Factory of Strategy: Thirty-Three Lessons on Lenin

These lessons were first published in 1978, around thirty-five years ago. They enjoyed their own life cycle, which I tried to describe in the preface to the second edition of 1998. Why give them another life now in an English translation that will address readers of different sensibilities, readers outside Europe (which was the field of Leninism), and younger readers, who, forty years ago, were not even born and now see Lenin’s Soviet Russia as an archaeological remain? Will it be possible, even, to give Lenin a new life?

I would like to dedicate this book to the militants of Occupy, to the Indignados in Spain, Greece, and Europe, and to the young people who, in the “Arab Spring,” have opened a new cycle of anticapitalist struggles for the emancipation of labor, social equality, and common freedom. Why would they welcome such a gift? What use could it be to them? These are the questions I will try to address here. I don’t know if I will succeed, but if I do, my political conscience, work, and militancy will be strengthened and maybe renewed as a result.

My starting point is a conviction, reiterated in all the volumes I coauthored with Michael Hardt (Empire, Multitude, and Commonwealth), that after 1968, through 1989, and especially during the first decade of the twenty-first century, we have embarked on a new epoch in human history; the conviction that the modernity that was definitively consolidated from the eighteenth century onward and that produced the emergence of socialist movements with capitalist development and the liberal revolution has come to its end. Capitalism, in the financial forms it takes on today and the crises it relentlessly undergoes, displays all the characteristics of its terminal stage. Occupy, the new movements of the Indignados, and the Springs seem to point to the other side of the expression of this crisis and radically manifest a new mode of thinking and acting for the emancipation of the oppressed. A Paris Commune: the novelty imagined by contemporary movements is a political form, finally discovered, that realizes the economic emancipation of labor, a new form of common life that is fundamentally expansive, a new season of critique of work and domination, and a spring of democratic invention.

However, on these premises, we do not forget Lenin or Robespierre. And we keep condemning Stalin as we condemn Napoleon. We don’t forget Bolivar as we don’t forget Jefferson—though we condemn many of the consequences of their actions. Having said that, this is old news, and we insist on that. It’s over, finished. But what has finished, really? What’s finished is the way these people, to impose their ideas and build a desirable society, experienced the state. They imagined and made use of the state as a necessary and fundamental tool of political activity. Here, instead, we find a place of radical discontinuity, of the very inversion of thought and political affects that we describe when speaking of this “rupture” with modernity; and this prevents us from seeing ourselves as disciples of any one of these heroes of modernity. We no longer believe that the state can be a motor of emancipation. Instead, we believe that the state is a sad and corrupt machine, and ontologically so, one that must definitively think of itself as an ill-fated abortion, a desire that never came to fruition because the commitment to unify democracy and capitalism, freedom and sovereignty could never be actualized. Today, we are aware of the crisis and the dissolution not only of the nation-state but also of sovereignty, and of the “autonomy of the political,” of that “body of the King” that from up in the heavens made power so sacred. We know that Jefferson, Robespierre, Bolivar, and Lenin too often hated that figure of power; but they always used it, they were always part of it.

But there is more to it in Lenin. Among the great politicians of modernity, Lenin is the only one who managed to posit the question of the “withering-away” and “extinction” of the state. Like Marx, he identified the profound connection between capitalism and modern sovereignty, and thus intuited the need to destroy not only capitalism but also the state. The attempt ended badly—that’s the least we can say, and with no irony. Nonetheless, we do not think that the experiment “necessarily” had to end badly. As Machiavelli taught us, there is no other necessity in human history than that born out of the victory or defeat that characterizes life in the continuous struggle between political subjects, interests, ideals, and productive forces. That attempt was defeated, but what didn’t disappear was its spirit, the drift that drives anyone who seeks freedom to propose a project for the dissolution of the state.

In the book we present here, forty years ago we were already trying to understand and demonstrate how Leninism was not the ferocious machine of the poor’s reappropriation of wealth and of the political dictatorship of an intellectual elite over the whole of society; it was not the mere military instrument of a subversive vanguard against the ancien régime. No: instead, thanks to its revolutionary ductility, Leninism could be configured as a new “political form” able to make itself adequate to different realities, both extensively (as it in fact did in Russia, China, Latin America, and globally) and intensively (singularly adapting itself and putting itself at the service of different working-class compositions and proletariats in the various countries oppressed by capitalism where it fought and sometimes imposed itself). I owe this knowledge to Italian Marxism, to Gramsci, and to all the subsequent developments, in operaismo, of revolutionary internationalism. Today, however, the task at hand is different. It is not only to demonstrate how Lenin’s method was effective in representing a new political figure in and beyond modernity, and how its organizational model was capable of adapting to different historical conditions through the seizure of the state. More than this, the task is to understand how the thought on the “withering-away of the state,” so central to Lenin’s agitation, has now become universal. Lenin as the withering-away of the state, the organized (not anarchic, but institutionally led) destruction of central power and of the “theological-political” nexus in all its forms, the reappropriation of freedom and of wealth: in this, can Lenin be a project for the future?

In the “Springs of 2011” in Arab countries, and in the Spanish Indignados revolt of M15 and then OWS, that project is present. Anticapitalism characterizes both the Arab “Springs” for freedom against dictatorial regimes and the Western ones for social justice against the financial crisis. And they are not mistaken in recognizing that the hegemony of financial capital presents itself on the one hand as “biopower” and on the other as a global, imperial power. But these “Springs” also present a series of novelties. These are:

(1) The reinterpretation of freedom as activity, as participation, and as “absolute democracy.” Central to this transformation is a set of material conditions: in particular, the acknowledgment of the transformations of labor, the postindustrial conditions of productive valorization, and the hegemonic emergence of the cognitive productive force. In focusing on this new figure of the labor processes and valorization, we can appreciate how the autonomy of the work of knowledge that represents the new subjectivity of living labor materially contests and dissolves any authoritarian organization that transcends the autonomy and immanence of producing.

(2) The reinterpretation of equality and the project of building an order of the “common.” On the basis of this claim lies the transformation of work, the hegemony of social cooperation in its postindustrial organization, and the ensuing “biopolitical” character assumed by production. A large part of this labor force has become precarious, mobile, and flexible, but from within such a condition, in the second or third generation of the precariat, the idea of an inequality of merit and of one’s role in the production of wealth, the ideology of debt, and the guilt of poverty are all dissolved and replaced by a consolidated recognition of the deep and creative equality of one’s common connection to work. This applies not only to advanced economies, but also to the young labor force of the Arab countries, which is highly educated and is also launched into the cognitive functions of the organization of production.

These are the fundamental and common characteristics of the “Springs.” Were their hopes realized? No. Instead of spring, hell broke out. In the Arab countries, a bloodthirsty process of stabilization followed the revolt. This was a sinister repetition of the spectacles of “pacification” and “normalization” that we had witnessed in past centuries: “Order reigns in Warsaw!” Political struggles were often turned into wars of religion. We are confronted with a monstrous alternative between the preservation of neofeudal regimes and the emergence of populist right-wing regimes that are often parareligious and racist, and always nationalist.

We have seen political, diplomatic, and war initiatives marked by a nonsensical and perverse pragmatism, almost worse than previous authoritarian regimes. In fact, we are faced with a shift from old disciplinary regimes to new regimes of control and exception, as we saw in Europe between the two great wars of the twentieth century.

In the Middle East, in Europe, Spain, and Greece, the repression of the “Springs” goes through processes of global financial regulation, that is, through a supranational duress implemented through a mechanism that thrusts individual countries into the new financial structures of global capitalism.

Biopolitical accumulation and cognitive valorization, wherever they are realized, are subjected to the dominion of banks and the global command of financial rent. We can read in this process and in the extreme violence of this shift a weakening of the efficiency of capitalist domination. As it becomes increasingly parasitical, its power does not so much arise from the activity of research and the organization of society for profit, as from the passive capturing of social rent. Financial capital usurps welfare and privatizes the public patrimony. It now produces technical governments to develop purely predatory functions for the state. In the United States, this process is probably even more powerful and violent; complicated and exacerbated by the demise of American hegemony over the rest of the world and the crisis of its constitutional shell and the “American dream,” a singular extremism has annihilated all debates between political forces and homogenizes the initiatives of power.

Has the “Spring of 2011” thus definitively come to an end? It would seem so. But the question is still open if only we see it all from other perspectives:

(1) The economic crisis is anything but over. The situation in the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf can hardly remain stable. The new technical and political composition of the subordinate classes and the new forms of accumulation render the ideological-religious system of control, which hides the now abyssal social differences, increasingly fragile. In this context, the “Spring of 2011” functions as a revolutionary potential, augmented only by the continuation and deepening of the economic crisis.

(2) In the West, as we have begun to see, an even more important process has been unfolding. Social and political movements—that we consider under the name of Occupy—produced a wealth of innovations with respect to the few past centuries of political history of the proletariat. In modernity, the great libertarian and socialist revolutions were characterized by the question of the seizure and use of the state. Every proletarian revolution, whether successful or not, aimed at establishing the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” Today, Occupy and the Indignados produce a new form of social revolution: they propose “constituent” revolutions that build new institutions for the appropriation of wealth, and for its production and management. They propose the citizenship of the common.

(3) We have entered an epoch when the central question arising from the “Spring” insurgencies concerns the construction of multitudinal political devices and institutions of democratic management of the common. This constituent thrust necessarily entails moments of destruction of existing forms of capitalist power and demands a federal space for the activity of the subaltern classes in the global realm.

Is a libertarian Lenin right for the present, then? Can the withering-away of the state be a question on the table again? We don’t know. However, just as Lenin was useful to us in our political infancy, so today, as the project of political autonomy of the new proletariat is mature, we propose his teachings anew, well aware of the provocation, and yet also capable, in the hell we are fighting in, of any alliance that can destroy the state and defend the old commitment to “peace and freedom” for every worker.