McIver
It’s irrelevant that no ‘council communist organisations’ exist today. People who brand themselves as council communists do exist, and won’t disappear, even after the passing away of the last pre-1968 specimen. As long as wage labour survives, council communism, like all ouvriérismes, will linger on. It’s another fossilised delusion in the ‘revolutionary marketplace’. True, they are more amiable than left communists. For starters, they don’t identify with Leninists and their party-patriotism though they support a ‘labour republic’ run by workers’ councils, a sort of ‘commune state’, but a nation-state all the same. All nations require one, including the ‘labour republic’, so it’s doubtful that this could be called ‘libertarian’, a vague term itself…
It’s true that from 1917 onwards many of the later council communists supported the Russian warlords and their Comintern after 1919. This was a sleazy past that council communists like Paul Mattick tried to erase and conceal forever after, with their brand name ‘council’ as opposed to the ‘party’ communists. That they colluded in the ideological cover-up of a murderous régime, like the lyrical Gorter and KAPD did, can’t be denied. This was a mass voluntary blindness, which afflicted all ‘ultra-lefts’ in 1917-27. Present day left communists apologise for this blindness with their theoria errores iustificat terrore, or ‘theory of mistakes’. Yet the council communist opposition to Bolshevism was ambivalent: according to leading council communists Pannekoek and Brendel, the Lenin régime, and Maoism later, were carrying out ‘bourgeois’ or ‘state capitalist revolutions’.
The scholastic titbit that the council communist heritage ‘fits’ into what today’s ‘pro-revolutionaries’ can draw from, is irrelevant as well. Though it should be said that ‘pro-revolutionaries’ is another brand re-positioning by competing mini-rackets, like the pantoish ‘thin red line’. All predicted by Camatte and Collu in 1969-72.
