Council communists' opinion on bureaucracy in the Petrograd soviet Feb-Oct 1917

Not quite a council communist (but a left communist) - having some kind of structure and a degree of centralisation does not necessarily equal bureaucracy. Particularly if higher bodies are still made up of delegates (as is the case for soviet democracy). Even the soviets in Makhno's territory had their own executive committees.

But if you a priori oppose any "concentration of power" then your issue might be with soviet democracy itself, since it's an expression of workers' power.

The factory committees (as building blocks of the Soviet council system) were a positive working class response to the immediate practical problems that workers faced in extreme conditions - still an experiment and work in progress - best look to the limitations in that in the objective circumstances, class composition, and most recent history of workplace struggle prior to the emergence of the committees. Please consult:
https://libcom.org/library/red-petrograd-revolution-factories-1917-1918-sa-smith

LBC

Dyjbas

But if you a priori oppose any "concentration of power" then your issue might be with soviet democracy itself, since it's an expression of workers' power.

No, because workers' power can be more widely dispersed among workers or at least among their delegates. Most of their delegates were left out of the decision making process, concentrating the power in only a fraction of them.

I believe Dyjbas' point is that if you oppose "concentrating power" as some principle, then concentrating power in the hands of workers, excluding capitalists etc., would seem to contradict that.

In decision-making itself there will always be a minority whose say is subordinate to that of a majority, which the former might see as violating their liberty. What's "authoritarian," a "violation of liberty" or an "illegitimate concentration of power" is relative, and it's not very useful if such ideas/principles are at the forefront of a societal critique, as they were for Bakunin and others.

I think we need to differentiate between an administrative structure of self-management and sectional ownership of a means of production.

Not sure about council communists specifically, so this might not be relevant for you. But I think spikyMike mentioned factory committees is that lots of people to the left of Bolsheviks typically do have a critique in general of soviets in the Russian revolution, and often point to factory committees as being better examples of working class democracy in practice at a grassroots level. Because even though there were many positive things about soviets, in many cases they were quite small, relatively, and quite distant from workers on the ground.
This pamphlet has more useful info, both on the committees and where they came into conflict with the, typically more moderate and bureaucratic soviets: https://libcom.org/library/factory-committees-russian-revolution-rod-jones

AJ, can you elaborate

All I was trying to say, LBC, is that the conventional and now outdated interpretation of syndicalism and industrial unionism and workers councils was that the workers would own their place of work, not too much different from today's Wolff's Workers Self Directed Enterprises proposals and many other advocates of cooperatives.

It was once summed up in the slogan, mines to the miners, the railways to the train workers and the garbage to the garbage collectors (or words to that effect)

What was being overlooked was the means of production should be socially own and controlled by society, not merely the workers in all the varied industries, who may well have conflicting interests. For example, I note Dave Douglass, one-time NUM militant still promotes the coal industry as positive and is against the fossil fuel opponents.

The day-to-day operation of manufacturing and transport will be carried out by various forms of workers councils and management committees but they will not collectively "own" it. They will run it on behalf of the rest of us.

They will have the task of fulfilling the wishes and meeting the demands of the community and of the wider society as a whole.

The IWW recognised the issue and introduced qualifications for new IU sectors to include actual non-paid workers such as those termed homeworkers so these anomalies are understood and being addressed.

It's also important to remember that the soviets functioned a bit differently across space and time. The Petrograd Soviet, with its many district soviets, was not, say, the Baku Soviet, where the hold of the working class was always weaker. And the Petrograd Soviet of March 1917 was not the Petrograd Soviet of December 1917. In fact, during the first six months after the October Revolution the Bolsheviks actually extended the soviet system and the principle of delegation and recall to many other areas of public life. Factory committees, which in many factories were actually called "soviets of workers' deputies" and sent delegates to district soviets and congresses, were part of that widespread grassroots.

In general, soviet democracy was the synthesis of centralisation and decentralisation. The Congress of Soviets, made up of delegates from district, regional, provincial, county and rural soviets, had supreme power. The Congress then delegated a Central Executive Committee (VTsIK) which held supreme power in between the congresses. The VTsIK then formed a Council of People's Commissars (Sovnarkom) and various other departments. The real issues only began during the Civil War, as working class self-organisation on a local level gradually exhausted itself and the mutual relationship between the higher and lower organs of soviet democracy was interrupted. It's in the course of that process that particularly the Sovnarkom began to assume the role of a capitalist state formation.

adri

I believe Dyjbas' point is that if you oppose "concentrating power" as some principle, then concentrating power in the hands of workers, excluding capitalists etc., would seem to contradict that.

Yes, this.

Lucky Black Cat

Dyjbas - as a left communist, are you more influenced by the Italian tendency or the Dutch-German tendency?

Italian Left (I'm in the CWO-ICT), but there are important lessons to be learned from the Dutch-German Left as well.

I can't see the connection to my post, though. Had I said something that made you think I saw it differently?

Not at all, LBC, as the topic was on workers' councils, it just had to be said.

In fact, your posts have been very welcome, bringing attention to many basic discussion points on Libcom, which for a while was a little bit inactive.

ajjohnstone

All I was trying to say, LBC, is that the conventional and now outdated interpretation of syndicalism and industrial unionism and workers councils was that the workers would own their place of work, not too much different from today's Wolff's Workers Self Directed Enterprises proposals and many other advocates of cooperatives. It was once summed up in the slogan, mines to the miners, the railways to the train workers and the garbage to the garbage collectors (or words to that effect) What was being overlooked was the means of production should be socially own and controlled by society, not merely the workers in all the varied industries, who may well have conflicting interests.

Except the means of production being "socially own[ed] and controlled by society, not merely [by] the workers in all the varied industries" is exactly how workers' councils were understood by most communists at the time, e.g.:

"The Soviets are the organs that take the place of parliament and the bourgeois administrative assemblies and gradually replace all the other ramifications of the State. To put it in the words of the most recent congress of the Russian communists, as quoted by Comrade Zinoviev, "the Soviets are the State organizations of the workers and poor peasants; they exercise the dictatorship of the proletariat during the stage when all previous forms of the State are being extinguished." In the final analysis, this system of State organizations gives representation to all producers in their capacity as members of the working class, and not as members of a particular trade or industrial sector. According to the latest manifesto of the Third International, the Soviets represent "a new type of mass organization, one which embraces the working class in its entirety, irrespective of individual trades or levels of political maturity"." (Bordiga, 1920)