Councils and Revolution: Participatory Democracy in Anarchist Thought and the New Social Movements

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Science & Society, Vol. 79, No. 2, April 2015, 243–263

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Councils and Revolution: Participatory Democracy in Anarchist thought and

the New social Movements

sHMUEL LEDERMAN

ABSTRACT: Anarchism is often considered to have inspired the New Social Movements emerging in the last few decades. The 2011 mass demonstrations in Spain, Israel, the United States, and other places seem to confirm that what is often called “new” or post-anarchism indeed inspires the visions and practices that character-ize the new social movements — in particular, the call for, and the prefiguration of a more direct, participatory democracy. However, this inspiration is also characterized by an important loss: the lack of a systematic attempt to envision what participatory democracy would actually look like and how it would function. Such attempts were an important legacy of the “old” anarchist tradition, in the form of workers’ councils. The political philosopher Hannah Arendt gave them an important and largely neglected political meaning. This legacy should be reconsidered and reinvigorated by schol-ars and activists who are interested in anarchism and/or the new social movements.

STUDENTS OF ANARCHISM and anarchist activists today often argue that anarchism has inspired the New Social Movements (NSMs) emerging in the last decades. Uri Gordon writes: “The

past ten years have seen a full-blown revival of a global anarchist movement, possessing a coherent core political practice, on a scale and scope of activity unseen since the 1930s” (Gordon, 2010, 414; see also Gordon, 2007; Dixon, 2012). Giorel Guran agrees that “post-ideological anarchism informs the impulse, culture and organization of oppositional politics today” (2006, 2). David Graeber is even more emphatic:

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244 SCIENCE & SOCIETY

As a political philosophy, anarchism is veritably exploding right now. Anar-chist or anarchist-inspired movements are growing everywhere; traditional anarchist principles — autonomy, voluntary association, self-organization, mutual aid, direct democracy — have gone from the basis for organizing within the globalization movement, to playing the same role in radical move-ments of all kinds everywhere. (Quoted in Pallister-Wilkins, 2009, 394.)

Some examples which provide clear signs of revival and innovation in anarchist activities, resistance and influence, include: infoshops (Goyens, 2009) protestivals (St. John, 2008), anarchoindigenism (Lag-alisse, 2011), the Zapatistas (Couch, 2001), and “Anarchists against the Fence” in Israel/Palestine (Pallister-Wilkins, 2009). The 2011 outbursts of mass demonstrations in Spain, Israel, the United States, and other places seem to confirm this tendency, which continues in many forms.

However, this anarchism is of a different kind than the “old” anarchism. It is less theoretical and more experimental, more multi-faceted and less clear about possible forms of decentralized society, more prefigurative and less utopian. As Gordon notes: “contemporary anarchism is ‘new’ in that it is only in small part a direct continuation of the nineteenth and early twentieth-century anarchist movements, which had been for the most part physically wiped out by the end of the Second World War” (Gordon, 2010, 414).

Questions of continuity and break in political traditions are a com-plicated matter, brought most to the fore recently in contemporary debates about the republican tradition (see, for example, Hankins, 2000), but it is one I will not pursue here. I will, however, point to something important that was lost in this break of the “new” anarchism from the “old” one. The “new” anarchists’ inclination to be “suspi-cious of theory and rejecting theoretical closure,” as Chamsy Ojeili puts it (2001, 402), is probably largely justified. However, Deleuze and Guattari’s statement that “it is with utopia that philosophy becomes political and takes the criticism of its own time to its highest point” (quoted in Vincent, 1997, 241) should be taken into consideration; or as Herbert Read put it a long time ago: “This Utopian tradition, as we may call it, has been the inspiration of political philosophy, providing poetic undercurrent which has kept that science intellectually vital” (Read, 1954, 21). It is the loss of one utopia, prominent in the “old”

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COUNCILS AND REVOLUTION 245

anarchist thought, that I would like to address here: the workers’/citizens’ councils.1

My argument proceeds as follows. First, I argue that while many of the NSMs call for and try to prefigure a more direct and participatory democracy, they usually provide no systematic elaboration of what such a participatory form of government would look like and how it would function. Second, I show that such attempts at envisioning in more detail what participatory democracy would look like was an important part of “old” anarchist thought. Third, I discuss the largely neglected contribution of the political philosopher Hannah Arendt to this legacy. I conclude with a brief discussion of the meaning of the participatory budgeting experiment in Porto Alegre, in light of this legacy of the utopia of the council system.

Utopia and the New Social Movements

Let me start with a brief overview of the main characteristics of the New Social Movements — particularly those known to have been influenced by anarchist tactics and practices — in order to demon-strate what I mean by saying that the utopia referred to here was lost to them. While the term New Social Movements is often used to refer to the networks of activists emerging already in the 1970s, I would like to focus here on the more contemporary movements, emerging mainly in the Global South, but also in the North, during the 1990s. They became prominent in the “battle of Seattle,” organizing them-selves as a global “network of networks,” in particular in the World Social Forum and the Global Justice Movement. And they practically exploded with the 2011 protests around the world (see Moghadam, 2009; Drache, 2008; Reitan, 2007; Castells, 2012).

The “new” characteristics usually attributed to these movements, in comparison to the “old” ones, are well known. Here is, at some length, a typical elaboration of them:

There is a tendency for the social base of new social movements to transcend class structure. The background of participants find their most frequent structural roots in rather different social statuses such as youth, gender,

1 On the forms of “utopianism” that are prominent in contemporary anarchist thought, see Honeywell, 2007.

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sexual orientation, or professions that do not correspond with structural explanations . . .

They exhibit a pluralism of ideas and values, and tend to have pragmatic orientations and search for institutional reforms that enlarge the system of members’ participation in decision making . . .

NSMs often involve the emergence of new or formerly weak dimensions of identity. The grievances and mobilizing factors tend to focus on cultural and symbolic issues that are linked with issues of identity rather than on economic grievances that characterize the working-class movement. (Johnston, et al., 1994, 6–7.)

Mayo puts it in somewhat different terms, but the meaning is largely the same:

The old social movements were seen to privilege the transformatory role of the working class, with a particular emphasis upon industrial struggles. . . . In contrast, new social movements theorists have been more concerned with the transformatory potential of movements rooted in a wider range of social actors, focusing on “life world” issues that are not so easily accommodated within the existing social order. (Mayo, 2005, 73.)

One “new” characteristic of these movements, however, is often overlooked: the lack of any systematic attempt to elaborate how a participatory form of government, on a national scale, would actually look and function. This is especially striking when one considers how prominent is the call for a more participatory form of government in the same movements. Take, for example, the Zapatistas:

We want to find a politics which goes from below to above, one in which “governing obeying” is more than a slogan; one in which power is not the objective. . . . We criticize the parties’ distance from society, that their exis-tence and activities are regulated only by the election calendar. . . . Against the hollowness of electoral democracy, Zapatismo proposes a radical democracy. (Quoted in Gurran, 2006, 152.)

Or the World Social Forum (whose first meeting in 2001 was of course in Porto Alegre, where the most famous participatory budgeting exper-iment to date was held):

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The convergence of difference among the anti-corporate globalization move-ments lies less in a shared vision of an outcome than in a shared commitment to a process. Essentially, the convergence of differences is best reflected in the widely asserted commitment to the reinvention of democracy . . . [meaning] the reinvention of society such that the mode of economic production, the structures of political governance, the dissemination of scientific innovation, the organization of the media, social relations and the relationship between society and nature, are subjected to a radical, participatory and living democratic process. (Fisher and Ponniah, 2003, 13, italics in original.)

Or the Spanish 2011 protest movement: “the [Spanish] move-ment agreed to move to different models of participatory democ-racy. . . . The forms of deliberation and decision-making in the movement itself . . . aimed explicitly to prefigure what political democracy should be in society at large” (Castells, 2012, 124–125). Or Occupy Wall Street: “While Occupy could not and would not agree on making detailed demands, it did agree . . . on ‘direct and transparent participatory democracy’ as its first principle” (Hayden, 2012, 22).

Participatory/radical democracy, then, is one of the battle cries of many of the NSMs, and many of them attempt to “prefigure” a more participatory democracy in their deliberation and decision-making process as well. However, note the last quote from Hayden: Indeed, it seems that other than articulating the aspiration for “direct and transparent participatory democracy,” neither Occupy Wall Street nor any of the other new social movements I mentioned, as far as I know, could and would “agree on making detailed demands” for advanc-ing in this direction. Part of the reason is surely the diversity of the movements and their deliberate self-distancing from any ideological dogma. But another important reason, I would argue, is the loss of an articulated and elaborated vision of how a real participatory democ-racy actually would work, or in other words, the loss of the utopia of participatory democracy.

Let me illustrate this point from my own experience in the 2011 Israeli protest. There was an abundance of calls for the transforma-tion of the economic policy of the Israeli government, and fairly elaborated schemes for how exactly to do that. There were also numerous discussions — many of which I participated in — of the alienation from, and lack of influence of “ordinary” citizens on,

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public policy. The discussions themselves, I should add, were con-ducted in an impressive participatory way, consciously prefiguring (though not using this word) how true democratic public discus-sion and decision-making on important public issues should look. Yet, when it reached the point where proposals were discussed as to how ordinary citizens can take part in public decision-making at the national level, or even the local one, virtually always the most far-reaching possibilities participants suggested were making our opinions known to the politicians through the internet; and making them more accountable through constant pressure from civil society. While definitely positive, this doesn’t strike one as a path toward a real participatory form of government.

I would argue that this has been largely the case for at least most of the NSMs, including those that are known to be influenced by (post-)- anarchism. This is importantly different from the fairly extensive dis-cussions in the “old” anarchist tradition of a full-blown participatory government in the form of a citizens’/workers’ participatory council system, to which I now turn.

The Councils in “Old” Anarchist Thought

The term councils (soviets), is to be found for the first time in the 1905 and 1917 revolutions in Russia. As Oskar Anweiler describes these political associations in his 1958 definitive work on the subject, they constitute representative bodies, usually emerging in revolutionary outbursts, that represent lower-class groups such as soldiers and work-ers (Anweiler, 1974, 3). As I proceed, I discuss the way the councils appeared in the revolutions, and how they became one of their central symbols and an important reference point to many of their leaders and proponents. However, it is worth noting that political institutions similar in their spirit to the councils can be found in earlier revolu-tions: the American town meetings, the “popular societies” of the French revolution, the “sections” of the Paris Commune — all were, as political philosopher Hannah Arendt described them, spontaneous associations of citizens who strived for a democratic political reform, through which they will be able to take part in determining the fate of their body politic and “govern themselves” (Arendt, 1958, 28). In this sense, behind the revolutionary councils in Russia stood a long,

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and in a way hidden tradition of this “lost treasure,” in Arendt’s words, of modern revolutions.

Initial theoretical expressions of the council idea can be iden-tified already in mid-19th century. Karl Marx famously referred to the 1871 Paris Commune as the future political form of com-munist society: “It was essentially a working-class government, the product of the struggle of the producing against the appropriating class, the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economical emancipation of Labor” (Marx, 1971, 75). It is worth noticing that for Marx the communes are a political institution, not merely an economic one, although for Marx their end is the economic liberation of the workforce. This is part of the tension that characterizes Marx’s thought, and in different ways also the tradition of thought of the councils: Are the councils an economic and social institution in essence, or rather a political institution — as far as the two can be separated? I will return to this tension later on. In any case, the quote above is pretty much all Marx has to say about this “political form, finally discovered.” As is well known, Marx deals very little with what the future com-munist society would look like, and we have no way of knowing how exactly he envisioned these communes. However, one could plausibly argue that Marx’s centralist inclinations, naturally most sharply recognized by the “old” anarchist tradition from Bakunin onward, prevented in principle allocating actual power to these de-centralized councils.2

A more powerful explication of the importance of decentralized associations in the spirit of the councils can be found, as is well known, in the anarchist tradition. In view of the common image of anarchism, it is perhaps still worth emphasizing that “what is ‘without ruler’ . . . is not necessarily ‘without order,’ the meaning often loosely ascribed to it” (Read, 1954, 35); and that “Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin, and their successors . . . understood that freedom . . . must be organized,

2 This is not true regarding some of Marx’s followers, or what is sometimes called “left com-munism” or more specifically “council communism.” As Noam Chomsky reminds us, at times council communists and anarcho-syndicalists were “almost indistinguishable” (interview with Robert F. Barsky in Pannekoek, 2003, x). Indeed, Pannekoek himself argues that “Marx’s conception of the dictatorship of the proletariat appears to be identical with the labor de-mocracy of the council organization” (2003, 48), but see McKay, 2012 for a different view of Marx with regard to the councils.

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must systematically permeate every cell of the social body” (Dolgoff, 1972, 7).

The form of political organization prominent in anarchist thought, starting from Proudhon, was a federal structure of associa-tions and communes. As James Joll writes: “Proudhon’s federalism had, by the 1860s, already become a doctrine shared by anarchists and many liberal republicans. The idea of a revolutionary commune as the basis for the new social organization was taken for granted by the anarchists and, whenever they had a chance, the formation of a revolutionary commune was the first step they took” (Joll, 1971, 238). Prominent among them was Bakunin. In “The Program of the International Brotherhood,” for example, he declares that

since the revolution must everywhere be achieved by the people, and since its supreme direction must always rest in the people, organized in free federa-tion of agricultural and industrial associations, the new revolutionary State, organized from the bottom up by revolutionary delegations embracing all the rebel countries in the name of the same principles . . . will have as its chief objective the administration of public services, not the governing of peoples. (Bakunin, 1972, 154.)

Following Proudhon and Bakunin, the idea of the decentralized associations as what might be called a new form of government, was handed down in the anarchist tradition. In its form as councils, it was preserved most prominently in the anarcho-syndicalist tradition (see Rocker, 1938). This later theoretical focus on the councils, however, was mainly an attempt to give a theoretical form to the actual coun-cils rising, as I noted before, during the revolutionary outbursts in Russia. Some more detailed historical reflection on the councils and their reception in the socialist and anarchist tradition, then, would be useful.

The Councils in Russia

The first workers’ council was established in January 1905 in St. Petersburg. According to Voline, who presents first-hand testimony on this first council, it did not belong to any party, but formed as a spontaneous initiative, from “below”: “Not one party, not one perma-nent organization, not one ‘leader’ gave birth to the idea of the first

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Soviet. The Soviet rose spontaneously, as the result of a collective agreement, in the context of a small, casual, and completely private gathering” (Voline, 1975, 90, italics in original.).3 From then on the council functioned as a permanent committee of workers. After a short while it was dis-persed by the Czarist government, but was re-established with the October 1905 revolutionary movement. Only then it became known more broadly among workers, and more councils were established following its example (ibid., 100). At the end of 1905 the councils, together with the whole revolutionary movement, were suppressed by the Czarist government, and they were re-established only in the February 1917 revolutionary outburst, this time showing up virtually everywhere (ibid., 101). Anweiler argues that although the Bolsheviks presented themselves later on as the initiators of the councils, in fact they grew with no relation to any party, and the Bolsheviks were actu-ally afraid of them from the beginning (Anweiler, 1974, 78). He points out that the significant growth of the councils took place in the 1917 revolution, when they showed up all over Russia. Anton Pannekoek summarized this eloquently: “In 1905 they were hardly noticed as a special phenomenon and they disappeared with the revolutionary activity itself. In 1917 they reappeared with greater power; now their importance was grasped by the workers of Western Europe, and they played a role here in the class struggles after the First World War” (Pannekoek, 2003, 76).

The phenomenon of the councils forced the Communist (RSDLP) Party leaders to respond. Virtually all of them praised the councils, but that praise was more a result of their awareness of the popular-ity of the councils and fear of the competition they presented to the revolutionary parties than of any real concern for their establishment and propagation. As Alexander Berkman writes:

The Bolshevik plan was to gain entire and exclusive control of the govern-ment for their party. It did not fit into their scheme to permit the people themselves to manage things, through their Soviet organizations. As long as the Soviets had the whole say the Bolsheviks could not achieve their purpose.

3 The way this council was established, as Voline describes it, is noteworthy: “One evening when there were several workers at my house. . . . We had the idea of forming a permanent workers’ organization: something like a committee, or a council, which would keep track of the sequences of events, would serve as a link among all the workers, would inform them about the situation and could, if necessary, be a rallying point for revolutionary workers” (Voline, 1975, 98).

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It was therefore necessary either to abolish the Soviets or to gain control of them. To abolish the Soviets was impossible. They represented the toiling masses. . . . There remained the only alternative of getting control of them. (Berkman, 2003, 122–123.)

The Bolsheviks’ hypocrisy with regard to the councils is perhaps most blatant in Lenin’s case. In April 1917, for example, in his article “The Tasks of the Proletarians in the Present Revolution,” he describes the emerging councils-republic as a higher type of democratic state and as recreating the type of state Marx talked about when he discussed the Paris Commune. But only three months later, in the article “On Slogans,” Lenin’s tone is quite different:

Too often has it happened when history has taken a sharp turn that even the most advanced of the parties have been unable for a fairly long time to adapt themselves to the new situation; they continued to repeat the slogans that were formerly true, but which had no meaning, having lost their meaning as “suddenly” as the turn in history was “sudden.”

Something of the sort may, apparently, repeat itself in connection with the slogan regarding the transfer of the entire power of the state to the Soviets. . . . That slogan has patently ceased to be true now . . .

The slogan, “All power must be transferred to the Soviets,” was a slogan for a peaceful development of the revolution, which was possible between March 12 and July 17, and which was, of course, most desirable, but which now is absolutely impossible. (Lenin, 1938, 92–93.)

Although Lenin claims it is just a phase in the revolution, after which power will be returned back to the councils, this moment, the end of “emergency,” never came. The revolutionary parties quickly took over the councils, and with the triumph of the Bolsheviks the councils were managed by them and lost even the appearance of independence. As Kropotkin later wrote: “We learn in Russia how communism can-not be introduced. . . . the idea of soviets, that is, of labor and peasants councils . . . the idea of such councils controlling the political and economic life of the country is a grand idea. . . . But so long as a coun-try is governed by the dictatorship of a party, the labor and peasants councils evidently lose all their significance” (Kropotkin, 1995, 251, italics in original). Indeed, the case of the Soviet Union exemplified

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Hannah Arendt’s statement, later on, that the revolutionaries were those who systematically eliminated the only institution that grew out of the revolution itself.4

Still, there were other, more sincere voices in Marxism with regard to the councils, first and foremost Rosa Luxemburg. But Luxemburg, like the other Marxist thinkers and revolutionaries mentioned here, did not offer a systematic formulation of a form of government based on the councils. Their treatment of the councils usually took place in the context of an ongoing revolution or of revolutionary outbursts. They mostly amounted to inevitable responses to an institution which became one of the founding features of the revolution, to everyone’s surprise, without real understanding of how the councils grew, why they created such enthusiasm among the masses, whose political instincts they expressed (or perhaps brought about). Ultimately, as Hannah Arendt wrote, this political form “contradicted all notions of a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ by means of a socialist or communist party whose monopoly of power and violence was modeled upon the highly centralized governments of nation-states” (Arendt, 1965, 261).

An important factor to be considered in the reception of the coun-cils in the socialist and anarchist traditions stems from the nature of the tradition of thought from which they came. The socialist and anar-chist thinkers and revolutionaries did not distinguish, as a principle, economy from politics, or more accurately, they saw politics as more or less a reflection of social–economic relations. This is the nature of the discussion of the councils also in the most prominent thinker alive who takes the councils as a viable alternative to the existing sys-tem: Noam Chomsky. Chomsky writes about the councils in several of his works. In Government in the Future, for example, he writes: “One might argue, or at least I would argue, that council communism . . . is the natural form of revolutionary socialism in an industrial society. It reflects the intuitive understanding that democracy is largely a sham when the industrial system is controlled by any form of autocratic elite” (2005, 27–28). For Chomsky, then, the councils are a social and economic self-management institution, and as such they prevent not only economic exploitation, but also the political dominance of capital. In other words, he relates to them first and foremost in terms

4 The same, incidentally, can be said about later experiments with the councils, especially in the only country where they were tried out on a large scale: Yugoslavia. See Markovic, 2011.

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of a substitution for the capitalist system, and his discussion remains, for better or worse, in those terms.

Hannah Arendt and the Councils

Outside the socialist and anarchist tradition, Hannah Arendt is exceptional as the only political thinker to offer a re-examination of the councils as an alternative to the party system. I present Arendt as “outside” of the anarchist tradition, because while many of Arendt’s commentators place her in the republican tradition (see for example Canovan, 1974, 15; Entreves, 1993, 2; Beiner, 2003, 166), and others in the existentialist tradition (Hinchman and Hinchman, 1984; 1994; Villa, 1996), none, as far as I know, considers her an anarchist or even as inspired by this tradition. However, here I will point to important convergence points between Arendt’s political thought and this tra-dition, especially with regard to her advocacy of a council system as an alternative to the centralized party system. It is not a coincidence, as I will show, that the council system remains largely a “blind spot” among Arendt’s commentators. Although some scholars recognize the importance of the council system in her thought (Nisbet, 1977; Kateb, 1984, 18; Canovan, 1992, 236; Bernstein, 1996, 118), only a few dedicate serious analysis to it. As one of them remarks: “One of the most puzzling aspects of the political thought of Hannah Arendt is her support for some kind of council democracy. It is one of the few topics in her work that is not taken seriously by critics” (Sitton, 1994, 307).

Arendt discusses the council system in several places in her writ-ings. It appears for the first time explicitly during the late 1940s, in her discussion about the possibility of establishing a federative structure of Jewish–Arab councils in Palestine. In Arendt’s opinion, this was the only chance to prevent war between Jews and Arabs; to establish a Jewish nation–state was, in her view, anachronistic and dan-gerous. A federative government of Jews and Arabs, in contrast, which renounces the principle of sovereignty upon which the nation–state is based, could have ensured the interests of both sides, ameliorated their fears, and enabled their cooperation, thereby preventing a seem-ingly unavoidable war. It was for her the only path to the political liberation of Palestine (Arendt, 2007, 400).

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The council system appears again in Arendt’s writings following the 1956 Hungarian revolution. In an article published about two years after the event (Arendt, 1958), Arendt describes enthusiastically the revolutionary councils that appeared spontaneously during the revolution, constituting law and order, freedom and political action. Here we find Arendt expressing again the importance of the councils. This was, for her, a re-discovery of a more than 100-year-old revolution-ary tradition, of citizens’ associations “from below,” starting with the 1848 national revolutions in Europe, through the 1871 Paris Com-mune, the 1905 Russian Revolution, and the revolutions of Russia, Germany and Austria after World War I. In Arendt’s analysis, these councils generated spontaneously out of the experience of revolution, emanating from the freedom and joint action that characterized it, and expressing the democratic aspirations of the citizens. However, just as in Hungary, the councils had always existed only for a short period, until they were defeated by the enemies of the revolution or by its leaders, which saw in them a dangerous source of competition.

However, Arendt not only describes in this article the experience of the revolutionary past, but also contrasts the councils with the party system, thereby drawing broad outlines for a form of government based on the councils. The councils grow from the bottom up, and express the political–democratic aspirations of ordinary citizens, in contradistinction to the ideological and particularistic nature of the parties. They allow broad political participation, while the parties create an elite rule and allow a real public sphere only to this elite. The council leaders are chosen by the people themselves and not by the party apparatus, and so can be estimated by their personality and their judgment, and not by semblance or ideology. Lastly, the parties eventually bring about the rule of bureaucracy, whereas the councils will subject the bureaucracy to the will of the citizens.

The most detailed description of the councils is to be found in the last chapter of Arendt’s On Revolution (1965). Arendt examines the French and American Revolutions, as well as the phenomenon of revolution in general, and comes to the conclusion that a revolution has one end: the foundation of freedom. In contrast to the French Revolution which eventually failed — especially in this sense of the foundation of freedom — the American Revolution succeeded in establishing a republican constitutional regime that protected the

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rights of its citizens, and allowed them in principle to act politically freely. However, even the American Revolution succeeded only in a limited way. It failed to preserve the revolutionary spirit that brought the American citizens to convene in the town halls throughout Amer-ica, discuss the questions of the day, and act as best as they could to shape together the fate of the republic. In the conventions of the American town hall meetings, Arendt saw a kind of “prototype” of the councils. The great failure of the American constitution, in her mind, was that it established a representative government, and did not create for the citizens of the republic spaces in which they could publicly associate, debate and act politically, and thereby enact directly their own self-government. The meaning of this failure, argues Arendt, was that the constitution preserved public freedom only for a minority of the people, the elite which rules through what came to be the party system: “It is indeed in the very nature of the party system to replace the formula ‘government of the people by the people’ by this formula: ‘government of the people by an elite sprung from the people’” (ibid., 281, italics in original). The councils, on the other hand, were indeed a new phenomenon, “the only entirely new and entirely spontaneous institution in revolutionary history” (ibid., 265), and they became for Arendt the great, and forgotten, achievement of the revolution — its single most precious “lost treasure” (ibid., 217).

So far, Arendt’s treatment of the councils is fairly similar to the way they are discussed within the anarchist tradition. But it is important to stress that Arendt discusses the councils in thoroughly political terms; for her the council system offers spaces where the political aspirations of the citizens, as distinguished from their economic and social needs, could be realized (ibid., 278). There is obviously much to criticize in this position, but it is important to emphasize, as Arendt does, the distinctly political meaning of the councils as an institution of self-governance, as a place where participation in political discussion and action as an end in itself could take place. In the common, somewhat misguided parlance of political theory: to elaborate the political aspect of the councils as an experience of “positive” freedom, and not only of “negative” liberty (from concentrated power, economic or political).5

5 As Crispin Sartwell stresses, anarchism is “the only political theory that rests itself entirely on the value of freedom” (2008, 7). However, I think it is fair to say that anarchist thinkers were mainly occupied with freedom from domination, or liberty, and not with possible “positive” aspects of freedom.

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Arendt suggests that the capacity for political action and discussion is an essential part of human potentiality; and that establishing a form of government whereby political action would be an actual possibility for ordinary citizens, as the councils are, is perhaps a utopia, but it is “a people’s utopia, not the utopia of theoreticians and ideologies” (Arendt, 1972, 231).

This conception of the council system as a “people’s utopia,” qualitatively different from other familiar utopias in the tradition of political thought, resonates in Kropotkin’s words, referring to the Paris Commune: “This fruitful idea was not the product of some one individual’s brain, of conceptions of some philosopher; it was born of the collective spirit, it sprang from the heart of a whole community” (quoted in Shone, 2000, 200). It is perhaps not advantageous for the New Social Movements, as well as for post-anarchist activists and scholars, that this vision of a participatory citizens’ council system is, for the most part, missing from their discourse.

Concluding Remarks

As noted above, Arendt’s affirmation of the council system did not enjoy any positive reception in the vast literature on her political thought. Granted, it is easy to understand the reservations regarding the view that Arendt indeed had in mind a council-based form of government — something that seems highly impractical in modern, mass democracy, especially the way it is usually conceived of in the liberal tradition. As Albrecht Wellmer puts it, “Arendt’s thesis that political freedom can only exist in a limited space seems to mark a radical break with the liberal–democratic tradition” (2000, 223). Other commentators’ reservations about the councils have to do with the dangers they believe are inherent in any attempt to establish such a form of government. First, there is the question whether a council system would reflect democratic or rather elitist, anti-democratic ten-dencies. Does Arendt not simply replace today’s elite with another one, that of political activists? (Kateb, 1995, 29–31; Brunkhorst, 2000, 196). Second, how would the rights of minorities and individuals be protected under a government in which so much power is given to majoritarian decisions in the councils? Third, would the dynamic of a form of government so intensively based on discussion and politi-cal action not also lead to the silencing of structurally disadvantaged

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groups, such as women, the poor, the old, and those who are under-educated or insufficiently eloquent? (Canovan, 1978, 19; Benhabib, 1996, 77–84). Such reservations and others are indeed significant, and one must admit that Arendt did not do enough to address them. The same could be said of the traditional conception of the councils advocated in the “old” anarchist thought.

I would like to dedicate my concluding remarks to a discussion of a practical experiment in participatory democracy, based to a large extent on the tradition of the councils, which I believe can teach us something about the criticisms I have just outlined. The example I would like to look into is rather well known: the participatory budget of the Brazilian city of Porto Alegre, the meeting place since 2001 of the World Social Forum, which assembles many of the New Social Movements. The best description of this participatory experiment is in my opinion Rebecca Abers’ Inventing Local Democracy (2000); I will rely on this work in what follows.

Porto Alegre is a metropolis in South Brazil, and home to some 1.3 million residents. In 1989, the Brazilian labor party (Partido dos Trabalhadores) rose to power, and, starting in 1990, led a broad pub-lic decision-making process on the city budget. It is estimated that in subsequent years hundreds of thousands of residents, in numerous neighborhood and region-wide assemblies and councils, took part in a process of prioritizing public works, such as street paving, the laying of water and sewage lines, building new schools and hospitals, etc. (ibid., 2). These councils were not merely consultative bodies: through them, “ordinary” citizens actually made decisions about allocating a large part of the city budget. How did all this come about? What motivated the city’s labor party leaders to set up such a participatory process? Two models of participatory democracy served as inspiration for this experiment. The first was the decentralized structure of the local Catholic Church, which had always stressed the importance of its members’ participation and initiative (ibid., 49). The second was none other than the council system. As Abers writes:

A second model harked back to the Paris Commune and the European experiences with worker councils. The council communism vision of small groups formed in neighborhoods and workplaces that would be incorporated into a “pyramidal” system of delegation — through which representatives with revocable mandates would communicate the groups’ positions to the

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highest level of decision making — became the organizing principle of the party and a central motif in proposals for governing. (Ibid., 49–50.)

Abers describes how, in the process of establishing these councils, many of the concerns mentioned above arose. It was argued that, due to lack of time and money, only residents who are better off would par-ticipate in the councils, whereas disadvantaged groups would (again) be effectively excluded from this democratic process. Second, even if members of disadvantaged groups did participate in the councils, their lack of education, experience, and knowledge might make them doubtful and reluctant to express their opinion, turning the councils into yet another forum in which advantaged groups set the agenda, and those with more experience in political activism take over the process. In short, it was argued that this proposal would result in nothing more then a new kind of elitist rule over the democratic process (ibid., 117–120). However, Abers tells us that in Porto Alegre it was to a large extent quite the opposite that happened. Residents of disadvantaged neighborhoods actually participated more, not less, than those from well-to-do ones. Their participation, it should be noted, was related to many factors: social solidarity, religious beliefs, trust in their neighbors, and so on (ibid., 136). But the decisive factor, according to Abers, was the success of participation itself: The more residents participated in the councils, and managed to improve the living conditions in their neighborhoods through them, the broader the participation became, so that ever more residents and neighbor-hoods took part in it (ibid., 138).

The success of the Porto Alegre participatory budget process was not only the mere fact of wide participation, nor even the improve-ment of living conditions in the neighborhoods. On top of this, the dynamics of deliberation and the need to make joint decisions also brought about the strengthening of social solidarity within and between neighborhoods. At times this was the result of the common interests of two or more neighborhoods; other times, of the rela-tionships that were formed during meetings among neighborhood representatives: “Through the budget process, neighborhood groups learned to trust one another, engaging in long-term relations of reci-procity” (ibid., 168).

Since deliberations were an essential part of the process, those who participated in them on a regular basis gradually improved their

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deliberation skills: they learned how to organize discussions; how to avoid making arguments that rely on a private rather than common background and hence stall the discussion; which debate and voting rules are required in order to reach fair decisions; how to deal with disagreements, and so on. Gradually, discussions within and between neighborhoods, although often emerging out of particular interests, brought about a better understanding of the needs of other residents and other neighborhoods: “As individuals left their neighborhoods to encounter other groups in collective decision making forums, they did broaden the perspective of their particular (neighborhood) interests to consider collective (region-wide) interests, and they did begin to feel solidarity with neighborhoods that were particularly disadvan-taged” (ibid., 192).

One could go on to describe the additional achievements of the Porto Alegre budget, as discussed in Abers’ and other studies, as well as to describe other similar, although less successful, instances (see, for example, Sellee and Perzzotti, 2009). The point is that many of the reservations regarding participatory democracy, at least at the local level, seem not to be necessarily justified. The case of Porto Alegre shows that, at least under certain conditions, spaces of self-government for ordinary citizens can be formed. In this sense, Porto Alegre and other similar cases suggest that perhaps a citizen council system is not merely a utopia, and that such a form of government might indeed constitute a genuine revolution in Arendtian–anarchist terms: the founding of a space of freedom in which citizens become equal in the public sphere by taking part in government, without anyone ruling over anyone else.

At minimum, the councils are one possible institution within which such a space of freedom can exist. It thus seems to me worth-while to follow in Arendt’s and the “old” anarchists’ footsteps, in order to recover the lost treasure of this oft-forgotten legacy. Even if a councils state is not likely to appear anytime soon, it could be that the theoretical recovery of this possible form of government, and the formation of local experiments in its spirit, could enlighten us with respect to the conditions of possibility for the realization of its politi-cal potential. It is in this sense that the following words of Arendt still constitute a relevant message:

No remembrance remains secure unless it is condensed and distilled into a framework of conceptual notions within which it can further exercise itself.

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Experiences and even stories which grow out of what men do and endure, of happenings and events, sink back into the futility inherent in the living word and the living deed unless they are talked about over and over again. What saves the affairs of mortal men from the inherent futility is nothing but this incessant talk about them, which in turn remains futile unless certain concepts, certain guideposts for future remembrance, and even of sheer reference, arise out of it. (Arendt, 1965, 222.)

Department of Sociology, Political Science and CommunicationThe Open University of Israel 1 University Road Ra’anana, [email protected]

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Councils and Revolution: Participatory Democracy in Anarchist Thought and the New Social Movements

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