He’s ambiguous at best, these days. I’d love it if someone who really knew Lenin and the Leninist tradition(s) - preferably someone critical but I’d settle for a smart vanguardist - could interview him and ask.
I read the preface tonight to his Lenin book, The Factory Of Strategy: 33 Lessons On Lenin, which I have a copy of in Spanish. The book was originally done in 1972-73, after a lecture course Negri gave on Lenin. It was published in Spanish in 2004, with a preface written in ‘03. In it he talks about how Lenin was “very present” in the movements at the time, in varying ways - the PCI, various groupuscules (for whom Leninism meant delegation of revolutionary political decision to a leader or a leading group, which meant a fetishism of authority and exaltation of a dictatorial symbology,” and others which he also wasn’t fond of. The rereading of Lenin was proposed in order to navigate that.
Outside of Italy, however, he speaks highly of the Bordigists, and favorably compares Badiou to them. He speaks even more favorably of Facing Reality who he describes as “ascribing to and renewing the critical marxism of Dunayevskaya.” That’s interesting, as FR was descended from the Jamesian side of the split post the Johnson-Forest Tendency. I wonder if that’s either an error on Negri’s part or if folk in FR circles were reading Dunayevskaya anyway.
He writes of the journal Classe Operaia and of a Trontian problematic, “we all accepted the posing of the Lenin problem: later some comrades reneged on this or preferred to consign this project to oblivion. I was and am convinced that we have to take this up in the same way.” Negri ends the preface by saying that only the figure of Lenin presents, for communism, the dimensions of the Pauline revolution. So not Paul, but Lenin. “We have a pending task: to reconstruct historical materialism and the theory of communism in the imperial era.” Negri states his conviction that the lessons on Lenin in the book are still a useful introduction to that project.