London Reading Group for ‘The Workers’ Council: From The Commune to Autonomy’

We are organising a local London reading group for the Red May series: ‘The Worker’s Council from the Commune to Autonomy’.

Sessions are held monthly on a Sunday @ 6pm. Currently we are based at the MayDay Rooms. Each session will also be followed by a meal and social, for all who are interested in continuing the conversations we are having in a more informal setting. Details of our next session can be found further down this webpage.

We will post each sessions’ description and reading list in this main event, as well as in the descriptions of each week’s respective events. For the full syllabus, follow this link: https://buff.ly/3VdiKNn

Below you can find a description of the module series by Red May and Jasper Bernes:

The twentieth century can count only one truly new communist idea: the workers’ council, which emerged in Russia in 1905 as part of a revolutionary mass strike movement. But what is a workers’ council, or soviet, and how does it follow from the nineteenth-century theory of the commune? Is there an underlying concept of proletarian self-organization which both these theories of class struggle share? And what role do these theories leave for the party? What is the relationship between the workers’ council, which vanished from the world at the moment of its greatest extent, in the 1970s, and the turn, in struggle since then, to an autonomy without councils.

In tracing the story of the workers’ council from the Paris Commune to the present era, we will define, as a matter of preliminaries, the basic contours of revolution in our time. Not the council or the commune, perhaps, but what the council hoped to achieve. The focus here is as much on the practical history of the communist movement, as it is on the intellectual history of the movement of communists. Works by Rosa Luxemburg, Jan Appel, CLR James, Paul Mattick, will be read in the context of the Paris Commune, the German Revolution, the Spanish Civil War, May ’68, and the Carnation Revolution.

The series comprises eight month-long modules, with local, offline reading groups followed two weeks later by an online plenary session, hosted by Red May. Participants are encouraged to organize their own reading groups. The series is designed for people to participate at different levels, either offline or online or both

Our next meeting:

Summer Social and Next Steps Meeting – Saturday 17th June.

Join us for a BBQ social and to discuss where we take our reading group next. Full details can be found here!

Our Meetings So Far

Session #1: Self Organisation and the Commune – Sunday 23rd October 2022. Notes can be found here.

Session #2: The Mass Strike and the Soviet – Sunday 6th November. Notes can be found here.

Session #3: The Workers’ Council – Sunday December 13th 2022. Notes can be found here.

Session 4: The Biennio Rosso, the Spanish Civil War, and Antifascism – Sunday 8th January. Notes can be found here.

Session 5: Inquiry and Organisation – Sunday 19th February 2023. Notes can be found here.

Session 6: Council Communism and 68 – Sunday 2nd April 2023.

Session 7: Portugal and the End of the Council – Sunday 23rd April 2023. Notes can be found here.