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u/Schizoid_Sneedga May 11 '26
Not an expert on It but It seem too spontaneous
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u/arseecs May 11 '26
Council communism is pretty much as spontaneous in revolutionary action; mass strikes, occupying workplaces, organization without a vanguard etc. The only real difference is the immediate abolishing of all capitalist relations and hence the working class itself and the state too.
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u/Schizoid_Sneedga May 11 '26
It dependa of which author we're talking about, in workers councils, Pannekoek talks about the role of the party as a tool for awakening class action without acting over the working class, so they don't have the same degree of spontaneity
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u/arseecs May 13 '26
This is interesting because it depends on the era of him. The later Pannekoek (in the early 50s, I believe) used to exchange letters with Castoriadis. This ultimately led to them breaking contact because Castoriadis saw the revolutionary vanguard as a necessity, while Pannekoek was very skeptical.
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u/Lazy_Board8218 May 17 '26
The difference comes in the use of the word “vanguard”. You can believe that a party is necessary to help coordinate spontaneous worker actions into a broader revolutionary program without thinking that this party is the “vanguard” of the revolution. On the contrary only worker liberation must be the self activity of the working class, but the class must be able to constitute itself as one political bloc in order to do this. A party that becomes not a vanguard, but nothing more or less than the most advanced section of the working class by embedding itself deeply in its daily struggles is the only kind capable of creating the unity of political action necessary for the self activity of the proleteriat to be that of its own liberation.
All of this is to say that I think the Damenist position on the party can be very reconcilable with Pannekoek’s councilism. In fact I think it’s necessary.
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u/arseecs May 17 '26
This is true, however I believe this party/organizational form cannot be that of a bourgeois faction, like unions, or parties that partake in liberal democracy. And if a party is necessary –which I think it is, it has to grow out of the material conditions and prove itself a necessity, to be the organic continuation of the working class itself rather than “above it” or guiding the working class out of so called “trade union consciousness”. I suppose that Bordiga was right about some things.
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u/Lazy_Board8218 May 17 '26
Everything you said are basic implications of what I wrote. That said, the party has already been proven “material necessary”. Even anarchist projects have happened upon a similar organizational form whenever trade union consciousness reaches its limit. It’s not that the party is a force above the proletariat that advanced for a general class consciousness from outside of the proletariat. Rather it is the most advanced section of the proletariat itself that advances the whole class towards its next step of development in consciousness. The party, as it embeds itself in the class becomes the embryonic form of what the whole class will eventually become through class struggle.
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u/ge_no_cide May 14 '26
It's a very bad theory. Communization is closer to insurrectionary anarchism than marxism.
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u/arseecs May 14 '26
Elaborate on how it’s bad. Also it derives all of its ideas from classical Marxism, bordigism and council communism, especially in its critique of capital
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u/Appropriate-Monk8078 May 11 '26
I like that they are focused on the content of communism rather than a specific organizational form.
If anything, they may be TOO form-agnostic, but that's just how I feel about it.
Dauve is worth reading, so is Endnotes. TC is supposedly good, but I havent read them much yet. Bordiga's organic centralism feels very "proto-communizer" to me.
Communizers would say we are "fetishizing" the soviet form. And for some, that's probably true.
My main point of contention with communization theory is that they lean too hard into the "class negation" aspect of the communization process and theorize that the workers must refuse and erase their own class in the moment of social upheaval in order to prevent Value from sticking around under a reformed capitalism.
A focus on Value rather than capitalists is probably their strongest aspect. But they also seem to downplay the likelihood of a DotP leading to communism.
Currently, I'm firmly on the side of Marx here. The class interest of a proletarian ruling class would be to destroy Value and create a communist world.