I don't really know much about it other than I've heard people say they don't like Leninists. But like...why? The worker soviets are literally councils that served essentially the same function as what council communists want, but with the party serving as a vector for that organization.
Also, Lenin frequently brings up the Paris Communé when discussing the soviet revolutionary model. He talks specifically about how the initial revolution creates a bourgeois state "without bourgeoisie" and eventually withers away into what you'd call council communism.
Like council communism is just the "higher stage" of communism (or the communist stage of socialism) right? The model exists under Leninist organization and the contradiction of Leninism is the political/bureaucratic elite that isn't the workers. The difference between this state and the bourgeois state is that its really fucking weak usually. Like think about the "fall of communism", it was easily toppled, but instead of getting council communism (which is what the workers would have done if left to their own devices) they reverted to capitalism due to massive intervention of the existing well armed and funded capitalist powers.
It depends what you mean by Council Communism.
My tendency, Luxemburgism (which isn't "pure CC" but is the primary intellectual forebear) isn't against ML, it simply works under the material circumstances of an industrialised capitalist society and a more conscious but also more atomised working class.
This makes many of the assumptions of ML not hold as strongly, in much the same way that the Third World required the adaptions of MLM to deal with the material conditions there. Broadly, it wants the grass level mass workers orgs to be more primary. Mostly these are Councils, but sometimes mutual aid, unions, or other organisations, even a mass Party. Luxemburgists argue that the industrialised state allows a broader working class movement that does not need as dominant a Vanguard Party to operate and lead, even if one might be useful. Again, this does not mean Lenin bad, just Lenin less applicable
In Germany after Rosa's death this devolved into the anti-parliamentary current that Lenin criticises in Infantile disorder. This resolved further into infighting, a wrongheaded emphasis on "spontaneity" that is frankly a curse on western communism, and a strong anti-Soviet current, mostly from an attempt to retain independence, and then a slow decline in the late 20s. Council Communism doesn't really exist as anything more than a strain of theory now.
It wasn't until the Italians ran with it that Council Communism/Left Communism gained its strong anti-ML bias, even though Italian LeftComs are generally focused more on a Vanguard Party.
Interesting history! Thanks for the writeup. I've been thinking a lot about that lately, namely the formation of some sort of worker vanguard in an essentially completely proletarianized society. How there aren't really peasants in the traditional sense anymore as even the peasants have taken loans from the banks and turned themselves into debtors to the capitalists who expropriate their value for ground rents and fronted capital.
The primary this is instantaneous communication. I keep thinking that Leninism is something we should work towards because if something else will work, it'll appear along that road (eg. The Bolsheviks already had councils and it didn't work with just councils, but if that would work now, we would be able to avoid the last step, either way though going all the way through gives lots of options).
My understanding is that Luxemburg was far from a council communist, a commited vanguardist with some different ideas of how that would apply to Germany (and this isnt even contrary to leninism, since lenin when writting in a non Russian contexts of what is to be done, wrote stuff pretty much in line with Rosa as far as vanguard practices and party structures go, and the way most people understand today Luxemburgism doesnt exist as a coherent formulated thing . Luxemburg was just an orthodox revolutionary marxist somewhat to the left of the then paradigm (second international) ,similar to Lenin. I struggle to see how you would formulate an ism out of it and idk if Luxemburg would have had either.
Worse than that the history of "Luxemburgism" is negative since the term was invented to purge Luxemburg & her influence from German Communism & make sure her theoretical works were buried deep under. Being a "Luxemburgist" in the 1920s meant opportunism & "right deviationism." , it wasnt formulated as some tendency around Rosa's contributions.
Edit: This article is an amazing dive into what actually Luxemburg positions were and all the ways they have been missinterpreted and wrapped through the years https://theacheron.medium.com/the-myth-of-luxemburgism-25f63d0e3efd
I've now read half of the article and will probably read the other half later today, but as of now I feel like it trivializes Rosa's contentions with Bolshevik policy. Of course that stems from material conditions, but everything does. And nobody could seriously claim Rosa opposed the Russian Revolution or something like that.
To avoid posting "out of context quotes" I highly encourage everybody to read Chapter 6 of The Russian Revolution, it is a very short read.
tbf, that pamphlet was written before she undertook her own revolution, thus before she had to actually face running it, after which she became much more authoritarian
What Hungover kind of said, I think Luxemburgs critiques of Leninist policy were quite substantial and make her, if not a full tendency, at least a variant of proto-leninism. Even Trotsky had far less disagreement with Lenin imo.
But also I don't think we really disagree all that much, Rosa and Lenin were very much of the same mind in general principles, just in different material conditions. While I wouldn't define the German Left Coms as Right deviationist per se, I do think they were terribly wrong headed and warped Rosa's critique of Leninism into a full break.
Luxemburgism, as far as it exists, is simply a set of tools and theoretical critiques that modify rather than replace ML. Which frankly is what I think tendencies should be anyway.
Paris Communé [past participle]
:deeper-sadness:
Un jour, Paris communera encore (One day, Paris will Commune again)
Why don't you just read something Like Paul Mattick's critiques of the USSR. Will tell you pretty much the gist.
Basically what I’m saying is that council communism exists, it is in fact possible under a Leninist organization and in fact is quite relevant to the worker revolution because the workers are already in power (not only in their councils but in their factories and schools and business enterprises and whatever else).
Also, the workers always see things as a class struggle. Whether they realize it or not they look at the history of their class as having a battle between reform and revolution that often don’t seem like they’re on the same side at all times.
yeah, I don't get wtf is going on with them but whatever. I think they're leftcom or something based off the weird rants about lenin.
Most likely a Trot judging by the second response. They make some okay points, but just get really ideological with it.
I’ll take your word for it, that shit had so many run-on sentences I just skimmed it and moved on lol
i mean im fucking stupid so I can tell when someone else is also just slamming their head onto a keyboard and rolling their face around on the keys.
The council communist approach, as I explain it, is that it’s okay to struggle within the organization on whatever issues you find essential or necessary for the victory of the revolution but then to fight to destroy the organization and to found a new one, one that is libertarian and communist.
To argue the right of an organization to do whatever it wants, as long as its members agree to it, is a fine thing to do but can never make a revolution in the first place.
As we go through the history of the Russian Revolution we find a class struggle going on within the revolutionary party which isn’t part of the plan from the beginning. Lenin initially objected to the first struggle in this way: “What sort of party is this? The party is the whole country. That is its capital. You are fighting over a capital that you have no idea where it is, it may be in one place or another, you are arguing about the precise place to build the centre of the party and that, indeed, is not correct.
The general line of the party is that it should comprise all the workers in the republic, outside of the capitals, this means all of the towns and villages and each of the trade unions, as all of these have a certain integral part.
The problem is not who will be in the headquarters of the party but that the headquarters should be at the centres of struggle. The communists should be at the centre of the struggle, not at the centre of the party. The party is only one means, one moment, of the revolution, the general line, the goal of the revolution is to take the state power, not to fight for the leadership of the party.”
Later in his life Lenin took the second and third step:
“In his first edition of What is To Be Done?, Lenin outlined the particular problems of the Russian state and its government and wrote that a majority of the masses did not want direct participation in government, they wanted participation in an organisational leadership.
In his second and third editions of What Is To Be Done?, he stated that in order to direct the masses toward the revolution, the party must either take the direct, objective interest of the masses, ie, the will of the masses, or it must create a leadership of the masses, ie, a leadership led by the workers and their party organisation.
He didn’t see how you could conduct a revolution without the political leadership of the masses but he recognized that without that there was no possibility of directing them towards the revolution.
This was the first step towards a dictatorship, to direct the masses.”
So, what happened to him? What happened to Comrade Lenin after the October Revolution? What happened to the First Five Year Plan? It was called off. It was put on hold. It was never implemented and it was all because Lenin disagreed with Trotsky’s proposal for revolutionary government.
During the Russian Civil War, where the new Soviet Union was fighting a counterrevolutionary front, Stalin began to build the new Soviet bureaucracy through Stalin’s tactics of using the bureaucracy as the leading force for state-building and central planning. This continued after Lenin died, and through the middle and the late 30’s and all of the way up to the final years of the Stalin era.
Lenin said it himself in 1925: “What we have hitherto accomplished has not been because of our organization but because of our opportunism.”
He was correct.
This is why Trotsky called Lenin “the political bankruptcy of world revolutionary politics.”
There is the myth that after Lenin’s death, Stalin consolidated state power, nationalized the means of production, raised workers’ salaries and protected the environment, etc.
These things did happen. This myth, however, is a myth because there was no radical, Marxist, egalitarian forces in the working class, the world wide working class. There were Leninists but not Marxists. Marxism can’t live with Leninism because Leninism is not Marxism.
We should remember that Lenin, in his notes on his “Power to the Soviets,” wrote that if there were a dictatorship of the proletariat, this dictatorship would be a dictatorship of the proletariat, not of a minority; a dictatorship of the international working class; a dictatorship with no contradictions and no antagonism; one government.
Nowadays we are witnessing the total bankruptcy of the official United States Marxists who call themselves Marxists but who lack a coherent class analysis, who do not understand why Marxism has the attraction and power that it does, that it is more than a theory, but that it is a movement, that it is revolutionary, that it will lead to a different society, a socialist society, a workers’ society, a society in which every person will be able to live a good life, on his/her own terms, in a free, democratic society. The United States Marxists in general make no attempt to build a Marxist movement, a movement that has a politics and a program that is not based upon good intentions and utopian thinking. They do not understand that there is a movement in the world that needs to be transformed by a Marxist politics.
Some of that comes off as pure ideology, I agree that the USSR had its problems, and the Russian revolution was absolutely a lucky moment for the workers seizing an opportunity presented in the wake of an imperialist war, but I'd also argue that Lenin's revolutionary tactics worked in a broad range of different struggles all over the world.
Anyone that sees a state like the USSR as an end goal is not understanding what it is. It was and was always meant to be a step in the right direction. The form it took wasn't the form it wanted to, but the form it was forced to take. Imperial interventionism and internal reaction are things that require a very organized and bureaucracratic state to resist which is why we see that form of state continue to pop up all over the place in almost every successful leftist revolution.
The proletarian revolution as you're describing it is something that requires mass education and industrialization/infrastructure. Something that most revolutionary states of the 20th century did not have. Right now the most likely candidate for something like what you're describing would be China as it has a massive population that is becoming more proletarianized and educated by the day. All the "backwater" revolutions that took on a bureaucratic form are evolving into a stage of production that more closely resembles that of the industrialized West, but without the baggage that those nations carry.
That's what the Belt & Road would be for. For the Marxists the hope would be that many of those colonized nations will turn to Communism with workers seeing Communist China as their benefactor and shining city on the hill by 2050.
If China continues on a Socialist path it would be a massive propaganda win as its cybernetic economy makes a clearer distinction from capitalism.
