Factory of Strategy: Thirty-Three Lessons on Lenin

IN THE PREVIOUS lesson we saw how the methodological framework Lenin provides for his reading of Capital and the relation he establishes between the theory of capital and the theory of the working-class movement led to a series of consequences that form the basis of the discussion on organization, using concepts such as determinate social formation. We saw how this discourse unfolds through an appreciation of the movements of spontaneity and economic struggle, which would become fundamental to Lenin’s thought throughout his experience. We have also seen how a descent into the concreteness of the composition of the working class and the proletariat as a whole would be crucial to his overall theory. But we also recognized that one of the most characteristic moments in Lenin’s discourse is how the tendency to dwell and penetrate the concreteness of the revolutionary subject also immediately points to a need for a qualitative leap; that is to say, that the continuity of class struggle in its spontaneous form, with its insistence on the immediate needs of the proletariat, must, at some point, be overcome. The adherence to this concreteness of the working-class movement is as important, since one must not be subjugated by it but must put forward an overall intelligence and ability for the working class to lead itself and, insofar as this comes from its outside, to lead the whole proletariat. The path is straightforward: the shift to the issue of external leadership emerges out of a close class analysis from within, and arises from an increasing awareness of the internal political needs of class, starting from organized autonomy. The courage and the difficulty of walking and having walked this path push for its verification and extension to organization: “We are marching in a compact group along a precipitous and difficult path, firmly holding each other by the hand. We are surrounded on all sides by enemies, and we have to advance under their almost constant fire. We have combined voluntarily, precisely for the purpose of fighting the enemy, and not to retreat into the adjacent marsh.”¹

This first decisive leap occurs around the beginning of the twentieth century and needs to be analyzed closely in order to unravel its implications. To sum up the presuppositions of this conceptualization, the first issue we need to be aware of is the depth and constancy of Lenin’s perception and insistence on the spontaneity of class processes. The second issue is the logical character of Lenin’s style, his ability to proceed from within the context of problems, to appreciate them with great analytical strength, and to then break, through an internal decision, with the continuity of the issue in a manner that is adequate to the problems that arose. The third moment of note that confirms the continuity of the shift is the absolutely working-class character of Lenin’s notion of an organization that is external to class. In this lesson I would like to dwell on this point.

Let us look at another text that introduces this working-class character of external organization. We have seen that What Is to Be Done? is the main text establishing a discourse on organization, and how this text is not only born out of a need for theoretical analysis, but also immediately tied to a political debate internal to the discussion on the first statute of the party.² Here, Lenin’s polemic is waged against everyone who does not see the shift toward organization as a shift to a degree of centralization of the movement, and thus as the determination of an external direction of the mass movement and the enucleating of a moment of political leadership in the form and content of both strategy and program. On this, there is a beautiful passage, worth reading:

The Rabocheye Dyelo’s assertions—which we have analyzed above—that the economic struggle is the most widely applicable means of political agitation and that our task now is to lend the economic struggle itself a political character, etc., express a narrow view not only of our political, but also of our organizational tasks. The “economic struggle against the employers and the government” does not in the least require—and therefore such a struggle can never give rise to—an all-Russian centralized organization that will combine, in one general onslaught, all and every manifestation of political opposition, protest and indignation, an organization that will consist of professional revolutionaries and be led by the real political leaders of the whole people. This is but natural. The character of any organization is naturally and inevitably determined by the content of its activity. Consequently, the Rabocheye Dyelo, by the assertions analyzed above, sanctifies and legitimatizes not only the narrowness of political activity, but also the narrowness of organizational work. In this case too, as always, it is an organ whose consciousness yields to spontaneity. And yet the worship of spontaneously developing forms of organization, failure to realize how narrow and primitive is our organizational work, what amateurs we still are in this most important sphere, failure to realize this, I say, is a veritable disorder from which our movement suffers. It is not a disorder that comes with decline, it is, of course, a disorder that comes with growth. But it is precisely at the present time, when the wave of spontaneous indignation, as it were, sweeps over us, leaders and organizers of the movement, that a most irreconcilable struggle must be waged against all defence of backwardness, against any legitimization of narrowness in this matter, and it is particularly necessary to rouse in all who take part in practical work, in all who are preparing to take up their work, discontent with the amateurishness that prevails among us and an unshakable determination to get rid of it. ³

The polemic is first and foremost leveled against those who believe there to be no need for centralized organization in Russia because the organization of the movement across Russia could only occur through the development of struggle: this is the theory of “organization as process,” that is, of an organization that comes into being directly within the process of struggles rather than by means of an act of political decision that transcends the process itself. Lenin’s adversaries defend not only a theory of organization in process, but also a theory of struggle in process, that is, a struggle that arises from, spreads, and develops without internal moments of general unification, general collision, or reunification into one struggle. Third moment: Lenin’s adversaries deny the possibility of a professional revolutionary organization where the effective political leaders of the whole people can meet. Beyond a theory of organization as process, beyond a theory of organization as struggle, there is a theory of leadership as process, whereby leadership cannot be a stable and professional struggle of political cadres, because these could never coincide with the effective political leaders of the masses. In the cited passage, following a convincing line of argumentation, Lenin strongly reiterates the urgent need “to establish an organization of revolutionaries capable of maintaining the energy, stability and continuity of the political struggle.”⁴

What interests us here is the rule defined in this passage and in Lenin’s work of this period as a whole. The rule of the shift to organization is that the more spontaneous and economic struggles develop, the more the need for a shift to a level of organization increases. Lenin shows no indulgence in notions of organization based on the theory of reflux of struggles, of “resistance,” and so on. On the contrary, the function of mass offensives and the ponderous wave of spontaneity impose a dialectical shift to organization. The image of this formidable billow, this impetuous growth of spontaneous struggle, reflects the mechanisms of argumentation of the spontaneists; but it also overwhelms them, because, here, to asseverate rather than deny the analysis of spontaneity, Lenin decides to impose the shift to organization. Organization is the verification of spontaneity, its refinement, while a code-driven attitude to spontaneity and organized primitivism, elevated and branded as an elegy of spontaneity, is a grave digger in this phase. Reality is dialectic; spontaneity is the dialectical basis of the shift to organization: when this shift does not take place, spontaneity itself is wretched and neutralized. Spontaneity, in this case, becomes organizational impotence. Its development prevents its own chance to configure itself as the totality of the revolutionary process. Organization is spontaneity reflecting upon itself. Otherwise it is impotence and defeat that try to justify themselves.

In those years the polemic continues on all aspects pertaining to spontaneism as organizational opportunism. The time and themes of the polemic return in a passage from One Step Forward, Two Steps Back:

We fought opportunism on the fundamental problems of our world conception, on the questions of our programme, and the complete divergence of aims inevitably led to an irrevocable break between the Social-Democrats and the liberals who had corrupted our legal Marxism. We fought opportunism on tactical issues, and our divergence with Comrades Krichevsky and Akimov on these less important issues was naturally only temporary, and was not accompanied by the formation of different parties. We must now vanquish the opportunism of Martov and Axelrod on questions of organisation, which are, of course, less fundamental than questions of tactics, let alone of programme, but which have now come to the forefront in our Party life.⁵

Questions of organization are less essential than those of program and tactics, Lenin says! Only if we understand correctly the relationship established here between, on the one hand, dialectical theory and the definition of the determinate social formation and, on the other, the theory of the working-class movement can we appreciate this statement, so unusual and unacceptable to the organization fetishism typical of the Leninist tradition. The fact is that the material referent of the movement, the scientifically recordable spontaneity of the working-class science of program and tactics, is more important: it logically precedes the problem of organization. Organization is the completion of a material referent, and its question can become or, as in the time Lenin analyzes, be historically primary.

Since we looked at the specificity of Lenin’s shift to the issue of organization, it is now time to consider the working-class character of organization itself. Initially, we investigated the relationship between spontaneity and organization and what determines the singular moments of their synthesis. We then saw that social democratic organization is formed within a determinate social formation and defined by the parameters and relations that working-class knowledge describes. The rule of the shift to organization is verified in this context: in more general and abstract, but no less valid, terms, we will see that this rule expresses a variable relationship between spontaneity and organization marked by a greater or lesser intensity that depends on the power relations between classes in struggle. That is, the force of the dialectical shift is directly proportional to the strength of capitalist power and inversely proportional to the strength and maturity of the working class. The whole of the relations Lenin describes through the category of determinate social formation is grasped in the concept of class composition, closer and more suited to us, which develops Lenin’s lesson in this direction. The political composition of the proletariat is understood as the determination of the needs, comportments, and degrees of political consciousness manifested in the working class as a subject at a given historical juncture. The concept of determinate subject is understood to be the working class as it confronts a whole series of power relations that connects it, as a subject, to other emerging social strata of the proletariat, as well as to other forces that face the proletariat, be they irreducibly antagonistic or susceptible to accepting the revolutionary hegemony of the working class. In other words, the political composition of the proletariat is the dialectical fiber sustained by the revolutionary subject, which Maoism defines through “class analysis.” In Mao’s works, this analysis is a grounding necessary for all political work to determine, from the standpoint of the revolutionary subject, the interweaving of the different components of the proletariat into power relations and to include, from the standpoint of antagonism, the other side of the dialectical relation. From the perspective of organization, class analysis functions as a way of determining the location of the organizational subject and the dimensions of its political impact on society as a whole. Obviously, there is a huge difference between the notion of class composition and the series of relations found in Maoist class analysis: the content of subjectivity we attribute to the working class in highly developed capitalist countries and its ability to situate itself in class divisions actively and hegemonically are infinitely superior to the possibilities of Maoist theory. But this is also further proof of the validity of the Leninist rule of organization. The difference is explicit in the fact that from the Maoist perspective the subject carrying out the analysis is essentially the subject of the organization, a party point of view dialectically linked yet external to class, whereas as far as we are concerned the kind of maturity and subjectivity that we can attribute to a working class that composed itself in mature capitalist development entails a subjectivity and higher analytical consciousness capable of developing the analysis immediately from inside class. (This working-class subjectivity was named, in slightly polemical terms, “working-class science” to recognize an effective tendency.)

The application of the Leninist rule of the shift to organization in Lenin himself presented specific characteristics too. The definition of the duality and externality of the point of view of the party and leadership in relation to the class movement is, as we have seen, in a direct relationship with the growth of the spontaneous struggles that are a permanent and not sporadic object of Lenin’s analysis throughout the 1890s. But the shift from this very high level of spontaneity, from this diffuse subjectivity and appreciation of working-class strength as a hegemonic subject, is later mediated toward the point of view of organization and its externality as a function of leadership and political recomposition, through the exaltation of some of the characteristics that are proper in a (given) political composition of class. The first specific characteristic directly involves the recognition of the absolute need for an organizational centralization of social democracy in Russia, a need evidenced both by the autocracy in Russia and by the conspiratorial tradition of the movement. From this first standpoint, Lenin appreciates and validates an element of the tradition of the struggles and the evaluation of their particular conditions. In the struggle against autocracy, the pursuit of the greatest effectiveness of struggle and terrorism, insofar as these had been the fundamental weapons of the populist movement, and, in the beginning, of social democracy itself, had entailed from the very first moments of emergence of revolutionary organization in Russia a maximum level of centralization and the use of conspiratorial rules. Here there is a fundamental difference between the rise of social democracy in Russia and Western European countries, for instance. In Western Europe, social democracy is essentially born out of the lever of the union, from a diffuse process subsequently unified by intellectual groups or intellectualized workers’ vanguards that constitute the party through various attempts at aggregation. In the specific conditions of the revolutionary process in Russia, in a regime of autocracy, this process is completely different: despite its far reaching character, the movement never manages to give itself forms of legal organization that go beyond spontaneity. Spontaneous revolts and riots develop without managing to group up: here, in a preliminary way, the idea of an absolute need for a central nucleus of leadership is formed precisely as an appreciation of the specific character of the struggle against autocracy and against the ferocious centrality of repression. The formation of a central nucleus is a response to a series of comportments filtered by the need for struggle and already becomes part and parcel of the comportments of the revolutionary movement.

The second specific characteristic of the rule of organization in Lenin’s Russia is also linked to the specificity of the political composition of class struggle there, the proof and character of the party form as external leadership: it is the working-class character of organization. Lenin’s merit is to have powerfully revealed this specificity of organization. One might say that the more the action of the vanguard needs to be defined in an external, generic, and recompositional form, the more Lenin insists on this character of organization. For him, the model of organization is the factory in the fullest meaning of the term. The power of capital is invading Russia and transforming it in a formidable and dramatic way. Adopting a Marxian outlook, Lenin follows the two faces of capitalist development: on the one hand, the cold-blooded smirk at the formidable power of capital as a productive force, for its authentic revolutionizing of social conditions, through the growth of the productive forces; on the other hand, an implacable hatred for the exploitation and wage subjugation of labor. In Russia, the drama of development is greater when the first phase of industrialization is both primitive and extensive. The formation of the Russian social democratic party occurs within the process described by Lenin in The Development of Capitalism in Russia, published in 1898. What is the factory in this context? It is the place of the formation of the first nuclei of the working class, where, aside from exploitation, they learn organization, this superior form of labor organization, which despite exploitation presents a higher degree of rationality and sophistication of production through labor cooperation. These are the characteristics that the organizational model of the party must concentrate on. The party, too, must be able to organize and form the multiplicative character of revolutionary labor, exalting and subverting against capital the very thing that it determines as a growth of the productive power of socialized labor. The party is a factory; it is an enterprise of subversion, an ability to impose a multiplier of productive rationality onto the revolutionary will of militants and the spontaneity of the masses. The party turns this primary matter, which is workers’ insubordination, into the accumulation of revolution, into a generic power to attack the adversary.

Lenin’s insistence on professionalism, centralization, and the division of labor in the party is fundamental and continues in What Is to Be Done?, One Step Forward, Two Steps Back, and the rest of his works from these years. A few references will suffice to grasp the overall spirit of his discourse. On the professionalism and centralization of the party: “no revolutionary movement can endure without a stable organization of leaders that maintains continuity. … Such an organization must consist chiefly of people professionally engaged in revolutionary activity.”⁶ On centralization and the division of labor: “specialization necessarily presupposes centralization, and in turn imperatively calls for it.”⁷ “Conspiratorial organization” of combat.⁸

Above all, in the following passage the Leninist model of the party is clearly outlined:

For instance, this same “Practical Worker” of the new Iskra with whose profundity we are already familiar denounces me for visualising the Party “as an immense factory” headed by a director in the shape of the Central Committee (No. 57, Supplement). “Practical Worker” never guesses that this dreadful word of his immediately betrays the mentality of the bourgeois intellectual unfamiliar with either the practice or the theory of proletarian organisation. For the factory, which seems only a bogey to some, represents that highest form of capitalist co-operation which has united and disciplined the proletariat, taught it to organise, and placed it at the head of all the other sections of the toiling and exploited population. And Marxism, the ideology of the proletariat trained by capitalism, has been and is teaching unstable intellectuals to distinguish between the factory as a means of exploitation (discipline based on fear of starvation) and the factory as a means of organisation (discipline based on collective work united by the conditions of a technically highly developed form of production). The discipline and organisation which come so hard to the bourgeois intellectual are very easily acquired by the proletariat just because of this factory “schooling.” Mortal fear of this school and utter failure to understand its importance as an organising factor are characteristic of the ways of thinking which reflect the petty-bourgeois mode of life and which give rise to the species of anarchism that the German Social-Democrats call Edelanarchismus, that is, the anarchism of the “noble” gentleman, or aristocratic anarchism, as I would call it. This aristocratic anarchism is particularly characteristic of the Russian nihilist. He thinks of the Party organisation as a monstrous “factory”; he regards the subordination of the part to the whole and of the minority to the majority as “serfdom” (see Axelrod’s articles); division of labour under the direction of a centre evokes from him a tragi-comical outcry against transforming people into “cogs and wheels” (to turn editors into contributors being considered a particularly atrocious species of such transformation); mention of the organisational Rules of the Party calls forth a contemptuous grimace and the disdainful remark (intended for the “formalists”) that one could very well dispense with Rules altogether.⁹

This is no simple polemic! In fact, this concept of the party and organization as a factory is adequate to the actual level at which the project of Leninist organization develops, reproducing the technical and political composition of the proletariat; it develops by making itself adequate to an ideology of organized labor typical of the large factory and of the class vanguard in Russia, also taking into account the internal and determinate characteristic of the shift we have described, where in fact capital and the organization of the factory are a formidable step forward in the formation and consolidation of an industrial proletariat as a material vanguard of the struggle. What develops in this shift is not only the material activity of the working class, but also its highest level of subjectivity as class, and therefore as comportments, needs, and quality of life. In this we find an application of some of the fundamental criteria of historical materialism, from which Lenin’s definition of the party grasps a level of class composition in an absolutely correct manner. At that level of composition, the factory is able to form a conscious vanguard, exalting the organizational moment and providing the conditions for emancipation, in a way that is all the more clear as the exploitation that a backward society such as Russia is subjected to gets deeper. For this reason, on the issue of organization for Lenin, the very interiority of the standpoint of the working class determines the need for external leadership. For this reason, the working-class character of Lenin’s analysis demands as its conclusion and consequence the definition of a relation of organization and leadership that is external to the proletariat as a whole. For this reason, Lenin’s adherence to an overall situation of the Russian proletariat and to the definition of the levers that will destroy this system determines that conception of the party. The way Lenin speaks of the party as a generalized necessity is similar to the way he speaks of the material economic needs and demands of the masses: “We emasculate the most vital needs of the proletariat, namely, its political needs”¹⁰ unless we develop a struggle for this kind of party.

I believe that it is not abstract phrases or models we need to learn from Lenin, but more importantly, this mode of relating to the revolutionary process and working-class subjectivity; we need to ask ourselves how the working class is composed today, what the need is for an organization that arises from its determinate composition, which is undoubtedly different today from what Lenin described. However, the object of this lesson is not to answer this question: what matters is that we start a series of verifications beyond the texts to gather some general ideas on the process of organization, going through Lenin’s discourse as it moves from the theory of capital to the theory of organization. This task can only be accomplished if we believe that “in its struggle for power the proletariat has no other weapon but organisation.”¹¹