WE WILL NOW conclude our analysis of the shift from the theory of organization to the strategy of the revolutionary process as outlined by Lenin. We have already insisted on several points, in particular on the independence of the proletarian party as a condition of any strategic proposal, and secondly on the fact that the revolutionary character of organization derives, in its historically determinate formation, from its working-class character and therefore from the particular dialectics established between the workers’ leadership of organization and the general determinations of the social formation, both at the level of alliances and at the level of timing, forms, and objectives of the revolution. On this issue, the significance of the shift from progressive democracy to socialism is defined, as is the relation with peasants as a separate class. In this conversation we would like to explore how the content and tendency of strategy in Lenin are characterized in terms of communism; that is to say, despite the determination that theory is forced to take on from the social formation, Lenin’s project never loses from sight the highest goal of the revolutionary process, which is communism. The building of communist society—to each according to their needs—is still the fundamental point, whatever the conditions, shifts, and analyses that given power relations demand.
Lenin as a whole, and in particular the Lenin of the years we are analyzing, the decisive years of the formation of the Bolshevik program immediately after 1905, continues to insist on the permanent character of the revolutionary action of the vanguard. Each single objective, when reached and consolidated, must be burned by the revolutionary party. Guaranteeing the continuity of this process is the independence of the proletariat, the independence of the political and material needs of the proletariat: the party, time after time, uses each situation to consolidate and strengthen itself, to establish the springboard for a further leap forward. The notion of the democratic-bourgeois dictatorship of the proletariat, a fundamental concept from the standpoint of permanent revolution, is located in this framework.
Why the democratic-bourgeois dictatorship of the proletariat? In the writings from 1905, in a ferocious polemic against Mensheviks, Lenin insists on the concept of dictatorship. What were the terms of the polemic? In Two Tactics of Social Democracy, from 1905, Lenin attacks the Mensheviks on the question of dictatorship and the form of management of the progressive bourgeois democracy in Russia. In his attack, Lenin refers to a book by Franz Mehring, one of the few good interpreters of Marx’s discourse in the Second International.1
Returning to the history of Marx’s activity as told by Mehring, Lenin reconstructs the shift of Marx’s discourse on democracy, in 1848 and the years after the revolution of 1848, especially through the work carried out in the New Rhine Newspaper. Lenin demonstrates that Marx correctly grasps the German revolutionary process of 1848 at various moments. First moment: an adherence to the concept of formal democracy in the hope that the democratic revolution, as such, could lead the process from within the very forms of democracy itself: the constituent, the establishment of free parties, and so on. Second moment: Marx’s clear suggestion that the simple form of democracy, without the ability to “impose democracy,” and thus a form of dictatorship with bourgeois contents, is completely in vain. What is meant by “bourgeois contents”? In the German case of 1848, these are the expropriation of landowners, the imposition of small peasant property, an alliance between the bourgeoisie and peasant small-property owners. If such an alliance is not built, it is because the revolutionary process, that is, the critical consciousness of the proletarian party (the League of Communists), is unable to lead the movement and impose this shift. The third moment is therefore Marx’s awareness of the absolute need for the proletariat to sustain the bourgeois-democratic phase by coercive means, and his awareness that this necessary phase of recomposition of the proletariat, by overcoming a whole series of material and economic delays to the constitution of a vanguard class, is led by the proletarian party in terms of dictatorship. The theory of the working-class leadership of the process turns into the outline of a process with intermediate phases (the formation of a free labor market and free peasant ownership), which the imposition of the law of capital onto all precapitalist social strata must go through. This is the constitution of a process of capitalist development within which the working class is constituted as such, and thus becomes capable of putting forward its own communist goals. But this can only occur through the material coercive force of the proletariat for the achievement of bourgeois-democratic ends. Bourgeois democracy is not only one of the forms of development of class domination; the question is who is in charge of the dictatorship, who holds the levers of power, whether it is the proletariat or, as in the German case, the bourgeoisie: a shy bourgeoisie unable to lead a revolutionary process and correspond to its own interests will necessarily need to ally with reactionary classes and carry out (within the bourgeois democracy itself) the most ferocious repression of the revolutionary force.
The same example applies to the Russian one: Lenin immediately uses it in the last chapter of Two Tactics of Social Democracy. When the revolutionary process fails to hit the state form and appropriate the material means of domination that the state avails itself of in a centralized way, then the revolution fails too. The democratic form, as such, allows for various alliances, but in particular it permits the repressive turn of the bourgeoisie when it is unable to correspond to its own interests of development. Instead of this, it is necessary to set in motion an impetuous capitalist development, and this means recomposing the working class and approach in Marxian terms, the “catastrophe” of capital.
This is a first standpoint that must be strongly underlined. The communist tension running through Lenin’s discourse on the strategy of the revolution is expressed in the concept of permanent revolution as a revolution capable of burning, in each instance, the single shifts to which it is coerced, a permanent revolution that is determined by an act of workers’ political will and decision. The political decision of the vanguard of the organized proletariat posits and then burns each single moment of the development that contains the struggles. The concept of the bourgeois-democratic dictatorship as a moment of the workers’ revolution and a form that proletariat power takes on at a specific phase of the Russian revolution radically expresses the notion of the continuity of revolution. This notion concretely returns to Marx’s discourse on communism, as it had emerged in the writings of 1848 through an effort to discover the mechanisms of revolutionary development, and as it had then been fully affirmed, as we will later see in our discussion on the Soviet, in the writings on the Commune from 1871. Marx states that it is always the working class that imposes the bourgeois republic, but only to the extent that this seizure is held by an adequate level of dictatorship and that organization is a nonreversible outcome.
In a backward situation and a determinate social formation such as that registered in Marx’s historical writings (in 1848 and 1871 in France and Germany) or that registered by Lenin’s writings on Russia in 1905, this shift is necessary but must also always be burned. Why? Because
it is our interest and our task to make the revolution permanent, until all more or less possessing classes have been forced out of their position of dominance, the proletariat has conquered state power, and the association of proletarians, not only in one country but in all the dominant countries of the world, has advanced so far that competition among the proletarians in these countries has ceased and that at least the decisive productive forces are concentrated in the hands of the proletarians.2
The history of the Commune verifies this as an indication in the form of working-class power with this objective: “Its true secret was this. It was essentially a working-class government, the produce of the struggle of the producing against the appropriating class, the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economical emancipation of Labour.”3
These Marxian concepts are constantly reiterated and exalted by Lenin. From the theoretical point of view, this leads to a series of important consequences. Until now, we have seen how the determinate social formation and class composition are the condition for the creation of a working-class and proletarian type of organization. We have seen how Lenin’s concept of organization emerges from the recording of a given situation and from its transformation into a series of operative concepts. At this point, there is a typical Leninist shift and an inversion of the discourse: the discourse on workers’ dictatorship in the phases of transition is in fact an introduction of the concept of organization, the force of organization that can modify class composition and thus the given social condition. The shift we have described in a linear way so far, from composition to organization to strategy, is now forcedly resolved and subverted. Lenin is convinced that where the proletariat organizes itself it manages to produce a power effect that determines the inversion of the relationship between class composition and organization. The independent variable is no longer class composition but organization.
Voluntarism, subjectivism, and Asian barbarism: Lenin’s adversaries have declared this a betrayal of Marxism in the most bizarre ways. But we could really say the opposite: it is precisely in this dialectics, established in each instance, between the ability of revolutionary subjectivity to recognize itself in the given conditions and its capacity to modify the conditions as they are given in this relation that the “mysterious curve of Lenin’s straight line” takes its shape, as Bebel used to say. The character of Marxist objectivism and materialism is never a static conception of reality (which is codism), but rather the ability of a material subject to recognize itself in its material needs and to constitute them into immediately revolutionary causes. It is simultaneously the principle of the subversion of praxis and the principle of collective and constitutive praxis. The reality confronting us, from nature, to history, to institutions, is changeable, as are the tools of interpretation and understanding of the violence of the relationship that one is subjected to every day. This is the field where Marxist materialism finds its clearest explanation. This dialectics between the objectivity of the premise and the subjectivity of the conclusion, the inversion of the relation between material class composition and the ability of organization, is Lenin’s innovation on Marxism: the theoretical hegemony is ascribed to a material subject that changes its reality by interpreting and using its constitutive material interests; these are no ideals, but actual facts that do not go beyond the generalized needs of the proletarian masses. From this standpoint, the goal of communism traverses the whole of Lenin’s perspective without ever becoming an ideology: it is always interpreted through material shifts; it is not a dream or a utopia, but always a relation between means and ends, between materiality and subjective tendency.
Let us see where Lenin’s notion of the revolutionary perspective matures. Fundamental to it are passages of The State and Revolution, but former theorizations can also be found in The Task of the Proletariat in Our Present Revolution.4 The text is written in April 1917, at the beginning of a period between a first phase of bourgeois democracy and a second one of proletarian revolution, when the Bolsheviks seized power. It is important to read it because it sums up, concisely, the main issues of Lenin’s discourse on the state and on the permanence of the revolution and its final goals. The section is entitled “A New Type of State Emerging from Our Revolution.” Lenin writes:
The Soviets of Workers’, Soldiers’, Peasants’ and other Deputies’ are not understood, not only in the sense that their class significance, their role in the Russian revolution, is not clear to the majority. They are not understood also in the sense that they constitute a new form or rather a new type of state. The most perfect, the most advanced type of bourgeois state is the parliamentary democratic republic: power is vested in parliament; the state machine, the apparatus and organ of administration, is of the customary kind: the standing army, the police, and the bureaucracy—which in practice is undisplaceable, is privileged and stands above the people. Since the end of the nineteenth century, however, revolutionary epochs have advanced a higher type of democratic state, a state which in certain respects, as Engels put it, ceases to be a state, is “no longer a state in the proper sense of the word.” This is a state of the Paris Commune type, one in which a standing army and police divorced from the people are replaced by the direct arming of the people themselves. It is this feature that constitutes the very essence of the Commune, which has been so misrepresented and slandered by the bourgeois writers, and to which has been erroneously ascribed, among other things, the intention of immediately “introducing” socialism. This is the type of state which the Russian revolution began to create in 1905 and in 1917.5
In the same context, he proposes to change the name of the Russian social democratic party, of the Bolshevik faction, to the communist party, in a section called “What Should Be the Name of Our Party, One That Will Be Correct Scientifically and Help to Clarify the Mind of the Proletariat Politically?” This section is extremely important and fully clarifies the continuity of the communist project and the insistence on the communist content of past experiences and of all of Lenin’s actions.
I now come to the final point, the name of our Party. We must call ourselves the Communist Party—just as Marx and Engels called themselves. We must repeat that we are Marxists and that we take as our basis the Communist Manifesto, which has been distorted and betrayed by the Social-Democrats on two main points: (1) the working men have no country: “defense of the fatherland” in an imperialist war is a betrayal of socialism; and (2) the Marxist doctrine of the state has been distorted by the Second International. The name “Social-Democracy” is scientifically incorrect, as Marx frequently pointed out, in particular, in the Critique of the Gotha Programme in 1875, and as Engels re-affirmed in a more popular form in 1894. From capitalism mankind can pass directly only to socialism, i.e., to the social ownership of the means of production and the distribution of products according to the amount of work performed by each individual. Our Party looks farther ahead: socialism must inevitably evolve gradually into communism, upon the banner of which is inscribed the motto, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” That is my first argument. Here is the second: the second part of the name of our Party (Social-Democrats) is also scientifically incorrect. Democracy is a form of state, whereas we Marxists are opposed to every kind of state.6
To sum up, in the determination of the shift from a theory of organization to a revolutionary strategy, where the latter is rooted in the analysis of the particular determinate social formation of Russia, Lenin insists on the independence of the proletariat as a party and on the workers’ leadership of that party, seeing this as a substantial guarantee of the continuity of the revolutionary design. But this is not sufficient: the organizational project is developed with allusions to the contents of communism and to the issue of the withering-away of the state, which becomes a key issue sustained throughout the whole of the revolutionary process. Lenin states that Marxists recognize the actual need for a state, and thus for a dictatorship in the particular phases that the revolution goes through; they especially recognize where the contents of the struggle, needs, and power of the masses can only produce a bourgeois-democratic determination of the contents of the revolutionary process. However, all of this must constantly be burned and overcome: the permanent revolution is the goal of communists. The communist party is different from other forces in the management of the intermediate phases of the revolutionary process of the proletariat because it is able to impose, within each moment, the goal of withering away the state.
As we have already done after the first part of our conversations, on the theory of organization, we will have to see where this Leninist shift from the theory of organization to the strategy of the revolution finds its place in the current composition of the working class, and how far Leninism can be used in the determinate social formation of current class struggles.
NOTES
1. Lenin, “The Vulgar Bourgeois Representation of Dictatorship and Marx’s View of It,” in Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution (Peking: Foreign Language Press, 1965), 135–145.
2. Karl Marx and Fredrick Engels, “Address of the Central Authority to the League,” in Marx and Engels Collected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1978), 10:281.
3. Karl Marx, “The Civil War in France,” in Marx and Engels Collected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1986), 22:334. On the way the problem of the Paris Commune and the state was approached by Lenin prior to 1917, see A. Tovaglieri, “Il problema dello stato in Lenin prima del 1917” [The question of the state in Lenin before 1917], Rivista di storia contemporanea 3 (July 1972): 289–314.
4. Lenin, The Task of the Proletariat in Our Revolution, trans. B. Isaacs, in Collected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1964), 24:55–91.