“ALL POWER TO the Soviets.” The resonance of this slogan marked the beginning of insurrection: from the dualism of power, to the storming of the Winter Palace, to the dictatorship of the proletariat. The antagonism of the capital relation not only needs to be dominated from within, from the organization of Soviets as organs of power, but must also be destroyed by the Soviets’ initiative as organs of struggle and insurrection. This is the red thread in Lenin’s teachings. But what does it mean to us, confronted with the political composition of the working class as it is now? What does insurrection mean?
Two aporiae have emerged from our conversations. The first concerns the nature of power. It seems that the spreading and socialization of power makes it harder to define it. The working masses have seized decisive margins of power, but this does not help them as such to solve the problem of power. The first fundamental aporia thus lies between the spread, the extension, and the socialization of power and insurrection. Precisely insofar as it is extensive, totalitarian, and involves the whole of society, the capital relation makes it difficult to conceive of the prospect of its destruction as a relation. The second aporia concerns the fact that, while it is possible to identify the classical relation of rupture, it is less possible to determine its decisive point of mediation. The Soviet form of the masses does not leave room for mediating delegations in the revolutionary process. The second fundamental aporia is thus found between the Soviet of the masses as the socialization of workers’ power and mediating organ of insurrection.
If we remain close to the Leninist formulation of the question of insurrection (the theory implicit in “all power to the Soviets”), it seems that these problems and aporiae cannot be solved. In Lenin, the call for the seizure of power seems decisively linked to an ideological notion of “power.” For Lenin, power is a nondialectical, natural absolute. His definition of power is singularly close to that of bourgeois theories of power.1 The fact that the dualism of power can only live in the short term is, for him, a clear consequence of this notion of power. Even in Trotsky, the idea of the dualism of power is shaped by the bourgeois notion and exemplified in the events of the English and French bourgeois revolutions.2 Our aporiae cannot be solved on the premise of this notion of power. But the experience of power proper to workers’ activity is very different today: power is experienced as a dialectical absolute that unfolds in the long term of the dualism of power, as a struggle that subverts the capital relation by introducing the workers’ variable as a conscious will of destruction. I don’t know whether Mao Zedong ever thought about this, but I believe that the reception of his thought can be largely attributed to this reading of workers’ vanguards.
On these premises, the concept of insurrection, in its classical form, is less useful to the workers, but this does not mean that the awareness of power and the wish to seize it and take its exercise to its most explosive and destructive conclusions has waned. On the contrary, the first aporia is actually solved in the concept of power as a dialectical absolute. Similarly to Marx’s definition of capital, power is dialectical because it is always a relation of forces, but absolute because conflict reaches its internal solution and finds “who is winning the war” on its path.3 Naturalness and historicity, each in their absoluteness, here find their real locus. The consequences of a realistic and working-class notion of power (of the dualism of power) can be huge. Revolutionary action, from this perspective, can be carried forward free from illusions, whether insurrectional or gradualist and reformist: the dialectics of the masses, the Soviet form of the masses, reveals the naturalist and formal rigidity of both perspectives. The gradualism of power, of its seizure and management, is the gradual nature of the destruction of capitalist power and capital relations.
From the solution to the first aporia there emerges an indication of the solution to the second aporia between the Soviet form of the masses and the overall mediation of the process. But this aporia cannot be solved in classical terms either. Not only is the working class not prepared for a complete mediation, but there is not even a chance of mediation. Any mediation represents an attempt to restore an image of power as a nondialectical absolute. This must be rejected as much as the capitalist image of power, because in its struggle for power, class needs not one instrument of mediation, but many punctual and continuous functions of the management of its civil war. In order to overcome the second aporia and solve the problems it raises, we need to understand that the current figure of power relations between classes forces us to change our concept of insurrection and that of permanent civil war.
It might seem that we have completely and definitively departed from Lenin’s thought and that ours is a left version of the particular “Italian ideology” of communism that so insisted, with greater or lesser loyalty to Gramsci, on the notion of hegemony, and so on. But this is not the case. Our firm and conscious adherence to the concept of the decisive centrality of working-class action, our awareness of the mechanisms that are recomposing the proletariat into a working class, and the urgency of communism clearly distance us from the sweet-toothed hypotheses of hegemony that, as far as we know, have been a necessary ground for reformism (necessary because their reference point was not the working class but “civil society”).4 In fact, we are still and decisively on Lenin’s grounds because we continue to refer to his theory and method beyond the distinctions of contents and changes in class composition. On this issue, two remarks will suffice: the first refers to the way Lenin looks to the management of the spaces of power seized after the defeat of the revolution of 1905 in the absence of an impending insurrection.5 Alongside his polemic against the liquidation of the party and in favor of its permanence, we read an insistence on the transformation of the prospect of insurrection into a prospect of civil war. Civil war is a fact of power insofar as it prevents the adversary from implementing restoration and assumes destruction as the center of its project. The organization of civil war is a fact of the masses: the Soviet and the vanguards that composed it must be recuperated into this destructive function of the masses and not into impossible attempts at democratic reintegration. The theory of civil war as class and mass practice (and we insist on this mass practice at the exclusion of individual ravings and deliriums on violence) is clearly alluded to in this period. Of course, it is a minor moment in Lenin’s thought, conceived in the absence of a closely impending insurrection (and, in this respect, we find more intense connotations in Mao). But we had to recall this moment because it shows that this line of thinking was present in Leninism and obviously linked to the analysis of class composition, however weak this composition was.
However, there is another, more important aspect that makes Leninism seem topical and current. This is the dialectical concept of revolutionary inversion of praxis, which is so fundamental in so many respects. The shift from the long-term dualism of power and from the mass Soviet to civil war is where we find a Leninist inversion of praxis. We name this shift a deepening of “class consciousness,” though the vagueness of the term brings together material elements: the given class composition, the structure of power relations, and the need to overturn them, to start overturning them and open a wide cycle of struggles. From within the composition, the actual will of civil war becomes the Leninist key to the solution to the problem. Only the recuperated contradiction between the mass Soviet and its offensive functions can bring about a leap forward: the inversion of praxis entails taking on the contradiction not as an unsolvable aporia but as a practical function of attack, as the mass twisting of reality.
The shift from the theory of insurrection to the practice of civil war is Leninist, and it confronts the composition we face today. So we recuperate the determinations of our situation. On what and against what does this inversion of praxis occur? First, on the vertical articulations of the fullness of capitalist power and their newly separated bodies, on repressive anticipations, on the entire set of instruments of civil war of the masters against class. And this is only in relation to the tactical objectives. But action and the adequate forms of organization are qualified through strategic objectives, where the debate broadens to immediately refer to the struggle against labor, the destruction of the capitalist organization of labor, and thus the mass nature of the communist project, as a minimal objective, in class. The disarticulation of command and the struggle against work are the determinate content of contemporary civil war and represent the Leninist key to the inversion of praxis.
We will dwell on these issues in other conversations, especially in our analysis of The State and Revolution. Now, to conclude this group of conversations on the Soviet and Lenin, let us briefly reconstruct our thesis. Lenin offers a straight route from spontaneity to the Soviet, traversing the party and insurrection, against autocracy. For us, this route goes from the Soviet of the masses to the proletarian organization of the end of labor, through a civil war against the current form of bourgeois dictatorship. Here lies the verification of our Leninism and Lenin’s topicality. The translations and transformations that some concepts have undergone are based on a web of methodological tools definitively consecrated in Lenin. Class composition, its determinateness, the concept of permanent revolution, and the inversion of praxis: these are the parameters by which our operations are determined. Today the interiorization of the class struggle against the system of capital has become so deep and implacable that the struggle against the capitalist organization of social labor has become the central political and theoretical medium of all passages. From the concept of insurrection to that of civil war against labor: this is an example of the application of the Leninist method to our times, even if we formally seized power, because this would not be a definitive fact. The interest of class is to manage the process of the extinction of labor. So, a working-class and proletariat dictatorship against labor—a dictatorship that is not simply accomplished through decrees, although the workers’ force of invention would produce decrees that are immediately decisive—is exercised through the continuation of an implacable war, inside the whole sociality of capital. After the workers’ struggle the masters turned their state into a powerful and mobile machine; they built a series of moments of absorption and integration geared toward preventing a global fracturing and the workers’ construction of a similar power. Here the notion of domination and power tends to translate everything, with no “last instances,” into the objectivity of the capitalist organization of social labor. And here, the concept of insurrection is interiorized by the whole of the working class, which is not waiting for decisive explosions but constantly instantiating moments of rebellion. We need to rebel, go against the current, and destroy: these are not individualistic slogans, but the watchwords of the proletariat, repeated time and again.
What about the Soviet? This “recovered form” of workers’ struggle is full of theoretical and practical virtualities. In the mass movement and the movement of struggles, the Soviet is an effective organ of power. It will be the organ of civil war insofar as the struggle of power opens up to the great strategic objectives of communism. The whole of workers’ realities swarms with these points of organization; it is a reality of organization. Workers’ power is growing and it is only a beginning, but our gaze already extends afar. The Soviet form of the masses as a whole of red bases and initiatives of struggle against work is accumulating and creating terrible offensive functions. In this, Leninism not only lives, it is revived. How beautiful to see things growing instead of simply turning to the study of our fathers!
NOTES
1. In particular, see the fascist work (though it is not only so) of Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. G. Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
2. See, especially, Leon Trotsky, “Introduction,” in History of the Russian Revolution, trans. M. Eastman (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2008).
3. In the definition of power provided by Schmitt.
4. On this, see N. Bobbio, “Gramsci and the Concept of Civil Society,” in Which Socialism? (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1986).
5. See Lenin’s writings from 1907.