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Preliminaries on Councils
and Councilist Organization
“The Workers and Peasants Government has decreed that Kronstadt and the rebelling
ships must immediately submit to the authority of the Soviet Republic. I therefore order
all who have revolted against the socialist fatherland to lay down their arms at once.
Recalcitrants should be disarmed and turned over to the Soviet authorities. The commissars
and other members of the government who have been arrested must be liberated at once. Only
those who surrender unconditionally can expect mercy from the Soviet Republic. I am
simultaneously giving orders to prepare for the suppression of the rebellion and the
subjugation of the sailors by armed force. All responsibility for the harm that may be
suffered by the peaceful population will rest entirely on the heads of the White Guard
mutineers. This warning is final.”
—Trotsky, Kamenev, Ultimatum to Kronstadt
“We have only one answer to all that: All power to the soviets! Take
your hands off them — your hands that are red with the blood of the martyrs of
freedom who fought the White Guards, the landowners and the bourgeoisie!”
—Kronstadt Izvestia #6
During the fifty years since the Leninists reduced communism to electrification, since the
Bolshevik counterrevolution erected the Soviet State over the dead body of the
power of the soviets, and since “soviet” ceased to mean council,
revolutions have continued to fling the Kronstadt demand in the face of the rulers of the
Kremlin: “All power to the soviets and not to the parties.” The
remarkable persistence of the real tendency toward workers councils
throughout this half-century of efforts and repeated suppressions of the modern
proletarian movement now imposes the councils on the new revolutionary current as the sole
form of antistate dictatorship of the proletariat, as the sole tribunal that will be able
to pass judgment on the old world and carry out the sentence itself.
The essence of the councils must be more precisely delineated, not only by refuting the
gross falsifications propagated by social democracy, the Russian bureaucracy, Titoism and
even Ben-Bellaism, but above all by recognizing the insufficiencies in the fledgling
practical experiences of the power of the councils that have briefly appeared so far; as
well, of course, as the insufficiencies in councilist revolutionaries’ very
conceptions. The council’s ultimate tendency appears negatively in the
limits and illusions which have marked its first manifestations and which have caused its
defeat quite as much as has the immediate and uncompromising struggle that is naturally
waged against it by the ruling class. The purpose of the council form is the practical
unification of proletarians in the process of appropriating the material and
intellectual means of changing all existing conditions and making themselves the masters
of their own history. It can and must be the organization in acts of historical
consciousness. But in fact it has nowhere yet succeeded in overcoming the separation
embodied in specialized political organizations and in the forms of ideological
false consciousness that they produce and defend. Moreover, although it is quite natural
that the councils that have been major agents of revolutionary situations have generally
been councils of delegates, since it is such councils which coordinate and
federate the decisions of local councils, it nevertheless appears that the general
assemblies of the rank and file have almost always been considered as mere assemblies of
electors, so that the first level of the “council” is situated above them. Here
already lies an element of separation, which can only be surmounted by treating local
general assemblies of all the proletarians in revolution as the ultimate, fundamental
councils, from which any delegation must derive its power.
Leaving aside the precouncilist features of the Paris Commune that so enthused Marx
(“the finally discovered political form through which the economic emancipation of
labor can be realized”) — features which, moreover, can be seen more in the
organization of the Central Committee of the National Guard, which was composed of
delegates of the Parisian proletariat in arms, than in the elected Commune — the
famous St. Petersburg “Council of Workers’ Deputies” was the first
fledgling manifestation of an organization of the proletariat in a revolutionary
situation. According to the figures given by Trotsky in his book 1905, 200,000
workers sent their delegates to the St. Petersburg Soviet; but its influence extended far
beyond its immediate area, with many other councils in Russia drawing inspiration from its
deliberations and decisions. It directly grouped the workers from more than 150
enterprises, besides welcoming representatives from 16 unions that had rallied to it. Its
first nucleus was formed on October 13; by the 17th the soviet had established an
Executive Committee over itself which Trotsky says “served it as a ministry.”
Out of a total of 562 delegates, the Executive Committee comprised only 31 members, of
which 22 were actually workers delegated by the entirety of the workers in their
enterprises and 9 represented three revolutionary parties (Mensheviks, Bolsheviks and
Social Revolutionaries); however, “the representatives of the parties had only
consultative status and were not entitled to vote.” Although the rank-and-file
assemblies were presumably faithfully represented by their revocable delegates, it is
clear that those delegates had abdicated a large part of their power, in a very parliamentary
way, into the hands of an Executive Committee in which the “technical advisors”
from the political parties had an enormous influence.
How did this soviet originate? It seems that this form of organization was discovered
by certain politically aware elements among the ordinary workers, who for the most part
themselves belonged to one or another socialist fraction. Trotsky seems to be quite
unjustified in writing that “one of the two social-democratic organizations in St.
Petersburg took the initiative of creating an autonomous revolutionary workers’
administration” (moreover, the “one of the two” organizations that did at
least immediately recognize the significance of this workers’ initiative was the
Mensheviks, not the Bolsheviks). But the general strike of October 1905 in fact originated
first of all in Moscow on September 19, when the typographers of the Sytine printing works
went on strike, notably because they wanted punctuation marks to be counted among the 1000
characters that constituted their unit of payment. Fifty printing works followed them out,
and on September 25 the Moscow printers formed a council. On October 3 “the
assembly of workers’ deputies from the printers, mechanics, carpenters, tobacco
workers and other guilds adopted the resolution to set up a general council (soviet) of
Moscow workers” (Trotsky, op. cit.). It can thus be seen that this form
appeared spontaneously at the beginning of the strike movement. And this movement, which
began to fall back in the next few days, was to surge forward again up to the great
historic crisis when on October 7 the railroad workers, beginning in Moscow, spontaneously
began to stop the railway traffic.
The council movement in Turin of March-April 1920 originated among the highly
concentrated proletariat of the Fiat factories. During August and September 1919 new
elections for an “internal commission” (a sort of collaborationist factory
committee set up by a collective convention in 1906 for the purpose of better integrating
the workers) suddenly provided the opportunity, amid the social crisis that was then
sweeping Italy, for a complete transformation of the role of these
“commissioners.” They began to federate among themselves as direct
representatives of the workers. By October 30,000 workers were represented at an assembly
of “executive committees of factory councils,” which resembled more an assembly
of shop stewards (with one commissioner elected by each workshop) than an organization of
councils in the strict sense. But the example nevertheless acted as a catalyst and the
movement radicalized, supported by a fraction of the Socialist Party (including Gramsci)
that was in the majority in Turin and by the Piedmont anarchists (see Pier Carlo
Masini’s pamphlet, Anarchici e comunisti nel movimento dei Consigli a Torino).
The movement was resisted by the majority of the Socialist Party and by the unions. On 15
March 1920 the councils began a strike combined with occupation of the factories
and resumed production under their own control. By April 14 the strike was
general in Piedmont; in the following days it spread through much of northern Italy,
particularly among the dockers and railroad workers. The government had to use warships to
land troops at Genoa to march on Turin. While the councilist program was later to be
approved by the Congress of the Italian Anarchist Union when it met at Bologna on July 1,
the Socialist Party and the unions succeeded in sabotaging the strike by keeping it
isolated: when Turin was besieged by 20,000 soldiers and police, the party newspaper Avanti
refused to print the appeal of the Turin socialist section (see Masini, op. cit.).
The strike, which would clearly have made possible a victorious insurrection in the whole
country, was vanquished on April 24. What happened next is well known.
In spite of certain remarkably advanced features of this rarely mentioned experience
(numerous leftists are under the mistaken impression that factory occupations took place
for the first time in France in 1936), it should be noted that it contains serious
ambiguities, even among its partisans and theorists. Gramsci wrote in Ordine Nuovo
(second year, #4): “We see the factory council as the historic beginning of a process
that must ultimately lead to the foundation of the workers’ state.” For their
part, the councilist anarchists were sparing in their criticism of labor unionism and
claimed that the councils would give it a renewed impetus.
However, the manifesto launched by the Turin councilists on 27 March 1920, “To the
Workers and Peasants of All Italy,” calling for a general congress of the councils
(which never took place), formulates some essential points of the council program:
“The struggle for conquest must be fought with arms of conquest, and no longer only
with those of defense (SI note: this is aimed at the unions, which the manifesto
describes elsewhere as “organisms of resistance . . . crystallized into a
bureaucratic form”). A new organization must be developed as a direct antagonist of
the organs of the bosses’ government; for that task it must spring up spontaneously
in the workplace and unite all the workers, because all of them, as producers, are
subjected to an authority that is alien (estranea) to them, and must liberate
themselves from it. . . . This is the beginning of freedom for you: the
beginning of a social formation that by rapidly and universally extending itself will put
you in a position to eliminate the exploiter and the middleman from the economic field and
to become yourselves the masters — the masters of your machines, of your work, and of
your life . . . ”
The majority of the Workers and Soldiers Councils in the Germany of 1918-1919 were more
crudely dominated by the Social-Democratic bureaucracy or were victims or its maneuvers.
They tolerated Ebert’s “socialist” government, whose main support came from
the General Staff and the Freikorps. The “Hamburg seven points” (calling for the
immediate dissolution of the old Army), presented by Dorrenbach and passed with a large
majority by the Congress of Soldiers Councils that opened December 16 in Berlin, were not
implemented by the “People’s Commissars.” The councils tolerated this
defiance, and the legislative elections that had been quickly set for January 19; then
they tolerated the attack launched against Dorrenbach’s sailors; finally, they
tolerated the crushing of the Spartakist insurrection on the very eve of those elections.
In 1956 the Central Workers Council of Greater Budapest, constituted on November 14 and
declaring itself determined to defend socialism, demanded “the withdrawal of all
political parties from the factories” while at the same time pronouncing itself in
favor of Nagy’s return to power and free elections within a short time. It is true
that this was during the time it was continuing the general strike despite the Russian
troops’ having already crushed the armed resistance. But even before the second
Russian intervention the Hungarian councils had called for parliamentary elections: that
is to say, they themselves were seeking to return to a dual-power situation at a time when
they were in fact, in the face of the Russians, the only actual power in Hungary.
Consciousness of what the power of the councils is and must be arises from the
very practice of that power. But at an impeded stage of that power it may be very
different from what one or another isolated member of a council, or even an entire
council, thinks. Ideology opposes the truth in acts whose field is the system of
the councils; and such ideology manifests itself not only in the form of hostile
ideologies, or in the form of ideologies about the councils devised by political
forces that want to subjugate them, but also in the form of an ideology in favor of
the power of the councils, which restrains and reifies their total theory and practice. A
pure councilism will inevitably prove to be an enemy of the reality of the
councils. There is a risk that such an ideology, more or less consistently formulated,
will be borne by revolutionary organizations that are in principle in favor of the power
of the councils. This power, which is itself the organization of revolutionary society
and whose coherence is objectively determined by the practical necessities of this
historical task grasped as a whole, can in no case escape the practical problem posed by specialist
organizations which, whether enemies of the councils or more or less genuinely in
favor of them, will inevitably interfere in their functioning. The masses organized in
councils must be aware of this problem and overcome it. This is where councilist theory
and the existence of authentically councilist organizations have a great importance. In
them already appear certain essential points that will be at stake in the councils and in
their own interaction with the councils.
All revolutionary history shows the part played in the failure of the councils by the
emergence of a councilist ideology. The ease with which the spontaneous organization of
the proletariat in struggle wins its first victories is often the prelude to a second
phase in which counterrevolution works from the inside, in which the movement lets go of
its reality in order to pursue the illusion that amounts to its defeat. Councilism is the
artificial respiration that revives the old world.
Social democrats and Bolsheviks are in agreement in wishing to see in the councils only
an auxiliary body of the party and the state. In 1902 Kautsky, worried because the unions
were becoming discredited in the eyes of the workers, wanted workers in certain branches
of industry to elect “delegates who would form a sort of parliament designed to
regulate their work and keep watch over the bureaucratic administration” (The
Social Revolution). The idea of a hierarchized system of workers’ representation
culminating in a parliament was to be implemented most convincingly by Ebert, Noske and
Scheidemann. The way this type of councilism treats the councils was definitively
demonstrated — for anyone who doesn’t have shit for brains — as long ago as
9 November 1918, when the Social Democrats combated the spontaneous organization of the
councils on its own ground by founding in the Vorwärts offices a “Council
of the Workers and Soldiers of Berlin” consisting of 12 loyal factory workers along
with a few Social-Democratic leaders and functionaries.
Bolshevik councilism has neither Kautsky’s naïveté nor Ebert’s crudeness.
It springs from the most radical base — “All power to the soviets” —
and lands on the other side of Kronstadt. In The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet
Government (April 1918) Lenin adds enzymes to Kautsky’s detergent: “Even in
the most democratic capitalist republics in the world, the poor never regard the bourgeois
parliament as ‘their’ institution. . . . It is the closeness of the
Soviets to the ‘people,’ to the working people, that creates the special forms
of recall and other means of control from below which must now be most zealously
developed. For example, the Councils of Public Education — periodic conferences of
Soviet electors and their delegates convoked to discuss and control the activities of the
Soviet authorities in this field — deserve our full sympathy and support. Nothing
could be sillier than to transform the Soviets into something congealed and
self-contained. The more resolutely we have to stand for a ruthlessly firm government, for
the dictatorship of individuals in certain processes of work and in certain
aspects of purely executive functions, the more varied must be the forms and
methods of control from below in order to counteract the slightest hint of any potential
distortion of the principles of Soviet government, in order tirelessly and repeatedly to
weed out bureaucracy.” For Lenin, then, the councils, like charitable institutions,
should become pressure groups correcting the inevitable bureaucratization of the
state’s political and economic functions, respectively handled by the Party and the
unions. The councils are the social component that, like Descartes soul, has to be hooked
on somewhere.
Gramsci himself merely cleanses Lenin in a bath of democratic niceties: “The
factory commissioners are the only true social (economic and political) representatives of
the working class because they are elected under universal suffrage by all the workers in
the workplace itself. At the different levels of their hierarchy, the commissioners
represent the union of all the workers in various levels of production units (work gang,
factory department, union of factories in an industry, union of enterprises in a city,
union of production units of mechanical and agricultural industries in a district, a
province, a region, the nation, the world), whose councils and system of councils
represent the government and the management of society.” (Article in Ordine
Nuovo.) Since the councils have been reduced to economico-social fragments preparing
the way for a “future Soviet republic,” it goes without saying that the Party,
that “Modern Prince,” appears as the indispensable political mediation, as the
preexisting deus ex machina taking care to ensure its future existence: “The
Communist Party is the instrument and historical form of the process of internal
liberation thanks to which the workers, from being executants become initiators, from
being masses become leaders and guides, from being muscles are
transformed into minds and wills” (Ordine Nuovo, 1919). The tune may change,
but the song of councilism remains the same: Councils, Party, State. To treat the councils
fragmentarily (economic power, social power, political power), as does the councilist
cretinism of the Révolution Internationale group of Toulouse, is like thinking
that by clenching your ass you’ll only be buggered half way.
After 1918 Austro-Marxism also constructed a councilist ideology of its own, in
accordance with the slow reformist evolution that it advocated. Max Adler, for example, in
his book Democracy and Workers Councils, recognizes councils as instruments of
workers’ self-education which could end the separation between order-givers and
order-takers and serve to form a homogenous people capable of implementing
socialist democracy. But he also realizes that the fact that councils of workers hold some
power in no way guarantees that they have a coherent revolutionary aim: for that, the
worker members of the councils must explicitly want to transform the society and bring
about socialism. Since Adler is a theorist of legalized dual power, that is, of
an absurdity that will never be capable of lasting as it gradually approaches
revolutionary consciousness and prudently prepares a revolution for later on, he
inevitably overlooks the single really fundamental element of the proletariat’s
self-education: revolution itself. To replace this irreplaceable terrain of proletarian
homogenization and this sole mode of selection for the very formation of the councils
as well as for the formation of ideas and coherent modes of activity within the councils,
Adler comes to the point of imagining that there is no other remedy than this incredibly
moronic rule: “The right to vote in workers council elections must depend on
membership in a socialist organization.”
Leaving aside the social-democratic or Bolshevik ideologies about the
councils, which from Berlin to Kronstadt always had a Noske or a Trotsky too many,
councilist ideology itself, as manifested in past councilist organizations and in
some present ones, has always had several general assemblies and imperative mandates too
few. All the councils that have existed until now, with the exception of the agrarian
collectives of Aragon, saw themselves as simply “democratically elected
councils,” even when the highest moments of their practice, when all decisions were
made by sovereign general assemblies mandating revocable delegates, contradicted this
limitation.
Only historical practice, through which the working class must discover and realize all
its possibilities, will indicate the precise organizational forms of council power. On the
other hand, it is the immediate task of revolutionaries to determine the fundamental
principles of the councilist organizations that are going to arise in every
country. By formulating some hypotheses and recalling the fundamental requirements of the
revolutionary movement, this article — which should be followed by others — is
intended to initiate a genuine and egalitarian debate. The only people who will
be excluded from this debate are those who refuse to pose the problem in these terms,
those who in the name of some sub-anarchist spontaneism proclaim their opposition to any
form of organization, and who only reproduce the defects and confusion of the old movement
— mystics of nonorganization, workers discouraged by having been mixed up with
Trotskyist sects too long, students imprisoned in their impoverishment who are incapable
of escaping from bolshevik organizational schemas. The situationists are obviously
partisans of organization — the existence of the situationist organization
testifies to that. Those who announce their agreement with our theses while crediting the
SI with a vague spontaneism simply don’t know how to read.
Organization is indispensable precisely because it isn’t everything and
doesn’t enable everything to be saved or won. Contrary to what butcher Noske said (in
Von Kiel bis Kapp) about the events of 6 January 1919, the masses did not fail to
become “masters of Berlin on noon that day” because they had “fine
talkers” instead of “determined leaders,” but because the factory
councils’ form of autonomous organization had not yet attained a sufficient level of
autonomy for them to be able to do without “determined leaders” and separate
organizations to handle their linkups. The shameful example of Barcelona in May 1937 is
another proof of this: the fact that arms were brought out so quickly in response to the
Stalinist provocation says a lot for the Catalonian masses’ immense capacities for
autonomy; but the fact that the order to surrender issued by the anarchist
ministers was so quickly obeyed demonstrates how much autonomy for victory they still
lacked. Tomorrow again it will be the workers’ degree of autonomy that will
decide our fate.
The councilist organizations that will be formed will therefore not fail to recognize
and appropriate, as indeed a minimum, the Minimum Definition of
Revolutionary Organizations adopted by the 7th Conference of the SI (see Internationale
Situationniste #11). Since their task will be to work toward the power of the
councils, which is incompatible with any other form of power, they will be aware that a
merely abstract agreement with this definition condemns them to nonexistence;
this is why their real agreement will be practically demonstrated in the nonhierarchical
relations within their groups or sections; in the relations between these groups and with
other autonomous groups or organizations; in the development of revolutionary theory and
the unitary critique of the ruling society; and in the ongoing critique of their own
practice. Maintaining a unitary program and practice, they will refuse the old
partitioning of the workers movement into separate organizations (i.e. parties and
unions). Despite the beautiful history of the councils, all the councilist organizations
of the past that have played a significant role in class struggles have accepted
separation into political, economic and social sectors. One of the few old parties worth
analysis, the Kommunistische Arbeiter Partei Deutschlands (KAPD, German Communist
Workers Party), adopted a councilist program, but by assigning to itself as its only
essential tasks propaganda and theoretical discussion — “the political education
of the masses” — it left the role of federating the revolutionary factory
organizations to the Allgemeine Arbeiter Union Deutschlands (AAUD, General
Workers Union of Germany), a schema not far from traditional syndicalism. Even though the
KAPD rejected the Leninist idea of the mass party, along with the parliamentarianism and
syndicalism of the KPD (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands — German
Communist Party), and preferred to group together politically conscious workers, it
nevertheless remained tied to the old hierarchical model of the vanguard party:
professionals of Revolution and salaried propagandists. A rejection of this model (in
particular, a rejection of the practice of separating the political organization from the
revolutionary factory organizations) led in 1920 to the secession of some of the AAUD
members, who then formed the AAUD-E (the ‘E’ for Einheitsorganisation
— Unified Organization). By the very working of its internal democracy the new
unitary organization aimed to accomplish the educative work that had until then devolved
on the KAPD, and it simultaneously assigned itself the task of coordinating struggles: the
factory organizations that it federated were supposed to transform themselves into
councils at the revolutionary moment and take over the management of the society. Here
again the modern watchword of workers councils was still mixed with messianic memories of
the old revolutionary syndicalism: the factory organizations would magically become
councils when all the workers took part in them.
All that led where it would. After the crushing of the 1921 insurrection and the
repression of the movement, large numbers of workers, discouraged by the waning prospect
of revolution, abandoned factory struggle. The AAUD was only another name for the KAPD,
and the AAUD-E saw revolution recede as fast as its membership declined. They were no
longer anything but bearers of a councilist ideology more and more cut off from
reality.
The KAPD’s evolution into terrorism and the AAUD’s increasing involvement in
“bread and butter” issues led to the split between the factory organization and
its party in 1929. In 1931 the corpses of the AAUD and the AAUD-E pathetically and without
any sound or explicit bases merged in the face of the rise of Nazism. The revolutionary
elements of the two organizations regrouped to form the KAUD (Kommunistische Arbeiter
Union Deutschlands — German Communist Workers Union). A consciously minority
organization, the KAUD was also the only one in the whole movement for councils in Germany
that did not claim to take upon itself the future economic (or economico-political as in
the case of the AAUD-E) organization of society. It called on the workers to form
autonomous groups and to themselves handle the linkups between those groups. But in
Germany the KAUD came much too late; by 1931 the revolutionary movement had been dead for
nearly ten years.
If only to make them cry, let us remind the retarded devotees of the anarchist-Marxist
feud that the CNT-FAI — with its dead weight of anarchist ideology, but also with its
greater practice of liberatory imagination — was akin to the Marxist KAPD-AAUD in its
organizational arrangements. In the same way as the German Communist Workers Party, the
Iberian Anarchist Federation saw itself as the political organization of the
conscious Spanish workers, while its AAUD, the CNT, was supposed to take charge of the
management of the future society. The FAI militants, the elite of the proletariat,
propagated the anarchist idea among the masses; the CNT did the practical work of
organizing the workers in its unions. There were two essential differences, however, the
ideological one of which was to bear the fruit one could have expected of it. The first
was that the FAI did not strive to take power, but contented itself with influencing the
overall policies of the CNT. The second was that the CNT really represented the
Spanish working class. Adopted on 1 May 1936 at the CNT congress at Saragossa, two months
before the revolutionary explosion, one of the most beautiful programs ever proclaimed by
a revolutionary organization was partially put into practice by the anarchosyndicalist
masses, while their leaders foundered in ministerialism and class-collaboration. With the
pimps of the masses, García Oliver, Secundo Blanco, etc., and the brothel-madam Montseny,
the antistate libertarian movement, which had already tolerated the anarcho-trenchist
Prince Kropotkin, finally attained the historical consummation of its ideological
absolutism: government anarchists. In the last historical battle it was to wage,
anarchism was to see all the ideological sauce that comprised its being fall back into its
face: State, Freedom, Individual, and other musty ingredients with capital letters; while
the libertarian militians, workers and peasants were saving its honor, making the
greatest practical contribution ever to the international proletarian movement,
burning churches, fighting on all fronts against the bourgeoisie, fascism and Stalinism,
and beginning to create a truly communist society.
Some present-day organizations cunningly pretend not to exist. This enables them to
avoid bothering with the slightest clarification of the bases on which they assemble any
assortment of people (while magically labeling them all “workers”); to avoid
giving their semimembers any account of the informal leadership that holds the
controls; and to thoughtlessly denounce any theoretical expression and any other form of
organization as automatically evil and harmful. Thus the Informations, Correspondance
Ouvrières group writes in a recent bulletin (ICO #84, August 1969):
“Councils are the transformation of strike committees under the influence of the
situation itself and in response to the very necessities of the struggle, within the very
dialectic of that struggle. Any other attempt, at any moment in a struggle, to declare the
necessity of creating workers councils reveals a councilist ideology such as can be seen
in diverse forms in certain unions, in the PSU, or among the situationists. The very
concept of council excludes any ideology.” These individuals clearly know nothing
about ideology — their own ideology is distinguished from more fully developed ones
only by its spineless eclecticism. But they have heard (perhaps from Marx, perhaps only
from the SI) that ideology has become a bad thing. They take advantage of this to try to
have it believed that any theoretical work — which they avoid as if it were a sin
— is an ideology, among the situationists exactly as in the PSU. But their gallant
recourse to the “dialectic” and the “concept” which they have now
added to their vocabulary in no way saves them from an imbecilic ideology of which the
above quotation alone is evidence enough. If one idealistically relies on the council
“concept” or, what is even more euphoric, on the practical inactivity of ICO, to
“exclude all ideology” in the real councils, one must expect the worst — we
have seen that historical experience justifies no such optimism in this regard. The
supersession of the primitive council form can only come from struggles becoming more
conscious, and from struggles for more consciousness. ICO’s mechanistic
image of the strike committee’s perfect automatic response to
“necessities,” which presents the council as automatically coming into existence
at the appropriate time provided that one makes sure not to talk about it,
completely ignores the experience of the revolutions of our century, which shows that
“the situation itself” is just as ready to crush the councils, or to enable them
to be manipulated and coopted, as it is to give rise to them.
Let us leave this contemplative ideology, this pathetic caricature of the natural
sciences which would have us observe the emergence of a proletarian revolution almost as
if it were a solar eruption. Councilist organizations will be formed, though they must be
quite the contrary of general staffs that would cause the councils to rise up on order. In
spite of the new period of open social crisis we have entered since the occupations
movement, and the proliferation of encouraging situations here and there, from Italy to
the USSR, it is quite likely that genuine councilist organizations will still take a long
time to form and that other important revolutionary situations will occur before such
organizations are in a position to intervene in them at a significant level. One must not
play with councilist organization by setting up or supporting premature parodies of it.
But the councils will certainly have greater chances of maintaining themselves as sole
power if they contain conscious councilists and if there is a real appropriation of
councilist theory.
In contrast to the council as permanent basic unit (ceaselessly setting up and
modifying councils of delegates emanating from itself), as the assembly in which all the
workers of an enterprise (workshop and factory councils) and all the inhabitants of an
urban district who have rallied to the revolution (street councils, neighborhood councils)
must participate, a councilist organization, in order to guarantee its coherence and the
authentic working of its internal democracy, must choose its members in
accordance with what they explicitly want and what they actually can do. As for the
councils, their coherence is guaranteed by the single fact that they are the sole
power; that they eliminate all other power and decide everything. This practical
experience is the terrain where people learn how to become conscious of their own action,
where they “realize philosophy.” It goes without saying that their majorities
also run the risk of making lots of momentary mistakes and not having the time or the
means to rectify them. But they know that their fate is the product of their own
decisions, and that they will be destroyed by the repercussions of any mistakes they
don’t correct.
Within councilist organizations real equality of everyone in making decisions and
carrying them out will not be an empty slogan or an abstract demand. Of course, not all
the members of an organization will have the same talents (it is obvious, for example,
that a worker will invariably write better than a student). But because in its aggregate
the organization will have all the talents it needs, no hierarchy of individual talents
will come to undermine its democracy. It is neither membership in a councilist
organization nor the proclamation of an ideal equality that will enable all its members to
be beautiful and intelligent and to live well; but only their real aptitudes for becoming
more beautiful and more intelligent and for living better, freely developing in the only
game that’s worth the pleasure: the destruction of the old world.
In the social movements that are going to spread, the councilists will refuse to let
themselves be elected to strike committees. On the contrary, their task will be to act in
such a way as to encourage the rank-and-file self-organization of the workers into general
assemblies that decide how the struggle is carried out. It will be necessary to begin to
understand that the absurd call for a “central strike committee” proposed by
some naïve individuals during the May 1968 occupations movement would, had it succeeded,
have sabotaged the movement toward the autonomy of the masses even more quickly than
actually happened, since almost all the strike committees were controlled by the
Stalinists.
Given that it is not for us to forge a plan for all time, and that one step forward by
the real movement of the councils will be worth more than a dozen councilist programs, it
is difficult to state precise hypotheses regarding the relation of councilist
organizations with councils during a revolutionary situation. The councilist organization
— which knows itself to be separated from the proletariat — must cease
to exist as a separate organization in the moment that abolishes separations; and it will
have to do this even if the complete freedom of association guaranteed by the power of the
councils allows various parties and organizations that are enemies of this power to
survive. It may be doubted, however, that it is feasible to immediately dissolve all
councilist organizations the very instant the councils first appear, as Pannekoek wished.
The councilists should speak as councilists within the council, rather than staging an
exemplary dissolution of their organizations only to regroup them on the side and play
pressure-group politics in the general assembly. In this way it will be easier and more
legitimate for them to combat and denounce the inevitable presence of bureaucrats, spies
and ex-scabs who will infiltrate here and there. They will also have to struggle against
fake councils or fundamentally reactionary ones (e.g. police councils) which will not fail
to appear. They will act in such a way that the unified power of the councils does not
recognize such bodies or their delegates. Because the infiltration of other organizations
is exactly the contrary of the ends they are pursuing, and because they refuse any
incoherence within themselves, councilist organization will prohibit any dual membership.
As we have said, all the workers of a factory must take part in the council, or at least
all those who accept the rules of its game. The solution to the problem of whether to
accept participation in the council by “those who yesterday had to be thrown out of
the factory at gunpoint” (Barth) will be found only in practice.
Ultimately, the councilist organization will stand or fall solely by the coherence of
its theory and action and by its struggle for the complete elimination of all power
remaining external to the councils or trying to make itself independent of them. But in
order to simplify the discussion right off by refusing even to take into consideration a
mass of councilist pseudo-organizations that may be simulated by students or obsessive
professional militants, let us say that it does not seem to us that an organization can be
recognized as councilist if it is not comprised of at least 2/3 workers. As this
proportion might pass for a concession, let us add that it seems to us indispensable to
correct it with this rider: in all delegations to central conferences at which decisions
may be taken that have not previously been provided for by imperative mandates, workers
must make up 3/4 of the participants. In sum, the inverse proportion of the first
congresses of the “Russian Social-Democratic Workers Party.”
It is known that we have no inclination toward workerism of any form whatsoever. The
above considerations refer to workers who have “become dialecticians,” as they
will have to become en masse in the exercise of the power of the councils. But on
the one hand, the workers continue to be the central force capable of bringing
the existing functioning of society to a halt and the indispensable force for
reinventing all its bases. On the other hand, although the councilist organization
obviously must not separate other categories of wage-earners, notably intellectuals, from
itself, it is in any case important that the dubious importance the latter may assume
should be severely restricted: not only by verifying, by considering all aspects of their
lives, that such intellectuals are really councilist revolutionaries, but also by seeing
to it that there are as few of them in the organization as possible.
The councilist organization will not consent to speak on equal terms with other
organizations unless they are consistent partisans of proletarian autonomy; just as the
councils will not only have to free themselves from the grip of parties and unions, but
must also reject any tendency aiming to pigeonhole them in some limited position and to
negotiate with them as one power to another. The councils are the only power or they are
nothing. The means of their victory are already their victory. With the lever of the
councils plus the fulcrum of the total negation of the spectacle-commodity
society, the Earth can be raised.
The victory of the councils is not the end of the revolution, but the beginning of it.
RENÉ RIESEL
September 1969
Translated by Ken Knabb (slightly modified from the version in the Situationist
International Anthology).
No copyright.
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