Resistance within South Africa's Passive Revolution: from Racial Inclusion to Fractured Militancy

In recent decades, scholars have turned to Antonio Gramsci's concept of passive revolution to explain the reproduction and development of capitalism. Most accounts focus on elite maneuvers from above. With specific attention to the case of South Africa, I examine the relationship between passive revolution, secured by elites through the negotiated democratic transition of the early 1990s, and mobilization from below in the post-apartheid period. South Africa's passive revolution featured formal racial inclusion, the preservation of extreme inequality and economic insecurity, the demobilization of popular forces, and narrow elite struggles for state resources. Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with activists and residents in the impoverished townships and informal settlements around Johannesburg, I show how passive revolution produced fractured militancy: the simultaneous proliferation and fragmentation of popular resistance. I demonstrate this process by examining the policy, organizational, and leadership dimensions of the relationship between passive revolution and popular mobilization. The analysis has implications for the study of both capitalism and social movements.