Context and Organization: Situating Antonio Negri's 'Factory of Strategy' in the Contemporary Debate on the Party Form

Abstract

This paper begins by observing a tension in contemporary political discourse on the left: against a backdrop of social movements that prioritize “horizontal” organizational structures, there has been a renewed academic debate on the relevance of Lenin and the party form. In this paper I look at Antonio Negri’s recently translated Factory of Strategy: 33 Lessons on Lenin (a work based on a collection of lectures originally delivered by Negri in the 1970s). I suggest that Negri’s untimely intervention can make a significant contribution to this debate, one that—without rejecting the Leninist project as such—reframes what it would mean to appropriate Lenin for today. By focusing on Lenin’s method of political analysis rather than his specific form of organization, I argue that Negri recovers from within Lenin’s writing a set of categories that can themselves provide the terms for a critique of contemporary Leninism. For Negri, this entails showing how Lenin’s system contains the means by which to theorize its own supersession. In presenting a theory of political intervention that is able to reflexively analyze its historical conditions of possibility, I suggest that Negri’s work on Lenin embodies several important theoretical and methodological commitments. This paper’s concluding section looks at recent work by Jodi Dean and critically interprets her endorsement of the party form in light of Negri’s intervention.

Keywords

• antonio negri
• autonomist marxism
• part form
• lenin
• jodi dean