Passive revolution

[1] Gramsci argued that when a social group lacks the strength to establish hegemony, it will instead choose a path where its interests and demands will "be satisfied by small doses, legally, in a reformist manner-- in such a way that it was possible to preserve the political and economic positions of the old ruling class.

[citation needed] Gramsci also used the term for the mutations of the structures of capitalist economic production that he recognized primarily in the development of the US factory system of the 1920s and 1930s.

Passive revolution is detailed by Gramsci as an elite process of state restructuring in Italy specifically, but it has been used as a frame of analysis for viewing other transitions to capitalist modernity.

[3] 'Passive revolution has been characterized by the quote from Prince Don Fabrizio Corbera of Salina in Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s novel Il Gattopardo: ‘Everything must change so that everything can remain the same’.

[1] The Chinese Communist Party under Deng Xiaoping coped with socioeconomic woes through consolidating its power, using market mechanisms and commodification to create controlled openings "to buy precious time in relation to both global capitalist competition and domestic popular discontent.