Factory of Strategy: Thirty-Three Lessons on Lenin

In this chapter, three main theoretical issues arise and need to be interpreted. The first emerges from a reading of Marx’s historical writings and his notion of the revolutionary shift in the context of Lenin’s polemic against the vulgar social democratic conception of it. Lenin refers to Marx’s text on the Civil War in France and to the last preface to the German edition of the Manifesto of the Communist Party, dated 1872. He highlights Marx and Engels’s correction in this preface, quoting the following text: “One thing especially was proved by the Commune: that ‘the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery and wield it for its own purposes.’”¹ Moreover, in 1871, in a famous letter to Kugelmann, a Hamburg doctor and friend of his, Marx writes:

What we are interested in pointing out is not so much that Lenin recovers Marx’s stance on this issue, but that in his own polemic with revisionists he raises a fundamental question that introduces us to a debate that is also very much alive in the workers’ movement today. This helps us verify the currency of The State and Revolution in the spirit in which we have done so far: “Here it will be sufficient to note that the current, vulgar ‘interpretation’ of Marx’s famous statement just quoted [that is, from the 1872 Preface] is that Marx here allegedly emphasizes the idea of slow development in contradistinction to the seizure of power, and so on. As a matter of fact, the exact opposite is the case. Marx’s idea is that the working class must break up, smash the ‘readymade state machinery,’ and not confine itself merely to laying hold of it.”³ How did revisionists interpret the passage we have just read? Let us read it again: “one thing especially was proved by the Commune: that ‘the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery and wield it for its own purposes.’” What was the revisionist interpretation of this? If we cannot simply and purely lay hold of the state machinery, we must create the general conditions to seize it. The process becomes one of complex and articulated development: a process that entails reforming the structure. But in fact, according to Lenin, the opposite is the case: Marx thinks that the working class must break and smash the state machinery as it is ready-made, rather than simply get hold of it. Lenin’s interpretation is confirmed by Marx’s text; the revisionist reading is only based on words and does not hold water.

But we are not interested in mere philology. We want to grasp the implicit issue here, which concerns the development of struggle and the seizure of power. Clearly, for revisionists the concept of development is primary and counterpoised to that of power. Despite its many variants, this is their scheme. In the context of the class composition recorded between 1870 and 1917, revisionists conceived of political development as being the same as economic development: political development and economic development are almost completely juxtaposed and the economic aspect becomes fundamental. From the classical social democratic perspective to the current communist one, revisionism has centered on a strategy of structural reforms and still upholds the hegemony of the economic instance: change in the economic structures is a condition of the seizure of power. This ends up reinforcing the economist and opportunist perspective and thus imposes an attitude that takes responsibility for the bourgeois state, which is a collaborationist and participatory stance. Methodologically and substantially, Lenin insists on a revolutionary notion that is formed by an emphasis on rupture, on smashing up; this becomes all the more relevant as the development and place of class struggle change in the economic context.

In no way does Lenin neglect the question of the relationship between development and the ability to break with it: he posits it in dialectical terms, and the discontinuity of the process does not elude but rather insists on the complexity of relations, choices, and alternatives. This insistence characterizes all of Lenin’s activity. We find it in the first period, during the 1890s; it emerges when he raises the issue of the insurrections of 1905, and especially after 1905, in his political work, when he gathers together his previous ideas and develops them theoretically in the Philosophical Notebooks. The relation between development and rupture, the definition of a discontinuous continuity of the revolutionary process, is one of the most important aspects of Lenin’s thought. Grasping this particular root as it rises up from a dialectical analysis offered in Marx’s writings on the Commune and recognizing its importance in the polemic against revisionism only reinforce our conviction that this is a fundamentally current and preliminary motif in Marx’s and Lenin’s thought.

A second fundamental aspect that requires some clarification in our reading is illustrated in other sections of the third chapter, in the context of another polemic. It might seem strange, but Lenin’s thought often emerges from polemics to which he offers a response—and what an odd response! Lenin’s response is not constrained by the object of the polemic; it is projected forward. It does not accept the operative field of the provocation; it subverts it as it responds to it. In any case, the second main aspect concerning us here is spurred by Bernstein’s critique of Lenin’s concept of power and of the organization of power after the revolution. On the basis of Marx’s discussion of the example of the Commune, Lenin claims that the withering-away of the state emerges from the possibility that all workers, organized as a ruling class, directly partake in the management of power. Bernstein and revisionists oppose Lenin on this and accuse him of “primitive democracy,” of not taking into account the complexity of advanced capitalist societies and so on.

How many times have revisionists leveled this accusation! But in Lenin, beyond the scientific definition, we also find the sensation and the idea that it is precisely the development of the capitalist base as a complex material one that allows for the direct management of power. The problem is always one of standpoint. When things are seen from the workers’ standpoint, the fact that the complexity of industrial development turns the labor force into a unified element, an abstract capacity whose function is totally interchangeable, allows for the overall direct control of economic and political development:

Capitalist culture has created large-scale production, factories, railways, the postal service, telephones, etc., and on this basis the great majority of the functions of the old “state power” have become so simplified and can be reduced to such exceedingly simple operations of registration, filing, and checking that they can be easily performed by every literate person, can quite easily be performed for ordinary “workmen’s wages,” and that these functions can (and must) be stripped of every shadow of privilege, of every semblance of “official grandeur.” All officials, without exception, elected and subject to recall at any time, their salaries reduced to the level of ordinary “workmen’s wages”—these simple and “self-evident” democratic measures, while completely uniting the interests of the workers and the majority of the peasants, at the same time serve as a bridge leading from capitalism to socialism. These measures concern the reorganization of the state, the purely political reorganization of society; but, of course, they acquire their full meaning and significance only in connection with the “expropriation of the expropriators” either being accomplished or in preparation, i.e., with the transformation of capitalist private ownership of the means of production into social ownership.⁴

At this stage many problems might arise in relation to the distorted form of this shift. But we have already criticized this and recognized that there is much optimism in Lenin’s notion of the transition. Yet we know that Lenin’s illusion can be recovered when a high level of development has determined an adequate material basis and thus a capable labor force, to the degree that its labor, or its refusal of labor, can produce communism. This is affirmed again when Lenin writes:

There is no trace of utopianism in Marx, in the sense that he made up or invented a “new” society. No, he studied the birth of the new society out of the old, and the forms of transition from the latter to the former, as a mass proletarian movement and tried to draw practical lessons from it. He “Learned” from the Commune, just as all the great revolutionary thinkers learned unhesitatingly from the experience of great movements of the oppressed classes, and never addressed them with pedantic “homilies.”⁵

Marx deduced from the whole history of socialism and the political struggle that the state was bound to disappear, and that the transitional form of its disappearance (the transition from state to non-state) would be the “proletariat organized as the ruling class.” Marx, however, did not set out to discover the political forms of this future stage. He limited himself to carefully observing French history, to analyzing it, and to drawing the conclusion to which the year 1851 had led, namely, that matters were moving towards destruction of the bourgeois state machine. And when the mass revolutionary movement of the proletariat burst forth, Marx, in spite of its failure, in spite of its short life and patent weakness, began to study the forms it had discovered. The Commune is the form “at last discovered” by the proletarian revolution, under which the economic emancipation of labor can take place. The Commune is the first attempt by a proletarian revolution to smash the bourgeois state machine; and it is the political form “at last discovered,” by which the smashed state machine can and must be replaced. We shall see further on that the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917, in different circumstances and under different conditions, continue the work of the Commune and confirm Marx’s brilliant historical analysis.⁶

The main aspect here is the relation between the base and the revolutionary movement: a different way of addressing in material terms the continuous discontinuity that had seemingly configured a purely logical process. The “shift to communism” is a “leap” that starts on the springboard determined by capitalist development; the role of theory is to mediate the reality that confronts us by means of a “historical-natural” method with no utopian undertones, even though the method projects our intelligence and our practical activities onto moments and realities that seem defeated in everyday practice. But the tendency—the scientific moment of the mediation between reality, objectivity, and subjectivity, between what confronts us and what the working class will do—grasps, indeed scientifically and beyond appearances, this irresistible revolutionary process. Contrary to the reformists, who claim that the leap is something unpredictable and purely subjective, Lenin thinks that the discontinuity of the process is embodied in reality, in the material basis, and must be recognized and analyzed. This material basis is as stable as it is great: the large industry, the factory, the social infrastructure of industry, and, from an upturned standpoint, the worker that this production determines. Today human beings can be used as producers beyond any qualification outside of what they are bearers of as commodity labor, because they are born, built, and instructed in this society, and thus become an entirely interchangeable element of its function as a whole. But the worker, while being inside this reality, also has the ability to dominate it in terms of elementary registers and controls, not simply by virtue of the reality of her proletarianization and the relation with the material basis that is open to her, but rather because this proletarianization equalizes everyone at the highest level of capitalist production. Capitalist production today is already open to this possibility and now only mystifies it in terms of command, hierarchical development, and the reproduction of the existing structure. But this basis, from both an objective and a subjective point of view, was determined in antagonistic and potentially revolutionary terms. This is another methodological aspect that the third chapter offers to our understanding of the fifth chapter, which it complements.

The third and last element concerning us in this chapter is even more important: it gathers together a series of fundamental motives for the theory of the revolutionary shift as well as the theory of the party. Let us read the last passage that Lenin quotes from Marx:

The multiplicity of interpretations to which the Commune has been subjected, and the multiplicity of interests which expressed themselves in it show that it was a thoroughly flexible political form, while all previous forms of government had been essentially repressive. Its true secret was this: it was essentially a working-class government, the result of the struggle of the producing against the appropriating class, the political form at last discovered under which the economic emancipation of labor could be accomplished. … Except on this last condition, the Communal Constitution would have been an impossibility and a delusion.⁷

“A thoroughly flexible political form”: proletarian dictatorship becomes here identical with the shift from state to nonstate. In Marx and Lenin, parallel to the affirmation of the particular process of insurrection, dictatorship, and withering-away, a tripartite formula, we find allusions to a binary formula that is much more realistic and true in practice, and now serves as the basis of our political discourse. If the problem of the abolition of labor is fundamental, then the binary formula is adequate to it. The Commune is not simply a dictatorship; it is a thoroughly flexible political form, an ongoing transition from state to nonstate. Here Lenin’s political position is impatiently exposed through an interpretation of this important quotation from Marx, where the shift is seen as the action of a proletarian engaged in an advanced level of struggle: in this, the binary formula of the immediate withering-away of the state is the correlative, both the cause and the effect, of the immediate expansiveness of the seizure of power of the proletariat. The opposition between this flexible political form and all other previous forms of government that had been unilaterally repressive is almost Lenin’s preventive self-criticism of the dictatorship of the proletariat, where the proletariat is conceived in a static and repressive way as a dogma of the shift. The dictatorship of the proletariat is a crucial and essential shift, but nothing could be more damaging than seeing it as inessential, and nothing could be more dangerous than seeing it as static and nondialectical, that is, conceiving of it outside of the logic of the continuous discontinuity and thus outside of the relation between the material basis and the development of subjectivity (or we might say outside of the Maoist interpretation of the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat as a permanent revolution).

In addition to the other beautiful things that can be found in chapter 3 of The State and Revolution, these three issues seem fundamental. Let us summarize them. The first is Lenin’s critique of the revisionist and social democratic understanding of the relation between development and revolution. Lenin clarifies, through Marx, that this is a relation of discontinuity and rupture. He does so in polemical terms, and this becomes more important as revolutionary convictions mature alongside the power of the working class in capitalist society. The second fundamental issue concerns the relation between the material basis and the possibility of a direct government of class: contrary to reformist discourse and practice, the direct government of workers is confirmed by the development and maturation of the formation of the material basis. On the premises of the previous two, the third aspect concerns the flexible political form of workers’ government as an ability to immediately develop the process of withering away, of liberation from labor, as soon as the state is smashed. These moments converge on the reaffirmation of the essential nature of the revolutionary shift inside and against development, while they help us define this shift as a binary process, wherein the process of the withering-away of labor there can immediately begin. Today our analysis confirms Marx’s “illusion” and Lenin’s “optimism.”