Ni parlamento ni sindicatos: ¡Los Consejos obreros!

by Denis Authier (Editor)

Text: French

353 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1976

Reviews

[Juan López · Rating 5 out of 5]

Librazo.

[Human · Rating 4 out of 5]

The strength of Dauve's conception of the workers' movement is also its greatest weakness. While Dauve avoids the economic determinism of Theorie Communiste (amongst others) and their use of real and formal subsumption as historical periods, his methodology of the organizational history of the many parties and sects that arose from 1848 up until 1923, while an invaluable resource on its own, intentionally avoids connecting the activity of the working class to their relation to capital accumulation and assumes the working class to be a vague, invariant, pure negativity. The working class is largely absent from Dauve's work, as Dauve's approach precludes any means to a determinate concrete engagement with workers. Dauve has no means of accounting for why it is workers act or fail to act in a given situation. Dauve's post-Bordigist rejection of the privileging of form by the councilists allows him to avoid fetishizing the party, councils, syndicates, etc., and ostensibly picking a side in the German revolution and producing a sectarian defense of this or that faction or party; however, his focus on organizational history leads to the implicit conclusion that organizational form is itself the problem. This book, while a great resource, should be read alongside concrete examinations of class composition and working-class social reproduction as a means to connecting the state of workers to organizational forms and weighing their possibilities and limitations.

[Nathan Fisher · Rating 2 out of 5]

Thankful for the translations. Dauve is truly a world-class idiot, however.