Hardt: Into the factory: Lenin and the caesure subjective

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Kategori: Autonomi och operaism

Into the factory: Lenin and the caesure 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 � posto su di noi, qui dove la classe operaia � 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 � il prezzo pagato alla composizione politica del proletariato italiano.� Non c'era modo di parlare di politica se non attraverso il leninismo.� ... �Era la koin� 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'� 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), � 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, � 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 � 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 � lotta politica che determina il salto alla seconda fondamentale affirmazione: la lotta politica non � 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 � 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 � 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 � 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 � 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, "� 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.

5.5 The mass vanguard and the ambiguities of worker centrality

On the theoretical plane, as we have seen, Negri attempts to rejuvenate Lenin's concept of the revolutionary subject by updating it with respect to the contemporary socio-political conditions. When we turn to examine how these ideas are played out within the Italian political context of this period, however, we find a clear disparity in Negri's thought and the persistence of certain Leninist propositions which he seemed to have rejected earlier. Negri advocates in his political circles, for example, the theoretical centering of the revolutionary subject on the typical factory worker and hence the organization of a vanguard party to lead the movement. We should be very careful, however, in interpreting these positions because they are so closely tied to the political contingencies specific to the Italian situation in this period. Therefore, with one eye on the turbulent political scene we will try to position these practical propositions in order to clarify this stage of Negri's thought.

Negri was one of the founding members of Potere operaio [Workers' Power] a political organization which existed roughly from 1969 to 1973. The status of the organization was continually in flux, but one of Negri's central and most problematic texts of this period, "Partito operaio contro il lavoro", which was circulated in various forms among militants in the movement, constituted his proposition of a programme to transform Potere Operaio into a revolutionary party. As a party, Potere operaio would be the central point of focus or the vanguard for the various struggles and thus lead the path to revolution. The most problematic element of this proposition, given the theoretical framework which we have established, is the conception of the priority of a revolutionary subjectivity centered around the factory workers: the mass worker is presented as the paradigm subjectivity and hence as the vanguard for the entire working class. The concept of a vanguard party persists here in Negri's thought, even though we have seen that the conditions for its existence have been taken away. Negri does have a coherent means of explaining this seemingly paradoxical position, but to be adequately understood these arguments have to be situated in the context of rapid social change and intense political violence. Once we position Negri's argument, in fact, the call for proletarian unity appears designed principally to fulfill a role of moderation, mediating between the extremes active in the workers' movements.

The foundation for the proposition of a vanguard party in Negri's theoretical investigations is a highly problematic one. His periodization of labor relations and production presents this in perhaps the simplest terms. Capitalist production of the late 19th century, Negri has argued, tended toward the development of highly- skilled factory production as its central factor. Correspondingly, through the conditions of these relations of production, a paradigm workers' subjectivity, the professional worker, progressively matured to the point that it constituted a independent threat to the existence of capital through its organization in the professional vanguard party. The capitalist transformation, then, to mass factory production both destroyed the conditions for the professional worker and created the conditions for a new worker subjectivity, the mass worker. The formal schema is logically completed, then, by the mass vanguard party as the form of organization adequate to the mass worker subject.

dominant capitalist | paradigm class | adequate structure of production | subjectivity | organization ________________________|______________________|________________ | | specialized industrial | professional | professional production | worker | vanguard party | | mass industrial | mass | mass vanguard production | worker | party

Therefore when Negri says "� inimaginabile una ripresa della teoria del partito (dentro la composizione attuale di classe) che ripete in maniera predissequa la teoria leninista" [Fabbrica 63] he is not rejecting the contemporary validity of a vanguard party tout court, but rather he is arguing for a "mass" rather than a "professional" class vanguard: "In realt� il concetto di avanguardia si � modificato, � divenuto concetto di �avanguardia di massa� ...." [61] The ambiguities here are all contained in the paradoxical concept of a mass vanguard. The first component of the concept, its "mass" character, attempts to bridge any possible gap or destroy any externality between the political elite and the masses of workers. In his critique of Lenin, we have already seen that Negri believes that the distinction between the particular and the general, between the economic and the political which Lenin theorized is no longer adequate to the class situation. Therefore, it follows that political organization must construct a unification of the working class not from a position external to the masses (as Lenin imagined it) but rather from an internal standpoint within the masses: "Non 'dall'alto', bens� dal basso, dal di dentro, questo processo di unificazione pu� solamente darsi." ["Partito" 130] Revolutionary organization, then, should be a "mass" organization in that it is situated within the class. Through the power of this mass subjectivity, the working class rejects any form of representation through external leadership and presents itself as the unmediated subject of power. "Il potere, la classe pu� delegarlo solo a se stessa." [147] However, this first component of the concept seems to be contradicted (or at least, problematized) by the second: this internal organization is nonetheless unified and centered around a vanguard, which is in some sense distinguished from the masses. The distinction is made, on a theoretical plane, principally on the basis of productive labor: the mass workers in the large factories are given the political task of a vanguard because they constitute the heart of capitalist production. Through this political priority and relative autonomy, the factory worker vanguard is privileged with an hegemony over the rest of the working class and indeed the entire society. In this sense, Negri reproposes revolutionary centralization and the political need for a party. In a perfectly paradoxical fashion, Negri proposes that the party be both internal and external to the class.

Here, however, we find the reappearance in Negri's thought of the traditional Leninist distinctions between the economic and the political in the concept of a mass vanguard. "Il concetto di partito delle avanguardie di massa � quello della unificazione fra lotta per il salario e lotta rivoluzionaria per il potere." [135] The mass economic struggle (for wages, against work) and the vanguard political struggle (for power) must be seen as both separate and united. This analysis of the two struggles corresponds perfectly to organizational strategies. The communist tradition of anti-fascist resistance (dating back to WWII) proposes organization on "dual levels": a mass level and an elite (or clandestine) level. The proposition of the mass vanguard is an attempt to maintain the power of this strategy but supersede its duality in a synthetical unity. Negri tries to work his way out of this theoretical dilemma, in other words, on both the analytical and organization planes, with a dialectical slight of hand: the two struggles are dialectically united in the mass vanguard party; the passage from the plural subject of the economic struggles to the unified subject of the political struggle is a passage from quantity to quality. "Solo un uso marxiano della dialettica materialistica ci pu� permettere di approfondire e di chiarire il concetto di avanguardia di massa, quindi il concetto di partito operaio contro il lavoro." [136] The appeal to the dialectic, however, does not give Negri a convincing solution to this problem. The concept of mass vanguard remains a paradox. Nonetheless, Negri's objective here is quite clear: he wants to discover a social synthesis to produce a coherent revolutionary subject strong enough to meet the contemporary needs of the class struggle.