Because it is the party’s function to prepare the revolution, it is – simultaneously and equally – both producer and product, both precondition and result of the revolutionary mass movement.
Georg Lukács, Lenin: The Unity of His Thought
For a certain North American and European left, revolution today names more a problem than it does a solution. We know that revolutions happen, but we have a hard time believing in revolution. We have a hard time believing in revolution because we are no longer confident that the revolutionary process leads in an emancipatory egalitarian direction. There are revolutions, but they are not for us, not the revolutions we were hoping for, not proletarian revolutions. And even if today there were or could be revolutions of the proletarianized, they would not be enough. Our goals are far grander (or is this grandeur but an inverted form of their diminution?).
I claim we no longer believe in revolution because we no longer adopt the perspective from which we see ourselves as revolutionaries, the perspective of the communist party. Absent this political perspective, only capitalism with its permanent crises, innovations, and transformations appears as capable of effecting revolutionary change. Fortunately, the crowds and demonstrations of the last decade suggest that a new party perspective may be emerging. The collective practices and intensities exhibited in current struggles, as well as the limits against which these struggles falter, are renewing the salience of the party question on the left. As people experience their collective power, the desire for something like a party is re-emerging, a party as the organized site of our belief in revolution.
In this essay I focus on two, seemingly opposed, approaches to organization and revolution. My argument begins with Georg Lukács’ account of the Leninist innovation: the realization that the core of historical materialism is the actuality of the proletarian revolution. This enables me to draw out the articulation of revolution, proletariat, party, and state central to the event of 1917. The force of this articulation comes from anticipation, the capacity of the future revolution to coordinate the actions that will bring it about. I then turn to our present setting wherein the links between revolution, proletariat, party, and state have dissolved. Here I engage Michael Hardt’s and Antonio Negri’s discussion in Commonwealth, the third volume of their influential Empire trilogy. For Hardt and Negri, revolution involves biopolitics rather than the state, democracy rather than the party, and identity rather than the proletariat. The problem with their account is that it precludes the temporality that would produce revolutionary practice. Revolution is present as potential, a possibility that flows out of what we are already doing. Hardt and Negri view revolution as a continuation of the practices of biopolitical production and capitalism’s own revolutionary innovation. There is no revolutionary break, no negation of some practices, trajectories, and potentials in the forwarding of emancipatory egalitarian aims. Theirs is thus a ‘revolution without revolution’. In contrast, the future projected in Lenin’s assumption of the actuality of revolution coordinates political action to bring revolution into being. The party anticipates the revolution, materializing the belief that makes revolution possible not just as an outflow or overflow of present possibilities, but as an effect of the negation of some practices, trajectories, and potentials and the forcing of others.
My argument relies on Jean-Pierre Dupuy’s notion of ‘projected time’. Dupuy introduces ‘projected time’ as a name for ‘coordination by means of the future’, that is, as a term for a temporal metaphysics wherein ‘the future counterfactually determines the past, which in turn causally determines it. The future is fixed, but its necessity exists only in retrospect.’1 From the perspective of the future, what led to it was necessary. It could not have been otherwise because everything that happened led to it. Before an event occurs, there are possibilities, options. After something happens, it appears inevitable, destined. Projected time thus assumes a future inevitability, establishing this inevitability as the fixed point from which to decide upon present actions.
Projected time might seem strange. Dupuy explains that it is actually ‘the metaphysics of the ordinary person’. It encompasses ideas of predestination, fate, destiny, ‘everything happens for a reason’, even psychoanalysis, to an extent. Projected time is also ‘the temporality peculiar to someone who carries out a plan that he has given to himself to carry out’.2 The example of planning makes clear how projected time is not a prediction of what will happen, a fantasy about what one wants to happen, or a set of proposals regarding what should happen.3 Instead, a certain outcome generates the processes that lead to it. Again, in this temporal metaphysics, the future is not the inevitable effect of a chain of causes. The future is itself the cause. The future produces the past that will give rise to it.
Dupuy developed the metaphysics of projected time in the context of an investigation of catastrophe. People have a hard time believing in imminent disaster, even in the face of abundant information that the worst is about to happen. Dupuy concluded that the obstacle preventing people from acting is not one of knowledge but one of belief. They know what will happen; nevertheless they do not believe that it will happen. Projected time addresses this level of belief. Dupuy wagers that since it is ‘more difficult to reject a fate than to avoid a calamity, the threat of catastrophe becomes far more credible if it appears to be something that is inevitable’.4 That very inevitability can mobilize the determination and imagination necessary for avoiding the inevitable. The logic here is prophetic: the prophet announces the fate of the people so that they will change their ways and thereby escape their destiny. Of course, the tragic rejoinder is that the effort to escape destiny brings about its fulfilment. Yet this logic, too, involves coordination by means of the future insofar as it is still the fixed future whose necessity is retroactively revealed. In Dupuy’s words, ‘an event becomes possible only in making itself possible’.5
Lenin: A Study on the Unity of His Thought is Lukács’ account of the enormity of V.I. Lenin’s theoretical contribution: Lenin realized Marxist theory in practice. Written in the immediate aftermath of Lenin’s death in 1924, Lenin is more than a shorter, livelier account of the party than the one in the better known last chapter of History and Class Consciousness, ‘Towards a Methodology of the Problem of Organization’, written two years earlier. Lenin is a presentation of Leninism as a new phase of Marxism. So even as the two works overlap in their emphasis on organization as ‘the form of mediation between theory and practice’, the latter work positions Lenin as ‘the only theoretician equal to Marx’.6 Lenin’s deployment of historical materialism in concrete struggle enables us to recognize, retroactively, Marxism’s inner truth: ‘historical materialism is the theory of the proletarian revolution.’7 Not all Marxists share this insight. Vulgar Marxists, Lukács notes, see crises as temporary and rebellion as irrational given the invincibility of the capitalist system. Lenin is unique. Because he grasps ‘the actuality of the revolution’, Lenin can explain the events around him in its terms. He posits a certain future – the revolution – and lets this future guide action in the present. Lenin thus identifies the mechanism through which organization mediates between theory and practice, a point hinted at yet undeveloped in the earlier essay.8 The projected future of revolution generates the practices that materialize the belief necessary for its realization.
The actuality of revolution could suggest iron laws of history or economistic determinism. This is not Lukács’ point – and it could not be his point insofar as he emphasizes that it is only with Lenin that the truth of historical materialism appears. Lenin changes the past, the relation between political economy and class struggle; he activates a different political process. Moreover, Lukács criticizes, repeatedly, mechanistic interpretations of Marx. And while most readers of Lukács emphasize the concept of ‘totality’ in his work, Lenin is striking for its distance from the concept. As Martin Jay notes, Lukács presents in Lenin ‘a modified “de-centred” or non-genetic view of totality. No longer was the proletariat the meta-subjective totalizer of history.’9 Jay doesn’t tell us what the de-centring force or event might be. I think it is fruitfully understood as the future. The fact that there will be a revolution, that proletarian revolution is on the agenda, affects the choices, actions, and groups that produce it.
Projected time tells us how to read Lukács’ claim that ‘the proletarian revolution constitutes the living core of Marxism’.10 The revolutionary future determines the actions that bring it about. Historical materialism isn’t primarily an account of the past. It’s a relation to a specific future, one where ‘revolution is already on its agenda’.11 Lukács observes that the error of Kautsky, Plekhanov, and others lay in their placing the revolution into a future so distant that the actions of the day had no bearing on it. A distant future lacks coordinating capacity. In contrast, he argues that Lenin made the actuality of revolution into the point from which questions are evaluated and individual actions are considered. The revolution functions as ‘a reality constituting a norm for our own actions’.12 This certain future enables choices and decisions. It cuts through multiple tendencies, the manifold conflicts of groups and individuals within the masses, as well as the economic fatalism that contributes to capitalism’s own response to crises. The fact of revolution operates as a force of negation within the present that pushes forth the practices necessary to it.
Lukács presents Lenin as making the imminent event of revolution into concrete reality. For Lenin, the actuality of proletarian revolution answers the question of the character of revolution in Russia, it is proletarian rather than bourgeois. This actuality announces as well the class whose role it is to lead the revolution, the proletariat. Lukács observes that most Marxists knew that capitalist developments would lead to proletarian revolution. Lenin, however, was unique in his application of this insight. Lukács notes how Lenin used it ‘to establish firm guide-lines for all questions on the daily agenda, whether they were political or economic, involved theory or tactics, agitation or organization’.13 With this attention to ongoing struggles, Lenin shifts the register of the question of revolution from knowledge to belief. Concrete practices, tactics, organization, and agitation not only manifest but also produce belief (this materialist notion of belief comes from Žižek who emphasizes that belief is how we act in the face of what we know).14 A specific vision of the future – proletarian revolution – determines in the present the tactics that will bring the future about.
The projected future of proletarian revolution exhibits coordinating capacity in three interrelated ways: (1) it engenders belief in the revolutionary task of the proletariat; (2) it establishes the role of the revolutionary party; and (3) it determines the proper understanding of the state. In each instance, Lukács brings out Lenin’s crucial contribution: Lenin concretizes theory in practice. He approaches practical questions from the perspective of the actuality of revolution. As tactics and organization materialize belief in the revolution, they help bring about the revolution that caused them.
First, Lukács notes that Lenin sees more than the misery of the proletariat. Because he looks at the condition of the proletariat in light of the fact that revolution is ‘already on the historical agenda as a practical reality’, Lenin detects ‘the revolutionary element “which will bring down the old order”’.15 Lenin doesn’t fall prey to economic fatalism. He sees the future in the present and works to bring out belief in that future. The repercussion for practical struggle is that Lenin recognizes that the bourgeoisie is no longer a revolutionary class. The task of revolution has passed to the proletariat.
Recognition of the fact that the bourgeoisie is no longer a revolutionary class enables a concrete understanding of the situation in Russia. Lukács points out that even if it was not clear to participants at the time, the actuality of the revolution was at the core of debates within Russian socialism. Those who projected proletarian revolution into a distant future emphasized the links between economic development and democracy. They thought the bourgeoisie needed to complete its revolution before the proletariat entered the stage. If the proletariat asserted itself too early, the bourgeoisie would ally with Tsarism thereby setting back proletarian progress. In contrast, Lenin understood that the bourgeoisie had already ‘ceased to be a revolutionary class’.16 It was no longer trying to realize its own revolutionary demands, but had instead abandoned them to the proletariat. Lenin’s anticipation of the proletarian revolution lets him explain the alliance between the bourgeoisie and Tsarism (both fear the revolutionary proletariat) and demonstrate the illusory nature of the link between ‘political democracy’ and capitalism (the bourgeoisie could pursue its interests under Tsarism).
Lenin’s anticipation also accounts for the proletariat’s leading role in the revolution. Because of its alliance with Tsarism, the bourgeoisie was unable to abolish Russian agricultural feudalism. The peasantry was stuck in a situation in which it could revolt, but not pursue a positive alternative. As Lenin presents it, the peasantry has two options: sweep away all medieval practices or gradually adapt to capitalism. The decision between the two is reached through class struggle. The proletariat is the decisive force in this struggle because of the proletariat’s own struggle against the bourgeoisie in the cities. So even though the proletariat and the peasantry have different aims, the fact that the bourgeoisie is no longer a revolutionary class creates the basis for their alliance. ‘The revolutionary alliance of all the oppressed’ develops out of ‘a concrete understanding of the conditions of proletarian revolution.’17
Lukács acknowledges the significance of Marx’s distinction between bourgeois and proletarian revolutions. Yet he condemns the way vulgar Marxism paralyzes this distinction into a ‘mechanistic separation’. In its opportunistic version, this paralysis manifests in the insistence that the proletariat discount its own revolutionary aims and support the bourgeois revolution. In its radical left-wing version, the paralysis appears as purity: anything not proletarian is overlooked. Purists ignore the various issues that arise under imperialism (national and colonial questions, for example) and as a result fail to understand the revolutionary environment. The ‘real revolution’, Lukács insists, ‘is the dialectical transformation of the bourgeois revolution into the proletarian revolution’.18 It’s not simply that they are different revolutions appropriate to different levels of capitalist development. One can, and must, become the other.
Second, just as the projected time of proletarian revolution engenders belief in the revolutionary task of the proletariat, so too does it establish the role of the revolutionary party. The actuality of revolution is the presupposition on which Lenin’s concept of the party rests. Lukács argues that the dispute between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks over party membership has to be understood as a conflict between ‘the two different basic attitudes to the possibility, probable course and character, of the revolution’. The projected future of proletarian revolution causes the Bolsheviks to select ‘single-minded revolutionaries, prepared to make any sacrifice, from the more or less chaotic mass of the class as a whole’. In contrast, the Mensheviks wanted to count as members those who supported and worked for the party. While the Bolshevik concept has come under sustained criticism, for instance, of the likelihood that professional revolutionaries ‘will divorce themselves from their actual class environment and . . . degenerate into a sect’, Lukács shows how the actuality of revolution produces a set of behavioral norms and expectations that Lenin, uniquely, had the perspicacity to implement.19
The party does not make the revolution. Nor does it try to pull along inactive masses and present them with a fait accompli. Instead, it anticipates the revolution. More specifically, the party is ‘conceived as an instrument of class struggle in a revolutionary period’.20 Given that the period is revolutionary, that the proletarian revolution is on the agenda, what form of organization follows? Lenin’s answer is the ‘strictest selection of party members on the basis of their proletarian class-consciousness, and total solidarity with and support for all the oppressed and exploited within capitalist society’.21 Why? Because of the way the proletariat develops its own class-consciousness and becomes able to put it to use in the context of revolutionary upheaval.
In the course of its revolutionary movement, the proletariat encounters differences within and without it. The internal differences involve economic differentiation within the proletariat (the infamous ‘labour aristocracy’). The external differences refer to the other classes that are part of the revolutionary alliance. Differences within the proletariat hinder class unity. Some workers, perhaps those with more education or experience in union leadership, tend to see their interests as allied with the bourgeoisie. Differences between the proletariat and other social strata create confusion, particularly as crises intensify and the revolutionary period gets nearer. The multiplicity of interests within the revolutionary alliance of the oppressed pulls them in different directions. Not every potential present in the masses forwards the revolution. Figuring out the correct path, and keeping together the alliance through which all can win, becomes increasingly difficult.
Lenin’s model of the party responds to the pull of these differences by providing an independent organizational space for the ‘fully conscious elements of the proletariat’. Lukács writes: ‘It is this that demonstrates that the Leninist form of organization is inseparably connected with the ability to foresee the approaching revolution.’22 In the party, even the most seemingly trivial decision becomes significant, that is, made in light of the projected future of proletarian revolution. A party decision cuts through myriad possibilities, directing action in one way rather than another.
The significance of revolutionary anticipation is born out in Lukács’ discussion of the way that Lenin’s concept of organization ‘means a double break with mechanical fatalism’. The first break is with ‘the concept of proletarian class-consciousness as a mechanical product of its class situation’. The second is with the idea that ‘the revolution itself was only the mechanical working out of fatalistically explosive economic forces which – given the sufficient “maturity” of objective revolutionary conditions – would somehow “automatically” lead the proletariat to victory’.23 Class-consciousness does not follow ‘with fatalistic inevitability’ from economic situation. Some members of a class will always be passive, always cross sides. Likewise, a combination of forces contributes to the revolutionary situation some ‘spontaneous-explosive’ actions and some ‘consciously-led class actions’.24 The role of the party is to anticipate this situation: ‘The party must prepare the revolution.’25 The projected future guides the party to prepare for it. The party must do everything it can to ‘prepare the proletarian masses intellectually, materially, and organizationally’ for what lies ahead.26 The party’s work is thus coordinated by means of the revolution it anticipates.
Lukács’ account makes clear that even as this view of the future provides the party with its organizational form, it is the party that sustains the view. He addresses the debate between Kautsky and Luxemburg. Kautsky argues that the party is the precondition of revolutionary action. Luxemburg argues that it is the product of revolutionary mass movement. Lukács finds each view one-sided: ‘Because it is the party’s function to prepare the revolution, it is – simultaneously and equally – both producer and product, both precondition and result of the revolutionary mass movement.’27 The party’s role as producer is itself a product of the projected future of proletarian revolution. The party is a product not only of events as they unfold and to which it responds but also of the future that calls it into being, the future that enables it to guides its responses toward it.
Crucial to Lukács’ argument is the party’s combination of flexibility and consistency. The party has to learn from the struggles of the masses, adjusting its interpretations and practices as necessary. How does it determine when changing itself is necessary? In light of the actuality of revolution: ‘Only its relations to the whole, to the fate of the proletarian revolution, makes a thought, a policy decision, etc., right or wrong.’28 Responses to the present in light of the projected future are inscribed into party structure and theory. Learning from the struggles of the people is possible because of the party’s anticipation of the revolution. The party thereby unites the discoveries that arise from the mass struggle with the actuality of the revolution. Belief in revolution arises out of the combination of theory and action: actions appear as revolutionary because the future revolution is calling them into being.
The third way the projected future of proletarian revolution exhibits coordinating capacity involves the understanding of the state. Lukács presents the problem of the state as one that Marxist theory perpetually defers into some indefinite future. He writes, ‘Only with Lenin did this “future” become present in the theoretical sense as well.’29 Lenin makes the question of the state ‘immediate’ by looking at it in terms of the actuality of revolution. This enables him to discern how the state is a ‘weapon of class struggle’. And this clarity further reveals the necessity of political organs beyond those traditionally associated with working-class struggles (unions, cooperatives, parties), organs with a capacity to include all the oppressed. The Soviets are these new organs, ‘an anti-government’ that disorganizes the bourgeois state apparatus and opens up the struggle for state power.
Understood in terms of the actuality of proletarian revolution, the Soviets as a form for proletarian state power provide the proletariat with practical political insight. For one, they reveal that the assumption that the proletarian revolution can avoid the state is ‘an ideological capitulation to the bourgeoisie’.30 Those who think that because the proletariat aims to abolish classes it has no need for the organ of class rule are utopian. They send the proletariat down the road to defeat, denying the class the means for defeating the bourgeoisie and establishing socialism. For another, the Soviets uncover ‘the bourgeois class character of democracy’.31 Many workers fall under the illusion that majority rule is to their benefit since they constitute a majority. Formal democracy, however, treats concrete human beings as abstract individuals. It ‘pulverizes’ social being, obscures people’s position within social belonging, and connects citizens as isolated atoms to the state as a totality. In contrast, the Soviets mark the proletarian attempt ‘to counteract this process of disorganization’.32 They create the opportunity for proletarian revolutionary leadership by providing the space through which the proletariat can seize ideological leadership from the bourgeoisie and develop an ideology of and for the oppressed classes.
Lukács emphasizes that ‘the actuality of the revolution expresses itself in the actuality of the problem of the state for the proletariat’.33 That the state is a weapon of class war does not mean that the struggle for socialism is won after the proletariat has seized state power. Not only does the struggle against the bourgeoisie continue, now more violently, but also the challenge of the transition to socialism presents itself all the more concretely. In the context of proletarian state power, the projected future of revolution manifests in the ongoing task of building socialism. Proletarian revolution is not a moment. It’s a process.
In sum, Lukács presents the actuality of revolution as a projected future. This imminent future suggests norms and standards for action. Every decision, every tactic, every compromise anticipates the revolution. They don’t wait until a more propitious time. To the extent that party practices are coordinated by the future, they both manifest belief in it – as opposed to the more abstract knowledge of revolution posited by social democrats – and help bring it about. Lukács insists that the actuality of revolution distinguishes Lenin’s position from both social democrats and left-wing purists. From the perspective of the former, the revolution is always too far off, the proletariat never mature enough, the unions still too weak. From the perspective of the latter, the ripeness of the moment dictates a pure politics, a radical insistence on principles without compromise. Unlike either, the actuality of revolution involves the political time of anticipation and struggle, a time when the future guides the party prepared to usher it in. For Lenin, Lukács writes, it is not enough to evaluate a concrete situation ‘in its reality’.34 The facts must be related to ‘the whole historical process’; they must be understood in terms of the actuality of revolution. The Lenininst innovation turns on a way of seeing that ties theory to practice by anticipating the future in the present.
Not all communists in 1924 agreed with Lukács’ assessment of the Bolshevik revolution. Lukács himself ends his short study of Lenin’s thought with a nod to these critics. He provides a dialectical justification for the seemingly contradictory policies of the Russian Communist Party as it returned to capitalism even as it asserted the necessity of revolution on a world scale: the period itself was contradictory. Over the next sixty years, debate over Lenin, the Party, and the success or failure of the 1917 revolution would intensify, pushed in one direction by Stalinist excess, in other directions by the experiences of communist parties elsewhere. By the time of the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the idea that a proletarian revolution led by a communist party would result in a new state form and successfully transition to socialism was widely discredited.35 Within the contemporary left, elements of the resulting consensus include the idea that the working class is no longer (if it ever had been) a revolutionary class; the rejection of politics centred on the state; and, the excoriation of vanguardism, hierarchy, and the party form. What, then, of revolution?
In the final volume of their influential trilogy, Hardt and Negri announce: ‘Revolution is now, finally, becoming the order of the day.’36 Their theory of revolution arises out of an account of the biopolitical character of capitalism in the late twentieth century. Networked communications have transformed the process of production, contributing to its homogenization, decentralization/deterritorialization, and informatization. Knowledge, affect, and communication play a greater role; labour has become ‘increasingly immaterial’.37 The result is a fundamental change in the relation between production and the reproduction of life: rather than separate from and subordinated to the demands of productive work, ‘life infuses and dominates all production’.38 As Hardt and Negri argue in Commonwealth: ‘Today the sites of economic production have spread throughout the social terrain and the production of economic value is increasingly indistinguishable from the production of social relations and forms of life.’39 With its biopolitical turn, capitalism subsumes the entirety of the social. Social relations don’t have to take on the form of the commodity to generate value for capitalism. Capitalism expropriates value from them directly.40
On the basis of their analysis of changes in production, Hardt and Negri claim that today ‘the perspective of revolutionary action has to be conceived on the biopolitical horizon’.41 Such a revolution is a ‘revolution in life’, that is, a revolution that exceeds the range of demands and expectations associated with the labour movement.
Biopolitical revolution has a distinct temporality. In contrast to the projected future provided by the actuality of revolution, revolution today
. . . is no longer imaginable as an event separated from us in the future but has to live in the present, an ‘exceeding’ present that in some sense already contains the future within it. Revolutionary movement resides on the same horizon of temporality with capitalist control, and its position of being within and against is manifest through a movement of exodus, which poses the exceeding productivity of the multitude against the exceptionality of capitalist command.42
Instead of a future with the capacity to coordinate action in the present, revolution coexists with and within non-revolution. Unable to imagine a future revolution, we can’t use its actuality to decide our tactics. As a distinct component of political action, tactics fall by the wayside, displaced by potentials within biopolitical production.
Revolution is an excessive element in the present, an element Hardt and Negri associate with the creative, cooperative, communicative labour of the multitude. Revolt involves separation from capitalist control, the liberation of biopolitical production from capitalist dominion. When they say that the ‘revolutionary movement resides on the same horizon of temporality with capitalist control’, Hardt and Negri are emphasizing a difference between biopolitical and industrial production. Under contemporary conditions, exploitation doesn’t involve the capitalist’s appropriation of a surplus of labour time that comes after necessary labour time. Necessary and surplus labour happen at the same time, in the same operation of producing social relations and forms of life. The blending of production and reproduction eludes the quantitative measure used to determine necessary and surplus labour time. In the present, therefore, ‘the capitalist temporality of valorization and expropriation’ can’t be understood in terms of measurable sequences but must be viewed as ‘a kind of simultaneity’.43 Hardt and Negri imagine revolution as an analogous ‘kind of simultaneity’, the excess and limit to capitalist command over the biopolitical production it can never fully capture or control.
Biopolitical exploitation includes accumulation by dispossession and the expropriation of the common. Key to the latter is capitalism’s expropriation of the common that biopolitical labour produces – common knowledge, language, culture, and modes of sociality. Hardt and Negri argue that ‘rather than providing cooperation, we could even say that capital expropriates cooperation as a central element of exploiting biopolitical labour-power. This expropriation takes place not so much from the individual worker (because cooperation already implies a collectivity) but more clearly from the field of social labour.’44 Biopolitical labour is generally autonomous from capitalist command, they argue, emerging out of networked cooperative practices. Capital seeks to capture, expropriate, and discipline these practices, even as it itself depends on the creativity that their autonomy unleashes. Bypassing commodification, capital extracts value directly from social relations themselves.
Hardt and Negri highlight the democratic dimension of biopolitical labour: in their view, the same networked, cooperative structures that produce the common generate new democratic capacities, and even ‘make possible in the political sphere the development of democratic organizations’.45 For this reason, Hardt and Negri reject ‘vanguard organizations’. The vanguard party corresponds to a different, earlier, structure of labour (a different technical composition of the proletariat). According to Hardt’s and Negri’s periodization, the vanguard party fits with the early twentieth century’s professional factory workers. The deskilled workers of the mid-twentieth century fit with that period’s mass party. The political form appropriate to biopolitical labour, the one appropriate to us now, they argue, must be democratic. More specifically, it must be cooperative, autonomous, and horizontally networked. Hardt and Negri concede that ‘these democratic capacities of labour do not immediately translate into the creation of democratic political organizations’, nevertheless, they are a good basis on which to build them.46
Even as they admit that the processes of biopolitical production do not immediately or automatically create the kinds of political organizations we need, and even as they acknowledge that they are not offering a figure adequate to the revolutionary process, Hardt and Negri insist on the distance between their concept of revolution and Lenin’s. Reducing Lenin’s complex and adaptive approach to political organization via the limited terms of contemporary politics, they treat Lenin’s party as ‘a new identity’. They argue that Lenin ‘conceives the articulation of the social groups in struggle under the hegemony of the party, which forms a counterpower, mirroring in certain respects the identity of the central power it opposes’.47 Since biopolitical production’s networked form takes on the form of power it opposes – the networks of surveillance, international treaties, multinational corporations, and militarized policing – the problem here can’t be that the vanguard ‘mirrors’ the power it opposes. Their periodization makes clear that the problem is precisely that it doesn’t. For Hardt and Negri, the vanguard party is inadequate, ‘anachronistic’, because it doesn’t look like the networks of contemporary biopolitical production.
This argument is not convincing. Complex networks are not the horizontal, cooperative, and autonomous forms that Hardt and Negri imagine. As Albert-Laszlo Barabasi’s work on complex networks demonstrates, free choice, growth, and preferential attachment produce hierarchies, dramatic differences between the one that is most chosen and preferred and the many that are not.48 The most popular node or item in a complex network generally has twice as many links as the second most popular, which has more than the third most popular and so, such that there is very little difference among the crowd of those at the bottom but massive differences between top and bottom. This hierarchical structure is pervasive in communicative capitalism. Blockbuster movies, best-selling books, and giant internet hubs like Google, Facebook, YouTube, and China’s Baidu, all reflect an effective ‘power law’ distribution of links in complex networks. The few get a lot; the rest get very little, almost nothing. The idea appears in popular media as the ‘80/20 rule, the winner-take-all or winner-take-most character of the new economy’, and the ‘long tail’ of the many.49 The ostensibly creative, cooperative, and democratic character of networked communication doesn’t eliminate hierarchy. It entrenches hierarchy by using our own choices against us. And, as Barabasi makes clear, this hierarchy isn’t imposed from above. It is an immanent effect of free choice, growth, and preferential attachment.
A political form mirroring biopolitical production would not be horizontal and democratic. Its democracy would produce ‘power law’ distributions, unequal nodes or outcomes, winners and losers, few and many. We see this phenomenon on Twitter as people fight through trending hashtags: hashtags provide common names that serve as loci of struggle. When they trend, they rise above the long tail of the millions of unread, unloved Tweets coursing through the nets. The democratic element – the very exercise of people’s choice to use and forward – produces the inequality that lets some hashtags appear as and even be, for a moment, significant. The fact of emergent hierarchies suggests that an emergent vanguard may well be the political form necessary for struggles under biopolitical conditions. To reject this form in the name of an as yet non-existent democratic organization is both to encourage the conditions that produce the form itself – democratic engagements – and to call for the elimination of whatever these engagements produce, namely, a few out of the many. This rejection has a persistent pattern on the post-68 left: the rejection of leaders and resulting infighting when they emerge and inefficacy when they are condemned.
The structure of the complex networks of biopolitical production indicates that, contra Hardt and Negri, a vanguard party is not anachronistic at all. It is instead a form that corresponds to the dynamics of networked communication. This structure indicates an additional problem with Hardt and Negri’s rejection of the vanguard party. They characterize Lenin’s party as involving an organizational process that comes from ‘above’ the movements of the multitude. Historically, this insinuation is clearly false. The Bolsheviks were but one group among multiple parties, tendencies, and factions acting in the tumultuous context of the Russian Revolution. They were active within the movements of the oppressed workers and peasants. The movements themselves, through victories and defeats, short and long-term alliances, new forms of cooperation, and advances in political organization gave rise to the party even as the party furthered the movements. Charles Post writes, ‘Leninism cannot be reduced to the post-1923 caricature of “democratic centralism”. Instead, the enduring legacy of Leninism remains the goal of constructing an independent organization of anti-capitalist organizers and activists who attempt to project a political alternative to the forces of official reformism not only in elections, but in mass, extra-parliamentary social struggles.’50 Lenin’s insistence on the actuality of revolution provides the coordination by means of the future at the heart of this projection of a political alternative. The party is a force of anticipation, a temporal force that Hardt’s and Negri’s concern with the spatial register of top and bottom omits.
Finally, Hardt and Negri criticize Lenin’s party on the grounds of identity. For them, the party is a ‘new identity’, and they think that revolution today must aim at the abolition of identity.51 Their argument against identity is an important corrective to the advocacy of identity politics still current among some segments of the left. Rejecting the primacy of class, Hardt and Negri draw out radical elements of feminist and anti-racist politics. They argue that the radical core of the politics of sex, race, and class is a self-abolition of identity that results in the proliferation of differences. ‘The project for the abolition of identity’, Hardt and Negri assert, ‘thus fills the traditional role of the abolition of property and the abolition of the state.’52
Hardt and Negri are right to emphasize the necessity of moving beyond identity politics, bringing us back, in a way, to the broader revolutionary struggles of the oppressed and recognition of the ways capitalism benefits from divisions among the masses. Attachment to identity results in immobilization and subordination, the limiting of what one might become. We should add that insofar as capitalist processes already produce, undermine, and expropriate identities, attempting to hold onto identity is like trying to hold onto air. Identities are already melting away, already vulnerable and unraveling.53 Nevertheless, Lenin’s party is not an identity. On the contrary, the party is a process, in Lukács’ version a process whereby the distinctions of what Hardt and Negri associate with identity are smoothed out and a collective revolutionary will is generated.54 To this extent, the party functions more through the installation and maintenance of a gap within the field in which identity is given than it does as a new identity.
Additional problems accompany Hardt’s and Negri’s substitution of identity for property and state. These include: leaving exploitative relations intact; leaving state violence intact; leaving processes of proletarianization intact; leaving systems of oppression intact. Capitalism and the state operate through the dissolution of identity just as much as they can through its inscription and amplification. At the level of tactics, a project for the abolition of identity easily flows into the dominant ideology’s fixation on fluidity and self-transformation, letting change at the personal level stand in for broader struggles for system change. In fact, when changes at the level of the person become significant, they push up against the limits posed by state and economy, making it clear that these fronts cannot be avoided. This means that fighting over whether and in what form property and the state continue cannot be avoided. Yet Hardt and Negri give us an account of revolution where the endpoint of such fighting cannot be imagined. Revolution envisioned as the abolition of identity fails to provide a perspective that can orient a politics that inevitably comes up against state and economy.
Hardt and Negri reject the goal of working-class power not only on grounds of identity but also on grounds of power. For them the state should not be seized even to serve as an instrument of class struggle (although the multitude might have to engage it). The state is and can only be a seat of domination that guarantees capitalist exploitation and the policing of identity hierarchies. Arguing that revolution must have democracy as its object and that it requires a long and arduous process of transformation, Hardt and Negri misrepresent the dictatorship of the proletariat as nothing more than subservience.55 Lenin also recognizes that revolutionary transformation does not happen overnight. The dictatorship of the proletariat is nothing but that process of transformation, a process that Lenin, like Hardt and Negri, associates with ‘an immense expansion of democracy, which for the first time becomes democracy for the poor, democracy for the people, and not democracy for the money-bags’.56 Unlike Hardt and Negri, however, Lenin recognizes that wresting the power and wealth concentrated in the hands of the few requires more than the extension of democracy. It requires its restriction as well: oppressors, exploiters, and capitalists must be suppressed. There are limits to democratic means.
For Hardt and Negri, the goal of revolution is ‘the generation of new forms of social life’.57 They describe revolutionary struggles as a process of liberation that establishes a common. Such a process, they argue, consolidates insurrection as it institutionalizes new collective habits and practices. Hardt and Negri thus conceive institutions as sites for the management of encounters, extension of social rupture, and transformation of those who compose them.
The resemblance between these institutions and Lukács’ depiction of the vanguard party is striking, all the more so given Hardt and Negri’s rejection of the party form. The party involves a common name, language, and set of tactics. It has practices that establish ways of being together. Its purpose is occupying and extending the gap within society that class struggle denotes. Moreover, Lukács insists that Lenin’s concept of party organization prioritizes flexibility and consistency; the party has and must have a capacity for self-transformation. What Hardt and Negri describe as the extension of insurrection in an institutional process is another way of theorizing the party.
Because they disavow the party, their version of democratic organization lacks a position that can anticipate the revolution and thereby materialize belief in its actuality. The future does not exercise coordinating capacity. Hardt and Negri emphasize that revolution is ‘squeezed in the vise between past and future, leaving it very little room for maneuver’. They write, ‘even when revolutionaries think their actions are sufficient to launch us into the future, the past bursts through to reimpose itself’. And they conclude, ‘Revolution’s creation of a new form of government holds off the past and opens toward the future’.58 Rather than products of the revolution they produce, revolutionaries in Hardt and Negri’s version remain at a distance from the future. Their actions seem disconnected from it, uninformed by it, and hence all the more under the sway of the past. Revolution opens to the future, but a projected future does not call into being the forces that will have produced it.
Lacking a vision of the future capable of orienting action, Hardt and Negri outline instead a platform of demands without a carrier, without a body to fight for them. To be sure, their model of institutions suggests that a party or parties could be such a carrier, but rather than presenting their platform as a party platform, Hardt and Negri present them as demands to be made to existing governments and institutions of global governance. The demands are for the provision of basic means of life, global citizenship, and access to the commons. They acknowledge that ‘today’s ruling powers unfortunately have no intention of granting even these basic demands’.59 Their response is laughter, ‘a laugh of creation and joy, anchored solidly in the present’.60 No wonder they don’t present their demands as the platform of a party. The demands are not to be fought for. They mark potentials present already in the biopolitical production of the common, merely in the form of demands for certain limits to capitalist control.
The identification of egalitarian potential in what generally seems a bleak and miserable present is laudable. But no practices coordinated by means of the future materialize this belief. Absent a party oriented toward its realization, though, it is hard to believe that this potential is stronger than, say, a neo-feudalism of globally connected fortress-cities surrounded by impoverished scavengers competing for access to a better life via networked gaming platforms and desperately defending their last bits of fresh water and arable land from refugees fleeing ever intensifying resource wars, while the tiny class of global billionaires eat caviar in gold-plated jets. Precisely because our setting is one of exploitation, ownership, competition, and struggle, our sense of the present has to be tied to the future that results from the realization of some potentials rather than others. The party is the form for this realization insofar as through it the future can produce the actions that will have brought it about.
The global wave of protests associated with the revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia, the mass assemblies in Spain and Greece, the anti-cuts, anti-austerity, and anti-foreclosure protests, the Occupy movement and so on testify to the fact that people are moving together in growing opposition to the policies and practices of states organized in the interest of capital as class. Across the globe, crowds are rupturing the status quo, the actuality of their movement displacing the politics of identity. These mobilized crowds are forcing the left to return again to questions of organization, endurance, and scale. Having come up against the limits of immediacy and horizontality, activists and organizers alike are thinking again about institutional forms like the party. Their ongoing experiments include radical left coalitions, movement parties, digital parties, and even new and adversarial occupations of established parties. The more people are seeing themselves with a collective capacity to change the world, the more they are working to develop this capacity, to strengthen and institutionalize it.
That the social and activist movements have returned organizational questions to the fore of left politics does not mean that these questions have been clearly answered, however. Even as the movements produce activist vanguards, organizers and militants committed to the struggles of the proletarianized, these movements have not yet produced a new international communist party or international coalition of the radical left.61 Moreover, it is not clear whether the protests and demonstrations accompanying capitalist crises in the North America and much of Europe auger a revolutionary opening or repeat the gestures of resistance constitutive of the repertoire of left political practice for the last several decades. Lukács lets us understand that these are different formulations of the same problem. Because the party is producer and product, precondition and result, of revolutionary mass movement, solutions and problems appear together and unevenly. The party that lets us see our struggles as revolutionary can only be the product of revolutionary struggles.62
To anticipate the party that anticipates the revolution: if revolution is on the agenda, what might this mean for a party today? Hardt and Negri imply that the party form is outmoded. I have argued instead that not only do contemporary networks produce ‘power law’ distributions of few and many but that emergent hierarchies – particularly when understood in terms of the vanguards and practices that already emerge out of political movement – point to the ways that party organizations emerge. Current examples of this tendency include the adoption of common tactics, names, and symbols that bring together previously separate, disparate, and even competing struggles. When local and issue politics are connected via a common name, successes in one area advance the struggle as a whole. Separate actions become themselves plus all the others. They instill enthusiasm and inspire imitation. They provide a sense of directionality and movement: which way is the struggle going? Simply multiplying fragmented, local actions isn’t enough – they have to be felt as more than what any one of them can be in isolation. A common name or set of symbols provides this consistency.
Learning from Lukács and Lenin, we know that consistency must be accompanied by flexibility. There is no reason to assume that every component or branch of the party, particularly an international party, must have the same structure and that this structure must remain constant. The problem the left encounters today is less a matter of establishing organizational details in advance than it is of solidary political will. As the will emerges, people will figure out the structure in light of the challenges we face. Such challenges include expanding militant pressure in ways that inspire and educate cadres; straining the resources of the state and breaking the confidence of the financial sector; abolishing private property and the capitalist banking system; and advancing international coordination in an uneven environment. The overall goal is to galvanize popular support and develop a program for common management of production, health, transportation, communication, food, housing, and education for the equal benefit of all in the setting of a changing climate, for starters. Responding to these variable challenges generates new knowledge that can be integrated and shared, knowledge that can support and enable flexibility.
If revolution is on the agenda, then it is a revolution of the proletarianized, of those whom capital as a class dispossesses of their labour, lives, and futures. Because capitalism’s system of dispossession operates through the wage, debt, privatization, enclosure, theft, colonization, financialization, and racialized state violence, the movements of the proletarianized mobilize a broad, international, array of people and concerns. A global alliance of the radical left, or, better, a new party of communists, can be knit together from the concentrated forces of already existing groups: militants skilled at direct action, artists adept with symbols and slogans, parties experienced at organizing, issue groups knowledgeable about specific areas of concern, mutual aid networks addressing basic needs. If this new party is to be an agent of revolutionary time, it will have to continue to foster and even amplify the common practices and tactics capable of materializing revolutionary belief. This fostering and amplification requires discipline, choices, conscious planning, and decisions regarding what to prioritize and how to allocate resources and energies. Lukács insists, ‘Only through discipline can the party be capable of putting the collective will into practice, whereas the introduction of the bourgeois concept of freedom prevents this collective will from forming itself and so transforms the party into a loose aggregate of individuals incapable of action.’63 Precisely because the movements are many, or, in the language of Occupy, the 99% are not one, precisely because of the multiplicity of the experiences of the oppressed, we need the party as the form through which we discipline ourselves, through which we produce the collective political will that will push revolutionary tendencies in an emancipatory egalitarian direction.
Many of us are convinced that capitalist crises have reached a decisive point. We know that the system is fragile, that it produces its own grave-diggers, and that it is held in place by a repressive international state structure. Yet we act as if we did not know this. The party provides a form that can let us believe what we know.
1Jean-Pierre Dupuy, Economy and the Future, Translated by M.B. DeBevoise, East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2014, p. 110.
2Dupuy, Economy, p. 116.
3Projected future thus functions differently from the program put forth by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams in Inventing the Future, London: Verso, 2015.
4Dupuy, Economy, p. 129.
5Dupuy, Economy, p. 140.
6Georg Lukács, ‘Towards a Methodology of the Problem of Organization’, History and Class Consciousness, Translated by Rodney Livingstone, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1971; Georg Lukács, Lenin: A Study on the Unity of His Thought, Translated by Nicholas Jacobs, London: Verso, 2009, p. 13 (italics omitted).
7Lukács, Lenin, p. 9.
8In ‘Towards a Methodology of the Problem of Organization’, Lukács describes the tangle of historical, social, and individual factors involved in any organized action. Emphasizing the need to approach an understanding of organized action in light of the historical totality, he writes, ‘an analysis that would see an organized action in terms of the lessons it contained for the future, as an answer to the question, “what then shall we do?” sees the problem in terms of organization’. Lukács, ‘Towards a Methodology,’ p. 300. It is this sense of futurity that is developed in Lenin.
9Martin Jay, Marxism and Totality, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984, p. 122.
10Lukács, Lenin, p. 12.
11Ibid. (italics in original)
12Lukács, Lenin, p. 18.
13Lukács, Lenin, p. 13.
14See my discussion in Žižek’s Politics, New York: Routledge, 2006.
15Lukács, Lenin, p. 11.
16Lukács, Lenin, p. 20.
17Lukács, Lenin, p. 23.
18Lukács, Lenin, p. 47.
19Lukács, Lenin, p. 25.
20Lukács, Lenin, p. 26 (italics omitted).
21Lukács, Lenin, p. 30.
22Lukács, Lenin, p. 29.
23Lukács, Lenin, p. 31.
24Lukács, Lenin, p. 33.
25Lukács, Lenin, p. 32 (italics in original).
26Lukács, Lenin, p. 33.
27Lukács, Lenin, p. 32.
28Lukács, Lenin, p. 36.
29Lukács, Lenin, p. 60.
30Lukács, Lenin, p. 62 (italics in original).
31Lukács, Lenin, p. 63 (italics in original).
32Lukács, Lenin, p. 64 (italics in original).
33Lukács, Lenin, p. 67.
34Lukács, Lenin, p. 80 (italics in original).
35In an essay written for The Socialist Register 1989: Revolution Today, Leo Panitch approaches the loss of confidence in socialist revolution as an effect of the continued revolutionary role of the bourgeoisie. See Leo Panitch, ‘Capitalism, Socialism and Revolution: The Contemporary Meaning of Revolution in the West’, The Socialist Register 1989: Revolution Today, Ralph Miliband, Leo Panitch, and John Saville, eds., London: Merlin, 1989, pp. 1-29.
36Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth, Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009, p. 344.
37Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000, p. 365.
38Hardt and Negri, Empire, p. 365.
39Hardt and Negri, Commonwealth, p. 239.
40See Jodi Dean, The Communist Horizon, London: Verso, 2012, pp. 128-129.
41Hardt and Negri, Commonwealth, p. 239.
42Hardt and Negri, Commonwealth, pp. 242-3.
43Hardt and Negri, Commonwealth, p. 242.
44Hardt and Negri, Commonwealth, p. 140.
45Hardt and Negri, Commonwealth, p. 354.
46Hardt and Negri, Commonwealth, p. 353.
47Hardt and Negri, Commonwealth, p. 351.
48See my discussion in Crowds and Party, London: Verso, 2016, pp. 12-13.
49Jodi Dean, The Communist Horizon, p. 138.
50Charles Post, ‘What is Left of Leninism? New European Left Parties in Historical Perspective’, The Socialist Register 2013: The Question of Strategy, Leo Panitch, Greg Albo, and Vivek Chibber, eds., London: Merlin Press, 2012, pp. 174-197.
51Hardt and Negri, Commonwealth, p. 334.
52Hardt and Negri, Commonwealth, p. 333.
53See my discussion in Crowds and Party, chapter 1.
54As Lukács writes in ‘Towards a Methodology of the Problem of Organization’, ‘the Communist Party as the revolutionary form of consciousness of the proletariat is a process by nature’, (p. 316, italics in original); and ‘the party exists in order to hasten the process by which these distinctions are smoothed out’, (p. 326). The distinctions Lukács is referring to are stratifications within the class.
55Hardt and Negri, Commonwealth, p. 363.
56V. I. Lenin, ‘The State and Revolution’, The Lenin Anthology, Robert C. Tucker, ed., New York: Norton, pp. 311-98.
57Hardt and Negri, Commonwealth, p. 354.
58Hardt and Negri, Commonwealth, p. 360.
59Hardt and Negri, Commonwealth, p. 382.
60Hardt and Negri, Commonwealth, p. 383.
61For a reading of Occupy as a political vanguard, see the last chapter of my The Communist Horizon.
62Lukács insists that a communist organization ‘can only be created through struggle’, ‘Towards a Methodology’, p. 317.
63Lukács, ‘Towards a Methodology’, p. 316.