The Brooklyn Rail

Among the great theoreticians of the socialist movement in the early twentieth century, the Dutchman Anton Pannekoek was certainly one of the few who succeeded in extracting a vision for the future from the crisis of the old workers’ movement framed by the conceptions of social democracy and its Leninist extremist variants. During the Second World War, having broken with every communist organization since 1921, Pannekoek lived withdrawn and isolated in occupied Holland, watched by the Gestapo. He worked during that time on his book Workers’ Councils. After the war, in a letter to Alfred Weiland, a German comrade who had also escaped the horror, he wrote: “We have been able to get through this period only because we have given ourselves important aims.”¹

We are not yet in a situation like that of Pannekoek, Weiland, and others, but we are already living through a period darkened by the black clouds of a new barbarism. In addition, unlike the earlier period, the old workers’ movement—dominated by “scientific” leaderships armed with recipes for the future—is beyond crisis: it is dead and buried. The fascisms, the war, and the postwar integration of society have completed the defeat of the revolution that began during the twenties of the previous century. While we look in today’s ephemeral and fragmented struggles for the signs of a new force of opposition to capitalism, now a destructive global system, it is stimulating to discover the interest that certain people have in the new ideas that emerged from that defeat, emphasizing that “what is new is only the workers’ council, the soviet, born in 1905 in Russia from the fires of the mass strike.” (p. 1)²

This sentence comes from Jasper Bernes’s book The Future of Revolution: Communist Prospects from the Paris Commune to the George Floyd Uprising. Presented as “a long history of the workers’ council as idea” (p. 2), this book reflects on the essential revolutionary events of the twentieth century and essays a serious re-reading of some of the writing that came out of those events, in order to explore “the idea of communism which these councils proposed, and those strains of the movement of communists which attempted to clarify, refine, and promote that idea of communism.” (p. 5)

The book gives the impression that the author (JB) takes a position apart from the small, ultra-minority milieu that knew these groups, texts, and debates. The critical attention he gives to certain questions is all the more perceptive and to the point. I won’t deal here with the three parts of the text—which is at times heavy and difficult to read—in any detail. I will limit myself to several aspects of the author’s political ideas with which I disagree, because disagreements can be a tool to clarify arguments and ideas.

First of all, I have an issue about what the author calls “council communism,” which is actually a body of ideas fabricated by political groups which, then, engage in criticizing it! JB accepts this idea of councilism, with strong support for the vanguardist Leninist theoreticians of socialism from whom he takes most of his references. Some of these, like Amadeo Bordiga, are relatively well known in Leninist circles; others are less familiar. More surprising is his continual reference to individuals in ultra-small circles of the same type, including those known as “communizers.” These present themselves as critics of the “councilist” ultra-left—one wonders if these concepts have any meaning today! JB claims that these ideas developed in France “directly after and in response to the failures of May ’68.” (p. 2) He adds that:

Communization is an internal critique of the concept of the council by true believers who found it lacking in the face of what May ’68 revealed and the decade of struggle in the 1970s confirmed—a new era of class recuperation, economic stagnation, and crisis, in which labor could no longer affirm itself as a pole opposite to capital, and therefore could no longer posit the emergence of a revolutionary council system from the mass strike. (p. 2)

I will not spend time on these remarks, of which I do not agree with a single line. It seems at the very least pretentious to speak of a “powerful critical theory,” elaborated by a few obscure people, whose analyses of “the failures of May ’68” and its consequences are as vague as their definitions of “councilism”. In the years after 1968, these individuals and their small-circulation publications employed a curious method consisting in fabricating an ideology—“councilism”—in order to critique it.³ The critique identified the council movement in the German Revolution with a movement of self-management by capital, confusing the councils, which at the end of the process became organs of social democracy, with the spontaneous movement at the beginning of the revolution and the subversive spirit that had animated it. They then denounced the council form as if it were the objective—the ultimate goal—of the councilists. In JB’s words, the critics of councilism “replace the nominal theory of the council communists—in which the council is the goal—with an adverbial theory of communism, in which communism is less a form than a process.” (p. 11)

All this is rather confused and debatable. In fact, the partisans of the council idea had themselves, as early as 1920, criticized the councils institutionalized by Weimar social democracy, seeing them as organizations integrated into capitalist functioning. But the manipulations of the post-May “anti-councilists”—whose objective is to pass themselves off as revolutionaries who had gone beyond a “councilism” constructed out of whole cloth—hardly matter. This is a stance classically proper to every sectarian group. As we will see later, this “critique” opens the door to a restoration of the vanguardism already made obsolete by the real movement of insurrections of the second half of the twentieth century, from the Spanish Revolution to the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, from May ’68 to the Portuguese Revolution. Self-organization is a dynamic, not a goal in itself; it is the necessary and unavoidable condition of any attempt to transform society. The expansion of the content of a form of organization depends on its function. As historical circumstances alter, a spontaneous and autonomous organization can obviously turn into its opposite. Karl Korsch, among others, admirably pointed this out in his studies of the French Revolution and the revolutionary Commune (cited by JB, in fact). According to their logic, the “critics” of “councilism” propose some ideas of this sort of an astonishing banality. Thus, “even though self-organization is the very presupposition of a revolutionary action, as and if the revolution unfolds it becomes an obstacle which the revolution must overcome,” (p. 29) or, even more disarming as Theorie Communiste writes and Bernes cites, “self-organization is the first act of the revolution; what comes later fights against it.” These are propositions without meaning; for, if in the course of a revolution, the movement turns against self-organization, this is because self-organization no longer exists, but has been organizationally institutionalized!

The underlying idea that every organization is in itself potentially counter-revolutionary is complementary to the abstract formulation according to which communism, as a movement, is inherent in “the movement of capital.” For some people, all of Marx’s work is about this “inevitability of communism,” which would therefore not require a conscious break with capitalist reproduction. This is the easiest answer to the question of social transformation, of the concrete abolition of capitalist social relations. Instead of this enigmatic formulation, I would like to refer to the question of what was called the “transitional period,” which was an important issue for the thinkers of the council idea. Starting from Marx’s formulation, that communism is the step from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom, the council communists developed the concept of “necessity” as embodied in shortages to formulate the need to “reconstruct” society on a new basis. This seems to me more concrete, less abstract. Anyway, for JB, the councils still have a “communist” content in this ‘movement of constructing communism’ only because of the presence and through the action of “communists.” As if it were up to a revolutionary vanguard to fulfill the task of vigilance, of preservation of the content. JB returns on several occasions in his text to the existence “of communists” and to the necessity of grouping “the communists” in the councils in order to keep alive their subversive nature. Thus he writes:

Here was what was missing in the democratic, pluralist conception of the council—delegates who were non-revolutionary or non-proletarian were not delegates at all but rather false substitutes. The delegates must be workers themselves, and they must be explicitly communist. Only where such content is specified can the council as form succeed. (p. 62)

Here he echoes the idea of Bordiga and other Leninists on this question. But who are these “communists,” where do they come from, and according to what criteria and by whom are they catalogued as communists? At the start of his text, JB emphasizes that the councils constitute the new element of the revolutions of the twentieth century. Perhaps they are. But ultimately, for him, only the action of the “communists” guarantees that these new forms have a revolutionary content—an idea with which neither Karl Kautsky nor Lenin would have disagreed. We have returned to the starting point and what seemed new turns out to be an old story.

In his book, JB is much more critical of Rosa Luxemburg than of the Leninist theoreticians:

Luxemburg has two opponents in mind in this text, both of whom treat the mass or general strike as event rather than process—on the one hand, caricatured anarchists who imagine the strike as a unanimous, total, and irrevocable withdrawal of labor that brings state and economy to its knees; on the other, social democrats who imagine that the mass strike is simply a political implement, to be used judiciously by the party in the service of campaigns for reform. (p. 34)

And again: “Luxemburg will, a dozen years later, become an advocate of the soviet but an ambivalent one, especially where it concerns the distinction between economic and political struggles and their institutional bearers, the trade unions and parties.” (p. 37) These remarks are brief but very questionable. Luxemburg did not have the time to grasp the council movement in all its breadth in the course of the German Revolution. However, since the mass strikes in Europe at the century’s beginning, she sensed and analyzed a new orientation in the class struggle and an energy of collective action on the part of the exploited which went beyond the principles of social democracy, party activity, and union functioning. Luxemburg could not discuss the idea of the councils, but she perfectly posed the contours of the crisis of social democracy and had a presentiment of the dictatorial dimension of Bolshevik vanguardism.

With respect to the anarchists as well, JB sins by omission. He does not understand the revolutionary significance of the idea and the practice of the “general strike,” which were part of this renewal of class struggle—an attempt to look for new forms of subversive action. He seems unaware of the important roles that anarchist militants played in the German Revolution and in the events which followed, such as the general strike against the Kapp Putsch and the social revolts in Central Germany in the early 1920s, as well as in the ephemeral Spartacus League. He hardly mentions the FAUD and its determining role in the Ruhr insurrection. He says not a word about the contribution of anarchist theoreticians like Rudoph Rocker to the council question. But this should, of course, be discussed with the same attention as the contributions from the super-Leninist Bordiga. It must be emphasized, however, that the pages of his book on the events of the German Revolution, the Kapp Putsch, and the March Action are very good; even if, here also, he is dependent on the Trotskyist historian Pierre Broué, leaving unmentioned writings by direct participants in these events—notably the texts of the ‘revolutionary shop stewards,’ today available in English in Gabriel Kuhn’s excellent book, All Power to the Councils.⁴ The writings of Paul Mattick and others on the period are also largely ignored.⁵

What is the place of the council idea in JB’s vision of an anti-capitalist world? While he values the idea of the councils, his whole analysis leads us, curiously, to relativize their importance. The councils are, certainly, an important event in modern revolutionary history, in the line of descent from the Commune. But they are not sufficient to carry through the revolution, to “construct” or “produce” communism. We return to the old critique of the councils made by the social democrats and then by the Bolsheviks: these organs are not in themselves sufficiently revolutionary; to be so, they must be staffed by “revolutionaries.”

In the second part of his book, JB develops a long reflection on the text, Fundamental Principles of Communist Production and Distribution, the most thoroughly worked-out text of the so-called “councilist current,” written in the early 1930s by Jan Appel, a left-communist member of the KAPD, and little groups of Dutch anti-bolshevik communists. Little known apart from insider circles, rediscovered in the years after May ’68, the Principles were critiqued by the post-“councilists” as insufficiently clear about the necessity to abolish the “law of value.” He takes up these questions in yet another laborious discussion of the question of value. The reader will accompany him to the degree that they are interested and share his propositions and criticisms. I limit myself here to noting certain ideas that seem to me to touch the basis of the matter.

The text of the Principles is valuable above all because it is a serious attempt to envisage the principles of a new organization of society and the reproduction of life according to non-authoritarian principles and without the separation of wage-labor. One can certainly study and discuss them endlessly, but it should not be taken as a finished model, definitive and for always. What remains important is the idea that any attempt to create a new, communist economy must be based on self-government and on the conscious and independent activity of the exploited, since ending the separation of wage-labor is the condition of the abolition of value. We can therefore agree with Pannekoek’s remark that the realization of the principle of self-management of production “passes in no way through a theoretical discussion about the best modalities of achieving it. It is a matter of practical struggle against the apparatus of capitalist domination.”⁶ Paul Mattick has the same thing in mind when he reminds us, speaking of the Principles, that “The ‘economic principle’ of the working class is … nothing else than the abolition of exploitation.”⁷

To compensate a little for JB’s fascination with Bordiga and his few post-soixante-huitard disciples, I would like to return to an anti-bolshevik communist idea. Towards the beginning of the 1950s, ten years before his death, Anton Pannekoek was aware that a simplistic understanding of the council idea was taking form, reducing it to an ideology—a new form of organization, leaving aside all of the principles and conceptions of a transformation of the capitalist world into a new society. In a short text sent to a little left-socialist magazine, Pannekoek wrote:

“Workers councils” designates not a fixed form of organization, dreamed up once for all time, with only its details remaining to be perfected…. In our time, we don’t think of the workers council as a fraternal organization which is its own goal; workers councils means the class struggle (in which fraternity has a part to play), revolutionary action against state power. Revolutions are not made on command, they arise spontaneously when the situation becomes intolerable, in moments of crisis….⁸

This is an approach to the council idea that seems to me more than ever to fit the possibility of a conscious break with the order of things, indeed the only one that can interest us, giving a new content to the class struggle: a radical spirit of struggle, principles of thought and action. To fix on a form of organization was and remains the line of Leninist and ultra-Leninist critiques of the council idea, which permit them to justify their vanguardist task—that of giving a revolutionary content to the councils.

This is exactly what we find in the third part of JB’s book (“Inquiry, Organization, and the Long 1968”). Here the author leaves the terrain of ideological debate to descend to earth and provide a rapid consideration of several experiments in subversion, from the Spanish Revolution of 1936 to the Portuguese Revolution of 1974–75. Attention is focused above all on the presence or not of organizations of the council form. The analysis of the content of the real movement of social subversion comes later or is shortchanged.

In the course of the Spanish Revolution the question of the council form of organization was raised only within minority circles. Only a few small groups within the POUM explicitly discussed it, proposing late in the game—after the defeat of the insurrection of May 1937 in Barcelona, wiped out by the Stalinist Republicans—the formation of councils under the leadership of the vanguard party. It should be remembered, in contrast, that the movement of spontaneous self-organization, which aspired to self-government of society, was powerful at the beginning of the revolution, which saw the creation of “Defense Committees.” Later, minority sectors of the CNT-FAI likewise discussed the need for unitary rank-and-file organizations, taking as example the experience of the Asturian revolution of October 1934. Finally, one should remember that the powerful movement of collectives, in industry and above all in the countryside, expressed the principles of anti-capitalist self-management: the idea of a socialism organized and controlled from the bottom up. Here again, what mattered was the spirit of the struggle and principles of action rather than a particular form of organization. To speak of “a lack of revolutionary vision among the anarchists” (p. 79) re-introduces the facile Leninist idea of a lack of revolutionary consciousness. However, if “revolutionary vision” was to be found in the course of the Spanish Revolution, it was to be looked for among the anarchist communities rather than among the organizations of Leninist origin.

On May ’68, JB’s treatment is similarly reductive and quick. His analysis basically rests on the beautiful text by Fredy Perlman, which is limited, even if generally correct. Thus the formation of “action committees” went beyond a wish for a strategy of unity; it was the organized expression of the ideas and desires of the movement, of its subversive content—a qualitative content that broke with and opposed the quantitative demands made by the parties and mainstream unionism, Leninist in origin. The “anti-councilists” catalogue this “qualitative” content as a new form of reformism, a simple proposal for the democratic management of the existing reality. JB appears to follow in this direction when he writes that:

Communism is not a form of management (or distribution) and thus proletarian self-management by workers’ councils is insufficient as a definition of communism. Communism must be the destruction of the law of value—something that is not a matter of management or form alone but of the very material structure of capitalism. (p. 147)

To reduce the radical currents of May ’68 to the demand for ‘self-management of isolated enterprises’ is to leave out what was most important: a movement whose dynamic contained a profound desire to change life and society. More than the self-management of enterprises, what was in play was the self-management of society.

Finally, the analysis of the Portuguese Revolution is the weakest part of JB’s book. If it is inadequate to present that revolution as an officers’ revolt (p. 153), it is also incorrect to claim that it “was particularly singled out as a conciliar revolution” (p. 151). To the contrary: the Portuguese Revolution was dominated by various authoritarian socialist currents, taking their last chance before the collapse of the state-capitalist bloc. In a situation of intense and complex social agitation, opposed currents confronted each other: that of state capitalism, that of democratic market capitalism, and that of defending the ideas and practices of a rank-and-file socialism of direct democracy. Only a small minority supported this last, autonomous current. JB’s idea of what was going on is made clear by one sentence:

In Portugal, as with the other late conciliar revolutions—in Chile, Poland, or Iran—councils or something like them form very broadly, throughout a part of the industrial base. But in none of them do the councils project or move toward a break with capitalist reproduction—on the contrary, inasmuch as self-management or autonomy is projected by these councils it is an autonomy that requires, paradoxically, the support of the state. (p. 153)

In the Portuguese case, the idea of self-management of the struggle that developed with the collapse of the old state apparatus and the colonial crisis came very quickly into conflict with authoritarian currents, both those of state capitalism and market capitalism. It remained minoritarian, for sure, controlled by the state, not only for ideological reasons but above all because of its weakness. Nonetheless, the demand made by the independent current of political organizations for a reorganization of production and society under the control of the workers was a break with capitalist reproduction. This current left its mark on the revolution, even if it was beaten by the Stalinist reaction and the authoritarianism of leftist soldiers allied with the forces of the market defended by the social democrats. In today’s grey times, what is left in the popular view of the Portuguese Revolution is this desire for a new order of things, a new life. So far, it’s poetry, but it lasts. The rest is forgotten.

In this contradictory and often confused process, the importance JB gives to the little story of Guy Debord’s “contact” on the banks of the Tagus is misplaced. This anecdote, showcasing a faithful follower of the master collecting a few disciples in a wine bar in Lisbon, only demonstrates the gap that existed between the real situation and the vanguardist wishes of someone like Debord, however brilliant his analyses. As in Jaime Semprun’s book, La guerre sociale au Portugal, the council form was called on to characterize the revolutionary content of the movement. But where were those councils? More significant was the late attempt of several Leninist chieftains of a local putschist organization bureaucratically to install a network of “revolutionary councils,” an attempt to reinvigorate a rank-and-file exhausted by the bureaucratic clashes and manipulations of the various Leninist parties. Of course, this attempt got nowhere, as the movement was already in decline. It is nevertheless significant that this last-minute manipulative proposal attracted interest and support from the “critics of council communism” of the après-May ’68, who believed they found in it the coming of the true “revolutionary councils.” (!?) One more proof of the misrecognition of a situation that was developing outside their analyses.

Curiously, JB claims that:

The Portuguese Revolution confirmed the suppositions of soixante-huitard council communists that a new era of councils arrived, and yet it provided a situation in which those councils were by their nature not only inadequate to the task at hand but forced to work at cross-purposes and to undermine the construction of conciliar power. Even if they had armed themselves and forestalled the counter-revolution of the Movement of the Nine, they would have had to confront the fact that the councils which had fallen under self-management were dependent upon the state as it existed and capitalism. (p. 157)

But what “soixante-huitard council communists” is he talking about? The wine bar circle of Debordian situationists or the neo-Bordigist thinkers of the “critique of council communism”? The little groups that supported the fights for self-organization and the attempts to collectivize in opposition to the capitalist social order—and they existed in Portugal then—never idealized the Portuguese Revolution as a “council revolution,” any more than they attempted to introduce the formation of “revolutionary councils” into it from outside.

The more historical part of the text thus raises some more general questions. If JB’s resume of the German Revolution represents a serious piece of historical research, the treatments of the Spanish Revolution, May ’68, and the Portuguese Revolution reveal regrettable weaknesses and approximations. With respect to the Spanish Revolution, JB sticks to mechanically seeking the existence or the absence of “councils.” But the spirit of self-government that one could find in the Russian soviets and the German councils came to life in Spain in other forms of self-organization. The same is true for the case of May ’68 in France. The author does not clearly see the subversive spirit of May and endeavors to analyze the real movement by referring to the councils “created” behind closed doors by the few adherents of the SI. The procedure is the same when he takes up the Portuguese Revolution, where the principles of self-organization and the workers’ aspirations for self-government took other forms of spontaneous organization: workplace committees and workplace and neighborhood committees.

After May ’68, as already noted, a little current in France constructed an ideology called “councilism” to serve as a target for criticism. This ill-fated task only confused things. First of all, by treating “councilism” as an ideology of capitalist management, and then by presenting every spontaneous organization demanding self-government as a potentially counter-revolutionary organization. What remains, in its purity, is the idea that the only content of communism is to be found in the movement of capital. This is a vague and abstract discourse that effaces the practical questions of social transformation.

In 1952, in a letter addressed to his friend, the heterodox Marxist Maximilien Rubel, Anton Pannekoek warned: “You ought not forget that in using the term ‘workers council’ we are proposing not solutions but problems.” This highly meaningful statement poses the question of the difficulties involved in constructing a new society, another system of production of life. Guy Debord, a well-informed reader, did not fail to note this idea.⁹ And this was someone who, who as we have noted, often gave the council form central importance in defining the revolutionary character of a struggle.

Instead of losing ourselves in the critique of “solutions,” even those suggested by a little committee, we will gain more clarity by looking closely at the “problems.”