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The difference multiplicity makes: The American Civil War as passive revolution

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 November 2023

Alexander Anievas Open the ORCID record for Alexander Anievas [Opens in a new window]  and
Dabney Waring Open the ORCID record for Dabney Waring [Opens in a new window]
Alexander Anievas*
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT, USA
Dabney Waring
Affiliation:
Department of Social and Political Sciences, University of Cyprus, Nicosia, Cyprus
*
Corresponding author: Alexander Anievas; Email: alexander.anievas@uconn.edu
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Abstract

This article examines and further develops the relationship between the theory of uneven and combined development (UCD), recently taken up by International Relations (IR) scholars to furnish a social theory of ‘the international’, and the Gramscian concept of ‘passive revolution’, which refers to a molecular process of top-down revolution and state formation that preserves ruling-class power by transforming its social base. To this end, the paper: (1) advances a productive distinction between ‘societal’ and ‘(geo)political’ multiplicity, increasing the transdisciplinary potential of UCD and challenging dominant state-centric approaches to IR; (2) demonstrates that UCD is central to creating the conditions for passive revolution; and, (3) argues that UCD illuminates the distinct spatial dimensions of passive revolution, for which the succession of ‘classes’ in time requires the expansion of capitalist social relations in space. To illustrate these claims, the article demonstrates how the American Civil War is best understood as an inter-societal conflict, exacerbated by the coexistence of two social formations within a single state, leading to war. It then shows how, upon victory, the North’s abolition of enslaved labour and the subsequent attempt to re-subsume the South within a single sovereign polity constituted a radical instance of passive revolution.

Keywords

American Civil Warhistorical sociologymultiplicitypassive revolutionuneven and combined development
Type
Research Article
Information
Review of International Studies , First View , pp. 1 - 20
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the British International Studies Association.

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References

1 Cf. Fiona B. Adamson and Madeleine Demetriou, ‘Remapping the boundaries of “state” and “national identity”: Incorporating diasporas into IR theory’, European Journal of International Relations, 13:4 (2007), pp. 489–526; Julian Go and George Lawson, ‘For a global historical sociology’, in Julian Go and George Lawson (eds), Global Historical Sociology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), pp. ix–xii.

2 Following Neil Davidson, we define bourgeois revolutions as socio-political transformations that promote or consolidate the capitalist production mode through the reconstruction of the state as an autonomous site of capital accumulation (How Revolutionary Were the Bourgeois Revolutions? [Chicago: Haymarket, 2012], ch. 19).

3 See esp. Friedrich Tenbruck, ‘Internal history of society or universal history?’, Theory, Culture & Society, 11:1 (1994), pp. 75–93.

4 Justin Rosenberg, ‘Isaac Deutscher and the lost history of International Relations’, New Left Review, 215 (1996), pp. 3–15.

5 Justin Rosenberg, ‘Why is there no international historical sociology?’, European Journal of International Relations, 12:3 (2006), pp. 307–40; Justin Rosenberg, ‘Basic problems in the theory of uneven and combined development. Part II: Unevenness and political multiplicity’, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 23:1 (2010), pp. 165–89; Justin Rosenberg, ‘The “philosophical premises” of uneven and combined development’, Review of International Studies, 39:3 (2013), pp. 569–97; also Alexander Anievas and Kamran Matin (eds), Historical Sociology and World History: Uneven and Combined Development over the Longue Durée (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016). A comprehensive list of recent works is available at: {https://unevenandcombineddevelopment.wordpress.com/writings/}.

6 See, inter alia, Robbie Shilliam, ‘The Atlantic as a vector of uneven and combined development’, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 22:1 (2009), pp. 69–88; Alexander Anievas and Kerem Nişancıoğlu, How the West Came to Rule: The Geopolitical Origins of Capitalism (London: Pluto Press, 2015); Jessica Evans, ‘The uneven and combined development of class forces: Migration as combined development’, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 29:3 (2016), pp. 1061–73; Kamran Matin, ‘Lineages of the Islamic state: An international historical sociology of state (de-)formation in Iraq’, Journal of Historical Sociology, 31:6 (2018), pp. 6–24; Johanna Siebert, ‘The greening of uneven and combined development: IR, capitalism and the global ecological crisis’, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 34:2 (2021), pp. 164–85.

7 For example, Kamran Matin, ‘Deciphering the modern Janus: Societal multiplicity and nation-formation’, Globalizations, 17:3 (2021), pp. 436–51; Matin, ‘Lineages’, pp. 6–24; Luke Cooper, ‘The international relations of the “imagined community”: Explaining the late nineteenth-century genesis of the Chinese nation’, Review of International Studies, 41:3 (2015), pp. 477–501.

8 See especially Rosenberg, ‘Basic problems’.

9 Dabney Waring, ‘Multiplicity, group identity and the spectre of the social’, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 36:2 (2023), pp. 145–63; Dabney Waring, ‘Collective identity, multiplicity, and the ontology of the international’, PhD thesis, University of Connecticut (2022).

10 Rosenberg, ‘“Philosophical premises”’, p. 583, emphasis added.

11 Justin Rosenberg, ‘International Relations in the prison of Political Science’, International Relations, 30:2 (2016), pp. 127–53 (pp. 135–6); see also Justin Rosenberg and Benjamin Tallis, ‘Introduction: The international of everything’, Cooperation and Conflict, 57:3 (2022), pp. 250–67 (pp. 257–8).

12 Rosenberg, ‘International Relations’, p. 136.

13 Cf. Rosenberg, ‘Basic problems’.

14 Rosenberg, ‘“Philosophical premises”’, p. 583.

15 For notable exceptions, albeit still partial, see Kamran Matin, Recasting Iranian Modernity: International Relations and Social Change (London: Routledge, 2013), ch. 2; Anievas and Nişancıoğlu, How the West Came to Rule, ch. 3.

16 Rosenberg, ‘“Philosophical premises”’.

17 Rosenberg, ‘Why is there no international historical sociology?’, p. 323.

18 Waring, ‘Multiplicity’.

19 Cf. Kamran Matin and Jahangir Mahmoudi, ‘The Kurdish Janus: The intersocietal construction of nations’, Nations and Nationalism, 29:2 (2023), pp. 718–33. The authors quietly make an unusual distinction between ‘societies’ and ‘the societal’, the latter only emerging with the political (p. 730, n. 6).

20 Cf. Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), p. xx. World-Systems Analysis is an important challenge to the internalism of canonical Marxism. It nonetheless fails to theorise societal multiplicity because it treats the world-system as a single society (Anievas and Nişancıoğlu, How the West Came to Rule, pp. 16–19).

21 Milja Kurki, ‘Multiplicity expanded: IR theories, multiplicity, and the potential of trans-disciplinary dialogue’, Globalizations, 17:3 (2020), pp. 560–75.

22 This distinction is also salient for some non-capitalist societal and (geo)political relations – for example, the relations between nomadic and sedentary societies in pre-modern Iran, mediated by the political institution of the uymaq, through which bands of herdsmen systematically ‘pumped out the surplus produced by the juridically and legally free peasants’, who constituted a distinct society (Kamran Matin, ‘Uneven and combined development in world history: The international relations of state-formation in premodern Iran’, European Journal of International Relations, 13:3 [2007], pp. 419–47 [p. 435]).

23 See especially, Adam David Morton, ‘Waiting for Gramsci: State formation, passive revolution and the international’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 35:3 (2007), pp. 597–621; Adam David Morton, Unravelling Gramsci: Hegemony and Passive Revolution in the Global Economy (London: Pluto, 2007); Peter Thomas, ‘Modernity as “passive revolution”: Gramsci and the fundamental concepts of historical materialism’, Journal of the Canadian Historical Association, 17:2 (2006), pp. 61–78; Peter D. Thomas, The Gramscian Moment: Philosophy, Hegemony and Marxism (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2009); Peter D. Thomas, ‘Gramsci’s revolutions: Passive and permanent’, Modern Intellectual History, 17:1 (2020), pp. 117–46.

24 Dora Kanoussi and Javier Mena, La revolución pasiva: Una lectura de los ‘Cuadernos de la Cárcel’ (Mexico: Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, 1985), p. 13.

25 Alex Callinicos, ‘The limits of passive revolution’, Capital & Class, 34:3 (2010), pp. 491–507.

26 Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, Volume III, ed. and trans. Joseph A. Buttigieg (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), p. 252, Q8§25.

27 Thomas, Gramscian Moment, p. 55; see further, Morton, Unravelling Gramsci.

28 Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971), p. 132, Q13§1.

29 Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, p. 115, Q10II§61.

30 Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, p. 115, Q10II§61.

31 Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, Volume II, ed. and trans. Joseph A. Buttigieg (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), p. 205, Q4§49; Gramsci (1971), p. 83, Q19§24.

32 Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, pp. 105–6, Q15§59.

33 Jamie C. Allinson and Alexander Anievas, ‘The uneven and combined development of the Meiji Restoration: A passive revolutionary road to capitalist modernity’, Capital & Class, 34:3 (2010), pp. 469–90 (p. 482).

34 Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, pp. 116–17, Q10II§61.

35 See Davidson, How Revolutionary; Allinson and Anievas, ‘Meiji Restoration’.

36 Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, p. 84, Q19§24.

37 Thomas, ‘Gramsci’s revolutions’, p. 126, emphases added.

38 Antonio Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Vol. 3: Quaderni 12–29, ed. Valentino Gerratana, 2nd edn. (Turin: Giulio Einaudi, 1977), p. 1962, Q19§2. The authors wish to thank Peter Thomas for help translating this quote.

39 Fabio Frosini, ‘Time and revolution in Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks’, in Francesca Antonini, Aaron Bernstein, Lorenzo Fusaro, and Robert Jackson (eds), Revisiting Gramsci’s ‘Notebooks’ (Leiden: Brill, 2020), pp. 125–40 (p. 131).

40 Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, p. 114, Q10II§61.

41 Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, p. 115, Q10II§61.

42 Chris Hesketh, ‘Passive revolution: A universal concept with geographical seats’, Review of International Studies, 43:3 (2017), pp. 389–408 (p. 407).

43 Esp., Morton, ‘Waiting for Gramsci’; Morton, Unravelling Gramsci. See also Allinson and Anievas, ‘Meiji Restoration’; Hesketh, ‘Passive revolution’.

44 See, inter alia, Andreas Bieler and Adam David Morton, ‘Interlocutions with passive revolution’, Thesis Eleven, 147:1 (2018), pp. 9–28; Morton, Unravelling Gramsci; Allinson and Anievas, ‘Meiji Restoration’; Davidson, How Revolutionary; Hesketh, ‘Passive revolution’.

45 Adam David Morton, Revolution and State in Modern Mexico: The Political Economy of Uneven Development (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2013), p. 239.

46 Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, p. 182, Q13§17.

47 Allinson and Anievas, ‘Meiji Restoration’, p. 474.

48 Bieler and Morton, ‘Interlocutions’.

49 For some crucial contributions to this effort, see Bob Jessop, ‘Gramsci as a spatial theorist’, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 8:4 (2005), pp. 421–37; Hesketh, ‘Passive revolution’; Andreas Bieler and Adam David Morton, Global Capitalism, Global War, Global Crisis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).

50 Rosenberg, ‘Why is there no international historical sociology?’, p. 315.

51 Cf. Hesketh, ‘Passive revolution’; Bieler and Morton, ‘Interlocutions’.

52 Martin J. Sklar, The United States as a Developing Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 17.

53 Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492–1800 (London: Verso, 1997), p. 558.

54 Ronald Bailey, ‘The other side of slavery: Black labor, cotton, and textile industrialization in Great Britain and the United States’, Agricultural History, 68:2 (1994), pp. 35–50 (pp. 44–50); Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 2014), pp. 312–24.

55 Anievas and Nişancıoğlu, How the West Came to Rule, pp. 162–8; see further, Blackburn, Making of New World Slavery, pp. 509–73.

56 Anievas and Nişancıoğlu, How the West Came to Rule, pp. 160–2; cf. James Parisot, How America Became Capitalist: Imperial Expansion and the Conquest of the West (London: Pluto Press, 2019); John Clegg, ‘A theory of capitalist slavery’, Journal of Historical Sociology, 33:1 (2020), pp. 74–98.

57 John Clegg, ‘Credit market discipline and capitalist slavery in antebellum South Carolina’, Social Science History, 42:2 (2018), pp. 343–76 (p. 346).

58 See esp. Alan L. Olmstead and Paul W. Rhode, ‘Biological innovation and productivity growth in the antebellum cotton economy’, Journal of Economic History, 68:4 (2008), pp. 1123–71; Alan L. Olmstead and Paul W. Rhode, ‘Cotton, slavery and the new history of capitalism’, Explorations in Economic History, 67 (2018), pp. 1–17; Caitlin C. Rosenthal, ‘From memory to mastery: Accounting for control in America, 1750–1880’, Enterprise & Society, 14:4 (2013), pp. 732–48; Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told; Clegg, ‘Theory of capitalist slavery’.

59 Neil Davidson, ‘The American Civil War considered as a bourgeois revolution’, in We Cannot Escape History: States and Revolutions (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2015), pp. 121–47 (p. 136, emphasis added).

60 That is, Brazil, Cuba, and Puerto Rico.

61 Peter Kolchin, American Slavery: 1619–1877 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2003), p. 190.

62 Kolchin, American Slavery, p. 190.

63 James C. Cobb, Away Down South: A History of Southern Identity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

64 Joseph A. Fry, Dixie Looks Abroad: The South and U.S. Foreign Relations, 1789–1973 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2002), p. 12, emphasis added.

65 Cobb, Away Down South, pp. 45–6.

66 Quoted in William Howard Russell, My Diary North and South (New York: Harper, 1863), p. 179.

67 See James M. McPherson, ‘“Two irreconcilable peoples”? Ethnic nationalism in the Confederacy’, in David T. Gleeson and Simon Lewis (eds), The Civil War as Global Conflict: Transnational Meanings of the American Civil War (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2014), pp. 85–98.

68 Fry, Dixie Looks Abroad, p. 12.

69 Davidson, ‘Bourgeois revolution’, p. 143.

70 Alex Callinicos, Imperialism and Global Political Economy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009), p. 150.

71 Michel Aglietta, A Theory of Capitalist Regulation: The U.S. Experience (London: Verso, 1979), pp. 77–8.

72 Parisot, How America Became Capitalist, p. 132; Olmstead and Rhode, ‘Biological innovation’, pp. 1155–6.

73 Roger Ransom and Richard Sutch, ‘Capitalists without capital: The burden of slavery and the impact of emancipation’, Agricultural History, 62:3 (1988), pp. 133–60 (p. 138).

74 Davidson, ‘Bourgeois revolution’, p. 140.

75 Anders Stephanson, Manifest Destiny: American Expansion and the Empire of Right (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995), pp. 31–2.

76 Anne Showstack Sassoon, Gramsci’s Politics (London: Routledge, 2020 [1980]), p. 210.

77 See also Hesketh, ‘Passive revolution’, p. 401; Davidson, How Revolutionary, p. 319.

78 Antonio Gramsci, Selections from Cultural Writings, ed. David Forgacs and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith and trans. William Boelhower (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), p. 415, Q24§3.

79 Davidson, ‘Bourgeois revolution’, p. 145.

80 Davidson, ‘Bourgeois revolution’, p. 143, emphasis added.

81 Charles Post, The American Road to Capitalism: Studies in Class-Structure, Economic Development and Political Conflict, 1620–1877 (Leiden: Brill, 2011), p. 152.

82 See Alex Callinicos, ‘Bourgeois revolutions and historical materialism’, International Socialism, 2:43 (1989), pp. 113–71; Perry Anderson, ‘The notion of bourgeois revolutions’, in English Questions (London: Verso, 1992), pp. 105–18; Davidson, ‘Bourgeois revolution’; Post, American Road; John Ashworth, ‘The American Civil War: A reply to critics’, Historical Materialism, 21:3 (2013), pp. 87–108.

83 Eric Foner, A Short History of Reconstruction, updated ed. (New York: HarperCollins, 2015), ch. 2; Robin Blackburn, ‘State of the Union: Marx and America’s unfinished revolution’, New Left Review, 61 (2010), pp. 153–74 (pp. 156–7); Stephen V. Ash, When the Yankees Came: Conflict and Chaos in the Occupied South, 1861–1865 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995).

84 Eric Foner, ‘Introduction’, in James Lowell Underwood and W. Lewis Burke, Jr. (eds), At Freedom’s Door: African American Founding Fathers and Lawyers in Reconstruction South Carolina (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2000), pp. xv–xxvi (p. xv); see also Heather Cox Richardson, The Death of Reconstruction: Race, Labor, and Politics in the Post–Civil War North, 1865–1901 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), ch. 3.

85 Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877, updated ed. (New York: HarperCollins, 2014), ch. 7; Post, American Road, pp. 272–3; Blackburn, ‘State of the Union’, p. 158.

86 Foner, Reconstruction, ch. 3; Richardson, Death of Reconstruction, p. 55; Post, American Road, p. 269.

87 Blackburn, ‘State of the Union’; Foner, Reconstruction, chs. 10–12; Richardson, Death of Reconstruction, pp. xiii, 44; Heather Cox Richardson, West from Appomattox: The Reconstruction of America After the Civil War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007); Post, American Road, pp. 260–2.

88 Post, American Road, p. 261.

89 Charles Post, ‘The American path of bourgeois development revisited: A response’, Science & Society, 78:3 (2014), pp. 369–79 (p. 375).

90 Blackburn, ‘State of the Union’, p. 159; David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 2007), ch. 8; Foner, Reconstruction, ch. 10.

91 Foner, Reconstruction, ch. 10; Post, American Road, ch. 5.

92 W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Howe, 1935).

93 Foner, Reconstruction, ch. 12.

94 Blackburn, ‘State of the Union’, p. 168; Richardson, Death of Reconstruction, pp. 215–6.

95 Blackburn, ‘State of the Union’, p. 165.

96 Foner, Reconstruction, ch. 12; Richardson, Death of Reconstruction, p. 158; Post; American Road, p. 275.

97 Blackburn, ‘State of the Union’, p. 167.

98 Davidson, ‘Bourgeois revolution’, p. 145.

99 Bruce Schulman, From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt: Federal Policy, Economic Development, and the Transformation of the South 1938–1980 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. viii.

100 David Roediger, Seizing Freedom: Slave Emancipation and Liberty for All (London: Verso, 2014).

101 Thomas, ‘Modernity as “passive revolution”’, pp. 74–5.

102 T. Thomas Fortune, Black and White: Land, Labor, and Politics in the South (New York: Fords, Howard, & Hulbert, 1884), p. 210.

103 Fortune, Black and White.

104 Rosenberg, ‘International Relations’.

105 Waring, ‘Multiplicity’; Waring, ‘Collective identity’, ch. 4.

106 George Lawson, Anatomies of Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), p. 64.

107 Lawson, Anatomies of Revolution, p. 64.

108 Lawson, Anatomies of Revolution, p. 71.

109 Leon Trotsky, The Permanent Revolution and Results and Prospects (London: New Park, 1962 [1928]), p. 9.