Changing Conceptualizations of Councils. The Workers’ Council as a Concept in Political Theory from Paris Commune to Postwar Period

The council as democratic form in both theory and practice has been a continually recurring political concept during the last 150 years. It has done so as part of a broad variety of political discourses. From Marx’ account of the Paris commune, via Lenin, Gramsci and Pannekoek and their ideas about council communism, to the post-war political theory of Lefort, Castoriadis and Arendt. It has persistently been conceptualized as an alternative to the Party, to capitalism, to the state, to representative democracy and to totalitarianism, which shows that it is a political form with a great capacity for admiration. Exactly because of this broad applicability, it is important to investigate the conceptual changes that make this concept central to many political ideas. This overview of shifting meanings is particularly interesting in light of current political practice. Since popular politics and autonomous institution building have appeared in relation to anti-austerity politics in Europe and USA (Spain, Greece, Occupy) and many experiments with councils and assemblies are taking place in Latin America and the Middle East, investigation of the conceptual and political development of the council form and its possibilities is both important and necessary. In this paper, the development of the concept of council will be investigated and analysed within the shifting contexts within which it has been applied. A first phase to be studied is the period between the Paris Commune and the Russian Revolution of 1917. The accounts of Marx and Lenin are to be found in almost all later references to the councils both as an empirical and a theoretical phenomenon. During the interwar period, the emergence of councils in Germany, Italy, Hungary and of course Russia provide empirical input for political theorists of that period. The development of council communism as a political ideology from the early 1920’s onwards (in the work of theorists like Antonio Gramsci, Anton Pannekoek, Herman Gorter and Otto Rühle) provides a rich impetus to the theorizing and conceptualisation of the council. After the second world war, the councils emerge again, in a different theoretical context. This time, political philosophers like Claude Lefort, Cornelius Castoriadis and Hannah Arendt develop the concept further and in a new philosophical milieu. The changing meaning that is attributed to the council concept will be traced by looking at the empirical phenomena that the authors refer to when they discuss the councils. Moreover, attention will be paid to the political function of the council: is it considered a committee, a commune, an assembly, or something completely different? And what is the council supposed to be an alternative to; the state, the party, the parliament? In what co- and context is the concept applied: is it used in political pamphlets, in party programmes, or in philosophical essays? The answers to these questions will lead to important insights regarding the conceptual changes of a core political concepts of the 20th and 21st century, and might provide necessary clarity about the concept in contemporary political practice and theory.