Factory of Strategy: Thirty-Three Lessons on Lenin

Our problem is not to merely define the transitory nature of the dictatorship of the proletariat and of socialism as a first step: in fact, Marx’s and Lenin’s forecasting of socialism becomes ever less realistic as the law of value cannot function. Marx states that capitalist production produces this kind of contradiction within itself, by taking the productive forces to such a level of productive potential, as they are socially integrated and constitute the mass of fixed capital, that its relationship with living labor becomes insignificant. At a certain stage of the development of capitalist society, we are confronted with a total disproportion between the material substance of this society as a sum of machinery and as socialization of the productive forces, on the one hand, and living labor, that is, labor that produces surplus value in direct relation with machinery, on the other. Socialism, as an apology for equality and as a proposal for the realization of the law of value that follows the rule of giving to each according to her labor, is confronted with the impossibility of determining any quantitative, incontrovertible, or scientific term as a criterion of wage redistribution. At this level of the overcoming of the law of value, wage redistribution occurs according to purely political norms, norms that express command and no longer have anything to do even with the fiction of equality that is interpreted by the law of value. At this point, we are confronted with our greatest problem: What does “transition to communism” mean today? What is the content of the dictatorship of the proletariat? What forms and times are given for the formation and development of the effective conditions for the withering-away of the state?

In both Lenin and Marx (as confirmed in the Grundrisse), transition means verification, realization of the law of value, to the point of wholly unfolding the ambiguity it interprets as a threshold model of formal justice and thus substantial injustice. The path to communism entails two preparatory phases: first, smashing the state machine; second, realizing this unjust socialism (unjust insofar as it is socialism, because there is no just socialism). Today, it is materially impossible to embark on this path. Some of the shifts have already occurred within capitalist development, in a last phase that has subsumed a function of socialism in it: capitalist development has determined conditions of income distribution that have practically burned the rule of the law of value and thus pose a series of questions on the transitions; these questions are entirely new, and revolutionaries’ critical attention must turn to them.

Let us analyze this more closely: for Lenin, the content of the dictatorship of the proletariat is the repression of the minority of exploiters first and the preparation of the conditions that should lead to a new gigantic development of the productive forces and thus to the threshold of communist freedom and the withering-away of the state by means of the destruction of the division of labor and the one-sided development of individuals. He theorizes these principles very clearly in the fourth paragraph of the fifth chapter of The State and Revolution:

When questioning the transition today, we need to recognize that our situation is different. Why? Clearly, the repression of the minority of expropriators is fundamental: in fact, the more the law of value ceases to apply, the more absurd and terrible does the law of command seem. But what does preparing the conditions for liberation today refer to? Obviously it does not merely refer to the fact that the ownership of the means of production becomes common, or to the realization of the law of value; from within the moment of the dictatorship of the proletariat today, we can think of “something more,” something that is already operative today and neither awaits the maturation of other conditions nor refers to a higher stage of development. This “something more” is not the destruction of the kind of division of labor founded on the unjust application of the law of value, but an assault on capitalist command as such. Today, the expropriation of the expropriators must contain in itself the possibility of destroying every form of command immediately, and of the liberation of class from labor (that is, from the law of value): communism does not follow on from any preceding phase.

Let us look at this in more concrete terms: it is thinkable today, inside capitalist society, to have a form of management of the means of production that makes private interest and all the forms of income that are not directly founded on industrial production superfluous, and it is thinkable today that the division of labor, as a traditional one between intellectual and physical labor, is outmoded. There is no logical difficulty in seeing this as the given situation. Capitalist reformism, even in the crisis it is forced into by class struggle, entails a continuous perfecting of this process. What is the only moment of irrepressible contradiction in a development that reproduces the whole condition of misery and inhumanity which capitalist development carries with it and that exasperates it the more it faces class struggle? It is the rule of command based on the self-preservation of capitalist production, on the preservation of the system of wages. For this reason today, the revolutionary process knows no intermediate phases within which to build the conditions of possibility of communism: today, breaking down the command of capital and the state does not necessitate opening up an intermediate phase to build conditions adequate to the development of communism; it means putting into action immediately the possibility of a communist existence. The conditions are built inside capitalist society by the communist class struggle of the proletariat. Obviously, this is given a distorted shape, as Marx and Lenin point out in their analysis of the last phase of the construction of communism. Science, technique, machinery, and the dead labor that was consolidated in capitalist production and that created formidable conditions for the production and great development of the individual (the development of a one-sided capacity for human expansion): all of this was consolidated in a distorted way, and this raises a series of question. Of what use is this dead capital to us in transition? Is it possible to “use” it? Can we conceive of a process of transition dominated by a necessary relation with the existing fixed capital, from a continuous and one-sided conception of the development of science and technique? I doubt that a generation of revolutionaries, having seized power, could regard science, technique, machinery, existing factories, and the entire armory of dead labor as immediately of use for the growth of communism. Probably the act of destruction of the state, the Leninist breaking point, must be levered against the whole of dead labor as it exists now. Workers’ comportments today do verify this perspective when the struggle is waged on advanced objectives: the spreading of nontraditional forms of struggle such as sabotage and the destruction of plants and materials as well as of the science and technique one-sidedly used and decisively subordinated not to the mythical permanence of the law of value, but simply to the irrationality of command. These forms of struggle are neither neo-Luddism nor cheap anarchism; they attest to a political declaration of extraneousness to the whole of capitalist development. Today it is unimaginable for a revolutionary movement not to take on the problem of the destruction of the state machine, as well as that of the destruction of dead labor as it has accumulated and been organized around the exploitation of humankind. Science, technique, machinery, and dead labor have become moments of a one-sided and irresistible theory and practice of capitalist command as such. Here proletarian dictatorship must prove itself and find the key to a further deepening of class struggle.

Now we can approach a further problem with transition. So far, we have seen how the dissolution of the law of value at a certain stage of capitalist development determines the impossibility of conceiving of an intermediate stage based on socialism. Second, we have considered how the massive presence of dead labor in the physical and material structure of capitalist command turns the moment of dictatorship into a need to push the “rupture” against these objects. The third problem we need to confront now is a revision of the linear progress from socialism to communism found in both Marx and Lenin, to an extent. How is this process conceived of? The process is described in the following terms. First moment: insurrection, that is the ability to smash the state machine; second: determination of the intermediate phase entailing the socialization of the means of production, common ownership, and the establishment of the law of value as a socialist, though unjust and necessary, norm; third moment: opening up a further phase through this dictatorship that facilitates the massive growth of the productive potential and that on this basis builds the shift to communism, that is, the dissolution of the state and of law, the affirmation of a state where each human will have according to her needs rather than her labor: a conscious dissolution of the law of value and labor in the communist phase. Notably, this shift from socialism to communism is implicitly a continuous process in both Marx and Lenin. There is a continuity of accumulation of productive capacities, of transformation of man and woman as a subject of this accumulation and as a subject of the objective transformation, and this proceeds at a continuous pace. All of this seems to slightly contradict Marx and Lenin’s method, which is strongly dialectical, as well as their awareness of the actual mechanism of class struggle and the real role of workers’ subjectivity in future history:

Furthermore, Lenin insists on the relative difficulty of facing the question of transition as a whole, and he invites caution, “because there is no material for answering these questions.”⁴ Nonetheless, the image one can draw from it is one of an excessively one-sided and linear tendency. Obviously, the boorish and mystifying orthodoxy of reformism has exalted these motives. Because of this, the continuity of the shift from socialism to communism must be questioned both theoretically and historically. It is obvious that, if accumulated dead labor has allowed for this enormous development of the productive potential of human labor, it is equally true that in capitalist development this new economic base takes on an absolutely distorted form, which is that of capitalist command. The moment of rupture must therefore turn not simply toward the juridical form of the state, but also against the overall accumulation of dead labor, which includes machinery as well as the shape of the brain that people have had to forge when coming in contact with capitalist science and the need to reproduce the capitalist mode of production. Far from being continuous, the shift from socialism to communism could only entail a “permanent cultural revolution,” the continuous destruction of objective criteria of orientation and knowledge. The process points to a route that is as difficult as it is dramatic. In this process one can only foresee a deepening and reproducing of class struggle in forms that no longer have anything to do with property relations, but with relations of command wherever they present themselves, and they will probably present themselves more forcedly in the organization of scientific knowledge. This can be said from the theoretical point of view.

From a historical perspective, the critique of the continuity of the shift must be even stronger. The fact that the need for this critique was neglected caused so-called socialist countries to reproduce the radical nature of its object. These are “so-called” socialist countries not because they are not socialist, but because they are as socialist as capitalist countries. After the proletariat’s seizure of power, phenomena grossly defined as the formation of a state bureaucracy—the state organization of command, whose roots are much deeper—are linked to the persistence of dead labor, the colossal pressure that it exerts against the liberation of living labor, against the force of proletarian invention, against every revolutionary possibility of collective praxis, in other words, against any chance to develop new forms of life. It must be said: Stalin and Mao identified this kind of difficulty very well, and the Stalinist solution for this problem was undoubtedly incorrect, but this cannot lead to the denial that this problem exists and to the fiction that the shift from socialism to communism is continuous. What was Stalin’s mistake? It was not that he identified this discontinuity; it was that he tried to solve it by means of state dictatorship. The Maoist solution to the problem is the opposite, and in this it is correct: it goes through the liberation of the mass power against the state.

In any case, we face a different problem today. The discontinuity is not measured as a persistence of the state and bourgeois right—“It follows that under communism there remains for a time not only bourgeois law, but even the bourgeois state, without the bourgeoisie!”⁵ It is rather measured against socialism, democracy, and the persistence of the power and command of dead labor over living labor. This discontinuity is much graver and dramatic. In Lenin, breaking the state machine meant substituting the ruling class through the armed expropriation of the expropriators, and there the issue of socialism and democracy ensued. But what does this rupture consist in today? It cannot be mere expropriation; it cannot be the armed realization of equality according to the law of value. Breaking the nexus between the development of the productive force and its capitalist form is the question today. But this accentuates beyond measure the discontinuity and difficulty of the process, because at this point there can only be class struggle and “cultural revolution.” The “democracy of armed workers” must be immediately realizable. The constitution of a “single state syndicate” and the use of economic calculation and control:⁶ this is the heavy legacy of capitalist development. But for us this does not represent the first phase, but the first act of the revolutionary process. This stage was reduced to an act, to a decree that was so immediately realizable because it represented the conclusion of a development of struggle. In his analysis of his conditions, Lenin adds a consideration that is perhaps the most heavily characterized by the need for continuity: “But this ‘factory’ discipline, which the proletariat, after defeating the capitalists, after overthrowing the exploiters, will extend to the whole of society, is by no means our ideal, or our ultimate goal. It is only a necessary step for thoroughly cleansing society of all the infamies and abominations of capitalist exploitation, and for further progress!”⁷

Well, this is our starting point. This step is reduced to an act and the situation is not linear because the armed proletariat cannot stop at dominating a social factory that neither relates to its needs nor can relate to development as a determination of the conditions for communism. The “rupture” cannot limit itself to a seizure of power but must extend inside and against the social factory and inside the very composition of class. The rupture is directed to the positive content of class liberation. Here, in the intensity of a dramatic and deep dialectics, begins a truly “forward movement”⁸ of communist society against the dead and petrified society of alienation.

The fourth great problem concerns the modality of the transition. It is another side of the critique of the continuity of the shift from socialism to communism and can present itself as a problem of critique and verification of the spontaneity of this shift. In Marx and Lenin, the shift from socialism to communism is described as an effect of a sort of gushing and immediate spontaneity: with the dictatorship, the “semistate” is no longer even a “state,” and Lenin recalls that Engels suggested that “the word ‘state’ be eliminated from the programme altogether and the word ‘community’ (Gemeinwesen) substituted for it. Engels even declared that the Commune was long a state in the proper sense of the word.”⁹ Now, this spontaneity is consistent with the notion of continuity and derives from the fact that there are three stages—the rupture, socialism, and communism—which are conditional upon one another. But in our situation these stages have been inverted (and we already have socialism not as the rule of the law of value but as the capitalist possibility of determining the social levels of its own reproduction that are valid within the rule of command and of fully revealing the inhumanity of socialism and of any application of the law of value). This means that what was defined as the first moment, the rupture, will still be a first element, but its tension will be altogether different. It will have to coincide with a process of withering away that in its turn is located inside the whole dialectics of the distorted form of socialization that the social production of capital has brought about. Thus, this overlapping of rupture and withering away, this foundation of one term upon the other, hardly gives rise to spontaneous and felicitous effects. Stalin and Mao identified this dramatic view of the intensification of class struggle at the very moment when we approach communism according to the rules of revolutionary dialectics: clearly spontaneity and happiness are very far from being given. But beyond Stalin and Mao, the same applies to us. The more the socialist phase is elided and rupture and withering-away overlap, the more the dialectics of class struggle eliminates spontaneity from the process and grasps the transition as struggle. The problem is here extremely serious because it concerns more or less all of the modalities of the revolutionary process: first and foremost, the figure of the revolutionary party as the ability to constantly reproduce, from within class and for class, the power to keep breaking class relations and equilibrium as they come to be determined; and with it, the ability to be vanguard and use all the means of violence to seize power. This ability does not emerge from Lenin’s concept of an external vanguard that negates and destroys in order to plan and create socialism, but it rises up from class as an adequate and determinate function: insofar as socialism is impossible, planning is the first thing to defeat, communism is the minimal program.

These problems emerge directly from the review and practical objective we need to consider, on this important chapter of The State and Revolution, in light of the current condition of class struggle. To sum up, the issues we think need to be reviewed are: First, a deeper critique of socialism and a full review of the times, the scheme, and the general model of revolutionary development. Second, the debate on the “rupture,” and by this we understand that we are not simply dealing with juridical formulas and institutional dynamics, but with the whole, massive reality of dead labor as machinery, science, and social organization of production. Third, the problem is one of the objective discontinuity of the shift from socialism to communism. Fourth, and finally, the issue of the critique of the spontaneity of this shift, with the implications it entails in terms of a definition of the subjective revolutionary power of the workers that organizes existing practice. These are the problems that, in this final phase, we will try to analyze individually not only to propose a solution but also to lead toward a correct approach to the problem of transition that is so crucial today in Marxism.