Workers' council

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A workers' council is a council, or deliberative body, composed of working class or proletarian members. The concept is applied to a body of elected laborers in a workplace that deliberate with the employers on behalf of the workers. Another common use of the term is to describe self-governing workers without bosses.

Workers' councils have arisen repeatedly through modern history with a variety of names. Notable instances include Russia during 1917, where the councils were called "soviets", Germany during 1918, Turin, Italy during 1919-1920, Spain during 1936, Hungary during 1956, France during 1968, Chile in 1973 (cordones), and Iran during 1978-1979 (shoras).

The key features of a workers' council include the phenomenon that a single place of work, such as a factory, school, or farm, is controlled collectively by the workers of that workplace. Basically a group of workers from that workplace acts as the manager. Therefore there is no real "manager," as the council itself controls the workplace.

Workers' councils also combine to elect higher bodies for coordinating between one another. Meaning that local councils elect the members of regional councils, and regional councils elect the members of the national council. Councils operate on the principle of recallable delegates. This means that elected delegates may be recalled at any time through a vote in a form of impeachment.

During the Russian Revolution of 1917 and German Revolution in 1918, the workers' councils replaced the old political institutions and bureaucracy which excluded people with a right-wing political alignment.

Nearly all Marxists believe that workers' councils embody the fundamental principles of socialism, such as workers' control over production and distribution as well as workers' control of the state. Indeed, some have described this as "socialism from below", which they counterpose against what they see as "socialism from above" endorsed by social democratic ideology and Stalinism. According to this view, socialism from above is carried out by a centralized state run by a bureaucratic apparatus in the interests of this apparatus, while socialism from below represents the self-administration and self-rule of the working class.

Because of this most Marxists advocate a council-based soviet democracy over a traditional representative democracy. A soviet democracy would grant the workers complete control of their society, while a representative democracy would rest political power in the hands of politicians.

Some notable advocates of a society based on workers' councils are the council communist movement, various anarcho-syndicalist and anarcho-communist groups, most democratic socialist especially revolutionary democratic socialists, such as the Debs Tendency of the Socialist Party USA, and some Trotskyist groups, such as the International Socialist Organization, as well as the Lanka Sama Samaja Party.