"‘A glimpse of a communist future’: interview with author Jasper Bernes" - Judy Cox (2025)

Marxist author Jasper Bernes’ new book, The Future of Revolution: Communist Prospects from the Paris Commune to the George Floyd Uprising, focuses on the fascinating history of workers’ councils. Jasper is a lecturer in English at the University of California, Berkeley.

You describe how the Paris Commune provided a new path to communism. How did the Commune prompt Marx and others to rethink the question of state power?

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels emerged during the European revolutions of 1848, and they participated in those revolutions.

The revolutions were important to their understanding of communism and their ­understanding of the need to confront the armed power of the state. But throughout the 1850s, Marx and Engels were still imagining that it might be possible to take over the state and use it to introduce communism.

The Paris Commune of 1871 demonstrated that ­workers cannot use the state—they had to overthrow both the military and the bureaucratic aspects of it.

The Commune was very ­significant—it showed a new path to communism, and in particular it showed the form such a path might take. At first, Marx did not think it would be successful.

But then he recognised that it was the discovery of the political form in which the ­economic emancipation of labour could be worked out.

You write that the workers’ councils were born out of the fires of the mass strike. You say they were the only innovation in revolutionary process in the 20th century—what do you mean by that?

The workers’ council was the singular contribution of the 20th century. The ­workers’ councils added a new dimension to the form of the Commune.

The Commune was supposed to be an organisation for the construction of socialism, but it was not organised in the workplace, and it was not ­rigorously proletarian.

The workers’ council rooted the commune form in the ­workplace. It restricted participation to proletarians.

Sometimes people had to provide proof of their work ­history as a way of ensuring that the workers’ councils were proletarian instruments and were committed to the task of ­overthrowing capitalism.

There were some cases where councils admitted people who were not committed to the project. They didn’t buy into the vision of the council communists.

Workers’ councils had to be both proletarian and communist, to be instruments for the planning of society, capable of constructing a common plan. This idea was there in the Commune, but it was not fleshed out.

Workers’ councils emerged first in St Petersburg, Russia, during the 1905 revolution. But because the revolution was quickly extinguished, they didn’t have a chance to develop.

It was really in 1917 that there was a real flowering of councils, first in Russia, then in Germany and across central Europe. Such councils became a model for the construction of socialism.

The workers’ councils set up during the German Revolution linked workplaces to communities and geographical areas.

There was a vision and there were groups in Germany who were organising to make the vision happen.

In November 1918 there was the Kiel sailors’ mutiny and mutinies in the army. These brought the war to a standstill. This encouraged workers to begin to take over the ­factories, and many industries were in workers’ hands.

The council communists wanted delegates who were committed to revolution, but Social Democratic Party functionaries and trade union ­officials got elected.

In some places ­delegates were elected from the ­shopfloor, but in other places revolutionary soldiers walked into an area and just elected anyone who was there to the workers’ council.

In Berlin, the workers’ ­council nominated delegates to decide what would happen next. Would there be a republic of workers’ councils or ­something different? The meeting held to discuss this was unsuccessful and it failed to give power to the councils. Some nominees did not want to give power to the workers—they wanted a constitutional assembly.

The German workers’ councils were not instruments of revolution. The councils invested the bourgeois state with power, against the will of their constituents.

In Russia, the councils assisted the Bolsheviks, the revolutionary socialist party, to take over the state.

Why was it different in Russia?

The workers’ councils—also called soviets—emerged ­naturally from spontaneous mass strike movements. They are an instrument for intensifying and generalising the strike.

The soviets have direct power over production by the ­workers, deciding what should and should not be produced.

Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky saw the soviets as the workers’ government in embryo. But the Bolsheviks were not interested in ­establishing workers’ councils to control production.

After the Russian Revolution, the councils were much more geographical. Proletarians in any area could vote for a ­representative on the soviets.

Workers established a separate structure based in ­workplaces, the factory committees. The councils were not really a power over ­workplaces but a springboard to take over the state. Soviets were political organs, while factory ­committees were economic organs.

In Spain in 1936 there was a revolution against general Francisco Franco’s military coup. What role did councils play?

Spain was really the most ­successful of the communist revolutions.

It went further even than Germany in 1918. Anarchism was so strong in Spain that once Franco launched his rebellion, the workers took over Spanish industry and really began to control large sections of the economy.

But the anarchists were ­worried about becoming authoritarian, so they sought alliances with other groups and compromised with the ­Republican government.

They didn’t really have a plan for socialising the economy.

The influence of ­syndicalism meant that revolutionary unions were given that task of organising the economy. But they were trade unions, so they were organised by industry, not across different industries.

In rural areas, the communes really did socialise wealth—it was extraordinary, exciting and far reaching. But it lacked any vision of coordination, in part because of the state’s armed power and in part because the syndicalists did not address the division of labour.

This meant they did not organise across different industries where workers had different interests.

Your book ends with the protests over the murder of George Floyd and the police abolition movement. How does that demand fit into the tradition of workers’ councils?

I was really interested in ­thinking about the movements of our time and considering how they could become revolutions.

Of course, the protests over George Floyd were not the Paris Commune, they were not Germany in 1918. But they were the most significant ­protests in the United States in the last 50 years.

The demand to ­abolish the police is implicitly a revolutionary demand. You cannot abolish the police ­without abolishing capitalism.

Any revolution’s first act must be the suspension of the armed power of the state. We saw the potential for that ­happening in the George Floyd movement.

Even in Germany in 1918, when the state collapsed in a wave of mutinies, remnants of the state survived and were used to crush the workers’ movement.

During the George Floyd ­protests, police power collapsed. The police were paralysed and they couldn’t protect ­property so there was wide scale looting.

This was the first moment of a revolution. What would have had to have happened differently for this to become a revolution on its own terms? There would have to be an understanding that the ­process of abolishing the police would mean abolishing capitalism.

This would require people to come together to debate and to organise.

Not every protest leads to workers’ councils being created. But the idea behind the workers’ council form is a massive one—it can both incorporate everyone, and it can coordinate everyone. Every revolution will need that kind of form.

I engaged in a kind of ­speculative exercise in ­imagining how to extend a movement beyond riots to insurrection and to revolution. It would require more than violence—it would require a common vision, a common plan, a common project.

And it would require ­positivity—meeting people’s needs to allow people to commit to a new society, to invest in it not for a few days, but for the long term.

There are many reasons to be optimistic. Capitalism is still here, and it is becoming more deadly. But more people are beginning to realise that there is no alternative but revolution if we want humanity not just to survive but to thrive.