Council Communism had died and is still dead. The real movement that it began ended the day it set forth into the clouds of revolution; Gorter’s death reaffirms this. The once-powerful citadel of organic proletarian power, manifested in the council system, was left to rot. At the core of leftist theory, it became a farm of absolute hypocrisy and a call for revolution that would never be answered.
I must now answer for my crimes. What do I mean that the council communists failed? Let's start where it all began. To understand how they failed as the one and only organization against the heart of the bourgeoisie, we must go back to the land of beautiful tears, before revolution was lost to the maw of capitalism.
The council movement first showed its ugly head in the Russian Revolution, where it was the main force behind many attacks. It was the first form of real action by the workers that had organization. Before, the party was of many involved with the real works of the revolution. The workers' movement had just cheated death, seen by the monarchists as a dog with no bite. But it was very different from what they had hoped it was. It was a machine of proletarian force, communism so close yet almost unreachable. Most of the Russian populace were still peasants, with no will for such self-governing bodies—they needed something over them to function.
To the workers' dismay, Lenin led the party to be the head of the Bolshevik cause. After the death of the councils, which were shown to be as organic as berries in the forest, the heart of the revolution was lost, and so the workers became sedentary. They lost their power to be communist, so why even try? "Let Lenin and his party do the work if they so please!" Some still wanted to have a true communist state, so they went to Kronstadt.
Like with everything, Lenin at first saw this as a great moment for the proletarian revolution. Why not support a party? Surely the people cannot organize themselves—think about what would happen if these councils had arguments! But just before his death, he realized the great error in his message. Communism had lost in Russia, and he knew it. They let the mad rule over the sedentary class, doomed in the gates of hell until Lord Yeltsin came to save the people from utter totalitarianism.
What a great move by capitalism, making the public image of communism one of utter terror, corrupting its core like it did with the others. We now arrive at the revival of the councils. They looked at what happened and swore to Marx above to not fall into the decadence of Leninism. This began with Herman Gorter and Antonie Pannekoek, with Pannekoek being the most famous of the two revolutionaries. Gorter and Pannekoek saw a chance to bring the council system to light with the fall of the Kaiser in Germany.
Germany was just as Marx had foreseen in his visions; the decline of capitalism was truly alive on the German frontier. Bremen was their playground. Although they had to fight against the Bolshevik menace, which rooted itself in Bremen and had similar optimism that leaned on idealism—no, that did not matter—they had it in their hands. Germany seemed most of all developed for a revolution of this size! After all, it was where the great mind of Marx was born, and it was the center of European power—well, it was before the war. War or no war, revolution was coming. Bremen failed, no matter! We can still make it out.
But soon came the pragmatists1 who stole all the communists from their lovely homes that Marx had built before them. Pannekoek still had a raw optimism, but deep down, like Lenin, he knew something was wrong with Marxism. What doubts would get him through it? He still had to push on. I hope Pannekoek would’ve learned what Camatte did in the years following, but against my wishes, he did not.
Then, with the power of lightning in his hand, he wrote “Workers’ Councils,” a detailed plan on our task as workers and how to use councils in the face of revolution. It did not go anywhere, though, and he died on an empty bed of dreams. Gorter, before he died in the early years, was not a utopian unlike what would await Pannekoek. He had a basis for the kind of revolution he wanted, and once he brought Bremen, which could not be desecrated like the Soviets because he sold it back to capitalism, he could not hold such a land for much longer. Mostly not to be blamed, he did not cause this crisis—it was more the Leninists and the devilish Lassalleans that all communists hated, their fault more than anything!
While they were theorizing, the devil came, and the devil’s name was Otto Rühle. Rühle was a man of the capitalists; he lied to the communists that Marxists were against the party. He acted like a councilist, but under the ropes of the grandmother was the fox under these lies. Rühle did not matter much in this story except for tainting the councilist movement even more into the rejection of the party-form, which Marx would’ve utterly hated. The Communist Manifesto was of the party, after all. What was this nobody except a liar? The party is needed because the proletariat needs a pre-revolutionary form of expression; otherwise, it would just be a number, they all said to Rühle. Rühle, the snake, never listened to them and continued his near-anarchist rambles.
Pannekoek was done with all this nonsense about the party-form and such—it was all nonsense that had to be capitalist in origin. If only he could see what became of him too. Furthermore, like Marx before him, he fell into the same trap that Germany would fall to communism in his lifetime, which never happened and never will, even a million years over. Pannekoek’s plans for communist victory, set out in “Workers’ Councils,” had failed, and so did councilism with it. They claimed to be in mass with the times of history, yet they did not realize why they failed. Bourgeois society was no more; they were fighting a ghost at the point of Gorter’s resolution. This is what made Pannekoek a utopian. He fought a phantasm and sought out an idea that could not be realized because capital itself had escaped and killed the bourgeoisie for them. What a delirious man he was!
Like the men that Zarathustra was trying to bring the overman to, they laughed at capital, and it did nothing but make it stronger. It used these socialist states against them and twisted the heart of revolution. Then they made the councilists turn on their fellow men, a trap even I fell into. Theory became a commodity in which communists turned on themselves to fight the fact that proletarians had been killed. Without the bourgeoisie, the proletarian class can no longer exist, and thus the council-form and party-form were equally killed in the forms that the original councils saw fit for basic communist organization.
It was more than obvious that the Marxist way of thinking had failed, even with the political economy, because since capital had now killed the gold standard, then went the underground railroad. The council movement, still stuck in the now ancient Marxist thought process, couldn’t see this—capital wanted this to be the case. The longer someone fought with the ghost of the bourgeoisie, the longer it would take for them to find out what schema capitalism is now in. Some Marxists tried to find out what was happening in the toxic waste of the contingency. One brave soul tried to find the reason why revolution never came to these lands, my friend in waiting, Guy Debord.
He claimed the reason to be a false sense of reality that the capitalist had created, the spectacle, commodity fetishism to the extreme. He did not see the end of the gold standard, far from it; he thought only that images had replaced actual thought to hide even more the fact we are the creators of commodities, not capital, which would make capitalism grow. But that was a fatal flaw on his end. It had ended the gold standard; it had not just commodified reality itself but also humanity. To the point that this capitalist reality has become real. The spectacle is no longer false; it is now what we will always live through. It has entrenched itself at the heart of reality. He couldn’t realize this because he was stuck in the Marxist theory that capitalism might try anything it likes, but it will fail one day or another.
When Debord called for the workers to realize the spectacle and form councils, the capitalist gave them the smallest of hopes, only to see that all the workers wanted was an election. They were so gaslit by capitalism that they believed an election would work, but it did nothing. Debord’s calls were rarely ever heard again. Capitalism wants crises just to prove the other side more wrong than ever; it is a very fatal strategy indeed. Sure, capitalism could try to stop crises, but why would it want that? Indeed, even the modern “communist” states are all in and out with the game and have become a period of capitalism itself to show how bad communism is, with this false communism.
The Marxists wanted to realize communism by using capital’s revolutionary power, but capital stole this future by using it for itself—a truly egoist capitalism indeed. All I have left is my mere pessimism, and I no longer have a dream. My dream is the spectacle's dream; I have lost all will to thought, and so this means the end of insurrection with it.
What do we have left for a post-capitalist form of organization? My friend, I do not know, really. Capitalism has made the thought of that a mere idealist dream for the poor. I could realize the gates of hell rather than answer such a question. But with my slight optimism for the future, where my egoism can run free, I choose councils yet still. They are the only form of the state where a true Gemeinwesen could materialize in this middle side of the universe. Councils allow the freedom for this irrational humanism, creative side that capitalism and the greater religious sphere have led us to oppose. Yes, they believe in an irrationality, but not an human one. What is paganism but the real irrationality of spirits! Councils allow us to adapt and change what comes up to us. It is not a solid matter, and it is not fixed, which the old Marxists have fallen into.
These councils cannot be used for revolution—what value does one have if he cannot even attack it on any front? What help would water do to lava? It can only be the real organization of post-capitalist society: organic self-irrationality adapted into materialism and yet still functioning on the basis of what communism is in its most basic principle.2 Communist have conquered bread as egoists, and you have got the best of what you could’ve otherwise.
You've told us everything, Adelaide! Now, for your own nobility in the court of law, go and change the world. But he told us he cannot do that; the law would have him dead, his head hanging from the axehead. He cannot give me what his father could—no, the dream of the Overman is dead; it died with his father. We will have to wait for the jester to end the court by twisting the king's head, and then we will be free.
Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party
“From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” - Karl Marx, Gothakritik
Good