Three Objections to Councilism

Here are three objections to councilism, or three large categories of objections, three gigantic rhetorical obstacles which councilism, if it is to be a serious political force, must somehow overcome.

1.

The first category is quite simply that people have never heard of councilism, and don't know what it means.  Either it has simply never occurred to them that the workers themselves might be capable of owning and administering the means of production, or, if it has occurred to them at all, they can't imagine what that would look like, because they've never given it any serious thought.  This is the old problem that, as Jameson and others have put it, "It's easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism."  In other words, it is nothing but a failure of imagination.  Councilism and related concepts simply aren't within the horizon of most people's imaginations as a possibility.

As such, if you begin to broach the subject of councilism with many people, they will usually respond in certain automatic ways - the ways that most people react to all foreign and unfamiliar concepts.  One way is to respond with laughter, derision, or sarcasm.  Or they may regard you as an idealist and a dreamer.  That's better than the even more typical response, which is fear.  (Then again, maybe it's the same thing - perhaps the nervousness implied in laughter merely masks the reality of fear.)  There's nothing people fear like the unknown, and there is hardly a political tendency more unknown than that of councilism.  People fear what they don't understand, and often feel hostility - or even anger and rage - towards that which they fear.  And if you are lucky enough to meet someone who does not respond to the concept of councilism with laughter, derision, fear, anger, or hate, you are almost certain to encounter simple confusion.  Not to mention blank stares, or people ignoring you altogether.

Because councilism is not within the horizon of imagined possibilities for most people, their first response to the concept of councilism will be to say, "That's impossible!"  But when you ask them why it's impossible, they rarely have a well-thought-out answer.

Precisely because most people have no working concept of councilism - even as something they disagree with - most of the time, in most conversations, they will try to turn it into something else, something it is not, when people argue with you about councilism, they will be arguing past you at various strawmen, and it will take all of your energy just to pull the conversation back to councilism and away from all the boogeymen haunting the conversation and sucking attention towards themselves.

Of course, people can't be blamed for the fact that they don't know what councilism is.  This ignorance is no accident.  There has been, after all, a concerted effort for decades - indeed, well over a century - to beat the concept of councilism out of people's heads.  Propagandists have striven to ensure that most people are capable of imagining only two alternatives: capitalism, of the American variety, or Stalinist-style police state, complete with purges, red terror, secret police, mass graves and so on.  Not only will the western propagandists drill this binary opposition into the minds of their young, but their "Marxist-Leninist" counterparts will essentially do the same thing.  Just as the right wingers will moronically be incapable of distinguishing between councilism and Stalinism, similarly the self-styled Leninists will blur councilism together with bourgeois reformism, Trotskyism, anarchism, liberal democracy and capitalism.  Perhaps the most nuanced history educators will admit the existence of another kind of capitalism, such as the 70s-style Nordic Social Democrats in Scandinavia.  And there the analysis ends.

2.

The second category of objections to councilism is a set of stock responses.  One of the ones I hear most often is "Does this mean I have to go to meetings?  It sounds like you'd have to go to a lot of meetings.  I hate meetings."  These are essentially memes that spread around the internet and are repeated unthinkingly by complete idiots.  I don't know what these people do for a living.  Can it really be that they have a job in which they don't have to go to meetings?  No one likes meetings.  But grow up.  What a person is telling me when they say something like this is that they are completely unserious and not worth listening to.  Sorry, but being an adult means you're going to have to have some human interaction.  At least in most work meetings, the interactions will generally be pretty civil and won't require you to be especially charming or interesting or chic.

The most bizarre use of the "too many meetings" argument is when it is when it is used to justify Leninist vanguardism.  Obviously, anyone who is unwilling to go to meetings is not a real revolutionary.  A revolution requires a lot more serious sacrifices than the ordeal of going to a meeting.  It may require you to fight, or kill, or die.  (Engels had that famous "Have these gentlemen ever seen a revolution?" argument.  Similarly, I want to ask: have these people ever seen any political activity of any kind?  It involves meetings.)

Meetings can be unfun.  They can be boring.  But they are infinitely preferable to oppression and exploitation.  (Besides, nowadays, you can attend meetings virtually, by video chat, on your phone.  You could be outside, enjoying a beautiful day and some pleasant conversation.)

The answer to this response should be - no.  If you don't want to go to meetings, you don't have to.  If you really don't care about decisions that are going to affect your life, that's fine.  You can leave it to those of us who do care.  In fact, please DO NOT COME to the meeting.  You're obviously the type of person who has nothing original or useful to offer, but just wastes everyone else's time with your endless, vacuous whining.

3. 

The third category of objections to councilism is much broader than the first two, yet it is far more rare.  In short, this is the category of real, material considerations of the problems of councilist strategy.  Why is it that workers' councils have not worked in the past?  For instance, the Russian revolution of 1917 was fought in the name of the "soviets" - literally, the "workers' councils."  Nominally, the USSR was the "Union of Soviet Socialist Republics."  And yet very quickly after Lenin declared "All power to the workers' councils," the reality of the republic turned out to be very much the opposite of that.  The Politburo grew in power and influence, and the workers' councils lost power extremely quickly, until they were little more than a rubber stamp for the decisions of the Politburo - and eventually they were eliminated altogether.  Why did this happen?  And why did other experiments with councilism likewise fail?  It's a complex question, worthy of much in-depth research and analysis.  Hardly anyone has even attempted to work on this question, let alone come up with any definitive solutions.  The closest examples I can think of are the Endnotes-types: you know, TC, Troploin, the Communization Current, etc. - and quite frankly, I'm not satisfied with any of their theories.  They don't seem particularly scientific to me.  I have my own pet theories, but I want to avoid any quick, easy answers.

It may very well be that there are real, profound problems with councilism, that force us to look for other strategies by which workers could attain self-management.  But the number of people who will engage in a serious conversation on the material considerations of the flaws of the councilist strategy (category 3) is so vanishingly small, compared with the number of people who operate with the knee-jerk reactions of categories 1 and 2, that every time someone actually comes up with an objection to councilism that demonstrates some originality and capacity for critical thought that I just want to run up and kiss them.