Workers' council

Workers' councils originated in Russia in 1905, with the workers' councils (soviets) acting as labor committees which coordinated strike activities throughout the cities due to repression of trade unions. During the Revolutions of 1917–1923, many socialists, such as Anton Pannekoek and Rosa Luxemburg, advocated for the control of the economy by the workers' councils. Several times in modern history, the idea of workers' councils has been attributed to similar forms of organization. Examples include:

• Paris, France during 1871 (la commune)[3]
• Adrianople Vilayet, Ottoman Empire in 1903
• Russia in 1905 and during 1917-1921 (soviets);[4]
• Poland during 1905, 1918, 1944–1947 and 1956, 1970, 1980–1981 (rady robotnicze);[5]
• Mexico during 1910–1920, 1994 and 2011 (comités trabajadores);
• Glasgow, Scotland during 1915[5]
• Austria during the 1918
• Germany during 1918–1919 (räte);[5]
• Ukraine during 1918–1921 (vilʹnikh radyy);
• Hungary during 1919 and 1956 (szovjetek);
• Italy during 1919–1920 and 1968 (consigli di fabbrica);
• Ireland during 1920–1921 (comhairle oibrithe);
• China during 1920–1927 and in 1967 (sūwéiāi);
• Korea during 1929–1931 (hyeob-uihoe) and 1945-1946 (inmin wiwǒnhoe) ;
• Spain during 1936–1937 (comités trabajadores);
• Vietnam during 1930-1931 and in 1945[6][7]
• Indonesia during 1945–1946[5]
• Algeria during 1962–1965[5]
• France during 1968 (comités d'entreprise);
• Czechoslovakia in 1968 ;
• Sri Lanka during the 1970-75 United Front government [8]
• Australia during 1971–1980 and 1990[9][10]
• Chile during 1973 (cordones);
• Argentina during 1973 and 2001[5]
• Portugal during 1974–1976[5]
• Iran during 1978–1979 (shoras);[11]
• Canada during 1981[5]
• Rojava from 2012 onward[12]

Despite Lenin's declarations that "the workers must demand the immediate establishment of genuine control, to be exercised by the workers themselves", on May 30, the Menshevik minister of labor, Matvey Skobelev, pledged to not give the control of industry to the workers but instead to the state: "The transfer of enterprises into the hands of the people will not at the present time assist the revolution [...] The regulation and control of industry is not a matter for a particular class. It is a task for the state. Upon the individual class, especially the working class, lies the responsibility for helping the state in its organizational work."[13][14]

In the workers' councils organised as part of the 1918 German revolution, factory organisations, such as the General Workers' Union of Germany (AAUD), formed the basis for organising region-wide councils. The council communists in the Communist Workers' Party of Germany advocated organising "on the basis of places of work, not trades, and to establish a National Federation of Works Committees."[15]

Councils operate on the principle of recallable delegates. This means that elected delegates may be recalled at any time through a vote in a form of impeachment. Recall of management committee members, specialist professionals such as engineers, and delegates to higher councils was observed in the Central Workers Council of Greater Budapest during 1956, where delegates were removed for industrial, organisational, and political reasons.

Workers' councils combine to elect higher bodies for coordinating between one another. This means that the upper councils are not superior to the lower councils, but are instead built from and operated by them. The national council would therefore have delegates from every city in the country. Their nature means that workers' councils do away with traditional centralized governments and instead give power indirectly to the people. This type of democratic order is called council democracy. The Central Workers Council of Greater Budapest occupied this role in the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, between late October and early January 1957, where it grew out of local factory committees.

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A workers' council is a deliberative assembly, composed of working class members, intended to institute workers' self-management or workers' control. Unlike a trade union, in a workers' council the workers are assumed to be in actual control of the workplace, rather than merely negotiating with employers through collective bargaining. They are a form of workplace democracy, where different workplaces coordinate production through their elected delegates.

Amongst both Marxists and anarchists there is a widespread belief that workers' councils embody the fundamental principles of socialism, such as workers' control over production and distribution. Whereas socialism from above is carried out by a centralized state run by an elite bureaucratic apparatus, here socialism from below is seen as the self-administration and self-rule of the working class.

Some left communists (particularly council communists) and anarchists support a council-based society; believing that only the workers themselves can spark a revolution and so workers' councils will be the foundation of the revolution. There are also Leninists (for example the Trotskyist International Socialist Tendency and its offshoots) who advocate a council-based society,[16] but maintain that workers' councils cannot carry out a revolution without the leadership of a vanguard party.[17]

During the May 1968 events in France, "[t]he largest general strike that ever stopped the economy of an advanced industrial country, and the first wildcat general strike in history",[18] the Situationists, against the unions and the Communist Party that were starting to side with the de Gaulle government to contain the revolt, called for the formation of workers' councils to take control of the cities, expelling union leaders and left-wing bureaucrats, in order to keep the power in the hands of the workers with direct democracy.[18]

• Workers' Councils: The historically discovered form of the dictatorship of the proletariat