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Contents

5. Into the factory: Lenin and the c‚sure subjective (1968-73).

5.1 Crisis of the Planner-State.

5.2 Spontaneity and subjectivity: Leninist organization 1.

5.3 Determinate class composition: Leninist organization 2.

5.4 The contemporaneity of Lenin: projective Marxism.

5.5 Worker centrality and the dialectic of organization.

5.6 Political violence and terrorism.

Remark -- Lenin and Nietzsche: the c‚sure subjective and the c‚sure

ontologique.

5.7 The subject which destroys the State: Lenin and Pashukanis.

5. Into the factory: Lenin and the c‚sure subjective (1968-73).

The intensity of the workers' and students' struggles of 1968 in

countries throughout the world took everyone by surprise. Italy,

however, was in many ways an anomaly. There was a constant crescendo

of revolts throughout 1968 and 69 in Italy and in several different

permutations the struggles persisted for the next ten years. One of

the symbolic centers or touchstones of the movements was the conflict

on Corso Traiano in September 1969 when FIAT workers' directly

confronted the Turin police in a violent struggle. The gravity of the

situation grew consistently at least through 1973; again the FIAT

workers represented the symbolic center: "Il 29-30 marzo 1973 a

Mirafiori, a Rivalta, in tutte le sezionei FIAT di Torino lo sciopero

ad oltranza si trasforma in occupazione armata." ["Partito" 189] For

Negri, the explosion of the "biennio rosso" and the subsequent years

may have come as a surprise, but only in its intensity, its urgency.

It came as a confirmation of his intuitions and his hopes and raced

forward beyond them, forcing a dramatic acceleration of the timetable

for social change; it gave new life to his thinking and imposed a

rigorous rhythm on it. The "ansia rivoluzionaria" which Negri had

tasted in the factories during the 60s, which seemed to grow within

the industrial working class ever since the Piazza Statuto revolt of

1962, now exploded violently throughout the entire society. A myriad

of new political organizations uniting workers and students propogated

throughout the country: Potere Operaio (Workers' Power), Lotta

Continua (The Struggle Goes On), Il Manifesto, etc. The demand for

profound social change, the intense desire for utopia pushed forward

an immediate agenda. Negri and his colleagues had to scramble to keep

up with struggles, to try to read the changing social reality. In

their minds, they were not witnessing an Italian version of the

Russian 1905, a dress rehearsal of some future event; rather, these

were the "April days", the immediate prelude to revolution. They saw

that it was their role as intellectuals to clarify and lend a

theoretical coherence to the direction of the mass struggles in order

to further their objectives and construct the newly emerging norms of

collective behavior; they sought an order in the exuberance of the

struggles. Furthermore, they felt the responsibility of bringing to

fruition the exceptional possibilities presented by Italy's anomaly:

"tutto Š posto su di noi, qui dove la classe operaia Š pi— forte."

["Partito" 158] At this point, Negri and his intellectual colleagues

definitively make the move out of the university and into the factory.

We have to modify our method of reading Negri's work accordingly,

then, to account for the new conditions of theorizing during this

period. First of all, if we fail to recognize the intense excitement

and the urgency that he and his colleagues felt, we will certainly

miss what is valuable here. There are principally two aspects of

these writings which we have to keep in mind: their aspiration toward

a collective voice and their political immediacy. What might seem to

us from the distance of 20 years like inflated rhetoric served a real

organizing function in the movements. Negri's work is filled with

slogans or "parole d'ordine", some of which he invented and others he

took from the stream of political discourse; the objective was, on one

hand, to present his arguments in a form which would be understood

generally in the movements and contribute effectively to the practical

struggles and, on the other hand, to give real substance and a solid

theoretical foundation to this discourse and its practical agenda.

Negri was very conscious of his role as an intellectual within the

movement and accordingly he attempted to integrate the principle terms

and ideas which were general in the movement into his own discourse,

in order to situate and evaluate them within a coherent theoretical

framework. In many respects, Negri was merely trying to keep his head

above water through the rapid flux of social movements. His works

lose their scholarly tone and formalities such as footnotes disappear

completely; rather, they aspire toward the collective voice of

political programmes, continually proposing "our immediate task".

This type of work should not be credited with the same kind of

originality which is accorded to individual theoretical endeavors; the

originality here, one might say, is principally in its effort to read

the intelligence of the masses and translate it into an effective

political form. Negri was trying to absorb some of the power of the

struggles within his own voice. However, it would take an extensive

historical study of the period, of the theoretical and practical

activities of the various organizations, to disentangle the genealogy

of the different line of thought and verify when Negri was forwarding

an original proposal and when he was merely repeating the generally-

held view. The issue of armed struggle is perhaps the most important

in this regard (especially for those interested in the question of

criminality) but it is also the most intricate: an adequate analysis

would certainly require extensive historical study. Such a study,

however, is outside our scope and will have to be taken up in future

work.

The other aspect of this period of Negri's work which we must

take into account is its political immediacy. The horizon of the

political movements seemed in a continuous state of flux and each

event added a new urgency. The texts are dated not only with the

year but also the month in which they were drafted. Negri felt the

need to interpret events as they occurred: for example, in September

1971 he prepared his article "Crisis of the Planner-State" for the

"Third conference on organization" of Potere Operaio as an

interpretation of the Nixon measures on the incontrovertibility of the

dollar passed just a month earlier in August. Time tables were short

and Negri was aware that his writing reflected this urgency. "It is

possible that the weaknesses of this essay -- the fact that it is too

immediately related to problems of organisation, and that it is

perhaps too polemical and summary in its attempt to stay close to the

contingencies of political discussion -- may turn out to be virtues;

if it is true that organised revolutionary practice is not only the

only way to understand reality scientifically, but also the only way

to bring it closer." ["Crisis" 96] Negri is attempting to subordinate

the theoretical discourse to the pressing practical demands, so that

while it loses its scholarly rigor, it gains a concrete import in the

world.

Negri's new theoretical approach during this period can be read

as an attempt to recast the Marxist framework: from critical Marxism

to what I call "projective Marxism". We claimed above that within the

framework of critical Marxism, the positive proletarian project is

always subordinated to the critique of capital. The project may only

arise in the future as a result of the critique in the dialectical

supersession of capital: to pose the project in the present, outside

of this dialectical context, would be viewed by critical theory as

simply utopian thinking. If earlier Negri found this critical

position problematic, after 1968 it became completely untenable. He

experienced the cycle of struggles as the emergence or maturation of a

working class subjectivity which demanded a political project on its

own terms, outside of the objective critical framework. Here the

objective critique of capital must be subordinated to the subjective

needs and desires of the working class. A new approach is needed to

make the leap that the critique itself could never accomplish. Lenin

seemed to offer Negri the insight necessary to develop a different

approach to Marxism, more adequate to the contemporary needs. The

explosion of the social struggles and the Leninist reading of Marx

give Negri a completely anti-Althusserian approach: if there is a

c‚sure ‚pistemologique which marks the divide between Marx's youth and

his maturity, it consists of the real appearance (not the

disappearance) of the revolutionary subject, it is the moment "quando

l'analisi si emancipa dall'esistente per farsi programma." [102] The

critical juncture, for Negri, refers not so much to epistemology but

to subjectivity. "Ben lungi dal concludersi in un "processus sans

sujet" l'evoluzione del pensiero marxiano aderisce sempre maggiormente

alla realt… organizzativa del soggetto rivoluzionario." [103 note]

The Leninist perspective and the growing pressure of the workers'

movements marks in Negri's thought a c‚sure subjective.

5.1 Crisis of the Planner-State

Even though we already find sufficient cause in Negri's thought

to bring into question the method of critical Marxism, principally

because of its inability to give the subjective standpoint of the

working class a central role in the critical process, still we find

that Negri pursues this analysis through this period of theoretical

and political crisis. The crisis of critical Marxism, in Negri's

thought, does not mean that it should be negated, but merely that it

must be reoriented and its argument must be grounded in a different

context: while in the previous period the proletarian project was

subordinated to the critique of capital, in this period we will see

that the critique is subordinated to the project. We will see the

specific form of this inversion later. For the moment, however,

within the same framework of the critique of the State and capital

developed in the earlier works, Negri attempts to define the new

relations of force which have emerged as a result of the new cycle of

struggles beginning in 1968. Once again, the task is to define the

modifications of the State-form and of the capitalist system of

control through a critique based on capital's own reading of itself.

The State has shifted, Negri argues, from a planner-State based

on Keynesian economic principles to a "crisis-State". By crisis-State

Negri does not mean that capital is on the verge of collapse -- there

is nothing catastrophic in this crisis. He merely means that the

capitalist State has abandoned the strategy of stability (in

production, markets, monetary policy, etc.) which previously had paved

the way for the development of mass industry. This restructuration,

then, not only poses new problems for mass production, but it also

puts an end to the social contract of planning, to capital's attempt

to interact with the working class through institutionalized

collective bargaining as a means of control and legitimation. The

advent of this "neo-liberal" State, however, does not mean a reduction

in economic and social interventionism, but on the contrary a

broadening of social labor-power and an intensification of the State's

control over the social factory. The new element, characteristic of

the crisis-State, is that the State adopts a new degree of autonomy as

the agent which regulates development, external to any direct

relationship between capital and labor. The tendency of these changes

points toward the disappearance of any organic relationship of

mediation between the working class and the State as the

representative of collective capital. "The separation and

unilaterality between labor and command over labor is thus pushed to

the furthest limit; the State can only take the form of a crisis-

State, in which it enforces and manages its own freedom of command for

the survival of the system as a whole." ["Crisis" 119] Crisis, then,

becomes the normal condition of capitalist development and rule to the

extent that the bilateral processes of economic and juridical

organization which provided an organic relationship between labor and

capital are abandoned.

Negri substantiates this proposition that the State-form has

shifted with an analysis of the function of money and the State's use

of monetary policy. This analysis is inspired by a new reading of

Marx's "Chapter on Money" in the Grundrisse [115-238] which Negri

attempts to relate to the contemporary situation in order to

investigate the relationship between the production of value and the

mechanisms of legitimation. [cf. "Partito" 107-22, "Crisis" passim.]

Money is presented in the capitalist system as a general equivalent,

as a form of mediation in the exchange between labor and capital. The

general tendency within capitalist development, though, is to liberate

money from its functions of mediation, as the universal representation

of exchange value, and allow it to serve as a direct force of

production and rule. Negri reads the Nixon measures of 1971 to

decouple the dollar from the gold standard as an exemplary point in

this passage. The international stability of exchange rates had

played an important role in guaranteeing the stable markets necessary

for planning mass production; the decision to abandon the policy of

standardized exchange signals the decline of the Keynesian planner-

State in that it undermines one of the important conditions of its

existence -- stable exchange markets. The changing role of money is

indicative of the changes in the form of value itself. The planner-

State is founded on what Negri calls the "law of value" which poses a

general equivalence and parity between productive labor and capital:

as we have seen, labor is posed through the capitalist constitution as

the unique source of value and hence the Grundnorm of right.

Collective bargaining and dialogue through the mediation of the trade

unions and the State provide the institutional foundation for the law

of value and its stability. The decision to destabilize monetary

markets put into question not only the mediating function of money as

a general equivalent, but also the mediating function of the State and

the trade unions (in the sale of labor-power, the establishment of

right, etc.). ["Crisis" 139] The shift in monetary policy, then, is

only indicative of the larger crisis of the law of value which

destabilizes the production process and brings into question the

established legitimacy of relations of command.

In keeping with the tenets of operaismo which we examined above,

Negri argues that these changes in capital and the capitalist State

can only be understood when we grasp the workers' movements as the

stimulus for development; capital never moves forward of its own

accord. In Negri's typically schematic form, we can say that just as

1917 pushed capital to 1929 and forced it to develop the planner-State

in the 30s, so too the pressures of 1968 brought on the monetary shift

of 1971 and the development of the crisis-State in the 70s. Once

again, capital attempts to recuperate its structures of control by

subsuming the workers' threat within the continuity of a dialectical

progression: capitalist structuration -> workers' destructuration ->

capitalist restructuration. Viewed strictly from the financial point

of view, "l'attacco salariale degli operai ha infranto" the illusion

of social peace and structural stability projected by capitalist

planning and bargaining; the wage demands undermined the bases of

monetary stability and pushed capital to the limit of its ability to

maintain a balance within the boundaries of its control. ["Partito"

115] Once again, however, the situation is better understood when

posed in broader terms, in terms of value: not only the wage demands

against individual employers, but also the demands against collective

capital and the State for the control of social production and

reproduction serve to destructure the planner-State as the agent of

rule. The organized industrial working class posed such a threat with

the new cycle of struggles that capital was forced to abandon its

project of stability, destroy its form of rule in order to protect

itself. In other words, capital had to abandon its proposition of

labor as the unique source of value, it had to "devalorize" labor in

order to combat the effective organization of the working class. The

demonetarization of capital, then, was accompanied by a devalorization

of labor. In practical terms this means the beginning of a new era of

technological innovation, of the further mechanization and

computerization of heavy industry and hence the dispersion of the mass

labor force which had come to represent a formidable adversary. In

order to combat the threat of the working class, in order to destroy

the conditions of its organization, capital is forced to shift its

focus from living labor to dead labor in mass production and hence to

suffer a falling rate of profit. (1) The crisis of the structures of

mass production signals the opening of a new capitalist project for

restructuration.

We should note that if Negri's thesis that the early 70s marked a

turning point in the conditions of capitalist production and in the

role of the State could have appeared as radical or controversial when

he first proposed this view, it no longer does today. In fact,

Negri's intuitions in these early years of the transformation have

been largely confirmed by contemporary economists: it is standard

today to interpret the early 70s as the period when the conditions for

mass production were destroyed and capital began searching for a new

basis. In The Second Industrial Divide, for example, Charles Sabel

and Michael Piore propose this same periodization from a capitalist

point of view and, while they do not refer to the contemporary period

as that of the crisis-State, their proposal for "flexible production"

does incorporate several of the characteristics in Negri's analysis.

(2) This analysis of collective capital and the State, however, is

still limited by the objectivist approach of the critical theory; that

is, the critique of political economy still cannot account adequately

for the actual working class as a concrete subject. If the critical

approach of operaismo proposes the working class as the stimulus of

capitalist development, it only grasps the class in an abstract form;

or rather, the critique of political economy recognizes the working

class primarily as the object of exploitation, but never fully

succeeds in presenting it as the subject of power. The intense

political struggles in Italy, however, forced Negri to look beyond the

critique to discover an approach which will pose the subjectivity of

the working class at the center of theory. Negri proposes this agenda

for theory: from the critique of political economy to the theory of

organization. Lenin is the obvious guide for this mission, the one

who effectively harnessed the power of the proletariat as the agent of

revolution.

5.2 Spontaneity and subjectivity: Leninist organization 1

To a certain extent, the study of Lenin was imposed on Negri by

the political exigencies of the time and by the discourse common among

militants. He explains this step in his intellectual trajectory

during an interview from prison in late 1979. "Per me il leninismo Š

il prezzo pagato alla composizione politica del proletariato italiano.

Non c'era modo di parlare di politica se non attraverso il leninismo.

... Era la koinŠ di classe: poteva darti fastidio ma potevi andare

avanti con la classe (e non con qualcun altro) solo utilizzandola."

[interview with G. Bocca 166] Leninism was in the air, part of the

culture of the movements; but, perhaps because he feels the pressure

of criminal accusations, Negri is certainly overstating the case here:

even if initially he did feel compelled to engage Lenin, the

confrontation proved to be extremely fruitful and served an important

role in the development of Negri's thought. In spite of his

reservations, his analysis brought to life a Lenin who was already

alive in the contemporary struggles and who could speak to their

central political problems. Furthermore, and perhaps more

importantly, Lenin provided Negri with a new perspective for reading

Marx and a new proposition for the Marxist intellectual endeavor.

Nonetheless, even in his enthusiastic appropriation of Lenin's

thought, Negri maintains reservations which are expressed as indirect

polemics against different propositions of "Leninism" (particularly

those of vanguard and military organization) common in the movement.

We are clearly on treacherous terrain, but let us try to be sensitive,

as much as we can, to the nuances of Negri's position in light of the

practical pressures and needs to which he is responding. (3)

The central question which theory must address, as we have noted,

is that of subjectivity: the pressures of the class struggle force it

onto the top of the agenda. The critical approach never adequately

deals with the subjectivity of the actual working class; the critique

of capital never succeeds in unifying itself with the standpoint of

the working class so as to recognize the proletariat as the effective

agent of social transformation. Critical theory, as we have seen it

in the Italian context and in Negri's thought, principally poses the

class struggle in an objective form and presents social development

through a dialectical dynamic. With the explosion of the new cycle of

struggles, however, the working class demanded to be recognized as the

direct and effective agent of social change. Negri poses the question

in specific political terms: "che cos'Š la classe operaia, oggi, non

pi— solamente, dentro questa specifica crisi, come oggetto di

sfruttamento ma come soggetto di potere?" ["Partito" 105] Critical

theory is an effective tool for recognizing the working class as the

object of exploitation, or rather as the subject constituted through

the complex mechanisms or dispositifs (4) of capitalist domination.

Lenin helps Negri bring the theory of the subject to center stage and

grasp the working class as the subject of power -- a subject capable

of recreating and managing society.

Negri reads Lenin's theory of the subject in his theory of

working class organization; or more precisely, he locates it in the

passage from the analysis of the political composition of the working

class to the theory of organization. According to Negri, the

subjectivity of the workers and their spontaneous behavior constitute

the centerpiece of Leninist organization. We can recognize right from

the beginning, however, that Negri's Lenin is not the Lenin which is

commonly presented. How, for example, can we reconcile this

exaltation of workers' subjectivity with the so-called "Leninist

objection" -- that the theory of organization is not dictated

principally by the composition of the working class, but rather by the

definition of the weakest links in capital's system of domination?

["Partito" 105] The traditional Leninist doctrine locates the

foundation of revolutionary organization not in the theory of workers'

subjectivity but in the critique of political economy. Negri's

proposition of a Leninist theory of the subject seems at first sight

to be in direct contradiction to the famous "Leninist objection", but

we will find that in the context of Lenin's thought this turns out to

be a false opposition. The critique of political economy only makes

sense for Lenin when it is put to use (and thus subordinated) within a

theory of working class subjectivity. In fact, according to Negri, we

will be faced by endless dilemmas such as this unless we submit

Lenin's thought to a Marxist analysis and trace its development

through specific historico-political periods; in other words, in order

to appreciate Lenin's reading of Marx, we need first to pursue a

Marxist reading of Lenin.

Negri proposes three periods of Lenin's theoretical development:

1) the analysis of the political composition of the working class,

1890-1900; 2) the organization of the party, 1900-1910; and 3) the

destruction of the State, 1910-1917. In the first two periods Negri

identifies two complementary approaches to the theory of the subject:

the first in the subject's spontaneity, the second in its receptivity;

the first, then, will be a subjective path to workers' organization

and the second an objective path. We will postpone our study of the

third period, which in many ways constitutes the payoff of the theory

of the subject, until later. The first period, which includes works

such as What are the friends of the people and The development of

capitalism in Russia, centers around Lenin's development of the

concept of a "determinate social formation". This concept, according

to Negri, is the essential point of Lenin's theoretical translation of

Capital. Marxist sociology recognizes the essential structures of a

society by "reducing social relations to relations of production" and

thereby discerning the determinate social formation. [Fabbrica 16] We

should not be misled, though, by this naturalistic and objectivistic

formulation: the contemporary culture was thoroughly permeated by this

terminology, [16-17] but in this early period Lenin uses the

discussion of the "determinate social formation" as a framework for

investigating the composition of the working class and for discerning

the character of the revolutionary subject. According to Negri,

Lenin's analysis of the determinate social formation involves the

investigation of the real conditions and behavior of the working class

which allows us to identify the actual working class standpoint. He

attempts to cast the social analysis so that it will allow us to

interpret the working class as a revolutionary subject. This

theoretical approach to working class subjectivity is, in Negri's

view, the key to Lenin's Marxism: "attorno a questo concetto di classe

operaia (che viene costituendosi sul concetto di formazione sociale

determinata, che diventa reale come motore di un processo tendenziale

inarrestabile), Š proprio qui che l'originalit… della lettura

leninista del marxismo si fa chiara." [19] Lenin brings the working

class into theory as a mature subject.

Negri substantiates this interpretation of Lenin through a

reading of his principle works of the 1890s. In these works we find

the groundwork for Lenin's theory of the subject (and hence of

revolutionary organization) in his analysis of the spontaneous

behavior of the working class: "il primo elemento che salta agli

occhi, nella lettura del Lenin di questi anni, Š l'esaltazione della

spontaneit…, -- non in maniera occasionale, ma permanente e

sistematica." [20] Lenin was witnessing the intense combativity of

the select group of highly-skilled Russian workers during these years

and he came to recognize the political importance of these spontaneous

economic struggles. Lenin read the determinate social formation in

the composition and behavior of the working class. The workers'

struggles, however immature they may be from an organizational

standpoint, always manifest a political intuition, they always allude

to political goals: "ogni lotta economica Š lotta politica". [20] The

workers' struggles always manifest a real political content and

furthermore economic agitation and worker spontaneity provide the

necessary foundation for any proletarian political programme. The

intense struggle of these highly-skilled workers, the developed

consciousness of this elite work force, already foreshadows the

characteristics of a powerful organization. Economism and

spontaneism: the orthodox "Leninist" tradition would attack these

conceptions, yet Negri finds them as the point of departure for

Lenin's work in the 1890s. Spontaneity is the emergence of working

class subjectivity and the affirmation of this spontaneity of the

masses is the first moment of Leninist organization.

In the following decade, however, particularly with What is to be

done? (1902), Lenin's theory makes a leap to a directly political

level. He proclaims in this second period that we must refuse the

"submission to spontaneity"; he focuses, in other words, on the

specificity of political struggle and organization which is beyond the

sphere of economic struggle, beyond the spontaneous behavior of the

masses. This proposition of political leadership might appear to be

in direct contradiction to the spirit of Lenin's work in the 90s, but

Negri reads this new element as a continuation of the earlier

position, as it theoretical complement. The specificity of politics

characterizes the second moment of Leninist organization. "E' solo il

completamento dell'affirmazione che la lotta economica Š lotta

politica che determina il salto alla seconda fondamentale

affirmazione: la lotta politica non Š solo lotta economica." [22] If

the first moment, the economic struggles of the workers and the

spontaneity of the masses, constitutes the intuition of revolutionary

organization, the second moment, that of political leadership and

autonomous political organization, is its confirmation; or better, if

the first moment is the affirmation of working class subjectivity, the

second moment is the affirmation of that affirmation. The vertical

form expressed in the workers' economic struggles, the hierarchical

relationship among workers is formalized (or raised to a power) in the

institution of the party. How, then, should we interpret Lenin's

attack in What is to be done? on the "submission to spontaneity"?

Even though it is of first importance always to adhere to the

concreteness of the spontaneous movements of the working class, there

must at some point be a qualitative leap which poses political

direction, a leap from the particular to the general. However, this

leap, Negri insists, is a leap within a continuous organizational

development. The intuition nascent in the spontaneity of the masses

must be organized, it must be raised to the level of consciousness:

"l'organizzazione Š la spontaneit… che riflette su se stessa." [27]

The direction imposed by a conscious political leadership is the

necessary fulfillment of the project inherent in the behavior of the

working class: "l'organizzazione Š infatti la verifica della

spontaneit…, il suo raffinamento". [27] Political leadership raises

the mass subjectivity to the level of truth and gives the working

class an interior identity. (5) The Leninist party, Negri insists,

assumes the model of a factory: it takes the raw material of the

workers' spontaneous subjectivity and transforms it into a coherent

and subversive weapon. [29-30] This Leninist conception of

organization is an implicit critique of the two positions which define

its borders: on one side it is the critique of anarcho-syndicalism,

which recognizes working class subjectivity in the spontaneity of

struggles but refuses its specifically political organization [43];

and on the other side it is the critique any attempt to pose a

revolutionary organization which is not firmly based in the

spontaneity of the masses.

5.3 Determinate class composition: Leninist organization 2

The paradox of Lenin's theory of subjectivity lies in the perfect

identity of the two moments of organization. "L'organizzazione deve

sempre ®rivelare¯, nel senso marxiano, la libera attivit… della classe

-- in ci• la prefigurazione Š possibile" [60] What is the logic of

this prefiguration? What leads Lenin and Negri to believe that the

spontaneous expression of the masses will be directly in line with the

conscious programme of the political leaders? To answer this we have

to look back at Lenin's conception of the determinate social formation

and the objective conditions which underpin the "spontaneity" of the

subject. There is an objective substratum in Lenin's thought,

functioning as a gloss parallel to the spontaneous path to

organization, which moves from the critique of political economy via

the analysis of class composition to the theory of organization. The

seeds for the character of working class subjectivity are to be found

in the specific mode of production, in the organizational form of

capitalist command. We have to qualify, then, our usage of

"spontaneity" in the emergence of working class subjectivity. We

should not understand the subjectivity which is expressed in economic

struggles as spontaneous in the sense that it derives from the free

will of the workers; on the contrary, the struggles are the result of

a determinate will formed in the material work relations in the

production processes. The spontaneity resides in the fact that the

workers' expression receives no external organization but arises

directly from material conditions. In other words, even the Leninist

affirmation of spontaneous worker expression in economic struggles

should not be interpreted as an idealist definition of subjectivity;

on the contrary, in Lenin "il soggetto Š definito dalla sua

composizione materiale: materialit… di lotte, di salario, di

collocazione istituzionale." [39] The subject is defined in the

specific conditions and relationships of its labor.

Lenin proposes the objective conditions which underpin the

formation of workers' subjectivity when he defines the theoretical

passage from the critique of political economy to the analysis of

class composition. Lenin refers the question of revolutionary

organization back to a phenomenology of the working class. In the

specific case of pre-revolutionary Russia, Lenin finds an industrial

working class which, in its laboring processes, is organized in the

factory through a strict hierarchy of relationships which place the

highly-trained worker in a position of leadership with respect to the

other workers. The specialized character of the labor tasks and the

rigid divisions within the factory, typical of Russian industrial

production in this period, provide the conditions for the

"professional worker" as the paradigm worker subjectivity. The

proposal of the highly-skilled worker as the paradigm subject is an

abstraction, but in Marxist terms it is a determinate abstraction,

that is, it is a concept based not on idealist speculation but on the

recognition of a real tendency in the concrete and material world, in

this case on the composition of the working class. The paradigm

worker subjectivity, then, is determined in the specific mode of

production and the composition of this subjectivity, in turn, provides

the model for revolutionary organization. In this sense, the workers'

organization is "prefigured" in the organization of labor processes.

In order to be grounded in the determinate worker subjectivity, the

party should trace the hierarchical organization of Russian capitalist

production and reproduce the same relationship between vanguard and

masses found in the factory. The Leninist party, then, "Š il partito

legato al recupero e alla riunificazione di una serie diversa di

strati, di forme di lavoro, di forme di sussistenza, di forme di

reddito e di forme di lotta." [58] The vanguard party should be

"external" and representative of the working class to the extent the

professional worker is detached from the mass of workers in

production. [29] Both the power and the limitations of Lenin's theory

of organization lie in its close tie to a specific mode of production.

The Leninist party is effective as a workers' organization in pre-

revolutionary Russia because it recuperates the specific

organizational forms which are immanent to the contemporary industrial

production processes; and it is limited for precisely the same reason

-- the form of the Bolshevik party is effective only as long as the

specific mode of productive organization persists.

5.4 The contemporaneity of Lenin: projective Marxism

One of the most important lessons of Lenin, then, or of Negri's

Marxist reading of Lenin, is "the need to relate discussion and

practice on the question of organisation back to the real materiality

of class movements today." ["Crisis" 112] We find that in fact Negri's

affirmation of the Leninist theory of organization serves

paradoxically to highlight the ways in which the historically specific

form of Leninist organization is no longer appropriate to the

contemporary manifestations of worker subjectivity and to the present

mode of production. In order for Lenin's discourse to correspond to

our needs, there would have to be a general homogeneity between the

political composition of the working class which he faced and that

facing us today; obviously, however, we can recognize enormous points

of heterogeneity. [33] When we look at the behavior and needs of the

masses of workers in Italy during this period, for example, we find

that the spontaneous expressions of subjectivity did not take the

vertical form of a select and conscious elite, but rather found a

general expression across a broad horizon. After decades of

militancy, it was common to say in that era, the workers had

internalized the strategies of combat and expressed themselves in a

myriad of autonomous forms, with disregard to any workers' elites and

outside of the "official" workers' movements. The detailed studies of

wildcat strikes by Romano Alquati at the FIAT plants give an excellent

description of the mass behavior of the workers. [Sulla FIAT] The

central point, which is perfectly obvious, is that the mass

expressions of the Italian workers in the 60s and 70s was greatly

different from the limited expressions of the elite Russian workers at

the beginning of the century: the spontaneous behavior had adopted a

horizontal rather than vertical form. The material movements of the

working class demanded a different form of subjectivity.

We reach the same conclusion when we pursue Lenin's "objectivist"

path to organization which analyses, in the theoretical passage from

the critique of political economy to the composition of the working

class, the conditions which underpin the formation of worker

subjectivity. The specialized industrial production in Russia, we

have noted, provided the conditions for the rise of the "professional

worker" as the paradigm worker subjectivity. Negri has already shown

in great detail, however, that in the 20s and 30s, after the full

impact of the October Revolution, capital reacted by restructuring

production and thus destroying the conditions for the professional

worker. In the process of the massification of production and the

deskilling of the labor force, capital destroyed the hierarchy among

the workers and hence it flattened the relationship between the

vanguard and the masses which previously had characterized workers'

organization. It destroyed the foundation on which the vanguard party

could be conceived as external to and representative of the class.

Negri also poses this historical change which separates us from

Lenin in Marxian terms as the passage from the formal subsumption of

society within capital to the real subsumption. (6) In the phase of

the formal subsumption, there is a certain slippage between social

production and capitalism: certain pre-capitalist and autonomous forms

of production and social cooperation persist external to capital and

they are merely formally subsumed within the global framework of

capitalist rule. In the real subsumption, though, labor power and

capitalist relations of production are extended horizontally

throughout society; labor and production are purely social

determinations and hence the "social factory" is absolutely diffuse.

The real subsumption, in short, is defined by the direct rule of

capital over society. Negri claims that while Marx recognized this

passage from the formal to the real subsumption as a tendency of

capitalism, today it has become a reality. In subsequent years, Negri

will make a great deal of this Marxian distinction, but at this point

and for our limited purposes the argument is quite simple: Lenin

recognized correctly in the conditions of the formal subsumption a

slippage between the particularity of economic struggles and the

generality of political struggles which needed to be addressed or

recuperated by party organization. Today, however, the fundamental

presumptions of Lenin's recognition have disappeared: "Il passagio

dalla particolarit… alla generalit…, dalla lotta economica alla lotta

politica ... perde il significato assunto nel pensiero di Lenin."

"Oggi, invece, nella nostra situazione, lotta economica e lotta

politica si identicano in termini completi ...." [34-5] The

fundamental passage of Leninist organization, then, from the

particular to the general, from the economic to the political is no

longer adequate to our reality. This distinction between the economic

and the political and the specificity of the passage between them was

the basis for Lenin's proposition of the party outside of the working

class. Today, in the conditions of the real subsumption, since this

distinction effectively has dropped out, there is no basis for

political organization external to the class.

Why has Negri entered into such extensive and detailed study of

Lenin, then, if he is only to conclude that Lenin's specific analyses

are completely out-dated and inappropriate for the contemporary class

situation? In what sense does Negri consider himself Leninist? "Non

esiste nessun feticcio, si chiami pure Lenin, a cui sacrificare." [69]

We do not need any Lenin worship, we do not need to advocate fidelity

to the set of abstract models he proposed; rather, what we should

adopt from Lenin is a project of reading the real and present

composition of the working class and interpreting its subjectivity,

its needs for organized expression. The most innovative aspect of

Lenin's thought is its mass methodology, its theory of mass

intelligence, its ability to dissolve theory in to the practice of the

masses and crystalize it again in a central insight. "Quindi leninismo

come metodo, ma come metodo di massa, come pratica di massa, nella

misura in cui il leninismo affida il destino rivoluzionario alla

capacit… delle masse di rendersi immediatamente agenti. In questo

senso nuovo si riconquista la complessit… del processo e s'intende

quel concetto liminare dell'insurrezione come arte." [68] Leninism is

an art insofar as it grasps, in the practice of the masses, the

subject of revolution. In Negri's hands, Leninism is a proposition

for a reorientation of the Marxist endeavor, a subordination and

incorporation of the critique of capital within the revolutionary

project of the working class, a dissolution and refoundation of theory

within the practice of the masses. This is the contemporaneity of

Lenin.