Passive revolution

Citation: Cihan Tuğal (2009) Passive revolution.
Internet Archive Scholar (search for fulltext): Passive revolution
Tagged: Sociology (RSS) Sociology (RSS), globalization (RSS), hegemony (RSS), islam (RSS), capitalism (RSS), neoliberalism (RSS)

Summary

Tugal explores the notion of passive revolution: "one of the convoluted, sometimes unintended, ways by which the dominant sectors establish willing consent (“hegemony”) for their rule" (4). Drawing on Gramsci's fleeting definition of the term, Tugal begins the basic criteria that differentiates passive revolutions from "classic" revolutions: "in a passive revolution popular sectors are mobilized with revolutionary discourses and strategies only to reinforce existing patterns of domination" (4). Tugal then delves into how AKP appropriated the islamicist mobilization previously undertaken by activists and workers. For Tugal, the question becomes: "Why did the activists and popular sectors, who had until that point supported the religious and anti-free market platform of the Islamist party, wholeheartedly embrace the AKP government?" (8). His answer focuses on the mechanisms by which the pious business community establish hegemony, making their vision the vision of pious popular sectors and activists through the AKP (8).

Hegemony is established on the interface between civil society and political society. How does political society link civil society to the state? Tugal argues that it is by "weaving together three aspects of social life - everyday routine, the use of space, and economic experience" (25). Drawing on Bourdieu, he argues that this takes place in social movements as elites "establish consent for inequality through instilling certain patterns of behavior, rhythms of life, notions of time, uses of the body, classification systems, bodies of knowledge and rituals" (29).

According to Tugal, political society: "is dependent on its relationship to civil society and the state. To refashion the political and social structure, political society must re-create civil society. This is what Islamic political society concentrated on doing until 2002" (102). The emergence of foundations, schools, and Sufi communities Islamized the everyday life of Sultanbeyli (102). Space was also transformed. Sultanbeyli was conceived as an “Islamic Fortress” with teahouses, booksellers, mosques, cultural centers, headquarters of Islamic parties, stores with Islamic paraphernalia, and gender-segregated restaurants (120). At the same time, 'Islamicizing' the relationship between civil society and economic was always a bit more problematic due to a lack of consensus between anti-private property radicalism and the pro-market supporters (124).

Eventually, islamization reached its limits as a result of a variety of causes. Islamists had developed communities, informal networks, and associations that they linked to the political party to mobilize and politicize millions of people, thus linking civil society to political society. However, they had failed to link these elements of civil and political society to the state or to use them to capture the state (8). Tugal argues that this was tied to the military intervention of 1997 that repressed Islamic civil society organizations. He also demonstrates how the limits of Islamist politicization were also expressed in persistent popular attitudes of materialist resistance to totalizing religious ideals: "first fix the economy, then we can pray" (108). In addition, he shows that while Islamism dwindled after the 1990s, losing "its revolutionary fervor and its claim to transform the totality of everyday life" (114), "it had also become a naturalized part of many residents' identity and life, though it was merged and reconciled with nationalism, traditional religion, and modernity" (114). Building on this foundation of casual, everyday religiosity, the AKP rose to power by using Islamist techniques of linking religious civil and political society to strategically "integrate the pious masses to the secular state" (8).

By the time Tugal revisited Sultanbeyli in 2006, the AKP-driven transition to a modern, secularized Islamic civil society had reached an advanced stage (chapter 6). The result is that formerly insurgent practices and ideas of politicized Islam have been subtly re-cast in a market-friendly, hegemonic mold. Tugal discusses several causes and effects of this transformation, ranging from the decline of popular religiosity (~p. 200-204); the secularization of both popular and elite strategies of self-representation; the changes in urban spatial structure and the "spatial gender regime" (207-211; 211-214); as well as the widespread naturalization of capitalism and market-oriented ideologies (217-231).

To summarize, Tugal's account of Neoliberal absorption of politicized Islam emphasizes how political struggles (the dismantling of "integral" Islamic civil society and the rise of the moderate AKP after 1997) brought about the routinization of Islamist charisma (203-204), enabling the AKP to subtly remake civil society in its own, market-friendly and non-dogmatic image. With the short-circuiting of insurgent religiosity and systematic interventions into the everyday habits and spaces of citizens, the AKP was able to take advantage of existing gaps and uncertainties in Islamist ideology, framing an elite project of market-oriented empowerment within the language of moderate, secularized Islamic faith. The breakdown of the formerly rigid boundaries between Islamism and secularism and the disappearance of organized forms of resistance to secularist hegemony facilitated the diffusion of AKP-inspired and market-friendly ideals of personal responsibility among the residents of Sultanbeyli.

In an interesting final twist, Tugal notes that while this process of passive revolution had reinforced the market-oriented project of the AKP at the time of his second visit, AKP hegemony remains incomplete in important ways. The shop-keepers, workers and small-time "entrepreneurs" Tugal interviews in 2006 articulate half-formed criticisms against the market and the subsumption of religious and political life to its logic, suggesting that a subsequent countermovement against the market may be able to gain traction in the event that some civic association or group emerged to organize such half-formed critiques into a self-conscious collective movement (231-233).

Theoretical and Practical Relevance

Tugal has published extensively in the New Left Review and other prominent venues. This book makes an important contribution to contemporary Marxist theory as it presents a compelling interpretation and extension of [en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_revolution Antonio Gramsci's theory of hegemony] by elaborating a more precise notion of political society than previously existed. The text is also a contribution to the literature on globalization as it interprets the rise of a national Islamist political movement in Turkey in relation to the broader transition to neoliberalism on a global level.