Among activists, intellectuals, and organizations of the so-called far left, there has often been confusion between council communism and anarcho-communism. I am referring to the political space occupied by the autonomous movement, whose rise in popularity in the 1970s did not always adequately address the political categories discussed in this text. In any case, there has always been a certain degree of overlap between activists from one current and another, and they are often regarded as comrades in the struggle, despite their theoretical or methodological differences.
The fact is that we are faced with two traditions that both legitimately claim the legacy of communist identity. Both share the goal or premise of abolishing the state and capital. Their difference lies more in revolutionary strategy than in terminology—which could be compatible or understandable between the two currents. We would be dealing with a difference of an ontological nature.
To put it very briefly, while council communism is based on Marx’s theory of crisis—which understands revolution as a material necessity imposed by the contradictions of capital—anarcho-communism has historically revolved around the technical intuition of abundance (the “taking of the heap”) and a voluntarist activism often disconnected from material conditions (Malatesta). The difference here lies in the understanding of the forces of production and the nature of the capitalist crisis.
So, if they differ in their revolutionary strategy, we could analyze the praxis of these currents and identify some patterns.
Criticism of voluntarism
On the one hand, council communism reflects a historical determinism. For this school of thought, the possibility of a revolution breaking out is the product of the historical trends of capitalist development. Revolution does not occur simply because one wants it to; rather, it is the result of material needs that arise from a crisis in the capitalist mode of production. This is what would spur millions of workers to set in motion the mechanisms for a revolutionary process.
Marx understood that revolution was an organic process stemming from the development of the productive forces: "...this development of productive forces (which itself implies the actual empirical existence of men in their world-historical, instead of local, being) is an absolutely necessary practical premise because without it want is merely made general, and with destitution the struggle for necessities and all the old filthy business would necessarily be reproduced" as he warns in "The German Ideology". Therefore, a revolution will fail if it does not time its actions correctly and instead focuses solely on reproducing scarcity.
On the other hand, we have Libertarian Communism or anarcho-communism, which tends to prioritize subjective will—a tendency that can lead to a disconnect from existing material conditions. Marx was very critical of this understanding of revolution, calling it “crude communism.” Malatesta was one of the leading proponents of voluntarism. Advocates of “propaganda of the deed” would also be voluntarists. So, according to this premise, the revolution can be brought about. State crises are created, a foothold is gained, authority is undermined, workers are mobilized, strikes occur, armed clashes take place, land is seized, and eventually the bourgeois state could fall like a ripe fruit, giving way to a revolutionary society.
Criticism of Autarkic Localism
The clearest point of divergence, the most significant difference, lies in the form or scale of post-capitalist social organization. Council communism argues that the anarchist tradition falls into a localist trap when it proposes society as a federation of autonomous and self-sufficient communes, since this implies a scale that is materially incompatible with communism’s principle of “from each according to their needs.”
According to councilist criticism, anarcho-communist models—ranging from William Morris’s regressivism to Murray Bookchin’s municipalism—tend to overlook the fact that the localist fragmentation of social reproduction (that is, a society organized as a federation of communes) prevents the attainment of the necessary level of abundance. Thus, an isolated commune, not being self-sufficient, is forced to exchange goods or services with others. This exchange inevitably requires a measure of value (money). This process restores economic competition among communes and, by extension, would mean reactivating the state as a regulator of conflicts of interest. Their conclusion is that localism does not overcome capitalism and that, in practice, it reproduces capitalism’s logical functions on a smaller scale.
What would be the proposed alternative? The World Commune of Councils. According to this proposal, communism is only possible as a world commune. Since capital is the first “totalizing social form” in history, overcoming it requires a nested structure of councils that scales globally and is also totalizing. Only this scale allows for the coordination of global social reproduction without vertical hierarchies or the autonomy of state power, reabsorbing the social powers alienated from humanity. Therefore, without coordinated global interdependence, abundance is technically impossible, condemning any revolutionary attempt to scarcity and to the spontaneous resurgence of the functions of money in the face of such scarcity.
The fundamental problem is that anarchism has not always been articulated correctly, nor has it presented its vision in an understandable way. Whether for this reason or because those explaining the anarchist vision within the Marxist camp were primarily anti-anarchist intellectuals, councilism fell into significant errors of interpretation that undermined the convergence of the two traditions.
One of the most significant errors in the communist critique of councils is the claim that anarchism aims for a fragmentation of society into autonomous and self-sufficient communes that would inevitably reproduce commodity exchange and, consequently, capitalism. This is not true. Anarchism does not propose isolation, but rather federalism. The anarchist structure is based on free agreement and on the federation of production and consumption organizations that coordinate at the regional, national, and international levels.
Even left-wing communists now recognize that modern technology (such as the internet, AI, etc.) enables global coordination without top-down control—something anarchists have always advocated through federation. Therefore, accusing anarchism of being backward or medieval overlooks the fact that leading figures in anarchism of the 1880s, such as Kropotkin and Cafiero, already incorporated large-scale production and advanced technology into their models.
Therefore, the criticism leveled by council communism—that anarchism seeks to return to medieval villages or isolated communes that would reproduce capitalism—is false. Modern authors such as Felipe Corrêa and Lucien Van der Walt, as well as entire movements such as platformism and anarcho-syndicalism, demonstrate that mass anarchism is global and internationalist. They propose democratic planning and federalist coordination of large-scale production, not local isolation.
Therefore, the criticism leveled by council communism—that anarchism seeks to return to medieval villages or isolated communes that would reproduce capitalism—is false. Modern authors such as Felipe Corrêa and Lucien Van der Walt, as well as entire movements such as platformism and anarcho-syndicalism, demonstrate that mass anarchism is global and internationalist. They propose democratic planning and federalist coordination of large-scale production, not local isolation.
The mistake lies in confusing autonomy (that is, freedom of decision at the grassroots level) with autarky (economic isolation). Anarchists advocate for social interdependence within a global structure of federations, which bears a strong resemblance to the World Commune of nested councils proposed by councilism.
On Technology and Progress
Returning to the topic of technology, in the 1930s, the Councilists feared a “dictatorship of the statistical office.” Today, the internet and big data serve as the material foundation that resolves this threat. Inspired by Otto Neurath’s principles, feedback loops and real-time global inventories render the accounting of working time obsolete. Technology enables distribution according to need to occur without the mediation of a bureaucratic body, rendering the GIC scheme a historically outdated model.
However, the accounting of working time is not a neutral measure; it is an inertial force that reproduces the money-form and the need for state power to monitor it. The true overcoming of capital requires eliminating the exchange relationship from the very outset of the revolutionary process, preventing the functions of money from spontaneously reemerging under “conditions of disciplinary control.”
We can see that communism is not an idealistic utopia, but rather a real movement that abolishes the present state of things on the basis of existing material conditions. Communism, as advocated by the councilists, is viable only as a system of abundance coordinated on a global scale and supported by advanced technological development. Thus, large-scale interdependence and the use of data systems to ensure free access are technical imperatives for it to function.
Thus, any return to the “simple life” or to local self-sufficiency would only lead to widespread scarcity, which would inevitably reignite the struggle for survival and commercial exchange—and, eventually, the state. That is why they argue that human emancipation can only be achieved through the Council form.
Criticism of the Concept of Revolutionary Power and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat
Left-wing communists often claim that anarchists “back down ideologically” when faced with the necessity of the dictatorship of the proletariat and that they lack a theory of revolutionary power. This criticism boils down to the idea that anarchists simply “reject power” and are therefore ineffective.
From the very beginning of the anarchist movement, revolutionary factions (such as Bakunin, Johann Most, Malatesta, and “The Friends of Durruti”) fully understood the need to use force to crush the bourgeoisie. For example, during the Spanish Revolution, “The Friends of Durruti” explicitly proposed a Revolutionary Junta. For its part, the CNT-FAI never tired of calling—both directly and indirectly—for a National Defense Council as an organ of workers’ power to defeat fascism and, through it, defend revolutionary society. And that’s not to mention its role in workers’ uprisings, with the establishment of revolutionary juntas, committees, or councils. The difference is not that anarchists ignore the need for revolutionary violence, but that they reject its transformation into a state separate from the working class—a state which, as Luigi Fabbri warns, inevitably becomes the oppressor of the very society it claims to defend.
On the other hand, anarchism does not deny power as the “ability to do things” or as a social force, but rather power insofar as it constitutes “domination”—that is, a hierarchization of social relations (Felipe Corrêa). By failing to distinguish between these concepts, left-wing communism accuses anarchism of being “apolitical,” ignoring the fact that anarchism proposes popular power or self-managed power from below—a power that emerges from the bottom up through federation, which is a tangible political structure… but is not a state.
On Workers' Councils and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat
Beyond semantic issues, the “dictatorship of the proletariat” in councilism takes a historical form based on armed workers’ councils. In this respect, it differs from Leninism, which favors the party-state model (in other words, the Communist Party becomes the workers’ state, and its leading cadres become the government).
On this point, revolutionary anarchism has always recognized the need for a “power” capable of crushing bourgeois reaction. For example, Bakunin spoke of the armed Commune. It was a Commune inspired by the Paris Commune, which was to be composed of workers’ associations (or workers’ societies). A little later, Johann Most argued that revolutionary communes must annihilate the “beasts of property” so as not to be crushed by them. For his part, Errico Malatesta defined a kind of dictatorship of the proletariat (without calling it that) as the effective power of the workers once they took possession of the means of livelihood until reactionary resistance ceased. Another author, Erich Mühsam, linked the dictatorship of the proletariat (he was already a contemporary of the Russian Revolution) to the self-determination of the class through its councils.
As we can see, both traditions are saying very similar things, which boil down to the idea that councils should take all power. In this sense, the councils would absorb the functions that are politically and economically separated in capitalist society. Both traditions would mean an end to government as a dominator of people and would establish councils as administrators of affairs. They would also serve to dissolve the class structure, and as this process progresses—as classes dissolve—the council would lose its coercive nature and become a human community.
In short, if we focus on the similarities between the councilist tradition and the anarcho-communist tradition, the distinction between “Marxists” and “anarchists” is less relevant than the dividing line between “communist” and “non-communist” elements. The councils are not a separate state, but rather the assemblies of the proletariat, and their success depends on their technical capacity to organize life.
Criticism of “political evasion”
According to left-wing communism, the Spanish anarchists treated the state like Tinker Bell, the character from Peter Pan: they believed that if they stopped “believing” in it or “legitimizing” it, it would disappear. By failing to destroy the republican state under the pretext of “anti-fascist unity,” they allowed it to reorganize and ultimately crush the revolutionary committees. The mistake was attempting to manage commodity production (exchange between collectives) without destroying political power, when both must be dialectically overcome.
Consequently, for left-wing communism, both social democracy (which elevated the state to an absolute) and anarcho-syndicalism (which, according to them, elevated the exchange economy to an absolute) failed. They see a clear lesson in the Spanish Revolution: the state and the capitalist market economy are expressions of the same social alienation and must be rejected simultaneously.
However, the criticism leveled by councilists such as Helmut Wagner—who characterize the anarchist stance as “apolitical” or “evasive” with regard to bourgeois political power—is incorrect. Luigi Fabbri clarified that anarchism is not apolitical in the sense of being passive, but rather possesses its own revolutionary methodology. Its politics consist of direct action and the construction of freedom as a “weapon of struggle” against the old world.
Contemporary authors such as Agustín Guillamón argue that the failure of the Spanish Revolution was not due to anarchism itself, but rather because the CNT leadership lacked a revolutionary theory suited to the historical moment and chose to build a “state anarchism” and favor collaboration with the government rather than destroy the bourgeois state as it was collapsing. Thus, left-wing communists are mistaken in judging anarchism by the “compromises of its collaborationist leaders,” ignoring the revolutionary minorities—such as “The Friends of Durruti” or sectors of the Libertarian Youth—who called for “all power to the unions.”
Incidentally, I would add that Guillamón himself bases his interpretation of the Spanish Revolution on Barcelona, whereas the perspective of the “leaders” of the CNT and the FAI was fundamentally Spanish, offering a more global view of the correlation of existing forces throughout Republican Spain [the popular front]. For this reason, although they saw the revolution as possible in Catalonia, they did not see it as feasible for all of Spain, since this would provoke a “civil war within the civil war” that would lead to the total defeat of the Republic and the death of the revolutionaries. Ultimately, this civil war within the civil war did occur anyway, but only because the Counterrevolution took up arms and attacked the Revolution (the May Days in Barcelona, the dissolution of the Council of Aragon). As we can see, those militants were plagued by a sea of doubts.
Therefore, the anarchist critique of the state is materialist and practical. Authors such as Fabbri explain that the state is an institution based on violence that must be physically destroyed through insurrection and immediate expropriation. The error of Marxism is to believe that the state can be seized by the proletariat for its own purposes. Since Bakunin’s time, anarchists have been warning that the machinery of the state transforms those who occupy it.
A Critique of Anarchist Disorganization
Anarchism is often accused of being a movement that is disorganized and chaotic by nature. In this regard, almost all Marxists view anarchism as an immature stage of the labor movement. This view combines the arrogance of many 19th-century Marxian and Marxist authors—with their defense of “scientific socialism”—with prejudices against anarchism based on various reasons that have little to do with rigorous analysis.
Since its inception, revolutionary anarchism has actively sought theoretical and tactical unity and has defended collective responsibility. The so-called “disorganization” has been a symptom of certain specific historical periods and is by no means an intrinsic principle of communist anarchism. This is demonstrated by documents such as The Platform by Makhno and Arshinov.
Some councilist texts go so far as to claim that anarchists attempt to sidestep politics by focusing on the “economic power” of the unions. Revolutionary syndicalism—as exemplified by Salvador Seguí, for instance—and the Platform itself argue that the Single Union is not merely an economic tool, but the political and social epicenter capable of administering public life without the need for a vanguard party. It is the “arm and brain” that prepares the working class for self-government. Councilism assumes that politics must be the monopoly of the Party (or of a council or soviet dominated by the Party’s ideology), disregarding the capacity of the workers’ organization to be, in and of itself, the structure of the new society.
By being portrayed as disorganized, anarchism takes on yet another stigma: its disorganization will prevent victory. Thus, July 1936 arrived amid theoretical “confusion”—a lack of a theory of power, uncertainty about how a “transitional society” should take shape, and doubt as to whether such a society should even come into being. We can acknowledge these criticisms, which are the same ones that revolutionary anarchist sectors leveled at the CNT at that very time (for example, by Camillo Berneri or by “The Friends of Durruti”), as I will discuss later.
However, by focusing their criticism on the alleged mistake made by the CNT leaders in 1936, the left-wing communists ignore the practical convergence that existed at moments such as in Germany in 1918–19, Kronstadt in 1921, or the barricades of May 1937, where both revolutionary anarchists and left-wing communists faced the same statist counterrevolution.
Placing the Anarchist Critique of the CNT-FAI’s Role in the Spanish Revolution in Context
In Catalonia, a takeover by revolutionary organizations was physically possible, since after defeating the army in the streets on July 19 and 20, the CNT-FAI gained absolute control of the situation. The Barcelona proletariat was heavily armed with some 35,000 rifles captured at the Sant Andreu barracks and controlled the city’s strategic points. However, the political viability of such an action—seizing power—was questioned internally at the Regional Trade Union Plenary on July 21, 1936. At that assembly, although Juan García Oliver proposed “going for broke,” the majority of delegates considered that establishing libertarian communism on their own was unfeasible due to several important factors.
The principal arguments against seizing power were the fear of international isolation and the threat of an economic blockade or even armed intervention by the capitalist powers. Furthermore, as already mentioned, the anarcho-syndicalist leaders feared that an “anarchist dictatorship” in Catalonia would provoke a civil war within the Republican camp, given that the CNT was in the minority in other regions of Spain. For this reason, they opted for antifascist collaboration through the creation of the Central Committee of Anti-Fascist Militias of Catalonia (CCMA), a body based on class collaboration that allowed the Generalitat government to remain in place as a legal “facade.”
From a later critical perspective, drawn from within the anarchist movement of the time itself, it is argued that the revolution failed because the CNT was “devoid of revolutionary theory” and lacked a concrete program to replace the state with centralized organs of workers’ power. In practice, power was fragmented among a myriad of local and factory committees that exercised authority on the ground but were unable to coordinate their efforts to form a center of power that was antagonistic to—or even an alternative to—the capitalist state. The group “The Friends of Durruti” later argued that the only viable option to save the revolution was precisely the immediate destruction of the state and its replacement by a Revolutionary Junta based on the unions and the militias.
In short, an analysis of dozens of anarchist authors over the course of decades shows us that, although the military victory of the workers’ insurrection in July 1936 was total in areas such as Catalonia, a lack of political vision and a commitment to antifascist unity led the revolutionaries to relinquish political power, allowing the bourgeois state to gradually rebuild itself. In the end, the workers who had won the war on the streets of Barcelona ended up surrendering politically to those sectors that favored strengthening the bourgeois state.
Although the CNT leaders’ assessment was national in scope and aimed to prevent Catalonia’s isolation, we can also identify some contradictions in that strategy:
The fundamental contradiction pointed out by the sources—especially those from critical strands of anarchism (such as Camillo Berneri and “The Friends of Durruti”)—lies in the fact that one cannot defend a social revolution by using and strengthening the very instrument whose historical purpose is to destroy it: the bourgeois state.
The stance of “winning the war first and carrying out the revolution later” (adopted by the CNT when it took up the language of the Communist Party) is viewed in the sources as a strategic trap. Berneri argued that the Spanish Civil War was a “social war” and that it could not be won by relying solely on bourgeois military criteria. By postponing the revolution, the morale of the people-in-arms—the only force capable of defeating fascism—was destroyed. The result was the creation of a traditional bourgeois army which, stripped of its revolutionary momentum, ultimately lost the war.
The idea of collaborating with bourgeois anti-fascist forces while maintaining the revolution in the economy turned out to be an “unattainable utopia,” according to The Friends of Durruti. The organs of coercion (the army and the police) were left in the hands of the republican state while the workers managed the factories. As Fabbri presciently warned, whoever has power over things ends up having power over people. The bourgeoisie used its control over finance, gold, and weapons to economically strangle the collectives that the CNT sought to defend from within the ministries.
When it accepted ministerial posts, it was said that the CNT had committed a “historic heresy.” In this way, the confederal organization went from being a class-struggle trade union federation to becoming an “appendage of bourgeois democracy.” While serving in the Republican government, the anarchist ministers were forced to ask workers to abandon the barricades (May 1937) and to give up certain social gains in the name of unity, thereby becoming “firefighters” of the revolution itself.
Anarchist criticism (from Bernieri to Guillamón, including César M. Lorenzo) argues that the confederal leaders presented the situation as a false choice between imposing an anarchist dictatorship and collaborating with the state. However, there was a third way that was neither an anarchist dictatorship nor surrender to the bourgeois state: the coordination of the revolutionary committees and the creation of a Revolutionary Junta based on the unions and the militias. By ignoring this option, the CNT did not prevent a dictatorship; rather, it facilitated the rise of the PSUC/PCE’s Stalinist dictatorship, which ended up gaining absolute control of the situation thanks to the confederal movement’s political weakness.
In short, the contradiction lay in attempting to save the revolution by handing over the keys to it to its natural enemies (the state and the bourgeois parties) in the hope that they would respect it until the end of the war—something that, historically, did not happen.
Conclusions: The Errors of Left-Wing Communism
Based on what was stated earlier in the text, I felt it was appropriate to point out the weaknesses of the theory of council communism.
Let's start with the most obvious point: both theories aim to reach the same conclusion, but one does so from a Marxist perspective and the other from an anarchist one.
As we have seen, council communism is deeply influenced by Marxian theory of crisis, which gives rise to an anti-voluntarism and anti-activism stance. It holds that the possibility of revolution is strictly determined by world-historical tendencies of the development of capital. This leads to the conclusion that if the productive forces have not reached a certain level, communism is literally impossible—a view that can result in passivity while waiting for ideal “material conditions.” This, in turn, provides an opportunity to accelerate revolutionary changes.
Another problem is that, historically, the council communists (specifically the Group of International Communists, GIC) proposed a distribution scheme based on the accounting of working time. While in the 1930s councilists rejected “planning in kind” out of fear of a “dictatorship of the statistical office over producers,” today technological developments (such as the internet and real-time data processing) allow for direct coordination without the need for such accounting detours or a central bureaucracy. Therefore, this scheme is historically obsolete. Nevertheless, even within councilism, this is a lively debate, and this conceptual error is acknowledged.
A similar issue arises when reading some councilist writings from the 1920s and 1930s. During those years, they argued against direct planning because they believed it would inevitably lead to a dictatorship by a specialized class of statisticians or a “central planning office.” Because they did not trust the councils’ technical capacity to coordinate without intermediaries, their economic model was caught between the market and bureaucratic control.
When council communists (such as Helmut Wagner) criticize the anarchist “evasion” of political power, they are actually revealing the weaknesses in their own analysis. Wagner and other councilist critics often confuse the “apolitical” (evasive or passive) stance with the “anti-political” (destructive of bourgeois political institutions) one. By insisting so dogmatically and intransigently on the label of “dictatorship of the proletariat,” they create an ideological barrier between themselves and other revolutionary sectors (such as libertarian communists or anarcho-communists) who, in practice, advocate exactly the same thing: that workers’ councils destroy and absorb all powers.
Despite being regarded as the “conscience of Marxism,” their theoretical position has historically relegated them to being a “voice in the wilderness.” By rejecting social-democratic reformism, Leninist authoritarianism, and mass unionism alike, their platform often lacked a genuine mass base (with the exception of a few months between 1919 and 1920 in Germany), appearing as a doctrine that was too far ahead of its time.
In short, the weakness of council communism lies in an overly rigid theoretical approach that can lead to a disregard for the creative capacity of the revolutionary subject (which it dismisses as “voluntarism”) and in its defense of economic methods that the very development of capitalism has rendered obsolete.
To this we will add one final criticism: the misinterpretation of other revolutionary traditions, such as anarchism. The mistake made by left-wing communists is to treat anarchism as an incoherent or childish ideology, without recognizing that it has its own organizational methodologies (organizational dualism and anarcho-syndicalism) that pursue the same goal without the authoritarian dangers that ultimately destroyed the soviets in Russia. Nor have they taken into account anarchism’s theoretical and tactical contributions; and when they have done so, it has been to point out conceptual errors and caricature anarchism, thereby falling into dogmatism.
In this regard, from my point of view, there is a lack of a healthy and constructive channel of dialogue among revolutionary traditions, where they can learn from one another. Disrespect and arrogance are often poor means of getting one’s own points of view across, when in reality there is so much to contribute.
Bibliography (in Spanish)
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Interesting
Interesting