What is Council Communism?
Council communism is a revolutionary Marxist tradition that emerged in Germany and the Netherlands after the First World War. It takes its name from the workers' councils, called soviets in Russia and Räte in Germany, that appeared during the revolutions of 1917 to 1919. Council communists argue that these councils, made up of recallable delegates elected in workplaces, are the proper form of working class rule. They reject reformist social democracy and trade unions as tied to capitalism, and they reject the Leninist idea that a vanguard party should hold power on behalf of workers. They came to see the Soviet Union as a form of state capitalism.
Core beliefs
- The emancipation of the working class must be the work of workers themselves.
- Workers' councils, with delegates who can be recalled at any time, should run production and society.
- Political parties should not take power on behalf of the working class.
- Trade unions and parliamentary elections tend to integrate workers into capitalism.
- The Soviet Union was state capitalism, not socialism.
- Socialism should be internationalist and opposed to all national wars.
History
The movement grew out of the left wing of the Second International, especially the Dutch Marxists Herman Gorter and Anton Pannekoek. During the German Revolution of 1918 to 1919, workers' and soldiers' councils briefly held power in many cities. In 1920 radical members who rejected parliamentary politics left the new German Communist Party and formed the Communist Workers' Party of Germany (KAPD), along with factory based organizations. Lenin criticized this current in Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder (1920), and Gorter replied with an Open Letter to Comrade Lenin. By the mid-1920s the groups had shrunk. Pannekoek wrote Workers' Councils during the Second World War, and Paul Mattick spread the ideas in the United States.
Variants
The original Dutch and German current, sometimes called the Dutch-German left, focused on councils and rejected parties. Otto Rühle went further, arguing that any political party was a bourgeois form of organization. The Italian left communists led by Amadeo Bordiga are a separate tradition that kept the party at the center. Later groups such as Socialisme ou Barbarie in France and some autonomist Marxists drew on councilist ideas.
Criticisms
Leninists argue that council communists underestimated the need for an organized party to defeat counter-revolution and that workers' councils without leadership were defeated in Germany and elsewhere. Social democrats argue that rejecting elections and unions isolated the movement from most workers. Anarchists generally welcome the focus on self-management but criticize the continued use of Marxist ideas such as the dictatorship of the proletariat. Historians note that the movement remained very small and never governed a country, so its proposals are largely untested.
In practice
Council communism has never been the governing ideology of any state. Its clearest practical link is with the short-lived council movements of the Russian, German and Hungarian revolutions and with later episodes of workers' councils, such as Hungary in 1956. Today it survives in small groups and in academic and activist writing, and it influenced libertarian Marxism and critiques of the Soviet model.