WE HAVE ALREADY seen how Marx’s and Lenin’s formidable feats were to use the method of the masses and raise the question of transition from the standpoint of the workers. What interests us is that this entailed a positing of the question from a political perspective and thus, preliminarily, from outside an economicist or related perspective. I think that this is extremely important and needs to be underlined. In fact, such framing of the question eventually disappeared from the discussion of the workers’ movement: we would have to wait something like fifty years, until the actions of the Chinese Communist Party in the second half of the 1960s, for the political issue of transition to be rediscovered. The rest of the literature gathered under the rubric of “the issue of transition” is economicist and excludes that the working class has a primary role in the management of the transition from socialism to communism. We might go as far as to say that the problem of transition actually became the most fertile terrain on which to develop a series of extremely formalized attempts at planning in the treatment of political economy of the self-styled Marxists. The paradox of the theory of transition as it developed prior to the revolutionary rediscovery of the Chinese Communist Party was that it began with The State and Revolution and ended up with a theory of economic calculus. From Lenin to Leontiev, ironically; from a theory of permanent revolution to a theory of equilibrium; from the definition of growing factors of revolutionary insubordination to the inputs-outputs of the system! Moreover, the theory of transition was entirely developed by economists within the remit of the theory of labor. After Lenin, reformism could only conceive of the period of transition in terms of value theory, a theory of exploitation. The issue of the shift to communism and of the abolishment of the law of value and of the economic system gradually became obscured until it was completely set aside, apart from the opportune addition of adequate mystifications, especially during the Stalinist period, when the fact that the Soviets had seized power seemed in itself sufficient for a notion of the withering-away of the law of value. These were propaganda operations, pure and simple. Probably they were based on what seemed to us the greatest limitation of Lenin’s theory, that is, the inability to express clearly an identity of tendency between communism and the fall of the law of value, and therefore between communism and the suppression of labor itself, which in Lenin was due to the sociopolitical structure he operated in. If this can be read between the lines in Lenin, it is not explicit but rather imposed, and the problem of transition as it emerges in 1917 in Russia cannot be detached from the general backwardness of Russian society and its economic basis at the time. This insufficiency is the mystified foundation of the passive, reactionary, and conservative motivations found in the later development of the theory of transition.
But let us be clear about this: this is a purely philological game and foundation. The later mystification can find its justification neither in the overall political framework of Lenin’s theory nor in his positing of the working class as the subject of change. In Lenin we find a ponderous example of a theoretical anticipation of reality, and the failures that often occur in the shift from the theoretical to the historical party (a shift that is always so terribly painful and grave, especially in the dramatic situation of revolutionary Russia) do not diminish its power. We always find, in Lenin, some element that makes it impossible to reduce his thought to economism. This element consists in an appreciation of the political theory of transition based on the assumption of the working-class subject as an absolute foundation: such an aspect resists any perturbation of the question in economicist terms. In the years that followed Lenin’s death, political staff and Menshevik economists, the same people who during the great crisis moved to the West and joined its large planning offices, seized Soviet planning and turned it into a capitalist machinery: this also highlights the irreducibility of Lenin’s thought to their practice.
Having said this, we can now move on to a further observation, secondary but useful for introducing a new element in the reconstruction of Lenin’s overall theory. This concerns the role of anticipation and forecasting. When we spoke of Lenin’s method in the first part of these lectures, perhaps we placed an excessive emphasis on the correspondence between his thought and the historical and political practice of his times, the determinate composition of the working class and its historical formation. This helped us show an important feature of his mode of proceeding and focus on the inversion from a theory of composition to a theory of organization. But things are more complicated than that. If we limited ourselves, even for a moment, merely to the level of composition theory, we would have to recognize that both the populists and the Mensheviks were right on this, insofar as, paradoxically, they reflected more intelligently the high degree to which political operations were possible in Russia. What characterizes Lenin’s theory, in this case, is simply the fact that his is the best understanding of the objective moments of the situation. If we take into account the two works that we have focused on—The Development of Capitalism in Russia and What Is to Be Done?—we can immediately note that they also display a formidable sensitivity to the moment of the tendency, since they both point to the action of a historical subject (in this case, the working class) as the drive, push, and traction that could impose progress toward mature capitalism on Russian society. The focus on the structure of the party as defined in What Is to Be Done?—on the hegemonic and driving function of a workers’ vanguard that carries with it the proletariat and some of the peasants and the small bourgeoisie, who are involved in a series of mediations such as progressive democracy and the parliamentary system—displays an ability not only to grasp some of the general characteristics of the situation, but to confront them with a driving function and winning tendency that thus presume a historical subject of the whole process. It is impossible to think of a historical tendency without also conceiving of a need for a determinate historical subject. This is certainly a historical product, but is still a subject. Only from this standpoint can the anticipation work, without being either cerebral or prefiguring: rather than a mechanical necessity, it is a necessary tendency planted in the ability of a historical subject to move in a given direction. When this determination is recuperated, the party becomes history and makes history. That subject must be led and subjected to a political class leadership. The same mechanism applies to what concerns the tendency of the transition in The State and Revolution. In this case, Lenin expresses an absolutely preliminary emphasis on the revolutionary subject, and this is the revolutionary subject that Lenin finds before him, and whose movement Lenin feels the intensity and reality of. Lenin’s theory concentrates on this subject, and his anticipation is only possible on the basis of the recognition of the role of the working class. This is an extremely important aspect of Lenin’s thought from the point of view of method: in this way Lenin deals decisively with economism and subjectivism, which are always experienced within the communist movement. The antagonistic duplicity of economism and subjectivism, or idealism and materialism conceived statically and nondialectically, is overcome by the identification of a subject that is material and avoids the possibility of falling into these opposing formulas of mystified solutions to the problem. The theoretical overcoming of the dualism is not practical: only organization can help the practical side, and when it comes to revolutionary organization, The State and Revolution presupposes it. In fact, in Russia, beyond the attempts of the NEP, planning was developed in purely economistic terms and exasperated the populist tradition of Russian Marxism, turning it into a vulgar Marxism where the subject of agency changes.1
We did not have a working class as such, as a subject leading the movement; instead, we started seeing as a subject the whole of the hypotheses of populism, the people, the nation, while planning was gradually reduced to economic calculus. Clearly this does not mean that economic calculus ought to be excluded from planning or that the growth and extension of the material basis can be denied because of the emergence of the project and will of the class. Rather, it simply suggests that we need to recall an absolutely fundamental moment in Marxism, that of the hegemony of the political, which is the hegemony of a consideration of class relations, levels of consciousness, needs and necessities, and everything that concerns, in the last instance, the political will of the masses and of the ruling class. Only from this perspective can the problem of anticipation in Lenin acquire clarity. And this also clarifies the fact that economism and reformism have heavily appropriated the issue of transition and turned it into a grim ideology that can in no way be recuperated in a classical Leninist framework.
This was a long parenthesis to recover the methodological design of Lenin’s theory. It is now appropriate to return to the text, The State and Revolution, and analyze the purely historical and polemical chapters that we have not yet considered. Chapters 2 and 3 analyze, respectively, the experience of 1848–1851 and that of the Paris Commune of 1871. Chapter 4 continues on the same issue to offer a deeper analysis of the state in classical texts, and chapter 6 essentially engages in a polemic with Kautsky and Plekhanov. I think that Lenin’s analysis in these chapters can now be better understood, because the expressive form of The State and Revolution slightly betrays the animus and intention of the work.
As we have argued, the main intention is to grasp the essential shift of the Russian revolution and propose to the workers’ subject the task of creating the proletarian dictatorship in order to bring about communism and wither away the state. The other chapters provide a series of elements that have already been outlined in the general introduction of the first chapter, and are concentrated in chapter 5, where the political perspective becomes more current and the project is outlined in practice.
Let us look into chapter 2. This is an interpretation of the Manifesto supported by a reading of Marx’s historical writings on the period. Starting from what we have argued so far, we will see that, rather than being an introduction or a stage toward chapter 5, which is undoubtedly fundamental, this second chapter can be regarded as its simplification. In other words, Lenin’s polemical needs and the opportunity to refer to the authority of classics as a foundation of his thought in no way represent a hindrance to the impact of the text. The reference to classics has the role of providing evidence in this as in other chapters. But it is worth underlining how in these chapters what matters is not so much the continuity, the systematic repetition of the presentation of the concept of the state, but the relevance of Lenin’s methodology, what we have named the Leninist anticipation of communism, as it is practically embodied in this phase of the Russian revolution.
First, it is worth noting the insistence, in the analysis of the Manifesto in chapter 2, on the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat: this is not an abstract concept but a particular and determinate function that must immediately be placed in a stage of development of the revolutionary process under analysis, that is, in the chapter on the economic bases of transition:
In depicting the most general phases of the development of the proletariat, we traced the more or less veiled civil war, raging within existing society up to the point where that war breaks out into open revolution, and where the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie lays the foundation for the sway of the proletariat. … We have seen above that the first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of the ruling class to win the battle of democracy. … The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the state, i.e., of the proletariat organized as the ruling class.2
Reclaiming the revolution as an element of the concept of the state here entails reclaiming the dictatorship as a primary aim of the revolution. This is why this theory was forgotten, because, as usual, the method of mystification has intervened in that of scientific analysis: “This definition of the state has never been explained in the prevailing propaganda and agitation literature of the official Social-Democratic parties. More than that, it has been deliberately ignored, for it is absolutely irreconcilable with reformism, and is a slap in the face for the common opportunist prejudices and philistine illusions about the ‘peaceful development of democracy.’”3
Mystification and demystification are economic categories, let us not forget that. Unfortunately these terms are now used as a substitute for “false” and “true.” But in Marxism mystification does not mean false, as opposed to true: a mystification can be true insofar as it exists and is given and real; there are mystifications that are infinitely more real and true than many other things. Mystification is not ungraspable; it is a reality linked to a particular utility and particular interests, and thus always determined by its class nature. From this perspective, the process of demystification is none other than the constant revelation of the interests behind an affirmation (or oblivion or neglect) and, in this case, behind a forgetting that is not secondary, because it affects the Manifesto, a crucial text for the whole of the communist tradition. These are the interests behind the mystification of the nature of the state:
The exploiting classes need political rule to maintain exploitation, i.e., in the selfish interests of an insignificant minority against the vast majority of all people. The exploited classes need political rule in order to completely abolish all exploitation, i.e., in the interests of the vast majority of the people, and against the insignificant minority consisting of the modern slave-owners—the landowners and capitalists. The petty-bourgeois democrats, those sham socialists who replaced the class struggle by dreams of class harmony, even pictured the socialist transformation in a dreamy fashion—not as the overthrow of the rule of the exploiting class, but as the peaceful submission of the minority to the majority which has become aware of its aims. This petty-bourgeois utopia, which is inseparable from the idea of the state being above classes, led in practice to the betrayal of the interests of the working classes, as was shown, for example, by the history of the French revolutions of 1848 and 1871, and by the experience of “socialist” participation in bourgeois Cabinets in Britain, France, Italy and other countries at the turn of the century.4
Of equal relevance is the method of mystification, which entails the notion of workers’ particular interests as a power and a foundation of the dictatorship. On the one hand, there is the mystification of the concept of the state in the name of particular nonproletarian interests; on the other hand, there is its demystification in the name of the particular interests of the proletariat as a “particular class”:
The overthrow of bourgeois rule can be accomplished only by the proletariat, the particular class whose economic conditions of existence prepare it for this task and provide it with the possibility and the power to perform it. While the bourgeoisie break up and disintegrate the peasantry and all the petty-bourgeois groups, they weld together, unite and organize the proletariat. Only the proletariat—by virtue of the economic role it plays in large-scale production—is capable of being the leader of all the working and exploited people, whom the bourgeoisie exploit, oppress and crush, often not less but more than they do the proletarians, but who are incapable of waging an independent struggle for their emancipation.5
Let us now return to chapter 2. Lenin immediately adds: “Marx’s theory of ‘the state, i.e., the proletariat organized as the ruling class,’ is inseparably bound up with the whole of his doctrine of the revolutionary role of the proletariat in history. The culmination of this rule is the proletarian dictatorship, the political rule of the proletariat.”6 The term “dictatorship of the proletariat” only appears later—in the Manifesto the paraphrase “the proletariat organized as a ruling class” is featured—but this does not change anything, because the other expression qualifies the paraphrase and allows for the concept of “particular class” to emerge. This is very important because Marx here overcomes the definition of the proletariat he had previously offered, where, soaked with the theories of the left Hegelians, the proletariat featured as a general class, as the universality of human interests. This view is still Hegelian and idealist, and is overcome insofar as the proletariat is no longer seen as a human, metaphysical, philosophical subject, but as the product of capitalist development. Here its particularity and that of its interests, as opposed to the social generality of capital, become the key to overturning the process, and it is clear that scientific communism can only be born out of this concept of particularity because only in this case can the dialectics be exercised on the subject, its independence, and the particularity of its immediately antagonistic interests: “Only the proletariat—by virtue of the economic role it plays in large-scale production—is capable of being the leader of all the working and exploited people, whom the bourgeoisie exploit, oppress and crush, often not less but more than they do the proletarians, but who are incapable of waging an independent struggle for their emancipation.”7
This notion of autonomy of proletarian emancipation, born out of the particularity of the subject, had to be discovered as a refusal of any preconceived generality, any burden of idealism and humanism that could be ascribed to the proletariat as such. Lenin’s affirmation of this notion gave great intensity to his Marxism, but this concept of the proletariat as a particular class was completely forgotten after Lenin, by social democrats and Marxist theorists alike, with their watered-down versions at the service of the pacific road to socialism. Sometimes this was done astutely, for instance, when, accompanying theoretical declarations in honor of the classics and tradition, they placed their emphasis on the general emancipating function of the actions of the proletariat. And from this, they moved toward the issue of alliances, the reaffirmation of the generality of workers’ comportment. But this is all false, practically and theoretically. The particularity of workers’ interests, the autonomous particularity of the interests of the working class, is absolutely irreducible and can only increase its autonomous particularity and turn into dictatorship. The interests of other sections of the proletariat (the large masses of all workers)—in other words, all of those interests that fall under the umbrella of the concept of working class as industrial productive labor, whether directly or indirectly—are not part of the revolutionary subject. Marx’s and Lenin’s concept of the working class has no appendix. The other proletarian interests can only be subjected to and dominated by the particular interest of the working class, and only then can the notion of alliance find meaning, insofar as these interests are dominated and used politically from outside, outside of any strategic confusion, and not from inside the workers’ interests, which are isolated, autonomous, particular, and sectarian. The notion of workers’ dictatorship that is taking shape in these passages is clear beyond any doubt: “The proletariat needs state power, a centralized organization of force, an organization of violence, both to crush the resistance of the exploiters and to lead the enormous mass of the population—the peasants, the petty bourgeoisie, and semi-proletarians.”8 Here, even the concept of violence seems to be a direct result of the particularity of workers’ interests: alliance is always a violence exercised against both exploiters and exploited; the interests of the exploited in general only coincide with those of the working class if one makes them coincide with the use of workers’ violence for the organization of the entire movement.
These ideas bring us straight to the core of the Marxist-Leninist theory of proletarian dictatorship and are extremely important for the theory of transition too: it seems clear to us that a theory of transition based on the issue of large alliances, for instance, and on structural reforms and reformist steps forward can acquire legitimacy in whomever’s theory but it has no foundation in the tradition of Marxism and Leninism. On the contrary, for Marxist and Leninist traditions, each problem always comes to be reduced to the essential issues of the emergence of the particular interests of the workers and the recognition that only violence can be an instrument of mediation in the revolutionary process.
From this standpoint, we will have to develop, as we do in the next lesson, the specific determination that requires a reunification of the particular interest with the exercise of violence. But the second chapter does not provide new insights into this. The only issue of note there is that Lenin also retraces Marx’s historical writings following the period of the Manifesto of the Communist Party, especially The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, and quotes two crucial passages concerning the interpretation of the overall process of proletarian revolution, especially in relation to the issue of bringing to light the revolutionary subject as it stands before him. In particular, at the beginning of the second paragraph of chapter 2, Lenin quotes what I think is one of the most beautiful of Marx’s passages, which begins thus: “But the revolution is thoroughgoing. It is still journeying through purgatory. It does its work methodically. By December 2, 1851 [the day of Louis Bonaparte’s coup d’état], it had completed one half of its preparatory work. It is now completing the other half. First it perfected the parliamentary power, in order to be able to overthrow it.”9 So the development of bourgeois political institutions is seen as the result of the workers’ struggle: “Now that it has attained this, it is perfecting the executive power, reducing it to its purest expression, isolating it, setting it up against itself as the sole object, in order to concentrate all its forces of destruction against it. And when it has done this second half of its preliminary work, Europe will leap from its seat and exultantly exclaim: well grubbed, old mole!”10 After all, “all revolutions perfected this machine instead of smashing it.”11 This is another crucial point: while it is true that institutional revolts and capitalist restructurings are the result and the effect of workers’ struggle, this perfecting still belongs to capital. Hence the constant paradox of capitalist development: that as it perfects itself, it becomes increasingly isolated and exposed to workers’ attacks; as it burns down all mediations and all developed forms of control over social movements, it becomes reduced to the executive, to the mere capacity of command and self-reproduction. The perfecting of capitalist development becomes its own precariousness as a rule: the more capital perfects itself, the more it approaches the revolutionary moment.
We have already seen this in different contexts, but it was important to have this conversation to see how Lenin’s notion of proletarian dictatorship loyally recovers Marx’s theory and uses it in a polemic against reformism, and, above all, to identify the need and urgency for a shift taking place in the Russian revolution. This is what we have highlighted in this lesson.
NOTES
1. We ought to be cautious when thinking about NEP. Di Leo regards it as a sort of cultural revolution that could have caused a rehabilitation of the mechanism of capitalist development and a resurgence of class struggle in Russia. See R. Di Leo, Operai e sistema sovietico [Workers and the Soviet system] (Bari: Laterza, 1970); and Di Leo, “Massa, avanguardia: gli operai e Lenin” [Vanguard mass: workers and Lenin], Critica Sociologica 12. There is also good documentation on the issue in general in Kaplan, Bolshevik Ideology and the Ethics of Soviet Labour, 1917–1920: The Formative Years (London: Peter Owen, 1969).
2. Marx and Engels, as cited in V. I. Lenin, The State and Revolution, trans. S. Apresyan and J. Ryordan, in Collected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1964), 25:406.
10. Marx, as cited in ibid., 25:410.