In its present form, this book dates back to 1972–1973, but some of it had been written (or at least partly written) ten years prior to that. Obviously, the present form of these essays is final. I decided against reworking any of these lessons for this edition. Why? Because in their relative naivety they are constructive, creative, and joyful.
How was the text born? Where did I get the idea from and why did my comrades at the time urge me to write it? In the 1970s, Lenin was very present in the movement, in the Italian Communist Party (PCI) as well as in the relatively distant areas of my militancy. Discussing his works and positioning the movements in relation to the Leninist tradition was essential. But the Leninist camp was divided along clear lines. I would say that there were two major interpretative trends in the workers’ movement of these times in Italy. Following Togliatti, the majority of the PCI defended an orthodox adherence to Leninism that was as philologically strict as it was opportunistic. In that climate, Gramscianism served a reformist theory of social change, and the concept of hegemony was a dispositif of consensus meant to substitute the will to power and Leninist indication toward the dictatorship of the proletariat. (Poor Gramsci, betrayed twice: first for being an authentically Leninist thinker and then for authoring an improbably democratic theory of communism.) The second trend present in the ideological market of the proletarian and workers’ movement of the 1960s and 1970s was that of other pseudo-Leninist groups. These were, above all, Marxist-Leninist (M-L); they were often organizational caricatures, symbolic rather than political, financial and appropriative rather than subversive and cooperative. In these groups and their sensibilities, the idea of Leninism had been attached to the twisted image drawn by Stalinism: Leninism entailed a delegation of revolutionary political decision to a leader or a leading group; it meant fetishism of authority and the glorification of dictatorial symbolism. In a popular way, they often represented communism as a church or, worse, as a sect, and at times as the vessel for the most unbridled populism.
Beyond the Italian borders, during the Cold War, on the international stage, forces and programs much more important than the caricatured figures of the Italian debate of the 1970s claimed to be Leninist and opposed both superpowers of that period. To them, the USSR was clearly a betrayal of Marxism. What needed to be worked out was whether a Leninist opposition to this Marxist betrayal was possible. In this context I was first and foremost interested in the current of the Bordighists, who engaged in a polemic against Stalinist voluntarism in the name of a harsh materialist objectivism. The Bordighists sought to reinterpret the history of leaps of insurrections described by Lenin in the framework of a theory of the revolutionary cycle. This theory in the first instance seemingly drifted away from the hope of a revolution, but subsequently established it as an event that was absolutely necessary. In those years, the 1960s and 1970s, some of my friends were Bordighist: a few comrades from Cremona in Italy, and Robert Paris and some others in France. To me, Bordighism responded to an open and effective demand for revolution by presenting itself simultaneously as resistance and insurrection, organization and event. Because of this, I had the impression that a theory of the subject like the one I was developing at the time could be submitted to such a dispositif. These theoretical alternatives to Leninism still exist today: they can be read without great political insight in Alain Badiou, for instance. But another trend interested me even more. Some friends had traveled back and forth between Europe and the United States and met the militants and theorists of the Facing Reality group. They came from the workers’ rank and file of the communist left that in the United States presented itself as Trotskyism, and offered very strong subjective interpretations of Leninism, linked to and also renovating the critical Marxism of Dunayevskaia. Their subjectivism, deeply rooted in the new working class of the New Deal, was made concrete through their continuing investigation of the relationship between the technical and political compositions of industrial labor. This was a high form of subjectivism open to the technological transformations of the organization of the labor force, the sociological changes of development, and a lively project of revolutionary transition.
Italian workerism was in a different position in relation to both the domestic and the international framework. Its position in relation to Lenin was wholly revisionist when it came to his theory and entirely pretentious when it came to his revolutionary project. From this perspective, Mario Tronti’s article “Lenin in England” was the starting point of our discussion. There, Tronti argued that in the situation of the 1960s Lenin’s theory confronted a radical transformation, a caesura in the social composition of the proletariat. This made a revision of the revolutionary project necessary. In the 1960s, at the journal Classe Operaia we all accepted this framing of the question on Lenin: some friends later renounced him or forgot and gave up this research project—I have been and still am convinced that we should return to Lenin again in the same way now as we did then.
In the following lessons from the 1960s and 1970s, I began revisiting and reworking the initial premise of Tronti (“Lenin lives on and confronts a new class reality”). First, the perception of a technical change in the composition of the proletariat that a political change corresponds to, or, in other words, revolutionary revisionism, is praised as an epistemological dispositif and as a means to organize the continuity of a revolutionary process: this is obviously made, produced, and reconfigured through struggles, victories, and defeats, but also and primarily through the ontological mutations of its protagonist subject.
Second, the crisis of theoretical Marxism after 1956 that followed the publication of reports on Stalin at the twentieth congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) was perceived to be a positive, constructive, and creative crisis. Revolutions and their necessities, theories and their possibilities exchanged roles: at this point in time, theory drove subjectivity and disposed it to becoming adequate to a new present. Then, a strange sort of “patristic process” began: this is to say that a renewal of Marxism began to unfold, similarly to the renewal affecting Christianity in the early centuries since its birth; on the ruins and the mistakes, on the political battles and ontological developments of the subject, a new synthesis for the future was being articulated.
Third, Lenin’s theory of revolution seemed to be far superior and infinitely purer than the Stalinist Thermidor. Revolutionary terror is real; it determines profound historical discontinuities and radically destroys the reproduction of the ruling classes: but it is also always mystifying when, alongside this drainage of the spirit, it reintroduces a new ruling class and new forms of command. Today, the Stalinist Thermidor is in no continuity with the Leninist revolution: a continuity of Leninism is only found in the heterodoxies of the October revolution. Lenin is continued in literature and in the imaginary with Mayakovsky, Bakhtin, and Lukács, in law with Pashukanis, in politics with Mao. Read Brecht’s Die Massnahme (The Measures Taken): there, in the monstrosity of revolutionary terror, you will find reclaimed the heterodox originality of the Leninist dispositif. Finally, seeing how theory could, after 1956, recover the place in the development of class struggle that it was denied by Stalinist administrative practice, we rediscovered in Leninism a productive matrix of new organizational forms, an ever stronger origin of the development of revolutionary power. In the early 1970s, we were experiencing the shift from the hegemony of the mass worker and the organizational hegemony of the outside intellectual to new organizational forms of the social worker and the labor force that were internal to intellectual production: this process of mutation of political subjectivity would clearly not stop there and we knew this. In fact, we already sensed the dawn of new organizational figures in praxis and revolutionary theory. To us, Lenin served as a methodological essay for the analysis of the transformation of class struggle; he was the shibboleth of a continuous revolutionary refoundation through the transformation of subjects.
At this point I would like to digress and remember the climate, the places, and the people who surrounded the work on these lessons on Lenin. As I said earlier, some of these lessons (particularly on the Soviets) had already been developed into articles in the early 1960s. Others, on Lenin and the theory of the party, were anticipated in lectures given at the University of Rome, La Sapienza. But it was not until later, at the University of Padua’s Institute of Political Science, which I chaired at the time (as a real “evil master”), that these lessons became thirty-three sessions. I am very proud of my academic work: I prepared the lectures, recounted them to very large audiences of students, and they were recorded. Then Gabriella and Elisabetta typed them up. I corrected them and prepared them for publication during the summer of 1973. I only held the course on Lenin between 1972 and 1973. The “evil master” did not repeat himself to students. There was a different course every year, and the debates at the weekly seminar at the Institute contributed to verifying the issues and fixing the points of didactic intervention for the coming year. Thinking about it now, I must admit that a seminar like that was impossible to digest for the Italian university system: it was really a Leninist seminar. In 1979 they put almost all of us in jail. But, before that, you could not imagine what, how much, and how subversive that Institute was capable of being. Luciano Ferrari Bravo, Sandro Serafini, Sergio Bologna, Guido Bianchini, Christian Marazzi, Maria Rosa Dalla Costa, Lisi Del Re, Ferruccio Gambino, and many others not unknown to the Italian intellectual chronicles of the last thirty years established themselves at the Institute. And then, many important friends and foreign comrades passed through: from Agnoli to Bruckner, from Harry Cleaver to John Merrington and Selma James, from Moulier Boutang to Coriat, to De Gaudemar. And even illustrious Italians, although they always disagreed, were compelled to confront us: from Rossana Rossanda to Trentin to Carniti; and then there were the laborites, from Giugni to Tarello to Ghezzi, all the way to the great Mancini, to Giannini, and to Caffe. And then there was the research our Institute carried out under the auspices of the Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (CNR) [National Research Institute], which in those years only a few other university institutes did. We produced important works on contemporary issues, from an analysis of the structures of centralization and the administrative procedures of the European Community, to direct investigations of the transformations of labor, between factory and society, between immaterial work and social work. The Institute as a whole oversaw a couple of scientific journals published by Feltrinelli and others by CLEUP [the University of Padua’s Publishing Cooperative]. The Leninist ideas of a theoretical reinvention of communism and an insurrectional overcoming of state structures toward liberty traveled and were updated amid this sea of initiatives and concrete projects.
The Institute was brought down by a repressive blitz thought up by a judge named Calogero and inspired by the occult structures of the state, of the Christian Democracy Party and the PCI. The blitz consisted in defining the Institute as the theoretical center of the Red Brigades. The heroic judge who came up with this theorem made an excellent judicial career for himself; the infamous informers and provocateurs who fabricated evidence and threw the professors of the Institute in jail are still now MPs on the reformist left (and the self-elected revolutionary left) or, obviously, on the political right. The Padua professors who supported the operation, typically inept in their work, had outstanding academic careers, even though they do not make any reference now in their curriculum (how pusillanimous!) to their work in the “April 7 affair.” But they could: the political class has not changed much, its anticommunism has proliferated, and today there is not even a need for a President of the Republic (the most honorable Pertini) to legitimize infamy by approving in only two days, on April 9, 1979, the preventive arrests of April 7.
I feel no bitterness or scandal in writing this. I only feel Leninist contempt for all the charioteer flies who call themselves socialist while serving patronage. There is no time to talk about the squalor of the Italian media of those times (and of today?); but this is no scandal, because infamy serves the owners of the means of communication, and dishonesty is amply compensated by them. Here there is only the certainty and denunciation of the fact that the whole of the Italian left has been involved in the corruption of the law ever since.
Most of the thoughts, passions, and people who carried out destructive, repressive, and reactionary actions against these “thirty-three lessons on Lenin” are dead and ended up in oblivion. These lessons, however, are now being republished. The political shift, which is only stammered in these lessons on a new theory of the organization of the exploited, between the working class and new forms of the proletariat, between the working class and the postmodern multitude, has greatly progressed today. But there is something more to it: in addition to the realizations that Leninist epistemology has imposed itself and that the revolutionary changeover from one subject to another across the historical process is truly and entirely perceivable and understood by everyone, there is also the fact that this shift is now presented as the very fabric of a global revolution, of the multitude against empire. Many of the premises of these lessons have certainly changed, as have many of the conditions that underpinned their reasoning. But does it matter? By imposing themselves on history, subjective forces alter the way that we know history; the movement of reality interprets reality itself. Leninist abstraction has returned to be real because the Leninist utopia is again a desire. It is much more amusing to see the great bourgeois men of letters recover, in this period of epochal transformation, the figure of Saint Paul as a testimony of the shift. To us, only Lenin seems to possess, for communism, the qualities of a Pauline revolution. We have a remaining task: to reconstruct historical materialism and communist theory in the imperial era. I am sure that these ancient lessons can serve as a useful introduction.
Rome, September 2003