What is Council Communism?
Council communism is a left-wing branch of Marxism that grew up in Germany and the Netherlands after the First World War. Its central idea is simple: the working class should run society directly, through councils chosen in factories and neighborhoods. Delegates to these councils can be removed at any time. Supporters see this as true rule by the workers. They reject both the Leninist party and the reformist parties of social democracy. Over time they came to view the Soviet state as a new kind of capitalism run by officials.
Core beliefs
- Workers must free themselves, and no party can do it for them.
- Councils of recallable delegates should manage both work and public life.
- Elections to parliament and cooperation with unions tie workers to the existing order.
- A party may teach and argue, but it must not seize power.
- Soviet Russia was state capitalism, not a step to socialism.
- The revolution has to be worldwide and must oppose national wars.
History
The councils first appeared in the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917. They spread to Germany in 1918, when soldiers and workers formed councils during the fall of the monarchy, and to Bavaria and Hungary in 1919. Dutch Marxists, above all Anton Pannekoek and Herman Gorter, drew lessons from these events. In 1920 the radical wing was pushed out of the German Communist Party and set up the KAPD. That year Lenin wrote Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder against them, and Gorter replied with an open letter. The groups shrank in the 1920s as the revolutionary wave ebbed. Pannekoek's book Workers' Councils (1946) gave the tradition its best-known statement, and Paul Mattick carried it to the United States.
Variants
The Dutch-German current is the core. Otto Ruhle went further than most and argued that every party, even a revolutionary one, was a bourgeois form. Karl Korsch added philosophical work on Marxism. A separate tradition, the Italian left around Amadeo Bordiga, also broke with Moscow but kept a firm place for the party. Later groups such as Socialisme ou Barbarie in France and the Italian autonomists took up councilist themes.
Criticisms
Leninists say that councils without a disciplined party cannot beat a determined counter-revolution, and point to Germany in 1919. Social democrats say that refusing to vote or join unions cut the movement off from ordinary workers. Anarchists like its stress on self-rule, but dislike its Marxist language about a workers' state. Many historians note that the movement stayed tiny and never held power, so its ideas have rarely been put to the test.
In practice
No state has ever been run on council communist lines. Its closest real-world moments were the short-lived council movements of 1917 to 1919 and, later, the workers' councils of the Hungarian uprising in 1956. Today it survives in small study groups and in the writings of libertarian Marxists. On the 12 axes it scores at the extreme of Public on Ownership and strongly toward Planned on Markets, Shared on Welfare and Democratic on Authority.