Workers' council
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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A workers' council, or revolutionary councils, is the phenomenon where a single place of work or enterprise, such as a factory, school, or farm, is controlled collectively by the workers of that workplace, through the core principle of temporary and instantly revocable delegates.
In a system with temporary and instantly revocable delegates, workers deliberate on what is their agenda and what are their needs, and mandate a temporary delegate to divulge and pursue them. The temporary delegates are elected among the workers themselves, can be instantly revoked if they betray their mandate, and are supposed to change frequently. There are no managers and all the decision power and the organization is based on the delegates system.
On a larger scale, a group of delegates may in turn elect a higher delegate to pursue their mandate, and so on, until the top delegates are running the industrial system of a state. In such a system decision power raises bottom-up from the agendas of the workers themselves, and there is not a decision imposition from the top, as would happen in the case of a power seizure by a supposedly revolutionary party.
See also
- Anarchism
- Anarcho syndicalism
- Co-determination
- Council communism
- Kronstadt rebellion
- Council democracy
- De Leonism
- Direct democracy
- Factory committee
- Horizontalidad
- Industrial democracy
- Industrial Workers of the World
- Libertarian socialism
- Luxemburgism
- Paris Commune
- Socialist Party USA
- Solidarity (UK)
- Soviet (council)
- Syndicalism
- Works council
