Charles Baudelaire in the Age of Passive Revolution: Benjamin and Gramsci

This chapter aims to confront Gramsci’s reflections on the new forms of capitalism and subjectivization as formulated in Americanism and Fordism with Benjamin’s notion of “second technique”. Both Gramsci and Benjamin understood the development of capitalist modes of production as a field of tension between the proletarian revolution and a new form of the capitalist art of government. This art of government, which neutralizes the alternatives emerging from an unorganized masse and includes them within the capitalist system corresponds to Gramsci’s “passive revolution” in politics and to Benjamin’s description of Baudelaire as “his own impresario” on the level of forms of life. Both philosophers’ analyses of capitalism anticipated some characteristics of neoliberalism. If, as Gramsci argues, the idea of progress is the fundamental resource of any form of passive revolution, then Benjamin’s critique of this idea could be aimed at disempowering passive revolution at its source.