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despite its criticisms of bolshevik and leninist policies. The final disappearance of the KAPD in 1933 and the
isolation in clandestinity of what remained of the German communist left, left the field open to the ‘councilist’
current.
‘Councilism’ does not simply mean advocating the workers’ councils as organs of the dictatorship of the
proletariat after the destruction of the old bourgeois state. It expresses a workerist vision which sees the
existence of revolutionary political parties within the workers’ councils as a negative factor. This negative
conception of the revolutionary party considers that the worker’s councils are the one and only crucible of
revolutionary consciousness within the working class. In line with Rühle’s conception, any party, even a
revolutionary one, is bourgeois in essence and aims at the seizure of power by a group of intellectuals in the
place of the revolutionary proletariat. 792
In the second place, ‘councilism’ is a negative reaction of revolutionary groups to the experience of the Russian
revolution. This was rejected as a ‘bourgeois revolution’, whose main social force was the peasantry and which
could only end up in state capitalism. The rejection of the Russian revolution led to a retrospective identification
between the Bolshevism of 1917 and the stalinism of 1927. By seeing nothing in the Russian revolution except
its ultimate degeneration, ‘councilism’ assimilated any workers’ revolution led by one or more revolutionary
parties with a ‘bourgeois revolution’ substituting itself for the power of the workers’ councils.
In the third place, ‘councilist’ theory, under the terrible shock of seeing the German proletariat defeated without
a fight in 1933, considered that the organisational structures of what it called “the old workers’ movement”, both
in their function and their way of operating, were definitively dead. The whole past experience of the 19 th
century workers’ movement was rejected as negative. The threat of fascism and the imminent danger of war, by
forcing most revolutionary groups into clandestinity, led the councilist groups to theorise the existence of small
clandestine groupings, discussion groups or working groups as the form of the “new workers’ movement’.
Finally, councilism was an ‘economist’ theory. Considering that the class struggle of the proletariat was
essentially economic, it saw the revolutionary process as a question of the form of the economic management of
the proletariat, in strike committees, unemployed committees and workers’ councils. The primordial issue of the
revolution was the proletariat’s domination over the productive forces. For councilism, the ‘dictatorship of the
proletariat’ was economic rather than political.
However, the fully-fledged councilist theory elaborated in the 1930s was not imposed on the international
council communist movement without hesitation and reservations.
The adoption of the ‘councilist’ vision encountered much resistance, both in the German movement and the GIC
itself. In this sense, the GIC was not a ‘pure’ councilist group.
The adoption of the Theses on Bolshevism (1934)
In 1932-33 a member of the Rote Kämpfer, Helmut Wagner, wrote the ‘Theses on Bolshevism’, which was to
become the theory of the international council communist movement. Re-worked collectively by the GIC, they
were translated into German and English and adopted by the whole ‘councilist’ movement. 793 They provoked
little discussion or criticism. To this day they have provided the theoretical basis for councilist groups all over
792 Rühle, op. cit.: “A party that is revolutionary in the proletarian sense is a nonsense. It can only have a revolutionary
character in the bourgeois sense, and here only at the historic turning point between feudalism and capitalism.” (p. 32).
793 ‘Stellingen over het bolsjevisme’, in: PIC, No. 5, April 1934; Räte-Korrespondenz, No. 3, Aug. 1934; International
Council Correspondence, No. 3, Dec. 1934. A French translation is available: Korsch – Mattick – Pannekoek – Rühle –
Wagner, La contre-révolution bureaucratique (Paris: 10/18, 1973), pp. 23-24.
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