Factory of Strategy: Thirty-Three Lessons on Lenin

CHAPTER 4, ON “Supplementary Explanations by Engels,” keeps to the themes of the third chapter and reinstates the question of the smashing of the state with an eye to Engels’s writings after 1871. From our point of view, not much can be recovered from it, because it consists in a series of repetitions and philological points on questions that were already expressed, with no new elements of note.

One interesting point for us, both methodologically and substantially, is found in the fourth paragraph, entitled “Criticism of the Draft of the Erfurt Program.” Here Lenin raises the issue of the economic basis of communism and the relation between forms of capitalist development and planning. This is one of the few points made on this issue, and it is interesting to see how it is developed. Lenin writes:

We shall note in passing that Engels also makes an exceedingly valuable observation on economic questions, which shows how attentively and thoughtfully he watched the various changes occurring in modern capitalism, and how for this reason he was able to foresee to a certain extent the tasks of our present, the imperialist, epoch. Here is that observation: referring to the word “planlessness” (Planlosigkeit), used in the draft program, as characteristic of capitalism, Engels wrote: “When we pass from joint-stock companies to trusts which assume control over, and monopolize, whole industries, it is not only private production that ceases, but also planlessness.” Here we have what is most essential in the theoretical appraisal of the latest phase of capitalism, i.e., imperialism, namely, that capitalism becomes monopoly capitalism.¹

The comment on this quotation points out an important aspect of the theory of transition. Lenin is commenting on Engels’s polemic against the definition of capitalism as “planlessness” and approaches the concept of “collective capital,” or planned capital. If capitalism cannot be planned for the editor of the Erfurt, the revolutionary shift concerns a planned society. The shift to planning, for him, is a shift to socialism. Rightly, both Engels and Lenin oppose this definition. In fact, the process of planning can easily concern capital itself. The whole of capitalist development is geared toward this aim. Shareholders’ societies, trusts, and monopolies are large collectors of capital that gradually build up to the figure of the planned collective capital. Far from being the essence of socialism, planning is a typical feature of capital as it reaches its hegemonic maturity. If this is true, the transition does not coincide with planning, but with the destruction of the wage-labor relation. If this is true, then all the theories—and there are many of them—that have persecuted us with their privileging of planning as the field of the transition must be attacked. In particular, we must demystify and undermine the framework of the ideology of planning that has been fervidly sustained in the socialist and communist movement until now. Moreover, if planning is a weapon of capital, if capital has come to apprehend it and constrain it in itself so forcefully that it has become natural to it, then we can derive a methodological indication of the need to keep refounding the communist program of destruction of the state and focus on the most advanced level of capitalist development as it unfolds.

And here we come to another side of the same coin: the fact that capital assumes forms of management and socialization proper to the socialist movement, far from demonstrating the overcoming of socialism, is in fact a process of approaching and approximating a more advanced phase from which to attack and ground the distinction between the state and the capitalist organization of labor. This growing socialization of capital, rather than appearing as an end and a radical transformation or subversion of the capitalist system, actually displays an opposed and antagonistic side, demonstrating that within this mode of production the working class is taking shape and undergoing a metamorphosis that makes it see communism closer insofar as its own socialization as a class and its own place in the instrumentalism (rationalized, centralized, and simplified) of capitalist command allow for a direct shift to the seizure of power. The progress of capitalist socialization is not a transformation of the capitalist regime in itself, but simply an opening for new possibilities for the revolutionary offensive of the working class:

But however much they do plan, however much the capitalist magnates calculate in advance the volume of production on a national and even on an international scale, and however much they systematically regulate it, we still remain under capitalism—at its new stage, it is true, but still capitalism, without a doubt. The “proximity” of such capitalism to socialism should serve genuine representatives of the proletariat as an argument proving the proximity, facility, feasibility, and urgency of the socialist revolution, and not at all as an argument for tolerating the repudiation of such a revolution and the efforts to make capitalism look more attractive, something which all reformists are trying to do.²

In the sixth chapter on “The Vulgarization of Marxism by Opportunists,” we find a harsh polemic against Plekhanov and Kautsky and a position in favor of so-called left radicalism (especially that of Pannekoek). We have little to add to this. The main aspect of this chapter is the strong polemical character of the dictatorship of the proletariat against opportunists. This is also used against anarchists, but the content of the anarchists’ demands (when they were not presented in Proudhon’s terms, that is, in terms of autonomy, decentralization, and small artisan experimentations) is always assumed as a fundamental part of the revolutionary project of left-wing communism. Against the anarchists, Lenin insists on the issue of the “leap” and the “break” of proletarian dictatorship as a moment for revolutionaries to concentrate on; but then, he uses the anarchists against the reformists, because Bolshevism—that is, the communist notion of the party and the state (as autonomous realities, one in terms of the overall mediation of the revolutionary process, and the other as the adversary and thus essentially as an object against which to turn the revolutionary force)—has nothing to do with reformism. From the anarchists, Lenin recuperates, holds forcefully, and makes credible the antistate stance, the hatred for any form of exploitation of human beings.

We have come to the end of our reading of The State and Revolution. This is a precious book, and reading and rereading it is the least we can do with it. Obviously, at every reading one needs to choose a standpoint on which to insist and focus. We have essentially tried to identify the issue of transition from a political standpoint, one of a critique of political economy, rather than insist on the prediction of some formal and sometimes ideological characteristics of the future communist state. This reading might have remained blocked in the idea initially declared at the beginning of our conversations. This idea was that Lenin’s Marxism is the most perfect instrument the communist tradition has left us: an instrument, a method. Thus nothing would be less Leninist than putting The State and Revolution on a pedestal and treating it as a text on which to mould the solutions that we provide, time and again, to the practical and theoretical problems of class struggle. Lenin’s method is the most refined form Marxist method because it is based on a series of extremely effective and politically determined concepts: these are, for instance, the concept of determinate historical formation, which can be translated into one of class composition; the concept of tendency, which is a theoretical and practical anticipation; the configuration of the revolutionary process as a product of a mass workers’ subject located inside the power relations that are time and again redetermined with other strata of the proletariat and eventually with other classes, from within which this relation is resolved into a definition of both strategy and tactics. Lenin’s method is the method of this subject, and the concept of the party as mediation between spontaneity and subjectivity, between mass movement and offensive movement, is nothing but the determinate form of this mass method.

Beyond the limitations of this essay, which we have, I think, strongly underlined, we can observe that the so-called Marxism of the 1960s, the Marxism that we have contributed to by practically developing and defining it as a new theoretical and revolutionary fabric and that is now affirmed as a fundamental part of the movement, can legitimately refer to Leninism. Undoubtedly, the reformists, having made Lenin vulgar, now try to recuperate the Marxism of the 1960s and, with books, anthologies, and conferences, with small bureaucratic support operations, try to make it meek and locate it within reformism. But this is a waste of time! The Marxism of the 1960s is vaccinated against this recuperation. In fact, this Marxism started from the position of a strong polemic against Lenin, and this is why, among other reasons, it could not read Lenin outside of the stringent orthodoxy into which communist parties had forced it, a stringent and mortifying orthodoxy that prevented one from grasping the constructive and expansive aspects of the Leninist method. Lenin was known as the author of Imperialism, but we know very well now that this “popular essay” does not correspond to the situation of imperialism we find ourselves in, to our thoughts or actions. Lenin was defined as the theoretician of the centralized party, of the rigid, instrumental, and bureaucratic relation with the union and workers’ struggles, but the struggles have decided to break with this relation of subordination. Lenin, finally, was defined as a theoretician of the unprincipled alliances determined by reformism.

Now, on these premises, in the context of the first phase of development of Marxism in the 1960s, critique could not help but involve Lenin’s thought. The elements of strength that the new Marxism had outlined—especially the formidable discovery of this revolutionary subject with new characteristics, a working-class subject that has completely changed its power relations with the rest of society insofar as the socialization of capital has proceeded and the whole of society was posited against the working class—globally undermined the way social democracy and the Third Internationalism had used Lenin. Thus, the attack waged against Leninism was positively aimed at destroying the fetishistic definition of the current force of capital as a state monopoly, as reformists were imposing this emerging definition as a doctrinal image. The theory of the party was attacked because it was a theory of the extraneousness and subordination of the proletariat; the theory of alliances and all the dirt it carried with it was also attacked; and so on.

But the experience of the Marxism of the 1960s allowed us to recover Lenin and find fertile ground in him, because this recovery completely discounted the critiques that were leveled in the past and found in Lenin’s method the basis, the support, and the instrument to carry them out. Perhaps Lenin operated, in relation to the Second International, the same shift that the Marxism of the 1960s forced in relation to the Third International. His initial reasons derived not only from a theoretically superior intelligence, but also and especially from a braver and more advanced positioning of class struggle: Leninism and our Marxism find a formidable path to take in this compactness of theoretical and practical thought.

Lenin is our new teacher, always alive and adequate, because Leninism, as an instrument and a method, is born not only out of its place inside the composition of the working class, or simply out of its ability to describe and analyze class experiences and generalize them in order to turn them into a weapon. And Leninism does not simply emerge from the shift from the weapons of critique to the critique of weapons in a determinate class composition. It also and above all is able to keep measuring up to and verifying the “leaps” determined by the revolutionary process. Lenin’s thought represents the paradox of an absolutely consistent theoretical continuity based on key concepts and on an elasticity that is ready to continuously adapt to new situations. This paradoxical characteristic is also typical of Marx’s thought, at least where Marx confronts the level of politics and history; but Lenin takes this all a step up. The Marxism of the 1960s will be able to consolidate its hegemony in communist theory, in Italy and in all advanced capitalist countries, when it rids the scene of all the archaic residues of traditional Third Internationalism, and recovers and develops this Leninism.

To conclude: today our fundamental task is comforted by reading Lenin’s texts. Our task is to carry out a systematization not only of the main concepts but also and above all of their relation to collective practice that, for the first time, we can now regard as a mature aspect of the communist project. The great changes our Leninism needs are not dependent on Lenin’s limits; they derive from the revolutionary and communist maturity of class. Leninism today will demonstrate this ability to traverse the masses into the class and subordinate any theoretical approach to what the direct practice of revolutionary struggle is. It is no longer possible to move thought forward outside a relation of this kind. This is a provisional conclusion that we accept, reread, use, critique, and recognize ourselves in Lenin; but beyond all this, Lenin made his revolution. This is crucial. Any conclusion must take this into account and can only be provisional until our own revolution measures up to the classics.