Workers' council

This article is about the institution. For the 1921 American political group, see Workers' Council of the United States.

A workers' council is a form of political and economic organization in which a single place of work or enterprise, such as a factory, school, or farm, is controlled collectively by the workers of that workplace, through the core principle of temporary and instantly revocable delegates.

In a system with temporary and instantly revocable delegates, workers decide on what their agenda is and what their needs are. They also mandate a temporary delegate to divulge and pursue them. The temporary delegates are elected among the workers themselves, can be instantly revoked if they betray their mandate, and are supposed to change frequently. There are no managers, and all decision power and organization is based on the delegates system.

On a larger scale, a group of delegates may in turn elect a delegate in a higher position to pursue their mandate, and so on, until the top delegates are running the industrial system of a state. In such a system, decision power rises from bottom to top from the agendas of the workers themselves, and there is no decision imposition from the top, as would happen in the case of a power seizure by a bureaucratic layer that is immune to instant revocation.

Historical examples

Several times in modern history, the idea of workers' councils has been attributed to similar forms of organization, although in most cases the workers didn't actually have full power control and were subdued to some external authority. Examples include Russia in 1905 and 1917, where councils were called "soviets"; Germany during 1918 (Räte); Poland in 1905, 1918 and 1956 (rady robotnicze); Turin, Italy during 1919–1920; rural Ireland during 1920–1921; China during 1926–1927; Spain during 1936; Hungary during 1919 and 1956; France during 1871 and 1968; Chile in 1973 (cordones); Iran during 1978–1979 (shoras).

Despite Lenin's declarations that "the workers must demand the immediate establishment of genuine control, to be exercised by the workers themselves", on May 30, the Menshevik minister of labor, Skobolev, pledged to not give the control of industry to the workers but instead to the state: "The transfer of enterprises into the hands of the people will not at the present time assist the revolution [...] The regulation and control of industry is not a matter for a particular class. It is a task for the state. Upon the individual class, especially the working class, lies the responsibility for helping the state in its organizational work."

Organization details

In the workers' councils organised as part of the 1918 German revolution, factory organisations, such as the General Workers' Union of Germany (AAUD), formed the basis for organising region-wide councils. The council communists in the Communist Workers' Party of Germany advocated organising "on the basis of places of work, not trades, and to establish a National Federation of Works Committees."

Councils operate on the principle of recallable delegates. This means that elected delegates may be recalled at any time through a vote in a form of impeachment. Recall of management committee members, specialist professionals such as engineers, and delegates to higher councils was observed in the Central Workers Council of Greater Budapest during 1956, where delegates were removed for industrial, organisational, and political reasons.

Workers' councils combine to elect higher bodies for coordinating between one another. This means that the upper councils are not superior to the lower councils, but are instead built from and operated by them. The national council would therefore have delegates from every city in the country. Their nature means that workers' councils do away with traditional centralized governments and instead give power indirectly to the people. This type of democratic order is called council democracy. The Central Workers Council of Greater Budapest occupied this role in the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, between late October and early January 1957, where it grew out of local factory committees.

Councils against unions and Stalinists

A workers' council is a deliberative assembly, composed of working class members, intended to institute workers' self-management or workers' control. Unlike a trade union, in a workers' council the workers are assumed to be in actual control of the workplace, rather than merely negotiating with employers through collective bargaining. They are a form of workplace democracy.

Many Marxists and most anarchists believe that workers' councils embody the fundamental principles of socialism, such as workers' control over production and distribution. Indeed, some have described this as "socialism from below," which they counterpose against what they see as "socialism from above" endorsed by Stalinism and Maoism. According to this view, socialism from above is carried out by a centralized state run by an elite bureaucratic apparatus, whereas socialism from below represents the self-administration and self-rule of the working class.

Some left communists (particularly council communists) and anarchists support a council-based society; believing that only the workers themselves can spark a revolution and so workers' councils will be the foundation of the revolution. There are also Leninists (for example the International Socialist Tendency and its offshoots) who advocate a council-based society, but maintain that workers' councils cannot carry out a revolution without the leadership of a vanguard party.

During May 1968 ( "The largest general strike that ever stopped the economy of an advanced industrial country, and the first wildcat general strike in history" ), the Situationists, against the unions and the Communist Party that were starting to side with the de Gaulle government to contain the revolt, called for the formation of workers' councils to take control of the factories, expelling union leaders and left-wing bureaucrats, in order to keep the power in the hands of the workers with direct democracy.

See also

• Anarchism
• Anarcho syndicalism
• Co-determination
• Council communism
• Kronstadt rebellion
• Council democracy
• De Leonism
• Direct democracy
• Factory committee
• Horizontalidad
• Industrial democracy
• Industrial Workers of the World
• Libertarian socialism
• Luxemburgism
• Paris Commune
• Socialist Party USA
• Solidarity (UK)
• Soviet (council)
• Syndicalism
• Works council
• Free association (communism and anarchism)

External links

• Workers' Councils: The historically discovered form of the dictatorship of the proletariat