Factory of Strategy: Thirty-Three Lessons on Lenin

WE WOULD LIKE to present a conclusive judgment on the theory of organization, or rather, on the relation between the theory of organization and the strategy of revolution that we have outlined so far. Let us summarize the main issues on which we have concentrated. We have seen that organization is the condition for strategy, from at least 1903, throughout the period of theoretical development of What Is to Be Done? and the revolution of 1905. The concept of organization is linked to a determinate analysis of the Russian situation, and defined as the condition for all possible strategies insofar as the independence of the working class is configured autonomously. Only in this situation can the party of the working class constitute itself as a dynamic element inside a social structure that is extremely differentiated, and impress a permanent character on the revolution by overcoming each single stage and power relation forced by the lack of homogeneity internal to the process (the need for alliances, the relation between the working class and peasants, and overall differences and unbalances in development). The vanguard represents the ability to make the process permanent; the concept of vanguard is therefore the concept of the party, as an independence of judgment and the working class’s continuous ability to lead the differentiated proletariat. Therefore, there can be no strategy unless the different shifts in alliances occur, unless the different moments of the building of the struggle between progressive democracy and socialism unfold up to the allusion to communism, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the destruction of the state. That is to say, unless the process is based on a dynamic relation established by the workers’ party to all other classes, starting from its independence, autonomy, and overall ability to command. The second element we have insisted on is the working-class character of strategy and organization, which is another way of saying the same thing: the most advanced capitalist form, the factory form, must be assumed within the workers’ organization as a moment of rationalization and efficiency. The guarantee that the proletarian organization will win and will, in the meantime, command the permanent process of revolution through successive stages goes through the efficiency of the command internal to the organization. Lenin derides anyone who accuses the Bolshevik formula of the party of resembling the factory, and also anyone who affirms that the dignity and radical nature of the workers’ revolutionary party are based on this, on being a guarantor of the production of organization according to the most advanced forms of production: this is the working class way of repeating, for the party, the formula of production. Here it must be pointed out that the Leninist party never had anything to do with the kind of communist party of the Third International and the communist reformism it produced. The difference lies in the working-class character of organization that Lenin always and decisively insisted on, from both the strategic point of view and the organizational one. The third observation we made concerns the programmatic content of the Bolshevik Party and how it directly points toward communism. The aim of the program is permanent revolution, a struggle that tends toward the constant traction of the revolutionary process and the burning-off of the levels at which it stops. The analysis we dedicated to this shift, for instance, from the issue of progressive democracy to the issue of socialism (which we will return to when we deal with the withering-away of the state), presents a fundamental case: the destruction of the wage system, the destruction of the system of capital, of the capitalist mode of production, and this is always taken into account in the Leninist party, even when the particular phases in which the working class and the party struggles are forced to oblige a series of intermediate solutions. These intermediate solutions, as soon as they are posited, must be dominated by the party from the standpoint of its overall independence, intelligence, and goals to lead the class struggle forward toward the objective need for the end of the capitalist mode of production, as the outcome of a conscious will of the proletariat in struggle.

Let us now ask, as we have already done in previous conversations on our interpretation of Lenin’s thought, how far this kind of analysis of the path that leads from the theory of organization to the strategy of revolution is valid for us today. We will examine the issues proposed by Lenin one by one.

The first concerns the concept of organization as a condition of strategy. We have seen why organization becomes the condition for strategy: it does so because in the objective conditions of the revolutionary process there was great fragmentation of classes, and thus there needed to be a determination of the shifts that developed at the pace of alliances between different social strata. The political and social situation of the Bolshevik Party in Russia really lacked homogeneity: the independence of the organized proletariat therefore demanded an organizational engine to posit and dissemble the knots of the overall social relation. In our current condition, seen from the standpoint of the objective conditions of the revolutionary process and thus of the organization of the party, the situation is radically different from that recorded in Lenin’s analysis. The concept of the party, in order to be functional in terms of working-class science, must always refer to the concept of class composition. Class composition is the determinate degree of unity of the workers’ interests and the relations between workers and proletariat that evolve historically, as well as a reflection of the power relations enacted or withstood by the working class in relation to other social classes. The analysis, in Marxian terms, not only goes through the sociological survey of existing social relations (the position of the class in the organization of labor and the prominent figure of this integration), but above all grasps the translation of existing social relations into movements of struggles of the proletariat, into subjective consciousness, levels of organization, and comportments. Class composition therefore means technical composition plus social composition plus political composition, and the whole is dialectically united. Today, the recomposition and requalification of the working class in relation to other proletariat strata are radically different, in our analysis, from that recorded by Lenin. The basis of this unitary recomposition of class essentially stems from the changes in qualifications and the demise of objective divisions in the labor force. These changes were imposed by the capitalist mode of production in the phase of development typical, to use Marx’s terms, of the period of “real subsumption” of labor under capital. Marx distinguishes between two broad phases. The first is called the “formal subsumption” of labor under capital. Here capital becomes the master of society by organizing labor, insofar as the latter is separated and tied to conditions that capital has not put in place. Capital conquers and organizes the labor conditions that preconstitute its development: this is the phase of “formal subsumption.” The “real subsumption” of labor under capital occurs when capital moves to a phase where all labor conditions (from the extraction of surplus to accumulation) are preconstituted by capital itself. At this stage capital is the master and commander of the circuit within which only the fact that it creates the conditions for work makes it possible for there to be work. Salaries that are independent from capital and its money form, incomes and forms of labor independent from large industry no longer exist: capital has completely conquered society and imposed on it a gigantic progress. Marx claims that this determines the emergence of the new collective individual capable of communism. And this is the point: communism is imposed first and foremost by capital as a condition of production; it is a gigantic development of the productive capacities of man, who becomes social and needs others to survive and create—no longer to vegetate and procreate, but to build. Building this man in alienation, capital offers a formidable potential for wealth and happiness. While being formed, this new world is monstrously exploited, and the exploitation of the system is directly proportional to its potential.

The Leninist party is linked to the phase of formal subsumption of labor under capital and to the recuperation and unification of a series of different strata, forms of labor, forms of subsistence, forms of income and struggle. The peasants’ revolt, the revolts of the nonindustrial proletariat, the early workers’ revolts are described by Lenin in his writings from the 1890s and in The Development of Capitalism in Russia from 1898, where the notion of formal subsumption of labor under capital is fully developed. Lenin states clearly that Russia is a capitalist country insofar as capital subsumes under its own organization different, previous, and ancient forms of production, not because capital dominates production and reproduction in the whole of the mechanisms of accumulation. The shift from the formal to the real subsumption of capital is crucial to the context of the issues of the Leninist party and the development of capitalism in Russia, because the latter is only possible in a democratic-progressive or socialist form.¹ This is done with great clarity, and Lenin’s greatness consists in his ability to accept all these conditions and bring them forward without ever being touched by the opportunism of those who believe that each of these shifts is sufficient; on the contrary, he does so with the ability to place in this paradox the working class will to destroy labor and the wage system, so that only the construction of capitalism can give us truly revolutionary conditions, and only the strength to traverse this infernal purgatory of an accomplished capitalist production can build the new potential communist humanity. This is the figure of the Leninist party, and it is valid in that determinate social formation. Today the conditions for this question are radically different, and the issue of the communist revolution is born out of the recomposition of class that capital carried out, here as in socialist countries, on the basis of a real subsumption of labor under capital as the fundamental and primary condition and the starting point of the analysis. In Marxian terms, the problem of organization must found itself on the recomposition and homogeneity of the working class that the capitalist process is determining. Beware, capitalism does not determine it out of will, but out of necessity, because in each shift lies the motor of profit. But profit, like all others Marxian categories, is a political relation insofar as it is extorted from other men; and when this political relation becomes capitalist development, its progress is necessarily dialectical, determined by a huge number of visible and invisible struggles, because this extortion of labor from the masses is constantly fought against, and only (technological and political) changes, continuous and systematic innovation, and progress in the modes of extortion can, time and again, defeat this kind of determinate workers’ resistance. In fact, all the great shifts in the capitalist mode of production have occurred at this threshold between formal and real subsumption and can be explained in terms of workers’ struggle. This exemplification can be made at least at three great moments. One of them is recorded by Lenin and consists in the first introduction of mass machinery and the assumption of the professional worker as a fundamental figure to the capitalist organization of labor.² The second moment occurs during what we have described elsewhere as the great crisis of 1929, with the introduction of systematic deskilling, the construction of the assembly line, and the most radical imposition of abstract labor: it is the period of the mass worker.³ We are currently going through the third moment: the phase of automated production and the shift of the form of command over production, the expansion and hierarchization of these relations of command and organization over the whole of society, beyond the enormous step forward in the productivity of human labor and thus the increased potential for the growth of the collective ability of the proletariat to produce wealth and invention, while the condition of the proletariat is made more miserable from the point of view of the relations of appropriation of the overall wealth.⁴ When compared to Lenin’s times, today the path that leads from the theory of organization to the strategy of the revolution is much more stringent and unison: it traverses a unified working class that is attacked in the realm of the social, and it excludes alliances that cannot be brought back to bear on the identity of workers’ interests, proposing a field of attack that is immediately unified by the goal of communism. In a Marxian sense, organization must always “reveal” the free activity of class and is prefigured in it. Prefiguring today means reading the near possibility of communist liberation of the unified working class in the enormous productive potential that it represents. Organization lives this class composition immediately and organizes a perspective of power.

Second problem: we have said that in Lenin the working-class character of organization and strategy is fundamental, even in the contradictions that the party form repeats. The working-class character of organization here directly means vanguard. Now we need to ask whether this subjective character, as well as the condition of vanguard interpreted by Lenin’s organization, is changed by the real subsumption of labor under capital today. In fact, we need to recognize that the experience of proletarian and workers’ struggles in this phase provides a set of subjective conditions to propose, again, the question of organization and strategy for the revolution (in our determinate social formation). But these conditions have radically changed in relation to those in which the Leninist party came into being. The very concept of vanguard has changed. In Lenin’s conception of the party, the vanguard can only be exalted in an intimately dialectical and deeply contradictory situation, where the working class, the proletariat, and other social strata are tied together in a circuit where the rhythm of alliances is absolutely central, and the shift from the phase of the struggle for progressive democracy to that of the proletarian dictatorship for socialism is typical of it. Subjective will and the ability to pull and collide, as well as to use the margins left open by autocratic domination, are all essential aspects of it. Revolutionary opportunities are built in the reign of tactics; they are the overall contradictions of the system finding residual spaces where the subjective autonomy of the vanguards can initiate its process. Insurrection is an art, an ability of the vanguard (as subjective power) to utilize the series of open spaces and incentivize a mechanism of relative necessity. The working-class character of organization is thus turned into revolutionary professionalism. The revolution is “from below” because the general conditions of the revolutionary process are posited from above, or from outside the vanguard’s ability to determine them. But if today class composition has advanced to the levels we have described, if the homogeneity in the relation between working class and overall proletariat is so close, what does this all mean? What are the subjective conditions of organization today? Is it still possible to imagine a kind of vanguard that, while positing the problem of insurrection, is itself simultaneously capable of recuperating, and imputing to itself, a full identification with the needs of the masses and the very movement of the united masses, rather than a mere ability to generically represent them? In fact, the notion of vanguard has changed and become a concept of “mass vanguard”; subjectivity has become an objective element itself. Mass vanguard becomes the objective condition on which to ground any notion of organization. From this standpoint, the determining and most important problem arises: that is, the problem emerging from the singular and dramatic objectivism of Leninist theory, its desire to reflect the determinate composition of class, while simultaneously trying to force it and transfigure it into a “communist” organization of the party.

Lenin thinks that the concept of organization comes, so to speak, after the concept of class composition; but in the project he develops, as a whole, the moment he relates some elements of composition to the form of organization he forces the situation and pushes it to the limit of an inversion of the relation between composition and organization. Now, starting from this limit of Leninism, we must go back to this problem and see how far struggles, in the specific kind of organization that class has given itself, have changed the very composition of class. We must verify whether the concept of organization has become so internal to the composition of a given class that there is now an infinitely more dialectical, immanent, and articulated relation between class composition and organization than the one Lenin could think of at the limits of his project. Despite the tension of his project toward its limits, in Lenin, objectivism and subjectivism always risk separation (and classical examples of this separation were offered in the problems of the Third International). Here, on the other hand, each step forward in the proletarian organization is directly and immediately a modification of class composition, a further inherence of the subjective aspects in the class composition. Lenin previews an inversion as the theoretical fulfillment of the theory of organization, embodied in the life of the actual working class. On this, some steps forward in the theory of organization can certainly be made today, considering the wealth of our experience in the past few years.⁵ In any case, isn’t it capitalist command itself that intuited the new form of the relationship between the capitalist cycle and subjective changes in class composition? This can be largely proved, as can the manner in which, starting from this awareness, the forms of control and domination of capitalism change to record the enormous structural and subjective power conquered by the working class.⁶ Taking the discussion further, we ought to not only consider the changes in the objective conditions of a theory of the party, but also see the changes in the subjective conditions in order to proceed to a deeper analysis of the working-class character of organization founded on the new concept of mass vanguard and internally correlated to class movements as such.

The third element that we have underlined in our analysis of the Leninist shift from the theory of organization to the strategy of the revolution was the communist content of this project. For it, the permanent revolution here burns all of the stages and, through a paradoxical inversion of economic need, points to the overcoming of all of the intermediate stages precisely when the revolutionary movement centers on the intermediate stages: from progressive democracy to socialism, from socialism to proletarian dictatorship, to the issue of the withering-away of the state and the allusion to communism. Our research will proceed and deepen on these issues: we will ask how the essential content of the program is presented in a different form today, whether the permanent revolution is not more dense and less paradoxical now, and, if communism is the minimal program of proletarian struggle, whether the issue of the withering-away of the state should not be immediately grasped as the issue of the withering-away of labor and whether in working-class and proletarian struggles today the problem of the workers’ dictatorship and the destruction of the bourgeois state is not immediately configured as one of the building of communist society. But this is the issue of our comment on The State and Revolution.

1. A note on this point: in Notebooks on Imperialism, Lenin analyses all of the organizational forms of labor in the work of Taylor, Gilbreth, and their German commentator Seubert. His strong interest in these works does not prevent an immediate understanding of the anti-working-class nature of the Taylorist system. Overall, however, Lenin has an objective attitude to it and records it with interest. Hence the ambiguity of his attitude; but isn’t ambiguity inevitable in a theory of two stages? In his analysis of Seubert’s work, Lenin insists on describing Taylorism as “labor science” and on the need for a democratic base for such reform to be possible (contrary to the rigidity of the workers stratification in Germany). In his analysis of Gilbreth’s work, one can primarily detect the working-class attitude of Lenin’s initial approach: but the ambiguity emerges again when he expresses such interest in the scientific analysis of labor and the means to augment productivity, especially in the conclusion to the notes: “magnificent example of technical progress of capitalism towards socialism.” Other references to Taylor show Lenin’s insistence on the “progressive” character of his work (as technical progress and socialization of labor).