2

Workers’ Councils in Europe

A Century of Experience

Donny Gluckstein

 

 

Recent events have called into question the much-trumpeted “inevitability” of capitalism and neutrality of the state. The smug optimism of the proponents of market forces was brutally destroyed by the credit crunch of 2008 and the deep economic crisis that has followed. If there has not (yet) been a repetition of the Great Depression of the 1930s this is due to massive intervention by the state to prop up an ailing system. It is now blatantly ridiculous to maintain that the parliamentary state stands above classes or is accountable to voters. Vast sums have been handed brazenly to a tiny minority of bankers and corporations at the direct expense of the great majority of the electorate and the public services they depend on.

Far less obvious, however, is what might be the alternative. The early utopian socialists, such as Owen and Fourier, imagined ideal societies and sought to implement them in reality, but these abstract schemes failed. Writing in the mid-nineteenth century, Marx avoided blueprints although he articulated the social and economic preconditions for socialism. An effective challenge to capitalism must be based in a numerous group of people—a class. This class must not be driven by the pursuit of private gain as are the capitalists, but by a collective, shared interest. Finally, it must possess the power to defeat capitalism. So, although the struggle against capitalism can involve a huge variety of people and take an infinite variety of forms (antiimperialism, resistance to oppression on grounds of race, gender, and sexuality, etc.), only the working class meets these criteria. It cooperates in workplace units and produces the necessities of life.

Since Marx, a number of people have claimed to have discovered the path to socialism. In the early years of the twentieth century Kautsky and the reformist Second International believed in the inevitability of socialism through parliamentary means. The First World War shattered this illusion and ushered in a thirty-year period of barbarism that culminated with Auschwitz and Hiroshima. After 1945 Stalin asserted that Russia’s centralized bureaucratic state would guarantee the victory of “actually existing socialism.” This system has since been exposed as state capitalism and as fatally flawed. In recent years mass social protests have been mounted against capitalism’s violence and poverty. The millions who marched on February 15, 2003, against the Iraq war were one striking example. Certain currents within this movement argue from an anarchist/autonomist position that the state itself should be ignored, suggesting spontaneous street action can suffice to transform society. However, the contemporary state not only remains powerful, but also acts, in the words of Marx’s Communist Manifesto , as the “executive committee of the ruling class.” So today there is an urgent need for a practical alternative to capitalism and its state. Not only does the combination visit economic devastation on ordinary people, but the state and economy seem incapable of effective action when our very survival on the planet is possibly at stake.

The experience of more than a century of mass struggle does offer some clues. At key moments workers’ councils have emerged to provide a glimpse of an alternative to capitalism. Unlike the fanciful schemes of the utopian socialists, bourgeois parliaments, or bureaucratic state machines, these bodies have grown naturally out of class struggle and embody mass direct democracy. Workers’ councils are not imposed by any party; they grow out of the grassroots conditions of working life. Part of the present, they represent a transition to the future, constituting a radically different kind of power.

The germs of the workers’ council can be found wherever labor takes action on its own behalf. However, full-blown councils are very much the exception, because under the “normal” conditions of capitalism, workers’ self-activity is limited in scope and time. Trade unions exist to negotiate with employers, not to overthrow them. If they conduct strikes these tend to be economic—concerning pay and working conditions—rather than escalating into a political challenge. Reformist political leaders use workers’ votes to gain leverage within capitalist institutions rather than destroy them. In each case the process of radicalization is cut short and subordinated to the needs of the representatives rather than the represented.

Class struggle escapes from these confines only when the usual mechanisms of control are disrupted, such as during war. The first condition for a workers’ council, therefore, is major crisis. The second condition is a high level of independent organization among workers. This chapter considers European workers’ councils during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871 and the First and Second World Wars. Through these events it traces the councils’ origins, development, and ultimate fates.

The Civil War in France, 1871

The revolution of 1871 is usually labeled “the Paris Commune.” As we shall see, this obscures the role of the first workers’ council, which was, in many ways, far more radical an innovation than the commune itself. The first condition for the emergence of workers’ mass democracy—major crisis—was met when France’s Emperor Napoleon III suffered catastrophic defeat at the hands of Prussia in 1870. The bulk of his army was taken into captivity and in September he was overthrown. Without the ability to wield physical force the new government found it very difficult to reestablish the authority of the French state.

The prospects for the second condition, collective organization, looked initially unpromising. Although the Parisian working class formed the majority of the capital’s population (Bron 1968, 115), they labored in tiny workshops. Sixty percent of economic units consisted of just two workers, while only 7 percent had more than ten (Gaillard 1977, 55–6). All this changed when the Prussian army mounted a siege of the capital. Most of the rich fled in advance, economic life ground to a standstill, and the poor were subjected to an appalling famine during which they had to resort to eating dogs, cats, and rats. In a bid to head off mass discontent and provide a means of defending the city, the government armed the workers, who now formed the overwhelming majority of the 340,000-strong National Guard.

Thus the Parisian working class acquired a collective organization, even if by a highly peculiar route. Officers of the National Guard were elected and the rank and file could exert direct democratic control over them through daily assemblies for drill (Lucipia 1904, 222). A central committee composed of delegates from the various militia units gave direct democratic expression to this mass movement. Its constitution stated: “The National Guard has the absolute right to choose its officers and to recall them as soon as they lose the confidence of those who elected them” (EDHIS 1988).These features of direct and ongoing democracy plus the right of recall were to appear in later workers’ councils.

Once the French government had made its peace with Prussia it saw these militiamen as a mortal threat. On March 18, 1871, it gathered the few soldiers it had left and attempted to disarm the guards by removing their cannon from Montmartre. Mass protests by working-class women and a soldiers’ mutiny prevented this, whereupon the remnants of the state decamped to nearby Versailles and launched a civil war, which culminated in the breaching of the city walls and indiscriminate slaughter of the Parisian working class.

Nevertheless, in the form of the National Guard Central Committee, a workers’ council had triumphed over the capitalist state, if only in one city and for a short time. The day after the revolution one newspaper described it as

without example in history. Your revolution has a special character that distinguishes it from others. Its fundamental greatness is that it is made entirely by the people as a collective communal revolutionary undertaking, anonymous, unanimous, and for the first time without leaders . . . a massive achievement strong in its authority of the workers! This is a natural power, spontaneous, not false; born from the public conscience of the “vile multitude” which has been provoked and attacked and now legitimately defends itself (La Commune 1871).

In the wake of this first workers’ council, between March and May 1871 popular initiatives enjoyed an extraordinary flowering, which, alas, we lack space to discuss here. Radical experiments in education, workers’ control, the arts, and social justice were initiated (Gluckstein 2006, 11–54).

There were problems, however. Many activists were influenced by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s theories on anarchism and argued against establishing a new state, even if based on collective power.¹⁷ They hoped that creating the model of a new society would be enough to win external support and avoid destruction by the Versailles forces. Others, such as the Blanquists, were solely interested in a revolutionary dictatorship and centralized political organization. They saw mass efforts to operate democracy or create socialism as a distraction from the fight for survival.

Furthermore, the workers’ council was so novel that its unique character was not properly understood. So rather than identifying in the National Guard the key institution of the March revolution, the committee declared, “Our mission is completed” (Rougerie 1971, 135) and ceded power to the commune. The latter was a town council elected on a geographical basis according to rules predating the revolution. Of course, in the environment of mass popular mobilization and civil war, this local government behaved very differently from an ordinary municipal body, but the unique features of the National Guard Central Committee that made it both accountable to its constituents and a direct emanation of collective strength, were absent from the commune.

Eventually the forces of Versailles, bolstered by soldiers hurriedly released by the Prussians to prevent the spread of subversion, drowned Paris in blood. The toll of victims in just one week, many of them noncombatant women and children, exceeded those executed in the Great French Revolution of 1789–93 several times over (Edwards 1971, 346). This was a warning of how far capitalism would go to defend its privileges and take revenge on its enemies. Nevertheless, the experience of 1871 was invaluable. It showed that collective, democratic self-organization can arise in the most unusual ways, and through the “Internationale”—the song written by a Communard and symbolizing the revolution’s aims—it remains an inspiration to this very day.

World War I and Its Aftermath

The workers’ council that appeared in Paris in 1871 was to be atypical. Capitalism’s further development led to increasingly large and concentrated units of production. This meant that collective organization would develop within the workplace, which now tended to be the industrial factory. The phenomenon became evident when war broke out in 1914 generalizing conditions of crisis across the European continent. Tendencies toward workers’ councils could be observed in a host of countries. In the following section we will look at four of these, each demonstrating a different characteristic of council development. During 1915 the embryo of a workers’ council emerged in Glasgow. In 1918–1919 workers’ councils in Berlin grew much further and momentarily challenged state power. During Italy’s “two red years” that immediately followed World War I, the workers’ council was given a clear theoretical expression by Gramsci, who reflected on the experience in Turin. Finally, we will look at Russia, where the workers’ councils reached their highest point.

The background of all four situations was similar. Until the outbreak of war on August 4, 1914, socialist parties across Europe had denounced imperialist war and promised “to intervene for its speedy termination” (1907 resolution of the Second International, quoted in Frölich 1972, 168–9). Within days of the outbreak most had abandoned their pledge and lined up with their respective state machines. On August 2 the British Labour Party held a demonstration on the theme “Down with War!” (McNair 1955, 43–4). A few months later it entered the wartime coalition government and supported the Defence of the Realm Act (DORA) and the Munitions Act outlawing strikes. All but one of Germany’s mighty Social Democratic Party (SPD) deputies voted to back the war, and the Kaiser declared a “state of siege.”

Italy’s Socialist Party (PSI) was verbally opposed to the conflict but declared that “for the time being class struggle is forbidden on account of the war”(Avanti!). In Russia the tsarist regime had its repressive machinery in place even before the war began.

With the official leadership willingly donning their patriotic blindfolds, the working class was easy prey to employers keen to become what the British called “profiteers.” War imposed similar conditions on both sides of the trenches. For example, inflation soared everywhere, the wartime totals being 205 percent for Britain, 300 percent for Germany, and 400 percent for Italy (Gluckstein 1985, 50).

Munitions workers, the key industrial force for modern warfare, were a particular target for the state. In Britain the Munitions Act restricted the right to strike, and this was copied by Germany in its Auxiliary Service Law. Stoppages were already outlawed in Russia, while many of Italy’s workers were conscripts who faced courts-martial if they struck. Hours in the munitions industries rose to the physical limit. Fiat workers had a seventyfive-hour week, while turners in Berlin worked a standard six-day week with compulsory Sunday working of five to twelve hours (ibid., 52). Trade union officials, following their reformist political counterparts, did nothing to oppose this. In Italy, despite verbal opposition to the war, the engineering union stated that “[they] were unable to prevent the war so it would be childish and ridiculous to think of resisting its consequences” (B. Buozzi, leader of FIOM, quoted in Abrate 1967, 168).

However, the huge expansion of employment in the munitions industries (135 percent in Russia, 34 percent in Britain, and 44 percent in Germany) (Smith 1983, 10; Gluckstein 1985, 47) offered these workers unprecedented bargaining power—if they were organized. Abandoned by the officials they had no choice but to generate their own structures. Across engineering centers like Petrograd (St. Petersburg), Berlin, Glasgow, and Turin, rank-and-file representatives were elected and committees formed. In tsarist Russia they were sheltered within the official war industry committees. In Berlin the representatives were called Obleute, in Glasgow shop stewards, in Turin commissars. Without consciously choosing the road to workers’ councils, the first steps had been taken. Once more an ongoing electoral unit—in this case the workshop—furnished the basis for instant recall and direct democracy.

But these were not yet workers’ councils. They required further development, both organizational and ideological. If a shop stewards’ committee confined itself to economic demands and the individual workplace, it was no more than a temporary substitute for the trade union. However, the war also challenged an important ideological prop of capitalism—the split between economics and politics. Under “normal” conditions there is a division of labor—reformist deputies deal with politics in parliament; trade union officials handle work-related topics. Thus, struggles over pay and conditions are restricted to the economic sphere, divided by industry and enterprise. They do not threaten the state. Official politics does not deal with capitalist/worker relations, so any debates that take place do so on ruling-class terms.

These considerations were barely relevant in Russia, where tsarist repression threatened every strike and the parliamentary institution, the Duma, had little credibility. As a consequence, overtly political strikes outstripped economic ones from the start in industrial centers like Petrograd (Smith 1983, 50). In Western Europe the transition from economics to politics, from the individual workplace to citywide councils, was more protracted. The war, however, aided the process. Emergency laws brought striking workers into immediate conflict with the state. Any action to defend pay from galloping inflation or mitigate appalling working conditions was unofficial, illegal, and therefore implicitly political. In the face of government repression, stoppages dared not remain localized. They spread across entire cities through strike committees encompassing many different enterprises.

These committees solidified into permanent organizations with the following characteristics: (1) democratic representation of workers at the point of production and instant recall of delegates who, as stewards, received no special pay; and (2) embryonic workers’ power—the independent self-organization of the workers across plants in a wide geographical area, creating the possibility of a challenge to capitalism that went beyond the economic to the political.

Glasgow

While the above-mentioned features were shared internationally, each country had its own trajectory. In Britain the traditional separation of politics and economics ran deep and only the first tentative steps toward a workers’ council were taken. In early 1915 workers in Glasgow struck for a pay raise—despite the war. To run the dispute a committee was formed, linking ten thousand unofficial strikers from twenty-six firms (Hinton 1973, 106).

Later that year the Clyde Workers’ Committee (CWC) crystallized in the Glasgow region. Bringing together three hundred stewards weekly (Gluckstein 1985, 68), it was effectively a permanent strike committee. Its first leaflet explained the fundamental principle of rank-and-file organization: “We will support the officials just so long as they rightly represent the workers, but we will act independently immediately [if] they misrepresent them. Being composed of Delegates from every shop and untrammeled by obsolete rule or law, we claim to represent the true feelings of the workers” (Clyde Workers’ Committee 1915). The formation of trade unions had been a tremendous step forward for labor, but they remained bodies to negotiate a better deal within capitalism. The shop stewards’ movement began where trade unions left off and lit the path toward a transition beyond capitalism.

Despite its spontaneous appearance, however, the Clyde Workers’ Committee was not the creation of newcomers. Most leading stewards were members of socialist parties, like Willie Gallacher (British Socialist Party) or Tom Clark (Socialist Labour Party). The same was true in every other WWI workers’ council movement. Yet because the CWC voiced “the true feelings of the workers” the socialists among them hesitated to openly voice their more politically advanced ideas in the factories. They campaigned on economic issues, such as the threat to skilled engineers of the employment of unskilled women. On occasion they would humble the government with magnificent campaigns through which they fought the consequences of imperialist war, such as high rents. But they did not denounce the war itself. As J. T. Murphy, a leader of the Sheffield shop stewards’ movement put it: “None of the strikes which took place during the course of the war were anti-war strikes. They were frequently led by men like myself who wanted to stop the war, but that was not the real motive. Had the question of stopping the war been put to any strikers’ meeting it would have been overwhelmingly defeated” (Murphy 1941, 77). Murphy’s account illustrates that the very strength of the workers’ council—its genuine representative character—was also a potential weakness. If the majority of workers were not convinced of the need for radical politics the council would fail to challenge the capitalist state and ultimately be broken by it. In February–March 1916 the CWC was destroyed by a series of arrests and the initiative passed to shop stewards in Sheffield.

Berlin

The German workers’ council movement began under circumstances similar to those in Glasgow, but went much further. War brought runaway inflation and food shortages, but it also brought political activity, especially after the fall of tsarism in Russia. During April 1917 two hundred thousand Berlin workers struck over a cut in rations, while in Leipzig the first German workers’ council was created, calling for food and peace (Flechtheim 1966, 102–3). While the war endured, however, a combination of state repression and persuasion by reformist political leaders prevented an all-out challenge to the state and the workers’ council movement receded momentarily, though it remained a popular organizational concept.

Military defeat and the Kiel sailors’ mutiny on November 2, 1918, broke the dam and brought a nationwide rebellion that toppled the kaiser. By November 9 industrial centers like Berlin, Bremen, and Hamburg had held workplace elections to choose delegates whose assemblies linked workers across entire cities. When these representatives joined with rebelling soldiers and sailors they constituted a radical center of mass physical force that could rival the capitalist state. This was what the Bolsheviks in Russia called “dual power.”

As in Glasgow, a layer of radical engineering militants had laid the foundations for the workers’ councils (Arbeiterräte). In Scotland the radical current stayed in control, if only by keeping quiet about its politics. In Germany, because these bodies had become truly mass organizations, they more closely represented the majority mood in the working class and thus were dominated by the reformist SPD. This was ironic, as the SPD was bitterly hostile to any form of council power as an alternative to parliament. Although the workers’ and soldiers’ councils effectively ran most of Germany, their Executive Committee voted 12 to 10 to accept the restoration of the Reichstag, which translated to the maintenance of capitalism (Institut für Marxismus-Leninismus 1968, 138–145).

This was not the end of the matter, however. Whatever the formal politics of the Arbeiterräte, the social crisis, which saw eight hundred Germans dying from hunger every day, impelled the councils to step in to organize rationing and requisitions, while in the factories a process of expropriating the bosses was under way. The tension between ideology and the brutality of capitalist crisis would inevitably be resolved one way or another.

On the other side the ruling class and their ally in the SPD were impatiently anticipating a counterattack. They feared the increasing self-confidence of workers who, as one example, rejected a generous pay deal on the grounds that “in a socialist state there is no longer any room for negotiations with private capitalists”(Freiheit 1918). In early January 1919 the government sacked Emil Eichhorn, Berlin’s left-wing police chief, knowing that this would provoke the revolutionaries into action in Berlin. This posed a dilemma for the revolutionary left, which, though growing fast, still did not command a majority in the Arbeiterräte. Should they first win over the councils to the idea of challenging for state power, or should they bypass them and act immediately? A section of the Obleute and the newly formed German Communist Party (KPD) decided to follow the latter path. The result—the so-called Spartacist rising—was a disaster.

While the mass of the German working class remained largely passive, the Communist leaders, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, were killed, along with two hundred others. It made little difference that a few weeks after the Spartacist rising the radical left won a majority in the Berlin workers’ council (Gluckstein 1985, 156). The movement had suffered a critical setback.

If the lesson of Glasgow had been that the left should not refrain from promoting an alternative socialist vision of the state and society when the workers’ council expands beyond the circle of radical militants to acquire a mass following, the bitter lesson of Berlin was that socialists dare not ignore the council, which, as a sensitive barometer of workers’ opinion, was a crucial indicator of what was—and was not—politically and tactically possible.

Turin

Turin was the center of a powerful council movement during the “two red years” in Italy that followed World War I. It was rooted in the Fiat automobile plants and consciously sought to establish workers’ control of production and to supplant the employers. In the article “Workers’ Democracy” the Marxist intellectuals Antonio Gramsci and Palmiro Togliatti characterized this current, asking: “How are the immense social forces unleashed by the war to be harnessed [and] given a political form” so that “the present is welded to the future?” Unlike those who saw parliament as the only route to social transformation, or those who rejected political strategy altogether, Gramsci and Togliatti suggested that “the socialist state already exists potentially in the institutions of social life characteristic of the exploited working class . . . the workshop with its internal commissions [shop stewards’ committees]” (Gramsci 1977, 65).

This represented a systematic theory to describe what the stewards in other Western European states had been groping toward. It both reflected and inspired the evolution of the workshop-based “internal commissions” into factory councils, which covered larger units. These soon spread beyond engineering to embrace Turin’s industries generally. Their mobilizing potential was so great that it was claimed they were strong enough to cause a complete stoppage of sixteen thousand Fiat workers in five minutes, and “without any preparation whatsoever, the factory councils were able to mobilize 120,000 workers, called out factory by factory, in the course of just one hour” (ibid., 318).

However, the aim of amassing democratic workers’ power without simultaneously consciously challenging the capitalist state and the employing class more widely proved inadequate. Workers’ control and the usurpation of power at the level of the workshop or even factory was not the same as possessing the coercive physical power of a state, as had been seen in Germany or in Russia. The limitations of the movement were revealed in April 1920 when a major strike developed: it was confined to Turin and so was defeated. Gramsci realized that as important as workshop organization was, it did not go far enough. Without diminishing the importance of democratic control organized from the bottom up on a rank-and-file basis, he began to stress additionally that “power in the factory can be seen as just one element in relation to State power” (ibid., 182). This brought to the fore the issue of political leadership, and Gramsci subsequently played a key role in the establishment of the Italian Communist Party.

Petrograd

It was in Russia that the workers’ council movement attained its greatest success, for here the council (or, to use the Russian term, soviet) became the basis of a new state. This body had already been established in St. Petersburg in 1905, when defeat in the war against Japan triggered a revolution. Leon Trotsky, chair of the Petersburg Soviet, summed up its strengths in this way. It was

a response to an objective need—a need born of the course of events. It was an organisation which was authoritative and yet had no traditions, which could immediately involve a scattered mass of hundreds of thousands of people while having virtually no organisational machinery; which united the revolutionary currents within the proletariat; which was capable of initiative and spontaneous self-control—and most important of all, which could be brought out from underground within twenty-four hours (Trotsky 1971, 122).

Although tsarism recovered temporarily and the soviet of 1905 was disbanded, its memory persisted. Then World War I brought intense suffering to Russia. Unlike Western Europe, where political and trade union reformists were (albeit with difficulty) able to act as safety valves to hold back council movements, in Russia government repression had closed off this channel. Therefore, when the army refused to fire upon hungry striking workers in Petrograd in February 1917, there were no obstacles to the mass re-creation of the soviets. They underwent virtually no incremental development such as was observed in the West. The Petrograd council really did appear within twenty-four hours. It was based on one factory delegate per one thousand workers and one delegate per regiment. From the start collective power in the workplace was fused with the physical power of armed men. And this system confronted a capitalist state in virtually total disarray.

Nevertheless, in its fundamentals the soviet was no different from the shop stewards’ committee or factory council, in terms of both its strengths and weaknesses. Despite the lack of well-established reformist politics the majority of the soviet delegates did not comprehend the potential of the institution they embodied. Tsarism might have been abolished, but most expected the next step to be a capitalist state along Western parliamentary lines. A more radical outcome was not widely envisaged, and this belief was reflected in the council majority—the Mensheviks, representing the less radical workers, and their Social Revolutionary allies, based among the numerous peasantry. Thus the Bolsheviks, who argued for “All power to the soviets,” could muster only 65 deputies out of 2,800.

However, the successive political crises of April, July, and September reflected a constant, democratic evolution in the soviet’s political complexion. As the continuing war and deepening social collapse took their toll, so did the soviet march in step with workers’ radicalization. In April 1917 Vladimir Lenin had argued that the Bolshevik Party he led must “struggle for influence within the Soviets . . .” (Lenin 1964, 49), and as time passed this approach paid off. Instant recall meant that popular disappointment with Menshevik and Social Revolutionary government policy led to their delegates being progressively withdrawn, with revolutionaries taking their places. By October 1917 the Bolsheviks had a majority in the Petrograd council, and in an almost bloodless insurrection the Military Revolutionary Committee of the Petrograd Soviet took power, seizing control of the Winter Palace and toppling the Kerensky government with a minimum of casualties. The revolutionary committee then declared that the soviet system would form the basis of the new socialist state.

This evolution demonstrated the essential difference between Russia and other examples. Russia’s workers’ councils were strong enough to constitute a real state power in their own right. This had been the case in Germany as well. But Russia, uniquely, had a mass revolutionary party committed to the idea of workers’ council power. The Bolshevik Party was strong enough to withstand the pressures within workers’ councils to accommodate to the majority still wedded to reformism. Such pressure had prevented the socialists in Glasgow from airing their radical views. Nor did the Bolsheviks’ desire for socialism—combined with their initial lack of controlling influence within the soviet—impel them to try to bypass the councils, as had transpired in Berlin. Lenin’s party had the confidence to foresee the victory of its arguments in the long term. It understood the need to win over the soviets to revolutionary change. The experience of 1917 was summed up by Trotsky who, once again, had been elected as the chair in Petrograd:

The organisation by means of which the proletarian can both overthrow the old power and replace it, is the soviets . . . .However, the soviets by themselves do not settle the question. They may serve different goals according to the programme and leadership ....Whereas the soviets in revolutionary conditions—and apart from revolution they are impossible—comprise the whole class with the exception of its altogether backward, inert or demoralised strata, the revolutionary party represents the brain of the class. The problem of conquering the power can be solved only by a definite combination of party with soviets (Trotsky 1977, 1021).

Tragically, Russia’s soviet state was short-lived, even though the name was retained. The numerical weakness of the working class in a largely peasant country, and its physical destruction in civil war and foreign wars of intervention, led to the hollowing out of the councils as meaningful democratic bodies. This was linked with the simultaneous degeneration of the Bolshevik party under Stalin. The two organizations had relied on each other to succeed and neither could survive long in power if the other were absent. This dynamic would prove to have profound consequences when the next major war began.

World War II and the Missing Councils

At first glance World War II had all the ingredients for a reemergence of workers’ councils on a grand scale. This was an event that, in terms of sheer human suffering, social and economic upheaval, and the destruction of conventional state structures, far surpassed the 1914–1918 conflict. However, in some countries we have already considered, conditions prior to the war made the development of councils unlikely. During the 1930s repression in Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany was so thorough and intense that very little independent working-class activity could be expected.

Parallels with World War I were closer in other settings. The political/economic truce offered by reformist politicians and trade union leaders to their governments once more left workers in Western Europe vulnerable to an enormous increase in exploitation. In Britain the Labour Party had joined Churchill’s coalition government and prominent trade unionists such as Ernest Bevin threw their efforts into maximizing production. In France the process followed a different path. It took just six weeks for Germany’s Wehrmacht to overrun the country in 1940. This unexpected collapse was widely attributed to the readiness of the French political and military establishment to collaborate with Nazism rather than rouse the population to fight back. In both England and France the hold of traditional labor movement organizations was weakened, making a workers’ council movement feasible.

As in World War I Britain experienced a number of strikes during World War II, but none of them produced permanent independent rank-and-file bodies such as the Clyde Workers’ Committee. France, under Nazi occupation and the Vichy regime, did give birth to a powerful resistance movement, and Paris was once again the center of action. During 1944 there were mass strikes in the capital involving police, postal, and metro workers. Despite General de Gaulle’s begging them “to return to work immediately and maintain order until the Allies arrive” (quoted in Tillon 1962, 318), a general insurrection erupted. Yet there was very little challenge to de Gaulle’s aim of reestablishing a capitalist France. Therefore, just three days after the liberation of Paris he was able to start dissolving the popular militias, and the process met with minimal resistance (de Gaulle 1998, 661).

Despite its years of fascist rule, Northern Italy saw the greatest level of workers’ activity of the entire Second World War. In March 1943, with Turin once again its epicenter, every factory in Piedmont was on strike (Battaglia 1957, 32). This movement played a significant role in the decision of the Fascist Grand Council and king to eject Mussolini as ruler a few months later. In the years that followed immense general strikes swept through the entire north of the country. In some areas the resistance even established liberated zones. The largest of these was the Republic of Domodossola, which was located near industrial Milan. It was “the only substantial part of Hitler’s occupied Europe to achieve independence, and obtain recognition” (Lamb 1993, 220).

Yet no institution resembling a workers’ council appeared in Britain, France, or Italy during this time. Why was this? The crucial factor was the opposition of the various Communist parties. They might have originated in the 1917 revolution and with the establishment of a soviet state, but by World War II that was long forgotten. These parties enjoyed huge influence in their respective labor movements, but from 1941 onward each one strove to deliver maximum support to Moscow in its desperate battle for survival against Hitler, sustained by collaborating with whichever capitalist state offered help. Stalin therefore downplayed the imperialist motives of Britain, France, and the United States, muted the criticism of their capitalist governments, and presented the war as a pure, unadulterated battle against fascism. Thus the revolt against the conditions of war that was a defining feature of the World War I workers’ councils was absent during World War II.

In Britain, for example, the Communist Party campaigned to maximize wartime production and denounced any stoppage as sabotage (see, for example, Croucher 1982). In France the Communist Party tamely accepted the postwar dissolution of the resistance because that suited Moscow’s foreign policy aims.

By mid-1945 the Italian partisans effectively controlled much of the north. However, when Togliatti, the Italian Communist leader who had written the seminal article “Workers’ Democracy” with Gramsci in 1919, returned from Russian exile he astounded his supporters by declaring, “The working class must abandon the position of opposition and criticism which it occupied in the past ”(quoted in Sassoon 1981, 22). Instead of encouraging workers’ councils, the partisan newspaper for antifascist resistance fighters, in a piece entitled “Hail the Government of National Unity,” insisted that “every disagreement about the regime we want in our country, every legitimate reform, if it is not urgent, must take second place, be set aside, be delayed until after the victory” (Il Combattente, May 1944, in Longo 1971, 180).

Conclusion

The developments of World War II reinforced, in a negative sense, the hardwon lessons of the Paris Commune and World War I. In the earlier cases workers’ councils could not succeed when they lacked the self-consciousness and revolutionary purpose that could only be injected into them by a radical socialist party. During World War II workers’ councils failed even to get off the ground when the Communist parties, which once might have been expected to promote them, refused to play that positive role and actively discouraged their formation.

The lesson of the European experience has been that workers’ councils are the basis for a different kind of state. Through instant recall, and the fact that shop-floor delegates receive no special pay while being directly and immediately responsible to their electors, they offer a kind of democracy undreamt of by any conventional institution. As the collective expression of the working class they provide a means of overcoming the sham democracy of parliamentary elections under capitalism. In capitalism real power is held by the bosses, not the disparate mass of individuals grouped together by an accident of geography, who do little more than put an “x” on a sheet of paper before abandoning the field to power and privilege for the next several years.

However, the formation of workers’ councils cannot be undertaken in isolation, but only in a symbiotic relationship with organized radical ideas. Without a self-conscious understanding of the revolutionary potential of the council, its very strength—grassroots democracy—will tend to reflect reformism and stay within the bounds of capitalist society. Equally, without workers’ self-organization and democracy—without the workers’ council—there can be no socialism.

References

Abrate, Mario. 1967. La lotta sindicale nella industrializzazione in Italia, 1906–1926, 2nd rev. ed. Milan: Angeli.

Avanti! 1918. Turin edition, October 17.

Battaglia, Roberto. 1957. The story of the Italian resistance. Trans. P. D. Cummins. London: Odhams Press Limited.

Bron, Jean. 1968. Histoire du mouvement ouvrier français. 2 vols. Paris: Les Éditions Ouvrières.

Clyde Workers’ Committee. 1915. Leaflet, November 1915, Glasgow. Beveridge Collection, St. Andrews University.

Croucher, Richard. 1982. Engineers at war. London: Merlin Press.

De Gaulle, Charles. 1998. The complete war memoirs. New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers.

EDHIS [Editions d’histoire sociale], eds. 1988. Federation Republicaine de la Garde Nationale. Comite Central. Status Declaration prealable, 26 September 1870. In Les Révolutions du XIXe siècle, 1852–1872. Paris: EDHIS.

Edwards, Stewart. 1971. The Paris Commune, 1871. London: Eyre and Spottiswoode.

Flechtheim, O. K. 1966. Die KPD in der Weimarer Republik. Frankfurt: Europäische Verlagsanstalt.

Freiheit. 1918. December 30.

Frölich, Paul. 1972. Rosa Luxemburg: Ideas in action. Trans. Joanna Hoornweg. London: Pluto Press.

Gaillard, Jeanne. 1977. Paris, la ville 1852–1870. Lille-Paris: Honoré Champion.

Gluckstein, Donny. 1985. The Western soviets: Workers’ councils versus parliament 1915–20. London: Bookmarks.

______. 2006. The Paris Commune: A revolution in democracy. London: Bookmarks.

Gramsci, Antonio. 1977. Selections from political writings, 1910–20. London: Lawrence and Wishart.

Hinton, James. 1973. The first shop stewards’ movement. London: Allen & Unwin.

Institut für Marxismus-Leninismus. 1968. Protokoll der Sitzung des Vollzugsrate der Arbeiterund Soldatenraete am 16 November 1918. In Beitrag zur Geschichte der Arbeiterbewegung, 138–145. Berlin: Institut für Marxismus-Leninismus.

La Commune, 1871. March 19.

Lamb, Richard. 1993. War in Italy, 1943–1945: A brutal story. London: Da Capo Press.

Lenin, V. I. 1964. Letters on tactics. In Collected works, vol. 24. Moscow: Progress Publishers.

Longo, Luigi. 1971. Sulla via dell’insurrezione nazionale. Rome: Editori Riuniti.

Lucipia, Louis. 1904. The Paris Commune of 1871. International Quarterly no. 8 (September 1903–March 1904).

McNair, John. 1955. James Maxton: The beloved rebel. London: Allen & Unwin.

Murphy, J. T. 1941. New horizons. London: John Lane/The Bodley Head.

Rougerie, Jaques. 1971. Paris libre, 1871. Paris: Editions du Seuil.

Sassoon, Donald. 1981. The strategy of the Italian Communist Party: From the resistance to the historic compromise. London: Frances Pinter.

Smith, Steve. 1983. Red Petrograd: Revolution in the factories, 1917–18. London and New York: Cambridge University Press.

Tillon, C. 1962. Les FT. Paris: Julliard.

Trotsky, Leon. 1971. 1905. London: Penguin Books.

______. 1977. The history of the Russian revolution. London: Pluto Press.