Occupy Lenin

That a strong evolutionism has been the protective, albeit veiled, deity of almost all anti-capitalist strategies for much of the twentieth century is hard to deny. Whether associated with working-class counter-power, progressive (and later participatory) democracy or the social economy, all these in their way presupposed a capitalism that tended by its very nature to die out, either from the slow-working poison of a historic crisis or because it is undermined by the new relations and new subjects that its own development is compelled to create. Due to its refusal to tackle the question of the construction of a state and an organic model of production for tomorrow, this theory, even in its most recent 'altermondialist' variants, is dependent on the strategies of today’s capital and of today’s state and remains caught up in the practices of governance. In proposing partial and insufficient economic alternatives, it fails to understand the meaning and seriousness of the present crisis and of the significance and direction of the new popular revolts that the crisis has already produced. The following brief thoughts contend that the current crisis has now made outdated this kind ‘evolutionary vision’ of the overcoming of capitalism, of the construction of a ‘possible world’ which held sway, in variant versions, up to the beginning of the twenty-first century. The crisis thus rings in, once again, the hour of Lenin. And the real dividing line is in fact the crisis: if its eruption brings us back to Marx, its momentary ‘solution’ brings us to Lenin. That is, it brings us to the need to put classes, their struggle and the state at the centre of analysis and to imagine a social alternative that can no longer be just a corrective for the deeply ingrained present but which has to offer itself as a break with it, without dodging the responsibility of proposing a new and coherent mode of production. From now on, the goal of the popular movements’ politics becomes twofold. On the one hand, popular grassroots institutions need to be developed. Forms of self-organization and of direct and/or participatory democracy need to grow. On the other hand, there must be coordinated action, articulated in steps and phases, aimed at the conquest and redetermination of state power. On the one hand, a linear and cumulative time for the progressive growth of popular self-organized subjectivity; on the other hand, discontinuous and changeable time for intervention in the political conjuncture. On the one hand, cooperative action; on the other, strategic action. Without one you cannot have the other. Without the first, there is no accumulation of the knowledge of relations and of forces that allows the conquest and transformation of the state and of production, and there are no autonomous popular institutions, which, keeping their distance from the state, may influence it and transform it without reducing socialist politics to statism. Without the second there are no political, juridical and economic resources allowing popular institutions to construct a new social order and, before that, to survive the crisis