Council Democracy, or the End of the Political

Alex Demirovic, translated by Joe Keady

Democracy, as it is widely understood, is equated with parliaments, periodic elections, parties, and representation. This form of liberal democracy has repeatedly been in crisis since the 19th century, but it has consistently been able to revive itself and, if anything, expand further. Parliamentary democracy has once again been diagnosed as being gradually eroded and in crisis in recent years: the dominance of business interests in politics, the distance of parties and parliaments from the general public, the imperviousness of public opinion to the interests of the populace, the executive decisions made to benefit institutional investors, and the spread of corruption, as well as that of right-wing populism and nationalism, are all symptoms of this erosion. Critics often pin their hopes on forms of direct democracy, but contrary to what this term suggests, it offers little potential for participation or agency. Direct democracy operates within the framework of liberal democracy, which is based on finding majorities to pass bills and therefore ultimately on a dichotomous yes or no position. As a result, social relations themselves are not constituted in a directly democratic way. Rather, direct democracy adds yet another procedure arises which is supplementary to the parliament instead.

The council democracy tradition represents one alternative to this. This may appear at first blush to be a museum piece, but during periods when social movements no longer oriented themselves to the parameters enforced by the ruling classes and no longer demanded these standards to be reinforced, but instead have transitioned into constitutive action, they have repeatedly updated their demands for a radical democratic alternative (see Arendt 1963). That demand has assumed various forms, including control over production, changes in the distribution of property, self-government, the cooperative management of production and distribution, anti-authoritarianism and self-determination of all social relations from the workplace to the school to the family. It can be expressed as "Work differently, live differently". The forerunners of the council democracy tradition are the English and French revolutions; the fundamental impetus comes from the Paris Commune and the council communist movement in Russia as well as in Germany, Hungary, Austria and Italy following World War I (see Ness and Azzellini, 2011). It was revived by the uprising in Hungary in 1956, by the social protest movements since 1968 and finally, by new initiatives in Latin America in recent years. Often spurred on by the social movements of their time, intellectuals such as Marx, Trotsky, Gramsci, Max Adler, Karl Korsch, Hannah Arendt and Cornelius Castoriadis have addressed the matter of council democracy at various times.

In this article I address certain aspects of council democracy. My intention is neither to apply old debates to the present-day situation without comment nor to suggest that they are directly applicable to it. Instead, I call attention to a particular problem in the debate on council democracy and therefore read older texts from the perspective of democracy theory. If the impulse towards council democracy has repeatedly renewed itself in the prevailing historical conflict, then a critical reading of this kind will be useful in three ways. It will recall these older discussions; it will show that council democracy utilizes important ideas in pursuit of fundamental democratization that are useful for today's social movements, and finally, it brings to light the problems connected with the demand for council democracy. I would first like to show that liberal democracy innately produces the necessity of a radical alternative. In the second section, I introduce the reasons for this with support from observations by Marx and the significant perspectives he developed on council democracy based on the experiences of the Paris Commune. The third section examines the problems that developed in the council democracy movement after World War I that are instructive for any new considerations of democracy theory.

The failure of liberal democracy

Council democracy is an alternative to liberal representative democracy. From the perspective of council democracy, parliamentary democracy is a principle that does not challenge the bourgeois class. Rather, parliamentarianism must be seen as a form of bourgeois domination (see Adler, 1919: 134–5; Pannekoek, 1946: 67–8, 266–8). The shortcomings of parliamentary democracy are therefore not simply incidental to it: they systematically contribute to the dominance of the bourgeoisie and its specific structure of ownership. Liberal democracy operates in the context of a two thousand-year conception of democracy. In this understanding of political organization, democracy is a regime in which, as a form of compromise, common people to a certain extent participate in that domination, alongside the rich. From this perspective, therefore, democratic institutions are not controlled through the shared and equal participation in the shared production of shared living conditions and shared interests. If the mechanisms of liberal democracy are not explicitly aimed at preventing the will to develop from the bottom up will, together with the collaborative formation of social relations, then they are designed to break down, postpone, filter and then selectively accept this will and its enactment. This happens through the process of representation, the institution of parliament and political parties, the separation of the legislative and executive branches, and the particular form of the state's management of people.

Liberal democracy separates the economic from the political sphere, the public from the private sphere and the universal from the particular in the social sphere. Universal interests are represented in the political. The political sphere constitutes the terrain of a universal will that is separate from society, which is to say it acts according to its...