Left-Communist admits perpetual failure of spontaneous workers councils

http://libcom.org/library/workers-co...ole-revolution (by Sheila Cohen)

The term ‘Workers’ Councils’ can perhaps stand as a catch-all title for an unpremeditated, quasi-spontaneous, ‘ground-up’ organisational form reproduced over many periods and across many countries by groups of workers previously unaware of such a structure or of its historical precedents. Its highest form the Soviet, its ‘lowest’ the simple workplace representatives’ committee, this formation recurs time and again in situations of major class struggle and even everyday industrial conflict.

Why do workers always, independently and apparently ’spontaneously’, adopt the same mass meetings-based, delegate-generating, committee-constructed form for their most powerful expressions of resistance? The answer is simple, because the form is simple; the form is constructed from the requirements of the situation, not plucked from thin air. Workers in a situation of upsurge are unlikely to look around at a range of possible alternatives: the workers’ council structure, at whatever level, immediately serves the necessities of the situation.

[...]

As this comment suggests, a related and equally defining characteristic of such delegate-based, accountable workers’ organisations was their freedom from official and institutional structures, in particular, of course, the established trade unions. Such independence and autonomy continually recurs as a feature of the workers’ council formation.

Here's something interesting in light of my position against broad economism (including the strike fetish economism of the ultra-left):

The history of workers’ council formation reveals that, perhaps by contrast to socialist orthodoxy, such transformation of consciousness is almost universally rooted in material issues which tend to spark often insurrectionary levels of revolt from an apparently trivial or ‘economistic’ base. Perhaps the most historic example of this is the Petrograd typographers’ strike in 1905 which, in Trotsky’s words, ’started over punctuation marks and ended by felling absolutism’ – as well as, of course, generating the first Petrograd Soviet (Trotsky 1971 p85). The resurgence of soviet power in the February 1917 revolution was in its turn sparked by women textile workers’ strikes and protests over bread shortages (Trotsky 1967 p110) as well as a strike against victimisation at the giant Putilov engineering works. In Italy, working-class women forced to queue for hours for meagre rations as well as working up to 12 hours a day in the factories launched a hunger riot which ’soon reached insurrectionary proportions when the women made [a] crucial link with workers’ industrial power…’ (Gluckstein pp169-70).

History provides many other examples of movements which, while ultimately challenging the system, are rooted in relatively mundane grievances. In the Chilean, Portuguese and Iranian upsurges of the mid to late 1970s emphasis was placed by workers, as always, on basic material needs; as one Chilean agricultural worker put it, ‘We’ve people to feed and families to keep. And we’ve had it up to here’ (Gonzalez 1987, p51). Yet out of these materially-based struggles ‘there emerged a new form of organisation …calling itself the ‘industrial belt’ – the cordon’ (p51, emphasis in original).

In Portugal, even after quasi-revolutionary committees, CRTSMs, were established in the factories, ‘Those who set [them] up saw the workers’ commissions as being merely economic’. In Iran, the movement which led up to the 1979 ‘revolution’ was preceded by ‘…strikes, sit-ins and other industrial protests [most of which] were confined to economic demands’ (Poya 1987).

Such ‘economistic’ considerations, often dismissed by the intellectual left, are shown over and over not to preclude an explosion of consciousness which rapidly races towards overarching class and political considerations in a dynamic which, crucially, is not dependent in pre-existing ’socialist’ awareness. As one organizer In 1930s America noted, ‘the so much bewailed absence of a socialist ideology on the part of the workers, really does not prevent [them] from acting quite anti-capitalistically’ (Brecher p165). Draper (1978) succinctly sums up this point: ‘To engage in class struggle it is not necessary to “believe in” class struggle any more than it is necessary to believe in Newton in order to fall from an airplane’ (p42).

The problem, however, is that the form is conducive to left-economistic fantasies. Glorified strike committees and growing political struggles out of mere economic struggles go hand in hand.

The final analysis is ultimately this:

The above analysis has not sought to address the question of the historic failure of the workers’ council formation to achieve a lasting regime of workers’ power and ownership, participative democracy and freedom from the oppressions under which the world currently labours.

I'm not sure why you think this is about a "left-communist" admitting the failure of workers' councils. The Commune is not a left-communist organisation.

I get the impression that you're arguing against something that you think "left-communists" say about struggles, but I'm not at all clear what it is. Perhaps you could explain?

I haven't read the full article but the bits you quote, from a cursory reading, don't seem incredibly controversial. After all, the February Revolution in 1917 in Russia started with a demand for more bread.

As for the failure of councils to create a lasting regime of workers power, this isn't simply a matter of the "inadequacy" of the council form. In the absence of a truly global revolution and the destruction of all existing states, workers' power in any form can only be a temporary affair.

So I'm really not at all sure what you're saying here.

Jacob Richter: the most interesting and indiscernible troll on tehInternetz.

Why not just start a thread here called, "My Problems with Left Communism"?

That way we can actually address your questions directly, have some hardy, robust exchanges and not have to figure out what the heck you're getting at all of the time. Seriously!

So dismissive, guys. It's not very hospitable of you.

Jacob, your obsession with party-movements is well-known, and most of the left-coms seem to have adopted a willingness to agree to disagree with you.

Gosh, I was always under the impression that this emphasis of mine came across *unintentionally* as a tad too cryptic for left-coms to understand.

I like your post, btw, for its informed critique of the development of alternative culture.

However, it's a worthwhile question to take up, as it addresses the character of the revolution, the necessary form of a revolutionary organization, and class lines.

I remember the last big discussion I had with other left-coms about state capitalism focused on the failure of "alternative culture" movements to be able to really separate themselves from the system. When western democracies were coming up with their big welfare states during the Depression and earlier, they did not make them up out of whole cloth, but instead co-opted the already-existing workers' mutual aid societies run out of trade unions or socialist parties.

You should separate the US from Europe. The US never had a strong labour movement, let alone one with a vibrant alternative culture, so there was nothing to co-opt. Europe never developed the big welfare states until after WWII. By smashing the SPD, Hitler also smashed what could have been a key element of his own welfare state scheme. WWII devastated the European countries so much that the infrastructure for the alternative culture was gone. The European states, while rebuilding, took it upon themselves to create their welfare states, while the soc-dems "specialized" in election gimmicks and the unions in collective bargaining.

[I wrote the paragraph above because I have indeed read somewhere an online anecdote by a union rank-and-filer about this history, and I've tried to paraphrase what that person said as best as I can remember.]

In some cases, these societies themselves had minorities that resisted this move saying it amounted to a takeover by the state, but they were always defeated by pressure from the state and from other members. Today, mutual-aid societies really can't survive without the investment of the state. Witness the total collapse of ACORN once state aid was withdrawn, or the financial troubles of the Workmen's Circle.

ACORN wasn't much of an alternative culture organization (I just read the wiki). Its main task is voter registration. Also, I advocated that private-sector collective bargaining be under the monopoly of an independent government organization, which would force unions to adopt a new role, preferrably one of alternative culture and more frequent strike action (to say the least before political activity of their own).

Witness the complete intermingling of the PSUV aid programs and the Venezuelan government's.

IIRC, the PSUV has no programs. Just the government (specifically organized within the PDVSA, like the misiones), and I made a post somewhere about the lack of alternative culture as one of my main criticisms of the PSUV (at least one other being the lack of a workers-only voting membership policy, but none of which was about the lack of an explicitly "revolutionist" program - as opposed to social revolution, this political non-"revolutionism" goes back to Kautsky's revolutionary/non-revolutionary period divide).

The state in modern capitalism has a tendency to absorb society into itself, and that includes workers' mutual aid societies run out of political parties. Political parties whose mutual aid societies are abosrbed by the state tend themselves to be absorbed by the state. Defending this sort of party organization amouts essentially to defending the capitalist states and the capitalist societies with which they are bound up.

I have been in discussions with comrades about this, but the recent privatization drives have opened up at least some space to fill.

Feel free to critique me right here for suggesting food banks (food banks for working poor, as opposed to soup kitchens for lumpen) as a way to jump-start things like Lenin's newspaper suggestion jump-started party campaigns.

Also, I disagree with the notion of such a tendency for society to be absorbed, if only because the rhetoric for "balanced budgets" is open to pro-privatization campaigns. However, I do agree with your remarks on independence from the state.

You yourself are an example of this, with your support of the PSUV and Die Linke, both governing parties enacting and enforcing austerity and anti-class-struggle legislation, translating into increasingly open support of Venezuela*.

*and probably the Berlin state government, though I can't recall any posts you've made dedicated to that body

Did I not post somewhere the possibility that the PSUV might be a fake "mass party" like the Democrats and Republicans in the US, with "membership" based merely on voter registration?

As for Die Linke, I don't support the Ossi coalitionists one iota. In fact, I don't support coalitions with the SPD. I do, however, would like Die Linke to have a workers-only policy (apologies to the petit-bourgeois Diether Dehm, no matter how good his "Monopoly" song is) and to establish an alternative culture, since the latter is the *only* way to leapfrog the SPD in both electoral and political support. Again, I have not said anything about an explicitly "revolutionist" program.

edit: posted in thread in the history forum