Factory of Strategy: Thirty-Three Lessons on Lenin

IT IS STILL controversial to say that the Leninist concept of the Soviet is not ideological, that the nexus between the party and the organisms of the masses is an open one, and that the relation between the ability of the party to be effective and the power of the masses to innovate can be turned around. The fact is that the Soviets that emerged from the October revolution were institutionalized, and their development was subservient to the needs of the development of capitalism in Russia (though in a popular and state form). Instead of becoming a force of innovation of the masses in the path toward communism, the Soviets were actually the place where the masses got mobilized toward production and socialism. One might say that it was necessary to go through the stages of a “revolution from above,” find a solution to underdevelopment, and build an adequate “foundation”; but once these stages were overcome, the Soviet was worn out and incapable of redefining itself as the organ and expression of class power.

The discussion among communists about how and why this happened must obviously start from the fact that it happened. For historical materialism, the irreversibility of this constituted praxis is a principle as fundamental as that of the reversibility of constitutive praxis we have insisted on.¹ Neither tearful lamentations on the “cult of personality” nor metaphysical disquisitions on the “Stalinist deviation” (in the sense of a reproduction of the subjectivist social relations)² can provide a solution to our problem. The indication of a resolution to this problem can be found in the Maoist polemic against fixing the process of socialism building and the shift to communism, and in the definition of a more grave error, which is the scission between this material construction of socialism and the permanent revolutionary transformation of the forces of production. The dictatorship of the proletariat, in that situation, institutionalized the relations that were recuperated in the revolutionary phase and made them rigid in a view of the material basis as the determining force, as the only variable of the process: a huge force of transformation was blocked, and the dictatorship of the proletariat was not seen as the subject of a permanent revolution. The most heinous economism, managed by ex-Mensheviks turned into technocratic planners, made its triumphal entrance into the state of the Soviet. The dominant role of class struggle up to the point of transition to a new stage was thus negated or mystified.³

The reformist practice of capital comes to terms with the Soviets on the basis of its awareness of the blockage of the revolutionary experience of the Russian Soviets and their recuperation into the structures of a rigid planning. It is not because it knows of the mere institutionalization of the Soviet that capitalist practice seeks to control it (attacks on institutionalization as such are the prerogative of anarchists and have little to do with the analysis of the complexity of the advancement of revolutionary power); instead, capital draws important lessons from the form of this institutionalization. The Soviet is institutionalized as participation in the organization of production, as support to the ideology of labor, as an instrument of planning. From this perspective, for the first time in the history of capital, at the mass levels of industrial production (and thus well beyond any cooperative, artisan, or peasant experience), the Soviet offers an example of how the workers’ variable can be enclosed in the viscous figure of the commodity and, there, as commodity, become socialized and dominated. In other words, capital recuperates the dynamic and participatory form of the institutionalization of the workers’ variable within the necessity of organizing labor and the capitalist goals of production. The first indications we have of this process are fragmentary but visible in the theory of the enterprise, at least in the socializing and strongly ideological version of it offered especially by the first, and not last, constitutionalism of Weimar.⁴ A second and less ideological phase is the triumph of planning policies inspired by Keynes that followed the crisis of 1929. Here participation is played out in terms of the great proportions of income distribution. The capitalist planning state inevitably bends to the need to confront the situation of power relations among classes, but only to bring them to a halt and make them rigid, inside its structure and finality. The evidence of this is that the monetary and fiscal instruments are punctual correlatives of a maneuver on workers’ forces and represent determinate levels of mediation and participation, in Keynes as in other planning economists and politicians.⁵ Today, in the history of the reformist modification of praxis, we can see a third phase of adjustment and resizing of workers’ participation. In any case, workers’ struggle has made it impossible to capture and compress the instance of power and communism in the webs of capitalist planning. Only a relation that runs deeper in the life of the masses, a deep interpretation of the capital relation that defines it, in the very dialectics of the capitalist standpoint, as a relation, can win. For instance, Sraffa’s economic intuitions, geared to eliminate any substance or necessity from the concept of capital and to allow for a contracting of its figure and function, manifest the conditions of a deep interiorization of the working class role for the purpose of capitalist development (even at zero profit).⁶ In this perspective, council communism has a new and unexpected prescience: the capitalist need for an effective interiorization of the relation of control, the bourgeois ideological itch of pluralism and participation, the reformist flaw of social democracy, and the cynical residue from the Third International have all had a field day with this opportunity to establish a balanced state of labor. The capitalist by remembering and the reformist social democrat by forgetting that labor still means exploitation. But what can one do when the theory of the enterprise becomes yellow, when the tools of Keynesianism for implementing monetary and fiscal regulation do not work? The state of labor and the corporation today, with its fundamental unionist and participatory character, is the only practicable way.

Let us return to our Soviet. On the one hand, the Soviets were closed because of the exhaustion of the revolutionary potential of socialist countries; on the other hand, the form of their inclusion in capitalist (socialist) relations of production ended up representing a superior form of labor organization and of capitalist domination of it. Why, then, raise the question of the Soviet today? Why do we claim that the Soviet, the Leninist discourse on the Soviet, is still a lively hypothesis for working-class science? Last but not least, why does the question of the councils keep being put forward by workers in struggles?

We have seen that in the experience of the Russian revolution, the Soviets represented, on the one hand, a spontaneous form of workers’ organization of the control of production, a constitutional form; on the other hand, they were an organ of the struggle against autocracy and capital, an organ of insurrection. These two aspects are intimately linked in the specific political composition of the Russian working class and proletariat in the revolutionary period. Lenin’s effort is progressively commensurable with this reality. During the initial phase, the distinction between the participative (and Menshevik-style reformist) side of the Soviet and the insurrectional one is particularly marked: the distinction accentuated, at the price of a regression of the revolutionary objective, the radically democratic and socialist characters of the process. When the perspective of communism, linked to the catastrophe of imperialism, seems close enough, in Lenin we find a more intimately comprehensive and unitary appreciation of the revolutionary character of the Soviet: from the standpoint of the vanguard itself, the Soviet is the moment when the masses are granted a delegation so that the great leap forward of insurrection can be accomplished. It can be derived from this that the concept of the Soviet is obsolete, undoubtedly in its first version, because of the formal character of the Soviet insurrectionist function and given that its contents cannot be other than social-democratic. But it is also obsolete in its second version because the mechanism of constitutional integration, first in socialist then gradually in capitalist reformist terms, has hinged on it most heavily.

On this second version, it is worth noting that the bourgeois democratic dictatorship exercised today in the forms of planning and the government of multinational enterprises not only incorporates the socialist participation of the masses but also tends to eliminate any weak point and any determination or coagulation of a form of insurrectionary mass. The autocratic state—and, following it, all other state forms, including the Keynesian one—was presented as exercising control in forms that were based on the generality of the power relations between classes: these could become, and did become under the pressure of workers’ offensives, points of rupture. Instead, the post-Keynesian, trade unionist, corporative state of the enterprise tends to the rest of the functions of control that interiorize and found themselves on the individuality of groups and power relations. The Soviet attacks the state along horizontal lines, turning its mass of power into insurrectionary power, playing the massification of class action against the generality of the dimensions of the capitalist relation. It operates along the horizontal lines of the mass against the state. But what does this mean today? Hasn’t the state substantially changed in order to respond to the latest international wave of workers’ struggles that were communicated along the horizontal lines of the masses against the weakest points of capitalist planning? Rather than from the generalization and circulation of struggles as typified in the Soviet experience and its repetition, the working class can expect the buildup of a determinate moment in the process of insurrection from the recognition of new power mechanisms, on which to build insurrectionary action. This action is built along vertical lines, with the ability to create an offensive on the points where class action coagulates and becomes mass, cumulates and multiplies: with the awareness that the bourgeois democratic dictatorship has no missing links and soft bellies, but guarantees the permanence of its power through heightening the vertex of the state and through repressive anticipations. The socialist and reformist integration of the Soviet is constitutional insofar as we recognize the structural nature of the intervening changes with adequate intensity and depth. The specter of Soviet action was reincarnated too many times, and the contemporary state is organized accordingly. As usual, the action of capital follows the struggles: this is not to recognize them through mere reference, but to clearly admit that we are aware of the force employed by capital in this shift from a dramatic perception to a structural modification of the state.

The debate on the Soviet and the fascination this organization of struggles inspires are in many respects obsolete. As for students’ enthusiasm for council communism, it is vain and ridiculous. But is this recognition enough to eliminate the question of today’s Soviet? No, we don’t think it is.

We will start with a general remark: whatever its ambiguities, the Soviet (and the Commune before it) is a “recovered form” of working-class action. This is to say, in these cases the Marxist inversion of praxis reached the apex of tension and revealed the fundamental features of communism: they are class institutions, for the class, in the class. Therefore, they are the institutionalizations inside capital of what capitalism can only institutionalize for the purposes of domination, the consolidation of struggle for the purposes of power, and the irreversibility of struggles from the standpoint of struggle itself, of the process of destruction of the existing. These formidable experiences of the proletariat contain all of the problems that the revolutionary action against wage labor has always raised. It is the momentary (if you like) but complete solution to the relation between class and power. (Lenin apparently drank champagne when, while counting the days of the seizure of power, he realized that it lasted longer than the seventy-two days of the Commune.) From this general perspective, we need to study the Soviets time and time again.

But another, more particular remark is called for, one concerning the political composition of the working class today. As we have often claimed, the concept of class composition is formed on parameters that refer both to the productive process and to the political experience of class. It is worth dwelling on this second aspect and trying to demonstrate the hypothesis that the more class massification increases and the more its “social individuality” is determined, the greater the importance of the political moments of class composition. This derives from the continuity of the process of subjective development of class, from the affirmation of more favorable class relations; but it is also, under these conditions, facilitated by the capitalist reform of the global structure of society, when it follows the struggles and the need to reabsorb part of their momentum, always in the form of a compromise. Just as the mechanism of the circulation of capital is often subverted into a mechanism of circulation of struggles, so must the very mechanism of reformist stabilization become a mechanism of political augmentation of class composition, in a way that is contradictory and often antagonistic, but always real. From this standpoint, it must be said that a series of features of Soviet struggles has become irreversibly embodied in the current comportments of the working class and thus in its composition. An autonomous assembly at the factories of FIAT, Alfa, Renault, and Ford spontaneously repeats the revolutionary will of the Soviets of St. Petersburg; in fact, it extends, individualizes, enriches, and confirms it in the refusal of delegation, through militancy, and the overall project-driven form of its organization. From large to small factories, the proletariat fights everywhere, whether visibly or not, and there the Soviet project lives in its ingenious and multiplied power. No proletarian hope can fail to consciously comprehend a Soviet comportment.