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.

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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.