Council Communism

COUNCIL COMMUNISM. A current that emerged in Germany and Holland in the 1920s, council communism spread to the United States by the time of the Great Depression. Though council communists never built organizations of any size or led struggles of particular note, they kept alive a vision of self-emancipatory communism that, at key points in American history, connected with oppositional movements. Independent of both the reformist and the Leninist Left, council communists long offered a vision of a “third path,” both Marxist and libertarian.

Council communism as a body of ideas was constructed on two pillars: that the spontaneous explosions of working-class activity that characterized the Russian Revolution of 1905, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) mass strikes of 1909–1913, the Russian Revolution of 1917, and the German revolution of 1918–1919 showed the way forward by demonstrating that workers could organize themselves directly at the point of production and then connect to organizations to challenge social power; and that vanguard parties constructed on the Leninist model would stifle and subvert such activity, block self-organization, and blunt any thrust toward self-emancipation.

The council communists locked horns with the Bolsheviks when the Third International insisted that all communist parties enter the trade union movement and participate in parliamentary politics in their own countries. The councilists argued that Western capitalism had entered a stage of crisis in which no reforms were possible, and that it was therefore counterproductive to rebuild reformist institutions like trade unions and parliamentary parties, particularly when workers themselves had shown an ability to transcend those institutions in the heat of struggle.

In 1921, Lenin read the council communists out of the Third International when he published Left-wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder. Herman Gorter, the famous Dutch poet, answered that a model based on a largely peasant country ought not be imposed on an industrialized one (Response to Lenin, 1921). By the 1930s, the councilist critique of Leninism had deepened into a reinterpretation of the Russian Revolution. In his “Theses on Bolshevism” (International Council Correspondence, October 1934), Anton Pannekoek argued that the Bolsheviks had actually carried through the tasks of the bourgeois revolution—“the destruction of absolutism, the abolition of the feudal nobility as the first estate, and the creation of a political constitution and an administrative apparatus that would secure politically the fulfillment of the economic tasks of the revolution.” Otto Rühle argued in “The Struggle against Fascism Begins with the Struggle against Bolshevism” (Living Marxism, September 1939) that the Communist parties in the West had become a major obstacle to the development of the self-emancipatory tendencies expressed in the revived labor movement.

In was in the 1930s that council communism reached America, as part of the diaspora of the European Left. There were some contacts made with the IWW and the Proletarian Party. But the councilists’ main activity remained the circulation of ideas within fairly small circles, primarily through their own journals (International Council Correspondence, New Essays, and Living Marxism), occasionally in journals with a broader audience (V. F. Calverton’s Modern Monthly or Dwight Macdonald’s Politics), and through books (Karl Korsch’s Karl Marx [1936] and Anton Pannekoek’s Workers’ Councils [1946]). Council communism’s emphasis on spontaneity and self-organization, as well as its critique of bureaucracy and institutionalized leadership, touched responsive chords in the sit-down strikes of 1936–1937 and the wildcat strikes of World War II.

Council communism again touched oppositional movements in America during the 1960s and 1970s. Its emphasis on self-emancipation and direct democracy, as well as its critique of bureaucracy and reformism, resonated with the outlook expressed by the campus-based New Left. A new journal and pamphlet series was begun (Root and Branch), which reissued Pannekoek’s Workers’ Councils, and explored the American student movement and Afro-American history. Jeremy Brecher’s Strike! (1972) presented a councilist interpretation of American labor history. It was originally subtitled The True History of Mass Insurgence in America from 1877 to the Present and was published by Straight Arrow, then connected with Rolling Stone magazine. Over the next two decades, Strike! sold more than 35,000 copies and helped to shape a new activist generation’s understanding not only of labor history but of the role of the working class in future social change.

The best known of all the council communists in America was Paul Mattick. Born in Germany in 1904, he worked as a skilled tool-and-die maker and participated in Rosa Luxemburg’s youth group before World War I. He played an active role in the revolutionary events of 1918–1921 and helped build Left and mass syndicalist organizations in the 1920s. Mattick emigrated to America in 1926, where he collaborated with cultural radicals like Max Eastman and labor radicals like the IWW in Chicago before assuming responsibility for editing councilist journals. He became best known in the 1960s and 1970s as a Marxist economic theorist.

Mattick applied and elaborated Henryk Grossmann’s interpretation of Marxist crisis theory—that the falling rate of profit resulted from the “overaccumulation” of capital and would lead to a “breakdown” in the capitalist economy. It was during such a crisis, Mattick posited, that spontaneous working-class revolutionary activity could be expected to revive (Critique of Marcuse, 1971). Mattick made an original contribution in his analysis of Keynesian economics. At a time when many on the Left as well as in the mainstream argued that state intervention and economic “fine-tuning” had banished all threats of depression to the historical past, Mattick applied a rigorous Marxist framework of value analysis and concluded that state intervention would soon reach its own “limits” in which the expenses of state expenditures would come to be viewed as a drag on corporate profits, as a siphon on investment capital (Marx and Keynes: The Limits of the Mixed Economy). Mattick’s framework proved useful in the analysis of the “stagflation” of the 1970s and the Reaganite “supply-side economics” and “deregulation” in the 1980s.

Rachleff, Peter. Marxism and Council Communism. Brooklyn: Revisionist Press, 1976.

Website: Left-Wing, Anti-Bolshevik and Council Communism. Marxist Internet Archive. https://www.marxists.org/subject/left-wing/index.htm