Nasser Paydar
Communism Abolition of Wage Labour and Leninist Militant Reformism
The October Revolution had several important indicators. Following the revolution, the anti-capitalist movement of the Russian working class was defeated. The approach of state capitalism, which was pervasive in this movement, represented by Bolshevism and Leninist strategies, triumphed. Bourgeois communism presented its earthly interpretation. The world labour movement lost its vision of the abolition of wage labour and was forced to accept the strategies of the day of social democracy, bourgeois communism, and the national left.
The government of the day of the revolution, which called itself the dictatorship of the proletariat and the key to the world of communism, carried with it the burden of the above indicators and other indicators of this kind. This government, with these characteristics and contradictions, was in some ways the target of protest and war. The dominant pole of world capital took its claim to be communist very seriously. The representatives of this pole shared a common perspective in the narrative of communism with the Bolshevik government of the day. They also considered the state planning of capitalism to be communism and, for this reason, aimed their entire arsenal of power against it. Social democracy tried to present the worst image of Bolshevism and the October event to the workers of Western countries. The workers of Russia were not satisfied with the current situation; they were paying for the defeat of their anti-capitalist movement by remaining wage slaves and enduring all the pressure of exploitation and the dictatorship of the day of capital, all under the banner of communism!! The working- and lower-class masses of the world welcomed the revolution to a significant extent, but the seeds of this welcome grew not from the soil of anti-wage labour consciousness, but from spontaneous class tendencies, “hearing the sound of the drum from afar,” and some naive thinking. The October Revolution disrupted the unity of the activists and vanguards of the European labour movement, and even the unity of the radical critics of social democracy to some extent. A considerable number of hesitant or even staunch supporters of Bolshevism, observing what was happening, gradually opened their mouths to criticize, calling the path of the Soviet Communist Party neither the path of the workers’ revolution nor the path of socialism, but a path to the wasteland of depravity and dictatorship. The “Spartacists” in Germany, a number of Dutch, English, and other communists were among these critics. Lenin quickly launched a campaign against these circles and activists, denouncing them under the name of “left communism” and rebelling against them with all his might in “The Disease of Left-Winged Childhood” and other articles.
The approach known as “Council communism or councilism” emerged from these conflicts and tendencies in the years after World War I. Antoine Pannekoek, Hermann Gorter, Karl Schröder and Otto Rühle belonged to this group. Later, Paul Mattick and others followed their words. Council Communism, as the nature of the social outlook and practical identity of its individuals required, never took the form of an organized or even coherent class approach, did not display a specific political practice and did not play an influential role in the world labour movement. This approach could not be otherwise, and the purpose of the present discussion is to explain this point. The fact is that for this work or for examining something called “Council Communism”, there is no real social and class movement before us. For this reason, referring to the statements of its founders is the only thing that can be done. Nevertheless, an anatomy of what these individuals have said from the beginning to the present is more or less necessary. Why? Because, first of all, the current conditions of class struggle are pregnant with the birth of all kinds of solutions, including radical strategies that criticize the left and bourgeois communism, but are also passive and liquidationist. Strategies that not only do not solve the problems of the labour movement but may even make its tangle of confusions even more complicated. Secondly, among the statements and writings of prominent theorists of Council communism, there are correct points, similar to which can be seen in other places, including in the chain of analyses, strategies, and the strategy of the struggle for the abolition of wage labour. The existence of these similarities may be misleading for the working masses and even for communist activists of the labour movement and may associate the real movement for the abolition of wage labour with a handful of fragmentary, scholastic criticisms, seeking democracy, and lacking a worker and socialist burden. “Not every round is a walnut,” whoever speaks of the Council movement is not necessarily an activist of the Council movement for the abolition of wage labour of the working class, and the record of those who claim to be the standard bearer of communism is clearer than any worker would need to explain that. The criticisms, explanations, and strategies of any approach claiming to belong to the labour movement and communism of this class can be understood not beyond the fragmentary statements of its individuals, but only by referring to the reliable results of a correct dissection of the social existence of the activists of that approach. The same should be done with regard to the movement known as “Council Communism.”
Criticism of Bolshevism
The cornerstone of the discourse of Council communism was laid on the critique of Bolshevism. For this reason, referring to the real fabric of this critique is an important step towards becoming familiar with the foundations of the vision and social existence of this approach. Among those who have been involved in the design and implementation of this critique, “Antoine Pannekoek” is the most well-known and well-established. Pannekoek was undoubtedly a militant communist, but his critique of Bolshevism, like all the critiques of subsequent commentators of “Council communism,” is not a Marx’s critique based on the view of communism as the abolition of wage labour. Recognizing this important point requires, first of all, a reflection on the narrative of Bolshevism and Leninism of the capitalist mode of production, socialism, workers’ political power, socialist revolution, the anti-capitalist movement of the working class, and a simultaneous dissection of Pannekoek’s critique of Bolshevism or Leninism. By criticizing this or that corner of Lenin’s views or the whole of Bolshevism, even if these criticisms are decisive, honest and decisive, it is still not possible to turn the lost onto the highway. It is not possible to help the labour movement to take a great communist leap to escape from the abyss of reformist stagnation in capitalist strategies. Bolshevism had a familiar explanation of the capitalist mode of production. An explanation that did not contain the essence of Marx’s anti-wage labour and Marx’s critique of political economy. Lenin’s narrative of capital was the narrative of social democracy and a faithful copy of Karl Kautsky’s interpretation of capitalism. At the heart of this narrative, components such as private ownership of the means of production, competition, anarchy of production and the impossibility of centralized planning were considered the basic indicators of capitalism’s identity!! Bolshevism and what the left of the world called Leninism also viewed socialism not from the perspective of Marx and the anti-wage labour movement of the working class, but from the pupil of the eye of social democracy. The socialist society envisaged by Leninism and Bolshevism did not go beyond the framework of state planning of the labour process of capital and capitalist relations in its economic reality and social essence. Bolshevism was not an anti-wage labour and communist approach of the labour movement and did not represent such a movement or approach in the length and breadth of its strategies, horizons and policies. The history of Leninism’s fieldwork was the history of calling on the Russian working masses to pave the way for the development of the European type of capitalism, an anti-regime based on the horizons and expectations of sections of the bourgeoisie, to bring to fruition the democratic revolution of the workers and peasants, and to prepare for the establishment of capitalism corresponding to centralized state planning and the type of these strategies and activities. The anti-imperialism of Bolshevism had definite popular and bourgeois foundations. What it pursued under the name of internationalism, more than anything else, represented a front of a section of the world bourgeoisie with a state capitalist approach to settle accounts with the more dominant section of the world capitalist class. The role of Leninism and Bolshevism in Russia and internationally has been to draw the masses of the working class to these very fields, and if anyone wanted to be a Marx’s and anti-wage labour critic of Bolshevism, they should have focused the sharp edge of their criticism on these issues. The pioneers of the “Council Communism” approach, including Pannekoek, did not do so and did not bring such criticism to the working masses of the world and the international labour movement. In the history of their activity, there is no significant challenge to the narrative of capitalism, socialism, or any of the other incorrect strategies and orientations of the Bolsheviks. Alignment with the theories and criticisms of “Rosa Luxemburg” on Lenin’s party and issues related to the organization of the labour movement is the only thing that can be sought in this history. A topic that in turn is worthy of discussion and its socialist and Marx’s depth is questionable in all respects. Among the first collective writings of the theorists of “Council Communism” published with the aim of criticizing the nature of the orientations of the Bolshevik government of the day, the following is noticeable.
“Suppose the central leadership were able to distribute what is produced fairly. The fact remains that the producers do not own the means of production. They do not belong to them. They are used only to make them work. The inevitable consequence of this is that groups that oppose the existing leadership will be suppressed by force. The central economic power is in the hands of those who simultaneously exercise political power. Any opposition that thinks differently on political and economic questions will be suppressed by every possible means. Thus, instead of, as Marx called it, free and equal associations of producers, there will be a penal colony the like of which no one has ever seen.” (Council Communism and the Critique of Bolshevism, by K. Brandl)
Before any words, I must clarify that the above criticism of Bolshevism, Leninism or what happened in the Soviet society in the days after the victory of the October Revolution, has advanced the basic axis of an urgent and important socialist dialogue. For this reason, compared to many other oppositions in the world labour movement of that day, this criticism has more labour and communist burden. There is no doubt about it, but this criticism lacks a conscious anti-wage labour and Marx perspective. The leaven of criticism is more democratic than socialist. Criticism has focused its sharp edge on the form of ownership of the means of production. But first of all, the form of ownership is not the final indicator or determinant of the identity of a mode of production and social relations based on it. The property form is a subordinate and secondary category; the external manifestation is the true leaven of any given form of production. What makes capitalism different from the forms of production before or after it is not the private ownership of the expression of production and exchange in this system. Here, the role of determining identity is played not by the legal appearance of ownership, but by being a commodity of labour power, buying and selling labour power as a commodity, and the complete separation of the worker from his work and the fate of his work. Secondly, and in this regard, the ownership of the means of production by the working masses is also a subject that can be interpreted. Several different and completely distinct cases can be considered. The first case is that the workers are asked to create their own councils or even that they themselves form such councils. The councils elect representatives for themselves in all centres of work and production, these representatives take charge of all affairs in the different centres of work, plan work and production, together with the elected representatives of other councils, form the National Congress of Workers’ Councils and shoulder their duty on a nationwide scale. The second case is that the councils again take on the task of managing the affairs of production and planning the social life of people, but these councils, apart from all the above characteristics, have representatives who can be dismissed and replaced at any time by the will of the majority of their members, without any special time limit. The common feature of both these forms of council ownership of the means of production is that the councils did not emerge from a conscious and well-established movement against wage labour. They were not the container and platform for the development of such a movement. They have not formed the open land of creative and penetrating intervention of the broad masses of the working class, the impregnable bastion of the anti-capitalist exercise of workers’ power and the training ground of the council socialism of individual wage slaves. And precisely for this reason, and because they do not play such a role, they are not currently the institution of the free, conscious, penetrating, equal and decisive presence of all individual working masses in all matters related to the planning of work and production and their social destiny. In other words, the workers are present in it, they actively participate in its elections, and in the best-case scenario, they dismiss and appoint their representatives whenever they wish. However, this presence, intervention, and active participation still do not guarantee the complete removal of the separation of the working masses from their work, the products of their work, and the fate of their lives.
The third interpretation that can and should be given to the ownership of the means of labour and production by the working masses is that the workers’ councils take over the planning of labour and social production, but these councils are not caricatures or formalities in any aspect of their work. On the contrary, they are the continuation of a real anti-wage labour council movement and have been tempered in the continuous practice of such a movement. In the maze of current class struggles, around anti-capitalist demands, with a clear perspective of abolishing wage labour, by resorting to effective strategies for advancing the struggle and by expanding these struggles to all areas of social life, the working masses forming these councils have gradually exerted their class power against capital, the capitalist state, and against all aspects of the existence of the wage slavery system. In the midst of the general process of this class war against wage labour, the Marx anatomy of the capitalist mode of production and social relations, the Marxian dissection of events within society and the world, the Marxian critique of the present objectivity of capitalism, and the communist understanding of other issues have become the real fabric of their class consciousness and awakening. The vast mass of wage slaves has practiced the exercise of will and socialist socialization in this process, in the midst of these struggles, and within this general organization of the Councils. Here they have cultivated and promoted their conscious, penetrating and free intervention. As a vital weapon of struggle, and as moments of the ongoing class war, they have explored the capitalist system in all its economic, political, social aspects and all its civil, legal and cultural structures, with an anti-wage labour perspective. At the same time, they have made the socialist alternative of planning the present social objectivity an organic part of their social existence.
In the latter version of the ownership of the means of labour by the working masses, there is absolutely no reference to the various legal forms of this ownership. On the contrary, the aim is to plan the abolition of wage labour and socialist labour and social production by the councils. In this regard, the councils are fundamentally different from the workers’ councils mentioned in both the first and second versions. The workers who are members of them, in terms of their understanding of capitalism and awareness of the process of abolishing wage labour or dismantling the relationship of buying and selling labour and establishing socialism, have a different situation from their counterparts in the previous councils. Here too, naturally, the working masses elect people from among themselves as representatives, give these representatives missions and delegate responsibilities. They determine and apply criteria and checks for dismissal, appointment and supervision of their work, and do other things of this kind. But what guarantees and characterizes the socialist basis of life, work, production, and social relations among humans is not merely the democracy that exists in the councils, free elections, and the possibility of immediate dismissal and installation of elected officials. The defining and defining element in this interpretation of socialist collective ownership is the fully conscious, free, creative, pervasive and equal intervention of all members of the working masses. In all three cases we are talking about workers’ councils and the domination of the working masses who are members of the councils over the means of work and production, but the role that the workers play within these different council organizations is fundamentally different. Not every council is necessarily an anti-wage-labour council of the working class. The anti-capitalist workers’ council movement is something much more than the democratic workers’ organizations called councils. The container for the formation of the working masses can be a council, they may participate in all the broad meetings of the councils, they can very freely elect their representatives. These representatives can be dismissed at any time, but despite all this, the councils in question are in no way anti-wage-labour councils of the working class. This is an important point that I have repeatedly emphasized in various writings. It is not the formal form of the workers’ organization that determines the reality of their movement. Quite the opposite. It is the latter that determines the nature, type, and validity of the former. This discussion takes on a very sensitive and complex character when it extends to how to negate capitalist private ownership of the means of labour and social production and replace this form of ownership with social and socialist ownership by the working masses. It should be noted that capital and the capitalist class do not exercise their control over the conditions of work, production, exploitation and life of workers only through the use of force and state power. Scientific superiority, expertise, management power and superiority in social planning or policymaking and the like are all mechanisms for exercising sovereignty, ownership and power. Let us consider that a group of people, under the name of a council, are responsible for managing all the affairs of an industrial unit. These people are at completely different levels in terms of political knowledge, scientific information, technical expertise and expertise, capacity for influence and planning ability. If these differences and distinctions are not the target of an active, conscious and practical communist critique, they can very quickly turn into precisely capitalist relations. They can lead to the separation of the majority of people from their work and the domination of the minority over the work and the product of their work and the fate of the lives of others in their survival and development. They can establish a situation that carries all the injustices, exploitation, and stench of capitalism without taking on the crude legal form of private ownership of capital. If, among the group we are discussing, some, due to their superiority in intellectual ability and specialized efficiency, as elected representatives of the workers, take over the entire planning of production, if they formulate policies for the process of work and production, and if the majority of these people, due to their low level of awareness, social knowledge, scientific ability, and specialized power, are condemned to be completely passive policy-takers and implementers and to submit to the plans of the former, then, whether we like it or not, class relations corresponding to the relationship between labour and capital have been established between these two segments of the population. Some have separated themselves from work and the fate of their work and, necessarily, from determining the fate of their lives, and some have taken control of all these matters. This is capitalism without any addition or subtraction. It is a type of capitalist planning of work and production that is ostensibly carried out by the workers. Workers who ostensibly have a council. They elect representatives, and their elected representatives can be easily removed and installed!!!
With this brief explanation, we return to the discussion of the experts of “Council Communism” about the ownership of the working masses over the means of labour and production. Everything shows that the narrative of socialist ownership of the experts of this approach is increasingly homogeneous and compatible with the second narrative that we have explained. They correctly speak of the lack of workers’ ownership of the centres of labour or the means of labour and production in Russian society after the October Revolution, but firstly, they say nothing about the real preconditions for ending the separation of working people from their labour and the product of their labour, secondly, they do not explain why, under what conditions, and as a direct result of which background and which practice of the movement the workers have been unable to achieve these conditions and capacities. Instead of these crucial and fateful points, the founders of “Council Communism” only bring up the centralized state dictatorship of the Bolsheviks and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union!! And this is what makes the democratic weight of their criticism so heavy and the burden of its socialist nature so deeply light. Let’s explore this issue further. A few lines above, we clarified that the real indicator of capitalism or socialism in the mode of production and social relations is absolutely not the legal and formal form of ownership of the instruments of labour. Rather, it is the existence or absence of the relationship of buying and selling labour power. Selling labour power has a very precise and clear meaning. A person who sells his labour power is separated from his work, loses the right to intervene in determining the fate of his work, and is forced to accept the monopoly of this right for the buyer of labour power. He is therefore deprived of the right to truly intervene in determining the fate of his livelihood and social life. Capitalism must be recognized on the basis of these indicators, and the traces of socialism, even in the earliest stages of its embryogenesis, must be sought in the abolition and elimination of these components, or at least in a very clear, efficient, and decisive direction to reject and eliminate them. In order for workers not to be sellers of labour power, they must have the means, abilities, and capacities conducive to conscious and penetrating intervention in the process of planning and policymaking of labour and social production. They must be able to exercise their conscious will and stamp their measured, thoughtful, and conscious influence on all decision-making. As long as the working masses are unable to play such a role, they will remain isolated from their work, and in order to achieve the capacity to play this role, they must definitely be prepared for this in the process of class struggle within capitalist society and in the depths of a powerful anti-capitalist soviet movement. The path that Bolshevism and Leninism had set before the Russian labour movement from beginning to end and throughout the years before the October Revolution was not the path of preparing, equipping, and equipping the workers to play this role. The root of the problem lay here. The basis for the separation of the working masses from their work and the capitalist survival of the mode of production, the process of work and social relations in Russia after the October Revolution must be explored here, in the depth of the strategies, horizon-building, education and the general political and class practice that dominated the labour movement in the years before October. This is something that the experts of Council communism do not do. They place the burden of all the disasters, the burden of the continuation of the dominance of capitalist relations on the shoulders of the political power of the day and the centralized party dictatorship in post-revolutionary society. An explanation that is radical in its own right because it sees the survival of capitalism, but it lacks socialist lessons for the workers of the world because it considers the real foundation of the failure of the revolution and the continuation of the dominance of wage labour relations.
Pannekoek, the most radical figure of this group, has an article entitled “The Party and the Working Class” that is important in terms of reflecting the above view. In this article, he rightly and with a socialist perspective, debunks the foundation of party-building in the labour movement. He clarifies that the work of parties is to bury the anti-capitalist power of the working class in the cesspool of their own anti-worker, sectarian, and bourgeois interests. He adds that wherever in history and in every corner of the world power has been transferred from one party to another, its only meaning has been the transfer of sovereignty from one section of the bourgeoisie to another. In completing his words from a communist perspective, he emphasizes that the concept of a “revolutionary party” is contradictory and misleading in its entire fabric. Pannekoek says all this and is profoundly right, but in explaining why, he points out a point that calls into question the socialist weight of all these correct ideas. In proving the un-working-class nature of party-building politics, he says that when these parties seize power, they find themselves faced with two different situations. Pannekoek describes these situations as follows. “Two things can happen. Either the masses continue to act, do not go home, do not hand over the government to the new party, organize their power in the factories and workshops, prepare for further conflicts, for the complete defeat of capital, prove that they are not incapable of revolution, then, of necessity, contradictions will arise with the party that wants to seize power and sees in the self-practice of the working class disorder and anarchy. In such a situation, the workers will probably develop their movement and sweep away the party. In the other case, the masses may follow the party’s convictions, entrust it with the management of affairs. Follow the slogans from above, trust the new government and return to home and work. In this case, the bourgeoisie will immediately apply all its class power, financial forces, enormous spiritual resources and economic power to the factories and huge complexes, while the ruling party is too weak and can only maintain itself through moderation and concessions. “In these conditions the party is unable to do much. It is deprived of the support of the masses of the class and inevitably becomes an instrument for maintaining the power of the bourgeoisie.”
(Pannekoek. The Party and the Working Class, quoted in context with some abridgement)
There is no doubt about the correctness of what Pannekoek says about the role of the party, but the various scenarios he foresees for how this role will be played by the party in relation to the working masses and the working movement are full of misinterpretations and unsociality beliefs. First of all, Pannekoek limits the destructive effects of party-building in the working movement essentially to the conditions of the revolution and the periods after it. While the main skeleton of the problem lies elsewhere, in the periods before the revolution. It is in these periods that the real fate of the working movement is decided. In order for the working masses to realize the capacity, power and possibility of anti-wage and socialist council socialism, they must overcome all the necessary twists and turns in the heart of these periods. In this regard, it is precisely in these stages that the party deals all its destructive blows to the working movement. The party burns the process of the soviet, anti-wage labour and conscious development of the working masses, becomes an obstacle to this development, blocks the channels for its realization, disrupts the process of its growth and maturity and asks the workers to hang their daily struggle against reformism and their future fate on the party’s gallows above their heads instead of going through this process. With demagoguery and continuous production of illusion, the party declares communism to be the law, itself the legislator and devout obedience to itself as the forced conditions for the workers’ movement to be socialist, destroys the anti-capitalist struggle of the working class and replaces it with a mixture of right-wing syndicalist reformism and an anti-class regime devoid of any anti-wage labour and socialist burden. It instils in the workers that their communist status is summed up in their attachment to the party and their positive response to its calls. It makes the internal activists of the workers’ movement out of the body of this movement a surgical operation and a mechanism for its guardianship over the working masses. It frees the working class from the communist burden, makes its own power, and makes the ladder of its ascent to the throne of state sovereignty a form of capitalist planning of labour and production. By doing these things, the party deprives the labour movement of all capacity and potential for organizing anti-wage labour councils, and it is quite obvious that in this regard it blocks the channels of workers’ development for socialist council socialism. Pannekoek remains oblivious to this fundamental part of the destructive influence of party-building on the workers’ movement, does not consider its consequences for the position of the working class in the conditions after the possible revolution, and for this very reason he also makes fundamental mistakes in assessing his twofold possibilities regarding the outcome of the relations between the party and the working masses. The first aspect of his prediction is deeply fanciful. The working masses who, without going through the maze of a powerful, conscious, anti-wage labour soviet movement and only behind a party, have advanced to the verge of overthrowing the political power of the capitalist day will undoubtedly not be capable of socialist socialism and conscious, free, creative, far-sighted, equal and penetrating intervention in the all-round soviet organization of labour planning and social production on the day of the revolution. Pannekoek’s assumption that they themselves, without any background of preparation, without training in continuous socialist swimming in the immense whirlpools of class struggle, without refining bourgeois inverted thinking, without achieving class consciousness, and without eliminating all these shortcomings and Achilles’ heels in the crucible of the anti-capitalist soviet movement, can become master architects of the building of socialism and capable actors in socialist planning of labour and production is very unrealistic. The history of the labour movement of the twentieth century is the best witness to this claim. The working masses in many countries made revolutions in the company of parties, they brought many revolutions to victory, but they themselves did not win in any of these revolutions. Everywhere they remained the sellers of labour power and the masses oppressed by the power of capital, the shackles of wage slavery on their hands and feet became even tighter than before, and in a word, Pannekoek’s first possibility never came true anywhere.
It should also be explained here that the insistence on the growth and maturity of a powerful anti-wage labour Councils movement as an indispensable prerequisite for the establishment of socialism absolutely does not mean that the labour movement should avoid preparing for various subversive uprisings and uprisings before going through all the stages of ascent to this level!!! This is the most vulgar distortion that can be made of this statement. The issue is completely the opposite. The whole discussion is about the fact that the working masses, in the midst of their daily struggles, must use all the necessary conditions to inflict every possible blow on the wage slavery system, including on the political power structure of capital. The process of preparing, preparing and equipping the working masses for socialist and anti-wage labour councils passes through this vast campaign against capital, the attack on all aspects of the existence of capital, the struggle against all forms of oppression and crime of the wage slavery system, the struggle against law, order, and the capitalist state. It is not that the workers should not use any necessary conditions to overthrow the governments, it is that they should make every uprising and every overthrow of every government an organic part, without any kind of phasing, any stage setting, and any form of periodization, of their ever-ongoing anti-capitalist movement. In this regard, the next and more important point is that the workers’ movement, regardless of what specific conditions, what twists and turns or tunnels, what periods of upsurge or recession, what uprisings or conventional and everyday forms of struggle it faces, will not succeed in destroying capitalism and establishing socialism without ascending to the level of a conscious, soviet, anti-wage labour movement, with a clear horizon of abolishing wage labour, composed of the largest number of involved, influential, aware, and capable masses of socialist socialism.
As for the second possibility, Pannekoek’s calculations lack socialist and anti-wage labour insight. The question is not whether the workers will leave the party alone, return to their homes, and continue their work, or whether this process will result in a bourgeois campaign against the impartial party, and the party will eventually become an instrument of bourgeois power!! This is not how it happens and has not happened in the past hundred years. The fact is that the workers will go to the labour market, and the party, as a representative of the state capitalist approach, will take over the capitalist and state planning of labour and social production, using the existing levers and mechanisms and taking advantage of the ignorance, weakness, and inferiority of the labour movement. Everything will remain as before, and only one form of capitalist labour and production organization will replace another. This will not happen in the process of the defeated bourgeoisie’s campaign against the party, but in the form of the complete and total victory of the state capitalist approach and the establishment of the party’s power bases. Pannekoek makes all these mistakes in his calculations, simply because he does not take into account the organic and intrinsic connection between the establishment of socialism and the existence of a powerful, conscious, and far-sighted anti-wage labour movement. The establishment of socialism is not possible without such a movement with the necessary class and socialist framework. Marx’s radical criticism of Bolshevism cannot be summed up in the fact that they blocked the way for the workers to exercise collective ownership of the means of labour by implementing a centralized state dictatorship. The more fundamental problem is that Bolshevism and Leninism, with all their capitalist-oriented analyses and prescriptions for the labour movement, did not help the working masses of Russia in organizing a powerful anti-capitalist soviet movement with a clear perspective of the abolition of wage labour. In this regard, they did not play any appropriate role in preparing, equipping, and preparing the workers to achieve the necessary potential for socialist soviet socialism. Bolshevism did not lead the working class and the labour movement of Russia on the basis of achieving such a perspective, potential, and capacity, but in another way. We will discuss this issue again.
The narrative of the organization of the labour movement
Despite all the correct insistence and emphasis, it places on the soviet nature of the organization of the working masses, Council communism very wrongly limits the relevance and urgency of this type of organization to periods of general uprisings and widespread mass uprisings. This attitude seriously questions the socialist foundation and anti-wage labour of the theorists of Council communism’s view of the labour movement. Pannekoek is less a prisoner of this attitude than all subsequent theorists of this approach, but even he states that: “When the proletariat rises up for its hegemony, it simultaneously develops and evolves its organization and new forms of economic order. These two developments are inseparable and form the process of social revolution. The organization of the working class in a strong body capable of mass action, of criticism, is revolution, because capitalism can only rule over unorganized individuals. When these organized masses rise up in mass struggle and revolutionary action and the existing powers are paralyzed and disintegrated, then simultaneously the leadership and regulatory functions of the previous governments fall into the hands of the workers’ organizations, and the continuation of production for the continuation of the basic process of social life becomes an urgent task. Since the struggle of the revolutionary class against the bourgeoisie and its organs is inseparable from the seizure of the means of production by the workers and their use for production, the same organization that unites the class for the struggle also serves as the new organization of the production process.” (Antoine Pannekoek. Notes on the Question of Organization)
All discussions revolve around the conditions of the uprising and the decisive days of the class struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. There is no mention of the anti-capitalist organization of the working masses in other days and periods. The history of capitalism is the history of the uninterrupted and uninterrupted campaign of the workers of the world against exploitation and dictatorship and the crimes and injustices of the wage slavery system, but this history has not witnessed large-scale mass uprisings in all its periods, moments and minutes. Nationwide uprisings have not been and are not phenomena of the workers every day, every year or even every few years. The workers’ movement in every corner of the world has gone through many twists and turns, ups and downs. It has suffered terrible defeats. It has gone through terrible bloodbaths and, following these dark and catastrophic events, has endured short, long and sometimes very long periods of stagnation, silence, surrender and submission. With all this, in the depths of all these conditions, it has fought against the situation of its day, and now the question is what it should do in the midst of such circumstances and conditions to organize itself, to rebuild its fighting power, to keep its class war strongholds intact. What will happen to its task of organizing itself and exercising its collective anti-capitalist class power? And what kind of organization should it turn to? This is a question that is absent in Pannekoek’s discussion, and much worse in the discussions of other theorists of Council communism. The profound indifference of Council communism to this decisive and vital question also confronts them with a more fundamental and fateful question. If the labour movement in all periods, ages, and stages of the class struggle, in the dark days of defeat and bearing the deadly consequences of defeat, in the periods of stagnation, stagnation, and the unbridled monotony of the bourgeoisie, does not prepare itself with all its might and strength to organize itself and organize itself in a soviet and anti-capitalist manner, if it does not do these things and pushes their implementation into oblivion, how and with what means will it be able to organize the power of the masses of its class overnight, in the blink of an eye, with the emergence of the faces of turbulence and the beginning of social crises, and turn this organization into a vessel for socialist fieldwork, uprising, bringing the revolution to victory, and more fundamental and greater than all of these, socialist planning and the abolition of wage labour and production!!!!
This is impossible, and the entire history of the workers’ movement confirms this impossibility without question. We have already seen that the pioneers of Council communism saw the state of the Russian working class at the end of the 1920s and the failure of the October Revolution. They were critical and protested at what was happening in Russia after October, they criticized Bolshevism, but they did not delve into the real roots of the failure. They did not seek the history of the failure in the absence of a strong anti-capitalist Council workers’ movement with a clear horizon of the abolition of wage labour in the years preceding the revolution. Here and in their entire discussion of the problem of workers’ organization, we are again faced with precisely and profoundly the same dilemma. The existence of an organized, conscious Council movement armed with a clear horizon of the abolition of wage labour as a real and essential precondition for the victory of the workers’ revolution does not occupy a place in their calculations. For them, the absence of a party is everything. The parties need only be dissolved. The workers will rise up against the apocalypse!! They are very right and very communist in their emphasis on the harmful consequences of party-building over the workers, but they make grave mistakes when they neglect the fundamental importance of a strong, organized, conscious, and far-reaching movement. It should not be overlooked that “council communism” by committing this same grave mistake can inflict the same blow on the workers’ movement as the party-builders of the left reformist spectrum inflicted and are inflicting. Pannekoek continues the same points as above: “In an illegal strike, the workers decide on their own affairs through regular meetings. They elect strike committees as the central organizations. The members of these committees, however, can be replaced at any moment. If the strike spreads to a large number of factories, they act in unison by means of larger committees consisting of representatives of all the individual factories. These committees are not organizations that make decisions according to their own opinion and above the workers. The representatives simply convey the message. They communicate the opinions and desires of the group they represent to the other representatives. They cannot play the role of leaders because at any moment they can be replaced by others. The workers must choose their own path, decide on their own actions. They must choose their own path and when the strike is over, the committees disappear and disappear” (ibid.).
Perhaps there is no need to explain further that the basis of anti-capitalist organization of workers as a permanent, continuous necessity, a guarantee of preparing, equipping and advancing the class struggle with a solid, growing and developing framework within the existing society is not the concern of the founders of Council communism. Organization in this conversation is only necessary when an illegal strike is on the way, a workers’ uprising is about to take place. Society is giving birth to and giving birth to a revolution. It is only at such times that people should get on their feet and, with this getting on their feet, “make a difference” to the earth and time. As soon as the strike is over, the organization and organizing process are also archived. As soon as the uprising ends in defeat, the need for organization also disappears. When the trumpet of the revolution is silent, the effort to organize and line up against capital also becomes redundant and meaningless. It seems that the requirement for any organization to be workers’ and anti-capitalist is that that organization rises with the occurrence of a critical situation and sets with the end of these conditions. How workers are supposed to organize at the broadest level in the blink of an eye, how their organization is supposed to be council-based, conscious, far-sighted, and socialist, and how it carries with it all the capacity necessary to end the existence of wage slavery, are issues that remain unanswered.
Confusing ambiguities that at the same time present other aspects of the unbalanced system of ideas and theories of the founders of Council communism before us. Aspects that include their narrative of class consciousness, the relationship between object and mind or theory and practice, the organic relationship between consciousness and movement and organization, the narrative of the conscious anti-capitalist movement, and the like. Points and topics that I will explain elsewhere in this article, but before that we must continue the present discussion further.
The subsequent theorists of Council communism made the narrative full of ambiguity and contradictions of this approach to the organization of the labour movement even more ambiguous and contradictory. ” Paul Mattick ” considers any attempt to establish any form of organization of the working masses as an opportunist, bourgeois, and anti-labour effort. He believes very seriously that:
No organization in a capitalist system can be sustainably anti-capitalist. ‘Sustainability’ refers only to limited ideological activity and is the privilege of sects and individuals to gain social influence. Organizations must be opportunistic in order to influence social events and at the same time serve their own ends.” (Paul Mattick, Spontaneity and Organization)
The traces of Paul Methick’s words about labour organizations can be clearly seen in the earlier version of Pannekoek’s work. There, too, there was a great deal of apprehension about the stability and permanence of labour organizations! The insistence on their temporary nature and the conformity of their rise and fall with the presence or absence of strikes or large-scale mass uprisings indicated this apprehension and pessimism. Both theorists believe that permanent organization is inevitably corruptive. It inevitably leads to degeneration. It adopts a bureaucratic direction, becomes a cell of capitalist society. All the relations, superiors and subordinates, values, rules, different and distinct class interests find their way into it. It dissolves in the political, civil, and legal order of capitalism, assumes all the characteristics and determinations of existing society, falls into the abyss of being a party, and in a word, loses all its labour credibility and anti-capitalist nature. Pannekoek and Paul Mattick forget one thing in their insistence and apprehension. It is not the mere permanence or temporary nature of a labour organization that determines the task of organizing the working masses in terms of dissolution in the structure of the capital order or complete class independence from the system of wage slavery. On the contrary, this type of understanding and view of the labour movement towards capitalism, towards socialism, towards the anti-capitalist and socialist orientation, towards the conditions and requirements for establishing communism, the abolition of wage labour, in the form of organization and anti-regime and the solutions and strategies of class struggle that also determine the fate of its organization.
Both men consider and judge the issue of organizing the labour movement as mentioned above, and they seek the escape of the organization of the working masses from bourgeois corruption in the temporary nature and the precise determination of the criteria for its emergence and decline. In developing his views, Paul Mattick places great emphasis on the issue of spontaneity, in such a way that in order to get rid of every evil, including the evil of the decline of labour organization, he directly resorts to the introversion and spontaneity of organizing. Paul Mattick’s interpretation of spontaneity or spontaneity has not one procedure but two distinct procedures. Two approaches that, according to him, are complementary to each other, but in reality, this is not necessarily the case, and in the case of workers’ organization, insisting on their consensus also implies the formation of an anti-wage labour council of the working class. The first approach, spontaneity, has a very correct, materialistic, and radical concept. It is what Marxian communism, and the abolition of wage labour also strongly insist on. That the anti-capitalist organization of the working class must and can be born from the depths of the life, work, and exploitation of the masses of this class and with the effective, resourceful, and resourceful leadership of the workers’ movement activists. Here it must germinate, grow, be aware, have a horizon, be strong, and become stronger. This is a completely positive and radical aspect of spontaneity, but its second approach is very negative and implies urgency and its rise and fall depending on the presence or absence of the specific turbulences of the class struggle. That the workers organize themselves to bring their strike to fruition and, upon the end of the strike, issue the order to disperse. That they begin the work of organizing themselves to bring the uprising to victory, and if that fails, gather the means of organization and crush any attempt to have an organized movement against wage labour into oblivion. Mattick says:
“Since some social forces, relationships and organizations are going towards nothingness and others are going towards their consolidation, it is clear that those who are committed to the future, to the new forces that are being promoted, should emphasize spontaneity, and those who are more closely tied to the old situation should emphasize the necessity of organizations” (ibid.).
Neither “Paul Mattick” nor “Panekok” explain why a self-motivated labour organization cannot continuously boast, develop, last, strengthen, and raise the class consciousness of the working masses while maintaining its radical anti-capitalist leaven. To become the real container of the anti-wage labour council movement, to become the resistant skeleton of the nationwide council organization of socialist labour planning and production in the future and the day after the revolution. They do not consider such a capacity for any form of organization of workers, including anti-capitalist councils, and for this reason, they consider adherence to the necessity of permanent labour organizations as a sign of people’s close entanglement with the ancient situation. In this regard, “Mattick” goes so far as to question any kind of conscious and purposeful effort of labour activists to organize the labour movement and sees the spontaneous ups and downs of the labour masses seeking organization as the only model for the correct work of the labour movement.
“Henri Simon,” a contemporary theorist of council communism, goes beyond his predecessors in formulating his views on workers’ organizations and expresses their beliefs in a much more fluent and straightforward manner. In his writings and interviews, he speaks of two types of organization, distinguishing between these two forms of workers’ organization under the names of administrative organization and spontaneous organization. “Simon” tries to draw a line between spontaneity and improvisation, and by explaining these lines as much as possible, he comes up with a more justified explanation of workers’ spontaneous organization. An attempt that ultimately does not solve a problem for the defenders of Council communism. First of all, he explains the concept in question. “Spontaneity does not mean something that comes from the sky. It is a kind of birth in which a rise from nothing takes place. A birth that sufficiently structures any kind of struggle. We are all necessarily social individuals, forcibly bound to a social organization, the organization of our lives. This organization of our lives is not a form of organization that fundamentally rules over the social organization. This organization is above all something for itself and rules over the social organization only as a result of our own activity.”
Henri Simon, after defining spontaneity and correctly describing its material foundations, adds that human beings spontaneously recognize their vital interests and express sensitivity to what prevents them from self-organization. At the same time, the capitalist system, by continuously suppressing all previous forms of spontaneous organizations of life, develops and imposes on individuals the absolute need for individual and social self-organization. By putting forward these points, Simon increasingly dresses people’s spontaneous reactions in the guise of efficiency and sanctity. To the point where he even considers their all-round siege by capitalist ideas, ideology, morality, culture and dominant strategies as a stimulus for their development, resistance and effective expression of life rather than a slaughtering sword or an engineering device for the aforementioned reactions. With such assumptions, he goes to the dual forms of workers’ organization and defines and distinguishes these two forms from each other as follows.
“A voluntary organization is an organization that, by creating or joining it, acts to realize certain predetermined ideas that arise from our belonging to an environment and to defend constantly what we consider to be our interests. For this we come together with a small number of people (often very limited) who occupy our intellectual space. The fate of the organization lies in its purpose, a purpose that is determined by the people who are related to each other and who work for themselves and for others in this organization. A purpose that is of a permanent nature and in which a system of references prevails. From that system one can deduce methods of action. In other words, a certain set of ideas has led to certain forms of predetermined activity. Almost always a limited group addresses or acts in relation to a larger group. This is inevitable in that people who know or think they know act in relation to people who do not know or know incompletely and are supposed to be persuaded” (ibid.).
This definition is full of fundamental flaws. All the factors that Simon brings forward in introducing this type of organization are factors that demonstrate the identity and reality of a party or political group of the type of common communist parties and groups that represent the existing world. But every voluntary organization or every worker organization based on conscious and purposeful effort and with a clear class horizon is not necessarily a party. Conflating these two phenomena together has only one meaning. That basically, every conscious movement of worker activists to lay the groundwork and lay a stone on a stone in order to form an anti-wage labour council of the masses of the working class is also considered equivalent to party building above the heads of the workers and we demand its unconditional closure!! The second important flaw in the above theory is that organizing the working masses around a specific goal, if this goal is truly liberation from the evil of the existence of capitalism and the preparation of a conscious class struggle against this system, is not only not a crime, but is a fateful and vital matter for the international working class. One of the most catastrophic problems of the global labour movement is its lack of horizon and its disconnection from the bright prospect of abolishing wage labour. Any form of workers’ organization that emphasizes the importance and urgency of this prospect directly threaten and fundamentally destroys the anti-capitalist consistency and guarantee of the growth of the anti-capitalist labour movement. The third important form of Simon’s speech is the unreasonable and fanciful insistence on the existence of a conflict between spontaneity and planning and the directed or purposeful effort of the workers in their organizing work. At the bottom of its spontaneity, the labour movement has anti-capitalist leaven, but this spontaneity should be more conscious, more consultative, and more anti-wage labour and organized. The process of organizing this autopoietic movement, which is fighting against the exploitation and lawlessness of wage slavery, should also make Marxian consciousness, awareness, and awareness as much as possible its blood circulation system and thinking head. Anti-capitalist spontaneity not only does not conflict with purposefulness and having a horizon, but on the contrary, the former without the latter is doomed to certain error.
Henry Simon, like his former sympathizers, is very right and right when he states the dangers of party building for workers, but when he equates any conscious intervention and purposeful effort of labour activists to organize against wage labour of his class with party building, he makes a very serious mistake. Following the incorrect explanation of the conscious organization of the labour movement, he examines another form of organization of workers and in this passage says:
“A spontaneous organization is an organization that arises from the action of all members of a group for a specific activity in defence of specific, immediate and immediate interests at a given point in time. The activities of the organization are spontaneous in response to the necessities of a situation. Such situations are not only the result of specific conditions that lead to the realization of the interests that must be defended, but also the result of the relationship that we can have at that point with all the voluntary organizations working in that situation. A spontaneous organization is the joint activity of a specific social group not by choice, but by the internal social cohesion of the individual at that point” (ibid.). We see that here too all the objections that we have mentioned before are repeated. A wall of contradiction has been erected between the spontaneity of the workers’ effort to organize and the consciousness and horizon of this effort. The inevitable connection between any approach to organization and a specific workers’ protest and action is emphasized, which means that the organization must be unconditionally non-permanent and transitory.
In other words, the mere existence and continuation of the work of any labour organization, even if it is an organization of anti-wage and socialist councils of the working class, is still considered sufficient reason for the freezing of that organization in the civil, legal, political and cultural order of capital. There is a famous story that tells of a person on a roof who came so close to the abyss that the risk of his fall was certain. Some people shouted at him that he was on the verge of falling, and the said person retreated in fear until he fell from the other edge of the roof to the ground. The experts and founders of council communism, in the midst of a specific historical situation, reflect in a progressive and radical way on the disastrous effects of party building over the heads of workers and syndicalist reformism. They rightly criticize these types of organizations, but they base this criticism neither on socialism, nor on the Marxian narrative of the anti-wage labour organization of the working class, nor on the conditions and conditions that go beyond the requirements and needs of the proletarian abolitionist movement, which is essentially based on a democratic critique of the bourgeois bureaucracy ruling in the Bolshevik Party, the Social Democratic parties, and similar subsequent trends. For this reason, and under the pressure of this same point of departure, they fail to recognize the fundamental and essential differences between the permanent anti-capitalist soviet organizations with the prospect of abolishing wage labour and the aforementioned parties, and in this direction, they go so far as to practically criticize any type of conscious, purposeful, soviet organization with a clear socialist prospect.
The narrative of consciousness and the conscious socialist movement of the working class
The points we have made so far may be more or less illuminating for understanding the real framework of the views and practical existence of Council communism. From these discussions it becomes clear how they view the most fundamental issues of the labour movement, including the issue of class consciousness and, more importantly, the reality of the socialist movement and the abolition of wage labour by the working class. Consciousness does not occupy much of a place within this system of views. When spontaneity is everything and enjoys maximum sanctity, efficiency, and adequacy, there is no room left for anti-wage labour consciousness. There is no need to explain that the working masses and their anti-capitalist spontaneity are surrounded from the ground and sky by all the inversions of capital and under the unrestrained fire of various forms of distortion of the capitalist system. This class spontaneity can suffer various fates. Capitalism, using all its ideological arsenals, beliefs, culture, thoughts, ethics, education, religion, nationalist, racial, ethnic and professional superstitions, the force of habit and all other mechanisms, target it. It makes every effort to engineer the cycle of change and its dynamic equations in accordance with what is required for the maximum valuation and profitability of capital. It reworks its radical anti-capitalist theme with a reformist treatment and replaces its natural communist orientation with compromise, subjugation and obedience to capital. The wage slavery system does this in response to this spontaneity and has all the necessary facilities to do so.
The other side of the story is the deeply contradictory and conflicting actions and effects that can and must be carried out by the anti-wage labour and socialist approach within the labour movement against all forms of pressure and influence of capital. Let me explain this point a little. The consciousness of the proletariat is its conscious, practical and movement-based criticism against the basis of capitalism and against all manifestations of the life of this system. This consciousness is not something that all members of the working masses receive all at once, all at once, cast, in the form of revelation, inspiration and occult secrets, simply because they are wage slaves. On the contrary, like all forms of knowledge, it is the result of anatomy, education, scientific exploration, discovery, summarization, practical application, promotion and social applications. In order for the initial anti-capitalist spontaneity of the workers to develop into socialist consciousness, it must pass through the maze of such activities, which undoubtedly must be realized in the process of class struggle, on the basis of the ever-present struggle between the proletariat and the capitalist system. The primary class instinct tells the worker that in order to earn his living and improve his daily livelihood, he must demand the highest possible price for his labour power. It tells him that for this he must exercise the necessary power against capital and against the capitalist or the state as personified capital. These are the issues that the anti-capitalist instinct of the worker screams in his brain, consciousness, and cognition and pushes him towards struggle, but this struggle and exercise of power against capital is faced with a world of obstacles and problems. He is faced with the resistance of capital in thousands of forms, and in order to overcome these obstacles and break down these resistances, the worker needs to expand his awareness, expand his ability, and increase his capacity for finding solutions. He needs to understand capitalism more and more.
He needs to know what capital does to him, what it does to his work and the products of his work, where the real roots of his hunger, deprivation, homelessness, low standard of living, social inferiority and his fall from any form of constructive political intervention in society and in determining the fate of his life lie. Spontaneity is the driving force that throws him into the field of struggle, but he is silent about many of the most fundamental and vital issues of this struggle and says nothing important. He does not explain to the worker that the root of all this oppression, crime, discrimination and evil that is perpetrated against women stems from the depth of the relationship of buying and selling labour power. He does not say anything about what the state is. What role capital plays in planning the economic, political, civil, cultural and legal order and what vital functions its shoulder. He does not say much about the meaning and relevance of law, civilization, culture, social contracts, parliament, elections, democracy, tyranny, other similar institutions, the place of all these in maintaining the stability of capital. It does not have a clear explanation in its bag, and it does not light a bright torch in the corners of the minds and brains of the workers about what role the above institutions, agreements, and contracts play in applying the principles of capital appreciation to the lives of the working masses, in perpetuating the capitalist system, and in inverting all existing objectivity and all the realities of the wage slavery system. It does not explore and expose the real basis of poverty and hunger, homelessness, lack of medicine, lack of education and other injustices and humiliations in the depths of the capital relationship and does not place them before the eyes of the workers. It does not extract the real roots of ignorance, superstition, religion, nationalism, fascism, racism, warmongering, terrorism, religious barbarity, liberal and neoliberal brutality from the core of the surplus value production relationship and does not issue a conscious, vigilant and decisive indictment against wage labour against them. The anti-capitalist spontaneity within the labour movement does not do any of these things by itself and by virtue of its primary existence. In order to succeed in fulfilling these roles, it must take pride in, and go through a long path, full of education, war, struggle, defeat, victory and ups and downs. More informed, more experienced, and more progressive workers must teach all of this to their more inexperienced and less knowledgeable comrades. They must make all of this learning, awareness, and enlightenment part of their agenda in the midst of daily struggle, in the maze of advancing the class war, and as an essential weapon in this war. This awareness or informative work is fundamentally different from writing a book, preparing a dissertation and a handful of academic works. It is in the form of nutrition and breathing and vital activities of the daily movement of the working class. A continuous work that is intertwined with the struggles of the working masses in all areas of social life and with the organization and orientation and everything of their movement. The primary anti-capitalist spontaneity is a living being that must be fed with all these works so that it grows leaves and the existence of a conscious anti-wage labour and a field determined to eradicate wage slavery. The pioneers and theoreticians of Soviet Communism, when they sneer around spontaneity and disdain all conscious activities, they actually block the way of the growth and development of Communism in the sense of the real movement of changing the existing objectivity. But this is only part of their huge mistakes.
Underlining the importance of a purposeful and sustained anti-capitalist council organization is another severe blow that is inflicted on this movement. For workers to form a committee for every resistance, protest, strike, uprising, and struggle, to establish a council, and to pack up their organizational equipment after the protest is over, to seek a way to preserve the purity and sanctity of their organizations by being temporary, seeing them as periodic, and considering the mechanism of special days, is certainly not a way that will lead the labour movement to victory in the war against capital. In order to confront the system of wage slavery, to impose any of its simple demands on the capitalist class, to overthrow the capitalist state, and to not be captured by right-wing and left-wing reformism and other misleading bourgeois strategies, the working class needs an organized, conscious, and far-sighted anti-wage labour council movement. The founders and defenders of council communism, with their explanations, guidelines, and theorizing, not only do not contribute to the formation, skeleton, consistency, and growth of this movement, but they also complicate its problems. The current adherents of this approach must elevate their legitimate criticism of right-wing union reformism and party-building above the workers to a socialist and anti-wage labour critique. Only then will their council communism become homogeneous with the communism of the abolition of wage labour of the proletariat.