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Title: Council Communism
Author: Mark Shipway
Date: 1987
Language: en
Topics: council communism, Libertarian Communism
Source: https://libcom.org/library/council-communism-mark-shipway-1987

Mark Shipway

Council Communism

Council communism is a theory of working-class struggle and revolution

which holds that the means that workers will use to fight capitalism,

overthrow it, and establish and administer communist society, will be

the workers’ councils.

Historically, workers’ councils (or ‘soviets’, from the Russian word for

council) first arose in Russia in 1905. During that year, workers in

many industrial areas engaged in mass strike. In the absence of any

widespread trade-union organisation, these strikes were organised by

committees of delegates elected from the factory floor. Where workers of

several trades or industries were on strike at the same time, delegates

from the separate strike committees often met in central bodies to unify

and coordinate the struggle. The most famous example of this was the St

Petersburg Soviet, formed in October 1905. As well as agitating over

economic issues, such as limitation of the length of the working day,

the soviets raised political demands, such as for the convocation of

Constituent Assembly.

The events in Russia in 1905 made a considerable impact on

revolutionaries in Western Europe, and particularly Germany. At this

stage, however, the soviets were not yet regarded as the most important

feature of the struggle; Anton Pannekoek, a leading theoretician of

council communism whose writings will form the basis of this account,

recalled later that the soviets were ‘hardly noticed as a special

phenomenon’ at the time.[1] Instead it was the mass strikes of 1905

which made the greatest impression, as typified by Rosa Luxemburg’s

famous account of 1905, which was titled The Mass Strike, and which

contained only one fleeting reference to the soviets.[2]

For revolutionaries such as Pannekoek and Luxemburg of the ‘left wing’

of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) the mass strike was one of

the first signs of the emergency of new forms of organisation and

struggle corresponding to new developments within capitalism. After the

First World War this recognition was developed into a theory which saw

the working class’s use of parliament and trade unions as belonging to a

period when capitalism was still an expanding system and workers were

able to win substantial reforms. From around the turn of the century

onwards, however, as capitalism entered the crisis which led to the

First World War, it became increasingly difficult for workers to wrest

any concessions from the ruling class other than through action on a

mass scale. Furthermore, the end of capitalist expansion also opened up

the prospect of a revolutionary overthrow of system, and this was again

a task to which new forms of mass action would be fitted better than the

old parliamentary and trade-union methods.

When the workers’ councils re-emerged in Russia following the February

Revolution in 1917 they surpassed the point they reached in 1905,

setting themselves up as a rival to the authority of the state and then

(or so it seemed at the time) seizing power themselves in the October

Revolution. ‘Now their importance was grasped by the workers of Western

Europe’, wrote Pannekoek.[3] In a pamphlet completed in July 1918,

another prominent council communist, Herman Gorter, wrote of the soviets

in Russia: ‘The working class of the world has found in these Workers’

Councils its organisation and its centralisation, its form and its

expression, for the revolution and for the Socialist society.’[4]

Under the impact of the Russian Revolution, and the German Revolution

the following year, various small revolutionary groups which had split

from the SPD over its support for the First World War formed themselves

into the Communist Party of Germany (KPD), voting by a majority to adopt

anti-parliamentary and anti-trade union positions at the founding

congress in 1918. When referring to this period, this anti-parliamentary

and anti-trade-union majority can for convenience’s sake be called ‘left

communists’, since at the time their political views appeared to be a

‘more extreme’ version of the ‘orthodoxy’ by which they were defined,

i.e. the Bolshevism of Lenin and the Third International.

Before long, however, the apparently tactical differences between the

left communists and the Bolsheviks came to a head. During 1919 the left

communist majority was forced out of the KPD by means of bureaucratic

manoeuvring, and in April 1920 formed itself into the Communist Workers’

Party of Germany (KAPD). The KAPD was one of the groups which Lenin

attacked in his polemic against ‘Left-Wing’ Communism, an Infantile

Disorder (1920).[5]

Lenin’s criticisms were answered immediately by Herman Gorter in a

lengthy ‘Open Letter to Comrade Lenin’, written in the summer of 1920.

Gorter had already expressed the basic premise of the ‘Open Letter’ in

his 1918 work on The World Revolution, when he had argued that ‘The

condition of the Western European Revolution, especially in England and

Germany, are entirely unlike, and cannot be compared with, those of the

Russian Revolution.’[6] Gorter argued that in Russia the working class

had been able to ally with the peasantry to overthrow a weak ruling

class. In Western Europe, on the other hand, the working class had no

natural allies, and faced a very powerful ruling class. Therefore all

tactics for the class struggle in Western Europe had to aim at

increasing the power, autonomy and class consciousness of the workers.

The tactics advocated by Lenin and the Third International — such as

participation in parliament and in the trade unions, and alliances with

Social Democratic Parties came nowhere near to fulfilling such criteria.

According in Gorter:

“As the Third International does not believe in the fact that in Western

Europe the proletariat will stand alone, it neglects the mental

development of this proletariat; which in every respect is deeply

entangled in the bourgeois ideology as yet; and chooses tactics which

leave the slavery and subjection to bourgeois ideas unmolested, intact.

The Left Wing [by contrast] chooses its tactics in such a way that in

the first place the mind of the worker is made free.”[7]

At first, the KAPD, along with like-minded groups from other countries,

fought for its perspectives within the Third International, believing

that “Whoever wishes to conduct the West-European revolution according

to the tactics and by the road of the Russian revolution, is not

qualified to conduct it.”[8] It met with no success in this struggle,

however, and left the International in 1921 after the Third Congress.

Soon afterwards, a section of the KAPD (the so-called ‘Essen tendency’)

tried to set up a new, Fourth (Communist Workers’) International. Given

the reflux of the post-war revolutionary wave, such a venture was doomed

to failure, but the Fourth International (or KAI) is still interesting

in that the attempt to establish it had to be justified by a critique of

the Third International, the Russian state, and the Russian Revolution.

The ‘Manifesto of the Fourth Communist International’ (written by Gorter

in 1921) argued that the Russian Revolution had been a ‘dual

revolution’: in the towns, a working-class, communist revolution against

capitalism, and, in the countryside, a peasant, capitalist revolution

against feudalism. This contradictory and antagonistic duality had been

resolved in favour of peasant-capitalist interests in 1921, with the

introduction of the New Economic Policy. Thenceforth the ‘Soviet

Government’ had ceased to serve working-class interests; it had become a

capitalist state. Insofar as the Third International was tied to the

interests of the Russian state, it too lad become a capitalist

institution. Hence the need for the formation of a new workers’

International.[9]

While Gorter was characterising the Russian Revolution as a ‘dual

revolution’ — part communist, part capitalist — other left communists

went further in their critique. In 1921, Pannekoek argued that ‘the

Russian revolution is a bourgeois revolution, like the French one of

1789’.[10] In time this view became predominant among the left

communists. By 1923 Gorter seemed to have abandoned his ‘dual

revolution’ thesis when he argued that ‘even in their First,

revolutionary, so-called communist stage, the Bolsheviks showed their

bourgeois character’.[11] Another left communist, Otto Rühle, had come

to the conclusion that the Russian Revolution had been a capitalist

revolution even before Pannekoek or Gorter, and in 1924 he too wrote

that the Russian Revolution had been ‘the last in the line of the great

bourgeois revolutions of Europe’.[12]

Thereafter the term ‘left communism’ became increasingly redundant. What

had initially appeared to be disagreements over the tactics of the

working-class revolution in Russia and Western Europe were now

understood as fundamental differences between the methods of the

capitalist revolution in Russia and the communist revolution in Western

Europe.

Revolutionaries such as Gorter, Rühle and Pannekoek analysed the Russian

Revolution as a ‘bourgeois’ revolution leading to the establishment of

state capitalism. For the working class the lasting significance of the

Russian Revolution did not lie in the type of society to which it had

given rise, but in the forms of action used by the Russian workers

during the revolution:

“Russia showed to the European and American workers, confined within

reformist ideas and practice, first how an industrial working class by

gigantic mass actions of wild strikes is able to undermine and destroy

an obsolete state power; and second, how in such actions the strike

committees develop into workers’ councils, organs of fight and of

self-management, acquiring political tasks and functions.”[13]

Thus, through their central emphasis on the council form, those formerly

styled ‘left communists’ came to be known as ‘council communists’.

At the beginning of the 1920s the KAPD had claimed a membership in

excess of 40 000. In close alliance were a further 200 000 workers in

the revolutionary anti-trade-union ‘factory organisations’ under the

umbrella of the General Workers’ Union of Germany (AAUD). However, as is

the case with any active communist organisations outside periods of

revolutionary turmoil, these numbers steadily decreased throughout the

1920s, so that by the 1930s the council communists existed only as

small, scattered propagandist groups, mainly in Germany and Holland. The

Dutch Group of International Communists (GIG), which was formed in 1927,

published the journal Rätekorrespondenz (‘Council Correspondence’). This

served as the vehicle for numerous important theoretical debates, many

of which were taken up by the German revolutionary emigrés in the USA

who had started publication of International Council Correspondence

(later known as Living Marxism and then as New Essays) in 1934. This was

edited by the ex-KAPD member Paul Mattick, and its contributors included

Rühle, Pannekoek and Karl Korsch. The group in America had some contact

with the longest-surviving British council communist organisation, the

Anti-Parliamentary Communist Federation. The APCF (formed in 1921)

published a succession of newspapers, the best and last of which was

Solidarity (1938–44). During the Second World War Anton Pannekoek wrote

what is probably the best-known expression of council communist ideas,

Workers’ Councils, and he continued to contribute articles to the

revolutionary press until his death in 1960. In the USA Paul Mattick

published a number of books after the war, mainly concerned with a

Marxist critique of bourgeois economics. His Anti-Bolshevik Communism

(1978) collected together the fruits of a life-time’s commitment to the

revolutionary movement.[14]

Theoretical Questions

In examining the principal theoretical ideas of council communism, it is

useful to bear in mind that council communism originally emerged in

opposition to certain dominant trends within the existing workers’

movement, in particular within Social Democracy and syndicalism. In

fact, council communist ideas are perhaps most easily understood when

approached from this angle.

In one sense, therefore, council communism can be seen as a critique of

the use of parliament and trade unions as weapons in the class struggle.

In his early writings, Anton Pannekoek did not reject these outright.

His text on Tactical Differences Within the Workers’ Movement (1909)

argued that parliamentary debates and propaganda during election

campaigns could be used to ‘enlighten the workers about their class

situation’. Trade-union organisation could impart a sense of discipline,

solidarity, and collective class consciousness. Agitation for reforms

could also conceivably increase workers’ class consciousness and

organisational strength.[15] However, this assessment of the worth of

parliament, trade unionism and reformist agitation indicates the point

of view from which the council communists evaluated all forms of

struggle, a point of view which Pannekoek summed up in Workers’

Councils:

“Here is the criterion for every form of action, for tactics and methods

of fight, for forms of organisation: do they enhance the power of the

workers? For the present, but, still more essential, for the future, for

the supreme goal of annihilating capitalism?”[16]

As we have seen, in his polemic with Lenin, Herman Gorter had argued

that all revolutionary tactics had to aim at increasing the power,

autonomy and class consciousness of the workers. This was a point of

view shared by Pannekoek, and it was on the basis of such criteria that

council communists rejected the old methods of Social Democracy. Thus,

in 1920 Pannekoek summed up his opposition to the use of parliament as

follows:

“parliamentary activity is the paradigm of struggles in which only the

leaders are actively involved and in which the masses themselves play a

subordinate role. It consists in individual deputies carrying on the

main battle; this is bound to arouse the illusion among the masses that

others can do their fighting for them.

... the tactical problem is how we are to eradicate the traditional

bourgeois mentality which paralyses the strength of the proletarian

masses; everything which lends new power to the received conceptions is

harmful. The most tenacious and intractable element in this mentality is

dependence upon leaders, whom the masses leave to determine general

questions and to manage their class affairs. Parliamentarianism

inevitably tends to inhibit the autonomous activity by the masses that

is necessary for revolution.”[17]

Before the First World War, Pannekoek had also criticised trade-union

activity by putting exactly the same emphasis on class consciousness and

autonomous activity. Within the unions, he argued:

“Success or failure appears to depend on the personal qualities of the

leaders, on their strategic skill, on their ability to read a situation

correctly; while the enthusiasm and experience of the masses themselves

are not regarded as active factors.”[18]

“Success of mass movements depends on their capacity for autonomous

action, their unquenchable ardour for battle, and the boldness and

initiative of the masses. But it is precisely these qualities, the

primary condition of the struggle for freedom that are repressed and

annihilated by trade union discipline.”[19]

As well as being a critique of parliamentary and trade-unionist methods

from the point of view of working-class self-emancipation, council

communism also emerged as an opposition to dominant ideas about what the

overthrow of capitalism would involve, and how this would come about. In

1938 Pannekoek wrote:

“There are many who think of the proletarian revolution ... as a series

of consecutive phases: first, conquest of government and instalment of a

new government, then expropriation of the capitalist class by law, and

then a new organisation of the process of production.”[20]

This had been the dominant conception within the Social Democratic

Second International. Similarly schematic conceptions of revolution also

prevailed within the syndicalist movement, which looked, for the most

part, to the gradual building up of industrial unions within capitalism,

the overthrow of the ruling class by the General Strike, and then the

reorganisation of society by the unions.

Council communists rejected these ideas. In Workers’ Councils Pannekoek

wrote that ‘victory will not be one event, finishing the fight and

introducing a then following period of reconstruction’,[21] nor would it

involve a series of ‘different consecutive occurrences’.[22] In

Pannekoek’s view:

“The revolution by which the working class will win mastery and freedom,

is not a single event of limited duration. It is a process of

organisation, of self-education, in which the workers gradually, now in

progressing rise, then in steps and leaps, develop the force to vanquish

the bourgeoisie, to destroy capitalism, and to build up their new system

of collective production.”[23]

This idea of revolution as a process is central to council communism,

and it leads us directly to a consideration of council communist ideas

concerning class consciousness and organisation, which Pannekoek

described in 1909 as ‘those two pillars of working class power’.[24] In

the council communists’ view, revolution would involve the mass action

of a vast majority of the working class. This was one of the principal

points of divergence between the council communists and the Bolsheviks.

The communist revolution wrote Pannekoek in 1938:

“cannot be attained by an ignorant mass, confident followers of a party

presenting itself as an expert leadership. It can be attained only if

the workers themselves, the entire class, understand the conditions,

ways and means of their fight; when every man knows, from his own

judgement, what to do. They must, every man of them, act themselves,

decide themselves, hence think out and know for themselves.”[25]

As this passage illustrates very well, mass action is inseparable from

mass consciousness, and the council communists continually emphasised

that widespread class consciousness was one of the essential conditions

of working-class self-emancipation. This is not to say, however, that

the council communists thought that widespread class consciousness was

an essential precondition of revolution, if this is taken to mean that

the majority of the working class must be fully class conscious before

any revolutionary action can be attempted. The emphasis in council

communism tended towards the reverse of such a relationship between

class consciousness and class action. As Pannekoek put it, the struggles

of the workers ‘are not so much the result as the starting point of

their spiritual development’.[26] In keeping with their idea of

revolution as a process, the council communists argued that generalised,

widespread class consciousness could only be a product of workers’

active engagement in the class struggle itself. In her account of the

1905 Russian Revolution, Rosa Luxemburg had argued that the ‘high degree

of political education, of class consciousness and organisation’ which

the working class needed if its struggles were to be successful could

not be brought about ‘by pamphlets and leaflets, but only by the living

political school, by the fight and in the fight, in the continuous

course of the revolution’.[27] Luxemburg’s conception was shared by the

council communists; in 1927 Pannekoek argued that class consciousness:

“is not learned from books, or through courses on theory and political

formation, but through real life practice of the class struggle. It is

true that prior to action, as well as after action, theory can be

expressed in concepts that present organized knowledge; but, in order to

develop in a real sense, this knowledge itself must be acquired in the

hard school of experience, a harsh lived experience that shapes the mind

in the full heat of combat ... It is only through the practice of its

struggles against capitalism ... that the proletariat is transformed

into a revolutionary class capable of conquering the capitalist

system.”[28]

In parallel with their view that widespread class consciousness would

emerge from active mass involvement in the class struggle, rather than

from ‘simply converting people through propaganda to new political

opinions’,[29] the council communists also anticipated that

working-class organisation, the second essential condition of the

communist revolution, would arise in a similar way. The revolution could

not be prepared in advance through gradually organising the working

class in readiness for the single, decisive revolutionary act. In 1912

Anton Pannekoek criticised the attitude which held that revolution was

‘an event in the future, a political apocalypse, and all we have to do

meanwhile is prepare for the final show-down by gathering our strength

and assembling and drilling our troops’.[30] Against this attitude he

had put forward the view that:

“it is only by the struggle for power itself that the masses can be

assembled, drilled and formed into an organisation capable of taking

power.”[31]

He repeated this view in Workers’ Councils:

“The workers’ forces are like an army that assembles during the battle!

They must grow by the fight itself.”[32]

Here Pannekoek’s ideas echoed Rosa Luxemburg’s formulation of the

relationship between class struggle and organisation in The Mass Strike:

‘the organisation does not supply the troops for the struggle, but the

struggle, in an ever growing degree, supplies recruits for the

organisation’.[33] In 1920 Pannekoek argued that mass revolutionary

organisations (such as the ‘One Big Union’ or ‘Industrial Unions’ that

syndicalists sought to create) could not be:

“set up within a still passive workforce in readiness for the

revolutionary feeling of the workers to function within it in time to

come: this new form of organisation can itself only be set up in the

process of revolution, by workers making a revolutionary

intervention.”[34]

One example which Pannekoek used in Workers’ Councils illustrates

excellently the council communists’ ideas about organisation. In the USA

in the 1930s the presence of large numbers of unemployed (and therefore

potential blackleg) workers meant that ‘Any regular strike against wage

cuttings was made impossible, because the shops after being left by the

strikers, immediately would be flooded by the masses outside.’ To

overcome this problem, workers adopted the occupation tactic, i.e. going

on strike, but remaining in the workplace. Workers also found that by

occupying the workplace collectively, the striking workforce was no

longer ‘dispersed over the streets and homes ... separated into loose

individuals’, and that strikes no longer had to be ‘accompanied by a

continuous fight with the police over the use of streets and rooms for

meeting’. As Pannekoek pointed out, the occupation tactic, which almost

as a by-product increased the solidarity and active participation of

those on strike, was not planned consciously in advance of the actual

struggles: ‘It was not invented by theory, it arose spontaneously out of

practical needs; theory can do no more than afterwards explain its

causes and consequences.’[35] Again, there is a continuity here between

the ideas of the council communists and of Rosa Luxemburg, for in 1904

Luxemburg had argued that ‘fighting tactics’ were not ‘invented’ by

revolutionaries, but were:

“the result of a progressive series of great creative acts in the course

of the experimenting and often elemental class struggle ... the

unconscious precedes the conscious, the logic of the objective

historical process goes before the subjective logic of its

spokesmen.”[36]

Thus organisation and class consciousness are linked through a

dialectical relationship. New forms of struggle and organisation arise

spontaneously, in the sense that they are not planned consciously in

advance, and they arise as a practical response to the problems faced by

workers in the course of their struggles. Once these new forms have

arisen, however, they can be made more widely known, and other groups of

workers can begin to act on their example.

To sum up these ideas, from the council communist point of view the

revolutionary process can be seen as one in which the working class

continually adopts new ideas and new forms of organisation in response

to the practical problems which confront it in the course of the class

struggle. Once workers have taken up the fight against the attacks of

the ruling class, the necessity to overcome the practical problems which

crop up in the course of the fight pushes workers towards the

realisation that existing forms of organisation are no longer adequate

to their tasks, and that new forms have to be developed. In the course

of an escalating struggle each practical step forward taken by the

working class in serious pursuit of its demands leads in the direction

of the overthrow of the existing system and the simultaneous

reorganisation of society in the working class’s own interests. As

Pannekoek put it in 1920:

“without being communist by conviction, the masses are more and more

following the path which communism shows them, for practical necessity

is driving them in that direction”.[37]

This is not a unilinear process; advances and retreats follow one

another. None the less, the underlying tendency is towards communism, if

for no other reason than that reliance on outmoded ideas and forms of

organisation invariably leads to defeats, whereas the adoption of new

ideas and new forms brings successes. In his book, Lenin as Philosopher

(1938), Pannekoek based this conception on a fundamental ‘theory of

knowledge’:

“On the basis of his experiences man derives generalisations and rules,

natural laws, on which his expectations are based. They are generally

correct, as is witnessed by his survival. Sometimes, however, false

conclusions may be drawn, with failure and destruction in their wake.

Life is a continuous process of learning, adaptation, development.

Practice is the unsparing test of the correctness of thinking.”[38]

Workers’ Councils and Communism

This basic account of council communism can be completed with a

description of the role of the workers’ councils within council

communist theory. As was the case with the council communists’ ideas on

class consciousness and organisation, their emphasis on workers’

councils is also understood best in the context of the central concept

of revolution as a process. If revolution is a process, rather than a

series of consecutive but separate events, then it follows that there

must be a single organisational form which can be used by the working

class throughout all phases of the struggle. In a slightly schematic

way, it could be said that since communism is based on common ownership

and democratic control of the means of production and distribution, the

organisations which carry out the communist revolution must be ones

which are suited to the realisation of this final goal. As Pannekoek

wrote in 1938:

“Since the revolutionary class fight against the bourgeoisie and its

organs is inseparable from the seizure of the productive apparatus by

the workers and its application to production, the same organisation

that unites the class for its fight also acts as the organisation of the

new productive process.”[39]

The organisations which the working class uses to fight against

capitalism are therefore in a sense pre-figurative of the organisations

which are used for the construction and administration of the new,

communist society.

Council communists have commonly expected the workers’ councils to

emerge from mass strike movements where workers would take the conduct

of their struggle into their own hands rather than leaving it up to

existing organisations such as the trade unions. All strikers would meet

in regular mass assemblies to discuss and organise the struggle, and to

elect strike committees whose members would be delegates mandated by and

answerable to the general assemblies and who could be recalled and

replaced at any time. Where the strike centres were geographically

dispersed, or as other sections of the working class joined the strike

movement, delegates from the separate strike committees would meet in

central bodies to unite and coordinate the struggle.

To the extent that it began to draw in wider and wider sections of the

working class, the movement’s demands would tend to outstrip their

original starting-point, and tend towards the expression of the

interests of the working class as a whole. At the same time, as a

consequence of the interests of the entire working class being at stake,

the general assemblies would be open to all those involved in the

struggle- revolutionaries, families and relatives of strikers,

inhabitants of the surrounding communities, the unemployed, and so on.

Within a fairly short space of time, the general assemblies and the

local and central strike committees would be faced with tasks other than

the pursuit of ‘economic’ demands. For example, they would perhaps have

to publish bulletins or newspapers, in order to spread information, keep

everyone fully informed about what was happening, and combat propaganda

put out by the ruling class. They might also have to form militias in

order to defend themselves against attacks from the armed forces of the

ruling class, and to take the struggle onto the offensive. Thus through

these and other necessary measures the strike committees would take on

political functions, becoming in the process true workers’ councils or

soviets, organs of working-class power, rivalling the authority of the

capitalist state.

Before long the workers would also be faced with the necessity of

organising food and power supplies and other essential services, whose

normal functioning would have been paralysed by the strike movement, in

order to supply their own material needs. Where factories and workplaces

were occupied by workers, to all intents and purposes the owning class

would have been expropriated, and production and distribution would be

restarted according to the needs of the workers. Here technical, social

and political decisions would be on the agenda: methods of production,

what to produce and in what quantities, the basis of distribution in the

event of shortages and so on. The workers would express their interests

in all these matters by exactly the same means they had been using

throughout the struggle: through their mass assemblies and committees of

recallable delegates. In other words, ‘The workers’ councils growing up

as organs of fight will at the same time be organs of

reconstruction.’[40]

It is not hard to see the connections between this brief scenario and

the theme of ‘non-market socialism’, for in the situation described

above all the essential features of a non-market society are present,

albeit in the most rudimentary, embryonic form: the property of the

capitalist minority has been expropriated and is now the common

possession of the workers; the uses to which the means of production

shall be put are no longer decided by the capitalist minority but are

determined by democratic discussion and decision-making in which all

workers have an equal chance of participation; the fruits of production

are distributed according to needs expressed by the workers, rather than

according to capitalist considerations of exchange, profit and the

market. It would be the birth of a moneyless society based on common

ownership and democratic control of the world’s resources, i.e.

non-market socialism or communism (both of which terms mean the same

thing).

Council Communism and Councillism

The above sketch of the role of the workers’ councils in the communist

revolution is a suitable starting-point for an assessment of this

current’s strengths and weaknesses. Although the preceding account has

been couched in speculative, ‘would be’ terms, this gives a misleading

impression of council communism; council communists have always rooted

their ideas firmly in the real experiences and struggles of the working

class, and the councils themselves have arisen repeatedly in different

periods and various circumstances during highpoints of the class

struggle. Although not always conforming in every exact detail to the

rough outline sketched above — the councils of the German Revolution in

1918, for example, arose from the apparent collapse of state power

following Germany’s defeat in the war, rather than from a mass strike

movement — on several occasions the actions of the working class have

followed the pattern described.

Even outside of the pantheon of ‘highpoints’ — such as Russia 1905 and

1917, and Germany 1918 — there have been other times when workers’

struggles have shown a tendency towards the emergence of the council

form, even if they have often ultimately failed to realise their

potential. The mass strikes of July-August 1980 in Poland are a case in

point. This massive struggle was sparked off by the state’s announcement

of increases in food prices. The Polish workers responded with demands

for large wage rises, and since they were well aware that the trade

unions were a part of the state, they took control of their actions

themselves, meeting in mass assemblies to elect mandated, recallable

delegates. Rather than fighting separately, the workers extended and

centralised their fight. In several regions inter-factory strike

committees (MKS) were formed, constituted by delegates from scores of

different workplaces. As well as negotiating with the state, the MKS

also set up groups of workers to defend occupied shipyards and

factories, and organised the supply of food, power, and other essential

services to a limited extent; in other words, they took on some

political and social functions beyond the scope of their ‘economic’

origins.

Council communism therefore has the definite merit of being based on

something which actually exists and which cannot be eradicated, short of

revolution: the continuing struggle within capitalism between the

capitalist and working classes. It does not regard revolution as

something which occurs on a totally different plane from, quite

unconnected to, the everyday struggle of the workers. It sees communism

as a potential lying within the everyday struggle, which will emerge

from this very struggle. For the council communists, therefore, the

‘communist movement’ is not just the few organised groups of workers who

are already class conscious; the ‘communist movement’ is also the

‘movement towards communism’, the real underlying tendency of workers’

struggles within capitalism, which is indeed what gives rise to

organised groups of revolutionaries in the first place.

According to council communist theory, the workers’ councils are

revolutionary organisations. They are not permanent mass organisations

of the working class. They emerge at times of intense political, social

or economic crisis when workers find themselves compelled to take

matters into their own hands. Their sole purpose is to negate the

authority of one class and install the power of another over every

aspect of society. If they do not succeed in this task, the councils

usually disappear with the defeat of the movement which produces them;

in other words, when their source and lifeblood, the initiative,

vitality and creativity of the working class, is drained away. Any

attempt to maintain a permanent existence outside revolutionary periods

changes the councils’ nature: either they take on non-revolutionary

functions (for example, negotiating with the ruling class ‘on behalf of’

the workers) or else they turn into small propagandist groups defending

a political programme.

The potential for the emergence of workers’ councils would thus seem to

be tied closely to a contingent circumstance: the breakdown of the

existing political, social or economic ‘order’. In 1920 Pannekoek wrote

that ‘Economic collapse is the most powerful spur to revolution.’[41] At

that time, very few revolutionaries did not sincerely believe (for

obvious reasons) that capitalism was going through its death throes and

would shortly collapse virtually of its own accord. Pannekoek himself

did not hold this view, but the relative importance which he attached to

conditions of economic breakdown would seem to be accurate. In the

concept of revolution as a process, it is the workers’ pursuit of their

demands which almost inexorably leads them to take measures which are

revolutionary. This may be credible during periods of capitalist crisis

when it appears as if the working class can only satisfy its most basic

demands by completely reorganising society. The Polish workers’

struggle, for example, originated from the working class’s protests

about its inability to obtain one of its most basic material needs –

food – but this original issue was soon outstripped as the struggle

began to challenge wider and wider aspects of the existing society.

However, such deep crises are not a permanent feature of capitalism.

There are also periods of boom and relative prosperity for sections of

the working class. During such periods there would not appear to be the

same potential for the logic of events to lead in a revolutionary

direction, for the capitalist system has a greater capacity to satisfy

the material demands which workers place upon it. At such times, the

conditions which would give rise to a revolutionary struggle and

workers’ councils would appear to be practically non-existent.

This leads on to the issue of how advocates of the workers’ councils

should organise themselves during periods when the emergence of workers’

councils and revolution do not appear to be immediate prospects. This

issue has been a subject of endless debate amongst groups of

revolutionaries standing within the council communist tradition. Of the

‘theorists’ of council communism mentioned so far, Otto Rühle and Herman

Gorter held diametrically opposed views on the role of the council

communist ‘party’, while Pannekoek occupied an intermediate position.

Rühle’s views on political parties seem to have been shaped decisively

by the experience of the mass parliamentary parties of the Second

International. His break with the SPD, which he had once represented in

the Reichstag, led to an indiscriminate rejection of all political

parties. In Rühle’s view, all political parties were, by definition,

‘bourgeois’. In 1924 he wrote that, ‘The concept of a party with a

revolutionary character in the proletarian sense is nonsense.’[42] At

the end of 1920, Rühle’s sympathisers dissolved the sections of the KAPD

to which they belonged into the local factory organisations (part the

AAUD). Rühle opposed the separation of economic and political

organisation, and favoured a single, ‘unitary’ revolutionary workplace

organisation. To this end he was influential in the formation of a

breakaway from the AAUD, called the General Workers’ Union of Germany —

Unitary Organisation (AAUD-E) in 1921.

The tendency represented by Rühle was opposed vigorously by Gorter, who

wrote that ‘the factory organisation is not sufficient for the great

majority of the proletariat to become conscious, for it to achieve

freedom and victory’.[43] The class situation of workers in individual

factories might prevent them from having a sufficiently broad over-view

of the entire political situation. It was therefore vital for the most

advanced and lucid revolutionary workers to form themselves into a

separate communist political party, to act as ‘the one clear and

unflinching compass towards communism’ and to ‘show the masses the way

in all situations, not only in words, but also in deeds’.[44] This party

would not seek to seize power itself; Gorter believed strongly in the

workers’ capacity for self-emancipation, and, indeed, for the reasons he

stated in his ‘Open Letter’ to Lenin, argued that there could be no

revolution in Western Europe otherwise. As more and more workers took up

communist ideas, the working class, the factory organisations and the

party would merge into one entity, united on the same level of class

consciousness, and capable of restructuring society.

Pannekoek seems to have vacillated between these two positions without

ever settling on one or the other. This is perhaps not surprising given

the great length of his period of involvement in revolutionary politics,

and the changing objective circumstances in which he put forward his

ideas. In 1920 Pannekoek supported a conception of the role of the party

similar to Gorter’s:

“The function of a revolutionary party lies in propagating clear

understanding in advance, so that throughout the masses there will be

elements who know what must be done and who are capable of judging the

situations for themselves. And in the course of the revolution the party

has to raise the programme, slogans and directives which the

spontaneously acting masses recognise as correct because they find that

they express their own aims in their most adequate form and hence

achieve greater clarity of purpose; it is thus that the party comes to

lead the struggle.”[45]

In the 1930s, however, Pannekoek swung in the opposite direction,

echoing Rühle’s equation of all political parties with parties like the

SPD: ‘The very expression “revolutionary party” is a contradiction in

terms.’[46] At this stage Pannekoek defined parties as organisations

which sought power for themselves; they were therefore incompatible with

working-class self-emancipation. Revolutionaries with similar ideas

might come together to discuss and propagandise, and to ‘enlighten’ the

workers through open debate with other groups, but these could not be

called ‘parties’ in the ‘old’ sense of power-seeking organisations.[47]

Later still, in 1947, Pannekoek seemed to return to his original

position, assigning the same functions to organised groups as he did in

the 1930s, but upgrading their importance in relation to the actions of

the working class as a whole:

“The workers’ councils are the organs for practical action and fight of

the working class; to the parties falls the task of the building up of

its spiritual power. Their work forms an indispensable part in the

self-liberation of the working class.”[48]

Council communists have therefore put forward a number of different

views on the party issue, ranging from Rühle’s rejection of all parties

as inherently ‘bourgeois’ to Gorter’s emphasis on the party’s vital role

as ‘the brain of the proletariat, its eye, its steersman’.[49] In

general, however, the council communists’ chief focus on the workers’

own councils has assigned the political party to a less central role.

The councils are neither created nor controlled by any party. They are

the spontaneous and independent creation of the working class in which

all workers participate on equal terms.

If this emphasis on working-class autonomy and spontaneity is taken to

an absurd extreme, however, it can lead to two dangers: first, the

denial of all necessity or reason for any political organisation

distinct from the majority of the working class, and, second, the

fetishisation of any organisational form created spontaneously and

autonomously by the working class. In combination, these dangers amount

to what has become known as ‘councillism’, i.e. an empty, formalistic

emphasis on workers’ councils which completely neglects the communist

content of the council communist equation.

It is certainly safe to say that capitalism could not be overthrown, nor

could a communist society be brought into being, without the

self-organised activity of the vast majority of the working class. But

this in itself is not a sufficient condition for the establishment of

communism. If the class struggle escalated to a situation in which

workers began to take the organisation of society into their own hands,

it would seem reasonable to imagine that this would also be accompanied

by a corresponding awareness, at the level of political consciousness,

of the momentous implications of their actions. But while this may seem

likely, there is sufficient evidence to suggest that it is far from

inevitable. Although there is rarely any absolute separation between

form and content in the struggles of the working class, neither are

there any cast-iron guarantees of the unity of form and content.

It is conceivable that workers could spontaneously take over the means

of production at a time of political, social or economic crisis, only to

establish a form of self-managed capitalism. (‘Councillists’, in fact,

see nothing wrong in this and have applauded the occasions when this

actually appears to have happened.) The essential additional condition

which must accompany widespread working-class self-organisation is,

therefore, widespread communist consciousness. It is from this fact that

the vital need arises for council communists to form political

organisations of the type described by Gorter and the early Pannekoek,

agitating and propagandising on the basis of a commitment to the goal of

a non-market socialist society as the only working-class alternative to

the existing worldwide capitalist system.

Council communist intervention in the struggles of the working class —

participating in, supporting and publicising them, and endeavouring to

deepen and extend them — should be informed by the perspective of a

commitment to nothing less than the final goal of communism. This means,

if needs be, defending the final goal even in opposition to the

immediate actions and concerns of the working class, as the KAPD clearly

understood:

“in the course of the revolution the masses make inevitable

vacillations. The communist, party, as the organisation of the most

conscious elements, must itself strive not to succumb to these

vacillations, but to put them right. Through the clarity and the

principled nature of their slogans, the unity of words and deeds, their

entry into the struggle, the correctness of their predictions, they must

help the proletariat to quickly and completely overcome each

vacillation. Through its entire activity the communist party must

develop the class consciousness of the proletariat, even at the cost of

being momentarily in opposition to the masses. Only thus will the party,

in the course of the revolutionary struggle, win the trust of the

masses, and accomplish a revolutionary education of the widest

numbers.”[50]

It was argued earlier that there is a dialectical relationship between

organisation and class consciousness: that new forms of organisation do

not arise as a result of shrewd forward planning, but once such new

forms have arisen, their example can be spread and exert a conscious

influence on the actions of workers in the struggles that take place

afterwards. It is as a part of this dialectical process, as a link

between the real struggles of the working class and its understanding of

all the implications of these struggles, that organised groups of

revolutionaries standing in the council communist tradition have their

most positive and vital role to play.

[1] Anton Pannekoek, Workers’ Councils (1941–2) (Cambridge, Mass.: Root

and Branch, 1970) p. 83.

[2] See Rosa Luxemburg, The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the

Trade Unions (1906) (London: Merlin, no date)

[3] Pannekoek, Workers’ Councils, p. 83.

[4] Herman Gorter, The World Revolution (1918) (Glasgow; Socialist

Information and Research Bureau (Scotland), 1920) p. 61.

[5]

V. I. Lenin. Collected Works, vol. XXXI (Moscow: Progress, 1996) pp.

17ff.

[6] Gorter. The World Revolution, p. 51.

[7] Herman Gorter, ‘Open Letter to Comrade Lenin’, Workers’ Dreadnought,

11 June 1921. The ‘Open letter’ (more commonly known nowadays as ‘Reply

to Lenin’) was published in the Workers’ Dreadnought, the newspaper of

the left communists in Britain who were grouped around Sylvia Pankhurst,

between 12 March and 11 June 1921.

[8] Ibid., 4 June 1921.

[9] The ‘Manifesto of the Fourth Communist International’ was published

in the Workers’ Dreadnought between 8 October and 10 December 1921.

[10] Anton Pannekoek, ‘Sovjet-Rusland en het West-Europeesche

Kommunisme’, in De Nieuwe Tijd (1921), translated in S. Bricianer,

Pannekoek and the Workers’ Councils (Saint Louis: Telos, 1978) p. 229.

[11] Herman Goner, The Communist Workers’ International (1923) (London;

1977) p. 4.

[12] Otto Rühle, From the Bourgeois to the Proletarian Revolution (1924)

(Glasgow/London: Revolutionary Perspectives/Socialist Reproduction,

1974) p. 8.

[13] Pannekoek, Workers’ Councils, p. 86.

[14] For a more detailed account of the German council communists during

the 1920s and 1930s, and of the groups they influenced in other

countries, see Denis Authier and Jean Barrot, La Gauche communiste en

Allemagne (19I8-I921) (Paris: Payot, 1976), especially pp. 189–216 and

221–30.

[15] See Bricianer, 1978, pp. 73–117.

[16] Pannekoek, Workers’ Councils, p. 104.

[17] Anton Pannekoek, World Revolution and Communist Tactics (1920), in

D. A. Smart, Pannekoek and Gorter’s Marxism (London: Pluto, 1978) pp.

110–11 (emphasis in the original).

[18] Anton Pannekoek, Tactical Differences Within the Workers’ Movement,

in Bricianer, 1978, p. 105.

[19] Anton Pannekoek, ‘Gewerkschaftsdisziplin’, Bremer Burger-Zeitung

(18 October 1913), translated in Bricianer, 1978, p. 132.

[20] Pannekoek, ‘General Remarks on the Question of Organisation’, in

Living Marxism, IV: 5 (November 1938), reproduced in Bricianer, 1978, p.

273.

[21] Pannekoek, Workers’ Councils, p. 54.

[22] Ibid., p. 108.

[23] Ibid., p. 91.

[24] Pannekoek, Tactical Differences Within the Worker’ Movement, in

Bricianer, 1978, p. 87.

[25] Anton Pannekoek, Lenin As Philosophy (1938) (London: Merlin, 1975)

p. 103.

[26] Pannekoek, Workers’ Councils, p. 98.

[27] Luxemburg, The Mass Strike, p. 32.

[28] Anton Pannekoek, ‘Prinzip und Taktik’, Proletarier, 7–8 (1927),

translated in Bricianer, 1978, pp. 241–2.

[29] Pannekoek, Workers’ Councils, p. 35.

[30] Pannekoek, ‘Marxist Theory and Revolutionary Tactics’, in Die Neue

Zeit, XXXI (1912), translated in Smart, 1978, p. 52.

[31] Ibid., p. 52.

[32] Pannekoek, Workers’ Councils, p. 91.

[33] Luxemburg, The Mass Strike, p. 62.

[34] Pannekoek, World Revolution and Communist Tactics, in Smart, 1978,

p. 116.

[35] Pannekoek, Workers’ Councils, p. 72.

[36] Rosa Luxemburg, ‘Organisational Questions of the Proletarian

Revolution’ (originally titled ‘Organisational Questions of the Russian

Social Democracy’), in Leninism or Marxism (Glasgow: Anti-Parliamentary

Communist Federation, 1935) p. 14.

[37] Pannekoek, World Revolution and Communist Tactics, in Smart, 1978,

p. 95.

[38] Pannekoek, Lenin As Philosopher, p. 17.

[39] Pannekoek, ‘General Remarks on the Question of Organisation’, in

Bricianer. 1978, p. 273.

[40] Pannekoek. Workers’ Councils, p. 54.

[41] Pannekoek, World Revolution and Communist Tactics, in Smart, 1978,

p. 94.

[42] Rühle, From the Bourgeois to the Proletarian Revolution, p. 26.

[43] Herman Gorter, The Organisation of the Proletariat’s Class Struggle

(1921), in Smart, 1978, p. 159.

[44] KAPD, ‘Theses on the Party’ (July 1921), in Revolutionary

Perspectives, 2 (no date) p. 72.

[45] Pannekoek, World Revolution and Communist Tactics, in Smart, 1978,

pp. 100–1.

[46] Anton Pannekoek, ‘Partei und Arbeiterklasse’, Rätekorrespondenz, 15

(March 1936), translated in Bricianer, 1978, p. 265.

[47] See Pannekoek, Workers’ Councils, p. 101.

[48] Anton Pannekoek, ‘Five Theses on the Fight of the Working Class

Against Capitalism’, in Southern Advocate for Workers’ Councils (May

1947), quoted in Bricianer, 1978, p. 267.

[49] Gorter, The Organisation of the Proletariat’s Class Struggle, in

Smart, 1978, p. 163.

[50] KAPD, ‘Theses on the Party’, in Revolutionary Perspectives, 2, pp.

72–3.