Council Communism and Organic Centralism

Misunderstandings and Futures

The two strains of leftcommunism, Bordiga fans and Pannekoek followers, have had a subtle war for over a century. In recent times that war has played out through the International Communist Tendency’s critique of Autonomist Marxism. And even so, whether that critique is exactly an attack on council communism or an attack on incoherent anarchist addled postmodern Marxism is also a reasonable question. But regardless of whether the ICP’s critiques of autonomism are actually attacks on council communism, the way they approach the tactics of the potere operaio group shows the distance between renegade practitioners of council praxis in the field and interpretations of council communist theory that imply all followers of Pannekoek or Mattick should just roll over and join one of the parties that hold on to the Bordiga or post-Bordigist tradition.

Bordiga’s concept of organic centralism is applicable outside of organizations explicitly and nominally named as “communist party”. Marx’s writing isn’t to be taken literally and frankly neither is that of Bordiga. The material concept of organic centralism contains the idea that a collective organization should manifest both communist principles and widely held worker interests and sentiments. This is obviously a goal which shares Mattick’s critiques of social democracy. The statist calcification of Lenin’s communist party and the bureaucracy idealization of democratic centralism is under critique by both Mattick and Bordiga. Gilles Dauve also argued that the council communist KAPD embodied organic centralism. But whether an organization is actually literally organic centralist or whether organic centralism is a horizon of party and general communist organization remains to be seen. Certainly the ICP leftcommunist party thinks it can only be practiced through communism exams given to all members. This is an overly literal interpretation very possibly.

Regardless of how metaphorically or literally a given perspective chooses to interpret the communist method of organic centralism, it is important that it exists as a counter point to Leninist democratism. As Bordiga explains in his Report On Fascism, fascists use the populism of democracy and democratic processes to justify their incoherence and empowering of militaristic professionals. Organic centralism is a more ambitious goal than to just replicate the populism of liberal capitalists that produce desires and factions in their voting block via commercials and advertising and manufacturing of consent and then grant those superficial political desires. We need a counter to the opportunist and revisionist mixture of liberal capitalism with the party ethic by Lenin via his mistaken theory of democratic centralism. Instead of applying organic centralism retroactively to German organizations, we should use it as a way of imagining better communist organizations which do not simply represent the proletarians but involve them and embody their interests.