Council Communist History and Praxis for 2025
The process of revolution and betrayal
The theory of worker councils in the West and around the globe has a 160 year history. Marx’s writings about the network of communes that appeared during the French Civil War in 1871 predicts their arrival. Lenin’s short pamphlet “what is to be done” begins to describe the appearance of worker councils or Soviets in 1910. Then Anton Pannekoek’s book Worker Councils in 1947 fleshed out the theory. After council communist theory fundamentals became fleshed out in 47’, a range of groups around the world have tried to apply council theory. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Nakamura Tsuyoshi, a Marxist in Japan broke away from Stalinism and adopted council communist ideas and organizing methods. In the later 1970s, the Mexican organization LC23S carried the torch with their communist league guerilla organization. Over 15 year later, in Iran, council communists inspired Mansoor Hekmat’s Worker communist party to be founded in 1991.
These movements around the world have merely improvised upon a tendency within Marxism that arose between the arrival of Lenin’s proto-Bolshevik embrace of council organization and his later betrayals of the Russian worker councils or Soviets that propelled the revolution. Council Communists like Paul Mattick, Anton Pannekoek and Herman Gorter did successfully theorize the council organization involved in many historical revolutionary periods. But like Marx, they never adopted Lenin’s ideology of Democratic Centralism which in many ways contradicts any sort of rule by councils. Council communist theory describes the process of revolution but does not call communist any counter-revolution against council organization. While some council communists do give a role to a political party, the political party for council communists is just a logistical group that coordinates between councils not a central locus of power.
In light of these histories, many readers may ask like Lenin once did, what is to be done? And the answer can be found in Herman Gorter’s response to Lenin’s polemic against the ultra left titled “Letter To Lenin”. In Gorter’s response, he highlights how while liberal trade unions necessarily become controlled by liberal reformist goals, industrial unions like the IWW teach workers how to build council organization because they show how workers might run their own workplaces autonomously. Sergio Bologna’s autonomist Marxist essay entitled “Class Composition and the theory of the party at the origins of the worker council movement” explains how IWW in America is in many ways distinct from European syndicalism and is more close to the council model. Gorter’s plan for how to achieve communism depends on the workers in industrialized capitalist countries maturing collectively in their struggle until they replace liberal unionism with council organization. While Lenin defends Soviets prior to assuming state power, Gorter emphasizes the route by which council organization may come to prominence globally. Gorter’s model is especially vibrant during a time in which most attempts at communism or socialism have failed and the global workers must reinvent organization in order to defeat capitalism.