Professor Kristin Plys has published a new article in Critical Sociology that reframes how scholars understand labour, capital, and resistance in the Global South. "The Gramsci-Mao debate on antifascism during India’s emergency (1975–1977) and beyond: Towards an anti-imperialist critique," reconsiders the Gramsci-Mao debate on antifascism through the lens of India’s Emergency (1975–1977), arguing that Gramsci’s theory of passive revolution and Subaltern Studies' unique reformulation of passive revolution inadequately theorize fascism as implicated in structures of imperialism. In contrast, Mao’s theory of fascism and the Naxalite Movement's seizure of it foreground the centrality of mass mobilization, anti-imperialism, and Third World revolutionary praxis, offering a vital corrective to Western Marxist limitations.
This analysis examines how Indian intellectual movements inspired by Gramsci and by Mao alternately navigated the Emergency, revealing the importance of theories of fascism that see fascism and imperialism as inextricable. By centring anti-imperialist and Global South perspectives, the article advances a critical framework for antifascist praxis that links local struggles to global hierarchies of power, reclaiming antifascist theory for the revolutionary Global South.
Read more here: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/08969205251388649
Kristin Plys is an Associate Professor of Sociology and History at the University of Toronto. She was the J. Clawson Mills Scholar in the Director’s Office at the Metropolitan Museum of Art from 2023 to 2024. She is the author of Brewing Resistance (Cambridge University Press, 2020), winner of the Global Sociology Book Award from Canada’s Congress for the Humanities and Social Sciences, and co-author, with Charles Lemert, of Capitalism and Its Uncertain Future (Routledge, 2022), honourable mention for the PEWS Immanuel Wallerstein Book Award from the American Sociological Association.