The Misery of Councilism

Following the meetings and publications we receive, there are many of us among the participants in the Echanges network who have noticed, for some time now, a resurgence of the vocabulary councilism to qualify us.

This vocabulary, which refers to the Russian Soviets and the German Councils, illusorily covers many different realities: the soviets of 1905 and those of 1917 in Russia do not present the same characteristics; this movement of soviets is in turn distinguished from the movement of councils from 1917 to 1919 of German soldiers and workers; finally, the action of councils or soviets is very heterogeneous according to their social composition.

In 1905 in Russia, all contesting parties or unions were banned; the working class was forced to create its own organizations, the soviets. By 1917, on the contrary, clandestine political groups had penetrated the milieu of industrial workers, and from the moment the Russian working class, soldiers and peasants organized again into soviets and factory committees, political militants rushed to take over.

The Russian working class at that time was few in number and concentrated in rare urban areas. It was different in the Germany of 1917. Councils of soldiers, workers and peasants homogeneously arose in almost all of Germany. They were uniquely, successively or simultaneously, punctual groups of workers, for example at the time of a strike, bodies constituted for the duration that endowed themselves with executive and legislative powers, like a party, or again as representatives of the proletariat vis-à-vis the state and patronage, like a trade union. In Russia as in Germany, Marxists and anarchists mingled in the councils. Party followers who thought that class consciousness should be constituted externally and then implanted in the class, in agreement or by force, mocked this self-organization of the proletariat by denying it any ability to express a revolutionary point of view.

Contrary to Leninists of all hues, we think, in Echanges, that it is not organization that preludes consciousness, but it is the latter that determines the organizational form it needs, and that the workers' councils at the end of World War I were mostly portions of the class that themselves led to their overcoming, for they allowed the working class to make the mistakes we so badly need in order to advance rather than obey infallible directives of an invisible committee whose defects the history of workers' struggles in all countries teaches us. The theory, according to which the modern labor movement is merely the artificial product of some leader conforms to a pattern established by lovers of regulated and disciplined struggles who know exactly, often long ago, how it should be acted upon, had no course within the German working class at the end of World War I.

The German working class set itself beyond Lenin and his fellow party members who aspired to make the working class happy in spite of itself with the success we know.

The question presents itself thus: is the emancipation of the workers the business of the workers themselves or should it be referred to specialists?

We know Lenin's contempt for the workers who "could not yet have social-democratic consciousness. They could have had it only from the outside." (What to do? 1902)

This same Lenin regarded, it is important to stress, social-democratic dogmas as the highest degree of proletarian class consciousness and socialism as he would later say, as "the soviets plus electricity."

The past does not return contrary to what some reactionary leftists want to believe, defending social gains, i.e., the status quo, in demonstrations alongside the workers while simultaneously holding a radical discourse on what the revolution should be, defending industry and forced labor on the one hand as on the other. Opponents of workers' councils refused to take into account workers' action against their exploitative conditions, which they tried to disguise under the concept of councilism. Just as in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when some militants created an "ultra-left" ideology that was easy for them to flog since it was their creature, councilism reappeared to denigrate workers' autonomous action by saving themselves the costs of reasoned argumentation about such action.

If there is a councilism, we know that it tends to make the council movement and the theory that came out of it look like a new ideology. All concepts created with a suffix in ism, assume a doctrine. I do not deny that certain comrades in our editorial staff sometimes refer to an ideology, Marxism, but if we look closely at this profession of faith, we see that they generally claim its most fruitful part, the observation of facts and their analysis, rather than its doctrinal system, reading grid as some shamelessly say. We are, no more than anyone else, without traditions, and the workers' council movement of the early 20th century is a part of it.

But we do not want to hide the flaws of this movement whose causes are simultaneously geographical, social and historical, and we will not sacrifice them to the fetishism of workers' councils: they were the expression, no more and no less, of the consciousness of the proletariat and the development of this class consciousness between 1917 and 1919.

Nor do we ignore that consciousness is made to wear on the unconscious and that the logic of the objective historical process conforms to the subjectivity of its protagonists. In Echanges no one is a councilist.