«The Worker’s Council from the Commune to Autonomy» with Jasper Bernes and Red May
A reading group series, hosted by Jasper Bernes and Red May Seattle.
Session 2:
The Mass Strike and the Soviet
Rosa Luxemburg’s seminal essay foregrounds workers’ self-activity and makes an argument for the revolutionary organization of the working class as evolutionary process, drawn in part from Eduard Bernstein’s reformist movementism. Her theory of the mass strike, based on analysis of the 1905 Russian Revolution, is notable for the fact that it does not mention the soviets of 1905, essentially aggregating them to the trade union organizations. This helps us to see the 1905 revolution as part of a broader, global movement-based organization of the working class, chiefly associated with syndicalism. The Eley is provided in order to indicate the lines of this broader class-struggle wave.
Luxemburg, Rosa. The Mass Strike, the Political Party, and the Trade Unions. Translated by Patrick Lavin. Detroit: Marxist Education Society of Detroit, 1925 (I, IV)
Eley, Forging Democracy: The History of the Left in Europe, 1850-2000.
Watch the session here, in case you missed it. Lluvia Benjamin of taller ahuehuete joins Jasper Bernes, and examines the 20th century revolutionary horizon in the Mexican nation-state.
The Series
The twentieth century can count only one truly new communist idea: the workers’ council, which emerged in Russia in 1905 as part of a revolutionary mass strike movement.
But what is a workers’ council, or soviet, and how does it follow from the nineteenth-century theory of the commune? Is there an underlying concept of proletarian self-organization which both these theories of class struggle share? And what role do these theories leave for the party? What is the relationship between the workers’ council, which vanished from the world at the moment of its greatest extent, in the 1970s, and the turn, in struggle since then, to an autonomy without councils. In tracing the story of the workers’ council from the Paris Commune to the present era, we will define, as a matter of preliminaries, the basic contours of revolution in our time. Not the council or the commune, perhaps, but what the council hoped to achieve. The focus here is as much on the practical history of the communist movement, as it is on the intellectual history of the movement of communists.
Works by Rosa Luxemburg, Jan Appel, CLR James, Paul Mattick, will be read in the context of the Paris Commune, the German Revolution, the Spanish Civil War, May ’68, and the Carnation Revolution. The series comprises eight month-long modules, with local, online reading groups followed two weeks later by an online plenary session, hosted by Red May.
Participants are encouraged to organize their own reading groups. The series is designed for people to participate at different levels, either offline or online or both.
The mailing list is now live.
Join the reading group, join the conversation.
Session 3: December 11th, 2022
The Workers’ Council
Jan Appel’s reply (as Max Hempel) to Karl Radek at the Third Congress of the Comintern, speaking on behalf of KAPD, encapsulates the idea of the council as it existed circa 1921. The KAPD sought to programmatize the council concept, and here Appel provides a clear account of their strategic thinking, but they were by no means the only adherents to the council concept, nor the only participants in the factory groups or “unitary organizations” which Appel makes central to their strategic thinking. Unlike the anarchists and the eventual adherents to the AAUD-E, Appel envisages some role for the party, though a party radically different from Radek’s.
Appel is in Moscow for the second time to speak on behalf of the KAPD, which will soon be excluded from the Comintern. He answers to a rousing set of criticism delivered by Karl Radek, particularly with regard to the behavior of the KAPD during the March Action. Both parties had sought to support the offensive underway, and both parties thought it failed for lack of organization. At stake then were their radically different ideas about organization.
The March Action is the heroic period of the KAPD, and the chapters from Dauvé are provided to give the necessary context and to detail their involvement in the March Action, which was, in fact, an attempt to make up for the disorganization of the communist left during the more significant Ruhr uprising a year before. Neither the KPD or the KAPD would get a chance to learn from their mistakes, however. The workers were disarmed and the councils likewise.
Dauvé, Gilles, and Denis Authier. The Communist Left in Germany: 1918-1921. Translated by M. DeSocio. Collective Action Notes, 2006. (chapters 12-15)
Optional
Jan Appel, “Autobiography” Karl Radek, “Report on Tactics and Strategy” in To The Masses: Proceedings of the Third Congress of the Communist International, 1921
Pierre Broué, The German Revolution (excerpts)
WT Angress, “Weimar Coalition and Ruhr Insurrection, March-April 1920”
Phillipe Bourrinet, The Dutch and German Communist Left (excerpt)
Martin Comack, Wild Socialism: Workers Councils in Revolutionary Berlin
Jasper Bernes, “The Self-Education of Jan Appel”.
The mailing list is now live.
Join the reading group, join the conversation.
