Factory of Strategy: Thirty-Three Lessons on Lenin

WE BEGIN BY studying a group of Lenin’s writings written between 1914 and 1916, two large collections of readings: the Philosophical Notebooks and the Notebooks on Imperialism.¹ The Philosophical Notebooks contain notes from readings that are cited in full with Lenin’s comments, general opinions, comparisons, and evaluations to the side. In particular, the most interesting part of the Philosophical Notebooks is the section on his reading of Hegel’s The Science of Logic. Lenin completed this reading between September 1914 and December 17 of the same year. Then, from December to May he read Hegel’s Lessons on the History of Philosophy and the Philosophy of History, providing commentary on both. In May 1915 he began a second set of readings on all the material available to him in that period regarding imperialism, which is collected in another series of notebooks that we’ll soon discuss, the Notebooks on Imperialism. Lenin continued this work until mid-1916 when he began to write “The Popular Essay” in Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, published in 1917.²

Let us first try to understand why and in what context Lenin engaged in a certain type of study (especially one on “the science of logic”) that was apparently very far from his primary and immediate interests as a revolutionary leader. At the beginning of the great imperialist war, Lenin was living in Krakow, the Polish region of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Here he found himself in great difficulty as a political exile, still intending to remain in Krakow, given the ease of direct contact with Russia. Nonetheless, he was forced to move to Switzerland, and after several peregrinations he established himself more permanently in Zurich. Once in Zurich, he had much material available to him because he could work in the largest libraries of this cultural center. He was completely politically isolated. In this situation he chose to withdraw into his studies, constrained by the lack of any chance of influencing others. On the other hand, during the first part of the war, the entire Bolshevik organization was radically dissolved in Russia, and efforts to put it back on its feet failed. Nearly all the Bolshevik cadre had been scattered and had no possibilities or even capability of reestablishing a central organization. The first volume of Carr’s The Bolshevik Revolution contains a brief description of the conditions in which Lenin worked and the extremely precarious circumstances of the Bolshevik organization in Russia during that period.³ These external factors—isolation due to the impenetrability of the front from all propaganda and agitation, as well as the destruction of the Bolshevik organization—offered Lenin the opportunity to apply himself to studying theory: first, essentially, Hegel’s theories and then issues of imperialism.

Even so, the externality of the occasion became an extremely important moment in the overall succession of Lenin’s thought. We have already seen the first phase of Lenin’s development and decided that perhaps Lenin was one of the few people who, in those years, managed to read Marx’s works in an original and lively but also absolutely faithful way, drawing extremely precise conclusions and definitions, programs and strategies. In particular, we have insisted on the definition of the nexus between class composition, organization, and insurrection as a definition of a path that revolutionary theory had to renovate from time to time. We have also seen some substantial methodological developments, such as the discussion on the Soviets, as an example of the creative mechanism of Leninist theory. But we have also seen how, before 1905, the relationship drawn between composition, organization, and insurrection was fairly rigid and how only in the heat of the battle was this relationship shaken up, opening the other path (opposed but nevertheless complementary) of theoretical considerations, the path that indicated a different order for the process: insurrection, organization, composition. In short, from 1905 on Lenin asserts that in the acute revolutionary phase, the proletariat organization can, from within the insurrection, assume an impactful force and a capacity of rupture such that it conditions the same composition of the working class. The organization, as the organization of the armed insurrection, as the capacity of destroying the power of the adversary class, can configure a situation in which the class composition of the proletariat frees itself of its misery to define itself as an innovative, creative moment, as a force that, through struggle, prepares the passage to communist society. Already indicated in 1905 was the possibility that the dictatorship of the proletariat could, as an organizing fact, as a fact of power, transform the same class composition and give us a figure of the liberated proletariat capable of constructing communism, of permanent revolution, the theoretical objective of communist discourse. That which the organization mediates can be made unmediated in the working class’s comportment once the adversary class’s power is overthrown, once the working class and the proletariat, as such, take upon themselves entirely the duty and the weight of the construction of a revolutionary society.

We’ll now see just how important this dialectical shift is. We are actually dealing with a dialectical shift of determined negation by the proletarian composition just as it was and as it had to be driven “from on high” toward the insurrectional moment, “artfully” played in order to open the insurrectional process: now the negation transforms through the insurrectional moment that precarious reality of the proletariat into a material force capable of constructing a continual revolutionary process. All well and good, this dialectical shift begins to take on full theoretical shape in Lenin through his study of Hegelian logic on the one hand and imperialist theories on the other.

There is one fact that has continued to amaze me since I learned it: there are two of Mao’s works from 1937, one “on contradiction,” the other “on practice,” both found in the first volume of the Select Writings of Mao Zedong,⁴ in which the only citations that appear are from Lenin’s Philosophical Notebooks. This is extremely interesting when we think that Lenin’s Philosophical Notebooks were published in 1934–1935: they immediately ended up in Mao’s hands, who was at that time barricaded in the mountains of Yan’an. The great Chinese revolutionary leader immediately appreciated the tremendous importance that the theoretical consciousness of the dialectical leap had taken on in Lenin. It is perhaps not by chance that this extraordinary and immediate theoretical consonance took place, if it is true, as we will see in the later sections of these conversations; it is also not by chance perhaps that it is nearly impossible to read The State and Revolution without thinking of Lenin’s study of Hegel’s thought, and that it is impossible to position the dialectical problem of transition without knowing Mao’s dialectics. It is not by chance, but it is, however, extremely interesting, especially if we keep in mind that throughout the history of Marxism, both the relationships between Marx and Hegel and in particular the relationship between Marxists and Hegel have been contradictory. As we know, Marx and Engels were Hegelians. That is, they participated in the Hegelian school of thought. Their philosophical formation took place within the so-called Hegelian left, a school that was very composite and difficult to unify in precise terms. Marx and Engels’s points of reference are fundamentally two: one known to all, Ludwig Feuerbach, the other less known, Moses Hess, who, however, had perhaps more influence on Marx because he had transformed Feuerbach’s theological criticism into a materialist critique of the structure of the state and integrated a communist thematic in the realization of mankind as a universal genre within the Hegelian left.⁵ Beyond this influence during the period of Marx’s formation, there is a relationship with Hegelian methodology that continually reappears. Regarding his cocotte with Hegel in the chapter on commodities in Capital, Marx justifies himself. This does not take away from the fact that even in completely different moments during the development of Marx’s thought the recovery and utilization of operational models from Hegelian logic always remain absolutely important. For example, in a letter to Engels from 1858, the moment at which Marx was working on his theory of profit, Marx writes: “by pure accident I came into possession of Hegel’s Logic, I leafed through it and it proved to be very useful in chasing off all of the theories of profit ever developed.”⁶ There is, therefore, a relationship with Hegel, by means of the Hegelian school initially, but always profound, that Marx continued to recover and that in the preface to the second edition the first book of Capital he openly defended,⁷ declaring to have refused to treat Hegel as the German Enlightenment treated Spinoza, “like a dead dog.” The relationship between Hegel and Marx clearly exists; we will not discuss it here at length.

Let it be sufficient to say that it is a relationship as close as it is instrumental. In reality, Marx rehabilitates a few of Hegel’s fundamental instruments and his sense of dialectical logic. Sayings such as “Marx overturned Hegelianism” or “He put reason back on its feet” and so on explain absolutely nothing. The important aspect is the continuity of a very profound theoretical reversal within which certain fundamental methodological instruments still have value (and we will see which ones precisely by analyzing the reading that Lenin offers of Hegel, a reading that is extraordinarily similar to Marx’s own reading). Several methodological instruments are adopted, absorbed, and developed, in a position rendered completely different by the theoretical referent’s materiality: the bourgeois spirit in Hegel, the working-class subject in Marx and Engels. It is not, therefore, an abstract and illusionistic reversal of the human dimension that differentiates the methodological use of the dialectic in Hegel and in Marx, but rather the radical historical difference of the subject to which it refers. The dialectic conjoins Hegel and Marx, 1848 separates them. At this point, after the Second International Congress, it is worth saying that the theoretical development of scientific socialism in Europe during the latter years of the nineteenth century sees Hegel expelled and discarded from the Marxist’s theoretical purview. (And all this was done in deeply incorrect terms, which were dominated by a mechanical and highly improbable Weltanschauung; Lenin did not know Hegel, if not in a summary and traditional manner, until he, at a mature age, already an experienced Marxist, confronted these writings on the science of logic.)⁸ Now, therefore, Lenin’s discovery of Hegel has a tremendous flavor of originality and demonstrates an extraordinary capacity to overcome cultural fetishes, which the tradition of scientific socialism had constructed and overturned in Lenin by way of a destructive evaluation and the consequent expulsion of Hegel from Marxism’s theoretical context.

A strange but significant phenomenon is that after these Leninist Notebooks on Hegel, the theoretical in communist thought (except for the brief parenthesis of leftist communism in Germany, the heroic one represented by Lukács, Korsch, and a few others, and the already mentioned Maoist reading) practically expels Hegel once again from its philosophical development. In the Soviet Union the study of Hegel is taken up only in an already advanced period of de-Stalinization, exactly as in other countries where communist forces develop theoretical work. It is only in this latter period that interest in the relationship between Hegel and Marx and (especially at this point) between Hegel and Lenin emerges once again.

Having said this, let us take up again this argument’s principal thread and let us formulate a theoretical hypothesis that might guide our reading of Lenin’s Conspectus of Hegel. Now, the hypothesis is that by way of his reading of and the commentary on The Science of Logic, with the mastery of several logico-dialectical instruments, Lenin is placed in the theoretical condition of giving scientific form to one of his earlier intuitions: the possibility of overturning the series composition, organization, insurrection into its opposite and its parallel: insurrection, organization, composition. On the other hand, Lenin is placed in the condition of acting almost in a more consequent manner, which is to maintain through this theoretical attitude (acquired in that kind of purgatory that was for him an isolation from class struggle) a relationship with experience, with an anticipatory foresight of revolutionary development. It would be difficult to be able to understand the journey that Lenin takes when he makes his April Theses public, or the political shift he imposes between April and October, or the entire interpretive direction that he gives to the Russian revolutionary process if we didn’t have in mind the theoretical attitude acquired through these studies during his most acute isolation. This theoretical attitude will show Lenin (in April 1917, against all the Bolsheviks, in a minority position within the party and the Bolshevik political office)⁹ insisting continuously nonetheless on the liquidation of the democratic phase, on the insurrection as a fundamental moment, on the importance of insurrectional determination in the composition of class, on the proletariat dictatorship as the first phase of socialist development, overturning the same Bolshevik orthodoxy, which instead saw the opposite process: organization, democratic revolution, and organization toward socialism, and therefore insurrection. The ability to accelerate and anticipate events, which even Lenin had already expressed in 1905, at this point takes on a more explicit and knowledgeable form, through which the possession of these methodological instruments for reading is not irrelevant. What Lenin was not able to express theoretically (what he had simply alluded to in revolutionary practice in 1905), he was able in 1917 to say with both full knowledge and anticipatory power. Lenin succeeded in making the dialectics into a real-history reading instrument, a scientific tool with the same precision of a microscope or a rifle.

The theory links defined, objective causes with defined, subjective effects. Why the dialectics is read by Lenin in these terms, and how he reads the historical comportments of the masses, is paradigmatic in the comportments of the working class and therefore has the capacity to interpret, to penetrate, to anticipate the comportment of the class and the masses according to scientific criteria. Does this signify an abandonment of the materialist foundation of Marxism in Lenin’s plans? Absolutely not. In reality, either materialism is considered the comprehensive horizon of our knowledge, based on human, collective, working-class praxis, which, when modifying nature and relationships of power, constitutes history, or it is considered an attitude that we do not know what to do with, that is old and mechanistic. Materialism is a theory that leads back to the real world, to the concrete before us, to the material force of the relationships of production in the entire human realm. Yet materialism reduces the world to this, insofar as mankind, as a collective praxis, as an ensemble of productive forces, continually reshapes, transforms, and revolutionizes the world in a practical relation. Dialectics is the law of this relationship; it is therefore the fundamental rule of the science that investigates the relationship between human productive collectivity and the transformation of nature and society. It reveals power relationships as attempts to block (on behalf of the power constituted through exploitation, through all the laws of command) this infinite, immense creativity, which resides in the collective praxis. This is why this “strange” chapter in Lenin’s thought is important; it is an emergency that takes on a universal value in an exceptional circumstance of isolation and defeat, in the purgatory that this great political leader found himself having to cross.

All of the sudden, during these years, through the Notebooks on Imperialism that immediately followed the reading of and commentary on The Science of Logic, Lenin found a way to perform an initial experiment on dialectical laws. The second great experiment was the April 1917 event, and the third was the publication of The State and Revolution. But why do the Notebooks on Imperialism and, more broadly, his writings on imperialism represent a fundamental element of this practice? The primary theses set forth in Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism are well known. In it, Lenin asserts that capitalistic development entails ever greater forms of economic concentration within individual metropolitan countries. This consequently determines the necessity of exporting goods and capital, but especially capital, such that it determines the inevitable competition on the world market between imperial powers, resulting in violence and war. Why is metropolitan capital forced to export? It must do so because the rate of profit in single countries falls as concentration, driven mechanization, and industrialization increase. Let us remember how the law of the tendency for the rate of profit to fall expresses itself: if the value of commodities is determined by the relationship between necessary labor (that is, labor that reproduces the worker for the power he must concede), and surplus labor, then this relationship becomes unbalanced by an augmentation of surplus labor with respect to necessary labor—however much work productivity increases, and therefore however much fixed capital (that is, machinery) increases, the general level of technico-scientific preparation of society and thus of the whole workforce increases, and thus more economies of scale are born, that is to say, large concentrations and thus the economy of the productive process, and so on. What does this mean? It means that commodities lose value, their value being tied to living labor, to the aspect corresponding to the necessary labor, which is exploited: if surplus labor rises disproportionately, and subsequently surplus value, and thereafter, through certain mediations, profit as a mass, then the relationship between the part of living labor which has been transferred to the commodities falls; and because it falls, so does the rate, which is the proportion relative to extorted labor.¹⁰ Capital must overcome this situation, and to do so it must enlarge its market, that is, it must find labor to which it can apply its ability to extract surplus labor. Once it arrives at a certain point of concentration and therefore at a certain point of labor productivity and socialization of productive forces, capital is compelled to seek new markets, but not simply new markets in which to sell, but rather capital markets, as a possibility of extracting even more surplus labor, as much as possible, always more; this precisely determines the phenomenon of colonization that Lenin studies in his Notebooks.

What does the dialectic shift in this study consist of? First, it consists in the understanding of the dramatic transformation by which capital, insofar as it accomplishes its civilizing function, is constrained—this is Marx when he continually insists on the sign of destruction that capitalist development moves within and produces and reproduces with wealth itself (“from this viewpoint the law of tendential fall in the profit rate is in general the most important aspect of the political economy”).¹¹ In the second place, the dialectic shift consists in the understanding expressed by Lenin that the contradictions determined within this type of process (even though they were inter-imperialist contradictions in the first place) can be immediately utilized by the class point of view as a declaration and sign of capitalism’s inevitable fall. Third, and this is the most important point, consciousness is determined in Lenin both by the enormous concentration of capitalist power in the figure of single imperialist states and by the enormous power of destruction that an imperialist clash unleashes. This consciousness turned in the decision of a revolutionary deadline, by word of order, not against war, but for the workers’ and revolution’s use of war against imperialism, for communism.¹²

Certainly all of this represents a specific situation: today Lenin’s Imperialism is a work that faces considerable limits. In particular, we have had to see capital renew itself dialectically and overcome some of these contradictions: consequently, today the imperialist theories need to be renewed. Yet we must say that Lenin’s reading of imperialism is absolutely correct for his time and suitable to reality, just as much as this reading is directly addressing the definition of that dialectic shift, which is the insurrectional shift. The awareness of Russian imperialism’s inability to sustain, at the degree of relative development at which it had arrived, the enormous weight of that war which determined its inability to sustain relationships of power within Russia, for Lenin becomes an expected outcome of the revolutionary journey.