WE ARE NOW returning to the issue of transition as framed by Lenin to confront it with the urgent theoretical and practical questions that face us today, and we will eventually return to the four specific fundamental issues outlined previously. First, we need to consider other general questions, in particular about the safeguard against the dangers of utopianism as we find it in Lenin. This danger is particularly present in discussions of the issue of transition; we might go as far as to say that in the socialist tradition the problem of transition emerges as a response to real and impatient questions and develops along the lines of a prefiguration. From the outset, the origin of the problem of transition, the prefiguration of the conditions, and the values of a communist society take root in the conscience of those who revolt and spring from and sediment in a consciousness of misery and in the ferocious and fantastic will to insurrection. Struggle, hope, and utopia are enmeshed in a single tension throughout centuries of proletarian insurgency. The power of the image of a future society that drags the struggle forward is a correlative of misery—on the one hand, something to be liberated from, on the other, in formidable tension and continuity, something that liberation moves toward, something to be liberated. While the prefiguration of the future is a force that directly acts on the organization of the revolt, it also characterizes the organization of those who rebel. The image of a communist society, in order to be seized, requires a communistic organization, and so on.1
Guarding against the dangers of unbridled hope, the shift from utopia to science directly influences the concept of organization and the definition of the timing and the forms of the revolutionary process. Therefore, the particular solution to the problem of transition is relevant not only at the level of analysis and political forecasts, but above all for a definition of the figure of the party: the revolutionary process and the figure, concept, and theory of the party are configured in relation to the kinds of obstacles and steps envisaged in this process, to the extent that the party represents the material interests of the proletarian masses in relation to goals to achieve and obstacles to overcome.
A party founded on the insuppressible hatred for the existing power of capital is different from one based on the love for communism. A party founded on the need to destroy and dissolve the present order of things will need, in Marxian terms, to be politically equipped to carry out this activity, and thus will need to exclude from its core any motivation that pushes this harsh present need into oblivion by means of beautiful words and dreams.
Let us return to the initial question: how are the dangers of prefigurations and utopia guarded against in Lenin’s The State and Revolution, which is so engaged in the definition of transition of its times and its contents? To answer this question, it is not sufficient to refer to the Marxian realism of Lenin’s theory, for, seen in the context of Lenin’s experience of social democratic opportunism, this is not a one-sided realism; on the contrary, it is double- and triple-edged. In fact, Marxian realism is such only when seen for what it is: a realistic analysis of the insurgence of the revolutionary subject as a proletariat, and a scientific consciousness of a revolutionizing process that results from development and its deadly contradictions. Clearly, in Marx’s and Lenin’s view, any possible prefiguration emerges from the activity of the masses; the party is the negation of prefigurations and utopia insofar as its role is to be an effective organizer of this activity. If Marxism is a revolutionary materialism, this is the only view it can possibly sustain.
As we have seen, the only way to avoid the danger of utopian prefigurations is to posit the question of transition when a determined and effective inversion of the relation between class composition and class organization is given. The revolutionary activity of the masses asks the question of transition realistically, and only the revolutionary activity of the masses can prefigure communism. Going back to the specificity of the question of transition in Lenin, let us try to analyze its other features and limits. I believe that it is possible to state something with a degree of certainty: insofar as the inversion of the relation between composition and organization posits this question, the way Lenin resolves it is strictly and rightly linked to his analysis of class composition and to the determinate social and political structure of this analysis. An extraordinary basic coherence emerges between Lenin’s analytical framework and the theoretical and practical consequences he derives from it. Therefore, Lenin’s definition of determinate class composition objectively dominates even this aspect of his communism and outlines, outside of utopian dangers, its dimensions and its contents. Inevitably, on this premise, Lenin’s thought, as it necessarily results from his refusal of utopia and the effectiveness of the discourse of the masses, presents the limits and problems we analyzed in the previous lecture.
Having said that, let us question whether there are further limits and inconsistencies in this system. Let us question whether our analysis can move beyond a comparison between our needs and those of the class composition of his times and detect potential inconsistencies in Lenin’s model in relation to the real situation he recorded and adapted to from time to time. The continuity of the revolutionary process from socialism to communism that characterizes Lenin’s definition of transition has been one of the main objects of the criticism coming from militants of the workers’ movement, from Stalin to Mao Zedong, and can certainly not be imputed to an inconsistency in Lenin’s thought. Although it is a fundamental limitation of Lenin’s theory, this linear continuity of the revolutionary process is also closely tied to the particular class composition to which his theory is addressed. The continuity of the process of accumulation persists even after the revolutionary rupture and the growth of the material bases adequate to communism; in Lenin’s situation, a rupturing in order to plan was a necessary moment—a rupture functional for planning and developing the continuity of the process of accumulation and its increasing and ever more extensive reproduction, because only on these material bases could the demand for communism come to take shape.
The other element we have pointed to is harder to understand: for Lenin, the notion of development is not only linear and continuous, but also spontaneous, pacific, and automated; here the process seems to move with a natural force, and this is an inconsistency and an idealist limitation of Lenin’s theory. In fact, Lenin knew perfectly well the workers’ spontaneous opposition to labor. The initial years of the revolutionary process in Russia confronted him with the massive and generalized flight from work of the workers. Under those conditions and that composition of class relations, the revolutionary process appeared to have nothing to do with the workers’ spontaneous dedication to work. In such a process, well beyond spontaneity, one needed to implant a specific dialectics, which Lenin soon interpreted and applied with the introduction of the NEP (New Economic Policy); these were an attempt to put into motion a dynamic of class struggle for development, for the determination of the conditions of the shift from socialism to communism in transition. The reactivation of the market and, in the market, the concession of trust in entrepreneurial freedom amounted to the state putting into action the mechanisms of class struggle: then the trade union reappeared as a negotiator of the price of the labor commodity, as the class pressure for socialism and the permanent revolution.2
Undoubtedly, the image Lenin provides for the process of transition in The State and Revolution presents some utopian undertones when it comes to the definition of the spontaneity of the shift, and this can be entirely understandable, given the political enthusiasm surrounding the writing of this work; yet it still represents a real and effective inconsistency in his theory. It is inconsistent not only in relation to us, but in relation to the rest of Lenin’s argument. It is strange that in the description of the fundamental shift from socialism to communism in The State and Revolution, Lenin’s dialectical insights seem to be lost; we are confronted with moments of evolutionism and gradualism, in the philosophical “tradition” of materialism in the widest sense of the term, rather than with the teachings of the Philosophical Notebooks on Hegel. The dialectical thread that emerges in later works and that plays as crucial a role as the previous traditional materialism seems to be underestimated in relation to this issue, and this is all the more surprising, given the chronological and thematic continuity between the Philosophical Notebooks and The State and Revolution.
Nonetheless, this is certainly not the most substantial limitation of Lenin’s work; rather, the greatest limitation is the almost-exclusive and extreme emphasis on the institutional aspects. This means attention to, on the one hand, the juridical property relation as a fundamental moment against which the rupture must be directed and to, on the other hand, the figure of the state as an abstract political-juridical institution present in the whole issue of transition: this is the greatest limitation. But this is a limitation to the internal consistency of Lenin’s theory. Who, more than Lenin, had developed the concept of political and juridical institutions in the analysis of class composition since the 1890s? Who more than him had insisted on the very interpenetration of the development of the productive forces with the figure of the state, drawing from it a notion of the state that, far from being merely juridical and institutional, was actually embedded in the analysis of the process of production and its direct and immediate form? On this issue, let us look at two classical works—The Development of Capitalism in Russia and Imperialism as the Highest Stage of Capitalism—that complete the arch of Lenin’s theoretical analysis from the 1890s to 1917. Both of these works present a conceptualization of the state as the organizer of the exploitation of work in proper terms, that is, not a statical but as a coordinated and functional force affecting the changes of labor organization during the period that goes from large manufacture to imperialism. In this perspective, the state is the form of overall capital, the effect and engine of development, the necessary relation and the figure of capital as the organizer of social exploitation on larger and larger scales. From this standpoint, it would have been important and consistent to further develop this issue in The State and Revolution; instead, the whole point is entirely missing, and Lenin simply emphasizes the juridical and institutional aspects of the state. Hence the impossibility of showing that the struggle against the state is a struggle against work: this is the limitation we insist on. From the standpoint of the revolutionary process, the hegemony of this aspect of the state wherein it immediately organizes labor only comes to prominence beyond the general conditions of accumulation in a stage of direct and general subsumption of labor under capital. But the Russian autocracy is such a burdensome and inevitable form of self-legitimating and traditional power that it in some respects justifies Lenin’s emphasis on the political and juridical institutional aspect of the state and his relative underestimation of the direct relation between the state and the organization of productive processes. Moreover, a close examination of the strategic and practical reality and an analysis of the particular state of disarray of the Russian state in the war period, when Lenin wrote this work, would plausibly demonstrate that there are justifiable reasons for his emphasis: when it comes to the direct organization of labor, insurrectional action develops precisely in the context of an accentuation of the complete disarray of the state not only in general terms, but also in terms of the infrastructure of industrial development, from railways to postal services, and of the coordination of social labor overall.
These justifications notwithstanding, this lack and internal limit in Lenin’s theory has heavily influenced the way in which the question of transition has subsequently been developed. Therefore, forms of voluntarism and subjectivism, institutional or parainstitutional, have been put forward when discussing the issue of the revolutionary process, and these pages in Lenin have been used as their justification.
Here, we need to take our discussion further both in terms of a critical evaluation and in the comparison of Lenin’s with our situation. First of all, let us propose some of the elements of the debate on insurrection. The issue of insurrection has rarely received the attention it deserves in discussions of transition. On the basis of a given class composition and given limits to development, on the basis of a necessary externality of the vanguard insofar as it is not merely regarded as an intellectual vanguard of theoretical consciousness but is instead a properly workers’ vanguard, the issue of insurrection clearly unfolds in the direct imputation of the responsibility for the insurrection to the vanguard alone. Clearly, insurrection is discontinuity and an explosion of a concentrated subjective will, born out of an overall structure that allows for the continuous creation of spaces that can or cannot be used by the revolutionary brain. In this class composition, the party only crafts the revolution insofar as it plays its own initiative in the overall disequilibrium of the process of accumulation and institutional restructuring of the accumulation of the bourgeois state. Insurrection is an art, and in Lenin’s theory, the party is a bearer of the art of insurrection: undoubtedly, the concept of “rupture,” as proposed in The State and Revolution, traces this notion of the revolutionary process. At this point, a question arises: when the relation between the breaking of the state machine and the withering-away of the state as the organizer of labor is posited directly and no longer linked to some spontaneity in the process, but rather to the deepening of class struggle—in other words, when we can begin to think the revolutionary process only on the basis of this tight relationship—what is left of Lenin’s notion of insurrection? What is, then, insurrection? The revolution today can only be crafted as a material ability to build a mass power that, step after step, time after time, destroys the reality of the capitalist state as a work state. This has no longer anything to do with insurrection as an eminent and explosive moment: the revolutionary process develops and can only develop as an overall process of revolutionizing. What does appropriation mean, after all, and what does it mean to wither away the state as the overall organizer of power in the working class, if it does not emerge from a determined ability to carry forward a process that is at once a molecular, determined, and continuous destruction of all the facets of the state organization and, simultaneously, also the actual seizing of this wealth and this materiality of power that confronts us?
If this is the situation, the limitations of the argument in The State and Revolution concerning its analysis of the relation between the state and the organization of labor really seem to force us to deeply revise the argument. This revision requires that we confront the organizational relation with the current terms of class struggle. In this light, the revision of the concept of the party is crucial. The party, this form of adjustment of ends and means that must develop the ability of organizing both the “rupture” and the “withering-away” (as the proletarian seizing of wealth), is a privileged object of the theoretical and practical inquiry of the masses. But in addition to this, other questions are raised. In the previous lecture, while discussing rupture, we showed that the question needed to be reviewed in light of the capitalist integration of the state form and the form of dead labor, which is so severe today that the problem, as indicated by class struggle, is probably one of materially distributing wealth not because it is wealth, but because it is presented in an entirely distorted way. We have seen how it is impossible to think that the existing machinery, science, and overall accumulation of dead labor can be used as it is in the development of communism. We are thus faced with a paradox: on the one hand, the development of the workers’ capacity for rupture cannot rely on a mythical moment but can only sustain itself on the desire for existing wealth, on the ability to immediately reappropriate it; on the other hand, this reappropriation must be completely subordinated to the ability to destroy and the need to build new conditions for a new world. This paradox represents a huge difficulty, and the misery of the political practice that reformism accentuates is difficult and makes our analysis even more difficult. But, faced with this difficulty, we must be Marxist and Leninist until the end. This entails that when issues arise that cannot be resolved, and when there is a terrible responsibility of committing potentially tragic mistakes, we must first of all think that our artisan tools are wholly inadequate and that the issues raised by the masses, in class struggle, must be solved by the masses through class struggle.
The same applies to the issue of organization: the activity of the masses manages to determine it time and again. And the same applies also to the determination between appropriation, destruction, and liberation of the power of mass invention.
I think that at this stage, and from this standpoint, we can begin to read the pages on the Commune that Lenin attaches to his treatment of the question of transition.3 Following Marx’s method, Lenin teaches us that the form of the organization can only be found in the movement of the masses. We are obviously entitled to carry out a more specific analysis of the commiseration between the organizational means and the ends of the movement, while keeping close, theoretically, to the specific terms of class composition. But we cannot forget that every time an actual organization arises, it does so because of the activity of the masses. To recognize the mass character of organization as a “recovered” form that the proletariat time and again moulds and discovers in itself is both the question and the solution. The Paris Commune is, from this standpoint, a formidable theoretical fact beyond all its ingenuity and mistakes, and it is a perfect moment of the proletarian expression of its ability as a subject to give an adequate form to its organization. This kind of analysis must move beyond the example of the Paris Commune.
Currently, in March 1973, the workers at Mirafiori are accomplishing their own theoretical miracle and discovering a form of military mass organization inside the factory; they are finding the right terrain of a new relation of struggle for appropriation and power. We will need to test ourselves on these grounds and remember that the problems our reading raises can only find, as Lenin intimates, a definitive solution at the level of practice. To the masses go the first and, always, the last word.4
NOTES
1. On the role of utopianism in the determination of the revolutionary movement during precapitalist stages of development, there is a vast and important literature. For a generic view, see the works of Ernst Bloch, in particular, his crucial text on Thomas Münzer. For subsequent works, see also the entry on “Utopia,” in Scienze Politiche: Feltrinelli-Fischer Encyclopaedia, ed. Antonio Negri (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1971).
2. On this issue, see R. Di Leo, Operai e sistema sovietico [Workers and the Soviet system] (Bari: Laterza, 1970); C. Bettelheim, Class Struggles in the USSR, 1923–1930 (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1998); F. I. Kaplan, Bolshevik Ideology and the Ethics of Soviet Labor, 1917–1920: The Formative Years (London: Peter Owen, 1969), as well as, of course, E. Carr, History of Soviet Russia (London: Macmillan, 1958–1978).
3. Lenin’s writings on the Paris Commune of 1871 repeat, with renewed enthusiasm, Marx’s appreciation of it.
4. See on this, Negri, “Articolazioni organizzative e organizzazione complessiva: il partito di Mirafiori” [Organizational developments and overall organization: The Mirafiori Party], in Crisi e organizzazione operaia (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1974), 189ff.