Factory of Strategy: Thirty-Three Lessons on Lenin

Marx confronts the question of “withering away” especially in the Grundrisse, in the framework of an analysis of the capitalist laws of development and mode of production. Obviously, the discussion is broached schematically and by way of an analysis and prediction of the liminal points of capitalist crisis, or the critical relationship between the development of the capitalist mode of production and the capitalist control of the conditions and productive forces of this development. But it would be mistaken to regard the pages we are going to read as a mere “potential future” or an objectivist extrapolation of some real data: the objectivism of Marx’s discourse is always dialectically connected to the emergence of workers’ antagonism and sets a trend and affirms itself as the outcome of class struggle.

From this standpoint, our reference to Marx, meant to throw light on the present might seem less paradoxical. Combining the pages of the Grundrisse with those of The State and Revolution can enable us to come closer to what interests us here: a critique of the issue of “transition” from the standpoint of contemporary class relations.

First, a further premise of our reading of the Grundrisse is called for. We now have an excellent translation of this collection of texts written in preparation for Capital, and also some commentaries in Italian.¹ Well, this is an extremely important work because it reveals a cross section of Marx’s thought and shows the dynamics of his theory: it is the laboratory wherein elements of critique come to combine. Its most important aspect is that the standpoint of the working class, workers’ subjectivity, is here liberated at every turn, beyond all preoccupations with the system, and in an entirely explicit manner. This might be the reason for the long silence that has hitherto surrounded this work, and this is certainly the reason why these pages of the Grundrisse become enormously important in the face of our present problems and the current significance of the emergence of the workers’ subject. Therefore, we would add that Marx managed to describe the mechanism of the elements that make up the workers’ theory of crisis, and to reveal it as a determination and effect of workers’ struggles, rather than as fall and catastrophe, in this work more comprehensively than anywhere else.

Beyond these premises, let us come to the core of the issue. How is the problem of withering away anticipated in Marx? Can this term be ascribed to the issue of crisis and fall in Marx? Can Marx’s and Lenin’s issues be drawn together, and how? In order to answer these questions, I think that it is necessary to recount some of the terms of Marx’s discussion. Marx’s definition of the problem of crisis and the overcoming of the capitalist system starts with an analysis of the changing tendencies of the conditions of production. The analysis touches on both objective and subjective aspects of this process.

Science is immediately incorporated into productive labor at the pace of the reduction of labor time: “invention becomes a business, and the application of science to immediate production itself becomes a factor determining and soliciting science.”³ Therefore, on the basis of these conditions, “real wealth manifests itself rather—and this is revealed by large-scale industry—in the immense disproportion between the labor time employed and its product, and similarly in the qualitative disproportion between labor reduced to a pure abstraction and the power of the production process which it oversees.”⁴

At the objective level, when we are faced with this limit of the capitalist development of large-scale industry, three fundamental contradictions emerge. The first contradiction pertains to the relationship between the unity and extensiveness of abstract labor and the power of the overseen process of production. The second consists in the fact that, within this process, capital, on the one hand, strives to “reduce labor time to a minimum, while, on the other hand, positing labor time as the sole measure and source of wealth.”⁵ Third, the contradiction that reveals the absurdity of capitalist command is that capital “diminishes labor time in the form of necessary labor time in order to increase it in the form of superfluous labor time; it thus posits superfluous labor time to an increasing degree as a condition—question de vie et de mort—for necessary labor time.”⁶

On the one hand … calls into life all the powers of science and Nature, and of social combination and social intercourse, in order to make the creation of wealth (relatively) independent of the labor time employed for that purpose. On the other hand, it wishes the enormous social forces thus created to be measured by labor time and to confine them within the limits necessary to maintain as value the value already created. The productive forces and social relations—two different aspects of the development of the social individual—appear to capital merely as the means, and are merely the means, for it to carry on production on its restricted basis. In fact, however, they are the material conditions for exploding that basis.⁷

No longer does the worker interpose a modified natural object as an intermediate element between the object and himself; now he interposes the natural process, which he transforms into an industrial one, as an intermediary between himself and inorganic nature, which he makes himself master of. He stands beside the production process, rather than being its main agent. Once this transformation has taken place, it is neither the immediate labor performed by man himself, nor the time for which he works, but the appropriation of his own general productive power, his comprehension of Nature and domination of it by virtue of his being a social entity—in a word, the development of the social individual—that appears as the cornerstone of production and wealth. The theft of alien labor time, which is the basis of present wealth, appears to be a miserable foundation compared to this newly developed one, the foundation created by large-scale industry itself. As soon as labor in its immediate form has ceased to be the great source of wealth, labor time ceases and must cease to be its measure, and therefore exchange value [must cease to be the measure] of use value. The surplus labor of the masses has ceased to be the condition for the development of general wealth, just as the non-labor of a few has ceased to be the condition for the development of the general powers of the human mind. As a result, production based upon exchange value collapses, and the immediate material production process itself is stripped of its form of indigence and antagonism. Free development of individualities, and hence not the reduction of necessary labor time in order to posit surplus labor, but in general the reduction of the necessary labor of society to a minimum, to which then corresponds the artistic, scientific, etc., development of individuals, made possible by the time thus set free and the means produced for all of them.⁸

We could add further evidence to these passages of the Grundrisse, but for the time being it is not important.⁹ From these sections of the Grundrisse, we highlight the fundamental assumption that Marx posits the issue of fall as one of withering away; the objective aspects are only presented as subjective. Marx chases and defines a contradiction that concerns the law of value itself. He shows how the law of value, which ought to represent the rationality of exploitation (and be the scientific key to its interpretation), must lose its rationalizing and legitimating plausibility within the very development of the capitalist mode of production. Marx shows how the demise of the function of the law of value simultaneously corresponds (as cause and effect) to the enormous and formidable growth of the productive, free, and innovative potential of the proletariat, and this simultaneity must be underlined. Hence there emerges the revolutionary contradiction between this new reality of class and any representation of the law of value and its functioning (even in its planned or socialist guise). The issue of the demise and the issue of withering away coincide at this point. The withering-away refers to the law of value-labor as a law of exploitation, whereby labor is—materially—fully emancipated from the residual legitimating rationality of capitalist development. From the capitalist standpoint, the demise of the functioning of the law of value corresponds to its subjective use in terms of maintenance of the mechanism of appropriation and alienation. It is necessary to rebel against this, and to move from the recognition that capital is no longer the regulation of development inside exploitation toward a struggle against capital as a pure and simple development of exploitation. For every subject and for all those who are exploited by capital, the content of this materialist prediction becomes both a material commitment to subversion and the materialist indication of the objectives of communism, as rooted in the comportments and the historical reality of class.

But let us return to the issue of “withering away” proper. For Lenin, and for Marx before him, the political conditions of the withering-away entail an articulation of insurrection, dictatorship, and socialism that allows for these shifts to determine not only a violent abolition of privilege but also a subsequent spontaneity of the process of withering away, when the large majority of the proletariat has consciously, that is to say, materially, reappropriated the conditions of the production of wealth. Marx predicts this spontaneity of the shift to communism very precisely, when he defines, at the level of the critique of political economy, the characteristics of that great “social individual” produced by the development of capital, in the accomplished abstraction of labor, the overcoming of the division of labor, and the fall of the conditions of subsistence of the law of value. In the Grundrisse, Marx anticipates Lenin with his definition of the most advanced stages of the shift to communism. But the viewpoints are wholly identical. Lenin neither corrects nor revises Marx’s propositions; he simply reinvents them, because he could not have read the Grundrisse, and because he does so in continuity with the revolutionary method of dialectical Marxism, which he is such a master of.

However, it must be said that even in the dark years, for theory, of the Second International, this implicit framework of Marx’s analysis had not been forgotten. Engels explicitly drew on it and developed an analogous theme, albeit from a standpoint of the theory of the state rather than from a general theoretical one. Let us recall this: on the basis of the social democratic traditionalism of the Second International, we move from a definition of the state as found in the Manifesto (“The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie”; “the organized power of one class for oppressing another”)¹⁰ to the later definition in The German Ideology that conceived of the synthesis of civil society in the state form. However, those who had not embarked on the Marxian path in the direction of a critique of the law of value could go no further than this. Unless you understood the critique of the state at the level of the critique of political economy, you could certainly not go any further—one cannot forget that the state is, for Marx, one chapter of Capital: “the whole is divided into six books: 1. On Capital (contains a few introductory Chapters). 2. On Landed Property. 3. On Wage Labor. 4. On the State. 5. International Trade. 6. World Market.”¹¹ Despite all this, Engels did do so and, from his privileged position as Marx’s reader, alluded to his analysis and the most advanced point of workers’ science. Taking up Marx’s suggestion (the state intervenes in the tendency in order to maintain “private production without the control of private property”),¹² Engels identifies a stage when the bourgeoisie demonstrates its “incapacity … for managing any longer modern productive forces.” Here Engels posits the figure of the state as “the ideal personification of the total national capital”: “the more it proceeds to the taking over of productive forces, the more does it actually become the national capitalist, the more citizens does it exploit.”¹³ And this happens because “the transformation, either into joint-stock companies, or into state ownership, does not do away with the capitalistic nature of the productive forces. In the joint-stock companies this is obvious. And the modern state, again, is only the organization that bourgeois society takes on in order to support the general external conditions of the capitalist mode of production against the encroachments as well of the workers as of individual capitalists.”¹⁴ In state-owned industries “the workers remain wage-workers—proletarians. The capitalist relation is not done away with. It is rather brought to a head.”¹⁵ Rather than being suppressed, the law of value is pushed to the limit of the mystification it induces: “The modern state, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine, the state of the capitalists, the ideal personification of the total national capital.”¹⁶

Out of the entire Second International, only Lenin was able to read and recuperate this lesson in The State and Revolution. The revolution needed to approach the seizure of the state to fully expose the dirty philology of power. “So long as the state exists there is no freedom,” he wrote.¹⁷ So long as the law of value exists, in whatever form, the proletariat will not free itself. Only revolutionary practice could reinvent Marx, and this is what happens in The State and Revolution. Here, the fabric of the critique of political economy, from the critique of the law of value, is fully grasped and developed. This is a formidable Marxist paradox: only the standpoint of class struggle can invent a scientific reading of reality in order to propose it as the object of destruction, as what must be destroyed in order to be liberated! Therefore, the direction we need to move toward is from the construction of socialism to the destruction of the law of value and its functioning whatever the form and of exploitation under any guise (even socialist). The anarchic barbarity of Leninism is here the highest and most refined point of the Marxian critique of political economy—in spite of all the professors!