Non-semantical differences between anarchism and council communism?

[Skyhilist]

Previously it had seemed to me that the disagreements between council communists and anarchists was mainly based on semantical distinctions (e.g. whether workers' councils should be called "DoTP" or "a state" or not)

Another poster told me though that there are apparently important distinctions between the two that make it so that "both are at odds with each other."

So could someone explain what these differences are that don't relate to semantics but that but anarchism and council communism so "at odds with each other", if this is true?

Thanks.

[Quail]

From Libcom (http://libcom.org/thought/council-communism-an-introduction):

Council communism was a militant workers' movement that first emerged in Germany and the Netherlands during the 1920s. Today it continues as an important theoretical current within libertarian communism.
The central (and simple) argument of council communism, in stark contrast to both reformist social democrats and Leninists, is that workers’ councils which arise in workplaces and communities during periods of intense struggle are the natural form of working class organisation. This view is completely opposed to reformist or Leninist arguments which stress that the working class are incapable of doing anything by ourselves and need to rely on vanguard parties, ballot boxes (and the state institutions that both of these entail) to sort out our problems.
These conclusions lead council communists to maintain very similar positions to those held by anarchist communists with the main difference often, but not always, being a commitment to Marx and his methods of analysis. As such there are historical and present day instances of close cooperation between the two currents, even to the point of council communists becoming members of anarchist communist groups.
Following from this, council communists argue that society and the economy should be managed by federations of workers’ councils, made up of delegates elected at workplaces and can be recalled at any moment by those who elected them. As such, council communists oppose bureaucratic state socialism (http://libcom.org/tags/state-socialism). They also oppose the idea of a revolutionary party seizing power, believing that any social upheaval led by one these ‘revolutionary’ parties will just end up in a party dictatorship.
They also believe that the role of the revolutionary party is not to perform the revolution for the working class, but only to agitate within the class, encouraging people to take control of their own struggles through the directly democratic institutions of workers’ councils.
It’s sometimes been thought that council communists have maintained an ‘outside and against’ position on bureaucratic reformist trade unions, seeing them as a brake on workers’ militancy and believing that the leadership, whose role is seen as little more than ‘cops with flat caps’, will always eventually sell out the membership. It is true that, historically at least, council communists have been anti-trade union. However, this has largely been due to the context in which council communists were writing. For instance, German council communists of the 1920s were fully aware of the German trade unions’ role in betraying the attempted workers’ revolution in 1918 (http://libcom.org/tags/german-revolution-1918). However, in modern times, though keeping a very critical view of trade unions and their undemocratic nature, council communists generally believe that having a union is better for workers than not having one.
Council communists obviously also held a strong criticism of the ‘successful’ Russian revolution of 1917 (http://libcom.org/tags/russian-revolution). Though they felt that originally it had a pro-working class nature about it, it ended up being a bourgeois revolution, with the new ‘communist’ leaders replacing the old feudal aristocracy with a state capitalist bureaucracy. The council communists hold that the Bolshevik Party (http://libcom.org/library/fight-against-fascism-begins-with-fight-against-bolshevism-ruhle) just took over the role of individual capitalists rather then got rid of it.
The council communists emerged largely out of the German rank-and-file trade union movement, who opposed their unions and organised increasingly radical strikes towards the end of 1917 and the beginning of 1918. These formed into the Communist Workers’ Party of Germany (KAPD) (http://libcom.org/tags/kapd), it's union the AAUD, and the AAUD-E (http://libcom.org/library/chapter-14-kapd-aaud-e), whose hey-day was in the attempted German revolution of 1918-19. Similar tendencies developed within the workers’ movements of Italy (http://libcom.org/history/articles/italy-factory-occupations-1920), Bulgaria and the Netherlands.
The brutally repressed but briefly successful anti-USSR workers' uprising in Hungary 1956 (http://libcom.org/tags/hungary-56) is often used as a practical example of how workers' councils can arise naturally out of the working class during periods of intense class struggle, even despite the workers' lack of explicit commitment to council communist theory.
Council communist ideas have since been taken on by many libertarian communists around the world with groups like Socialisme ou Barbarie (http://libcom.org/tags/socialisme-ou-barbarie) and the Situationist International (http://libcom.org/tags/situationist-international) being greatly influenced by them.
However, these groups are sometimes designated derogatively as 'councilist' by council communists, for overtly obsessing over workers' spontaneity and submitting to what Mark Shipway describes (http://libcom.org/library/council-communism-mark-shipway-1987) as 'an empty, formalistic emphasis on workers’ councils which completely neglects the communist content of the council communist equation.' This is perceived as dangerous because it is possible that workers might be able to spontaneously take over the means of production during a crisis but only end up establishing a form of 'self-managed capitalism' in which federated workers' councils govern the world but unpleasant capitalist wage relations (http://libcom.org/library/karl-marx-alienated-labour) are still retained.
Council communists in contrast think that the working class must develop to possess a strong political consciousness and have communism and the abolition of capitalism set as their goal; the councils are only the means by which this goal can be realised. This was also the criticism made by the KAPD/AAUD when the AAUD-E split from them in rejection of a separate organisation of communists.


Personally the only part of that I'd really disagree with is that I think we should engage with traditional trade unions as a way of building consciousness. Obviously trade unions in their current form have huge limitations but since they're the way that most workers organise it doesn't make sense to avoid all participation in them.

Also, the article says
"These conclusions lead council communists to maintain very similar positions to those held by anarchist communists with the main difference often, but not always, being a commitment to Marx and his methods of analysis."
but I don't personally know of any anarchists who haven't read Marx and aren't influenced by him.

I'm currently doing a bit of reading into council communism, so maybe I'll come back to this thread in a bit when I've done some more reading. I guess I am fairly sympathetic towards what I've read about council communism so far though.

[Skyhilist]

They also believe that the role of the revolutionary party is not to perform the revolution for the working class, but only to agitate within the class, encouraging people to take control of their own struggles through the directly democratic institutions of workers’ councils.

Well damn, this is confusing. Blake's Baby, who generally seems to know his stuff on this told me that council communists did not support a revolutionary party playing any role in revolution. So I'm guessing maybe left communists and council communists have different ideas on what a "revolutionary party" is. This doesn't really seem to differ from anarchism in any non-semantical way then. Anarchists tend to be against revolutionary parties in my experience, but aren't against groups like AFed for example that council communists might even call "revolutionary parties", given that their definition of a revolutionary party just seems to be any group encouraging libertarian socialism. So the distinction based on this seems once again completely semantical.

Also,

"These conclusions lead council communists to maintain very similar positions to those held by anarchist communists with the main difference often, but not always, being a commitment to Marx and his methods of analysis."

I think I can explain what they meant here. Anarchists are usually largely influenced by Marx. However, anarchists reject terms like "Dictatorship of the Proletariat", while council communists do not and instead use these terms. But this is still only a semantical because terms like "DoTP" are really just different ways of characterizing and describing things that anarchists also want. The only difference is that anarchists would call what they want a state while council communists would. They both seem to generally want the same tangible thing though, so this difference still seems entirely semantical.

Also another difference would be that council communists have been critical of trade unions, but this just seems to be due to historical context and not really having much to do with council communist theory in and of itself. And there are plenty of anarchists who are critical of bureaucratic trade unions as well who seem to be no less critical than modern day council communists, so I don't see any real difference hear either.

So yeah, to be honest I'm still completely confused. I fail to see a single inherent difference that isn't entirely semantical as to what council communists and anarchists actually want for the revolution.

[Blake's Baby]

1 - after 1930 in my understanding the 'council communists' rejected any 'parties' at all; so the idea is not that the revolutionary 'party' agitates inside the working class, but the Council Communist groups act as propaganda groups and dissolve themselves at the first opportunity. The idea is not to seperate political minorities from the rest of the working class but to generalise political consciousness inside the working class. The organisation has no 'special role' and in fact works towards its own irrelevance. But, yes, I can't see why it's not a 'party'. I think the rejection of the term 'party' is semantic; as it is by for example the Anarchist Federation in Britain.

2 - the rejection of trade unions is pretty fundamental to Council Communism. In the 3rd International it was the KAPD (taking their cue partly from Luxemburg) who took the most anti-union line, seeing the unions as part of the reformist apparatus of social-democracy, against Lenin who supported them and indeed instructed the Communist Parties to work in them. To the KAPD, from whom the Council Communists emerged, the union form was dead. Council Communists (and Left Communists, we share a certain amount of common ground) have theorised that it was the relatively recent development of capitalism in Russia that was the cause of Lenin and Trotsky failing to see that unions are part of the apparatus of capitalism. In Western and Central Europe, where most of the Left Communists were based, and where capitalism had a much longer development, it was much more obvious that unions were part of capitalism's control systems (it was of course the union federations in Britain, France and Germany that played such a massive role in recruiting the working class for the war, whereas in Russia they had not yet been fully integrated into the social-patriot accomidation with capital). The later Council Communists continued to reject the union form, as it was tied to previous forms of struggle in the 'old workers' movement' (which was bourgeois in their estimation).

However, they formed their own factory organisations, rather confusingly called 'Unionen' (the normal German term for 'union' is Gewerkschaft). These were not trade or craft unions, but were something between an industrial union and a political organisation. Some also had a soft spot for the IWW (eg Paul Mattick Snr).

So, no, I don't think it's 'historical context'. I think it's a fundamental rejection of the union form as a vehicle for class struggle. Council Communists are pretty much by definition anti-union; even more so than Left Comms (there are shades of opinion in the Communist Left about how anti-union we should be, with some Bordigists even supporting the idea of 'Red Unions').

[Skyhilist]

Most anarchists reject trade unions though as a means of class struggle. I mean after all syndicalism is not trade unionism -- so it differs fundamentally from suggesting that the trade unions in Europe at that time (or the types of unions that they were in general) could've been revolutionary. So I'm not seeing how the non-semantical differences with even anarcho-syndicalists are inherent, let alone anarchists in general.

[argeiphontes]

Council communists insistence on the collective as the natural and primary structure of postrevolutionary society is indistinguishable to me from anarchism, too. They should just forget about unions and merge their positions. Any anarchism is a communism, right? Except for anarcho-syndicalists, anarchists aren't union-happy. Then there's anarcho-communism, which is probably also much the same...

Wittgenstein said that all arguments are about definitions. ;)

[d3crypt]

I consider myself both an anarcho communist and council communist. I think the main difference is just that council communists agree with most of marx's theories, and just have a different view of the dotp than other marxists. Hence why i consider myself an advocate of Marxist-Luxemburgist-Pannekoekist- Guy Debord Thought with Anarchist Characteristics.

[Skyhilist]

Council communists insistence on the collective as the natural and primary structure of postrevolutionary society is indistinguishable to me from anarchism, too. They should just forget about unions and merge their positions. Any anarchism is a communism, right?

Yeah that sounds right to me. I mean unless you account for mutualists I guess who are communist anarchists... but really I wasn't even thinking of them, I was thinking specifically of the other types of anarchism which are communist.


Except for anarcho-syndicalists, anarchists aren't union-happy

I think this might be an oversimplification of anarcho-syndicalism though. I mean given the fact that every anarcho-syndicalist I know sees the type of unions we have now even as awful and often even reactionary. I mean, you wont find any syndicalist supporting the AFL-CIO as revolutionary for the most part.

Also, here's a thought: even if council communism an anarcho-syndicalism are inherently opposed to each other that still doesn't prove council communism to have any inherent non-semantical differences with anarchism. I mean what would make them then any different from anarchists like Malatesta who didn't like anarcho-syndicalism?