Talk:Workers' council

Untitled

Venezuela and Argentina don't have workers' councils, they have comanaged factories (in the first case) and cooperatives (in the second case.

Actually, Venezuela has true workers' councils, even though Chávez is holding them back. A workers' council does not have to actually be in control of their workplace to be considered a workers' council. I'll find and post references. Ahuitzotl (talk) 23:43, 5 January 2008 (UTC)

One-sided

I slapped the {{totally disputed}} label on this articles, because it presents the Soviet POV as if it were historic fact.

Many Western analysts deny the contention that these councils or soviets had any autonomy. Rather, they were completely controlled from above. I could use some help documenting this. --Uncle Ed 20:36, 5 May 2006 (UTC)

I removed the tag. Unless you have a cite for this, and one better than "Many Western analysts..." there's no need for the tag. •Jim62sch• 23:39, 5 May 2006 (UTC)

Well, isnt the kronstadt rebellion evidence in itself? It was demanding the return of the autonomy to their soviet, so one could logically conclude that they did loose their autonomy. I dont understand how this even needs some special documentation, seems to me to be common knowledge, but I can mention one book Ive read about it, i should check the title, i think simply, 'radnicki savjeti', that is "workers councils", published in belgrade just as yugoslavia was beggining to disintegrate in 1989 so there was some exploration of this newly found freedom, about the history of workers councils. Part of it studies the russian revolution in an allmost day-by-day fashion, and it does conclude that though when the first 1917 revolution started they were largely autonomous, as lenin rose to power he wery swiftly took their autonomy away. In yugoslavia, I spoke to many people about them, and most agree that they were only a thin overlay to a largly stalinistic system, but they did give some significant liberties to people in their daily working lives, so they did have some, and not insignificant, but only 'low level' autonomy. Higher up, the party rules absolutely. I know this anecdotal evidence doesnt mean a thing, but again, Im first puzzled that this is unknown, and second not really sure what this question of authonomy has to do with this article anyways.

Where does this article speak about the reality of the autonomy of soviets in russia? It seems to speak of workers councils in general, as it should. The word soviet, is simply 'council' (or 'advice') i never undestood why people who dont speak slavic languages spoke of the soviet union... Its a general idea and has little to do with russia and their revolution, exept that maybe for the first year or so of the revolution they existed there, among many other places..Hell, even the Works councils in current germany and their companies, and in the european regulation of corporate statutes, seem pretty much an incarnation of this idea, so it really has nothing especially to do with post-revolutionary russia...

--83.131.141.59 17:30, 2 October 2006 (UTC)

The mutinous sailors definitely listed "Soviets without Bolsheviks" as one of their demands, but this has to be taken in the context that the Bolsheviks still enjoyed popular support in most Soviets. The sailors' resolutions, supposedly on behalf of the Kronstadt Soviet, were actually forced upon the townspeople. Once the sailors marched off to fight the Red Army, before they had even been defeated, the local council reconvened and voted to rejoin the RSFSR. The British had forcibly put Mensheviks in power in a lot of southern Soviets, and followed that up with campaigns of terror and executions of Bolshevik leaders and supporters, and the Kronstadt mutineers were communicating with the same Mensheviks and Whites who had championed such undemocratic British adventures, so the Red Army was--far from quashing a democratic uprising--merely preventing the interventionists from opening up another coastal bridgehead against the Soviet republic. If, during the US Civil War, a naval base in Maine had voted to join the Confederacy and welcomed the Franco-British fleet into port, the Union army would have stomped that uprising and no one would be crying about it today.

Lenin's government did deny Menshevik-run Soviets the right to secede and join the Whites, but it was Stalin and his clique who rewrote the Soviet constitution and butchered the opposition, because they were clamoring for more autonomy in the councils, and fiscal accountability on behalf of the rich bureaucrats who supported Stalin. Revolutionary figures like Trotsky, Tukhachevsky, Bela Kun, and Lenin's entire politburo, had to be executed because their democratic leanings did not mesh with Stalin's mafia-style relegation of the Soviets to the position of rubber-stamp parliament. Therefore, Lenin can't be called a dictator any more than Lincoln can.

Workers' councils are not a purely Russian phenomenon, and that is why this article is called "Workers' council" and not "Soviet." As much as you may dislike the fact that "Soviet" is a common synonym for "workers' council" in many languages, that is an indisputable fact which is unlikely to change any time soon, and can not be ignored by Wikipedia. It's common to refer to the Russian parliament as the "Duma" and the German parliament as "Reichstag" even though parliamentary democracy is not exclusive to either of these countries. Ahuitzotl (talk) 23:34, 5 January 2008 (UTC)

I'm gonna set about redoing the 'historical examples' Lenin bashing section into something what the happened in the totalitarian state, but also that there is more to the history of workers councils than 'Leninism' as represented. The soviet history post revolution isn't pretty and I'll use the preceding discussion to guide it. Menswear (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 17:15, 26 December 2009 (UTC).

All links under See Also should somehow be worked into the actual text of the article. Squideshi 17:53, 30 April 2007 (UTC)

Sections

This article has no sections. The history of workers' councils and how they function is blended together. While this doesn't make the article that difficult to read or understand, it is detrimental to it's quality. I'll probably organize it soon, unless someone else does so before me, which seems unlikely. Furtheremore it seems unlikely that I'll organize it...(Demigod Ron 03:24, 22 May 2007 (UTC))

Now that the article has sections, what could be done to improve it? The 'Organization Details' section seems tied up with history and specific communist theories. Some of the content could probably be moved to the intro of the article while much of the section could be merged into the 'Council Communism' section, my attempt to clean up the portion of the article devoted to theoretical socialism.

Flameoguy (talk) 16:26, 9 June 2022 (UTC)

Merger Proposal

We should merge Soviet (council) into Workers' council. The article on Soviets is generally geared towards explaining the history workers' councils in the context of the Russian Revolution and the Soviet Union. The councils described in that article are also referenced in this article, such as the aforementioned Russian Soviets as well as the Irish, Polish, and German Soviets. There is historical precedent for equating 'soviets' and 'councils', as the word Soviet was used to describe various council communist governments such as the Hungarian Soviet Republic.

This article currently lacks much of the historical context that surrounds workers' councils. Such a merger could improve this article by expanding on the history of how workers' councils developed and evolved both as an idea and a political system. The sections on etymology and the history of soviets outside Russia would also be very useful as many of the listed examples on Workers' Council don't have any substantive description.

Flameoguy (talk) 00:08, 9 June 2022 (UTC)

• Support  These two articles are about is a single subject, and a combined article could be subdivided in summary style if and when it grows too large. Workers’ councils in the Soviet context were important, but integral to the subject, and there is no reason to separate them out. —Michael Z. 16:58, 9 June 2022 (UTC)
• Eh, but there's enough content on the implementation of workers' councils in the Soviet Union to warrant its own article, regardless of what is merged into this one from the current soviet (council) article. czar 07:23, 16 June 2022 (UTC)

  You should feel free to merge as much relevant content here as you'd like, but it does appear clear that merging the entire history here would overpower this small article. So merge away, but the distinct history of Soviets in the Soviet Union does have enough coverage to warrant a summary style split any way you'd slice it. czar 18:52, 19 August 2022 (UTC)

Verify list of examples

The list of examples has grown over the years that this article was written to the point that it's quite unwieldy and there are many obscure and unsourced examples of workers's councils. It's necessary to individually verify and cite each example and remove it if necessary. If anyone has trouble sourcing a particular example please bring it up here and we can work to either verify it or remove it from the page.

Flameoguy (talk) 16:22, 9 June 2022 (UTC)

I'd suggest moving the unsourced list here for discussion and only leaving the sourced/verified items in the article. czar 18:53, 19 August 2022 (UTC)

Full citations

@Asterix12: can you confirm what articles you copied you most recent additions from, as we need to grab the full citations from those articles. Cdjp1 (talk) 16:06, 20 February 2023 (UTC)

OK, so the first four citations were from books relating to workers' councils,. The first one is "Workers' Councils and the Economics of Self-Managed Society" by Cornelius Castoriadis. Two were from The Conquest of Bread and "The Great French Revolution" by Peter Kropotkin. The other citations I got from the article on free soviets, it was the book "Nestor Makhno and Rural Anarchism in Ukraine" by Colin Darch. I got three citations from the article on the Spanish Revolution of 1936 which were studies on how the Spanish communes worked and how effective they were. For the last citation, I used Lenin's The State and Revolution (not the article itself, but from reading a bit of the book). Do you want a list, or is this fine? Asterix12 (talk) 21:07, 20 February 2023 (UTC)

Oh yeah, I forgot. Sorry. In the "Anarchism" title, The first book I cited was "The Principle of Federation" by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. I cited a PDF from The Anarchist Library. Asterix12 (talk) 21:38, 20 February 2023 (UTC)

Give more details on historical examples

I think it's best that we give short explanations for each historical example as opposed to leaving them as bullet points. I've started on a few of them already, but I look to expand on them. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Asterix12 (talk • contribs) 00:26, 1 September 2023 (UTC)