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Council Communism or Councilism is a libertarian Marxist philosophy that developed after the Russian Revolution and the German Revolution. It believes that workers' councils are the only effective way to establish a communist society. Council Communism frequently overlaps with anarcho-syndicalism, but retains a strong connection to Marxism.
Steps
Council Communists believe that there are six main steps to achieving council communism:
- Revolutionary class consciousness develops within the working class in a severe crisis of the capitalist system (with encouragement and agitation by a revolutionary organization).
- The workers then establish directly democratic councils in both workplaces and communities as the basic organs of the revolution. (This arises naturally under periods of intense class struggle, such as the Soviets in the Russian Revolution and the Shoras in the Iranian Revolution).
- Using these councils, the workers then proceed to seize the means of production and dismantle the state.
- Following from this, society and the economy is managed and coordinated by workers' councils, where production in all workplaces is managed by their workers via participatory decision-making.
- In workplaces too large to assemble all workers, decision-making is passed to special councils made up of delegates from their respective workplaces (although they still perform normal tasks like their fellow workers) which can be recalled at any moment by those who elected them in the first place.
- As opposed to directly controlling the factory, their task is to facilitate discussion and to carry out the decision made by their fellow workers that elected them, as well as facilitating cooperation between workplaces, as well as coordination between consumers/community groups and workplace committees/councils.
Notable Council Communists
- Anton Pannekoek
- Bernhard Reichenbach
- Ernst Schwarz
- Gerd Arntz
- Gilles Dauvé
- Henriette Roland Holst
- Herman Gorter
- Jan Appel
- Karl Schröder
- Marinus van der Lubbe
- Ngô Văn Xuyet
- Otto Rühle
- Paul Mattick
- Paul Mattick Jr.