Resistance within South Africa’s Passive Revolution: from Racial Inclusion to Fractured Militancy Marcel Paret 1,2 Accepted: 20 July 2021 /Published online: 6 November 2021 # The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2021 Abstract In recent decades, scholars have turned to Antonio Gramsci’s concept of passive revo- lution to explain the reproduction and development of capitalism. Most accounts focus on elite maneuvers from above. With specific attention to the case of South Africa, I examine the relationship between passive revolution, secured by elites through the negotiated democratic transition of the early 1990s, and mobilization from below in the post- apartheid period. South Africa’s passive revolution featured formal racial inclusion, the preservation of extreme inequality and economic insecurity, the demobilization of pop- ular forces, and narrow elite struggles for state resources. Drawing on extensive ethno- graphic fieldwork and interviews with activists and residents in the impoverished townships and informal settlements around Johannesburg, I show how passive revolution produced fractured militancy: the simultaneous proliferation and fragmentation of pop- ular resistance. I demonstrate this process by examining the policy, organizational, and leadership dimensions of the relationship between passive revolution and popular mobi- lization. The analysis has implications for the study of both capitalism and social movements. Keywords Passive revolution . Racial inclusion . Decolonization . Class struggle . Capitalism . Social movements . Democratization . South Africa . Apartheid During the first two decades of the new millennium, a mixture of crisis and resistance appeared to challenge neoliberal capitalism. 1 Following the anti-globalization movement of the late 1990s and early 2000s, the global financial crisis and recession of 2008–2009 gave rise to renewed protests across the globe between 2009 and 2014. This protest wave did spawn left- International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society (2022) 35:567–589 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10767-021-09410-x 1 This article draws from material in the forthcoming book, Fractured Militancy: Precarious Resistance in South Africa After Racial Inclusion, to be published by Cornell University Press. * Marcel Paret marcelparet@gmail.com 1 Department of Sociology, University of Utah, 380 S 1530 E Rm 301, Salt Lake City, UT 84103, USA 2 Center for Social Change, University of Johannesburg, Johannesburg, South Africa