The real question is rather: for those who deny the centrality of the working class, where is the epicenter? For the centrality of the working class is not merely “sociological”: it is an image of the centrality of the modes and relations of production with multiple social and ideological formations which intersect and contradict each other. Or further: in a system without an epicenter, where would movement come from?
The critique of Stalinist dogmatism from “the left-wing position of theoretical antihumanism” challenges a form of Marxist theory which supports, guarantees, and illustrates a certain view and practice of class struggle, a certain vision of socialism.
Once we manage to avoid identifying a “political center” and “theoretical” center in advance, from identifying the elaboration of a strategy with the application of a pre-established vision to the course of history, it might be possible to overcome the dilemmas of “democratic centralism” and the “right to tendencies.”
To modify the balance of power within the state, and furthermore, radically modify the materiality of the state, is only one aspect of a democratic transition to socialism. The other aspect of the process depends on, at the same time, grassroots social movements propelling the spread of spaces of direct democracy: in short for movements to ground themselves in popular struggles that always spill over beyond, and keep a distance from, the state.
It is necessary, then, to modify our relationship to Marxism today, to begin from its lacunas, its points of fragility – to openly confront its forbidden zones, its blind spots, so that this real crisis becomes an emancipatory one, producing other analyses, other political practices.
It is in this profoundly political sense that we are forced today, it seems to me, to speak of a theoretical crisis within Marxism, in order to clarify the ways in which it affects what is called Marxist theory itself: and in particular the fact that a number of apparently infallible principles inherited from the Second and Third Internationals have now been placed in doubt.
The crisis, moreover, goes beyond the purely political domain and invests the realm of theory itself. It is a crisis of Marxism, which is experienced by immense masses as an unacknowledged reality. Marxism – not as a body of theoretical or philosophical thought, but as the great idealistic force that was changing the world – is now groaning under the weight of this history.
I believe that Marxist theory is “finite,” limited: that it is limited to the analysis of the capitalist mode of production, and of its contradictory tendency, which opens up the possibility of the transition to the abolition of capitalism and its replacement by “something else” which already appears implicitly in capitalist society.
In 1977 Louis Althusser gave a famous speech in Venice on “the crisis of Marxism,” a thesis almost as scandalous as that of an epistemological break in Marx’s thought.
If we want to call the “Lenin question” the problem of organization opened in the 1970s and today newly again before us, we can certainly do so, provided that it is understood that the watchword of Lenin does not mean nostalgia or organizational fetishism, but is rather a new solution for the problems that he had posed and victoriously resolved.
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