Evolution of the Problem of the
Political Workers Councils in
Karl Korsch
I
The counterrevolutionary character of political
developments in
Thus, a history of the political workers councils
as authentic institutions in
If we look back on the general development of the
political councils in Germany, we can state that, in the chapter on the causes
of the rapid decline and disintegration of the Council institutions, together
with the well-known main causes, which are naturally found in the domain of
general economic and political developments, other concomitant causes of an
ideological kind must be mentioned as having played a role: in the brief period
of time when the real preconditions for laying the foundations for and building
a solid proletarian dictatorship existed in Germany, the opportunity was
necessarily wasted due to the fact that, among broad swaths of the
revolutionary proletariat, even in its own functioning “Councils”, there was an
almost total lack of real understanding concerning the organizational bases of
a revolutionary Council System and the essential tasks which it must perform.
1. The most important organizational
failing consisted in the fact that, in most cases, the political Councils were
not elected by the proletarians themselves organized by factories and trades,
as they should have been, but by the socialist parties; and simultaneously,
almost on the same day, a “Workers Council” was formed in every town and city
in Germany (even the smallest peasant communities of a totally non-proletarian
character elected their “Workers Councils” through a kind of political mimicry
. . . in order to protect their local interests against the interference of the
neighboring urban “Workers Councils”).
Nevertheless, if afterwards the will to create authentic councils were
to have been clearly asserted and seriously invigorated, this shortcoming could
very well have been rectified over the following months. But this happened
practically nowhere. It is true that some discredited members were “deposed”
and that others, deceived romantics of the revolution, withdrew on their own
initiative; the great majority of the members of the political workers
Councils, however, “stuck” to their posts until, more or less by the force of
circumstances, the whole splendor of the Councils fell to earth.
2. The extremely grave consequence which
resulted from this ignorance of the tasks of the political councils consisted
in the fact that the “sovereign” Councils were in many if not most cases content
with a very ineffective “control”, when in reality they should have demanded
full powers in the legislative, executive and judicial fields. Due to this
self-limitation, not only was the preparation of the later repression and
elimination of the Councils by the new organs of the democratically-constituted
State power made possible, but, from the very beginning, a good part of the
pre-revolutionary powers and laws were left completely intact. In this way,
after a brief waiting period, the pre-revolutionary tribunals and the old
bureaucracy as well as even a good number of legislative organs of the
pre-revolutionary period were able to conduct their old activities without too
much interference. Only the “Executive Committee” of the Greater Berlin region
(
On the other hand, most of the urban and rural
local communal councils limited themselves to the exercise of mere control
functions, even with regard to State and municipal “legislative” bodies. Thus,
not only were the organs of the local legislative branch (elected in Prussia,
and elsewhere as well, in accordance with the Three Estates voting law!) and
the legislative organs of the Reich and all the larger states and most (but not
all!) of the smaller ones not abolished, but they were even granted legal
recognition; precisely the same thing had previously taken place with respect
to the executive organs of the Reich, the states and the municipalities
(regional Councils, presidents, etc.), with only purely sporadic dismissals
taking place and the prevailing attitude being restricted to a certain
“control” of their activities, becoming less effective with each passing day;
and, in precisely the same way, a complete distrust towards “independent
jurisdiction” was manifest, and the controlling organs only declared they were
satisfied when, during the first period, this jurisdiction gave no signs of
life. Together with this great lack of clarity with respect to Council power on
the part of the Councils’ own local representatives, a great deal of the fault
with regard to these sins of omission lies with the “Council of Peoples
Commissars”, which was hostile to the Councils; and even the “Executive
Committee” of Greater Berlin, later so revolutionary, was not totally blameless
either, since on November 11, 1918 it promulgated an appeal whose first
sentence reads: “All the communal authorities of the various Länder, of the entire Reich, and of the army are to
continue in their activities.” Such was the lack of clarity which, during the
first period immediately following the November events, prevailed with respect
to the essential tasks of the Council dictatorship, even among the most
renowned defenders of the revolutionary idea of the Councils in
3. Another point where understanding was lacking regarding the
tasks of the political Councils and which also had fatal consequences in the
subsequent period, consisted in the fact that no one knew how to distinguish
the tasks of the political Councils from those of the economic Councils, a
distinction which is totally necessary in the period of transition from a
capitalist order to a socialist order of society. Many months after November
the greatest lack of clarity continued to persist concerning this distinction,
which enabled the government, the bourgeoisie, the SPD, the trade unions and
other open or disguised enemies of the Council System to manipulate the Workers
Councils by successively confronting them with their economic and political
tasks (thus, for example, for a certain period at the beginning of 1919, some
leading right wing members of the socialist party demanded that the Councils be
restricted to “economic” tasks, while on the other hand the leaders of the
right wing socialist trade unions sought to restrict the Councils to
“political” tasks). This entire trend culminated in Article 165 of the new
Reich Constitution, which, together with the workers councils restricted to
purely economic tasks (enterprise councils, territorial workers councils, Reich
workers councils), also envisioned the creation of various economic councils
(territorial economic Councils, Economic Council of the Reich) which would
authorize and promote “far-reaching socio-political legislative proposals” and
which would also be granted certain “jurisdictions of administration and
control”. As a result, in these provisions of the Reich Constitution not only
did the whole economic system of the councils find written expression, but so
too did the whole political system of the Councils which, in post-revolutionary
Germany, became a legal institution.
II
If we now follow the vicissitudes of political
power in particular, we can distinguish: 1) the period of the Councils properly
speaking, from November 1918 until the First Congress of the Councils on
December 16, 1918. This period of provisional Council rule was followed, after
the elections for the National Assembly on January 18, 1919 and for the
executive of the National Assembly on February 6, 1919 in
These four stages of the political evolution of
the Councils can be more fully characterized as follows:
During the first period, both the extreme right as
well as the center, the SPD and the USPD right wing, pressed fervently and
anxiously for the National Assembly. But at the same time the idea of the
Councils was surging: extensive circles reaching even to the highest layers of
the intelligentsia and wealth, spoke, wrote and dreamed of the Council
principle as a supreme organic principle, in opposition to the mechanical
procedure of democracy, with its slip-of-paper voting. This went so far as to
lead to the founding of “Humanist Workers Councils” and things of that sort.
The sovereignty of the Councils was then universally recognized as a
provisional condition that would last until the constitution of a National
Assembly.
In terms of institutions, during this period there
were: a) the Council of People’s Commissars, elected by the Workers and
Soldiers Councils of Greater Berlin, which comprised the Executive, and later
also exercised the Legislative power; b) the Executive Committee of Greater
Berlin as a municipal Workers Council; c) territorial Executive Workers
Councils in all the population centers of each state; d) local Workers
Councils; and e) rural and property-owners councils, in all rural and urban
communities.
In addition to the above: aa) “Workers Councils” in every large factory or
industrial complex; in the big cities these met in plenary assemblies that
elected their Executive Committees and imposed upon the latter strict mandates
and resolutions; bb) “Soldiers Councils” in every military detachment,
organized and coordinated by company, battalion, etc. These were represented at
the First Congress of Councils, where they passionately demanded the National
Assembly and where they won recognition of the so-called “Hamburg Seven Points”
concerning military command.* Later, at the beginning of March 1919, they also
held their own “General Reich Congress of Soldiers Councils” in Berlin. Shortly
thereafter they quickly disappeared almost without a trace, in step with the
dissolution of the remains of the old army.
The First Congress of Councils in 1918 (which Däumig called a “suicide club”) almost completely
relinquished political power. It voted for elections to a National Assembly
slated for January 19, 1919; until that date it handed over Executive and
Legislative powers to the Council of People’s Commissars, and elected a
“Central Council” whose powers were limited to minor jurisdictions with nearly
non-existent powers of control, after the fashion of the old central German
Councils, and in which neither the communists nor the independents were
represented (which consequently also led to the resignation of the three USPD
people’s commissars). This Central Council (composed of members of the SPD,
with Cohen-Reuss as its president) was dragging out
its colorless and insipid existence—as we immediately expected—until the end of
1919 and the beginning of 1920. It only yielded its powers over the Reich to
the National Assembly which met at the beginning of February, and handed over
its powers in Prussia to the National Assembly of Prussia which convened in
mid-March, but it continued to exist; it still convoked the Second Congress of
Councils, but retreated whenever the least insinuation of government power was
brought up, and proceeded on its own initiative to enact a restriction of the
Councils, limiting their tasks to purely economic affairs through the creation
of community-labor “chambers of labor” (which were later rejected by the
general assembly of the SPD and by the National Assembly of Weimar and which
today, however, have undergone something of a resurrection in the current
government proposals concerning the constitution of higher economic Councils,
territorial economic Councils and a Reich economic Council). Along with this
Central Council, the revolutionary “Executive Committee” of Greater Berlin
still existed (composed of members of the SPD, the USPD, the KPD and the
democratic parties; and later also the USP and KPD with Däumig,
Müller, etc., as presidents) more or less illegally,
based on the plenary assembly of the Workers and Soldiers Councils of Greater
Berlin, until it was violently expelled by Noske’s
troops on November 6, 1919 from the offices it had originally been assigned in
a government building; then it moved, following a brief period of complete
illegality, to Münzstrasse, where it continued to
conduct business as a “Council Central”, and today is the “VKPD Trade Union
Central”.
III
On January 11, 1919, Noske
entered
The Second Council Congress, held on April 8,
1919, could not affect the course of this development, and in fact did not try
to do so, given that the revisionist, majority-socialist element, which was
basically hostile to the Councils, now openly supported other arrangements. It
is true that the Central Council, which had already in January tried to declare
the communal Workers Councils extinct after the introduction of universal
suffrage, was made responsible for fighting to preserve the communal Workers
Councils as control offices by a Congress resolution. But these last remains of
political Councils lost their miserable prerogatives almost everywhere during
the course of the year; in most cases their end was imposed by the fact that
they lost their public subsidies. And on this reef of the financial question
the feeble attempt by the Central Council, in October 1919, to convoke
elections for a Third Council Congress also came to grief.
From that moment on, the political movement of the
Councils was totally transformed into an economic movement of the Councils,
above all in the struggle over the Enterprise Councils. At the same time, the
supporters of the “pure council movement” (the USPD left) continued to attempt
to oppose the isolated system of enterprise councils created by legislation,
with a “revolutionary Council organization” (that is, a unity organically
articulated by industrial sectors and economic regions, of Councils and
regional offices which, regardless of party or trade union affiliation, were to
be conceived solely in their role as revolutionary Councils), and to
transfigure this Council organization so that it should be the bearer of not
just the economic idea but also the political idea of the Councils. They were
supposed to become the specific organization of the class of the revolutionary
proletariat, at both the economic and the political levels. But this attempt,
in which the communist party quickly ceased to participate, only had a
temporary practical impact in certain industrial centers (Greater Berlin,
central
Published in Neue Zeitung fur Mittelhuringen, Vol. 3, March 1921.
Note
* The “Hamburg Points” stipulated that the power of
command over the army and the navy be transferred to the Council of People’s
Commissars under the control of the Central Council; that the symbols of rank
be abolished; that the carrying of arms off-duty be prohibited; that the
responsibility for the troops’ loyalty be transferred to the Soldiers Council;
that military commanders be elected; that the existing army be abolished; and
that a people’s militia be formed as soon as possible. The Congress ratified
these points. (Author’s note).