Alex Callinicos's intervention in the debate on the geopolitics of the states-system and capitalist modernity provides a crucial wake-up call to International Relations (ir) and International Political Economy (ipe). Yet, within the contending positions disputing the political economy of geopolitical conflict, interstate rivalry, and capitalist imperialism, the insights of Antonio Gramsci have been notably present by their absence. This article attempts to contribute to the dialogue initiated by Alex Callinicos by drawing attention to Gramsci's relevance to theorising the relationship between the states-system and capitalism. It does so by elaborating how the theory of passive revolution reveals the political rule of capital by internally relating the states-system and capitalist modernity within a focus on uneven development. This concern is evident in Gramsci's own analysis of Anglo-Saxon capitalism and the geopolitics of the states-system in his survey of Americanism and Fordism. This theorising of the passive revolution of capital might then provide a fruitful basis from which an empirical research agenda on social development could be advanced with reference to postcolonial state formation processes.
Antonio Gramsci; capitalism; passive revolution; postcolonial states; International Relations; International Political Economy
