ing them to the policies of the dominant coalition and can thereby obstruct the formation of class-based organised opposition to established social and political power.Fascism continued trasformismo.Gramsci interprets the fascist state cor- poratism as an unsuccessful attempt to introduce some of the more advanced industrial practices of American capitalism under the aegis of the old Italian management. The concept of passive revolution is a counterpart to the concept of hegemony in that it describes the condition of a non-hegemonic society-one in which no dominant class has been able to establish a hegemony in Gramsci's sense of the term.Today this notion of passive revolution,together with its components, caesarism and trasformismo,is particularly apposite to industrialising Third World countries. Historic Bloc (Blocco Storico) Gramsci attributed the source of his notion of the historic bloc (blocco storico)to Georges Sorel,though Sorel never used the term or any other in precisely the sense Gramsci gave to it.13 Sorel did,however,interpret revolutionary action in terms of social myths through which people engaged in action perceived a con- frontation of totalities-in which they saw a new order challenging an established order.In the course of a cataclysmic event,the old order would be overthrown as a whole and the new be freed to unfold.14 While Gramsci did not share the subjectivism of this vision,he did share the view that state and society together constituted a solid structure and that revolution implied the development within it of another structure strong enough to replace the first.Echoing Marx,he thought this could come about only when the first had exhausted its full poten- tial.Whether dominant or emergent,such a structure is what Gramsci called an historic bloc. For Sorel,social myth,a powerful form of collective subjectivity,would ob- struct reformist tendencies.These might otherwise attract workers away from revolutionary syndicalism into incrementalist trade unionism or reformist party politics.The myth was a weapon in struggle as well as a tool for analysis.For Gramsci,the historic bloc similarly had a revolutionary orientation through its stress on the unity and coherence of socio-political orders.It was an intellectual defence against co-optation by trasformismo. The historic bloc is a dialectical concept in the sense that its interacting ele- ments create a larger unity.Gramsci expressed these interacting elements some- times as the subjective and the objective,sometimes as superstructure and structure. Structures and superstructures form an 'historic bloc'.That is to say the complex contradictory and discordant ensemble of the superstructures is the reflection of the ensemble of the social relations of production.s The juxtaposition and reciprocal relationships of the political,ethical and ideo- logical spheres of activity with the economic sphere avoids reductionism.It avoids reducing everything either to economics (economism)or to ideas (idealism).In 167 Downloaded from mil.sagepub.com at LIB SHANGHAI JIAOTONG UNIV on October 10,2010Downloaded from mil.sagepub.com at LIB SHANGHAI JIAOTONG UNIV on October 10, 2010