The Workers Council from the Commune to Autonomy
100 years of communism: 1871-1974
Below follows information about a new series I’m running through Red May
First online session Oct. 16, 12pm PST. Sign up here
The twentieth century can count only one truly new communist idea: the workers’ council, which emerged in Russia in 1905 as part of a revolutionary mass strike movement. But what is a workers’ council, or soviet, and how does it follow from the nineteenth-century theory of the commune? Is there an underlying concept of proletarian self-organization which both these theories of class struggle share? And what role do these theories leave for the party? What is the relationship between the workers’ council, which vanished from the world at the moment of its greatest extent, in the 1970s, and the turn, in struggle since then, to an autonomy without councils.
In tracing the story of the workers’ council from the Paris Commune to the present era, we will define, as a matter of preliminaries, the basic contours of revolution in our time. Not the council or the commune, perhaps, but what the council hoped to achieve. The focus here is as much on the practical history of the communist movement, as it is on the intellectual history of the movement of communists. Works by Rosa Luxemburg, Jan Appel, CLR James, Paul Mattick, will be read in the context of the Paris Commune, the German Revolution, the Spanish Civil War, May ’68, and the Carnation Revolution.
The series comprises eight month-long modules, with local, offline reading groups followed two weeks later by an online plenary session, hosted by Red May. Participants are encouraged to organize their own reading groups. The series is designed for people to participate at different levels, either offline or online or both.
More information here.
On Self-Organization and the Commune
The emancipation of the working classes must be, as we know from history and from Marx and Engels, conquered by the working class itself.[1] The class of proletarians must organize itself, must self-organize, for who else could be trusted to abolish class society and class rule but the class which cannot rule? In this sense, self-organization is presupposed by all meaningful class struggle, the prelude of insurrection if not revolution. But whose is the self of self-organization? What is the working class itself? It cannot be the sum of each worker themself, as organized by capitalism, for that is by definition not self-organization but other-organization. Nor can it be the product of all workers, organized for each other, for that is simply communism, leaving no room for another class and thus no room for classes or class as such. It must be the difference that some section of the class makes when it removes itself from its organization by capitalism and for the ruling class. Self-organization is always a matter of some section of the class that would be all but isn’t. Self-organization is never, then, the class itself, but rather some fraction of the class subtracted from given relations. To organize for themselves and by themselves, the members of some projective collectivity must do so with each other, but most importantly, against their already existing organization by and for capital. The proletariat steps forward by stepping back out of the existing organization of the world but it never does so wholly. The proletariat is always only some proletarians.
Self-organization does not unite the working class but splits it—in doing so, however, it betokens the abolition of class, not the unity of proletarians but real human community. Split upon split, self-organization inscribes the division between classes within the proletarian class in order that all divisions might be trespassed. Against a self-organizing fraction, the unity of the class presents itself as the subordination of each member of the class to their identity as exploited worker or dispossessed proletarian. The workers occupy their factories but it is never all the workers nor all the factories nor, when a show of hands is taken, are the occupiers even the workers. Liberation means breaking with both the owners and the arbiters of labor power, breaking with the class of rulers as well as the class of the ruled, the owners and their delegates and representatives within the class, who enable the buying and selling of labor in bulk. But by the same measure, this exceptionality is also always a form of representation if not substitution. In organizing by themselves such self-organizing fractions are rarely entirely selfish in their motives, are rarely only strictly for themselves. This is why it is usually some moment of individual mournability that sets things off—the police kill a worker, or some section of workers are fired, and then everyone reacts, for themselves and others all at once.
The workers occupy the factories in May ’68, for example, but their demands are both selfish and not: they stand with the students, against De Gaulle, and for themselves. They inspire and are inspired by other proletarians near and far, with and without jobs, inside and out any sociological bound we might draw. The rebels of the Paris Commune, of the Shanghai Commune, of Berlin in 1918 and Bologna in 1977 and Argentina in 2001 act for themselves and others—not just Paris or Shanghai or Bologna or Buenos Aires or Cairo but Paris and Shanghai and Bologna and Buenos Aires and Cairo. Inasmuch as they act in such a way as to make possible a later overcoming of class itself then they act on behalf of all proletarians, even and especially those not yet born into dispossession. In this manner, to the extent that they introduce something new into the class struggle, something imitable they inspire sympathy, solidarity and imitation far and wide. This is the secret meaning of the term commune, which is always a fragment of some communism not yet established, a part without a whole that nonetheless treats itself as whole, a communist Paris without a communist France, a city center turned into an armed encampment, an occupied factory made emblem of proletarian autonomy as such.
As without, so within. The self- of self-organization is spectral, dissolving at any moment into the frayed ends of individual selves. This is why all attempts to represent, to count, to fix the revolutionary camp in place, however defined, must fail. In collective action, people together believe what individually they doubt, making the boundaries of such actions indiscernible. Self-organization is a kind of fanatic reason—something is rational because, in collective action, people make it so. From the revolutionary Red Interval of 1917-23 through to the 1960s and 1970s, this is the conclusion we are led to draw from the shocking reversals and betrayals of the greatest revolutionary proletarian successes. In Germany in 1918, in the wake of the Russian Revolution, this dynamic was perhaps posed most clearly, if only because there the most massively inertial institution of the workers’ movement, the SPD, confronted one of the largest fields of proletarian revolutionary self-organization yet seen. Communists like Rosa Luxemburg, aligned with the Spartacist League and its successors, hoped to out-maneuver the left wing of capital by drawing upon the substantial support demonstrated by the workers’ and soldiers’ councils of November, spontaneous formations that had ended a world war and toppled the German empire, but in balloting workers are counted modulo capital, as individual chunks of variable capital, heads of house, citizens, and consumers. A kind of Heisenbergian uncertainty attends self-organization, then. Some subject, some specter, makes itself felt, makes its presence known, but cannot be represented or observed directly—in fact, dissipates when one attempts to formalize or gather it, to body the ghost in constitution.
This is simply another way of saying that the object of self-organization is not, or cannot be, the securing of rights, for that is organization by and of another. Thus is the moment of contract, of settlement, always a scandal for struggles that insist on self-organization, whether piqueteros or Zapatistas, whether in the Zone a defendre or the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone. Self-organization cannot become self-rule, autonomy, without becoming the domination of each individual by some abstract notion of the collective, some mediation, substitution or representation. As atomized, penniless, and market-bound individuals, proletarians are weak, but collectivization is no guarantee against heteronomy, since capital treats labor as variable capital, bought in bundles that might be individuals or groups, a real-valued function that might as well be one worker or one thousand or 12.57 workers, whatever that means. The collective action of a movement can be absorbed as a movement of variable capital, as a flow of labor-power reproduced at a given capacity.
This explains the sudden reversals experienced when it comes time to settle up. In June of 68, in Paris, the mass of the workers greet the negotiations between the leaders of the respective classes with an indifference equal to the ferocity with which they downed their tools in the great strike of May. In Italy’s Creeping May, the rank-and-file organizations which brought the apparatus of Italian industry to halt with ease dissipate just as quickly in the face of negotiations between the classes. The informality of self-organization cannot be banished, cannot be formalized, no matter the tyrannies imposed by such lack of structure. That lack of structure, or rather that refusal of structure, derives from the antinomies of the class struggle.
For this reason, even though self-organization is the very presupposition of revolutionary action, as and if the revolution unfolds it becomes an obstacle which the revolution must overcome.[2] Perhaps limit is the better term, for it is not what self-organization does that hinders the revolution but what it doesn’t do. The self-organizing fraction cannot simply subtract itself, for it remains materially dependent—that way lies suicide. Nor can it simply transact, or contract, for that would be organization by and through the enemy class. It must extract from capital and retract from the state what is necessary for each self to organize itself with others according to its own desire, which is to say nearly everything. The self of self-organization is projective, prospective, aspirational, not the real individuals themselves but a kind of spirit that hovers near, but only near. It doesn’t exist here and now, and therefore can only look on itself strictly as itself—as worker in autoplant, parent in a neighborhood, citizen in a city—as in fact the self of another, as something to be abolished. Self-organization always fights its way into a corner where the options are suicide, compromise, or total victory, which is to say the overcoming of opposition between self and other in the sense used here, the abolition of classes. Absent the production of communism, of classless society, such a self presents itself as vengeful spirit, appears most clearly when destroying the things of this world.
[1] Marx, “General Rules and Administrative Regulations of the International Working Men’s Association,” 3.
[2] Simon, “L’auto-organisation est la premier acte de la revolution, la suite s’effectue contre elle.”