The Brooklyn Rail

“We should conclude that if this is how the proletariat forms up in revolution, then that is how we as Communists, who wish to be the leadership in this revolution and must be that leadership, should undertake to organize the revolutionary proletariat.”

— Jan Appel¹

“The past carries with it a secret index by which it is referred to redemption.”

— Walter Benjamin²

Jasper Bernes’s tale of revolution past and future whirls around a German communist, Jan Appel, doing time in Düsseldorf for piracy, seventeen months until December 1925. At the tail of the initial waves of the German Revolution, as a delegate to the still young Communist International for the new German Communist Workers Party (KAPD), in 1920 he and comrades provoked a mutiny on a fishing boat and sailed the North Sea to Russia. On this trip, in a Speech before the Congress of the Comintern in 1921, Appel failed to win the Comintern to the path of the workers’ councils. (In 1920, Lenin implicitly called Appel et al children to their face, reading from a manuscript on the infantile left. In 1921, the KAPD was expelled from the Comintern.) Incarcerated in the wake of the revolution, Appel read the first two books of Marx’s Capital, and reflected on the class struggles in Russia and Germany, later writing of the moment that he “finally came to a unified view.” With this view, he would write notes for what became, after joining the Group of International Communists (GIC) in Holland, the GIC’s Fundamental Principles of Communist Production and Distribution (Grundprinzipien).³

Among the 1921 Speech, the Grundprinzipien, and the revolution they emerged from, Bernes finds the essence of his new book, The Future of Revolution. In it he answers at length the question, what ideas are both novel and enduring in the history of communist struggle since Marx? Responding in various registers and investigating up to the present, he names a single overarching one, the workers’ councils.⁴ Such durable ideas, like that of the councils, are what Bernes calls revolutionary examples, ideas of social practice that in spreading, potentially spread communism and are thus the future of his title.⁵ The book is then a narrative and a theory of revolutionary examples since Marx’s writings on the 1871 Commune. From another angle this book can be read as an intellectual history and theory of what is now called “communization,” perhaps the most comprehensive to date. Communization, as we shall see, is a tendency on the communist far left that emerges following the struggles of 1968 as a critique of the workers’ council idea. The tendency calls for an immediate implementation of communist measures in a revolution.⁶

Let’s work our way back to Appel, from the Commune. Marx wrote of it that in Paris, the working class had finally found the political form for their liberation. Bernes identifies in Marx four aspects of this form: the replacement of the military by the armed proletariat, oversight of administrators by recall from below, workers wages for administrators, and an aim toward planned, cooperative production controlled by the class. The council revolutions that come later, in Russia in 1905 and 1917 and in Germany and elsewhere in 1917–1923, add crucial ingredients to the Commune’s recipe (though not all of them add the same ingredients): they are formed in workplaces, they mandate that delegates be proletarians, and their focus is on social reproduction according to the communist maxim, according to need.⁷ Throughout these revolutions, Bernes finds a challenging tendency for proletarian power to separate political from economic domains, centralizing the first and decentralizing the second. But councils, spread by mass strikes, must smash the state and directly communize the economy, and these two steps, smash and communize, are tied together, “political decentralization becomes the precondition of unitary economic organization.”⁸ That was the idea, but the councils nowhere made it past step one. Soviets smashed the state in Russia, for instance, but Bolshevik political power subordinated them before they could even consider directly socializing production.⁹

In Germany, those devoted to council revolution were strongest, but were also ultimately defeated, though slowly enough to carve more dimensions into the council example. Readers should keep this in mind, since Bernes covers this revolution in greater depth than any other, by a wide margin. Developments in Germany began in 1918, as in Russia, with the “antiwar mass strike movement.”¹⁰ To follow Appel: before the outbreak of revolution in Hamburg, in early 1918 Appel organized strikes among fellow workers in arms manufacturing, becoming a local delegate to the Shop Stewards Movement, one of about four hundred representing one thousand times as many workers nationally. After the declaration of the republic, during the first period of counterrevolution by the Social Democrat dominated provisional government, in January 1919 an uprising broke out in Berlin, only to be flattened, during which repression the paramilitary Freikorps murdered Rosa Luxemburg and fellow German Spartacus League turned Communist Party (KPD) leader Karl Liebknecht. In Hamburg, this news led Appel, with the Shop Stewards and others to march on local soldiers, whose weapons they seized and distributed to 4,000 workers. “But the unions managed to demobilize and disarm these workers,” Bernes writes, an experience that led many, Appel included, to find unions an obstacle to revolution.¹¹ The German councils too had by then largely been demobilized by incorporation under the Social Democrats, having from the beginning been diluted by petty bourgeois delegates, so Appel and others looked to build thoroughly proletarian factory organizations, like the Shop Stewards, that could revive the councils without ceding militancy, arms, or representation. Then came a failed armed and expropriating revolutionary wave in the Ruhr region in 1920 (which led Appel and others—the KAPD were actually the majority—to split from the KPD because it had been too timid). Factory organizations initiated briefer actions in 1921, which both the KAPD and KPD supported and which were also ultimately suppressed. This is the background to Appel’s piracy, the 1921 Speech to the Comintern, the KAPD’s subsequent expulsion from the Comintern, and Appel’s imprisonment.¹²

The Comintern speech, in Bernes’s telling, contains several revolutionary examples, negative and positive. On the negative side, Appel relegates the trade unions and parliamentary parties to the past, as having brought workers this far, but no further. On the positive side, Appel calls for a new role for the communist party, as a catalyst in the revival of councils through factory organizations, leading others to self-organize by using the revolutionary forms already chosen by the proletariat. To this, Bernes contrasts the Leninist and Luxemburgist visions of the party, as, respectively, professional leaders and educators of the proletariat. Perhaps the party as catalyst is a new idea in Appel, though he himself refers to the party’s activity as leading and educating. The clearer difference from the dominant, alternative party traditions, is the divergence regarding unions and parliament, and thus an emphasis on advancing the struggle by other means. Regardless, Bernes offers another positive example in Appel’s concept of the KAPD, as a party separate from but catalyzing councils can also organize beyond the factories as well, among the many unemployed.¹³

It is all this that Appel digests with his prison food into his unified view, reflecting on the past and reading Marx. The Russian Revolution had not ended the history of capitalist dispossession, but renewed it under state control; only workers’ control of production through the councils could end this. With the GIC, in the Grundprinzipien, he produces what Bernes calls a “plan for a plan” for communist production on this model, condensing the decade of struggles and Marx’s critique of political economy into a revolutionary example for the councils of the future.¹⁴

In The Future of Revolution’s middle chapter, “The Test of Communism,” Bernes places the Grundprinzipien as pivotal in an intellectual tradition beginning with Marx and carrying through to communization theory, deducing from a critique of capitalism the logically necessary elements for communism. Throughout that tradition Bernes sees a persistent confusion between two aspects of the theory, which he distinguishes, between a “test of value” and a “test of communism.” The law of value is Marx’s idea that the value of a commodity under capitalism is equal to the socially necessary labor time on average required to produce that commodity. From this law, Marx deduced how an apparent social equality conceals inequality, workers are paid to preserve their ability to work but unpaid for their surplus product, which can then be accumulated as capital. The test of value amounts to whether or not a given form of society preserves this law. Abolishing value, for Bernes, indicates that a society is not capitalist; but communism is not merely the negation of capitalism, it is also the negation of the state and the construction of something new, some traits of which we’ve already detailed.¹⁵ To pass the test of communism, the dispossessed must at least replace class and state rule with planned production by communal free association to meet the needs of all. The USSR, for example, in Bernes’s view was neither capitalist nor communist, passing the first but failing the second test.

In Marx’s Grundrisse and “Critique of the Gotha Program,” Bernes finds earlier tests of value, the essentials of which he elaborates in his reading of the GIC’s Grundprinzipien, calling the text “the most serious attempt to flesh out the ideas in the ‘Critique of the Gotha Program,’” though apparently Appel had not yet read the “Critique” itself.¹⁶ The Grundrinzipien proposes a system run by workers’ councils where workers are paid in labor certificates and products are priced according to socially necessary labor time; labor certificates would be issued by hours worked, minus deductions for general social use (GSU), through which essentials like shelter, food, and clothing, are made freely available to all. As productivity increases, more and more of the economy would be shifted towards the GSU. According to the authors, like Marx before them, with labor certificates the law of value would not hold, because collective planning and free association would guide production, not the pursuit of profit. This would pass in Bernes’s estimate both a test of value and a test of communism, of the transparency and tractability of social production. Of special interest for him is a notion that Appel had to persuade fellow GIC member Anton Pannekoek that transparency and tractability could be safeguarded through a communally administered bookkeeping operation, available to all for review, tracking labor hours and product distribution.¹⁷

Members of another left communist variant, from Italy, found themselves like Appel in exile after the 1920s. Associated with the one-time Italian communist party leader Amadeo Bordiga, they read the Grundprinzipien and reviewed it in their journal Bilan. They critiqued the GIC plan, on the ground that if a market still exists and measurement of labor time still exists, so too must value. After decades of political quiet, during fascism and his own imprisonment, Bordiga himself became in Bernes’s view the first to deduce a test of communism—with both council communism and the USSR as failed cases.¹⁸ Communism for Bordiga must “abolish classes, … [and] overcome the division of labor and the separation of town and country”; workers’ councils—so he reasoned from his observations of the Italian experience—will not be able to do that because they preserve the market by maintaining the enterprise division of labor.¹⁹ For him, the solution is a revolutionary communist party, which must uphold an anti-individualist doctrine of communism. For Bernes, however, this solution fails Marx’s test of communism—conscious planning and free association are gone.²⁰

After the French 1968, Gilles Dauvé revived part of the Bordigist criticism of the Grundprinzipien for the measurement of labor time, to which Bernes responds “Dauvé still confuses conscious measurement by labor time with regulation by labor time.”²¹ This leads Bernes to introduce what he calls the demon in the matrix: that because labor certificates do not, like money, socially regulate production, if some other means of communist regulation is not found, other social relations will need to impose this regulation through force, which is what he thinks occurred in non-capitalist, non-communist Russia. Failing that, the labor certificate, if it becomes regulative, becomes money again.²²

Bernes follows the veteran council communist Paul Mattick, who in a 1969 introduction to the Grundprinzipien argued that productivity has reached a point where most needs could be met freely, with limited rationing decided communally by councils. This leaves little of the original Grundprinzipien plan except the underlying principle of the workers’ councils. “What is communism? We have already encountered some definitions: classless, moneyless, stateless society; freely associated workers meeting their needs with the means of production under conscious and planned control,” writes Bernes, with planning achieved through the GIC’s system of open bookkeeping.²³ To establish this, armed proletarians must smash the state, organize themselves into councils, and overcome separation by geography and production.²⁴

Council communism disappeared, while Stalinism triumphed, until its ambiguous revival by the New Left and its forebears, discussed in the third and final chapter of The Future of Revolution. First came Grace Lee, C.L.R. James, and Raya Dunayevskaya’s Johnson-Forest Tendency (JFT), who, after World War II criticize Russian state capitalism and, reacting to an uptick in workplace militancy, believed that capitalism had already organized the workers: workers need only unleash self-organization; a vanguard would only get in the way. Instead of vanguardism—and this is for Bernes the signature revolutionary example of the moment—the role of revolutionaries was to engage in inquiry and analysis, to reflect on the self-activity of the proletariat and by spreading those reflections, cultivate class consciousness.²⁵ “Workers’ inquiry” was then refined by groups in Europe organized in part around workers’ publications, in France by Socialisme ou Barbarie’s (SouB) Tribune Ouvrière and in Italy by Quaderni Rossi.²⁶ Aptly but paradoxically, and Bernes observes this only indirectly, by then inquiry had become an answer for what to do when mass proletarian self-organization appears far off and not, as in the JFT’s expectation, near. A split emerged within SouB between these residual vanguardists, and those who likely saw intervention in the class struggle as an obstacle, preferring inquiry, publication, and building networks, with the latter group forming Informations et Correspondances Ouvrière (ICO). ICO, along with the Situationist International (SI), are particularly responsible for reviving the council communist tradition in France. While the Situationists shared a critique of SouB, they set themselves apart from ICO on the question of intervention—by reviving, in Bernes’s view, Appel’s vision of a communist organization that would catalyze proletarian self-organization, with the added difference that in revolution the SI would self-abolish.²⁷ To council communism, by way of the avant-garde arts, the SI added the idea of prefiguring the future in today’s struggles, a stance preceding them in the anarchist-communist tradition.²⁸ Except for the 1956 outbreak of workers’ councils in Hungary, crushed by the Red Army, these debates all unfolded in a period of relative stillness for the labor movement in Europe;²⁹ while in the US, movements resembling what the JFT expected earlier began to unfold, inside and outside the workplace, with the rising Black Freedom Struggle.³⁰

The events of May 1968 in France provide something of a revolutionary counter-example to the worker’ councils, generating mass strikes and occupations without them. Students occupied the universities and workers occupied the factories, but only on campus, where militants of all kinds assembled, was a council formed.³¹ In the air, in part through the SI, was a critique of the division of intellectual and physical labor, with students and workers both rejecting subjection to work, but the workers did not self-organize on the factory grounds and the unions interceded to keep out “the activist mob—intellectuals, students, unemployed workers, striking workers from other workplaces.”³² This counter-example, gave rise to Dauvé’s critical synthesis of council communism and Bordigist vanguardism, criticizing the limits of the workers’ council, while preserving an emphasis on proletarian self-organization, and insisting on the immediate revolutionary abolition of value and the state.³³ From this came the tendency calling itself communization theory. Dauvé also took from Bordiga, who had taken it from Marx, a distinction between the formal and the historical party of communists. We know the formal party well; the historical party on the other hand refers to the form communism takes in the historical process of this emergence as well as the content it expresses. Dauvé then dropped the hammer on the vanguardists and the self-organization purists, alike, writing that “The wish to create the party and the fear of creating it are equally illusory.”³⁴ To Dauvé, Bernes rejoins that councils may be insufficient, they may not initially form in workplaces, but they are nonetheless necessary, asking, after abolishing everything, what else would one call what proletarians form anew to freely and collectively reflect on social conditions and plan their transformation? This line of thought, which Bernes borrows from one of few recent texts he discusses, “Theses on the Council Concept” by the New Institute for Social Research, accents the continuity rather than division between communization and the council lineage.³⁵

Despite the expectations of some, the 1970s saw the revival of workers’ councils, which appeared from Chile to Portugal. Bernes follows Guy Debord’s interest in the latter revolution, where Bernes sees a repetition of the failure of the councils in Germany in the context of our current era, shaped by decolonization, the oil crisis, and rising globalization. In 1974, military officers revolted against the Portuguese fascist state and its losing decolonial wars in Africa, forming the Movement of the Armed Forces (MFA). Though, unlike in Germany, councils never formed within the military, space throughout society was opened for militancy, from the media to the neighborhoods, and hundreds of workers’ councils organized, though unevenly, while agricultural workers seized hundreds of plots of land from landlords. Because the MFA and their police branch appeared at first to support them, the workers never sought to arm themselves or smash the provisional state. In a trend that would repeat elsewhere, like in 2001 Argentina, where council-run workplaces struggled to survive through state support and superexploiting themselves. In Portugal, value abolition wasn’t on the menu since the revolution appeared as antifascist and anticolonial, not communist per se. In the end, the upper ranks of the MFA suppressed the revolution and restored capitalist democracy.³⁶ For Bernes, Portugal confirms the tests of value and of communism, as well as the lessons of May 1968. The orbit of revolutionary movements had extended beyond the workplace and a new antipolitical orientation had emerged, negating the present but struggling to affirm something else. Unlike some interpreters of our historical period, self-organization for Bernes must “emerge both inside and outside the workplace and in the process overcome the distinction between them.”³⁷

While Bernes follows mass movements through to 2020, with a special emphasis on the George Floyd Uprising and the prospect of police and prison abolition, his investigation of the many sides of the revolutionary examples of the workers’ council effectively ends in Iberia. From these, though, he brings one dimension in particular to bear on the recent uprising, on behalf of those in the future. Bernes presents a sort of hybrid between inquiry and open bookkeeping, as a means for communists to catalyze struggle whenever it next goes down, a call he has advanced since his work for Endnotes on “Counterlogistics” in the aftermath of Occupy—a proposal to inventory the resources in any given area necessary for survival, from useful workplaces to public utilities, as targets for would-be councils to communize.³⁸

This is an idea worth trying, but inquiry and catalysis in this guise appear quite different than in their prior appearance, which had at least some relevance when revolutionary verve was on the wane or even in shadow, let alone waxing. While Bernes writes favorably of inquiry of all kinds as an urgent task for communists today, to both critically develop and amplify the revolutionary examples that emerge from present struggles, in the end he lands with a focus on inventory.³⁹ I understand the appeal, since it keeps alive the communist bookkeeping of Appel and the GIC. In this way, inventory is an inquiry into the technical conditions of revolution; but the social consciousness, experience, and relations of the proletariat are the traditional subjects of workers inquiry. Bernes has created something of a bind for himself. On the one hand, he shows the persuasiveness of the Situationists’ assessment of the SouB/ICO split, that the best use of inquiry is in catalytic intervention in non-revolutionary times to bring on the revolts. This is supported by the combined facts that traditional inquiry would appear to have had, as Bernes concludes, greater use in periods of comparative social quiet, as well as that, as he does not discuss, the audience of most traditional inquiry has been the communist, anarchist, and fellow traveler, militant segments of the petty bourgeois and working class. Those militants, in those times, would be the people most positioned to make use of inquiry to intervene. But regarding such intervention, Bernes finally appears to favor Dauvé’s agnosticism (a common line in the communization milieu), rather than the Situationists and Appel’s advocacy of it. He writes, “In the long run, what will have succeeded is as likely to be the patient work of generations as the quick work of ecstatic weeks.”⁴⁰ It seems clear from the evidence here and elsewhere that communists should prefer catalytic intervention to promote self-organization, and not only through inquiry, in even the worst of times. While we should bring humility to our efforts, the fear of creating the party is obviously the worst of Dauvé’s warned illusions, leading often to permanent inaction. Like Appel, we should pursue every opportunity to fight on all fronts. In any case, it is hardly easy to tell which times we are living in—revolution follows counterrevolution as often as the other way around. Under counterrevolution, can we really bear the risk of following fear?

Bernes might be tempted to reply to this by accusing me of my voluntarism, of overemphasizing the role of will and ideology, a critique he levied in these pages against Vincent Bevins’s If We Burn.⁴¹ While he rightly criticizes Bevins for much more than this, on this subject he asks, against Bevins’s arguments for a Leninish approach to organizing, “Was spontaneity in these cases a choice, an ideology, or simply a structuring condition?” Can we choose the party or does history decide for us? It’s not that the choice is irrelevant, but that we should embrace both aspects (we make history, not in chosen conditions, etc.), while keeping the test of communism in mind. Often in this book Bernes knows this, assessing the failure of revolutions, such as the Spanish 1930s, as due to the absence of a plan for communization, a “plan for a plan” in his words.⁴² The point is not only that it could not have been otherwise, but that this teaches us that it could be next time. This is why the revolutionary example matters: novel social practice reveals ideas that inspire us to adopt them as our own, in theory and in practice.

A tension at a broader level in the book has to do with the two ways of understanding its subject I mentioned from the start. Is it a history of what’s new and lasting in our understanding of communism since Marx or is it an intellectual history and theory of communization? While Bernes’s method suggests the former, his canon and geography are those of the latter. As a history of the workers’ council through its critique by communization, the book is undoubtedly a success. But are the councils and their critique really the only valid communist revolutionary examples since Marx? Legitimately, since a book has to start and end somewhere, Bernes takes this fact for granted, but nonetheless he has not demonstrated its proof. To do so would require comparing council communism to other traditions. One possibility comes quickly to mind, given the ongoing campus struggles against the genocide and for the liberation of the Palestinian people, reminiscent as many have said of the 1960s and 1970s. A global history that would place the traditions of the workers’ councils and decolonization into a single narrative still waits to be written. As Bernes has shown, the Portuguese experience would be one crucial intersection of these plots. It could be that decolonization may not show revolutionary examples that would pass the test of communism, but if this is the case, it would need to be asked why so many examples of the councils arise in the context of imperial wars, and why so many militants have taken decolonization as a revolutionary example. The former Situationist, Mustapha Khayati could be a key figure as well, writing the SI’s pamphlet On the Poverty of Student Life, as well as the several SI contributions on the anti-colonial movements, before resigning membership to join the Democratic Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and attempting to catalyze workers’ councils.⁴³

Enough about imaginary books, what about the oversights in this one? There is at least one major line of investigation that Bernes had openings to pursue that would have been entirely germane, the communist theme of the abolition of the family. Bernes could explain not addressing the range of recent material on this subject by authors like Madeline Lane-McKinley, Sophie Lewis, and M.E. O’Brien, since, he does not explicitly wade into the waters of contemporary communization discourse. Bernes does not entirely forget the family question, writing in the context of the communist test of labor certificates, “[a]t stake here is not really whether structures like the family persist but whether they are actively enforced in communism….”⁴⁴ Family abolition, of course, called even Marx and Engels to mention it in their Manifesto.⁴⁵ I can’t help but find it peculiar that, given that Bernes has elsewhere assessed the writing of the British left communist feminist Sylvia Pankhurst as “extraordinarily interesting,” that he gives her idea of the household soviet not even a sentence of attention.⁴⁶ Given the history of the family, say in post-revolutionary Russia, there is every reason to believe that if they are not deliberately abolished, then they and their accompanying gender and sexual oppression will reassert themselves.⁴⁷ To my knowledge, Pankhurst’s proposal to achieve this through household soviets is unique for its time. Such soviets would make care, housekeeping, and their tools communal; abolish rent; and freely educate students through adulthood.⁴⁸ One would think this idea merits special attention given that it, like Appel’s notion of unemployed councils, anticipates by decades the post-1968 theme of class struggles and council self-organization beyond the workplace.

For all such lacunae, The Future of Revolution is essential reading for communists of all factions, succeeding in indexing a history of failures to a lineage of revolutionary examples that if redeemed might well redeem humanity. Different readers may be more compelled by this or that story, figure, or text, from among the variety of examples; Bernes’s history generally gives each of them sufficiently generous narrative and critical consideration for us to find our own way through the plot. Bernes is, after all, an English professor by trade, and like a good professor, he “encourage[s] readers to examine the texts themselves and draw their own conclusions.” ⁴⁹ It has been a pleasure to study The Future of Revolution with him. Now, as Marx said in other words, as people have rightly never stopped repeating, the point is to do revolution, not just read about it. But, it really doesn’t hurt to read about it.