WHAT IS COUNCIL COMMUNISM?
As a distinct political current within the radical workers' movement, council communism arose in the 1920s and '30s, originally in Germany and Holland. The revolutionary uprising in Germany from 1918 to 1921 provided the original impulse. Council communists were initially part of a larger international current known as 'left communist' (condescendingly referred to by Bolshevists as "ultra-leftists"), and were briefly allied with, and attached to, the Third or Communist International (during 1920-21). As such, the council communists were entirely within the marxist political tradition.  But what came to separate them from all other currents in that tradition was their appreciation of the historical lessons to be drawn from the course of events that occurred in Germany and Russia (and elsewhere, such as Hungary and Italy) between 1917 and 1923.
Foremost among these lessons concerned the question of the role of the communist party in the revolutionary process. While the Bolsheviks and their supporters in the Third International insisted on the necessity for the party to lead, organize and direct the revolutionary process -- as the 'vanguard of the working class' -- and to attain (and retain) supreme power in the new, "revolutionary workers state"; the left and council communists from Germany and Holland, on the other hand, rejected such vanguardism. Whereas the early German and Dutch left communists were in favour of a minoritarian (as opposed to a 'mass') revolutionary party which would refuse to try to organize or dominate the revolution --  leaving that to the masses of workers themselves; the council communists came to reject the party organizational form itself as inherently counter-revolutionary (because inherently vanguardist), and in any case unnecessary for the success of the revolution. It was for such reasons that they came to call themselves 'council' communists in opposition to all of the 'party' communists.
Soon after disassociating themselves from the Bolsheviks and the Third International, the German and Dutch left communists began a critical analysis of the new 'Soviet' regime and social system, characterizing it as state capitalist. Later, in the '30s, the council communists developed an analysis according to which the 1917 revolution was a bourgeois (rather than a proletarian) revolution and the Bolsheviks were (all along) radical defenders of capitalist development.
For the council communists, the central problem for the success of the proletarian revolution was the question of the development of revolutionary class consciousness throughout the whole of the working class; such development of political consciousness being the only guarantee against a vanguard party substituting itself for the whole class in the seizure and exercise of supreme power in the revolution. If the class was sufficiently conscious -- and for them this was a matter of conscious collective action, rather than mere beliefs or ideas -- the workers would not permit a vanguard group to usurp their collective power. As a result, all of their views on appropriate tactics for the radical workers'  movement were concerned primarily with fostering workers'  tendencies towards collective self-activity, self-initiative, and most importantly, self-organization.
Their experience in Germany, and their understanding of the Russian workers' experience during the crucial years of 1917-21, convinced them that during such periods of acute social crisis of modern capitalist society, workers spontaneously generated forms  and methods of collective action which permitted them to collectively control their struggle without any hierarchy or separate leadership. As a result, they fundamentally opposed not only vanguardist parties and their practice of 'revolutionary parliamentarism', but also working within trade unions in order to transform them into tools of revolutionary struggle. Their first-hand experience had irreversibly convinced them that all trade unions were fundamentally and unalterably tied to the continued domination of capital and the state over the working class, and further, that when necessary, workers would abandon the unions and create their own autonomous factory committees to undertake the tasks usually left to the unions -  as they had done in their hundreds of thousands in Germany in 1919-20. The stifling hierarchical and bureaucratic structure necessary for the day-to-day functioning of any large trade union in modern capitalist society could only act against the tendency of workers directly organizing and controlling their own struggles.
Syndicalist 'revolutionary' unions were rejected on the grounds that spontaneously generated councils and factory committees were the appropriate organizational forms for revolutionary action; while any union, no matter how 'revolutionary' in words, would necessarily be contaminated by 'opportunism' and reformism, since it would, in non-revolutionary periods, have to engage in collaboration and compromise with the forces of capitalist domination. For the council communists, the project of building and maintaining 'strong organizations'  within modern capitalist society, as far as the revolutionary workers' movement is concerned, is hopeless, since such organizations will require a powerful central bureaucracy to remain strong, while the forces of social control and ideological domination at the disposal of the ruling capitalist class would inevitably infect these organizations, rendering them incapable of revolutionary activity when such is demanded of them.
So how was it, then, that the workers' councils permitted the class at large to co-ordinate and control their struggle without any hierarchy or separate leadership? The actual functioning of the early councils in Russia and Germany showed how: workers organized themselves in general assemblies at the point of production, debated and then collectively decided on courses of action, not just for themselves in their separate workplace, but for the whole social movement of which they form a part; then they elect council delegates who are explicitly mandated to defend only the positions collectively decided by their assembly; these delegates were also recallable (or revocable) at any time as decided by their assemblies; the delegates in the councils would attempt to reach agreement on which course of action to pursue, but if this was problematic they would then return to their respective assemblies, apprise all workers there of the situation, and then the assemblies would debate and collectively decide whether they would change or revise their positions, and re-mandate their delegates accordingly; in this way they would work out a solution, without delegating any power to a separate group of potential leaders.
In the radical activist upsurge of the 1960s, there occurred a revival of interest in council communism, but often this was from a perspective more libertarian and less marxist than was that of the original council communists. This new 'councilism' put its emphasis on the aspects of 'self-management', direct democracy, and federalist autonomy concerning the theory and practice of the councils.
Well known theorists of this tradition include Anton Pannekoek, Otto Ruhle, Jan Appel, Henk Canne-Meijer, Paul Mattick, Karl Korsch, Cajo Brendel, and, more recently, the 'councilists' Cornelius Castoriadas (a.k.a. Paul Cardan, a.k.a. Pierre Chalieu), Claude Lefort, and Henri Simon.
	Wage Slave X
		October 2000