The Brooklyn Rail

Writers of lofty books on communist revolution are lucky enough if they are merely wrong. I can therefore only welcome these three worthy responses, kindly hosted by Field Notes, for the opportunity they allow me to clarify what I have left dim. Like Anton Pannekoek, quoted by Charles Reeve at the end of his review, I consider the workers’ council at the center of my book more problem than solution. The workers’ council names not so much a solution but a series of preconditions for communism and therefore functions which revolution must fulfill, if it succeed. Any twenty-first century revolution would do so, however, by departing from the actuality and the ideal of the historical workers’ council. Whereas the mass strike historically was centered upon the workplace, mass struggle is now eccentric to production, both inside and out of it—as such, whatever achieves these conditions will not likely center on the work-floor, though it must encompass and transform it entirely.

I do not conclude, therefore, that “every organization is potentially counter-revolutionary,” as Reeve charges. In fact I criticize Amadeo Bordiga for precisely this point, arguing that his emphasis on content alone, and his indifference to means (or form), can “open the door to a restoration of the vanguardism already made obsolete by the real movement of the insurrections of the second half of the twentieth century,” as Reeve worries my account does. As I write, Bordiga’s “treatment of communism as an end, as content, could become a kind of Platonism, an endorsement of communism as enlightened technocracy, and also a kind of by-any-means-sufficient opportunism.” When I speak of the necessity of an immediate plan for common production for common use, I do not mean, as Frits Janssen argues, a “variation of the well-known view that the workers can only make a revolution when they are ‘conscious’…when they have studied piles of books” but rather an intensive and extensive network including “the vast majority” in the activity of planning and producing in common for common use. This is why, in my second chapter, I emphasize, with what I call the test of communism, how this process must be made transparent and tractable to all, as quickly as possible.

Nonetheless, content is important—necessary if not sufficient. Function implies, at a certain level of generality, both form and content. As I argue, the workers’ councils of 1917–1923 mark an advance on the Paris Commune because they add to the commune-form, with its mandated, revocable, and rotating delegates, a specifically proletarian and communist restriction. Reeve thinks these specifications “vanguardist,” supposing they derive from Lenin but I adapt them from the writings of historical council communists themselves. When I criticize the “democratic, pluralist conception” of the council, I am speaking of majority social democrats and independents who wanted the councils to include town administrators, shopkeepers, journalists, and party officials, just like any other bourgeois democracy. Reeve asks, referring to my restrictions: “who are these ‘communists,’ where do they come from, according to which criteria and by whom they are catalogued as communists.” The answer I hope my book gives is that the criteria are determined by struggle itself— the terms are expansive, potentially subsuming comprising human community entirely. In Germany such self-designation included hundreds of thousands if not millions, not just the members of formal parties like the KAPD but the anti-party or anarchist factory groups as well, all who hoped to use the councils not to convene and ratify a National Assembly for a new bourgeois republic but who demanded direct socialization of wealth by free associations of workers. If this is a vanguard then it is certainly not the vanguard of professional revolutionaries imagined by Lenin. This is rather a “party” constituted not by membership in a formal organization but by the struggle for communism itself and includes both formal and informal organization, both avowed “communists” and those who might use another name. In Portugal such a “party” comprised all those who struggled for “a reorganization of production and society under the control of the workers.”

I can only feel, then, that with Reeve and Janssen there is more agreement than disagreement. Reeve in particular restates as criticisms points I myself make and he sometimes seems to confuse my book with its characters. He takes issue with “what the author calls ‘councilism’” but it is clear he is talking about the characters in my book, who coined the term, and not me, since I purposefully avoid it, chiefly because I agree with Reeve that it rests upon a simplifying mischaracterization of council communism both historically and during its postwar revival. In discussing the critique of the workers’ council from the standpoint of communization, by Gilles Dauvé and others, I am careful to show how many of their objections are in fact anticipated and already answered by their would-be interlocutors. Nonetheless, truth sometimes by falsehood outs, and I consider these criticisms generative, illuminating, precisely because, to return to Pannekoek, they treat the workers’ council as a problem rather than a solution and therefore glimpse important contours of revolution in an era when capital stagnates and labor is increasingly superfluous.

Julian Park’s review, for its part, comes at the book from the other side, finding that my emphasis on inquiry as organization, in the final chapter, comes at the cost of the theme of intervention which Reeve and Janssen criticize. The difference between the two, however, is that one can be discussed directly in books and the other can only be spoken about in terms of generalities. Intervention happens—it occurs in the wake of some particular cycle of struggles, and is the natural product of the process of partisanization I describe above, whether we are discussing the German shop-stewards movement or action committees of 1968. But because these groups are local to particular situations there is little one can say aside from what I do—these groups can play the role of amplifying and catalyzing but not directing and leading. They can say yes but not no. But the issues at stake will be particular to specific moments, where their solution is often a matter of art, not to mention happenstance. It is difficult to form in advance organizations adequate to such moments, since in normal conditions organizations must adapt to the status quo and its temporality or work underground in face of the full violence of the state. We can however think about what might facilitate such moments in advance. Here as I say the most important thing is to pay attention and to broadcast what seems significant. This is why I emphasize the importance of workplace and struggle inquiry, reporting on contemporary conditions and the struggle against them. If I also stress what I call technical inquiry this is because it is something that is already happening and at the same time something which must accompany any revolutionary struggle—a key and unremarked dimension to the socialization of production from below. This kind of information is already being collected and distributed as an aspect of struggle, and there are many interesting works of communist theory that are already acts of inquiry of this type. I am here following my own advice and amplifying what I think worthy of it. In certain instances, acts of inquiry like this can act as catalysts—think of the role of a map with targets that encourages self-organized activity in the context of a mass struggle. But most of what I am interested in talking about is how this kind of inquiry will necessarily be a part of any successful revolution after the suspension of the armed power of the state. Imagine if the rights of landlords were unenforceable. You could just do things ad hoc or post hoc, but this would lead to conflicts and make it likely that some sort of unaccountable central committee would try to assert control over the process. In this sense, self-organization is a limit that the revolution fights against. It would do so by establishing a transparent survey of available housing and existing need for housing in which more or less everyone participated.

Park also wonders if “the councils are the only valid revolutionary examples since Marx.” This is not quite what I conclude—there have certainly been many revolutionary examples other than the workers’ council since Marx. Indeed, I think nearly every struggle I mention contains such and I mention, by way of the George Floyd Uprising, the burning of the Third Precinct. What I mean when I say that it is only the council which is new is that the logical conditions of revolution against capital and state revealed by the workers’ councils of 1917–23 still obtain, and that any further specifications are corollary. Perhaps it would suffice to say that they are the fullest example since Marx. Whether the tactics of today are new or old depends in some sense on the level of specificity at which we discuss them. I certainly do not mean to disparage the creativity of class struggle in my lifetime, nor its insights, many of which concern the changing nature of capitalism and therefore the struggle against it. As I say, the most important thing we can do is to pay attention, to broadcast and amplify what we find valuable. There is much to be learned from struggles all over the world—in our era revolutionary examples often come from outside the western world, as they did in 2011, with the Arab Spring. Though my analysis focuses mostly on Europe and the United State, the conditions I describe now obtain broadly. Just as 1968 was a global uprising, its legacy is likewise global, and as I note, the analysis I perform at the end, via the George Floyd Uprising, could have been performed with dozens of other cases, from Mexico, Chile, and Argentina, to Hong Kong, Sudan, Turkey, and France, to name just a few examples. I chose the United States because I live here and because I know it better.