Factory of Strategy: Thirty-Three Lessons on Lenin

THE LAST PART of the fourth paragraph of the first chapter, a summary of the theses presented so far, interests us for two reasons: First, from a methodological standpoint. Lenin insists on the fact that only dialectics allows for a correct understanding of the stages of the revolutionary project. We know what the role of dialectics is for Lenin: on the one hand, dialectics makes it possible to understand the relation of continuity between structure and superstructure, institutional moment and materiality of political struggle, and to bring the terms of class struggle to bear on the theory of the political composition of the working class. On the other hand, for Lenin, dialectics allows this continuity to be made discontinuous, to invert the relation between composition and organization, materiality and revolutionary will. Let us return, from this perspective, to some of the issues we have dwelled on concerning Lenin’s Notebooks on dialectics. The operative instruments of dialectics, as managed by Lenin, allow for an intervention into the continuity and the discontinuity of the revolutionary process while also uniting this duality in the process of the tendency. Perhaps there is no heavier accusation than the one Lenin levels against the authors and politicians of the Second International in this text:

To fully understand this passage, we need to remember some fundamental moments in the process of development of Lenin’s methodology and, as we have argued, how those different moments came together. The first moment dates back to the 1890s and is characterized by a definition of the concept of social formation, that is, the political composition of the working class as found in The Development of Capitalism in Russia. The second moment, of the years that immediately precede and overlap with the first imperialist war, sees an outline of the dialectics of the revolutionary leap and a definition of the radical discontinuity of the process, induced by the deepening of the contradictions of capitalist development. The synthesis of these moments cannot merely be reduced to an example of eclectic combination. On the contrary, these different moments unite in a dynamism that is as effective for the interpretation of the revolutionary process of the masses as it is founded on the collective will of the revolutionary subject. The combination is a function of the heat of the moment and the most explicit version of the standpoint of the workers in the history of revolutionary Marxism. On the other hand, the eclectic falsification of dialectics is a method typical of the political argumentation of reformists. The reality is complicated, they claim, so let us consider all the tendencies and countertendencies that agitate within it! This reality is inexhaustible and irreducible to the determinate “one-sidedness” of the workers’ standpoint! Here eclecticism is opportunism. Of course, reality is inexhaustible in itself, but what affects it and makes it comprehensible is a class standpoint. For Marx and Lenin, society is mature enough for the revolutionary process insofar as a subjective force reduces it, simplifies it, and forces it into this fundamental class relation. Eclectic falsification reduces dialectics to a broom that sweeps away everything around it; it goes against the method of Marx and Lenin, which is one of a determined and close examination of the problem, of the solution to the basic antagonism in the problem, and of the elimination, or, rather, subordination, of all secondary elements to the fundamental contradiction: “The necessity of systematically imbuing the masses with this and precisely this view of violent revolution lies at the root of all the teachings of Marx and Engels.”²

Now we come to the second reason for our interest in this last section of the first chapter of The State and Revolution, and take up another important element in Lenin’s thought: namely, how everything that was presented in the Marxist tradition as a theoretical thesis is made immediately practical and determined. The method that is typically Marxian but takes on an absolutely new form in Lenin is the method of a tendency that grasps contradiction at its highest stage and describes the reality of capital from within the violent exasperation, from the standpoint of the workers, of a particular stage of development, thus overturning its determinacy into a project of workers’ offensive. The materiality of the tendency is turned into the materiality of the project. From this perspective, theory changes its meaning too: the practical determination of Lenin’s discussion, the subjective dimension and the party project, and his ability to see reality “directly” in its moments of transformation require a close examination of the nuances of the differences between Marx and Lenin. Althusser³ noted this, observing that while Marx’s discourse essentially runs through historical structures (for instance, in the definition of the shift between different stages of manufacture, from simple cooperation to large industry) and describes the overall tendency in this continuity, Lenin makes use of immediately scientific structures. It is important to avoid a hypostasis of this difference: in Marxism the coexistence of these two tendencies is precisely what characterizes dialectics. Undoubtedly the operative character of Lenin’s categories is an enrichment of dialectics; the fiber of Lenin’s thought is a complex theoretical and practical activity and does not use successive horizontal structures, but vertical ones that represent, time and again, the threshold, the cutoff point of a determinate historical formation. His practical insistence on these levels of understanding condenses revolutionary will onto an immediately practical plane. Demystification immediately becomes an operational scheme; understanding is a condition of and always subordinate to operability. The subjective will of the party must succeed in interrupting this historical series at any point: this is the conclusion and one of the specific elements of Lenin’s thought.

From this standpoint, our own Marxism is enriched, and it would be useful to develop our analysis, on the basis of these points, and verify its richness in fields of investigation that are closer to us. For instance, it would be very beautiful if we started to open up the analysis of the development of the capitalist mode of production (of the process of restructuration) here in a direction similar to the one initiated in Italy in sporadic moments during the 1960s. This analysis could be opened to include the identification of a series of new scientific definitions that bear on the comportments of workers and masses, not merely as they are qualified with reference to their internal historical modifications, but also as the emergence of punctual subversions and ruptures in the continuity of development.⁴ It would be interesting to launch this kind of analysis again, especially taking into account the events that are occurring, the prevalence of stagnation of development, and consequently perhaps also the prevalence in workers’ comportments of stable structures rather than dialectical rhythms accentuated in the relation between class and capitalist development. Obviously, it is always a case of relative points of view and evaluations, because all of these elements always move hand in hand, and the historical body of the working class we are confronted with is extremely compact and singularly united. However, it is necessary to highlight the acceleration or deceleration of the overall process, privileging adequate tools accordingly. Going back to Leninism, in this sense, is opportune and necessary.

But let us return to Lenin’s text. Here the practical rupture of the historical continuum is determined by specific contents: what is specific is not only the method but also the content of its application. Lenin concludes and sums up his argument thus: “The supersession of the bourgeois state by the proletarian state is impossible without a violent revolution. The abolition of the proletarian state, i.e., of the state in general, is impossible except through the process of ‘withering away.’”⁵ The analysis does not conclude with a practical and decisive inversion of the historical situation as it came to be determined: as we have seen, the development of imperialism and its war exasperate the figure of the state as an antiworkers’ function of command. Here the violence of the state becomes its determinate content. The analysis grasps and almost exasperates the fixing of this figure: against the violence of the state, only workers’ and proletarian violence are valid. What allowed us to directly trace the shape of reality as a function of an attack on it was not a simplification of it, but its scientific reduction. The destruction of the state is a condition for any further step. The abolition of the state starts from the exercise of power, because the exercise of proletarian power fundamentally entails the realization of a formidable transfer of power to class, to the masses. The destruction of the state is the condition for the withering-away, for the proletarian positive process of reappropriation of power as society as a whole. At this point, instead of following the order of Lenin’s exposition, I will jump to chapter 5 of The State and Revolution. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 are close examinations and philologically accurate recuperations of Marx and Engels’s texts on this question. Lenin reconstructs the debate on the revolutionary process and communism as it developed in the theory of the classics. The second chapter concerns the teachings of Marx and Engels on the revolution of 1848–1851; the third chapter focuses on the experience of the Paris Commune of 1871 in Marx’s analysis; the fourth chapter dwells on Marx and Engels’s texts from 1870 onward and on the polemics internal to social democracy, especially the question of the program (Erfurt and Gotha). We will return to these chapters later.

What interests us at this stage is seeing exactly what “withering away” means beyond its mere theorization, although Lenin wishes for theory to be organized around a determinate and continuous experience as much as in terms of a political program. This text, in fact, does not simply emerge from a theoretical need, but from a need for theory to be linked to a revolutionary practice with the aim of overcoming the democratic phase of the Russian revolution. This text is characterized by revolutionary passion; it is traversed by it and left incomplete because, as Lenin claims, it is more interesting to make the revolution than write about it. Let us see how the question of the economic conditions for the withering-away of the state, and thus the question of the program, is confronted by Lenin.

Here we come to the fifth chapter of The State and Revolution, on “The Economic Basis of the Withering-Away of the State.”

Before reading and closely following Lenin’s argumentation here, we will highlight some of its fundamental characteristics because this moment is as central to Lenin’s discourse as it is problematic, especially to those of us who read The State and Revolution from the standpoint of the workers and must therefore confront our urgent needs with Lenin’s. Lenin’s discussion on the economic basis of the withering-away of the state returns to Marx’s discussion on the level of development of the forces of production and the identification of the tendency of class struggle as it presented itself in the second half of the nineteenth century. Lenin’s problem consists in establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat as a shift to a socialist phase that is still dominated by the need for organizing labor and wages. Obviously we are first and foremost interested in recuperating the form of the revolutionary process described by Marx and Lenin. But while we are interested in the form of this shift and its dialectical reality (in this lies the permanence of the teachings of the classics), we are also forced to confront its contents and ask whether and to what extent Marx and Lenin’s discourse, in different situations, is valid to us, or whether these definitions are now insufficient and contradictory. The basic problem concerns the relation between revolutionary workers’ power (as it is expressed through the insurrectional shift and the establishment of the dictatorship) and the organization of social labor. Confronted with this problem, we can ask, today, whether the overall maturity of the productive forces has reached the levels described in the pages of Marx’s Grundrisse, where communism becomes the main point and content of proletarian dictatorship, where by communism we understand the destruction of the organization of wage labor rather than simply the socialist perfecting of this organization. In Lenin, the debate is still entirely linked to the problem of socialist organization of labor, and he recognizes this shift in the whole of the revolutionary Marxist tradition of the nineteenth century. Therefore, is it possible to manage within an analogous form of dialectics a problem that is based on such different conditions (for us and for the workers’ science familiar to Lenin)? Can The State and Revolution teach us anything in this respect?

I think it can, because like Marx, Lenin goes to the core of the question. He announces it in the premise of chapter 5:

The analysis basically follows the Critique of the Gotha Program, which was already largely investigated in the fourth chapter and becomes here a fundamental text (the Gotha program is the proposal for the program of German social democracy, and takes its name from the city that hosted the congress).⁷ Here Marx confronts a series of problems that are introduced in a discussion of social democracy. In particular, the Gotha program was strongly influenced by the social democratic faction that regarded Lassalle’s theoretical position as the foundation of their project.⁸ They reflected on the possibility of an alliance between the working class and the Prussian state to isolate the class of landowners that had until then enjoyed a prominent position in the management of the Prussian and German state machine. This marginalization and alliance would have facilitated the recognition of the working class as the motor of development. The main issue in Lassalle’s theory that finds its way into the Gotha program is that of “equal wages.” In the particular German situation, the state administration played a huge role in the acceleration of the development of German industry in the second half of the nineteenth century: Germany turned from being a country marginalized from capitalist development into the power that had all its papers in order to enter the imperialist phase, and this process took place thanks to the determinate mediation of the state. The process of the unification of Germany was made possible by the ability of the Prussian state to insert itself into the production process and directly function as the capitalist brains of development.⁹ In this situation, Lassalle’s reasoning is as follows: a political alliance between the working class and the progressive forces of the state is desirable because it would allow for the progressive elimination of parasitical revenues (of landed estates and their related political powers) and the constitution of a highly productive society where rent is reduced to zero. Here we can see the law of value perfectly in force. But what is the law of value? It is the law according to which the capitalist product, profit, is seen as a relation between necessary labor time and surplus labor, and thus as a relation of ratios of relative wages corresponding to ratios of labor supplied, where profit is not understood in bourgeois terms as an interest ratio of capital expenditure, but as a surplus directed toward the overall reproduction of capital. From this perspective, the wage is “strictly” understood as a rate paid to the laborer for a labor directed to the greater overall reproduction of capital: when capital reproduces itself at a more advanced level of development, wage quantities and relations must be revised and renewed always as integral rates and revenues of the labor supplied. Here revenue becomes a socialist function. From Lassalle onward, socialist planning would be more or less set in these terms. Lassalle’s operation can be more clearly understood in political terms. Exploitation obviously remains unchanged for the working class, and profit, as a global quantity of capital that is renewed and augmented, is based on a rule of exploitation and constituted by a surplus value that augments itself. But for Lassallian socialists, the main problem lies in the definition of a scheme of reproduction wherein wage distribution (of capital and labor) is always commensurate to the laws of development and its needs. Exploitation is regarded as a necessary function of this process: there is no development without labor exploitation because there is no development without labor, so the question is how to eliminate the overexploitation arising from ratios of revenues that have a completely different status, that is to say, parasitical rent.¹⁰

Marx and Lenin offer a strong critique of these positions when they concentrate on the overcoming of the law of value, the demystification of the “equal wage,” and the building of the economic bases of communism: the dialectics applied to these questions is a crucial motif and workers’ theory still refers to it today. Like Marx, Lenin claims that equality, the function of the law of value (that is, the exclusion of the surplus profits of particular classes), and equal wages (as wages that are integral to labor in a society that functions in socialist terms) have nothing to do with the withering-away of the state and the transition to communism. Lenin presents a radical critique of Lassalle and brings it to bear on the terrain of a definition of the transitory phase. This is the crucial point of the fifth chapter of The State and Revolution. I believe that this is one of the highest expressions of Marxian theory, only equaled, perhaps, by some of the passages found in Marx’s Grundrisse, which was unknown to Lenin in 1917. Only in the Grundrisse do we find an anticipation of the communist critique of the rule of equality and of the definitive destruction of these lurid utopias in effectively materialist terms (unless we wish to go back to the fervid allusions of Marx’s early writings). This is the definitive dissolution of any relationship between the communist struggle and the struggle of the radical bourgeoisie in whatever form it manifests itself; this is also the definitive dissolution of any relationship between the idea of freedom and the idea of communism, of any continuity, however generic, between liberal forces and the definitions of a communist realm.

In future conversations we will return to these issues. Now it is most useful to note some of the limitations of Lenin’s text. In fact, despite its power, in this text Lenin’s intuition is still expressed in terms of an analysis and critique of the state superstructure of liberalism and of socialist radicalism, rather than as an analysis that grasps the society founded on labor as the essential moment of the material organization of labor. The reason for this limitation is also the strength of Lenin’s intuition, because it organizes the subjective will to break through and disrupt the material limits and the organization of social labor as they present themselves in the determinate level of development of his times. A radical examination and interpretation of these tendencies from the standpoint of the workers are only possible today and starting from the highest levels of capitalist development, from the most advanced watchwords developed by workers in struggle. For this reason, these pages of The State and Revolution must be integrated not so much with the formal completion of this or that issue, but rather with all of the moments where theory leaps forward and turns into a practical ability to recuperate the new fabric of class and struggle as it presents itself. The limit of Lenin’s discourse might be necessary, understood as arising from the formidable contemporary ability to allude to more advanced contents of communism through a critique of equality! The problem of equality is not one of formal identity or abstract equivalence between different people: it is a question of building a communist society. Rather than recognizing an identity or an equality that does not exist and can never exist in the capitalist process, the issue is building an equality that is a constitutive, equalizing, and liberating activity, rather than a utopia, a process of destruction of the state as the hierarchical rule of exploitation. It is no surprise that this libertarian apotheosis of Leninism has always caused greater scandal in the good reformist socialist tradition than, for instance, the issue of violence: in fact, the Oriental and Blanquist ideology that Lenin has been attacked for consists in this radical critique of the concept of equality played at the rhythm of the law of value.