The key names here are those of Antonio Gramsci, Anton Pannekoek, and Rosa Luxemburg. The workers council movement was strong in Italy around 1919-1920. Gramsci was one of its key exponents. Lenin also expressed support, but later, when anti-Bolshevik leftists called for workers councils to be given power in the USSR, he condemned them as ultraleftists (Lenin, "Leftwing Communism: An Infantile Disorder"). In fact, shortly after the Bolshevik revolution (or coup), Lenin and his allies suppressed the soviets, or municipal workers’ and soldiers’ councils, and established dictatorial power in the hands of the Bolshevik Party.

Council-communism therefore become a platform of opposition to Bolshevism by anti-Leninist communists. Anton Pannekoek, a leading figure in the Second International of socialist parties, was one of its leading exponents. Rosa Luxemburg, leftwing anti-Leninist, was also in favour. According to Robert Barksy, "the social revolution envisaged by Pannekoek would involve overturning systems of production present in both Bolshevik and capitalist societies, so that workers would have complete power over their work and control over their destiny." In a council-communist society, each factory would have its own workers’ committee. The people themselves would decide, communally, on their working conditions. Thus council-communism would represent a kind of decentralized socialist community with planning undertaken democratically by localized workers’ committees. Such a system was certainly never implemented in the USSR or China, though Yugoslavia tried a fairly decentralized form of communism which has something in common with the council-communist approach.

©1998 Richard Pond