Form versus Content

The anarchist fixation on purely economic forms also betrays the tendency to discount the need for the proletariat to seize political power before it can truly seize economic power. This fundamental error of approach is what leads anarchism to trumpet the successes of the Spanish Civil War in terms of the ‘collectives’. While it is true that these collectives took on the form of workers’ economic control, their content was that of workers managing their own exploitation in service to a particular fraction of the capitalist state.

http://en.internationalism.org/wr/30...orkers-control

I was wondering if someone could explain this a bit more to me, namely how a body would make the bridge from the content of 'workers managing their own exploitation' to the content of worker emancipation (if that is the correct way to put it)?

As I understand this is most commonly used to distinguish the factory committees of the October revolution from the Soviets but what was it in practice that actually made the Soviets different?

Hello bricolage and welcome to this group.
I don't think this distinction between the soviets and the factory committees is accurate - both were initially part of the revolutionary upsurge in Russia. In fact the factory committees were sometimes in advance of the soviets - at one point Lenin thought they could be the basis for the insurrection. Later on they did become a vehicle for illusions about workers self-management at a purely economic level, but this was partly the other side of the coin to the fact that the soviets were being deprived of their political authority as the revolution degenerated. Ideally both the soviets and factory committees should have been working together to strengthen the real 'dictatorship' of the proletariat.
The key difference is between Spain and Russia: in Russia, for a brief time, the working class did take political power, in Spain in 1936 this never happened, so the collectives were inevitably turned into vehicles for the domination of the bourgeois state over the workers.

I think I took that distinction from this section;

What made the Russian Revolution a real revolution was not the fact that workers formed committees in an effort to defend themselves in the face of the advancing capitalist crisis[2]. While an expression of the class struggle, these organs cannot be considered the final form of the proletariat’s control of society, simply because while they are essential to run the local aspects of economic activity their nature precludes them being able to manage the economy for the collective benefit of society as whole. The true revolutionary content of Red October was the fact that, through the Soviets, the working class was able to perceive itself not simply as a class capable of controlling factories for the purposes of its own immediate survival but one that could destroy the political power of the bourgeoisie as embodied in the capitalist state and then begin to manage the whole of society.

What I seemed to be reading into this was that the collective in Spain were similar in form to the factory committees but they were differentiated as they existed within a bourgeois state, something the factory committees did not.

I am still a bit confused about the Soviets though, what made them political bodies and not economic ones?

The soviets are primarily political if you like, because they are the main organs for taking power and destroying the bourgeois state. But they also have an economic side in organising production and distribution, and this aspect will become more and more important as the revolution advances towards being able to focus on the positive social transformation.

I am still a bit confused about the Soviets though, what made them political bodies and not economic ones?

The factory committee's were based on individual workplaces whereas voting to the Soviets was based on an electoral roll which excluded non-proletarian classes and where one delegate was elected per 1000 citizens.

These two article from Il Soviet are pretty good on the subject:

http://www.marxists.org/archive/bord...esentation.htm
http://www.marxists.org/archive/bord...19/soviets.htm

Worker's Councils are based on geography, whereas the factory committee's and profkom's (non-manufacturing workplaces i.e. every workplace that isn't a factory) are based on point of production- though from what I understand the Worker's Councils would be made up of delegates sent from the committee's as zanthorus states, from a certain area.

The function is political vs economic as the worker's delegates were in charge of administration and social policy- and would be instantly revocable if those they represent disagreed with the decisions they made (so the will of the workers was always represented). The committee's at the base level were respoonsible for the economic life of a workplace (and in many instances completely running the business as many were expropriated or simply abandoned by the owners)- deciding wages, benefits, hours, inventory and ordering, logistics, etc.