THE BURDEN OF proof of the difficult equilibrium of “Left-Wing” Communism fell on the development of class struggle in two ways. First, by exposing its negative side, the vicissitudes of the Communist International could not be more implacable evidence of the grave deviations “to the right” provoked by that polemic against “leftism,” so much so that the actual continuity of the international workers’ movement was definitively broken, with no possibility of turning back and restoring it. Secondly, it exposed its positive side in the interpretation of the new workers’ struggles around the world. In this respect, we should note that the moments of the second stratum, where Lenin tries to reinterpret some of the positions of “extremists,” found wide expression and affirmation through the struggles. In any case, the scission between the two sides of “Left-Wing” Communism was aggravated and made extreme by the development of class struggle.
Some people who are aware of this have treated Lenin as an empty shell to discard. Is it right to do so? If we were to keep to the reasons of tradition, to its respect and the habitual function of the institutional continuity of the workers’ movement, it would be right to do that. But from the dialectical standpoint it would not, because the two sides of the difficult Leninist equilibrium are real moments, not only present in the institutional history of the workers’ movement, but above all active in and inside the political composition of the working class. Here the victory of the institutional side was revealed to be ephemeral, and the tendency to develop the second side, through a new communist political class composition, became unstoppable. Our task will not consist in engaging in anti-Leninist polemics, but in trying to dig deep into workers’ struggles and make the tendency Lenin hints at emerge in a way that can win organizationally. It is a case for moving back from “Left-Wing” Communism to What Is to Be Done? and to Lenin’s refoundation of the new strategic project of the new political composition of the working class. The revolutionary task is to discover this undefeatable dialectical element. But this task cannot be proposed ambiguously again. I remember that starting in 1969 in the realm of the most apprised vanguards of the revolutionary movement, the rallying cry was, “Let’s start saying Lenin.” What came of it? A clumsy repetition of some aphorisms, the mechanical reproduction of a bureaucratic schema, theoretical reflux, and an accommodation of the positions of reformism. This is certainly not the trend we wish a resumption of Leninism to follow. It cannot sway between formalism and empiricism; it must rigorously become a substantial Leninist adherence to collective practice, to the political composition of the working class.
We need a historical reconstruction of the vicissitudes of class struggle from Lenin’s times to ours. How many and which periods of struggle have gone past? Certainly the period of that difficult equilibrium between workers and party, in which the figure of the mass worker, through spontaneity, compensated for the lack of a party leadership of the offensive: today, what new development is determined between the insuppressible movement of leadership “from below” of mass actions and the functions of the offensive? To use Lenin’s terms, how are “the movements of the left and the right arm” articulated? The historical crisis of capital that we are immersed in and that promises a repressive development in the long term tries out new mechanisms of class restructuration: how can the capitalist initiative be anticipated on this terrain and in this perspective? Moreover, in this new historical period of class struggle, how are the various components of the proletarian movement recomposed and restructured? What is the relationship between autonomy and leadership? We have often insisted on the importance attributed by the new political class composition to the movements of proletarian autonomy insofar as they anticipate and chase after the operations of capitalist power along internal and vertical lines: But how can a sense of direction be recomposed in this movement? How is it necessarily built from below and from within? We have insisted on the proletarian tendency toward direct reappropriation and the establishment of a dualism of power on these grounds in the medium term: how, given this situation, are the moments of the workers’ and proletarian dictatorship for communism established and built?
These are only some of the questions facing us and looking for a solution in the practice of the masses. In fact, even the question of a new “what is to be done?” is terribly complex, because, as Lenin taught us, the totality of the questions conditions and inseparably unites content and form. Now, the process of class reorganization starts from a series of crucial premises, the first of which is the urgency for class to reappropriate its own organization and immediately make it an instance of power. The problem of organization emerges and develops, in a Leninist way, from a total adherence to these fundamental comportments. The working class displays an impressive maturity, and the tendency of organization comes to affirm itself amid a burst of comportments of liberation and power struggles, a condensed and powerful mass looking for a new expressive force. As we are confronted with this violence of mass processes, this “geological explosion” of the movements, of what use can old aspirations and icons be? Again, from the standpoint of Leninist dialectics, we must recognize the new dialectical shift as it is determined not only by the domination of the totality over single contents and forms, but also by the self-productive power of the process, its violence and radical nature. The new “what is to be done?” is written by the masses today: Lenin alluded to this task when he dedicated the second stratum of his “Left-Wing” Communism to the masses and the violence of the international revolutionary process.
Note that what we are talking about is not old spontaneism or being “at the tail of the masses.” The continuous experimentation with organization of the new left and the constant risk of making relevant to the masses what the material movements of class built are subjective tasks; but they are “tasks,” not “delegations”! When the working class took delegation away from the institutional workers’ movement, it took it away from everyone. It was not simply the denunciation of the “betrayal” of the institutional movement, but a radical and substantial modification of the political composition of class. And if we wish to speak of “betrayal,” we need to clarify that it did not consist in failing to be loyal to the original model of Bolshevism but in failing to mediate, through a constant revolution of organization, the two elements of the difficult equilibrium Lenin had tried to mediate in “Left-Wing” Communism. Continuity could only amount to permanent transformation, the subjective risk of anticipating and revealing what the masses came to build into their process of liberation and power struggle. It is neither “delegation” nor “betrayal.” There can be no “delegation,” even to identify the terrain of a new organizational synthesis, but only the risk of theoretical and practical anticipation, and thus the development of a specific function of the mass movement itself.
How are we to move forward if the only practice of “what is to be done?” permitted today is one of intensification of all moments of autonomy? How is the shift to unity—not only unity of program but also unity of timing—given the “ultimate and decisive” moment that Lenin recognizes as our right commitment and that his last work places the greatest emphasis on? In other words, how is the materialist definition of the essence as connection and coordination turned into a definition of the movement as production, which is typical of Lenin’s materialist dialectics? Or in other words again, how can we configure, today, when faced with a determinate political class composition, that Leninist practice of the revolutionary inversion of the relation “composition-organization” into “organization-composition”?
We only have fragments of the needed answers to these questions, which are sparse but rooted in the comportment of the masses. Workers’ and proletarian autonomy is the fundamental fabric these comportments are rooted in, and from an internal analysis of workers autonomy, the chapters of a “what is to be done?” founded on the present composition of class unfold. At the level of tactics, it moves in the intermittent but continual shift from communist (radically egalitarian) demands on wages and salaries to actions of direct reappropriation, to movements of organization and management of power. At the level of organization, it is found in the development, in leaps and yet uninterrupted, from the pluralism of points of organization and the contemporary plurality of all forms of struggle (in the Leninist sense: both legal and illegal) to the coordination of the overall initiative and the accumulation of moments of clash. Workers’ autonomy has learned to manage a permanent organizational revolution. It does not fear the danger of a possible dispersion of its strength because it knows that this molecular fabric lives off irreducible power relations. Instead, it refuses all forms of gradualism in the management of the struggle because this destroys its strength and entails the delegation and representation of a power that the class knows it can manage. The highest realization of the working class today is that power does not come into being in representation and delegation, but is established in class itself. Strategy, the path toward a qualitative leap demanded by revolutionary dialectics, is in no way analogous to the process of representation.
This is a discontinuity that needs to be posited inside class, in its immediacy and particularity. The essence must be recognized as productive and denied as a connection.
Having said this, no problem has been solved; we only reframed the question from the standpoint of the political comportments of class. The mechanism of a solution can only emerge if one digs deeper into the mix of the power relations that constitute class composition, into the analysis of the indissoluble nexus that ties together the comportments of class and capitalist development. The relationship between the theory of Imperialism and the strategy of insurrection outlined by Lenin during the first imperialist war is a perfect model of the path of revolutionary thought that is adequate to its times. Now as then, the analysis must retrace the interconnections between struggles and capitalist development, between struggles and crisis, restructuration, and so on. Insofar as struggles have imposed development upon capital, their immanence in the material structure of power has become stronger. Hence the need for a punctual analysis that is always fixed on the class standpoint and always mobile in the interrelations of power. Today we have the chance to read, from our standpoint, what capital can no longer read from his. Schematics, formalism, and irrationalism permeate the human and social sciences of capital; they are no longer able to even describe the effects of exploitation, something that bourgeois radicalism had traced at points, and they no longer allow capital to restructure and intervene in the way that it managed to do until the 1930s. Only from the class standpoint can the current situation of power relations be explained. Capital can, and is forced to, come to this recognition only when it has the chance to preventively and repressively manipulate the forces that constitute the working-class standpoint. We could give many examples of this: inflation, the play of multinationals, and so on. But this is not the place for it. Here we only want to recover Lenin’s teaching in an intentional and informal manner: we must turn the analysis that capital twists to control development, leading to the deepening of the crisis.
With this, we come close to Lenin’s operation of the inversion of practice. The dialectical shift pivots on the crossing of revolutionary will and capitalist crisis, one that only the scientific class standpoint can outline. In this perspective, Leninism is the ability to turn Marxian scientific analysis into a weapon of the proletariat and the armory of the masses. We have seen, studied, and experienced moments when this happened. Criticism and self-criticism must now carry out the task in continuity with a new Leninist exegesis that is all practical and all mass-based. In fact, what we experienced in European countries and especially in Italy during the 1960s represented a formidable preparatory experience for a revolutionary process that will later mature into an offensive. But only if we deepen the critical and self-critical analysis of our 1905, only if we do this at the level of the masses, can the process of revolutionary organization adequately grow.
Terrible times lie ahead of us. The capitalist terrorist use of crisis, the repressive transformation of the state, the definitive change in the rule of development, and the fall of the law of value: we see all this and we will see it more and more heavily turned against us. We will have to resist. We will rediscover, with Lenin, that all of the weapons of the proletariat must be used, especially those that are most heavily denied to us by a tradition of defeat and betrayals. To this, we must add that Marx and Lenin’s definition of our task of destruction of the state for communism will only be given within the recognition of a newly recomposed strategic project, and in a subsequent cycle of international workers’ struggles.
It is your task, workers and students, all of us marching under the flags of communism, to solve, in subversive practice, the question of insurrection and liberation.