The role of Workers’ Councils in Socialist Revolution (Birmingham – 2.00pm)

[link]

ajjI am listening to the argument that when the working class moves then the state institutions cannot fight back.  As is argued, these institutions are relationships not solid objects.  Break those relationships and they don’t work.  In the background I am pondering the relevance and value of these arguments.However if I may respond first to some of the point you make in the last contribution because when I raise the issue of what workers councils  can do in a revolutionary situation you respond by point out problems in trade union, the NUM, the RNLI and charities in general, local government institutions and parliament within capitalismThese are state capitalist institutions (apart from the charities which are capitalist institutions) run with capitalist norms and goals.  I think that is significant.  They are not ‘natural’ institutions that appear in all societies and can be adapted at will. These institutions are all products of capitalist society  Feudal society had kings and queens and layers of aristocracy all of which were supported by workers (serfs as they were called then).  Lets go back further to slave society.  It was a society in which workers achieved massive amazing feats of construction..  Maybe they get adapted somewhat to work in other class societies but the features of these institutions are specific to their mode of production and can only be used as suchPerhaps I am exaggerating again but I don’t know how to argue this.   You say don’t reinvent the wheel, but I think socialism requires very different organisations to capitalist one.  Yes let’s use the buildings and the desks and chairs, lets use computers and the internet but don’t expect workers to keep the same relationships between people.  I don’t believe TUs and local councils and parliament with all their paid officers, managers, chairman, boards, executtive committees, permanent ctte members and so on and so on, will play any part in genuinely socialist society.I absolutely agree with you that : “One thing (the workers) don't require (being) told is our capability and capacity to organise society…the working class problem is that they do it for our ruling class rather than for ourselves. “So why say keep using the same institutions that keep them held down.  When workers become conscious and radical then they build new organisations not ones that politicos like us tell them to use or that capitalist have oppressed them with. Perhaps you believe me but when I say that workers councils are products of struggle not me – I don’t expect or need to tell workers to use them.  Workers councils are simple structures based in amongst the workers themselves not capitalist institutions which tell them what to do.  I do not therefore accept that TUs, charities, local government, parliament are based in the working class simply because they have workers in them.  You could say the same about Ford or IBM too – why not just use them as they are.   Let me pick on poor old parliament again.  Parliament is an assembly but it is an organization with the key features of periodic voting of representatives for large numbers of people, it is comprised on political parties that represent specific policies/groups/vested interests and from it a government is selected and sits above it.  This structure will not, sorry, I hope not exist in socialism.  We don’t know how socialism will be organised in detail really, but I would suggest that assemblies will be needed but that they will use ‘delegates recallable at any time’.  This would mean there would have to be a long chain (network, structure)  of assemblies with different responsibilities – you cant call that structure a parliament nor a local government either.Socialism is a revolution not a reform of capitalist institutions.

[alanjjohnstone]

I think i should really emphasise that no where do i suggest or agree that we use parliament, trade unions, or any other expression of social organisation "as they are". We intend to change them into a more fully representative reflection of the workers movement. You criticise political parties,  and i say to you that the SPGB took the conventional concept and created something better from political parties  as they were in 1904 and as they are now in 2014. We declined dumping the whole idea of a politcal party and made the political party fit for purpose. In fact, we will boast that our form of organisation is superior to many other leader-less groups in that it retained some elements of past traditions such as accepted rules of debate and standing orders. Nor is parliament to be used as a passive weapon, a vote every few years and thats the the only role a worker play as you try to suggest. We envisage a fully active and imaginative participation of workers in politics, local national and international. Wilson said a week is a long time in politics…and it can be fully filled with involvement. The electorate will have no back-seat spectator role watching aspiring laders of  the likes of Galloway grandstanding. (We have discussed amongst ourselves how we would transform parliament while still a minority. One suggestion has been every candidate will sign an undated application to the Chiltern Hundreds to rein in any maverick.)In an earlier post you talk about the workers councils only functioning in a revolutionary manner "when run by class-conscious workers"This is exactly what we say about the vote, trade unions, industrial unions, in fact every aspect of society…they will be revolutionary when made up of revolutionaries. Even your IBMs and Ford will change when their workers begin to transform their work-places. There too things will not be "as they are". But will these same workers abolish everything about these transnationals…despite being profit corporations they have made production a worldwide social production. We will use their research , we will use their forecasting, we will use their logistic chains, we will use their information systems. Those already organised within these giant corporations such as the trade unions, or professional  scientific and trade associations won't be untouched by rising workers' consciousness. We will not use them "as they are" but turn them into "what we want them to be."By extension we say we can adapt bourgeois democracy into social democracy. Men and women as Marxists keep saying make their own history, they take what exists and wield it in their interests. The discussion on workers councils is important but they do not exist right now. Each time they arise it is under different conditions and not always in the same way.When was the last time they had any real relevance? Argentina? We could debate it was not class consciousness that motivated workers to take over abandoned factories and class consciousness never increased because of it but a survival strategy that either failed or succeeded and if it succeeded it was because they integrated into costs and profits. And the current ongoing  struggle for them in Argentine is to gain legality and recognition by the State through  parliament and the law so they can borrow credit from banks and the suchlike.And here again the SPGB are not saying to workers,  don't take over the factory if you can get away with it to save your jobs and feed your families but do more…make it a political fight so they cannot use the police and courts to re-instate capitalist property rights. Make it a class conscious struggle otherwise whats the old Lenin quote…a half-revolution signs its own death warrant. 

[ALB]

link wrote:

I do think you should have read the link to Rosa Luxemburg which you suggest refutes my argument – Hardly.  One paragraph says: ‘In order to do this, is a majority in the National Assembly necessary?  Only those who subscribe to parliamentary cretinism, who would decide the revolution and socialism with parliamentary majorities, believe this. Not the parliamentary majority in the National Assembly, but the proletarian mass outside, in the factories and on the streets, will decide the fate of the National Assembly.”Do you agree with this then?

Of course only the "proletarian mass" outside parliament can establish socialism. To mean anything from a socialist point of view a parliamentary majority would have to be a reflection of the opinion of workers democratically self-organised outside parliament. So that the socialist MPs would be their delegates."Parliamentary cretinism" is the view that socialism can be brought into being by the action of MPs alone, as advocated at the time by the Labour Party and on the Continent by Social Democratic parties. They imagined that socialism could be gradually introduced by a parliamentary majority gained on the basis of promises to reform capitalism. Ed's dad, among others, demolished that one in his book on so-called "parliamentary socialism".Having said this, I wouldn't want to claim that Luxemburg's position was the same as the SPGB's. I was just making the lesser point that she was not dogmatically "anti-parliamentarist" and so it wasn't the same as yours.  In fact she specifically argued on this point against those you see as your intellectual forbearers.She seems to have underestimated the degree of support for socialism in Germany at the time (or maybe she didn't as she advised against the Spartacist uprising). For a contemporary socialist comment on this and the elections to the National Assembly see this article from the February 1919 Socialist Standard.

link wrote:

NOW you demand that I go back over ‘when and where has this happened’  which is precisely what I discussed in the first place.

There's been a misunderstanding here. I know perfectly well that there were "soviets" formed in Russia in 1905 and 1917, but I interpreted the following passage from your earlier post that you were saying that there had been workers councils that had actually run things "ignoring money, costs, profits":

link wrote:

When run by class conscious workers, they showed the capacity to enable workers themselves to run society according to  socialist principles ie ignoring money, costs, profits and focusing instead on need, on equality and recallable delegates.

It was examples of this that I was asking you to produce. But maybe I misread you or did you mean to suggest that there had been?

[alanjjohnstone]

Not to belabour the point but i happened to come across this reference to our attitude towards the ballot which i think reflects my earlier statement that we don't passively accept bourgeois democracy as it is but would engage with it. "People jeered at “impossible Communism”! as alluded to by Marx in his “The Civil War in France’ where he praised the workers of Paris : Working men’s Paris with its Commune will be forever celebrated as the glorious harbinger of a new society. Of course! But for what? As I understand now, for the one new principle that it forged and fastened on to universal suffrage: elected delegates “responsible and revocable at short terms” which made me to coin “revocably delegated socialist democrary”,I mean not just a ballot and a vote to elect, nor just a “right” to recall but more, a real content: participatory and decision-making democracy." – Binay Sarkar, Word Socialist Party (India)

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