s to the 1940s.…”

Reforming States, Agricultural Transformation, and Economic Development in Russia and Japan, 1853–1913

“…In this analysis, the Japanese state “became the indispensable mediating conduit joining together capitalism and the landlord system” and was continuously called on to resolve “the contradiction incessantly generated by the forceful union of what were originally two different” modes of production (Nakamura 1968: 238). In the phrasing of a different stream of Marxist thought, Japan represents “a near-classic case of ‘combined development’: an amalgamated social structure fusing different ‘stages’ of development—in this case, an intertwining of tributary and capitalist social relations” (Allinson and Anievas 2010: 484). Even if by the end of the nineteenth century a substantial industrial capitalist sector had emerged, it was “a hothouse variety, growing under the shelter of state protection and subsidy” (Norman 1975 [1940]: 218).…”

Passive revolution: a universal concept with geographical seats

“…123 In Southeast Asia, Japan's Meiji restoration has been viewed through the lens of passive revolution as have contemporary Chinese labour struggles. 124 Finally, with regards to Africa, at a regional level, the general trend of democratisation in sub-Saharan Africa has been interpreted as a passive revolution as have the specific cases of state formation in South Africa under the African National Congress (ANC) and most recently Malawi. 125 These separate analyses speak for themselves in showing the diverse applicability of passive revolution (and as such should be read for their own merits).…”