The Future of Revolution, book review and response
You should read Jasper Bernes’s recent book The Future of Revolution: Communist Prospects from the Paris Commune to the George Floyd Uprising. In what follows I’m going to try to convince you to read the book by highlighting some of the worthwhile content and saying a bit about why I think that content matters. After making a case for the book, I then berate you briefly (though it will feel like a long time, I’m very annoying) to hurry up and get and read the book. I then turn, as is appropriate to my being someone very annoying, to some nitpicking and reservations. As I try to stress, the nitpicks and reservations aren’t intended as qualifying my recommendation of the book - I mean it when I say you should read it. Instead, they’re intended as raising some issues about what those of us convinced by the book ought to do with the important ideas it conveys. I intend those further remarks of mine as really addressed to people who have already read the book, a point I will belabor irritatingly. Let’s get started.
In the 50 year period from 1871 to 1921 there were incredible developments in working class collective action, both in the sense of qualitative leaps forward and a large number of important events. I’m very aware that nice round numbers like ‘fifty’ indicate some simplifications that shouldn’t be taken too much for granted. I’m also aware what we likely find incredible developments in working class history over any fifty year or so span of time. Still, it remains the case that the late 19th and early 20th century was a high point in important respects - a wave swelling over time, to speak.
This swelling wave is the object of the book’s first chapter. Bernes tacks back and forth between important developments in workers’ collective action and the ideas of important socialist intellectuals. We learn much about the Paris Commune in 1871 and the formation of workers councils in the early 20th century, especially in Germany around and just after the First World War. We also learn much about how Karl Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, and many others tried to make sense of those events, with Bernes giving the reader useful concepts in the process.
This history of conflict and theorizing is very important and Bernes does a great service to contemporary readers by providing a guide to both what happened and how to think through the significance of what happened. (At the risk of being presumptuous, I think Bernes and/or his publisher Verso should consider assembling a reader of key texts or excerpts from key texts from the material his book surveys, to serve as a companion volume, accompanied as well perhaps by an annotated bibliography and/or bibliographic essay regarding further reading.)
This is perhaps overly schematic, and if there’s a defect here I’ll ask you to read it as my error conveying Bernes’s points; but anyhow: the ‘commune’-ness of the Paris Commune could be defined as the lived collective self-governing of the working class after it has wrested a geographic area from the control of the state to a significant degree. If that sounds too vague, then imagine if you and your neighbors took over the city or town where you lived and ran it, while fending off efforts by the powers that be to take it back from you. The full list of what’s involved in those actions of taking over, running, and keeping hold would be quite long and hard to exhaustively capture on paper. I’ll come back to that.
The ‘council-’ness of workers’ councils can be similarly defined as the organization involved in governing productive units when those units have been taken from the control of employers, whether public or private. Here too as a concretizing shorthand imagine if you and your coworkers took over your workplace, ran it yourselves, fended off efforts to take it away from you, and, as would be necessary if you’re to keep going, began to network with people in other workplaces getting them to take over and to share ideas and materials with others who had so taken over. Again, the full list of activities involved could be long, complex, and hard to exhaustively lay out. As I said, that’s all a little schematic, but I want you to have some sense of what I’m referring to.
Bernes doesn’t provide that kind of neat definition. A hostile or impatient reader might criticize the book on that basis, but that’d be unfair. These concepts become clear over the course of Bernes’s account, and by not rushing to simplifying definitions the book also draws out that these collective practices in their lived reality are incredibly complex and dynamic over time, thus hard to pin down or exhaustively list. To put it another way, reading the book one gets a valuable sense of the relative open-endedness of revolutionary processes (if all of this was cut and dried such that there was a simple manual, we’d be in a very different situation now). That open-endedness isn’t absolute, though: revolution necessarily involves some general tasks. I’ll come back to this in a moment. For now, I’ll just say that specifying some of those general tasks is a major purpose of the book, as is providing a framework for thinking about those tasks. The book succeeds admirably at those purposes. Again, you should read it, and discuss it in a reading group.
Working class self-governance of the sort I’ve mentioned has a conflictual relationship with the prevailing organization of the world. The old and the new, to use terms Bernes favors, can not coexist in a peaceful and stable way. This is at least part of why we find practices like commune and council, at least to any robust degree, only in contexts of serious social unrest characterized by large and unruly strikes, riots, and so on - i.e., contexts wherein people step outside the normal routes and scripts in which social life runs in capitalist society. Commune and council are names for further intensifying that stepping outside, in a way that builds on the broader unrest underway. Bernes’s account of these ideas tends toward being a little austere and abstract. This is beneficially clarifying, while some readers will crave more detailed narration and drama.
Readers with such cravings are in luck, as Bernes spends a fair bit of time in the book’s first chapter giving an account of concrete uprisings particularly in the early twentieth century in Germany’s Ruhr, an industrial region subject to intense development and dynamism. This chapter manages to be simultaneously wide-ranging, in-depth, and concise. Again, to simplify a great deal, the first chapter focuses on people who lived through tremendous hardship, fought back, in some instances surpassed fighting back and moved into demanding (and in some cases, actually beginning truly) to steer their own lives collectively, and on some reflections during and immediately after those events.
The purpose of that historical overview is to draw out some of the required tasks of revolution - we might say necessary but not sufficient conditions. These include some actions or factors that inhibit the repressive wing of the state from simply killing enough people to end a revolt, real democratic governance of workers themselves including the short term recallability of any representatives they elect as well as means for ensuring transparency and capacity to deliberate about the actions of those representatives, and this democratic governance being in a sense all encompassing rather than respecting the public/private or political/economic splits that characterize capitalist society. This list of necessary conditions helps clarify what has to happen for a communist revolution to begin, to continue, and to remain communist in character. Bernes also draws out how these different requirements have been met (or not met) in specific ways in specific conditions, which helps underline for readers that any future revolution will have to meet versions of these requirements in time and place specific ways.
Generally speaking, all class societies generate harm and misery. Capitalism is a particular kind of class society which generates harm and misery in its own specific ways. The basic move I just made - the general type on the one hand, particular versions of the type with their own specificities on the other - can be repeated with regard to different versions of capitalism. Liberals and radicals diverge on, among other things, whether they place explanatory weight and political emphasis on the pathologies of specific versions of capitalism or the pathologies of all versions of capitalism as such. Bernes stresses the latter, problems with capitalism as such. This is laudable and important. It also involves thinking in a somewhat different way than the first chapter. Without wanting to make too much of these terms or the distinction involved, the first chapter is broadly historical in a way that readers of history will recognize and while the second is more theoretical in a way that readers of theory will recognize.
The heart of the second chapter is two concepts which build on each other, in Bernes’s terms ‘the test of value and ‘the test of communism.’ In short, the test of value is a name for doing away with all of the capitalism-ness of the capitalist world we are in: the suppression of capitalism. Bernes presents this concept by way of a well-conducted and concise overview of some areas of Marxist writing - value theory or value form theory - that can appear overly abstract or scholastic but which in fact deal in close detail with central matters of how capitalism operates - with capitalism’s capitalism-ness. This work helps us to identify “the rules of a game [we] hope to consign to the dustbin.” It provides us “a crosshair that flashes red when we need to smash something.” (88.)
The idea with ‘the test of value’ is that if we are to end capitalism, we need clarity about what we mean by ‘capitalism.’ Given that capitalism is complex, getting to the bottom of what the full set of capitalist social relations consists of - that is, what all must be smashed and placed in the trash - is a necessarily difficult and complex task. Hence the importance of the theory Bernes summarizes. Bernes doesn’t put the point this way but one thing I took from this chapter is that impatience with complicated theorizing that feels far removed from all the blood and fire of ongoing life and death under capitalism is understandable - anyone who comprehends even a fraction of the suffering this system causes will of course be impatient with everything that isn’t ending the system - while at the same time that theorizing deserves some measure of patience and attention, being as it is an attempt to help make it so that our “crosshair flashes red” at the right times.
While we want capitalism smashed, we want more than that. We don’t want a simple “game over,” we don’t want any ending whatsoever to capitalism. We want an ending that is specifically emanicipatory, and maximally so: not a different class society after capitalism, but a fully liberated human society, thus one in which sociality isn’t organized in the form of classes. That is, we want communism, defined as a “classless, moneyless, stateless society” consisting of “freely associated workers meeting their needs with the means of production under conscious and planned control” (123) wherein everyone’s well-being is provided for under the classic slogan “to each according to need.” Bernes articulates this second aspiration through a second term, the test of communism.
Put simply, the test of value names what we want to escape from while the test of communism names where we want to escape to - to true emancipation - and how we shall escape - through emancipating ourselves collectively. That collective emancipation will involve some of the specifics Bernes articulates in the first chapter - recallable delegates, self-governance by the working class, prevention or defeat of state repression, and so on. This also means that the first two chapters enrich each other effectively, with their changing emphases on historically-grounded concepts drawn from the lessons of past struggles and logically rigorous theorization produced by Marxists and communists mostly after or between (and inspired by, in aspiration to enrich) periods of intense struggle.
Before turning to the third chapter, I want to point out something. In the tradition(s) Bernes addresses (and to the best of my knowledge, in the milieu(s) in which he tends to move), it’s generally understood that the vision of revolution sketched here is distinct from many others in Marxist tradition. Bernes doesn’t particularly press the issue of the relative distinctness of this vision of revolution but I think it’s worth noting.
The distinctness of this vision of revolution has two facets. One, revolution is still something of an event, a distinct period in time such that revolutionary vs non-revolutionary eras is a sensible distinction, and furthermore revolution is something of a hard break from the existing order - as opposed to views that see the end of capitalism as a more evolutionary process and one involving less of a hard break.
Two, unlike some other conceptions of revolution as distinct period and event, in this conception the revolutionary period is not one that involves any strategic or tactical retention of any elements of state or capital, understood as withering away later through deliberate planning, nor is there any procession of higher and lower stages. Of course there isn’t a leap in an instant from a world ruled by capitalism to a world of nothing but communism, and of course communist societies will continue to change after they have fully ended capitalist social relations. The point I want to underline here is that in this vision there occurs a process of social transformation where actions and relationships exist that are in an important sense already communist, and which begin to spread.
The idea is something like a war of communism against capitalism where communist social relations are to an important degree part of the means through which our side conducts that war, rather than being only an end state arriving after success. To put it another way, communist activity is itself part of the active doing of the revolution from its inception - the how of the revolution, so to speak. This vision is sometimes referred to as communization. The book’s third chapter pays the most attention to the far left milieus that developed that term. It’s been a long time since I read it but (I’m partial to this text on the matter: https://libcom.org/article/communization-theory-and-abolition-value-form-internationalist-perspective )
It is a terrible misfortune - an avalanche of misfortunes involving a great deal of both metaphorical and literal bloodshed - that the ideas and practices Bernes presents have only infrequently had powerful, lived forward motion. They have spent most of their history as echoes of past potential and glimpses of future possibilities perceived in far bleaker times. ‘Perceived’ is poor wording on my part, as it renders the ‘perceivers’ passive recipients. What really happened, as Bernes stresses especially in his book’s third and final chapter, is that small groups and networks sought to keep these memories alive and refine analyses in light of them, while large parts of the rest of the working class has continued to struggle massively in changing ways. We meet a list of small groups and networks, such as the Johnson-Forest Tendency, Socialism or Barbarism, the Situationist International, to mention just three of the more famous ones. These groups’ hopes were occasionally closer to realization in periods of unrest, like those in France in 1968, Italy throughout the late 1960s and 1970s, and Portugal in the mid 1970s, periods which were similarly both object of analysis and spur for further theoretical refinement of analytical perspectives.
In addition to their ongoing analyses of moments of particularly intense struggle and political potential, Bernes also stresses these groups’ efforts to document and interpret the everyday realities and activities of working class people, a practice often known as workers’ inquiry. The name comes from a document of that name penned by Marx in the late 1800s intended to help guide French socialists in conducting interviews with workers in an early form of qualitative social science.
In one respect, inquiry of this sort is a core element of the Marxist tradition (Lenin once said that “the very gist, the living soul, of Marxism” is “a concrete analysis of a concrete situation”), and arguably any collective action involves some measure of inquiry implicitly, insofar as action in a social location means one has at least some tacit knowledge of that location. In another respect, the sort of work that usually goes under the term workers inquiry is something quite specific, being an attempt to pay close attention to real conditions lived by working class people in the present and the ways workers live despite and against those conditions. This inquiry often involves some degree of dialog in some sense, whether it’s rooted in an interview practice or in the sense of workers involvement in writing up the final text or both.
This kind of work often involves some tensions, between being a matter of marxists writing for other marxists or being members of the working class writing for fellow members of the working class. Those are not absolutely different categories, to be sure - there are many marxists in the working class, for one thing - but they are differences of emphasis. That need not be an insoluble problem, of course. People are able to codeswitch, after all, and conversation in one setting with one vocabulary can be important in other settings where other vocabularies are spoken. Ideally, in my view, the inquiry itself will include multiple registers in which people speak so that the codeswitching is already present in the text, so to speak, and the results of the inquiry will be actively presented to fellow members of the working class in a further dialogic and organization-building process. (The final two long paragraphs of Lenin’s “Where to Begin?” are relevant here in my view: https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/may/04.htm)
Bernes gestures toward this kind of unifying of inquiry with other political practices by speculating that future uprisings might give rise to “abolition inquiry committees” (171) that reflect on the general problems of revolution and the concrete circumstances in which people in struggle face those general problems.
Let me add here that in important respects Bernes’s book is itself partially a product of such a left and working class public sphere. Bernes conducted a reading group or two on some of the texts his book draws on and the larger literature, and presented parts of his argument as he developed it via radical education venues like the Red May project in Seattle. That kind of practice is a very good idea for at least two reasons: it subjects left intellectual production to a degree of collective discipline through the conversation involved, and to specifically discipline to parts of the left and working class, compared to the - on the one hand - relative indiscipline and on the other hand the different interlocutors involved in academic work. Furthermore, the act of producing this book by involving those spaces means - without at all meaning to minimize Bernes’s individual (singular!) contribution in any way - that insights from such spaces get a chance to circulate further and add a little to the ongoing collective thought process. Again at the risk of being presumptuous, and again without at all wanting to minimize Bernes’s own individual insights here as author, Bernes and his interlocutors might consider writing up a how-to text on how other people might try to learn from the impressive collective intellectual processes that helped support the making of this fine book.
I’ve emphasised the third chapter’s stress on inquiry here because I think it’s interesting and insightful, but that’s not all the chapter does. Over all, this chapter surveys repeated collective attempts to pass the tests of value and communism, and reflections on what to make of the continued lack of passing those tests. Bernes doesn’t provide simple answers (“one neat trick to emancipate the proletariat! Click for more information!”) so much as pose these difficult questions with clarity - and a loudly implicit sense of hope, in that he presents hard and high stakes problems as ultimately soluble - while also indicating a thought provoking set of texts, authors, and lived examples of struggle through which readers can keep thinking through these issues after closing the book.
I hope I’ve convinced you to read the book. I’ll add that I’ve had to leave out a lot. There’s a lot in this book despite it being relatively short. That alone is quite the feat on Bernes’s part, and so too is the fact that the book never feels crowded despite covering so much material. I’ll add that the book has received some good, thoughtful reviews. If you’re sympathetic but want a bit more convincing, I would recommend Julian Francis Park’s review at the Brooklyn Rail ( https://brooklynrail.org/2025/05/field-notes/the-workers-council-redeemed-on-jasper-bernes-the-future-of-revolution/) and Ian Alan Paul’s review at his web site (https://thefrozenseainside.com/the-test-of-anarchy).
There are some other more critical reviews worth taking seriously as they raise issues that anyone trying to think with this book about its important subject matter really should work through. In my view these reviews are far more worthwhile for readers who have read Bernes’s book, so if you read them before reading the book, give them another look later after you’ve read the book. I mean specifically Callum F’s review in Prometheus Journal (https://prometheusjournal.org/2025/04/30/review-the-future-of-revolution/) and this pair of reviews also in the Brooklyn Rail: https://brooklynrail.org/2025/05/field-notes/workers-councils-solution-or-problem/ by Charles Reeves and https://brooklynrail.org/2025/05/field-notes/on-the-future-and-past-of-revolution/ by Frits Janssen. (Bernes responds to reviewers at the Rail: https://brooklynrail.org/2025/05/field-notes/jasper-bernes-responds/ Unsurprisingly that’s worth reading but again in my view the criticisms and replies are better read after reading the book.)
This is a compact book, in a good way, a way that must have been a lot of work to bring about - which ranges widely, in a thought provoking way, while also staying laser-focused on fleshing out some key tasks required for revolutionary communist politics. There are few voices articulating these tasks in the present, let alone with Bernes’s clarity and conviction, so I hope the book gets a wide readership. I further hope that readership takes up the book through collective intellectual life in the narrow sense - read it, talk about it, use it in arguments, push back on it - and in way informed by collective intellectual life in the more expansive sense of struggling together in dynamic and concrete ways. To be a little more pointed, I hope the book informs some intra-left controversy, not because I enjoy conflict (I don’t, I think it’s a distressing necessity) but because a left that fails to disagree with itself is a left that is stagnating, likely leaving crucial realities unaddressed, and failing to both develop its own capacities and to effectively enroll new participants into its ongoing intellectual dynamism. In particular, I’d like to see more contention over the relative renewal of what we are supposed to believe is an electoral route to socialism, a renewal which rests to a significant degree on an implicit notion of socialism which is far less ambitious in its aspirations than the revolutionary maximalism Bernes so rightly insists on.
I hope I’ve convinced you to read the book. I don’t know how to make the case further so I will simply berate: Go get the book! Now! Do it!
You can order it online from the publisher https://www.versobooks.com/products/977-the-future-of-revolution (While you’re at it, also get a copy of Resisting Erasure: Capital, Imperialism and Race in Palestine by Adam Hanieh, Robert Knox and Rafeef Ziadah. I read it recently and it’s very good as well, sadly urgent given the ongoing massacre of Palestinians funded by the US, UK, and other governments around the world and those governments continued resort to authoritarian repression of people opposing this massacre. https://www.versobooks.com/products/3410-resisting-erasure) If you don’t like ordering online, you can get your local bookshop to order it if you like. Request it at your library. Download or shoplift it if you’re so inclined. You have multiple options, so use one of them. Get the book, already!
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If I may presume to tell you what’s best for you (while I’m at it: sit up a little straighter, unclench your jaw, take a few deep breaths, you look like you could use it. And have you had enough water today? Need a snack?), you will be better served by closing this tab now and opening the book than you will be by continuing to read this before reading the book. You can always come back later: Open Mode lurks eternal, staring in horror, gnashing its teeth.
Right, so that’s them gone, what a relief!
[Rubs eyes, yawns, stretches, startles.] Shit.
Are you still here? You can’t have read the book THAT quickly, can you?
Ahem.
I shall now try to set my self-indulgent and overextended dad jokes aside, a big lift as I’m sure you can understand, and try to articulate some concerns and reservations I have with Bernes’s book. Before getting into the substance I want to be very, very clear about the, I don’t know, disposition of these concerns and reservations in relation to Bernes’s book. I do recommend the book, I meant everything I said above. I belabor the point because I know ‘I have concerns and reservations’ undermines ‘I recommend’ in many conventional usages in ordinary contexts (that’s why I tried to place the self-indulgence between my statements of recommendation and these statements of reservation-having, as a kind of cushion intended to insulate the former from the latter - is this a method, or just more self-indulgence? Yes.) That said, we’re talking about ideas of communist revolution, hardly an ordinary context. The far left and the self-emancipation of the proletariat proceeds in part through a series of disputes and disagreements over time, though against a backdrop of shared agreement. My recommendation is based on such a backdrop of shared agreement. My concerns and reservations stand against that backdrop and are intended constructively, despite my many limitations.
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Right, throat cleared, let’s get down to it.
Bernes clearly has little time for electoral politics, an attitude he shares with the historical actors and thinkers he writes about - and rightly so in my view. If anything, I wish he had made the point more, well, pointedly, given the prevalence of illusions about electoralism on the left these days. This attitude shows up in dismissive asides about political parties or parliamentary parties. At the same time, we get positive uses of the term ‘party’ in various ways, since many of the historical actors he writes about were in favor of some kind of activity or organization they called a party. (Tracing the meaning of ‘party’ in these usages over time would be a wortwhile task it seems to me, but it’s not my real point here.)
I’m talking about the party and such here as an entry point and as what I think is a useful contrast. What I really want to note is, first, Bernes seems to reject electoral politics and the versions of ‘party’ tied to those, while allowing more room for other versions of ‘party’ and ‘parties.’ I note this because, second, the book takes a different disposition to ‘union’ and ‘unions.’ We get similar dismissive asides about unions as we get about parliamentary parties, but we get less allowance of room for alternative versions of ‘union’ and ‘unions.’ As far as I can tell, for about the first two thirds of the book references to unions are exclusively negative, ambivalent, or focused on unions as intrinsically limited.
Late in the book, however, Bernes makes passing mention of potentials for ‘base unions.’ (To the best of my knowledge the term is a fairly literal translation of an Italian term, “sindacato di base” - sindacato meaning union and “di base” meaning something like rank and file or grassroots.) I was pleased to see this reference on Bernes’s part as it indicates a different view of union struggles than the first parts of the book indicate. This isn’t remarked on, though - are ‘base unions’, as unions, subject to limitations that are somehow inherent to unionism as a form of organization? I would say no while others influenced by some of the works Bernes reads would say yes. I can’t tell what Bernes would say. That’s fine, no book can do everything, but it’s something those of us who find the book convincing should deliberate on, in my view.
A related matter, or maybe different facets of the same matter: in the first chapter’s discussion of events in Germany in the early 20th century Bernes talks about radicals who "focused on the formation of unionen, or factory groups." The 'factory groups' are distinguished from "the trade unions." (53.) This particular reference to "trade unions" is in a quote from the German communist Jan Appel but Bernes doesn’t gloss the quote, refers often to “trade unions” himself, and there’s no indication he disagrees with Appel.
Two issues here. One, “unionen” should be rendered in English as “unions,” not “factory groups.” One of the radical organizations active in the early twentieth century was the FAUD, the Freie Arbeiter-Union Deutschlands, an anarchist union. The FAUD clearly thought of themselves as specifically a union and used the word ‘union’ as that term. Another of the left groups that emerged in this period in Germany was the AAUD, the Allgemeine Arbeiter-Union Deutschlands, the General Workers Union of Germany. In both cases ‘union’ is not a false cognate, but rather has the same meaning: ‘Arbeiter-Union’ means workers union. This is how the term was translated in the IWW’s One Big Union Monthly in 1920. That translation appeared in an article ("The Germans and the I.W.W.", OBU Monthly v2 no8, August 1920) by William Weyh, a German-born member of the IWW.
I’m aware that this may seem like simple pedantry on my part and I’m certainly not above such things. To be clear, I think the translation of the term is the less important point by far, but I also thinkthe terminology does do a bit of signaling, analogous to a finger pointing one direction rather than another. (The common use of ‘union’ and ‘trade union’ as synonyms is another version of this kind of signaling. My point isn’t that the word choices do politicking per se so much as that I think these word choices reflect some politics lurking in the subtext. That subtextual politics is worth subjecting to critical scrutiny, which requires pulling it out of the subtext. In any case, the more important point, and which the terminology points away from, is what ‘union’ meant to these historical actors. If the apparent pedantry about terms annoys, my apologies, but I think that can’t be avoided if I’m to raise the matter of the meaning of the term to the actors involved.
The One Big Union Monthly article that I mentioned (it’s on googlebooks here: https://books.google.com/books?id=Y7ZLAQAAIAAJ&newbks=1&pg=PA47#v=onepage&q&f=false) seems to be a translation of two articles published by the KAPD, the Communist Workers Party of Germany, one of the councilist groups Bernes writes about. In the first part, the KAPD refers to itself and the IWW as having an important kinship. More important to my point, the KAPD doesn’t use the term ‘union’ as something to dismiss like the (correct) dismissal of parliamentary parties. Nor are ‘union’ per se or all unions as such embraced - no more than the KAPD being a party means that all parties or ‘the party’ per se is embraced. Rather, in this context the KAPD - one specific kind of political party with a specific politics and practice - favored one specific kind of unionism with a specific politics and practice.
The KAPD article praised a pamphlet by Grover Perry on the IWW (https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/unions/iww/1913/perry.htm), then summarized some of what the KAPD liked about the pamphlet and the IWW, namely the rejection of craft unionism, a rejection not unique to the IWW. A craft union, and trade union in this context is a synonym for that term, is a union of a specific group doing particular kinds of work: carpenters with carpenters, plumbers with plumbers, etc. The IWW, KAPD, and other left unions around the world rejected craft unionism as promoting sectoral interests among parts of the working class at the expense of other sectors, the class as a whole, and, in the long run due to the weaknesses that resulted, the organized crafts themselves. Hence the emphasis on all workers (the ‘general’ of General Workers Union and the ‘one big union’ of the IWW), and on having members organized by industry, hence industrial unionism. To be clear, early left unions like the IWW seem to have overstated the radicalism of these organizational practices.
My point here is fourfold: some of the German councilists Bernes’s book focuses on were building organizations they thought of as unions; they saw these unions as a specific type of union - they saw themselves as engaged in a specific practice of unionism - distinct from others; they saw this as part of the process of building toward revolution and communism; and they did this work in connection with an international process of struggle, thought, and dialog within the working class. That dialog was conducted partly by correspondence as with the OBU Monthly running translation and commentary on a KAPD publication. It was also conducted partly face to face, as radicals both migrated around the world and circulated around the world as sailors. Gilles Dauve, one of Bernes’s major sources and interlocutors, notes that the German councilist Fritz Wolffheim had lived in the US and been an IWW member prior to advocating for the AAU in 1919. He and another councilist, Heinrich Laufenberg, considered the AAU “to be the German section of the IWW,” in Dauve’s words. (https://www.marxists.org/subject/germany-1918-23/dauve-authier/ch09.htm) The historian John Gerber notes as well that Wolffheim was not only an IWW member but had edited an IWW publication while in the US, while also stressing contact between radicals in Germany and IWW members working as sailors. (https://files.libcom.org/files/2024-08/Anton%20Pannekoek%20and%20the%20Socialism%20of%20Workers'%20Self-Emancipation,%201873-1960%20Book%20(J.%20Gerber).pdf p120) While I freely admit an attachment to the IWW and its history, this isn’t mere antiquarianism or my wanting a nod to my personal favorite past actors. There are some conceptual issues here as well, with political stakes.
The unions that some of the councilists were involved in were, as I have tried to stress, distinct kinds of unions practicing distinct kinds of unionism. There is already here an important point in my view, and one that seems to me almost overwhelmingly neglected, namely that the wide swathe that can fall under ‘union activity’ is not all one thing so much as it is a range of practices with very different politics. That is, unionism is really unionisms - or, any specific unionism is always just one approach to union activity among others - and different unionisms are different politics: just as the actions of a ‘party’ like the KAPD and, say, the Labour Party are wildly different.
In my view one of the major victories of labor law in the United States has been to make this harder to understand in large part by narrowing the range of practices then naturalizing or reifying that narrowed range. Language like ‘union density’ reflects this. (Imagine a similar term like ‘density or frequency of political practice’, as if all political practices are, as political, equivalent.) I’ve written a few pieces at Organizing Work griping about this, including this essay on US labor law, as have other writers there. As far as I can tell the overwhelming majority of the actually existing labor left in the US concedes nearly all of the ground on these matters to the capitalist state and the labor officials that labor law cultivates, with the lefter end of the labor left mostly limiting themselves to more internally egalitarian versions of the same basic approach to unionism that the US government sought to cultivate via the National Labor Relations Act.
The existence of these radical unions advocated by some of the councilists also raises a theoretical matter about how different time periods and activities relate to each other. The project of the radical unions was to fight for better lives in the short term under capitalism and to do so in a way that actively promoted revolution. This combination is often viewed as foolish and/or as linking two discrete kinds of activities - fighting for a better life at or despite one’s job vs fighting to abolish capitalism. That distinction makes some sense but it’s easily made too much of and is, I suspect, as much or more a distinction between two kinds of contexts rather than two kinds of activities. In any case, it is not a given that these are two distinct kinds of activities which are, subsequent to their discrete existence, then combined. To treat them that way - as distinct, I mean - is, I think, reasonable but it is merely one reasonable way to think among others. Certainly the radical unionists of the IWW, AAUD, and others didn’t think that way.
This is part of what was at stake in the fight over “unitary organization” that Bernes discusses briefly. In one part of the Marxist tradition, one that is unfortunately largely hegemonic - not least because its distinctions track onto, and perhaps derive from, the real-but-misleading split between economic and political that capitalism fosters, a split reinforced by state institutions like labor law - there is an essentialized division between tasks of the party and tasks of the union. The ‘unitary’ in ‘unitary organization’ was a matter of radicals rejecting that split - not so much doing ‘party work’ and ‘union work’ in the same organization as refusing those categories. There’s a bit on this in a document adopted by the AAUD in 1920 - here https://www.marxists.org/subject/germany-1918-23/dauve-authier/04.htm
- stating that “the goal of the AAUD is unitary organization” and denying any “justification for the existence of political parties (since historical development impels towards their dissolution)” - and in this 1920 text by the German councilist Otto Ruhle, calling for all revolutionary workers to join the AAUD and make it the organization in which their revolutionary activity occurs and rejecting political parties as such: https://www.marxists.org/archive/ruhle/1920/ruhle02.htm
The idea of unitary organization - and the closely related idea that fighting organizations (like unions, tenant organizations, and so on) can and should themselves hold revolutionary politics - is far more often dismissed out of hand than given a fair hearing. Likewise, and facilitating that dismissal, the idea of two discrete kinds of action, proper to two distinct kinds of organization, the party and the union, is far more often assumed than argued for, a question begged more than anwered (and rarely even asked). This too is a matter of political common sense encouraged by labor law among other forces, and it is often treated as THE Marxist view, as part of the Bolshevik revolution and its ideas having become ‘classical’ within the Marxist tradition, even though views like I’ve mentioned here often pre-date the Bolsheviks and the inherited hard line drawing between party and union.
Matters of radical intellectual history aside, a theoretical issue here is whether people in struggle for better lives under capitalism necessarily are doing something or building something antithetical to struggling to end capitalism - in fighting to get by do we necessarily build obstacles that future members of the working class and/or our future selves will have to tear down? - or might, at least some of the time shorter term struggles actively pave the road toward revolution via their struggles? And, specifically, via their organizations?
Even more concretely: should fighting organizations have social revolutionary politics? The AAUD thought so, as did (and does) the IWW. The Communist Party in the United States thought so as well at least for a while in the late 1920s and early 1930s (the so-called ‘Third Period’). In my time on the left I have heard the opposite said over and over and over again. One version of the argument goes something like this: ‘fighting organizations should focus on what it can win now, deeper or more radical views will be a distraction.’ On this view, fighting organizations should be to an important degree apolitical or agnostic with regard to a great deal of the larger world. Meanwhile radicals who support and participate in them will talk radicalism elsewhere, in organizations (parties?) of fellow radicals, with the implication often being that the fighting organizations lead the short term fights - supply and carry out the tactics - while the political organizations link the fights together and provide longer term direction - i.e., defining strategies. This view sits in some tension with the idea that the working class emancipates itself, even if the party consists entirely of workers as its members. At the very least, there is a nontrivial difference between understanding the self-emancipation of the working class understood as driven by an enlightened subset of workers is vs as being the process wherein the majority of the class comes to governing itself and comes to take up a communist spirit.
For what little my view matters, I think revolutionaries supporting struggles in the short term should endeavor to be as effective as possible in that short term support while also trying to foster the radicalization not only of those struggle’s participants, as individuals, but also of those struggles collectively in their organized forms. (I’ve written further about this at tedious length in a reply to Tony Smith here: https://buttondown.com/nateholdren/archive/my-correct-views-on-a-couple-things-a-response-to/) I assume Bernes agrees but I can’t tell from the book. Again this seems to me a matter that those of us convinced by the book should deliberate on, as the different possible positions here point in significantly different directions. To be a little pointed I would also add that if I’m right, and of course I think I am, then the far left view that treats all unions as necessarily, by virtue of being unions per se, ends up carrying water for less radical forces in the left and outside the left.
I have a strong hunch here, but don’t currently know how to connect all the dots, that this issue of revolutionary unions being more contiguous with workers’ councils than Bernes’s book indicates also has some important bearing on a recurring but only partially thematized thread in the book, that of councils breaking out in moments of serious unrest and then becoming pulled back into non-revolutionary purposes. There isn’t an easy fix for that - it’s not a problem soluble in advance so much as it’s political tension or process that will have to be worked out as it arises.
Two more reservations, about which I will attempt to be more brief. The capitalist state appears here largely as the repressive arm of the state. That’s very important, to be sure, but we see little of what Simon Clarke called institutionalized forms of class collaboration - mechanisms for mitigating grievances, simultaneously meeting working class aspirations within the bounds of capitalist social relation and keeping the class’s aspirations (or at least its actionable ones) within those bounds. Labor law is important here. So too is the welfare state.
I’d also suggest that in their rejection of the parliamentary party and the trade union, councilists were rejecting the capitalist state. More to the point, the parliamentary party and the trade union are in part forms of mediation of the relation between the working class and itself, the working class and the capitalist state, and, via the state, the class and capitalist social relations. This mediation is sometimes consciously crafted for political purposes, purposes which are often naturalized so that their status as political and as deliberately crafted disappear - again I’d point to labor law and my article at Organizing Work. (I’d point as well to the discussion in the Solidarity Federation book Fighting For Ourselves - itself heavily influenced by the councilist tradition Bernes focuses on - regarding the relationship between workers’ organizations as forms through which workers’ “do” their association and institutions that represent workers to others. A major purpose of labor law is to keep workers’ association within bounds compatible with capital accumulation, which it does by using representation to foster some activities of association and prevent others.) don’t mean to be unfair here, I recognize that a book can only do so much. I do hope lots of people read Bernes’s book and take up its politics, which includes an important anti-state sensibility. As they - you! - do take up the book, I hope readers also read further about the theory and history of the capitalist state and its role in influencing working class organizations and struggles in pro-systemic directions.
Finally, Bernes only mentions this in passing a few times, but I think it bears bringing up: many people who, like me, share the general communist politics the book presents with such clarity, also - unlike me! unfortunately! - believe something to the effect that capitalism has become irreversibly stagnant in some way. To be fair, none of the views Bernes advocates in the book require this view of capitalist stagnation - I don’t mean to nitpick by raising something the book doesn’t rely on. Instead, I raise it for two reasons. First, while the point isn’t logically required by or logically entailed by any arguments in the book, the book might well help convince people of the view in passing, without argument, because the book is convincing about what it does argue. No one is well served by that kind of convincing in passing.
Second, and more importantly, I think that view is mistaken on at least two counts. One, we simply can’t really know if the system is currently in a trough between waves or if there are no more waves. It bears mention that the history of Marxism is chock full of predictions of that sort and the parts of the tradition Bernes focuses on is arguably especially so. Two, even if the system is stagnant in some important way such that production, defined in capitalist terms, is necessarily sluggish, it’s not at all clear what follows from that. Often the implication is that something fundamental has shifted in the course of the class struggle, such that the state can no longer use palliative reforms to buy itself time, or that struggles that would, outside periods of stagnation, be fully system-compatible become, in periods of stagnation, antisystemic because they demand something the system can no longer deliver or permit.
The final three paragraphs of this 1934 essay by the councilist Paul Mattick are a case in point: https://www.marxists.org/subject/left-wing/icc/1934/11/permanent-crisis.htm. The essay is perhaps ambiguous enough that it could be read as saying that there are periods when the working class is forced to bottom out, is pushed below the water line so to speak, with those periods coming and going, but I’ve known quite a few people who think that capitalism eventually must reach such a period as an irreversible dead end: this period will come but won’t go, the argument goes, unless ended by revolution. Even setting aside my skepticism about our ability to tell the difference between a trough between waves and a permanently becalmed waveless sea, I think this argument is mistaken as a prediction about the fate of the class as a whole.
It seems to me what actually happens is a localization of misery within specific sections of the class, other sections remaining above the water line at least temporarily. When that happens, the latter sectors of the class are subject to a host of carrots and sticks that work against them acting in solidarity with the former sectors, and work to normalize the fate of those former sectors. In other words, the system is guaranteed to keep on killing a lot of people, but it’s not guaranteed to impoverish the entire working class or majority of the class simultaneously: there are localized breakdowns, so to speak, rather than a permanent system-wide breakdown. (On some of the details, I’d strongly recommend Simon Clarke’s book Marx’s Theory of Crisis, which rejects views like these, including rejecting Mattick explicitly (p51 of the PDF at that link), while instead arguing that capitalism is a system that forces massive uncertainty and harm onto many people, in changing and unforeseen ways. I’d also recommend Chris O’Kane’s chapter in the recent state debate book, and the article series by Aufheben magazine on the idea of capitalism as permanently stagnating - Aufheben calls that ‘decadence.’) I could be wrong on this, though I don’t think I am. Even if I am, I think the issue of whether the system is irreversibly stagnant (or ‘decadent’) bears serious discussion rather than being treated as simply a matter that serious communists can consider settled.
That ends my quibbles and reservations. I want to stress as I’ve tried to say already, I raise these not in any attempt to knock the book - this isn’t a Yelp review or whatever - but rather as matters that I think it would behoove those of us convinced by the book to discuss, in a spirit of ‘how are we to best move forward with and via the important ideas this book presents?’ If you haven’t already gotten a copy of the book, do so now, I insist!