Some anti-Councilism Procedures

Professional ideologists in the East impute to the council communists a sectarianism which, ignoring the necessary “meditations” or “stages”, would bring them closer to Stalin, the Gang of Four or other excessive centralists, while stigmatizing their alleged propensity for enterprise egoism. Only the correct action of the Party (and its police) could eradicate the “left opportunist” heresy, which was nonetheless still being reborn, in ever-renewed forms.

Elsewhere, a very different, but no less virulently anti-Councilist, current criticizes them both for emphasizing the factor of culture and working-class consciousness, and for planning a more transparent organization of social life. This latter current denies workers any possibility of emancipation without prior fusion with a category never defined other than by the single term “proletariat” and by that quality, however inconceivable within class society, of possessing “neither culture nor ideology”. A very old trend, no doubt, a bizarre mixture of bleating spontaneity and incendiary declamation, to which the current beginnings of the disintegration of bourgeois society and values give the face of a neo-individualism with often libertarian references.

Paulo presents a version of this in Spartacus (July-August '78), where, not without finding his own discovery paradoxical, he proclaims that Marx, Castoriadis, Stalin, Pannekoek, Kautsky and the whole holy fraternity are one and the same family. Haven't they all nurtured, or said they nurtured, projects for the reorganization of society, and called on workers to militate in this direction? This is a trait they all share, and one that clearly separates them from bourgeois liberal thought. But if we take a closer look at their projects, which these proper names symbolize all too imperfectly, this apparent homogeneity dissolves all at once... Unless one adopts a method dear to anti-Councilism: forge oneself the conceptions one wishes to reduce to nothing. Thus Paulo, who, from the constitution of councils of doctors and others, envisaged at the end of 1918 by Pannekoek to resolve the thorny question of the liberal professions, infers the maintenance of specialized police corps and therefore the absence of any “change in social organization”!

Paulo insists that posing the problem of future society is “already ideology, which can only lag behind real practice”. Hence the injunction: “Let's throw out these dusty gadgets, the separate political and economic action”. It remains to be seen whether these “dusty gadgets” are not the result of “real practice” here and now. Paulo reproaches me for this assertion: the critique that council communism made of parliamentarism and syndicalism in its time retains a plenary validity with regard to the general conditions of class struggle in our time. In his view, this is “unbridled praise”, “a myth built from scratch”. Let's take a look.

At the heart of the Council cCommunist conception is the central idea that workers as a social category possess a culture born of a certain relationship with capital and its conditioning organs (school, media, civil code, etc.), but also of the very forms of work and workers' struggles. A culture which, marked by a position of subordination and weakness in social life, is generally characterized by the internalization of bourgeois values: respect for hierarchy and existing modes of delegating power, the quest for security and promotion, and all that is expressed by the myriad of -isms flourishing on the dung of a society of oppression and exploitation: patriotism and racism, machismo and individualism, conformism, and so on.

Far from being “gadgets”, the representative institutions linked to political and trade union action are proving to be the major factor in conflict resolution and thus in social harmony. There is much talk today of the decline of parliament, stripped in part of its role as a sovereign body in favor of the executive, the administration, trade unions and pressure groups. This is to lend it a decision-making power that, in practice, it has never exercised on its own. But above all, it means remaining blind to the progress of the parliamentary form, insofar as it institutionalizes inter-class dialogue, a dialogue that the capital-labor balance of power necessarily renders bogus, at least in its essentials. And isn't this form of dialogue gaining ever more ground at various levels of civil society, from recognized associations and works councils to so-called joint bodies for the management of social life? Is this not the modern basis of party and union power, the power that holds all the means of coordinating social struggles?

In the face of such enormous power, to which workers are all the more attached because they built it themselves, and which enables them to make measured but continuous progress at the cost of little effort, a power which is moreover linked to the even more enormous power of capital, everything points to the fact that direct action by workers is bound to be a total fiasco. (By “direct action” we mean — in the words of the council communists — autonomous action, i.e. action led by rank-and-file delegates who are more or less at odds with the traditional forms of supervision and integration, i.e. classic parties and unions). In general, this type of action only appears in situations where traditional forms of struggle and organization are, in the eyes of many of those concerned, no longer equal to the situation.

Even on a limited scale, such movements develop virtualities hitherto latent in attitudes of passivity. Don't they require people to take charge of their own lives? The critical spirit, the capacity for collective initiative and decision-making, the feeling of solidarity, the sense of equality — all these mental traits, these elements of culture, which daily life in capitalist society had the effect of repressing and diverting, are now tending to blossom. It's a long and arduous process, as we have to contend with unprecedented pressures, not only from outside, from the forces of management, but also from within, from the power of acquired attitudes, which do not disappear by magic.

As long as these movements remain coгроratist, or punctual — limited to a series of immediate demands — they may achieve some of their objectives; but this victory, always dearly paid for, is soon called into question, with the inevitable “return to normal”. Only in exceptional circumstances of social crisis, finally revealed by mass action, do they lead to the establishment of truly new organs of power. The form of representation inherent in most phases of bourgeois society, with its facade of democratism now veneered on a dilution of so-called joint powers that ultimately leaves the field open to the masters of capital, is then succeeded by the form of direct workers' representation, the workers' councils.

Up to now, these representative bodies have been incapable of deepening and sustaining the powers they had usurped. Of course, there's nothing to say that things will be any different in the future: the task is so colossal. But it's also foolish to pretend to carry it through without first having a project in mind, which public discussion of the various possible orientations, inseparable from any autonomous struggle, will enrich by rectifying. This is what Pannekoek, among others, meant when he said (1952):

“The idea of workers' councils has nothing to do with a program of practical achievements to be implemented tomorrow or next year -, it is merely a guiding thread for the long, hard struggle for emancipation that the working class still has ahead of it.”

If Paulo is to be believed, this would be a system in which the existence of theorists is justified by the importance of the theory they hold — which is no longer the direct product of the practice of the masses themselves, but of the theorization of their past practice by intellectuals“, etc. So I ask: is the “importance of a theory” a function of its capacity to enlighten, or of the personality of any of its representatives? Is it true or false that the past has nothing to teach us about the role of traditional organizations or how to break with them? Is it true or false that, in the present conditions, one of the few means — however derisory it may be in view of the magnitude of the task — available to us to help strengthen the emancipatory movement is none other than the effort to think? Undoubtedly, theory — Marxist theories, whether vulgar or critical — has led to too many failures in the last century for us not to know that it is fallible. But can autonomous action, the only effective factor in educating the masses, be dissociated from reflection and generalization, of which past experience is an inescapable component? This is so obvious that Paulo, the great destroyer of “old things”, sums up his concept with a quote from the intellectual Bakunin, 136 years old...

“Socialism,” Paulo reminds us, along with the chorus of anti-Councilist theorists, cannot be “the effective management of production by the collectivity of producers”. Too pithy a definition to be sufficient1 , certainly, but if socialism has nothing to do with that, what is it? Well, what is it? It's about “radically destroying capital and building life”. That's all the reader needs to know: no culture, no ideology! To equate “workers who need capital to live” with “proletarians who need to destroy capital to live” would be “political gangsterism”. But where does this mysterious obligation come from? Since the distant days when Bakunin set himself up as its apostle, what have been the historical achievements of this supposed category of ravaging proletarians, which would render the modern Council Idea obsolete? And (at least as a theoretical schema) what kind of social edifice is it capable of building?

It's all too easy to dismiss these questions as “ideological”! It's all too easy, too, to exalt the “pleasure of destruction” instead. As if capital hadn't clearly demonstrated, through so many appalling massacres and annihilations of accumulated social labor, its sinister propensities for the pleasure of destruction and for creating the conditions for its triumphant survival!

• 1On production and distribution in the new world, see for example the Pannekoek anthology, part 4, section 4.