Factory of Strategy: Thirty-Three Lessons on Lenin

Insurrections: Critical Studies in Religion, Politics, and Culture

by Antonio Negri, Arianna Bove (Translator)

Factory of Strategy is the last of Antonio Negri's major political works to be translated into English. Rigorous and accessible, it is both a systematic inquiry into the development of Lenin's thought and an encapsulation of a critical shift in Negri's theoretical trajectory.

Lenin is the only prominent politician of the modern era to seriously question the "withering away" and "extinction" of the state, and like Marx, he recognized the link between capitalism and modern sovereignty and the need to destroy capitalism and reconfigure the state. Negri refrains from portraying Lenin as a ferocious dictator enforcing the poor's reappropriation of wealth, nor does he depict him as a mere military tool of a vanguard opposed to the Ancien R?gime. Negri instead champions Leninism's ability to adapt to different working-class compositions in Russia, China, Latin America, and elsewhere. He argues that Lenin developed a new political figure in and beyond modernity and an effective organization capable of absorbing different historical conditions. Negri ultimately urges readers to recognize the universal application of Leninism today and its potential to institutionally -- not anarchically -- dismantle centralized power.

Genres: Philosophy, Politics

368 pages, Hardcover

First published April 5, 2004

About the author

Antonio Negri was an Italian political philosopher known as one of the most prominent theorists of autonomism, as well as for his co-authorship of Empire with Michael Hardt and his work on the philosopher Baruch Spinoza. Born in Padua, Italy, Negri became a professor of political philosophy at the University of Padua, where he taught state and constitutional theory. Negri founded the Potere Operaio (Worker Power) group in 1969 and was a leading member of Autonomia Operaia, and published hugely influential books urging "revolutionary consciousness."
Negri was accused in the late 1970s of various charges including being the mastermind of the left-wing urban guerrilla organization Red Brigades (Brigate Rosse or BR), which was involved in the May 1978 kidnapping and murder of former Italian prime minister Aldo Moro. On 7 April 1979, he Negri was arrested and charged with a long list of crimes including the Moro murder. Most charges were dropped quickly, but in 1984 he was still sentenced (in absentia) to 30 years in prison. He was given an additional four years on the charge of being "morally responsible" for the violence of political activists in the 1960s and 1970s. The question of Negri's complicity with left-wing extremism is a controversial subject. He was indicted on a number of charges, including "association and insurrection against the state" (a charge which was later dropped), and sentenced for involvement in two murders.
Negri fled to France where, protected by the Mitterrand doctrine, he taught at the Paris VIII (Vincennes) and the Collège international de philosophie, along with Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Gilles Deleuze. In 1997, after a plea-bargain that reduced his prison time from 30 to 13 years, he returned to Italy to serve the end of his sentence. Many of his most influential books were published while he was behind bars. He hence lived in Venice and Paris with his partner, the French philosopher Judith Revel. He was the father of film director Anna Negri.
Like Deleuze, Negri's preoccupation with Spinoza is well known in contemporary philosophy. Along with Althusser and Deleuze, he has been one of the central figures of a French-inspired neo-Spinozism in continental philosophy of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, that was the second remarkable Spinoza revival in history, after a well-known rediscovery of Spinoza by German thinkers (especially the German Romantics and Idealists) in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

Reviews

[Luke · Rating 2 out of 5]

A lot of the typical (and possibly outdated) narrative of Lenin put in nearly impenetrable language. When Negri is being more original, I find his insights lacking and sometimes insipid (such as implying that we are already living under sociallsm because the law of value is no longer operative). Most of the text is just hot air.

[James M · Rating 5 out of 5]

A brilliant rereading and recontextualisation of Lenins work, from his conception of how the nature of capital shapes the strategy of revolution, the importance of dialectics, and an exceptional analysis of the State and Revolution and it's insights on the withering away of the state