Councilism was a radical, ultra-revolutionary, particularist tendency deviated from the mainstream council communism of Netherlands and Northern Germany. Unlike council communists such as Anton Pannekoek and Paul Mattick, councilists rejected party form in general.
Personality
Councilism hates it when people confuse it with Italian left communism or mainstream council communism.
History
Council communism began to theorize within the council's communism movement in the 1930s. They tended to break away from mainstream council communism, which maintained "Marxism" in terms of the nature of the Russian Revolution, the form of the proletarian dictatorship, and the position on the party.
Councilism defined the 1917 Russian Revolution as the bourgeois revolution, and theorized the proletarian revolution as 'self-management' socialism rather than the world revolution. In particular, he criticized all forms of non-Council political organization as bourgeois and counter-revolutionary and denied the necessity of political organization.
Against Stalin's thesis of 'socialism in one country' from 1926 to 1927, all communist leftists declared the counter-revolution and the death of the Comintern, but councilists reconstructed their theory of socialism in 'one region' based on autonomy and self-reliance. It was criticized as "Stalinist" from the standpoint of mainstream council communism. After that, councilists publicly theorized the thesis of local socialist construction, especially in the 1930s.
Furthermore, the councilists rejected the need for a separate political organization other than the council (Soviet) beyond rejecting party control in general. At that time, the Dutch left had developed an independent understanding of the trade union issue, the material sources of the crisis of capitalism, from the decline of capitalism to the new form of worker organization. This was also a deviant from orthodox Marxism, but it continued to be a particularly important part of the class struggle, especially in the unemployed movement. However, the Dutch left, shocked by the "Bolshevization" of the Russian Revolution, grew increasingly drawn to the council's rejection of the political organization and its obvious role in it. It combined a complete denial of Bolshevism and the Russian Revolution, criticizing it as 'bourgeois' from the beginning.
Judging the Russian Revolution as a kind of bourgeois revolution, councilism insisted on the adoption of communist economic measures as a 'liberation zone' rather than a political and economic measure for the realization of the proletarian dictatorship as the first step of the proletarian revolution, i.e. for the (international) control of workers. This councilism argues in the experience of the Russian Revolution that it advances the revolution without creating bureaucracy through the immediate implementation of worker control and the abolition of wage labor and commodity exchange. Therefore, councilism, ironically, was in line with the right-leaning factions of early Marxism in terms of economism. Paradoxically, councilism later influenced ultra-left tendencies such as anarchism and syndicalism.
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