Workers' council

The council communist Antonie Pannekoek describes shop-committees and sectional assemblies as the basis for workers' management of the industrial system.

This was most notable in the lands of the Russian Empire (including Congress Poland and Latvia) in 1905, with the workers' councils (soviets) acting as labor committees which coordinated strike activities throughout the cities due to repression of trade unions.

[9][10] At the First International, followers of Proudhon and the collectivists led by Mikhail Bakunin have endorsed the use of workers' councils both as a means for organising class struggle and for forming the structural basis of a future anarchist society.

[11] Writing for the French anarchist journal The New Times [fr], Russian theorist Peter Kropotkin has praised the workers of Russia for using this form of organisation during the Revolution of 1905.

"[16] The Central Workers Council of Greater Budapest occupied this role in the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, between late October and early January 1957, where it grew out of local factory committees.

[17] Rosa Luxemburg was a vocal proponent of radical socialist democracy, and advocated for the revolution to be led by workers' and soldiers' councils.

[19] Marxist revolutionary Vladimir Lenin proposed that the dictatorship of the proletariat should come in the form of a soviet republic with democratic centralism.

[24] At several times, both in late modern and in recent history, socialists and communists have organized workers' councils during periods of unrest.

The events of this period has been a significant influence on the development of Marxist and anarchist political theory and revolutionary praxis.

[32] Councils such as the Petrograd Soviet were formed by striking workers to coordinate the revolution, exercising political power in the absence of the Tsar's governance.

[33][41] During the May 1968 events in France, "[t]he largest general strike that ever stopped the economy of an advanced industrial country, and the first wildcat general strike in history",[42] the Situationists, against the unions and the French Communist Party that were starting to side with the de Gaulle government to contain the revolt, called for the formation of workers' councils (comités d'entreprise) to take control of the cities, expelling union leaders and left-wing bureaucrats, in order to keep the power in the hands of the workers with direct democracy.