The Worker's Council from the Commune to Autonomy with Jasper Bernes, Session 2

The twentieth century can count only one truly new communist idea: the workers’ council, which emerged in Russia in 1905 as part of a revolutionary mass strike movement. But what is a workers’ council, or soviet, and how does it follow from the nineteenth-century theory of the commune? Is there an underlying concept of proletarian self-organization which both these theories of class struggle share? And what role do these theories leave for the party? What is the relationship between the workers’ council, which vanished from the world at the moment of its greatest extent, in the 1970s, and the turn, in struggle since then, to an autonomy without councils.
In tracing the story of the workers’ council from the Paris Commune to the present era, we will define, as a matter of preliminaries, the basic contours of revolution in our time. Not the council or the commune, perhaps, but what the council hoped to achieve. The focus here is as much on the practical history of the communist movement, as it is on the intellectual history of the movement of communists. Works by Rosa Luxemburg, Jan Appel, CLR James, Paul Mattick, will be read in the context of the Paris Commune, the German Revolution, the Spanish Civil War, May ’68, and the Carnation Revolution.
The series comprises eight month-long modules, with local, online reading groups followed two weeks later by an online plenary session, hosted by Red May.
Participants are encouraged to organize their own reading groups. The series is designed for people to participate at different levels, either offline or online or both.

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Red May is a month-long spree of red arts, red theory, and red politics based in Seattle, Washington. We gather in bookstores, movie theaters, bars, parks, cafes, alleys, and auditoriums to share in discussion and plot ways forward toward a world in common: a world beyond capitalism. While we will continue our annual collective hurdle over the wire of our capitalist horizon, now you can join us throughout the other 11 months of the year.