Sick Day/Reds

I've got this thing where when I'm sick (fever, cough) I sleep for like 16 hours and get better.

I'm taking a sleep break; in hour 4 of the sleep marathon. (Damn nicotine! Damn H20! Without them, I'd've slept straight thru!!) So here's some idle musings.

"This blogpost is a stub" (heh - love Wikipedia)

The red left - communists, socialists, syndicalists - has always been a fractured mess in my town. There were great things - the 1934 Teamsters strike, which someone once described to me as 'the only victory the Trotskyists ever had', and the CIO was pretty red, as well as the Farmer-Labor party.

But due to a bunch of factors, probably including COINTELPRO and huge social stigmatization, there were just vicious infights and dogmatic inflexibility. Except I guess there's a decent group around - Socialist Alternative? I dunno.

Anyway, I was reading about Rosa Luxemburg, and drifted over to this description of Council Communism.

The central argument of Council Communism, in contrast to those of Social democracy and Leninist communism, is that workers' councils arising in the factories and municipalities are the natural form of working class organisation and governmental power. This view is opposed to both the Reformist and the Bolshevik stress on vanguard parties, parliaments or bureaucratic states.

The core principle of council communism is that the government and the economy should be managed by workers' councils composed of delegates elected at workplaces and recallable at any moment. As such, council communists oppose state-run "bureaucratic collectivism". They also oppose the idea of a "revolutionary party", since council communists believe that a revolution led by a party will necessarily produce a party dictatorship. Council communists support a workers' democracy, which they want to produce through a federation of workers' councils.

Council Communists support workers' revolutions, but oppose one-party dictatorships. This has much in common with libertarian communism and most strains of anarchism, although the latter usually upholds individual liberty and autonomy as paramount over all else, which Council Communism does not.

Sounds cool to me. I always thought the 'party elite' stuff was bogus, as well as the 'dictatorship of the proletariat'.

Signing off (cough, cough) with more Eco to follow... =)