Defunct
52-455: The International Council Correspondence was a council communist magazine published in Chicago from 1934 to 1943. In 1938, it changed its name to Living Marxism and again to New Essays in 1942. Paul Mattick was the chief editor and main contributor, Karl Korsch , Anton Pannekoek , Max Nomad , Daniel Guérin , Otto Rühle , Dwight Macdonald and Victor Serge also published in
104-449: A dictatorship of the proletariat , transforming it from a wage-earning, propertyless mass into the ruling class". Although Marxists tend to focus on class consciousness (or its absence) among the proletariat, the upper classes in society can also think and act in a class-conscious way. As Leonard Fein pointed out, "The very rich have been well aware of their class privilege and have labored mightily to protect and defend it". Early in
156-764: A New Labour Movement" and Helmut Wagner's "Theses on Bolshevism". Council communists popped up in several other countries. The German emigrant Paul Mattick brought it to the United States where he published the International Council Correspondence . J.A. Dawson published the Southern Advocate of Workers' Councils in Australia and Laín Diez published council communist texts in Chile. The 1960s student movement led to
208-526: A brief resurgence of council communism, mainly in France, Italy, and Germany. After the decline of the 1968 movement , it mostly disappeared again, but for a few small groups in Europe and North America. While sharing a common general direction, council communists differed widely in their views on many issues. In contrast to reformist social democracy and to Leninism, the central argument of council communism
260-459: A common motive for wanting to end their disadvantaged status relative to other castes, but that class is an arbitrary distinction in capitalist society where there is equality before the law. Mises believed that under capitalism, one's wealth does not very much affect how one is treated by legislators, law enforcement, or the courts. Mises' follower Murray Rothbard argued that Marx's effort to portray workers and capitalists as two monolithic groups
312-419: A communist society. Where the network of worker councils would be the main vehicle for revolution, acting as the apparatus by which the dictatorship of the proletariat forms and operates. The government and the economy should be managed by workers' councils composed of delegates elected at workplaces and recallable at any moment. As such, council communists oppose authoritarian socialism . They also oppose
364-414: A mass movement to failures by its proponents. They did not develop a politics that could survive under a stabilized capitalism. Council communists did not gain an understanding of the composition of the council movement, the reasons for its decline, and the influence of Leninism and democracy on workers. All this was exacerbated, according to Gerber, by council communists' dogmatism and a lack of leadership at
416-563: A party in its own right. The AAUD–E quickly became an assortment of individual groups and tendencies rather than a coherent organization. It lost its leading theorist Rühle in 1925, when he concluded that the political situation was too reactionary for revolutionary politics. In 1927, it merged with a group excluded from the KPD and a union organization to form the Spartacist League of Left Communist Organizations, which in turn merged with
468-638: Is a Jew, he will play the card of Jewish finance-capital". The next major dispute in the KAPD concerned the formation of a new International opposed to the Comintern, the participation of the AAUD in wage struggles, and the role of the party's leadership around Karl Schröder . Schröder's leadership in the KAPD became increasingly controversial and he was perceived by some as attempting to exert dictatorial control. Politically, Schröder's faction argued that capitalism
520-405: Is defined as a stratum of society sharing common grievances and a unified perspective; and a "class for itself", which is defined as a stratum organized in active pursuit of its own interests. Categorizing a person's social class can be a determinant for their awareness of it. Marxists categorize classes based on their relation to the means of production , especially on whether or not members of
572-466: Is necessary to combine in unions, fight the employers, and strive to compel the government to pass necessary labour legislation." To overcome this (in Lenin's opinion) limited worldview, a vanguard party of the most politically advanced section of the working class was needed to help replace trade union consciousness with class consciousness. The Polish political philosopher Leszek Kolakowski disputed
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#1732765947852624-603: Is not a Party Matter , Rühle argued that the goal of the revolutionary movement was to take over production and therefore had no need for a party, which would necessarily become opportunist. Accordingly, Rühle and his supporters left the KAPD in November 1920 and, when it became clear that the pro-KAPD faction was in control of the AAUD in June 1921, they set up the AAUD–Unitary Organization (AAUD–E). The AAUD–E criticized
676-422: Is referred to as anti-authoritarian and anti-Leninist Marxism. Class consciousness In Marxism , class consciousness is the set of beliefs that persons hold regarding their social class or economic rank in society, the structure of their class, and their common class interests. According to Karl Marx , class consciousness is an awareness that is key to sparking a revolution which would "create
728-821: Is regarded as being strongest in Germany and the Netherlands during the 1920s. Council communism emerged in the years after 1918, as some communists in Germany and the Netherlands concluded that the Russian Revolution had led to power being concentrated in the hands of a new political elite. Its most prominent early proponents were the German educator Otto Rühle , the Dutch astronomer Anton Pannekoek , and
780-489: Is that democratic workers councils arising in factories and municipalities are the natural form of working class organisation and governmental power, maintaining that the working class should not rely on Leninist vanguard parties or reforms of the capitalist system to bring socialism. Alternatively, the party would maintain a propagandic and "minoritarian" role. Council communists see the mass strike and new yet to emerge forms of mass action as revolutionary means to achieve
832-579: Is the Russian model that reveals to all countries something – and something highly significant – of their near and inevitable future" and that certain features of the Russian Revolution were universally valid. Gorter took on the task of answering Lenin. His Open Letter to Comrade Lenin reiterated the argument that the differences in the class structure between East and West necessitated differences in communist tactics. Despite this dispute,
884-712: The ICC . The magazine's original purpose was to correspond with fellow council communists, primarily in Europe. It changed its name as the European council communists began to go underground in the late 1930s. The magazine was published by the United Workers Party, later known as the Council Communists , which had split from the Proletarian Party of America in 1934. A complete reprint of
936-405: The "objective theory of class consciousness is only the theory of its objective possibility". Austrian School economist Ludwig von Mises asserted that "Marx confus[ed] the notions of caste and class". Mises allowed that class consciousness and the associated class struggle were valid concepts in some circumstances where rigid social castes exist, e.g., when slavery is legal and slaves have
988-466: The 1930s. According to Frits Kool, the term council communism was first used by Franz Pfemfert in 1921. According to van der Linden, council communism was defined by five basic principles: The German and Dutch left was part of a broader left communist movement that pushed back against the imposition of the Bolshevik model on Western Europe. In Vienna, Georg Lukács emphasized the importance of
1040-566: The 19th century, the labels " working classes " and " middle classes " were coming into common usage in British society. David Cody writes about this time period: "The old hereditary aristocracy, reinforced by the new gentry who owed their success to commerce, industry, and the professions, evolved into an ' upper class ' (its consciousness formed in large part by the Public Schools and Universities) which tenaciously maintained control over
1092-642: The AAUD–E. In 1925, the Essen KAPD's main leaders including Schröder left to rejoin the SPD as they thought the revival of the council movement of the revolutionary period unlikely. In 1927, Gorter died and by 1929 the group could not afford to publish its newspaper. The Berlin KAPD, having lost its leadership and theorists to the Essen KAPD, spent the next years issuing repeated and widely ignored calls for insurrection. In 1927, it lost its AAUD affiliate which declared itself
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#17327659478521144-851: The American Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). It was seen by some as the union federation affiliate of the KAPD . In 1918, Gorter wrote the pamphlet The World Revolution pointing to differences between the situations in Russia and Western Europe. Pannekoek asserted in World Revolution and Communist Tactics , a pamphlet he published in 1920, that communist tactics in Western Europe were necessarily different from those in Russia. He argued that in Western Europe
1196-578: The Berlin AAUD in 1931 to create the Communist Workers' Union of Germany, but this organization had a membership of just 343. By the early 1930s, council communism as a large-scale movement had come to an end. According to John Gerber, council communism was a product of the post-war turmoil and, as a result of the end of the council movement, the council communists' politics became abstract. He also attributes council communism's decline as
1248-473: The Comintern. At the Second World Congress of the Comintern in 1920, the Comintern leaders Lenin, Leon Trotsky , and Grigory Zinoviev unanimously rejected the KAPD's positions. An open letter by the Comintern's executive committee informed the KAPD that the Comintern fully supported the KPD in its dispute with the left. Some KAPD delegates left the congress early in protest. Lenin criticized
1300-615: The Dutch poet Herman Gorter . They were initially enthusiastic supporters of the Bolsheviks and the Russian Revolution. In 1918, Gorter said that the Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin "stands out above all other leaders of the Proletariat" and that Karl Marx was Lenin's sole peer. In 1919, Pannekoek wrote that "in Russia communism has been put into practice for two years now". When the Communist Party of Germany (KPD)
1352-549: The Essen tendency. Pannekoek was exasperated by the factionalism in the movement and stayed out of the dispute, though he mostly sympathized with the Berlin tendency. After the KAPD withdrew from the Comintern in 1921, its leadership decided to make plans for the formation of a new International. Schröder and Gorter supported this, but many in the organization were skeptical that the time was right for this move. In April 1922, after
1404-415: The German council communist movement consisted mostly of intellectuals who had already been part of the left wing of the SPD before World War I as well as younger intellectuals, people with a Bohemian background and academics, who were radicalized by the war. Its membership consisted mostly of younger workers who had not been politically active before the war and former soldiers embittered by the brutality of
1456-717: The KAPD for differing from the KPD only in its rejection of parliamentarianism. At the KAPD's second congress in August 1920, the National Bolshevik wing of the party was expelled. This wing was led by Heinrich Laufenberg and Fritz Wolffheim . They supported a strong German nation that, after a successful proletarian revolution, would ally itself with the Soviet Union in a struggle against Western capital and militarism. They also invoked anti-Semitic stereotypes in their critique of Paul Levi, claiming that "because Levi
1508-626: The KAPD was replicated in the Bulgarian and Dutch organizations, as groups in each party supported the Essen KAPD and others the Berlin KAPD. After 1922, the council communist organizations declined and disintegrated. The German organizations were down to 20,000 supporters in 1923 and just a few hundred by 1933. The Essen KAPD declined most quickly. In 1923, a faction left to form the League of Council Communists, most of whose members then joined
1560-646: The KAPD's mass base and never had more than 200 members. In Bulgaria, too, there was a left communist wing in the Communist Party . Led by Ivan Ganchev and influenced by the KAPD, the left formed the Bulgarian Communist Workers' Party (BRKP) in January 1922. It had just over a thousand members, mostly workers and few intellectuals. In the United Kingdom, the former suffragist Sylvia Pankhurst , also opposed to parliamentary politics,
1612-418: The KAPD, Pannekoek, and other left groups in the 1920 pamphlet "Left-Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder , accusing them of spreading confusion. He claimed that a refusal to work in parliaments and labor unions would leave workers under the influence of reactionary leaders. He conceded that there were considerable differences between Russia and the more advanced countries in Western Europe, but held that "it
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1664-641: The KAPD, and other similar groups, initially sought to change the international communist movement from within. At the Third World Congress of the Comintern in 1921, the KAPD failed to rally a left opposition and therefore withdrew from the International. The council communist critique of Bolshevism became more fundamental. Council communists concluded that the Bolsheviks were not in fact building socialism. In 1921, Pannekoek argued that
1716-568: The Russian Revolution was but a bourgeois revolution like the French Revolution . Gorter characterized it as initially a dual revolution, a working-class revolution against capitalism and a capitalist revolution against feudalism, but argued that this dualism was resolved with the New Economic Policy of 1921 and that Soviet Russia had become unambiguously a capitalist state. By 1921, council communism had broken with
1768-402: The bourgeoisie was more established and experienced and that as a result class struggle must oppose bourgeois institutions such as parliaments and trade unions. He emphasized the importance of class consciousness among the masses and deemed the avant-garde party model advocated by the Bolsheviks a potential obstacle to revolution. Immediately after the KAPD's formation, it sought admission to
1820-606: The class own capital . Non-Marxists differentiate society's various groups based on social stratification , i.e., income, race, gender, ethnicity, education, occupation, or status. Whereas Marx believed the working class would gain class consciousness as a result of its experience of exploitation , later orthodox Marxism , in particular as formulated by Vladimir Lenin , argued that the working class, by itself, could only develop "trade union consciousness", which Lenin characterized in What Is to Be Done? as "the conviction that it
1872-431: The historical process. Henceforth, reality itself must tend toward the theory, making it the "expression of the revolutionary process itself". In turn, a theory which has as its goal helping the proletariat achieve class consciousness must first be an "objective theory of class consciousness". However, theory in itself is insufficient, and ultimately relies on the struggle of humankind and of the proletariat for consciousness:
1924-408: The idea of a revolutionary party since council communists believe that a party-led revolution will necessarily produce a party dictatorship. Council communism and other types of libertarian Marxism such as autonomism are often viewed as being similar to anarchism due to similar criticisms of Leninist ideologies for being authoritarian and the rejection of the idea of a vanguard party. As such, it
1976-629: The left majority out of the party and about half of its 100,000 members left. In April 1920, the left formed the Communist Workers' Party of Germany (KAPD) with an initial membership of about 38,000. The move was partly motivated by the fact that the left perceived the KPD's reaction to the Kapp Putsch as weak. The same year, the General Workers' Union of Germany (AAUD) was formed as a revolutionary labor union partly modeled on
2028-503: The lower levels. After the Nazis took power in Germany in 1933, organized council communism disappeared, although a few groups continued in the resistance to the regime . It continued in several small groups in the Netherlands. The Group of International Communists (GIC) became a coordinating center for international debates until the late 1930s. It published the movement's central texts, most prominently Henk Canne Meijer 's "The Rise of
2080-469: The magazine was published in the 1970s by Greenwood Reprints with an introduction by Paul Mattick. Council communism Defunct Council communism or Councilism is a current of communist thought that emerged in the 1920s. Inspired by the November Revolution , council communism was opposed to state socialism and advocated workers' councils and council democracy . It
2132-413: The necessity of a struggle to win workers over and they were more open to flexibility in tactics such as participation in wage struggles, which Schröder dismissed as reformism. In March 1922, this dispute led to a split into an Essen tendency, led by Schröder, and a Berlin tendency, each with its own AAUD affiliate. The Berlin tendency was stronger, but most intellectuals in the KAPD including Gorter joined
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2184-545: The notion that class consciousness could be instilled from outside by a vanguard party. In Main Currents of Marxism and his other writings, he stated that in order to achieve a unity of theory and praxis , theory must not only tend toward reality in an attempt to change it; reality must also tend towards theory. Otherwise, the historical process leads a life of its own, while theorists make their own little theories, desperately waiting for some kind of possible influence over
2236-464: The official communist movement and formed a distinct current, according to the historian Marcel van der Linden . Many authors agree with van der Linden in dating the emergence of council communism to the early 1920s, but others, like Philippe Bourrinet and John Gerber , refer to the tendency as the Dutch–German form of left communism during this period and date the advent of council communism to
2288-568: The party split, the Essen KAPD and the KAPN formed the Communist Workers' International (KAI). The BRKP and the CWP joined later. The KAI also claimed to have a Russian affiliate, but in reality it only consisted of two Russians living in Berlin. Gorter wrote the KAI's program. Its organizational structure was similar to the Comintern's, but it never attained any significant influence or activity. The split in
2340-488: The political system, depriving not only the working classes but the middle classes of a voice in the political process." As the Industrial Revolution progressed, the sharpening of socioeconomic divisions caused each group to become more acutely conscious of its position in the hierarchy. While Karl Marx rarely used the term "class consciousness", he did make the distinction between "class in itself", which
2392-463: The spontaneity of the working class. In Italy, Amadeo Bordiga was opposed to electoral politics, but had little regard for councils as the basis for a reorganization of society and advocated vanguard parties as Lenin did. In Russia, the Workers' Opposition criticized the bureaucratization of working-class organizations and sympathized with the KAPD. According to Hans Manfred Bock, the leadership of
2444-446: The war. In September 1921, the Communist Workers' Party of the Netherlands (KAPN) was formed as a Dutch analog to the KAPD. Gorter was supportive of this decision and became its chief spokesman, but Pannekoek was skeptical because he felt conditions for a new organization were not ripe in the Netherlands. The KAPN was modeled on the KAPD and its program was nearly identical to the German party's. It did not, however, manage to replicate
2496-551: The working class's revolutionary dynamic. As Weimar Germany stabilized in the early 1920s and the council movement of the German Revolution ebbed, the disputes became more pronounced. As early as the KAPD's founding congress, Rühle and Franz Pfemfert , the editor of the journal Die Aktion , were opposed to any centralized party structures and the traditional division of the labor movement into political parties and economic labor unions. In his 1920 brochure Revolution
2548-574: Was excluded from the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) in September 1921. She formed the Communist Workers' Party (CWP) in February 1922. It claimed to have 500 members, but likely had far fewer. From its inception, the KAPD was beset by disputes and internal turmoil. The party was composed of a wide variety of political tendencies and it did not create stable organizations, as its proponents feared they could become bureaucratic and hold back
2600-499: Was false because workers and capitalists routinely compete within themselves, such as capitalist entrepreneurs competing with each other for market dominance, or native workers competing with immigrant workers for jobs. Rothbard said that if there is constant conflict among members of the same class (like, for example, among landowners, nobility or slaveowners), then it is absurd to claim these landowners, nobles and slaveowners can also have shared objective interests with one another against
2652-683: Was formed in December 1918, a majority in the party was opposed to electoral politics and trade unionism. These positions placed it to the left of Bolshevik orthodoxy. In 1919, the Communist International (Comintern) was formed to promote Bolshevik policies internationally. In October 1919, Paul Levi , the head of the KPD leadership, pushed through a new party line that followed the Comintern's policies. This line called for participation in parliamentary elections and fighting for control of established labor unions. In effect, this forced
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#17327659478522704-400: Was in a final crisis that would lead to its demise, but that workers were not yet ready for capitalism's end as they were still under the control of reformist leaders. From this they concluded that the KAPD's role was to firmly adhere to strict revolutionary principles so it could lead workers at a later time. Schröder's opponents agreed that capitalism was in decline, but for them this implied
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