This article examines the specific case of Brazil as an area in which Gramscian analysis has been put to practical use. It examines the application of Gramsci’s work to Brazilian reality in three different ways. First, the introduction of concepts derived from the Prison Notebooks in order to understand the development of capitalism in Brazil. This aspect deals in particular with the concept of ‘passive revolution’, and the relationship between ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ social formations in Gramsci’s analysis. Second, the role (...) of Gramscian thought for political parties, particularly the Brazilian Communist Party (PCB) and later the Workers Party (PT), in particular the novel formulations of Gramsci’s concept of hegemony that appear during the PT presidencies. Third, the varied appropriation of Gramscian analysis by the Landless Workers Movement of Brazil (MST), situated in an appreciation of Gramsci’s concept of the ‘Modern Prince’. The purpose of the article is to reflect on the possibilities and limitations of translating Gramsci’s thought to new contexts, and how new developments may or may not maintain the leitmotif of his thought. (shrink)

This article critically engages with debates on uneven and combined development and particularly the lack of attention given in this literature to accounts of spatial diversity in capitalism’s outward expansion as well as issues of Eurocentrism. Through interlocutions with Antonio Gramsci on his theorising of state formation and capitalist modernity and the notion of passive revolution, we draw out the internal relationship between the structuring condition of uneven and combined development and the class agency of passive revolution. Interlocuting with passive (...) revolution places Antonio Gramsci firmly within a stream of classic social theory shaping considerations of capitalist modernity. As a result, by building on cognate theorising elsewhere, passive revolution can then be established as a lateral field of causality that necessarily grasps spatio-temporal dynamics linked to both state and subaltern class practices of transformation in social property relations, situated within the structuring conditions of uneven and combined development. (shrink)