Council communism is not, despite what both superficial sympathizers and detractors have often claimed, simply an arrival at anarchist communism by marxist means, or decked out in marxian terminology, although the two currents are more similar to each other than to virtually any other, and are among the precious few in history with any legitimate claim to be considered communist. A handful of significant differences remain, though, even beyond the anti-voluntarism and anti-activism which flows from council communism’s grounding in marxian crisis theory and consequent understanding of revolutionary possibility as determined by the world-historical developmental tendencies of the capitalist mode of production, and the material necessities arising therefrom.
One major difference in aims is that council communists do not share the principal defect in the anarchist conception of communism: the idea that it will be composed of many self-sufficient, autonomous communes vaguely federated. The anarchist communists rightly reject proudhonist/bakuninist ‘collectivism,’ seeing that maintenence of commodity-production and exchange inevitably reproduces exploitation, and consequently the state. But what they don’t see is that the localist fragmentation of social reproduction they envisage would not allow for any one of these would-be ‘autonomous’ communes to produce at a level of abundance sufficient to gaurantee ‘to each according to need.’ Thus despite the best of communist intentions, a ‘commune’ in this set-up would inevitably have to turn to exchange with other communes in order to acquire things it needs but can’t produce, which would necessitate some medium of exchange (i.e. money); the productive unit might be bigger, but all the problems of proudhonism would be reproduced, which would then reproduce economic competition, then the state. At its weakest, anarchist communism substitutes for Proudhon’s utopia of petty commodity-producers an even more retrograde one, a utopia of the medieval village (William Morris makes this explicit!)—and at its weakest, so too does the contemporary ‘communisation’ tendency, when it succumbs to the ideological phobia of so-called ‘mediation,’ insisting everything must be face-to-face, ad hoc, and ‘organic.’
Even when anarchist communist visions refuse this regressivism, incorporating large-scale production and advanced technology (as Cafiero, Kropotkin, and Most all did to varying degrees), this is ultimately an arbitrary difference, because they still stop short of the understanding that communism must be global communism and nothing else, that there is no commune but the world commune—this is why it can only be born of global capital, the first totalizing social form in history. Murray Bookchin is the historical terminus of the incoherent attempt to think a technologically-advanced anarchist communism-of-abundance wedded to an archaic localism of the small self-sufficient community. Thus one of the most important council communist texts of the 20th century is Jeremy Brecher’s 1973 critique of Bookchin in Root & Branch, which now functions as a critique of communisateur ‘mediation’-phobia avant la lettre.
Before the first decade of the 20th century, when the proletariat created the council in struggle, there was no real historical alternative to the localist fragmentation of anarchist communism on the one hand, and the despotism of bureaucratically-planned state-capitalism championed by Ferdinand Lassalle, Louis Blanc, et al (identified with ‘socialism’ by the parties of the Second International, and harshly denounced by Marx in the “Critique of the Gotha Program”) on the other. Hence why Marx’s libertarian communist theorizing finds no correlate at the level of practice—and why he throws out the stopgap statism of the Manifesto come the Paris Commune, the first appearance of a precursor to workers’ councils, in which he recognizes the emerging shape of the dictatorship of the proletariat. The experience of the Commune enabled Marx to grasp that “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes” (The Civil War in France), but must smash it all and carry out “a revolution against the State itself, this supernaturalist abortion of society, a resumption by the people for the people of its own social life” (ibid., first draft), self-organized in a completely new, disalienated form.
Only the nested structure of councils, scaling up to the global level, allows for the coordination of world social reproduction without top-down command or an autonomized state power. And only a certain level of technological development allows for the councils to match needs to their fulfillment in-kind, without the detour of accounting and distribution on the basis of labor-time—indeed, the internet is a crucial technical factor that has made a concrete possibility the planning principles already anticipated by the theorist of the 1918-’19 Bavarian council republic, Otto Neurath. In the 1930s, the council communists argued against in-kind planning because they claimed it would result in the ‘dictatorship of the statistician’s office over the producers,’ but real-time global communication, inventory, data processing, production/consumption feedback loops, make a specialized stratum of statisticians or a ‘central planner’s bureau’ superfluous. This is the other side, in addition to the much higher level of material productivity, of why the Groups of International Communists’ labor-time accounting scheme is historically obsolete and the direct communisation the anarchist communists always called for is now possible—but it’s possible only through the world-commune-of-councils.
By the early 1970s, not only Paul Mattick Sr., but For Ourselves (in the “Too Little Too Late?” piece) and Root & Branch (in the above-cited Bookchin-critique), the most advanced council communist voices of their time, understand this: neither thinks labor-time accounting is desirable or necessary, and they propose instead systems of coordinating social reproduction in-kind. This development is crucial, because just as it’s true that the councils’ global interconnectedness is a sine qua non of communism, so too is the direct institution of ‘to each according to need’ with no exchange-relation, even in the most attenuated sense of a given number of labor-hours for the equivalent amount of goods from the social store (that supposedly bypasses any money-form that could circulate or accumulate). Just as Walter Boelke and Helmut Wagner were right against the Spanish anarchists when the former insisted that the model of autarkic self-sufficient communes was utopian and would sabotage any attempt at communism, so in 1930, Luigi Galleani was right and the council communists were wrong about ‘according to need’ vs. ‘according to deed:’ the GIC’s scheme was just as utopian. A deed-based distribution system for the ‘factor of individual consumption’ was not just an unfortunate interim measure on the road to communism as they hoped, but would block and undo the attempt at communism because of what it would inevitably reproduce, just like the anarchists’ isolated communes. The idea that labor-certificates would not circulate because they were not supposed to is a total blindspot in both Marx’s Gotha Program-critique and the GIC’s Grundprinzipien that runs counter to every insight of Marx’s into the historical and logical development of the functions of the money-form in Capital and the Grundrisse. Someone would have to introduce and enforce all kinds of technical and/or disciplinary workarounds to ensure these ‘labor certificates’ couldn’t be hoarded or exchanged, and pretty soon you have the separate power of a state governing people, not just the councils administering things—and then you have a de facto ruling class over-and-against the producers themselves, with an interest in maintaining its own power-position, that would act as a break on any further development toward communism (indeed this is the problem with all ‘transitional systems’—their own inertial gravity ends up preventing the communism they’re supposed to midwife). The Friends of the Classless Society offer an excellent critique of labor-time accounting, and these notes from Internationalist Perspective make the clearest case that exchange and the functions of money emerge spontaneously in conditions of scarcity. But what follows from this is that not only will labor-time accounting not be able to prevent the reemergence of the money-form, neither will the crypto-primitivist poverty-communism seemingly desired by many communisateurs—and so many anarchists pining for a return to the simple life. Communism can only be a communism of sufficient abundance to ensure free access to necessaries; under any other conditions the functions of money would necessarily reemerge, in spite of revolutionaries’ best intentions.
If all this means that beginning to organize all social reproduction on ‘according to need’ lines in the course of the revolutionary process itself was historically impossible in 1930 due to the level of development of the productive forces, as the GIC thought (this was their justification for dividing productive sectors between those for freely-available ‘general social use,’ and for the ‘factor of individual consuption’ distributed on the basis of labor-time, the latter of which was supposed to eventually wither away), then communism itself was not yet possible—and indeed, no communism was forthcoming. Kropotkin’s warning that “the revolution must be communist or it will be drowned in blood, and have to be begun all over again” (The Conquest of Bread) was proven correct, as was Marx’s warning that it’s impossible for the revolution to be communist below a certain level of development of productive forces, before certain historical preconditions have been attained, because otherwise “want is merely made general, and with destitution the struggle for necessities and all the old filthy business would necessarily be reproduced” (The German Ideology).
Despite this different conception of aims, in practice, anarchists supported and participated in the workers’ councils alongside marxists virtually everywhere they emerged, certainly in the major early episodes in Russia and Germany. Thus the difference doesn’t seem insurmountable, especially as the necessity of the large-scale interdependence of the councils is proven in an actual revolutionary situation—anarchists will be compelled to recognize that centralizing coordination is not some inevitably-‘authoritarian’ bogeyman and ‘big’ is not bad. The intra-revolutionary antagonism in the present era must not be ‘marxists’ against ‘anarchists,’ but communists against all non-communist elements in the self-styled pro-revolutionary ranks, both marxist and anarchist—this is a point noted as early as the 1960s by the most clear-sighted thinkers of the time (Guy Debord and the situationists, Hans-Jurgen Krahl, Maximilien Rubel, etc.).
A similar situation obtains with the other major point of dispute—the council communists continue to intransigently insist on the revolutionary necessity of the dictatorship of the proletariat, a notion at which anarchists are ideologically obligated to balk. But actually, proletarian dictatorships were attempted (though crushed by western- or bolshevik-style social-democrats wedded to defending or developing capitalism) in both Germany 1918 and Russia 1917, and anarchists participated in them. It was the councils of Kronstadt that represented the last remnants of the proletarian dictatorship, not the bolshevik party-state that massacred them. When the wordgames are put aside, serious anarchist communist revolutionaries have always understood the need for and the character of proletarian dictatorship in the same basic way council communists do (unfortunately, it’s a different story when it comes to anarcho-syndicalists).
Let’s take a look at what anarchist communist Johann Most had to say on the subject—he doesn’t use the infamous phrase, but he describes proletarian dictatorship with no less ruthless exactitude than Dr. no-excuses-for-the-terror Marx: “In every community where the people have gained a victory, revolutionary committees will be constituted. These execute the decrees of the revolutionary army, which, reinforced by the armed workingmen, now rule like a new conqueror of the world. The former system will be abolished in the most rapid and thorough manner, if its supports — the ‘beasts of property’ and horde of adherents — are annihilated. The case standing thus: if the people do not crush them, they will crush the people, drown the revolution in the blood of the best, and rivet the chains of slavery more firmly than ever. Kill or be killed is the alternative. Therefore massacres of the people’s enemies must be instituted. All free communities enter into an offensive and defensive alliance during the continuance of the combat. The revolutionary communes must incite rebellion in the adjacent districts. The war cannot terminate until the enemy (the ‘beast of property’) has been pursued to its last lurking place and totally destroyed.”
Errico Malatesta too gives the correct definition of ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ as “simply the revolutionary action of the workers in taking possession of the land and the instruments of labor, and trying to build a society and organize a way of life in which there will be no place for a class that exploits and oppresses the producers. … ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ would be the effective power of all workers trying to bring down capitalist society and would thus turn into Anarchy as soon as resistance from reactionaries would have ceased and no one can any longer seek to compel the masses by violence to obey and work for him.”
Erich Mühsam, anarchist and heroic participant in the 1918 Bavarian councils, puts it thus: “the workers [in the German revolution] associated with the phrase ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ the simple notion that the oppressed class throws off the chains of capitalism in a revolutionary uprising in order to exercise self-determination over its own affairs through its councils.”
By the 1917-’23 revolutionary wave, anarchists too recognized that the ‘revolutionary committees’ Johann Most anticipated had found their real historical expression in the workers’ councils. The councils either destroy or absorb all previously alienated powers, coordinate all aspects of social reproduction and administration directly, and violently crush the reaction. Though democratic internally, no exploiters may participate in the councils, thus they are a dictatorship from the standpoint of the bourgeoisie. As all bourgeois forces are expropriated, defeated, dissolved and demoralized, or defect to the side of the revolution, the councils progressively lose the shape of a dictatorship as their role as a weapon of suppression comes to a close, and they also lose their ‘proletarian’ character with the defeat of their capitalist antithesis, as there is no more class-relation, no more wage-laborers and no more exploiters. But at no point is there a separate state body or party-dictatorship with powers autonomized from the class-in-revolt-against-classes: there are only the armed workers, and the comrades from their own ranks they delegate to execute their decrees, who can be recalled at any time. The councils do not lead or direct the insurgent proletariat, they are the assemblies of the insurgent proletariat, and all power of decision rests with them, flowing from the bottom up: ‘higher tier’ councils are merely fellow-workers acting as messengers for delimited purposes and delimited lengths of time, linking up at progressively larger geographic scales. In fact, in a revolutionary situation in present historical conditions, the delegation process would likely be much simplified and remain closer to the base, as different councils can debate and communicate and cooridnate decisions directly in real time, rather than send someone to travel somewhere to have a meeting.
The Spanish revolution was lost (to the extent to which it ever had a chance in that historical constellation) because it did not adequately grasp the necessity or real character of proletarian dictatorship. Already in pre-revolutionary times, the Spanish anarchist workers had alienated their powers in the CNT and FAI. The unions of the CNT were supposed to take over and run the workplaces (on ‘collectivist,’ not communist principles), and this was to exhaust the social revolution according to the professional anarchists organized in the FAI. The anarchists understood they must not make a mere political revolution, but they did not grasp that communism necessitates something other than the passively apolitical revolution they pursued. Helmut Wagner was quite right to critique the Spanish anarchists’ failure to directly attack bourgeois political institutions, their evasion of the question of political power. Anarchists too often treat the state like Tinkerbell: a bad dream that’ll vanish if enough people stop ‘believing’ in it, ‘acknowledging’ it, ‘legitimizing’ it (how many idiots in the ‘Occupy’ era said just this?). But Wagner gets lost in conceptual confusion when he calls this an ‘anti-political’ attitude rather than what it is (an apolitical one), and asserts the “need to build political power.”
Marx’s perspective, rather, is that the communist revolution has one and only one “political act,” which is in fact an actively anti-political act: “the overthrow of the existing ruling power and the dissolution of the old order. … But as soon as its organizing functions begin and its goal, its soul emerges, socialism throws its political mask aside” (Marx, “Critical Notes on ‘The King of Prussia’”). Social revolution is precisely the reintegration of the social powers formerly autonomized as apparently self-moving ‘political’ and ‘economic’ fetish-forms into the everyday life of human beings. The end of political as well as economic alienation is what distinguishes its project, universal human emancipation, from the bourgeois revolution’s merely political emancipation of a particular class. “Only when the real, individual man re-absorbs in himself the abstract citizen, and as an individual human being has become a species-being in his everyday life, in his particular work, and in his particular situation, only when man has recognized and organized his ‘own powers’ as social powers, and, consequently, no longer separates social power from himself in the shape of political power, only then will human emancipation have been accomplished” (Marx, “On ‘The Jewish Question’”). The power of the councils must abolish the bourgeois state and capitalist production-relations, and organize all social life on new bases, but it is neither ‘political’ nor ‘economic’ power—it is rather the overcoming of this antithesis. The real problem is that anarchists, ever undialectical, attempted to shirk the necessity of this overcoming: they affirmed one pole (‘economic’ power, in the shape of syndicalist management of commodity-production), while evading the other, when the social revolution must be the determinate negation of both.
The Spanish anarchists paid the price for this failure. The FAI let the temporarily bewildered bourgeois state alone, and the workers trusted the party-you-daren’t-call-a-party, when they should have smashed the state and assumed all power themselves. The republican state was still functional and as the tide of the war turned, the anarcho-bosses of the FAI were compelled to join a coalition goverment with the bourgeoisie in the name of ‘anti-fascism!’ This is why the dictatorship of the proletarians themselves, associated in their councils, must destroy the bourgeois state, the unions, the party (or its anarchist analogue)—ALL SEPARATE POWERS. Instead, the disgusting ‘anti-fascist’ government of bourgeois republicans, stalinists, and anarcho-bosses did the only thing it could: waged the war in its ‘national interests,’ which pit it against the committees and councils of revolutionary workers. “The barricades must be torn down!” decreed the FAI, and it’s a credit to the self-activity of the proletarians that they defied their party-leaders and went down fighting right to the bitter end in 1939.
The Spanish experience proved that the counterrevolutionary historical role of anarcho-syndicalism was, in the anarchist tradition, parallel to that of the social democracy in the marxist tradition. The reactionary elements were already there in ‘collectivism’ as preached by Proudhon and Bakunin (which Kropotkin correctly saw as an incoherent, impossible attempt to perpetuate wage-labor without exploitation or domination), but it was anarcho-syndicalism that generalized them and rendered anarchism an ideology giving cover for a trade-unionist practice fully integrated into bourgeois society. Meanwhile, Lassalle-influenced German-style social democracy widely popularized the equally incoherent and impossible dream of ‘state socialism,’ and accomplished the perversion of the verbiage of marxian theory into an ideology of legitimation for party-rule. Both ideologies wanted to absolutize one aspect of bourgeois society, while shearing off another and its negative consequences. Social democracy wanted to absolutize the enlightened-despotic state and liquidate the villified ‘private economy’ in favor of bureaucratic administration, while anarcho-syndicalism wanted to absolutize the economy (romanticized as independent workers’ collectives exchanging commodities through free and fair contracts) and lop the villified state off the top. Neither is actually possible (both state and economy must be overcome together or neither will be), but both their respective mystifications played their part in the defeat of proletarian revolutions in the two countries where, due to historical circumstances, they had been most deeply integrated into the real social practice of the workers—in Germany and Spain. Social democracy (and its leninist spinoff) has, with its much greater sphere of influence, done much more harm in draining the terms ‘socialism,’ ‘communism,’ and ‘marxism’ of content and turning them into their opposite. But on a more limited scale, anarcho-syndicalism did nearly as much to domesticate and sow great confusion in the anarchist ranks. In the Spanish revolution, for instance, Issac Puente and the CNT abused the term ‘libertarian communism,’ making it an empty phrase covering up proudhonist syndicalist practices: the CNT’s 1936 program detailing how commodity exchange should occur in ‘libertarian communism’ is perverse in just the same way as Stalin’s ‘socialist application of the law of value’ is!
As the council communists filled the role of the stubborn conscience of marxism in bad times, an untimely voice in the wilderness unmasking the mystifications of the social democrats and leninists to no avail, anarchist communism—in its strict anti-organizationalist, anti-trade-unionist, insurrectionary variety—filled this role against the collectivists and syndicalists. In the 19th century, due to the historical conditions detailed in Peter Jonas’s “Beyond the Agrarian Revolution,” no libertarian marxism could exist outside of Marx’s notebooks. All that was on the agenda were bourgeois-democratic political movements and reformist labor struggles that Marx and Engels considered ‘progressive’ and supported precisely because they pressed on capitalist development. But there were those who couldn’t accept the limits of their time. The ideas of Carlo Cafiero and Johann Most—from the theory of capital accumulation establishing the material preconditions for communism, to its secular crisis-tendency as catalyst for proletarian revolution, to ‘to each according to need’ based on the refunctioning of advanced technology to eliminate toil and drastically reduce the time necessary for social provisioning—are basically marxist, and were directly influenced by Marx (Cafiero was the first to introduce Capital to Italy, Most a defector from the German social democracy). Yet they wouldn’t give in to social-democratic practice, but demanded anti-state communist insurrection at once. Their cause was hopeless, and terminated in the famous desperate dynamite campaigns. But as much as they are anarchist communists, they could be justifiably interpreted as some of the earliest libertarian marxists—far too early, in fact. This is what makes them at once tragic and foolish and grand.