“The working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery and wield it for its own purposes.” This sentence was the only addition Karl Marx made to the Communist Manifesto. It was written in 1871, after the Paris Commune was brutally put down. As early as the 1850 March Address to the Central Committee of the Communist League, Marx recognised the need for workers to build institutions that could provide an alternative to the power of the capitalist class. The defeat of the Commune proved decisively to him that this alternative power could not come through the existing institutions of capitalism.
What, then, is the Marxist alternative to the parliaments and congresses that govern many countries today? The first thing to understand is that parliaments, as we know them, are constrained by written constitutions, judicial review and other separations of powers, which limit their ability to govern in the interests of workers and oppressed groups. Parliaments (and the constitutions that underpin them) are designed specifically to maintain the rule of the capitalist class and their property rights, and to maintain class divisions. So parliamentary powers are limited relative to the power of the capitalists, which rests on their control of the economy and therefore of most of society’s wealth.
At any rate, governments rarely contemplate significant challenges to capitalist power, because another part of their function is to coopt political opposition into a pro-capitalist framework. The parliament creates highly paid professional politicians, divorced from the rest of the population, who live more like capitalists and depend on the capitalist status quo for their social position. As well, the parliament is only one component of the broader state apparatus, which includes the police forces and military, the judiciary and the courts, and the permanent bureaucracy (public servants in various government departments). They all work together to manage the capitalist system.
Marxists are for a totally different type of state, with something called a workers’ council at its heart—akin to a workers’ parliament. There are many differences between a regular parliament and a workers’ council.
First, capitalists and their representatives are excluded from participation in workers’ councils. The exploiting class has no right to political representation. Second, councils are based on workplace voting, linking the economic power of the working class to its political power. Third, workers who become delegates to a council never become professional politicians—they remain workers on a workers’ wage and are instantly recallable. Fourth, workers’ councils are the supreme democratic authority: they cannot be limited in their power by previous capitalist conventions or institutions. That is, they build a new system of institutions whose sole purpose is to destroy the capitalist system and institute socialism.
In practice, workers’ councils arise organically out of revolutionary situations. They are not set up as a blueprint for a new society, but are messy affairs that try to address the immediate problems workers face as they fight for a better world. The most far-reaching system was established during and after the 1917 Russian Revolution, so it’s worth looking at what happened there to give us an insight into what this alternative can look like.
Workers’ councils first emerged in Russia to administer a mass strike that swept the country during the 1905 revolution. Inevitably, debates needed to be thrashed out and strategic questions clarified. So workers developed an ecosystem of delegated meetings to coordinate the revolt. They named this council system the soviet. Its activities flowed organically in response to the developing situation, such as helping print workers confront censorship and forming armed brigades to protect civilians from counter-revolutionary violence.
In February 1917, the second Russian Revolution started when women textile workers in the capital, Petrograd (St Petersburg), struck on International Working Women’s Day. Before long, Russia had erupted and workers re-created the soviets—this time, more widespread than ever. As Leon Trotsky later explained in his History of the Russian Revolution:
“The revolutionary leaders did not have to invent it; the experience of the Soviets of 1905 was forever chiselled into the consciousness of the workers ... As a matter of fact, thanks to the tradition of 1905, the soviets sprang up as though from under the earth, and immediately became incomparably more powerful than all the other organisations which later tried to compete with them (the municipalities, the co-operatives, and in part the trade unions).”
The soviets were based on a system of delegates who weren’t paid more than the average skilled worker and who received no special subsidies or compensation. A simple mass meeting could recall a delegate at any time. The democracy of the soviets was totally different to what we call democracy under capitalism.
“No political body more sensitive and responsive to the popular will was ever invented”, John Reed, an American communist and eyewitness to the revolution, recounted. “And this was necessary, for in time of revolution, the popular will changes with great rapidity.”
This democracy and mass engagement in politics are what made the soviets important. They became the nerve centre for workers’ power, coordinating the functioning of entire cities and regions. An example of the authority was Order No. 1 of the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies—the most important soviet during 1917. This placed the military under the control of the citywide soviet and its weaponry under the control of elected soldiers’ committees. Weapons, the order read, “shall by no means be issued to the officers, not even at their insistence”. The goal here was to prevent the upper classes, overwhelmingly represented among the officers, from organising against workers and soldiers’ control.
The soviet then took control of the postal and telegraph bureaus, the radio stations and printing presses, and all train stations. By and large, this was all part of workers asserting their own control over the economy. As Trotsky noted:
“In order to remove financial resources from the hands of the officials of the old power, the Soviet decides to occupy the State Bank, the Treasury, the Mint and the Printing Office with a revolutionary guard. The tasks and functions of the Soviet grow unceasingly under pressure from the masses ... The workers, the soldiers, and soon also the peasants, will from now on turn only to the Soviet. In their eyes, the Soviet becomes the focus of all hopes and all authority, an incarnation of the revolution itself.”
The soviet wasn’t the only centre of organisation. There were separate factory committees, trade unions, educational and agitational bodies like newspapers and political organisations, youth groups and militias and more. The residents of apartment buildings would get together to make decisions about the buildings, and teachers at a school would meet and debate radical curricula for their students. All of these elements and more played some role in the new revolutionary society. But the Petrograd Soviet was like the backbone to them all.
In 1917, its primary place of residence was the Tauride Palace. It is perhaps more associated with the Smolny Institute, where it later moved and where Lenin would later reside. The institute’s previous occupants, residents of a boarding school for young women of the aristocracy, had packed their bags and moved to the more pleasing environs at the heart of counter-revolutionary territory.
Technically, it relied on delegates at a ratio of one representative for every thousand workers, peasants or soldiers. Trade unions, factory committees and district soviets could also send delegates. The rules were flaunted with enthusiasm. In two weeks, 3,000 people appeared as delegates, most of them soldiers. The building buzzed. John Reed noted: “The order of business can be, and usually is, smashed to pieces in the first half hour”. Unable to be confined to the allocated rooms, the footprint of the Soviet expanded into the palace halls. Trotsky again:
“An uninterrupted flood of soldiers, workers, soldiers’ wives, small traders, clerks, mothers, fathers, kept opening and shutting the doors, sought, questioned, wept, demanded, compelled action—sometimes even indicating what action—and converted the Soviet in very truth into a revolutionary government.”
In this context, an executive committee was formed, with representatives from each of the parties that supported the revolution. This body evolved in size and composition. There were many other sections, usually known as commissions, that addressed all the pressing questions, from food supply and housing to the military aspect of the revolutionary struggle. Collectively, they gathered in plenary sessions to debate whichever critical question was of the greatest urgency at that time. And, inspired by events in Petrograd, workers set up soviets across the country.
“Already early in March, soviets were coming into being in all the principal towns and industrial centres”, Trotsky wrote. “From these, they spread in the next few weeks throughout the country. They began to arrive in the villages only in April and May.”
The various soviets sent delegates to an All-Russian Congress of Soviets every few months, the first of which was convened in June 1917 and was attended by delegates representing more than 50 regional, provincial and district associations of soviets as well as several dozen soldiers’ organisations. The second congress, which occurred during the October insurrection, is immortalised in Reed’s Ten Days That Shook the World and its film adaptation, Reds.
When asked about their political affiliation, the number of Bolshevik delegates increased dramatically between the first and second congresses. At the first, the Bolsheviks were less than 10 percent of delegates. The Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs), a peasant-based party, were the largest group, followed by the Mensheviks, a conservative socialist group competing with the more radical Bolsheviks.
In the Petrograd Soviet, which shared these leanings for the first half of 1917, this balance had several implications. According to Trotsky, these two largest parties fostered the influx of attendees likely to bolster their own standing. For the SRs, this meant encouraging soldiers, who were primarily peasants, to attend. “There were over 150,000 soldiers in Petrograd”, Trotsky wrote. “There were at least four times as many working men and women of all categories. Nevertheless, for every two worker-delegates in the Soviet, there were five soldiers.”
The SR and Menshevik leaders welcomed any number of individuals by private invitation, further diluting the Soviet’s working-class character. This meant that in the first half of 1917, the Petrograd Soviet was prone to take more conservative positions on the questions of the day. Refusing to countenance rebellion in the army, it encouraged soldiers to stay at their posts. Refusing to take power into its own hands, it campaigned for loyalty to the provisional government, which had been set up by the capitalists.
Yet as the revolution progressed and the moderate, conciliating political forces disgraced themselves, mass consciousness shifted. As well, the leaders of various political parties were drawing more radical conclusions, and the parties were diverging into two camps, with the Bolsheviks leading the insurrectionary side. In July 1917, there was a unity congress of the Bolshevik Party, now with 240,000 members, and several other groups. Chief among them was the Mezhraiontsy, whose 4,000 members included Leon Trotsky, David Riazanov, Anatoly Lunacharsky and other leaders of the revolution.
As a result of all these shifts, by the beginning of November, the Bolsheviks had perhaps 90 percent of the delegates in the Petrograd Soviet, up to 60 percent in the Moscow Soviet and most of the delegates in another 80 local soviets in industrial cities.
Interestingly, the influence of the Petrograd Soviet was primarily political rather than practical: its resolutions were enacted by local soviets and other committees. “The sole practical measure carried through by the Petrograd Soviet in the matter of food supply was the limitation of the consumer to a strict ration”, Trotsky wrote. The local district soviets executed decisions most directly.
They were responsible for dealing with housing, helping workers with clerical and legal issues, caring for orphans and supporting returned prisoners of war. They developed programs for adult education, for theatre shows and publishing newspapers. Specialisation was uncommon. Once the most pressing elements of a task were resolved, another area of work would immediately materialise.
This was not an example of socialists in these councils greedily accumulating more and more control for themselves: quite the opposite. The Bolsheviks in particular resisted the trend to subsume responsibilities under the district soviets, working to leave as much work as possible in the hands of the pre-existing municipal apparatus to relieve the overworked soviet delegates of those responsibilities. They preferred an oversight role. Typically, it was sabotage by public servants of a particular department that compelled the district soviets to absorb its responsibilities.
With very few resources available from a war-drained and poor population, amid counter-revolutionary violence and international isolation, the soviets managed striking feats. Consider housing. The revolutionary society drastically reduced the number of overcrowded apartments, shifting residents into the requisitioned rooms and homes of the upper classes.
They also understood that the question of the home was not just overcrowding, but the burden of housework placed on women. Collective childcare sites, laundries and kitchens were all built. Moving the bulk of this infrastructure out of each apartment opened precious space. “No less important than the separation of Church and State”, declared Alexandra Kollontai, a prominent Bolshevik leader, is the “separation of kitchen from marriage”. They worked hard to shift the burden away from individual women to the community. “In Petrograd during 1919-20, almost 90 percent of the entire population was fed communally”, she wrote.
Ultimately, in October, the soviets assumed all political power, dissolving the capitalists’ provisional government. This created the first workers’ state in history and paved a path for socialists today to follow. Russia proved that we cannot rely on the institutions of capitalism, like parliament, to achieve socialism. Instead, workers must create their own democratic councils to build the sort of liberated society we deserve.
