Council communism emerged in the years after 1918, as some communists in Germany and the Netherlands concluded that the Russian Revolution had led to power being concentrated in the hands of a new political elite.
In October 1919, Paul Levi, the head of the KPD leadership, pushed through a new party line that followed the Comintern's policies.
The move was partly motivated by the fact that the left perceived the KPD's reaction to the Kapp Putsch as weak.
[5][6][7][8][9] In 1918, Gorter wrote the pamphlet The World Revolution pointing to differences between the situations in Russia and Western Europe.
He argued that in Western Europe the bourgeoisie was more established and experienced and that as a result class struggle must oppose bourgeois institutions such as parliaments and trade unions.
He emphasized the importance of class consciousness among the masses and deemed the avant-garde party model advocated by the Bolsheviks a potential obstacle to revolution.
[12] Lenin criticized the KAPD, Pannekoek, and other left groups in the 1920 pamphlet "Left-Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder, accusing them of spreading confusion.
He claimed that a refusal to work in parliaments and labor unions would leave workers under the influence of reactionary leaders.
[17][18] By 1921, council communism had broken with the official communist movement and formed a distinct current, according to the historian Marcel van der Linden.
In Italy, Amadeo Bordiga was opposed to electoral politics, but had little regard for councils as the basis for a reorganization of society and advocated vanguard parties as Lenin did.
Gorter was supportive of this decision and became its chief spokesman, but Pannekoek was skeptical because he felt conditions for a new organization were not ripe in the Netherlands.
Led by Ivan Ganchev and influenced by the KAPD, the left formed the Bulgarian Communist Workers' Party (BRKP) in January 1922.
[31] In the United Kingdom, the former suffragist Sylvia Pankhurst, also opposed to parliamentary politics, was excluded from the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) in September 1921.
The party was composed of a wide variety of political tendencies and it did not create stable organizations, as its proponents feared they could become bureaucratic and hold back the working class's revolutionary dynamic.
As Weimar Germany stabilized in the early 1920s and the council movement of the German Revolution ebbed, the disputes became more pronounced.
Accordingly, Rühle and his supporters left the KAPD in November 1920 and, when it became clear that the pro-KAPD faction was in control of the AAUD in June 1921, they set up the AAUD–Unitary Organization (AAUD–E).
They supported a strong German nation that, after a successful proletarian revolution, would ally itself with the Soviet Union in a struggle against Western capital and militarism.
[37][38] The next major dispute in the KAPD concerned the formation of a new International opposed to the Comintern, the participation of the AAUD in wage struggles, and the role of the party's leadership around Karl Schröder.
In 1925, the Essen KAPD's main leaders including Schröder left to rejoin the SPD as they thought the revival of the council movement of the revolutionary period unlikely.
[52] After the Nazis took power in Germany in 1933, organized council communism disappeared, although a few groups continued in the resistance to the regime.
The German emigrant Paul Mattick brought it to the United States where he published the International Council Correspondence.
[55] In contrast to reformist social democracy and to Leninism, the central argument of council communism is that democratic workers councils arising in factories and municipalities are the natural form of working class organisation and governmental power,[56] maintaining that the working class should not rely on Leninist vanguard parties[57] or reforms of the capitalist system to bring socialism.
[60][61] Where the network of worker councils would be the main vehicle for revolution, acting as the apparatus by which the dictatorship of the proletariat forms and operates.
[62] The government and the economy should be managed by workers' councils[63] composed of delegates elected at workplaces and recallable at any moment.