The following essay is a revised and expanded version of the author’s online intervention entitled “Lenin’s Alternative: A Politics of Another Type”, which took place on 25 May 2024, as the closing address of the international series of events Leninist Days/Jornadas leninistas (27 January to 25 to May 2024), organised in commemoration of the centenary of the death of Vladimir I. Lenin.
It was originally published last 28 January on the website of Communis, one of the organisers, together with Historical Materialism, of Leninist Days.
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There are many Lenins, as the astounding gallery of discordant images presented throughout these remarkable forty-one “Leninist Days” has so amply attested. It is indeed one of the sure signs of Lenin’s now assuredly “classical” status that so many different readers have been able to find in his thought and activity such diverse ways of approaching both historical and contemporary issues, and above all, a way of comprehending the consistent intertwining of the historical and the contemporary. Lenin is a “classic” in this precise sense, that is, not a fixed monument retrieved from the past, but a refracting prism by means of which the present can seek to gain new perspectives on its relationship to itself.[1]
Understood as classic in this way, it can never be a question of choosing between one or another of these Lenins: Lenin the party organiser and austere theorist of organisational discipline versus Lenin the almost anarchistic tactician of the temporal specificity of the political intervention into existing relations of force, for instance, or Lenin the (Dada-esque?) poetic practitioner of the appropriately timed slogan versus the pragmatic policy advocate of the New Economic Policy and Cultural Revolution.[2] We need all of these Lenins, all these different visual angles onto the past, present and future of revolutionary politics in an authentic sense as a living tradition. The capacity to inherit all of them in their conflictuality and creativity over the last 20 years, and throughout this genuinely global series of seminars, can, in this sense, be taken as an index of the growing maturation of a new generational socialist culture.[3]
In this text, I propose to focus on only one of these Lenins, and, indeed, on a very brief, almost ephemeral and maybe even marginal moment in Lenin’s overall evolution, even if its later influence and inheritance by conflicting Marxist currents has made it appear much more central to Lenin’s thought and practice as a whole than was historically or textually the case. I am referring here to Lenin the theorist of the novel notion of “dual power” in the middle months of 1917. My thesis is that this is the Lenin who outlines an alternative conception of political power, and more precisely, the Lenin who outlines the conception of a type of politics that represents an alternative to the main currents of modern political thought and practice.
What are the central features of these main currents of modern political thought, and in what sense is Lenin to be distinguished from them? Necessarily very schematically, these main currents can be characterised as a line that runs from Bodin, Hobbes and Rousseau to Weber, Schmitt, Rawls and beyond, which thinks politics qua politics in one way or another as the production of unity by means of a relation of authority and command. For this (obviously internally contradictory and conflicting) tradition, politics is constituted as that instance in modern social formations that, in a literal sense, ‘forces’ them, an instance of regulation, decision and consequentially of the imposition of order (of whatever type) on what is assumed to be the primordial disorder of the pre-and non-political, whether they are conceived as the social, the economic, the ethical, the moral or any other variant.[4] Politics is thus effectively thought as a mechanism for the affirmation of what this tradition characterises as ‘sovereignty’, the instance of ultimate political power that affirms itself, and above or beyond which there can be no effective appeal, structurally or temporally. In Bodin’s foundational terms, in order to be truly sovereign, sovereignty must be absolute, perpetual and, crucially, indivisible, in the sense of being a power that is unable to be shared or divided between the sovereign and its subjects.[5] Sovereignty, that is, establishes the necessity of a permanent and structural separation between ruling and ruled instances, or expressed in other terms, between organisational force and associational practice. It is on this basis that a circular relationship can be established between means (politics) and ends (sovereignty), in which the latter retroacts upon the former, making the notion of non-sovereign politics a contradiction in terms.
This emphasis upon incontestable, undivided and enduring political unity necessarily culminates in the principle and practice of politics as ‘representation’ in a very precise sense: the ‘re-presentation’ of that which has (logically and temporally) been made absent, an absenting undertaken precisely in order to render re-presentation possible.[6] Representation, in this specific sense, should be understood not only in a narrowly institutional sense associated with the parliamentary tradition, as the valorisation of the responsible and judicious consciousness of the Representative set against the caprice of the Delegate. Rather, representation here is conceived as a formalisation of the wider practices of the absenting of the energies and perspectives of the overwhelming majority of actors in a social formation (namely, the working classes in the broadest sense, or, in Gramsci’s terms, the subaltern social groups) and their replacement – their re-presentation – by elites of various types in political processes defined in narrowly and strictly institutional terms.[7]
It is not only Hobbes’s graphically representative figure of the Leviathan, a unified body containing and ordering formerly chaotic multitudes, that we should consider in this expanded optic. Even an open critic of the principle of representation as such like Rousseau reproduces this logic of ‘representative absenting’ at the heart of his notion of the General Will.[8] Indeed, the rapidity of the transition that Rousseau recommends from the (fractious) ‘will of all’ to the (unified) ‘General Will’ could be taken as an even more paradigmatic instance of this absenting-representing process than its Hobbesian forerunner, insofar as the general will functions as an instance of transcendental imposition of order precisely by means of a subtractive logic. The general will is what is left as formal universal instance after all empirically existing particular claims have been reclassified as contingent. As Rousseau famously characterised the “considerable difference between the will of all and the general will: the latter looks only to the common interest, the former looks to private interest, and is nothing but a sum of particular wills; but if, from these same wills, one takes away the pluses and the minuses which cancel each other out, what is left as the sum of the differences is the general will”.[9]
Rousseau’s argument historically played a central role in the rise to pre-eminence of the notion of ‘popular sovereignty’, which has often and increasingly been regarded as a democratically more acceptable alternative to the (instrumentally) absolutist claims commonly and erroneously taken to lie at the foundation of Bodin’s theorisation of sovereignty. In this conception the positively evaluated adjective is taken not only to qualify or modify the (now suspect) substantive, but even in some ways to negate it. Yet the impetus behind Bodin’s theorisation – namely, the attempt to derive a principle of supreme political power from the nature of the constitution of the political community as a hierarchy of ruler and ruled – in fact, arguably, only reaches its logical conclusion precisely in the notion of popular sovereignty, that is, a sovereignty of ‘The People’ in which the abstraction of a singularity-multiplicity is affirmed as the ultimate source of political decision without interior challengers or divisions (Rousseau’s seditious factions of private interests) or – the crucial point – without an exterior (insofar as complete and totalising political unity, the people is strictly speaking uncountable and precisely in this sense can occupy the place of the singular sovereign).[10] As an abstraction formed by means of re-presentation, the people thus come to function both as subject (wielder of sovereign power) and, simultaneously, as its own object (ruled by ‘itself’); Bodin’s dream of sovereignty as the stable fusion of ruling and ruled instances in an enduring political community without exterior is indeed, arguably, only finally realised precisely in such a popular declination.
Bourgeois and capitalist politics is, in this sense, constitutively representative and sovereign, constituting a key moment of condensation of what I have elsewhere argued are the more general processes of subalternisation that have characterised political modernity.[11] Such substitutionism is, obviously, by no means limited to the specific forms of subalternisation of bourgeois representative democracy, but has been a dynamic even and especially in the history of oppositional political forces. The common feature in such historically variable processes of subalternisation is that organization is valorised over and against association, leading to an unbridgeable (formal) distance between political power and political knowledges (in their plurality). Even in so-called ‘popular’ regimes, the maintenance of a distinction between the decision-making capacity of a singular organisational moment and the necessarily multiple and overlapping practices of association ensures a gulf between those who govern and those who are governed. In this sense, sovereignty necessary subalternises, because it structurally assigns a permanently subordinate position to other, non-sovereign instances; indeed, sovereignty cannot do without such subalternisation, insofar it depends upon this generalised submission, this recognition of itself as an ultimate court of appeal, in order to assert (successfully) its claims to be sovereign.
In what sense, then, do I argue that Lenin should be distinguished from such theorists of politics as sovereignty, and that the notion of dual power, in particular, represents a theoretical alternative to the main representative current of the party of bourgeois sovereign order? Dual power has, after all, more frequently been understood as an exemplary instance of Lenin’s concrete analysis of a concrete conjuncture (to use Althusser’s terms), that is, as having primarily a historical or empirical significance, as a description of specific and transitory conditions in the evolution of the Russian Revolution in 1917, rather than representing a theoretical contribution in its own right. In order to understand the theoretical significance of the notion of dual power, we therefore first need to set aside some of the influential ways in which it has traditionally been understood.
First, a situation of dual power for Lenin was not produced through the application of political will (or at least not if ‘will’ is understood in terms of subjective orientation, as Willkur rather than Wille, to use the Kantian distinction). As he originally elaborated this elusive notion in the space between the two revolutions of 1917, dual power was not a matter of a choice: the more or less subjective choice by a given political actor of one strategic proposal over another at an indeterminate time. It was, instead, an objectively given situation, or, more precisely, a relation of force inscribed in the structure of a specific conjuncture of crisis. It was a moment of intensification of an underlying structural contradiction, configured and expressed in a singular and therefore unrepeatable way. To that extent, the revolutionary conjunctural crisis of 1917 was not arbitrary, the result of Machiavellian machinations by Lenin in particular or the Bolsheviks in general, as a certain generalised ‘diabolical’ reading of it supposes.[12] Rather, even and especially in its singularity, it was symptomatic and expressive of the structural crisis of political modernity itself.
Second, precisely because it was a relation of force inscribed in the structure of a specific conjuncture of crisis, the existence of a situation of dual power did not signal a ‘subtraction’, or a subjectively determined ‘exodus’, from existing politics.[13] Lenin did not propose that a situation of dual power was or could be produced, that is, by a simple rejection of engagement with the existing state apparatus, in favour of a ‘purer’ power located elsewhere, whether in civil society or in some other supposedly liberated space. Lenin, in fact, always argued that engagement with the existing state, including the mechanisms of parliamentary democracy, could be tactically useful for the revolutionary movement, in particular conjunctures and under certain precise political conditions.[14] A part of the novelty of the notion of dual power is precisely that it mobilises this realistic perspective in the midst of a revolutionary crisis. The situation of dual power in Russian in 1917 occurred for Lenin both ‘within and against’ and the existing state, to use the almost Augustinian formulation later frequently adopted by Mario Tronti to characterise the sources of workers’ rebellions.
Third, dual power in Lenin is less a fully developed theory than an eruptive moment of conceptual clarity and intensity. With all due respect to Poulantzas, “all Lenin’s analyses and actions are not ‘traversed’ by the ‘leitmotif’ of ‘dual power’”.[15] In fact, the term ‘dual power’ [dvoevlastie] is not at all prominent in Lenin’s voluminous writings before and after the Russian Revolution of 1917.[16] While such a lack of textual traces may seem puzzling in light of dual power’s later influence in the formation of so many ‘images of Lenin’, there is, in fact, a simple reason for this terminological absence: the reality for whose description it was formulated did not exist prior to 1917. The thesis of the existence of a situation of dual power only emerges explicitly in Lenin’s political vocabulary in the very specific moment of ‘interregnum’ between the two revolutions of February and October 1917. We thus need to turn to consider the singularity of this moment in order to clarify the specificity and even peculiarity of Lenin’s conceptual proposal.
While a certain approach to the history of ideas might argue that the ‘concept’ (as distinguished from the ‘word’) of dual power is already present ‘in a practical state’ in the April Theses composed during Lenin’s journey to the Finland Station, it was, in fact, only explicitly formulated by Lenin in an article published in Pravda on 9 April 1917, and most famously presented in The Task of the Proletariat in our Revolution (written a day later on 10 April, but not published until September). Furthermore, the ‘word’ itself of ‘dual power’ was not in fact of Lenin’s coinage; numerous writers from a variety of political perspectives had already been talking about an anomalous situation of dual power since the Soviets had refused to take on full governmental responsibility after February and the consequent emergence of the ineffectual Provisional Government.[17] In these instances, the thesis of dual power was an attempt to comprehend the entirely unexpected “interlocking of two dictatorships”, Soviets ranged against the Provisional Government. In the article in Pravda, Lenin explicitly notes that “Nobody previously thought, or could have thought, of a dual power”.[18] The type of political power embodied in the Soviets emerged outside but alongside the existing state apparatus, an apparatus that had been severely weakened in both legitimacy and functioning by a major social and political crisis (and it was precisely this weakening that represented a Machiavellian occasione in which the Soviets could emerge as a political institution of some durability). However, Lenin did not here characterise dual power in terms of a Manichean clash between pure versus impure powers. Rather, it represented an unstable type of ‘mixed government’ of the competing claims, to use Gramsci’s term, of ‘political society’ (or organisational practices) and of ‘civil society’ (associative instances), at the moment of the destabilising of their normal hierarchies.[19]
The social bases and political consequences of these two ‘governments’ or ‘dictatorships’, however, were entirely different. The Provisional Government, however provisional and precarious it was in reality, had pretensions to be or to become a ‘state in the proper sense of the term’ in a formal sense, that is, a state apparatus founded upon ‘law’ (administered by political elites) and, ultimately, the ‘rights’ of private property. By virtue of its participation in the paradigms of sovereignty and representation, it was necessarily a repressive and a subalternising form of government. It aimed to affirm and make endure what Bodin, and before him Machiavelli, had observed as the ‘primordial’ fact of politics (in the sense of the empirically given situation from which politics of any type initially emerges), namely, the observation that there really are those who lead and those who are led – precisely the configuration of forces that had precipitated the revolutionary crisis.[20] The Provisional Government, in this sense, represented no resolution to the crisis, but its continuation or even formalistic repetition.
The Soviets, on the other hand, represented a ‘special type of state’ that recalled, for Lenin, the defining features of the Paris Commune. Both the Commune and the Soviets were founded upon and functioned as popular initiative (in particular, the replacement of the police and army by the arming of the people itself, and direct popular control of officialdom and bureaucracy through processes of delegacy and recall). To use the terms of Marx’s analysis of the political significance of the Paris Commune, they were an expansive form of government in which to begin to work out the emancipation of labour.[21] These two governments were, in the strictest sense, mutually incompatible political powers, founded on entirely different presuppositions regarding the nature and functioning of political institutions and politics itself. Their antagonism had to end in the disappearance of one or the other. Lenin insisted on the exceptional and necessarily temporary nature of this conjuncture: “There is not the slightest doubt that such an ‘interlocking’ cannot last long. Two powers cannot exist in a state”, he argued. “Dual power merely expresses a transitional phase in the revolution’s development”.[22]
The notion of dual power also represents a transitional phase in Lenin’s thought, as he attempted to comprehend the unprecedented configurations thrown up in 1917. It is a phase that traverses the highs and lows of the Summer of 1917, and which reached its programmatic conclusion in Lenin’s renewed reflections on Marx’s writings on the Paris Commune in The State and Revolution. Indeed, the eruption of the situation of dual power in 1917 prompted Lenin to revisit themes on which he had long meditated, just as the outbreak of war had led him to return to Hegel in 1914.[23] The State and Revolution is a work that can legitimately be inscribed amongst the great ‘unfinished works’ of the materialist tradition, insofar as this tradition allows us to understand incompletion not in terms of lack but as its determination by and within the conjuncture.[24] Begun during the almost Machiavellian solitude of Lenin’s time as an outlaw in a haystack, it was a work that he happily ‘abandoned’ (in Valéry’s sense) when the revolutionary upsurge returned in the early Autumn. Just as Spinoza’s Tractatus politicus symptomatically breaks off just as the discussion of the nature of democracy begins, so Lenin’s treatise on Revolution ‘interrupts’ itself precisely at that moment when it sets out to recount the history of the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917 in a comparative perspective. “It is more pleasant and useful to go through the ‘experience of revolution’ than to write about it”, Lenin famously dryly remarked after the insurrection of October.
The theorisation of dual power was also itself interrupted by the events of late 1917. The term largely disappeared from Lenin’s writings as the state of exception of 1917 was resolved with the seizure of the Winter Palace and the new revolutionary government was forced to confront very different political contexts. First civil war and then, the counterrevolutionary tide seemingly stemmed, the hesitant construction of a socialist order under the NEP, saw the Bolsheviks grappling with, and ultimately being defeated by, the challenges of occupying the ‘commanding heights’ of administrative authority in the absence of a powerful social movement from below. The invocation of the potentials and pitfalls of dual power in Lenin’s writings thereby became, in some senses, an anomaly without precedents or successors. It was, in this sense, less a finished concept than as a genial intuition still marked by potentially productive ambiguities. It was an insight never fully elaborated at the time of its emergence, and which thus remained particularly open to endless revisitations and reinterpretations by the subsequent Marxist traditions.[25]
Reconstructing and actualising such a perspective today, in a period of proliferating and intersecting struggles, requires us to understand the precise sense in which Lenin’s notion of dual power outlines a radical alternative to the main currents of modern political theory, or as Lenin enticingly calls it, the notion of a ‘power of a completely different type’. One of the most innovative currents of contemporary radical thought (and one of Lenin’s most creative readers), however, has instead tended to read it in terms ultimately compatible, even if antagonistically, with the paradigm of sovereignty. Antonio Negri understands the theoretical significance of dual power as the moment of the re-eruption of an originary constituent power, breaking out of the constricting constitutional form cruel history had imposed on its molten, titanic force. This approach was proposed in his magisterial Insurgencies from 1992, in passages that however drew directly upon his earlier important study of Lenin from 1977.[26] Negri’s ‘lessons’ on Lenin in the cauldron of the Italian anni di piombo were, in fact, a decisive transitional stage in his evolution from earlier studies of the forms of bourgeois power (in, for instance, Descartes politico of 1970) to his later explorations of concrete alternatives to them.[27] Indeed, in retrospect, we can now see that Negri’s proposal in the 1980s and beyond of a qualitative distinction between potentia and potestas in his influential and contested readings of Spinoza represents the metaphysical continuation of themes originally explored in relation to Lenin in a political register.[28]
A situation of dual power for this approach is regarded as the re-assertion of a qualitatively distinct type of creative power that lies at the foundation of every constitutional order, a power that may be repressed or distorted but can never be exhausted or eradicated. As primordial force of innovation, constituent power in this vision functions as a once present but now absent cause, passing into the new constitutional order its innovation has called forth, like a ‘vanishing God’ that disappears into his creation. Yet, insofar as ontologically primary, constituent power nevertheless subsists within the form over whose birth it had presided, as the ‘permanence of innovation’ or as latent threat of renewed vitality at the moment when the constitutional order sooner or later passes over into corruption and decline.[29] Understood in this way, dual power seems to represent the fusion of a Marxist theory of the singularity of revolutionary crisis (always a novel overdetermination of overdeterminations) with the fundamental presupposition of the natural law tradition, namely, the ultimately generic and ontological foundation of political action and power. Only on the basis of this presupposition could there be a genuinely ‘natural history’ of constituent power.[30]
While conceiving a situation of dual power in terms of an originary constituent power may secure its temporal and ontological primacy, however, it also destines it to dying soon after the day of its birth. For, as Lenin claimed, “such an ‘interlocking’” of powers “cannot last long”. A situation of dual power is, by definition, an exception to the ‘normal’ functioning of sovereignty, that is, in Bodin’s terms, its claim to be absolute, indivisible, and perpetual. As tempting is the notion of a prolonged situation of ‘permanent dual power’ may be – that is, a situation in which (relatively) autonomous institutions of popular political organisation subsist alongside established forms of state power over a longer period of a protracted structural crisis, intermittently harassing it in guerilla-like skirmishes – it does not resolve one of the fundamental paradoxes that arguably lies at the heart of the notion of constituent power itself.[31] This is the paradox that constituent power can only be configured as such – and, crucially, can only be distinguished as constituent power – through reference to its temporal and formal differences from the constituted power at whose origins it is thought to lie.
If these differences are conceived in temporal terms, constituent power appears as both prior and internal to the modern sovereign state, in the sense of representing the historical and structural foundation that the consolidation of the state must sublate (in the dual Hegelian sense of reciprocal and simultaneous cancellation and preservation). If understood as a formal relation, on the other hand, constituent power, rather than preceding constitutional order, is depicted transcendentally as the posited condition of possibility of the existing constitutional order, and is thereby retrospectively determined as an ‘absented cause’.[32] In both cases, constituent power effectively comes to function as an alternative to the abstract originary moment of the social contract – but one that is ultimately no less abstractly mythical.
In a situation of permanent or enduring dual power, the weakly emergent constituent power would remain structurally subaltern to the established order, performatively claiming an autonomy that the very same performance denies, insofar as it could only occur while recognising the continuing presence of its antagonist. The longer such a situation of ‘low intensity dual power’ were to endure, the more opportunities constituted power would have to reassert itself as sole organizing political instance. The growth and decline of radical movements over the last 30 years have provided ample evidence of this tragic dialectic, from the containment and slow exhaustion of the initial Zapatista uprising to the dissipation of the radical movements in the squares that had fuelled the so-called Arab Spring and its reverberations once ‘normality’ – either authoritarian as in Egypt, or parliamentary as in Turkey – was (re)imposed.
What such an ontological understanding of dual power also tends to obscure, however, is not only Lenin’s emphasis upon the temporally exceptional status of dual power, as interregnum. It also neglects the precise sense in which the Soviets did indeed represent for Lenin a ‘power’ [vlast’] analogous to sovereign authority – but a “power of a completely different type”. What was the nature of this difference? Soviet power was different not because it was incommensurable with the power claimed by the Provisional Government; a common measure had already been imposed by the conjuncture, as the two different forms of government made competing claims to supremacy in the same social formation. Neither the Soviets nor the Provisional Government put themselves forward simply as generic forms of power (in Weberian terms, as Macht, the mere capacity to act). Rather, both made claims to function as the concrete supreme authority in the very particular concrete conjuncture of 1917 – in Weberese, as the Herrschaft [domination] that could constrain actions, or force them to be undertaken even if unwillingly.[33] If the Provisional Government’s decrees had been able both to gain at least a passive or tacit consent (in the sense of not being actively opposed by strategically located sectors of the population), the Soviets’ pretensions to represent an alternative governmental power would not have been entertained for long.
Does this emphasis upon the Soviets’ claim to supreme authority therefore mean that Lenin’s notion of dual power is ultimately compatible with the “univocal conception of power” found in his near contemporaries Max Weber and Carl Schmitt, as Antonio Negri has argued?[34] Does dual power, that is, unwittingly participate in the paradigm of sovereignty, if not in its more austere Hobbesian variant (as Lars Lih has provocatively suggested),[35] then at least in terms of the variant of ‘popular sovereignty’, which from the nineteenth century onwards (and increasingly following the cold war) has been affirmed as the only historically viable basis for a durable (sovereign) governmental regime?[36]
It is Lenin’s argument that the Soviets represented a “power of a completely different type” that prevents their recuperation within the sovereign model of political authority, whether absolutist or popular. It was a power of a completely different type both because of the way in which this power was produced, and because of the way in which this power functioned not as sovereign authority, but, instead, in the place of sovereign authority. The absenting logic of representation that is central to sovereignty’s structuring of the social order was turned against itself; the Soviets’ control of decisive instances in the society ‘re-presented’ the sovereign authority that the initiatives of popular forces had made absent.
Production: On the one hand, the Provisional Government’s claims were made within the established paradigm of the production of modern sovereignty: legality guaranteed by constitutional form, legitimacy produced by means of ‘representation’ (of however limited a type), supremacy of command, temporal endurance solidified in law, and so forth. On the other hand, the Soviets inherited an old revolutionary tradition that insisted upon the always revocable nature of political delegation. The continuous review of the implementation of the Soviets’ decisions – that is, the articulation of executive, legislative and administrative powers in an organic relation of mutual correction – constituted the basis for an always revisable form of political order, or, in other words, of continuous re-ordering. To refer once again to Marx’s reflections on the Paris Commune, it was an “expansive” rather than repressive political form.[37]
Function: The Provisional Government’s fragile claim to represent a sovereign authority aimed fundamentally to assert the primacy of political command and regulation over the social, and the permanence of order as goal of the exercise of political power. In other words, the vlast’ of the Provisional Government aimed to maintain the existing order and its foundation in the ‘right’ to private property as structuring principle of the public realm. The Soviets were instead conceived in Lenin’s argument not as a variant of the (modern representative) “state in the proper sense of the term”, but a nascent rupture with its fundamental logic. Their assertion of supreme decisional power in the society arose negatively, as a specular negation of their opponent’s competing claim to it. The dramatic seizure of the Winter Palace was in this sense less an occupation of the place of sovereignty than its encirclement in order to prevent its capture by the opposing forces, and its emptying out from within. It was a refusal to recognise that there could be any higher power impeding the institutionalisation of re-ordering that the Soviets continuously enacted in the very nature of their functioning – including the power of the Soviets themselves, which was not self-affirming but merely a means to the political end of popular empowerment.
The difference between the types of powers represented by the Provisional Government and the Soviets was, therefore, neither a case of the incommensurability of two qualitatively distinct powers, nor a simple opposition of one power set against another in a symmetrical antagonistic confrontation, upon which a mere excess of force could decide. The difference, rather, resided in the very nature and function of the type of power their occupation of the place of sovereignty both expressed and produced. Varying a formulation of René Zavaleta Mercado, I propose to characterise this difference as the ‘duality of dual power’.[38]
Zavaleta preferred to use the notion of a “duality of powers” [dualidad de poderes], rather than “dual power” [poder dual] or “double power” [doble poder], in order to emphasise that the revolutionary situation theorised by Lenin (and following him, Trotsky) did not involve the bifurcation of a “single, classically unique power”, but, instead, the emergence of “two powers, two types of state”, which were fundamentally incompatible.[39] Zavaleta’s theorisation was influenced, in particular, by the experiences and discussions of dual-power situations in the early 1970s in the Popular Assembly in Bolivia and the brief season of Popular Unity in Chile – reflected tragically in the postface that Zavaleta appended to the original edition after the events of the ‘first 9/11’. However, his theorisation of a duality of powers seems to me to remain ambiguous, caught between a conception of a quantitative difference of powers (majoritarian versus minoritarian, popular versus elite) and a qualitative distinction between powers structured and functioning in different ways (‘two types of states’), but seeking to act upon the same object (society as the common ‘prize’ of this struggle between different powers).
By redeploying the notion of a ‘duality of dual power’, I instead seek to emphasise the disequilibrium between the two powers contending to occupy the place of sovereign authority. One power – the Provisional Government – sought sovereign power in order to maintain it; it was, to use the terminology of Poulantzas, a ‘unitary power’ that aimed to ‘condense’ within itself, and thereby to regulate, all social conflict. Sovereignty here functioned as an end in itself, and as re-presentation of itself; in the Hobbesian terms invoked by Lih, it indeed sought “to overwhelm” and “to overawe them all” in order to secure order and the (passive) obedience of its subjects. The power embodied in the Soviets, on the other hand, did indeed seek to occupy the ‘normal’ place of sovereignty in the seizure of the Winter Palace; but the goal of this seizure was not that of ‘taking power’ in order to maintain the existing sovereign system. It was, instead, a seizure undertaken in order to disable the normal functioning of not only the Provisional Government but of sovereign authority as such, and thereby to permit the already functioning power of the Soviets to expand, dissolving the ‘place’ of sovereign power into the non-place of a political relation of continual socio-political reordering. Pace Lih, it was in this precise sense that Lenin’s slogan, ‘All power to the Soviets!’ had an historically concrete and explosive meaning – not as the affirmation of a communist Leviathan, but as the replacement of the permanence of sovereignty as a hierarchical unity of organisational and associational instances with the permanence of the revolutionary movement itself.[40]
Janus-faced, the Soviets both did and did not participate in the paradigm of modern sovereignty. But therein lay the Bolsheviks’ terrifying gambit. By insisting that the time was right to assume governmental responsibility with the insurrection of October and the dissolution of even the formality of the Provisional Government, the Bolsheviks were gambling that the political relationality and immediacy of popular expression in the Soviets, as a ‘working government’ of the Paris Commune type, would sustain the continuance of the revolution in permanence’s deconstructive dissolution of sovereignty. Throughout the setbacks and reversals that quickly followed October, through the Civil War to the institution of the NEP and the politics of the united front as an attempted ‘cultural revolution’, the Russian revolutionary process was marked by the increasingly frantic attempts to recapture that fragile utopian vision and experience – before being swept away definitively by the restoration of the naked, absolutist sovereignty of Stalin’s counterrevolution.
Isolated in the ‘commanding heights’ of sovereign state power, the original experience of the duality of dual power in the Russian Revolution proved unable to prevent the return of a classically austere system of sovereignty – or to use again Gramsci’s terminology, the re-affirmation of the primacy of organisation over association and the subalternisation of all social instances to the rationality of political society. It was an experience repeated so often at the end of all the other great popular uprisings throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries that few today even consider the dissolution of political society as anything but utopian in a deleterious sense. Is it still possible to resist the seemingly inevitable return of the politics of the party of order? Is a situation of dual power as an objective opening – an opportunity – for the emergence of a politics of another type, still possible today?
Concrete responses to this question can only be proposed by and within the actual movements of struggle underway today – movements which, as I have elsewhere argued, are arguably much more vibrant and creative than is often thought.[41] There is little need to emphasis the distance that lies between the revolutionary energies that crystallised in the Soviets in the 1917 and oppositional movements in our own times; a well-rehearsed narrative of (often imaginary) defeat over the last 50 years has always already reminded us of our own postlapsarian state…. Nevertheless, it is noticeable that recent movements have been characterised by rediscovery of comparable dynamics of popular participation and empowerment in collective and deliberative institutional arrangements, however limited and contradictory. Lenin’s proposal of the possibility of ‘a politics of another type’ provides these movements with a reminder of four key principles that should inform and accompany their efforts as permanent critical touchstones:
First: politics as it is currently constituted in its official sovereign and representative forms is not an antidote to subalternisation; in its usual reliance on a logic of the absenting of popular and subaltern demands and their re-presentation in the hierarchies of command condensed in the established political and juridical fields, it is one of the most potent mechanisms for generalising and normalising the experience of subalternity across the entire social field. No sovereign power will save us…
Second: To engage in radical politics today is to do so in full awareness not only of institutional or official politics’ limits, but also of the fact that politics as we know it, even and sometimes especially radical politics, remains an expression of the problems our movements aim to solve. Hierarchies of command, claims to predominance by restricted or restrictive groups, pacifying practices or structural blockages on energies and dispositions: none of these experiences are alien to oppositional political cultures, least of all to movements such as those of today constituted at the intersections of diverse backgrounds, claims and goals. It is not the seizure of sovereign power but its deconstruction that remains the final goal of revolutionary politics.
Third: Politics itself is not enough. The type of politics that does not reinforce the subordination of association to organisation upon which political modernity rests remains a project for the future, not a legacy readily available to us. To be simply ‘more political’ within the confines of most current practices of politics is not, in itself, enough. What is decisive is the type of politics in which emancipatory movements engage, both in relation to existing political structures, and even more crucially, in terms of their innovation of new political structures within those movements themselves. The permanence of the revolutionary movement includes the necessity of revolutions within the revolution itself.
Fourth, and finally: no politicisation without desubalternisation, as the concrete critique of representation and sovereignty, as both institutions and even more fundamentally as orientations that continually attempt to reinstate the established order at the moments of its crisis. The fundamental challenge for radical movements today does not consist in the politicisation of supposedly merely social demands, or their representation at the political level; our intersectional sociopolitical movements have already practically demonstrated the extent to which political relations of force already traverse all social instances. It is, instead, the form and the practice of politicisation within movements themselves that will determine their capacity to grow. The concrete critique of sovereignty and representation as governing logics of political action through experimentation in alternative practices of delegation and popular empowerment is today our generation’s first step towards generating a de-subalternising ‘politics of another type’ capable of inheriting Lenin’s radical proposal.
[1] On such a dialogic rather than antiquarian conception of classicism, see Niccolò Machiavelli, ‘Letter to Francesco Vettori, December 10, 1513’, Machiavelli and his Friends. Their Personal Correspondence, trans. by James Atkinson and David Sices (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2004), p. 265.
[2] On these different Lenins, see Lars Lih, Lenin Rediscovered: “What is to be Done” in Context (Leiden: Brill, 2006); Alan Shandro, Lenin and the Logic of Hegemony. Political Practice and Theory in the Class Struggle (Leiden: Brill, 2014); Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Lénine et l’arme du langage (Paris: La Fabrique, 2024); Moshe Lewin, Lenin’s Last Struggle (London: Pluto, 1994); Craig Brandist, The Dimensions of Hegemony: Language, Culture and Politics in Revolutionary Russia (Leiden: Brill, 2015); Paul Le Blanc, Lenin: Responding to Catastrophe, Forging Revolution (London: Pluto, 2023). The “negative capability” to hold all of these different dimensions of Lenin’s practice in mind is one of the many factors that distinguishes more recent biographical scholarship, such as Lih’s, Le Blanc’s and Tamás Krausz’s nuanced Reconstructing Lenin: An Intellectual Biography (New York: Month Review Press, 2015) from the reductive, teleological and now definitively dated reading offered in Robert Service’s influential Lenin: A Biography (London: Macmillan, 2000).
[3] The remarkable explosion of new readings of Lenin’s historical and contemporary significance over the last 20 years began from the important 2001 conference later collected in Lenin Reloaded: Towards a Politics of Truth, ed. Sebastian Budgen, Stathis Kouvelakis, and Slavoj Žižek (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007).
[4] In this sense, the distinction that a representative of contemporary neo-Republicanism such as Maurizio Viroli attempts to draw within this tradition between Hobbes (as theorist of formal order, or order without qualification) and Rousseau (focused on the specific conditions of a just order, or of a ‘well-ordered society’) obscures the decisive feature common to both: namely, the presupposition that politics consists in the attempted imposition of order on a pre-existing disorder (in both Hobbes and Rousseau, disorder, whether natural for the former or artificial for the latter, is consciously presented as a mythic foundation of the political). See Maurizio Viroli, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the ’Well-Ordered Society’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 46 et sq. The necessity of transcendental ordering to produce the internal unity of a political community in modernity is most consequently theorised by Schmitt, though, again, only through recourse to obscuring mythical form (in Schmitt’s case, of external enmity), which functions as the ‘political cement’ that fuses into a formalistic whole the elements that can only retrospectively be regarded as internally conflicting. See Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), particularly pp. 23-29.
[5] Jean Bodin, Les six livres de la République, ed. Gérard Mairet (Paris: Librairie Générale Française, 1993). In particular, see Book I, Chapter 8 (“Of Sovereignty”), pp. 111 et sqq and Chapter 10 (“Of the True Marks of Sovereignty”), pp. 151 et sqq, where Bodin logically derives the structural and necessary function of sovereign power from the nature of the constitution of the political community as such, as a hierarchical unity of command and (willing or constrained) obedience. Hobbes and Rousseau will later extend and radicalise this insight in different directions, but they do not fundamentally alter its topography and priority.
[6] On the absenting logic of the modern sovereign order, see Augusto Illuminati’s classic J.J. Rousseau e la fondazione dei valori borghesi (Milan: Il saggiatore, 1977).
[7] I have explored the novelty of Gramsci’s conception of the subaltern in Peter D. Thomas, “Refiguring the Subaltern”, Political Theory 46:6, 2018, pp. 861-884.
[8] For a still useful account of the ambiguous role of representation in Rousseau’s institutional analysis, see Richard Fralin, Rousseau and Representation (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978). For an important recent argument that the notion of the ‘general will’ reintroduces a representative logic surreptitiously behind the back of Rousseau’s famous rejection of representation in the name of the immediacy and self-representative capacity of the general will, see Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Assembly (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 27 et sqq
[9] Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Of the Social Contract, in The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 60.
[10] As Derrida observed, “The sovereign One is a One that can no longer be counted; it is more than one [plus d’un] in the sense of being more than a one [plus qu’en], beyond the more than one of calculable multiplicity”. Jacques Derrida, Rogues (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), p. 168.
[11] See Peter D. Thomas, Radical Politics: On the Causes of Contemporary Emancipation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2023), particularly pp. 117 et sqq.
[12] Robert Service is merely one of the most recent of the influential figures who have promoted such a reading, traces of which can nevertheless be found in many interpretations of very different political commitments.
[13] My reference is to terms proposed by Badiou and Negri on the basis of very different theoretical presuppositions, but with arguably similar political consequences.
[14] See August H. Nimtz, Lenin’s Electoral Strategy from Marx and Engels Through the Revolution of 1905 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); and, by the same author, Lenin’s Electoral Strategy from 1907 to the October Revolution of 1917 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).
[15] Nicos Poulantzas, State, Power, Socialism (London: NLB, 1978), p. 252.
[16] The wide spectrum of meanings associated with the notion of a proletarian vlast’ in the Russian revolutionary experience has been extensively explored by Lars Lih over many years. Lih’s earlier work emphasised, in particular, the difficulty in translating the term vlast’ into English, though his more recent work has tended to suggest a potential general equivalent in the notion of ‘sovereign authority’ (a suggestion with which I disagree in the specific case of Lenin’s use of dvoevlastie in 1917, for reasons I will soon explore). See in particular ‘Vlast’ From the Past: Stories Told by Bolsheviks’, Left History 6:2 (Fall 1999), pp. 29-52) and ‘All Power to the Soviets: Marx meets Hobbes’, Radical Philosophy 201 (February 2018), pp. 64–78.
[17] See Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, The February Revolution, Petrograd, 1917 (Leiden: Brill, 2018).
[18] Lenin, ‘On Dual Power’, in Collected Works Vol. 24 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1964), p. 38.
[19] I have explored, in different ways, the dialectical relation between political and civil society for Gramsci in Peter D. Thomas, The Gramscian Moment: Philosophy, Hegemony and Marxism (Leiden: Brill, 2009), particularly pp. 186 et sqq., and Peter D. Thomas, Radical Politics: On the Causes of Contemporary Emancipation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2023), particularly pp. 117 et sqq.
[20] The essence of Lenin’s critique of Kautsky’s conception of the state in The State and Revolution is precisely that Kautsky refuses to see that the modern state is necessarily and always an institution of class power that perpetuates a separation between leaders and followers, rulers and the ruled – and, insofar as a state ‘in the proper sense of the term’, is structurally and constitutively incapable of doing otherwise. On this point, see the still very valuable contributions of Colletti and Magri in Dibattito su stato e rivoluzione (Rome: La nuova sinistra, 1970).
[21] Lenin’s notes and excerpts on “Marxism on the State”, compiled in Zurich in January and early February of 1917, in this sense functioned as the initial exploratory hypotheses that informed his observations of the novel situation of dual power from February onwards, during which he came to understand what his compilation of quotations from the Marxist classics could concretely mean in the actions of the Soviets – a learning process that culminated in the recasting of those quotations in the drafting of The State and Revolution during the Summer and early Autumn.
[22] Lenin, ‘The Tasks of the Proletariat in our Revolution’, in Collected Works Vol. 24 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1964), p. 61. In June Lenin repeats the claim of dual power’s instability and transitory nature in ‘Has Dual Power Disappeared? in Collected Works Vol. 24 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1964), pp. 445-8.
[23] On Lenin’s ‘conjunctural’ reading strategies, see Stathis Kouvelakis, “Lenin as Reader of Hegel: Hypotheses for a Reading of Lenin’s Notebooks on Hegel’s The Science of Logic”, in Lenin Reloaded, pp. 164-204.
[24] On the theme of ‘incompletion’ within the materialist tradition, see Slavoj Žižek, The Indivisible Remainder: On Shelling and Related Matters (London: Verso, 1996), p. 6.
[25] For recent very different attempts to think through the significance of dual power for contemporary politics, see George Ciccariello-Maher, We Created Chávez: A People’s History of the Venezuelan Revolution (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013), pp. 234-56; Fredric Jameson, An American Utopia: Dual Power and the Universal Army (London: Verso, 2016); and on a global scale throughout the long 1970s, Michael Hardt, The Subversive Seventies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2023).
[26] See Antonio Negri, Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State, trans. by Maurizia Boscagli (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999 [1992]), pp. 286ff. Compare to La fabbrica della strategia: 33 lezioni su Lenin (Padua: librirossi 1977), reprinted by Manifestolibri in 2004, though now leading with the original subtitle; see pp. 130ff.
[27] See Antonio Negri, Political Descartes: Reason, Ideology and the Bourgeois Project, trans. By Matteo Mandarini and Alberto Toscano (London: Verso, 2007 [1970]).
[28] See Antonio Negri, The Savage Anomaly: Power of Spinoza’s Metaphysics and Politics, trans. by Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991 [1981]).
[29] Negri’s argument in Insurgencies that the construction of the political should be seen as the product of the “permanent innovation” of constituent power was developed in critical dialogue with Pocock’s famous and seemingly very different understanding of innovation. See Negri, Insurgencies, p. 29. In Pocock’s reading of The Prince, innovation is seen as a secondary ordering response to the primary flux of fortuna (conceived as “pure, uncontrolled, and unlegitimated contingency”). J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), pp. 156f. In other words, innovation is regarded, in ways compatible with the sovereignist tradition, as the retrospective attempt to impose order upon disorder. Negri’s ontological reversal of polarities – the innovation of constituent power as always foundational, even when repressed, to the constitutional order that seeks to domesticate it – only seemly escapes the fundamental presuppositions of this argument; for, insofar as it leaves the opposition of the terms in place while valuing them differently, it maintains and arguably reinforces its sovereignist logic to the extent that innovation continues to be thought as a governing instance that founds political unity. Rather than a rejection of the paradigm of sovereignty as such, Negri’s conception of innovation might in this sense be better characterised as ‘post-soverignist’, or in Benjaminian terms, a search for a ‘true’ sovereignty before/beneath/beyond sovereignty.
[30] For a problematisation of such a notion, see Antonio Negri, Insurgencies, p. 7.
[31] This thesis of a situation of ‘permanent dual power’ has been creatively explored in recent work by Panagiotis Sotiris. See ‘Rethinking Dual Power’, paper presented at the 2017 London Historical Materialism Conference, available at:
https://www.academia.edu/35145688/Rethinking_Dual_Power. See also Michael Bray, ‘States of Excess: Passive Revolution, Dual Power and New Strategic Impasses’, paper presented at the 2022 London Historical Materialism Conference, available at:
[32] For explorations of the paradoxical nature of constituent power in a constitutional perspective, see Martin Loughlin and Neil Walker (eds), The Paradox of Constitutionalism: Constituent Power and Constitutional Form (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
[33] Max Weber, Gesamtausgabe, Band 23 (Tübingen: Mohr und Siebeck, 2013), p. 210.
[34] Antonio Negri, Fabbrica di porcellana. Per una nuova grammatica politica (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2008), p. 15.
[35] Lih’s ‘All Power to the Soviets: Marx meets Hobbes’, Radical Philosophy 201 (February 2018), pp. 64–78 is a fundamental contribution to the debate regarding the theoretical significance of Lenin’s slogan and the reality of Soviet power. However, in my view, Lih moves too rapidly to identify effective operational authority with sovereignty as such. For the defining feature of sovereignty, from Bodin to Hobbes to Rousseau and beyond, is not merely that it represents an instance of supremacy of command, absolute authority or – in the terms Lih takes from Hobbes – the capacity to “overawe” all other social instances and thereby to secure their obedience to an established power (pp. 65-6). Rather, as Bodin emphasises when he distinguishes sovereignty from other concepts of supreme or decisional power (tyranny, dictatorship, magistracy, the role of the Archon in ancient Athens, among others), the novelty of the modern notion of sovereignty consists in the way in which it derives a conception of foundational ordering power from the nature of the political community as a hierarchical unity of ruling and structurally subaltern moments (the indivisibility of sovereignty), and fixes these relations as a permanent and necessary feature (sovereignty as perpetual) (see, in particular, the subtractive-comparative definitional method Bodin employs in Book I, Chapter 8 “Of Sovereignty”). Rather than considering the Soviets as an instantiation of sovereignty, I would therefore suggest that Krausz’s comparative formulation that, in October 1917, other social instances were (temporarily, contingently) brought “under the control of the Soviets” (rather than, that is, under the control of other institutions, or those of the Provisional Government) describes more accurately the antagonistic and conjunctural nature of Soviet power. See Tamás Krausz, Reconstructing Lenin: An Intellectual Biography (New York: Month Review Press, 2015), p. 201.
[36] For reconstructions of the history of popular sovereignty, see the essays collected in Richard Bourke and Quentin Skinner, Popular Sovereignty in Historical Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). Regretfully, studies of the relevance for notions of popular sovereignty of neither Lenin nor the broader Russian revolutionary experience are included in this volume.
[37] On the notion of an expansive political form, see Stathis Kouvelakis, ‘Marx’s Critique of the Political: From the 1848 Revolutions to the Paris Commune’, Situations. Project of the Radical Imagination 2:2 (2007), pp. 81-93; and more recently, Stathis Kouvelakis, ‘Événement et stratégie révolutionnaire’, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Sur la Commune de Paris, Textes et controverses (Paris: Éditions sociale, 2021) and translated on the Verso Books blog: https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/blogs/news/5039-on-the-paris-commune-part-1?_pos=77&_sid=c9caf5c36&_ss=r ; https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/blogs/news/5042-on-the-paris-commune-part-2?_pos=6&_sid=5700cafa7&_ss=r ; https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/blogs/news/5044-on-the-paris-commune-part-3?_pos=81&_sid=c9caf5c36&_ss=r
[38] René Zavaleta Mercado, El poder dual en América Latina, in Obra completa I: Ensayos 1957-1974, ed. Mauricio Souza Crespo (La Paz: Plural editores, 2011 [1973]). For an important contemporary discussion of the significance of this text, see Susana Draper, ‘Hegemonía, poder dual, poshegemonía: las derives del concepto’, Poshegemonía: El final de un paradigma de la filosofía política en América Latina, ed. Rodrigo Castro Orellana (Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 2015).
[39] Zavaleta Mercado, El poder dual en América Latina, p. 378.
[40] I have explored some dimensions of the history of the notion of the permanence of the revolution in Peter D. Thomas, “Gramsci’s Revolutions: Passive and Permanent”, Modern Intellectual History 17:1 (2020), pp. 117-146. For the primary texts that influenced Gramsci’s creative re-imagining of this notion, see Frederick C. Corney ed., Trotsky’s Challenge: The ‘Literary Discussion’ of 1924 and the Flight for the Bolshevik Revolution (Leiden: Brill, 2016).
[41] See Peter D. Thomas, Radical Politics: On the Causes of Contemporary Emancipation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2023).
