Council Communism

Origins and Development

Council communism emerged from the experiences of the 1917 Russian Revolution and the 1918 German November Revolution. The Dutch theorists Anton Pannekoek and Herman Gorter, along with the German Otto Rühle, initially supported the Bolsheviks enthusiastically but soon recognized that the class structures and historical conditions of Russia and Western Europe were fundamentally different.

When the Comintern was formed in 1919 to enforce Bolshevik policies internationally, the anti-parliamentary, anti-trade union majority within the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) was expelled. They formed the Communist Workers' Party of Germany (KAPD) in 1920. Lenin targeted them in his pamphlet 'Left-Wing' Communism: An Infantile Disorder. Gorter responded with his 'Open Letter to Comrade Lenin,' arguing that the Western European working class, lacking a peasant ally, had to fight bourgeois institutions directly.

When the KAPD withdrew from the Comintern in 1921, council communism crystallized as a distinct current. Pannekoek concluded that the Russian Revolution was merely a bourgeois revolution, and the characterization of the Soviet Union as state capitalism became the standard council communist position.

Core Theory

1. Workers' councils, composed of delegates elected at workplaces and recallable at any moment, are the vehicle of revolution and the administrative and economic organs of future society.
2. The Leninist vanguard party is rejected as it necessarily produces party dictatorship. The party's role should be limited to propaganda.
3. Participation in parliamentary elections and existing trade unions is rejected, as these are tools by which the bourgeoisie controls the working class.
4. The Soviet Union is not an alternative to capitalism but a new type of capitalism (state capitalism).

Later Influence

As a mass movement, council communism faded by the early 1930s but continued in small groups through the Dutch GIC (Group of International Communists) and Paul Mattick in the United States. After World War II it influenced the French group Socialisme ou Barbarie, the Situationist International, and the 1968 student movement. Today it is recognized as a body of thought occupying the intersection of libertarian Marxism and anarchism.