The poetry of the future

A review of The Future of Revolution: Communist Prospects from the Paris Commune to the George Floyd Uprising by Jasper Bernes (Verso, 2025), £16.99

Jasper Bernes’ fascinating new book is a long history of the workers’ council— long because it includes the prehistory of the workers’ council in the 19th century and the afterlife of the council in the 21st century. Revolutions dress in the costume of the past to speak the poetry of the future, Karl Marx observed nearly 200 years ago.1 The communists of the 21st century use the ideas and forms current in Marx’s day—the uprising, the trade union, the political party, the strike, the revolution, socialism, anarchism, communism. Bernes argues that the workers’ councils, which were born out of the “fires of the mass strike” in Russia in 1905, are the only innovation, the only new aspect of communism, to emerge since the Paris Commune of 1871.2 There have, of course, been major innovations in Marxist theory since 1905, for example on the questions of imperialism, oppression, state capitalism and the revolutionary party. However, Bernes’ focus is on the mechanisms that arise spontaneously from workers’ struggles and create the basis for a communist society.

No one can write that poetry of the future, Bernes suggests, “It has to be done before it can be thought”. However, we can develop a sense of what must be done to lay the basis for a communist future by studying what Bernes calls “past revolutionary futures”.3 Bernes aims to explore the relevance of the writings of Marx, Rosa Luxemburg and CLR James, alongside less well-known theorists of workers’ councils, such as the German socialists Jan Appel and Paul Mattick, the Italian revolutionary Amadeo Bordiga and the French activist Gilles Dauvé. Bernes supplements his analysis of their writings and experiences with his own history of engagement with a theory of Communisation. Communisation emerged as a response to the failure of the great uprisings of 1968 to fulfil their revolutionary potential. The radical hopes of 1968 were replaced by a new period of economic stagnation and crisis. By the end of the 1970s, Bernes suggests, labour, “could no longer affirm itself as a pole opposite to capital, and therefore could no longer posit the emergence of a revolutionary council system from the mass strike”.4 However, Bernes remains optimistic about the long-term prospects for a communist revolution.

This optimism is in part derived from Bernes’ belief, which he shares with Luxemburg, that all the defeats of uprisings and revolutions in our history contribute to our understanding of how to win a communist revolution. Bernes writes that the communist tradition “might be thought of as a sequence of greater and lesser failures in which the contours of communist revolution become progressive sharper”.5 One of the most important events in this process of clarification was the Paris Commune of 1871. The conclusion Marx drew from the experience of the Commune was the necessity of workers destroying the armed power of the state and replacing the standing army with the armed people. This profound insight means that the Commune is an image of the future as much as a memory of the past.6 Marx argued that the Communards had discovered the “political form” under which to work out the economic emancipation of labour.7 The key features of this political form included the suppression of the standing army and the arming of the people, the supervision from below of elected bodies that were instantly recallable, the payment of an average workers’ wage for all officials, and the creation of an administration that was both a working-class body and a working body.

The extraordinarily predictive power of Marx’s analysis of these features of the Commune was confirmed in Russia in 1905 and in 1917-23, when workers’ councils reproduced similar forms of workers’ self-organisation. The difference between the councils and the Commune was that the councils were based on the workplace, the elected delegates were workers and could, therefore, become instrumental in creating a communist society by organising production for need.8 Workers established factory councils in order to take over the management of their workplaces when their bosses were kicked out or ran away. The workers’ councils organised across workplaces and beyond them, for example by organising soldiers and sailors. The workers’ councils developed the potential to replace the functions of the old state. For the Marxist theorist Karl Korsch, the “true secret” of the Commune and the later councils was their proletarian content—what they did rather than the form they adopted.9 However, Bernes argues, the form of the councils does matter because it flows from the need for working-class self-organisation, for the expropriation of the means of production and the collectivisation of production.

Leon Trotsky, who was centrally involved in the St Petersburg soviet of 1905, observed that the workers’ councils were born spontaneously of an objective need to fill the gaps created by the general strike. Any mass strike movement required workers to take up the social functions paralysed by the strike, and the workers’ councils that emerged were “workers’ government in embryo”.10 These councils were organisations of the proletariat, not merely within the proletariat.11 Trotsky acknowledged the revolutionary nature of the soviets, while establishing a natural leadership role for the revolutionary party within the councils.

Luxemburg also analysed the mass strike movement that swept across the Russian Empire in 1905. She characterised mass strikes as turbulent, chaotic processes of working-class creativity. It was only later, in November 1918, that she addressed the question of the council form in an essay, “What does the Spartacist League want?”. Luxemburg fused the councils’ capacity for supervision from below, which had been established by the Paris Commune, with the specifically workplace-based energies of the mass strike.12

The workers’ councils developed organically out of the need to coordinate the mass strike—they both enforced the strike and granted exceptions to ensure electricity and food reached those who needed it. The councils, which reemerged after the overthrow of the Tsar following the revolution of February 1917, were primarily political bodies. Factory committees developed alongside the councils to exert pressure over economic issues and trade unions, which had been heavily repressed under the Tsar, grew to represent workers’ interests. Lenin was in a minority within the Bolshevik party when he returned to Russia in April 1917 and raised the slogan, “All Power to The Soviets!”.13 The slogan was based on Lenin’s conception of the soviets as mechanisms enabling tens of thousands of workers to organise themselves and to be a potential instrument of the revolution. Once the mass strike develops into a revolution, once the armed power of the state is fractured through mutinies and desertions, and is then actively overthrown, the role of the council transforms from challenging the old regime to creating the new through a common plan.

In Russia in 1917 and in Germany in 1918, councils emerged from mass, anti-war strike movements.14 Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht joined with others to turn the revolutionary socialist and anti-war Sparticist grouping into a new German Communist Party (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands, KPD). Bernes’ gives a compelling account of the German Revolution, its courageous worker revolutionaries, its transformative potential, its delays, deliberations and the ultimate betrayal by many of the official leaders of the workers’ movement. Workers and soldiers’ councils erupted in Germany after the Kiel Mutiny of November 1918. The Executive Committee of the Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils was divided between moderate and more radical organisations, but there was never a majority in favour of workers’ power. This resulted in a “two-faced government”, with councils for the workers and the bourgeois state apparatus for the ruling classes and the army.15 The Committee did not give equal weight to both sources of power. In practice, it provided left cover to the leaders of the major reformist party, the Social Democratic Party (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, SPD), as it reestablished the authority and power of the state.

The first wave of the German Revolution culminated in January 1919, with perhaps the largest working-class action seen at that point in history. Some 200,000 workers, many armed with rifles and machine guns, swarmed central Berlin, surrounding the police station. They wanted only a signal from their leaders to launch their revolution. Yet, no signal came. The leaders deliberated, debated and discussed. The masses and the leadership, Bernes writes, lay as if under a spell, each waiting for the other. The workers went home demoralised. There was no guarantee that an uprising at this point would have succeeded. Certainly, Luxemburg feared it was premature. However, the newly launched KPD lacked the size or influence required to hold the revolt back until wider sections of workers across Germany were prepared to join it. What is certain is that the leaders of the SPD seized the moment to launch a violent counter-revolution: “Thus was the bourgeois Weimar Republic consecrated with the blood of the workers,” as Bernes writes.16

In Hamburg, Jan Appel, strike leader and chair of the Shop Stewards’ Movement, heard of the murders of Luxemburg and Liebknecht in the counterrevolution. He led a march of around 4,000 to the city’s barracks. The protesters disarmed the soldiers and distributed their weapons among the workers. The Berlin shop stewards and the communists were determined to maintain their contact with the mass of the working class. Appel and his comrades rejected working with parliamentary parties or trade unions, arguing that these old organisations of the working class had been rendered obsolete by the revolution and the establishment of workers’ councils. Based on these views, Appel would be part of a left split from the KPD, taking away many of its most important groups, including in cities such as Berlin. Appel later formed the German Communist Worker’s Party (Kommunistische Arbeiterpartei Deutschlands, KAPD). Many of its supporters were ultraleft revolutionaries impatient for a workers’ insurrection.

In 1920, a group of right-wing generals, who had helped the SPD repress the revolution the year before, attempted to launch a military coup in Berlin, in what became known as the Kapp Putsch, named after far-right MP Wolfgang Kapp. Other generals supported the coup or remained neutral. The SPD leaders fled the capital. The KPD had little capacity to intervene, especially in Berlin, where it had lost much of its membership a few months earlier. With its most capable leaders either absent from the capital or in prison, the KPD initially opposed a general strike against the coup, disastrously viewing the Putsch as a contest between two equally bad groups of counter-revolutionaries, although it would soon be forced to revise its position.

The working class, as Bernes explains, “was as opposed to the reconstitution of the army and empire as it was to anything and downed its tools without being told to do so”.17 The workers’ swift and powerful response was an “incredible example of proletarian self-organisation”—within a few days, nearly 100,000 workers had armed themselves, disarmed the far-right Freikorps military organisation and begun to elect delegates to workers’ councils.18 This resistance was concentrated in the industrialised area of the Ruhr, where workers took charge of their society and councils emerged. However, having beaten back the army, the workers thought their job was done, and they handed power back to political parties based on parliament. Neither the KPD nor the dissident left-communists, who would soon found the KAPD, were able to lead the movement towards a confrontation with the state.

A year later, a new flash point emerged in Eastern Germany. The March Action erupted when the government moved to disarm revolutionary workers in the Leuna works, a chemical factory employing some 25,000 workers. The communists called a general strike, which had only limited support among workers. By this point, the KPD had grown considerably, especially because the majority of the Independent SPD, itself a large split from the SPD, had voted to fuse with the communists. The KPD was emboldened by its growth, pushed to the left by an influx of raw recruits and encouraged by reckless advice from advisors sent by Moscow. The party decided to turn the struggle into a test of strength with the state by provoking an uprising. Groups of communists, from both the KPD and KAPD, including Jan Appel, joined in the burning of police stations and courthouses, robbing banks and distributing expropriated money to the workers. However, the call for insurrection was a serious misjudgement. The mass of workers were, at this point, in no mood to rise up; the action was isolated and collapsed following an offensive by the police and army. The KPD lost much of its newly gained support, while the KAPD would enter a decline from which it never recovered.

The potential for workers’ councils also emerged in Italy after a wave of factory occupations at the end of 1920. The example of the Russian Revolution meant that many Italian socialists looked to workers’ councils as the surest guarantee of a movement towards socialism. Many of the workplace-based factory councils were under the leadership of anarcho-syndicalist unions and tended to confine themselves to economic questions. The Italian factory councils were based on the idea that workers’ control of production would be sufficient to challenge ruling class power. They did not aspire to political as well as economic control. Antonio Gramsci supported the factory councils, which he saw as the basis for self-management in the factories of Turin. The revolutionary party, Gramsci argued, could not lead the working class to revolution alone but the factory councils could be the model of a proletarian state.19

Gramsci’s approach was contested by other members of the Italian Socialist Party, including those grouped around Amadeo Bordiga. Bordiga argued that the factory councils of October and December 1920 were premature. The working class as a whole would have to take power to avoid the occupations becoming isolated and smashed by the forces of the state.20 What the workers’ movement lacked, Bordiga argued, was an intransigent revolutionary party. Bordiga criticised the factory committees as too exclusively focused on economic issues, a critique which was influenced by the syndicalist nature of the Italian factory committees. Bordiga argued that only the revolutionary party could guarantee that workers’ councils follow a communist path. This, Bernes argues, is to propose a kind of supervision from above, when what councils need to function effectively is the mass participation of workers to supervise the councils from below.21

Trosky described how the St Petersburg soviet of 1905 ratified and consolidated pre-existing unanimity among the workers, a unanimity also identified in Paris in 1871 and Germany in 1919. Trotsky wrote that “[t]he methods of struggle did not have to be discussed; there was hardly time to formulate them”.22 There were huge political debates in the soviets, but the impetus of the revolutionary moment created a unity of purpose. The problem, Bernes suggests, is that unanimity is easier to maintain in a mass strike than it is when the councils become instruments of the insurrection or begin directing the communist reorganisation of production. Workers unite around a common goal of opposing a war or winning a mass strike movement but often divide on whether to challenge the state and to organise society in radically new ways. “What is needed,” Bernes argues, “is less a specific plan and more a plan for a plan, an orientation toward action in common that can turn the chaos of the insurrectionary moment into a self-reproducing communism”.23 It could be added that any plan to break the destructive power of the state will not be generated spontaneously by even the most powerful and united soviet. This is precisely why the role played by the revolutionary party is crucial in winning a majority within the soviets to the need to overthrow the state.

This concept of the revolutionary party is one Bernes rejects. He is more sympathetic to Appel’s conception of a party as “amplifier and catalyst”, which promotes struggles and aims to transform them into workers’ councils but does not provide political leadership.24

Appel represented an ultraleft current within the international socialist movement. This current varied from country to country, but some common themes were the need for revolutionaries to abandon working in trade unions and reject any engagement with parliamentary elections. Appel was given the brush off by Lenin when he managed to visit Moscow. Although friendly, Lenin avoided debates with Appel by reading a large extract from his Left-wing Communism and Infantile Disorder aloud to him. In Left-wing Communism, Lenin argued against Appel, the KAPD and others­—including Sylvia Pankhurst in Britain—who thought they could dismiss working in non-revolutionary trade unions and ignore parliamentary contests, both of which Lenin saw as crucial to gaining support for revolutionary ideas among workers.

Back in Germany, Appel, his comrade Paul Mattick and the Dutch revolutionary Anton Pannekoek advanced the idea that workers’ councils could only exercise power from below through collective accounting, which they called inventory. It implied laying the process of production out to be scrutinised and open to collective control. According to Bernes, this was one of the important discoveries the councils added to the experiences of 1871. He writes that
“[p]olitics from below cannot be merely about a raising of hands and a counting (or discounting) of people but must involve real control, materialised through an appropriation of the total wealth of society as a matter of both representation and practice, since the two are inextricably combined”.25

Bernes looks to the experience of the Spanish Revolution to shed further light on the debate between Appel’s ultraleftism and the majority of the international communist movement. When general Francisco Franco launched his military attack on Republican Spain in 1936, the Spanish poor responded just as they had in the Ruhr in 1920, but on an even larger scale, with mass militias and mass factory occupations. However, the workplace committees remained union committees, rather than instruments of revolution. The Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification (Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista, POUM) and the anarchist Friends of Durruti tried to address this weakness, but there was no “unitary architecture” to coordinate action across workplaces and regions.26 In Spain, Italy and Germany, a lack of vision and focus led to the demoralisation of the revolutionary forces and the revolutionary party.

Bernes devotes a section of the book to the relationship between Marx’s theory of value and a communist society. Although Marx did not develop a map of a potential communist future, Bernes explains that he constantly compared the capitalist present to such a future to illuminate his critique of capitalism.27 Marx’s theory of value and the hidden relationship of exploitation is central to this critique. Engaging with Marx’s theory, at quite a high level, is not an academic exercise, Bernes writes. Such a theoretical investigation reveals the reality behind the “magic and necromancy that surround the products of labour”.28 The concept of value “is nothing for communists if not a crosshair that flashes red when we need to smash something”.29 Bernes explores how communists have engaged with the question of value-form, the role of communism in abolishing the value-form and how categories of abstract and concrete labour would be transformed by communism.

The final section of the book looks at the trajectory of council communism after the “long 1968”.30 Bernes explores the different perspectives developed by Marxist thinkers, including Raya Dunayevskaya, Amadeo Bordiga and CLR James. James argued that revolutionary organisation had been rendered obsolete by the organisation of the working class. It just needed to become aware of its power. These ideas influenced ultraleft groups in Italy and France in the aftermath of 1968. There were enormous theoretical confusions and organisational difficulties associated with revolutionary organisation at that time. Despite their diversity, these debates centred on the possibility of workers’ spontaneous struggles and the need for some kind of revolutionary leadership. Bernes argues, many socialists saw in France and later in Portugal, Chile, Poland and Iran, “not the death rites of the council form, but its renaissance”.31 However, the conclusion Bernes draws from the experiences of 1968 is that “Communist revolution” would be a “process of fusion—one-sided communist measures that break apart the enterprises and structures of everyday life…until a critical mass has been achieved”.32 Revolutions do involve such fusions, but they also depend on moments of insurrection against the state, moments which in turn depend on organised, established revolutionary leadership.

Bernes concludes with a discussion of the Arab Spring and the George Floyd Uprising, both of which, he argues, provide examples of the enduring possibility of communist revolution. The Arab Spring confirmed one of the key lessons of the Portuguese Revolution of 1974: the state might look defeated, but it is only in abeyance, and it remains capable of reasserting its power through force. The great accomplishment of the George Floyd Uprising was to focus anger on the police and the criminal justice system. Bernes speculates on what might have developed if vast abolition assemblies had emerged out of the uprising. What if these committees spread to other cities, and began to amplify the struggle, to distribute viable forms of struggle across the cities of the United States? Abolishing the police, Bernes suggests, could lead to discussions about the abolition of class society itself.

There is much to learn and much to engage with in Bernes’s study of the history and the future of workers’ councils. My most important criticism of this book is that Bernes’ focuses on the German Revolution of 1918-23 but says little about the revolution in Russia in 1917-8, which did actually succeed in establishing a new state based on workers’ councils. This is not just an omission—it reveals the weakness of Bernes’ political approach. He dismisses the workers’ councils of the Russian Revolution as purely political, while the factory committees organised workers at the point of production. This is to massively underplay the rich history of the Russian soviets.

Trotsky described how the soviet structure arose from the general strike of 1905, how it was authoritative even though it lacked traditions, how it could involve hundreds of thousands even though it had no machinery, how it showed both initiative and self-control.33 The soviet took up political questions, most importantly the need to arm the workers and organise them into a revolutionary army. Although Lenin was a party man, he also appreciated the “tremendous reservoir of energy, enthusiasm and creativity that the soviets contained”.34 Lenin argued against the counterposition of the soviets and the party, calling for a fight for both.35 In 1917, the soviets were transformed from “organs of the strike struggle” to “organs of an uprising”. Lenin conceived of the soviet as an embryo of a workers’ government, and an independent forum in which the Bolsheviks could win workers to their revolutionary perspective. The workers’ councils were the form through which workers’ power could be exercised. The revolutionary party enabled their potential power to be realised through a revolution which smashed the old state machinery.

Bernes’ achievement is twofold. Firstly, he has written a book that acknowledges the deep problems councils faced in winning state power, and how they presented revolutionaries with challenges as well as enormous opportunities for collective resistance. Secondly, he remains optimistic about the possibility of workers’ councils reemerging from the uprisings and insurgencies of today. Workers’ councils come from the experience of the past, but they are also of now, and of the future. However, the future of the workers’ councils is intrinsically linked to the future of the revolutionary party.

Judy Cox is a journalist on Socialist Worker and is on the editorial board of International Socialism. She researches and publishes on women’s history.

Notes