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.