The Fundamental Positions of Council Communism, a Contribution

§1
Council communism considers that the working class develops as a revolutionary subject through the class struggle and, more specifically, through the deployment of its conscious self-activity. It is the practical antagonism with the existing society in all its forms, mainly against capital and against the State as its general representative, which moves the proletariat to awaken its subjective capacities. And, insofar as this antagonism tends to be sharpened by the decline of the capitalist mode of production (because of its inherent limits), these subjective capacities not only tend to develop more and to do so more massively - driven by the intensification of the class struggle - but also tend to develop proletarian consciousness in a communist-revolutionary sense.

§2
This means that the development of the proletariat as a revolutionary class demands a form of individual and collective activity which has as its foundation a dialectical and free unity of spontaneity and organization, thought and action, development of subjective capacities on the individual and collective levels. Only in this way does the workers' movement acquire a revolutionary character: as a movement of class self-liberation, both material and spiritual. This requires the creation of new social relations in the proletarian movement itself, which are concretized in the emergence of new forms of organization that unite revolutionary struggle and liberation of subjective capabilities.

§3
It is the working class that effectively develops all these aspects of its social movement, moved by the concrete necessities of life and rising, driven by these same necessities, to the rational understanding of the world and its transformation (in particular, rising to the understanding of the conditions and principles of its class autonomy, that is, of the deployment and structuring of its revolutionary self-activity). In opposition to this, all the forces of capitalist society devote themselves to the task of curbing this tendency towards autonomy and returning the proletariat to its state of inert, unconscious and manipulable beings, commodities for the production of capital and for the reproduction of capitalism as a whole. All forces that attack the dialectical unity of proletarian praxis (see thesis 2), either by blocking its development, or by trying to fragment it in order to distort its elements, are counterrevolutionary forces.

The forces of the second type are the most dangerous, since they can present themselves more easily than the first as representatives of the proletariat. Their tactic does not consist in the unilateral negation of the initiatives of the class, but in their deviation in order to convert them into a controlled force. For this they destroy the spontaneous tendency to the collective unity of praxis, using hierarchization and the division of labor in the organization of the workers' struggle and movement. This is the general case of the unions and the workers' parties when they have not yet become pure and simple lackeys of capital and the State. The true revolutionary class struggle, that is, the self-development of the proletariat as a revolutionary subject, is only possible outside and against the union and party framework.

§4
The only way to defeat these counterrevolutionary forces is, on the one hand, through the grouping of the most advanced proletarians around revolutionary principles, to spread them, develop them and apply them in the class struggle and thus promote the self-development of the class as a whole. This is the theoretical side. The practical side is that these principles must not be limited to clarifying problems of the full and integral development of the autonomy of the workers (in particular, the problem of the forms of organization), but must be embodied in the struggle itself and adopt an eminently practical and concrete formulation, that is: propaganda for an antagonistic orientation of the proletarian demands and for the creation of stable forms of proletarian power that confront in a direct and more or less open way the power of the bosses and the state.

The development of this tactic, here expressed in very general terms, is nothing other than the revolutionary evolution of the proletarian struggle and can only express itself practically, and reach a massive dimension, in the form of a generalized rise of the proletariat that challenges capitalist domination and creates a revolutionary situation.

§5
Bolshevism and the other pseudo-revolutionary currents are the last wall of capitalism. At best, they could serve to temporarily divert the proletarian struggle from its true objectives - at worst, they destroy it by plunging it into a succession of defeats with no way out and delivering it into the arms of bourgeois ideologies (current situation in many or most countries). The content of these tendencies is the mystification of the emancipation of the proletariat and of the practical way to achieve it. Their first characteristic, then, is to be practically opposed to the general principles contained in the previous theses. Its second characteristic is to have an ideological theoretical character, that is, dogmatic and rigid, instead of a scientific character and always open to the investigation of the historical praxis of the proletariat. In short, their defining feature is that they do not seek the understanding and realization of the ways in which the proletariat can, through cooperation and struggle, deploy its full self-activity.

Among these currents is to be found the majority of anarchism, although proletarian anarchism - that which originated historically with Bakunin and the anarchist wing of the First International - is only among these because of its underdevelopment and historical deformation, while, on the other hand, Bolshevism is nothing more than the radical and total deformation of the original Marxism.

§6
We Council Communists do not hold any dogma to which we would like to mold the proletarian movement. What we defend is the free development of this movement, convinced that it will be the historical course and maturation through practical experience that will make the proletariat develop its revolutionary consciousness. We do not claim to develop this consciousness for the workers, we only spread our contributions to help the class to do it by itself, for which the development of the proletarians' own capacities and their active will is the most important thing.

It is the movement which, with its practical action and mental effort, produces its own consciousness. Revolutionary theory is only the intellectual form in which that historical action has been synthesized and its function is to be a means to accelerate and extend the development of communist consciousness at the mass level, both through theoretical discussion and training and through its direct application to the practical development of the class struggle. In this latter sense theory is also, of course, a guide to action, as is in general every form of consciousness consciously linked to practice.

§7
What is Council Communism? The general ideas of Council Communism are abundantly expounded in its classic texts, such as Anton Pannekoek's Workers' Councils and many others. But what really matters is not its similarity or dissimilarity, at the level of abstract and general ideas, with other forms of thought that also claim to be revolutionary. What matters is to understand their basic conception, that is, their way of thinking and their historical-materialist conception of praxis. Then it will be understood why Council Communism is nothing other than the most advanced form so far of the revolutionary thought of the working class and, therefore, capable of integrating all the positive developments achieved in it independently of its origins or doctrinal links.

On the other hand, what is decisive for conscious proletarians in choosing between one or another current of thought, as a basis for the development of their own consciousness and actions, depends in reality on practical experience and socially determined practical aspirations. That is why we Council Communists do not engage in the scholastic and doctrinaire discussion, typically anarchist, of whether “Marxism or anarchism”, nor do we engage in trying to reorient Leninists by showing them their incongruities in the name of common adherence to “Marxism”. In any case, those who are dissatisfied with the praxis of existing currents of political thought will probably find in Council Communism a form more in keeping with their aspirations and a new point of departure. What we want is to develop living revolutionary thought and this is what it means for us to call ourselves “Council Communists”, taking up the heritage of earlier Councilists.