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: Thirty-Three Lessons on Lenin (a work based on a collection of lectures originally delivered by Negri in the 1970s). I suggest that Negri’s 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.
Articles by Douglas Spielman
Douglas Spielman is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Communication at the University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill. His past work has looked at representations of time in Marx’s theory of value. Douglas's current research analyzes the ways in which labor was mobilized as a category of political recognition and right in early modern and modern social thought. He is, in part, concerned with how these usages of the category were impacted by technoscientific developments and discourses.
Marxism, Cultural Studies, and the “Principle Of Historical Specification”: On The Form of Historical Time in Conjunctural Analysis
Karl Korsch identifies in Marx’s work what he calls “the principle of historical specification,” the way in which “Marx comprehends all things social in terms of a definite historical epoch.” This work is concerned with this idea and its instantiation in contemporary social theory. With this paper I hope to show how the principle of historical specification has been interpreted within the Birmingham tradition of cultural studies, paying specific attention to (1) the form of historical time implicit in the concept of a “conjuncture,” and (2) the logic of historical periodization that follows from a “conjuncturalist” approach to historical research. I argue that a conception of plural temporality is central to the mode of historical analysis associated with the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies.