Asked to characterise the significance of the October Revolution,
John Maynard Keynes - always one of capital's most astute thinkers
- once suggested that 1917 heralded the victory of "the Party
of Catastrophe." For many of the revolutionaries who helped
to establish the international communist movement, however, the
simple, unambiguous demand for 'All Power to the Soviets' had
seemed to encapsulate a new class politics finally able to surpass
the disasters of war and betrayal. One of them, the poet Hermann
Gorter, greeted Lenin at the time as 'the foremost vanguard
fighter of the international proletariat', and the soviets
themselves in the following terms:
"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
(Quoted in Shipway 1987: 105).
For most people on the far left, Gorter and his colleague Anton
Pannekoek are remembered - if they are known at all - as two of
the lefts castigated in Lenin's "Left-Wing" Communism,
An Infantile Disorder. In 1917, however, both were prominent
figures within the international revolutionary movement. To their
mind, the participation of the social democratic parties and
unions in the First World War demonstrated not only the moral
turpitude of the Second International's leadership, but the very
bankruptcy of forms of organisation which shifted 'the center of
gravity... from the masses to the leaders! (Gorter). Against
the craft unions of old, they counterposed factory committees and
soviets; against the party-form of social democracy, they
championed a 'new type' of political vanguard dedicated
exclusively to the development of workers' self-organisation.
Within much of Western Europe - and Germany above all - such
perspectives found a wide resonance between 1917 and 1923.
Expelled in late 1919 from the Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands
(Spartakusbund) for their rejection of parliamentarianism and the
old trade unions, the German 'left' communists formed a new party,
the KAPD, which briefly overshadowed its 'official' rival in
militancy and influence. Through their network of affiliated
workplace organisations, the AAUD, the 'Lefts! for a time
acquired an important presence within the German working class,
particularly in the strategic regions of the Ruhr and Bremen.
During the attempted rightist Kapp Putsch of early 1920, their
activists played a leading role in the Red Armies which briefly
dominated the Ruhr.
Factional divisions, ongoing polemics with the majority of the
Bolshevik leadership, and renewed competition at home from a
communist party now fused with the left social democrats, all
combined to weaken the 'Lefts" standing in the class after
1921. Perhaps the most serious of the KAPD's internal differences
concerned the nature of the party. One wing, around Otto Ruhle,
held that since the Revolution is not a Party Matter' - the
party-form being inherently bourgeois - the KAPD should dissolve
itself into the new workplace organisations, which would instead
be the proper vehicles of proletarian dictatorship. Against them,
the majority expounded a theory of the offensive, wherein the
cadre party ('hard as steel, clear as glass') sought to lead the
proletariat by example - with less than happy results, as the
disastrous March Action of early 1921 made clear.
By the early twenties, when it became clear that the Soviets were
such in name only, and the Comintern subordinate to Russian
foreign policy, the left communists finally broke with the
Bolsheviks. Within Europe, the relative stabilisation of class
conflict after 1923 brought with it the loss of the tendency's
remaining audience. Turned in upon themselves, the remaining left
communists began slowly to reassess their political perspectives.
Developing one of the first theories of state capitalism, they
came to see the Bolshevik regime as the product of the last of
'the great bourgeois revolutions of Europe'. Like Ruhle, many
also began to question the appropriateness of the party-form for
communist politics, arguing instead that, while groups of
revolutionaries should do all they could 'to foster
self-initiative and self-action' in the class, spontaneous actions
of dissatisfied masses will, in the process of their rebellion,
create their own organisations, and that these organisations,
arising out of the social conditions, alone can end the present
social arrangement (Mattick 1978: 85, 84).
During the thirties, a number of small but lively journals
provided a forum for debate and discussion amongst the 'council'
communists, as such 'Lefts' now called themselves. Perhaps the
best-known of these was Paul Mattick's International Council
Correspondence (later Living Marxism), to which Ruhle, Pannekoek
and Karl Korsch all contributed. While the theoretical work and
political analysis advanced in these journals was often of a high
standard, the council communists' isolation continued into the
following decade; if anything, the climate of the Cold War would
be even more inhospitable for those who saw the rival blocs as
simply different forms of capitalist imperialism.
Like many other tendencies of the old communist movement, council
communism would be 'rediscovered' by the radical politics of the
sixties and seventies. Whilst never attracting the sorts of
numbers who flocked to the Leninist groups, the current
nonetheless exerted a significant influence upon the outlook of
the post-1968 libertarian left. Even here, however, its reach was
largely indirect, via other groupings and thinkers -- the
situationists, Socialisme ou Barbarie, the Johnson-Forest Tendency
-- whose earlier break with Leninism had brought them into contact
with the surviving council communists during the fifties. In some
cases the accidents of family history also played their part:
Noam Chomsky, for example, would have his first encounter with
radical politics courtesy of a council communist uncle in New
York.
In many cases, this libertarian reinterpretation of council
communism has taken the form of 'councilism', an ideology which
celebrates the direct democracy of the councils whilst reducing
the struggle for a classless society to the project of workers'
self-management of production (see, for example, many of the
arguments propounded in the British journal Solidarity during the
seventies). Against this, a new generation of ultra-left thinkers
has argued that "Socialism is not the management, however
'democratic' it may be, of capital, but its complete
destruction!" (Barrot and Martin 1974: 105).
Of course, there is also much to criticise about the politics of
the original council communists themselves, and considerable
debate to be had as to the degree to which such views are of
relevance today. Certainly one of the damaging (if unintended)
consequences of their efforts to defend a vision of working class
autonomy from both capital and all self-proclaimed saviours has
been an understanding of class composition that remains frozen in
time. This deficiency has left some of their modem day
descendants poorly equipped to deal with new working class demands
and behaviours, and the questions of race and gender with which
these are often entwined - although on this score, at least, they
are hardly alone on the left. At the same time, given the parlous
state of the labour movement, the council communists' insistence
upon workers' self-organisation as the heart of class politics has
lost none of its pertinence. Meanwhile, revolutionary workers'
councils have continued to appear in many moments of intense
social conflict over the past seventy years: from Hungary to
Chile, from Poland to Iran. The most recent instance was just
four years ago, during the 1991 rebellion in Kurdistan; it will
not be the last.
Further Reading:
(most of these references can probably still be found in
university or public libraries)
Jean Barrot and Francois Martin (1974) Eclipse and Re-emergence of
the Communist Movement. Black and Red, Detroit.
An aggressive attempt to rethink the left communist tradition. In
the process, council communism is criticised for seeing capitalism
less as a social relation and'more as a management systern'.
Gabriella Bonacchi (1976) 'The Council Communists between the New
Deal and Fascism', Telos 30, Winter.
A sometimes difficult but nevertheless comprehensive account of
the council communists' debates over crisis theory, the nature of
restructuring, and state capitalism during the thirties.
Serge Bricanier (1978) Pannekoek and the Workers' Councils. Telos
Press, St. Louis.
A wide-ranging collection of (often condensed) pieces from
Pannekoek's pen, wrapped in an almost hagiographical chronicle of
his life.
John Gerber (1989) Anton Pannekoek and the Socialism of Workers'
Self-Emancipation, 1873-1960. Kluwer Academic Publishers,
Dordrecht.
This biography is a critical yet not unsympathetic account of
Pannekoek's politics, tracing the path from his prominent role in
pre-1914 social democracy and the Zimmerwald movement to his
activities as a left and council communist.
Russell Jacoby (1981) Dialectic of Defeat - Contours of Western
Marxism. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Amongst other things, this book emphasises the links developed in
the crucial years from 1917 and 1923 between left communist
practice and some distinctly 'westem'brands of marxist theory.
Douglas Kellner (ed) (1977) Karl Korsch: Revolutionary Theory.
University of Texas Press, Austin.
This anthology opens with a long and thoughtful overview of
Korsch's work. A number of Korsch's contributions to Living
Marxism - on the Spanish Civil War, on fascism, and on marxist
theory - are also reprinted here.
Paul Mattick (1978) Anti-Bolshevik Communism. Merlin Press,
London.
A collection of twelve essays written between the thirties and
sixties. Apart from discussions of Korsch and Riffile, there is a
particularly fine chapter weighing up the respective merits (and
otherwise) of Luxemburg and Lenin.
Paul Mattick (1971) Marx and Keynes: The Limits of the Mixed
Economy. Merlin Press, London.
The book that made Mattick famous amongst a new generation of
marxist economists, with its comprehensive critique of both
Keynesianism in the West and state capitalism in the East.
Anton Pannekoek (1951) 'Workers' Councils', in Root & Branch (ed.)
(1975) Root & Branch: The Rise of the Workers'Movements. Fawcett
Crest, Greenwich.
The first two parts of Pannekoek's last major work - the first
English edition of which was published in Melbourne back in 1951 -
are reprinted in this collection, alongside a number of more
recent council communist texts by Paul Mattick and others.
Rene Riesel (1969/1981)'Preliminaries on the Councils and
Councilist Organisation', Internationale Situationniste 12, now in
Ken Knabb (ed.) Situationist International Anthology. Bureau of
Public Secrets, Berkeley.
A provocative assessment of the workers' council tradition,
rounded out with a list of tasks fitcing those for whom the
councils represent 'the sole form of the anti-state dictatorship
of the proletariat'.
Otto Rilble (1924/1974) From the Bourgeois to the Proletarian
Revolution. Socialist Reproduction, Glasgow.
One of the first properly council communist texts, in which all
forms of political organisation other than the councils are
denounced as bourgeois and counter-revolutionary.
Mark Shipway (1987) 'Council Communism', in John Crump and
Maximilien Rubel (eds.) Non- Market Socialism in the Nineteenth
and Twentieth Centuries. Macmillan, London.
Perhaps the best short introduction to council communist politics,
by a member of the British group Wildcat.
Mark Shipway (1988) Anti-Parliamentary Communism. The Movement
for Workers' Councils in Britain, 1917-1945. Macmillan, London.
A detailed history of the British council communist groups led by
Sylvia Pankhurst and Guy Aldred.
D. Smart (ed.) (1978) Pannekoek and Gorter's Marxism. Pluto
Press, London.
Four key texts written between 1912 and 1921, dealing with
nationalism, the tactics of the Comintern, and the role of party
organisation in the process of workers' self-emancipation.
Steve Wright (1980) 'Left Communism in Australia', Thesis Eleven
1.
An account of the Melbourne-based Southern Advocate for Workers
Councils and its editor Jim Dawson, charting his forty year path
from De Leon and the IWW (via the old Socialist Party) to
Pannekoek and council communism after the Second World War.
Steve Wright now works in the Centre for European Studies, Monash
University. He is still a member of the West Coburg Progress
Association.
From Collective Action Notes Home Page
www.geocities.com/Capitol/Lobby/2379
