Committees, commissions, workers' councils or "soviets" are bodies of delegates elected directly by the workers' assemblies, accountable exclusively to them and revocable at any moment. They are born from the extension of the mass strike and, as the struggles develop, they tend to become the form of organization of the class as a whole as the "party" of bourgeois society; that is, they assert a "dual power" that prepares them to become the organ through which the class will exercise its "dictatorship". They then become a real "transitional state" which, as the revolution becomes global, will be able to undertake the decommodification of society.
Origin
With the development of imperialism, in the last decade of rising capitalism, the class struggle intensifies and begins to show new forms all over the world. The main one, the mass strike, is very far from the syndicalist fantasy of the "revolutionary general strike". The "unexpected", unplanned mass strike merges with the revolution. There is no macro-organization calling it, no structure of full-time officials, no gigantic strike fund.
Therefore, if the Russian Revolution teaches us anything, it is above all that the mass strike is not artificially "made", not "decided" at random, not "propagated"; it is a historical phenomenon which, at a given moment, results from social conditions with historical inevitability.
It is therefore not by abstract speculations on the possibility or impossibility, the utility or the harmfulness of the mass strike that the problem can be understood or discussed. The factors and social conditions out of which the mass strike grows in the present phase of the class struggle must be examined. In other words, it is not a matter of the subjective criticism of the mass strike from the standpoint of what is desirable, but of the objective investigation of the sources of the mass strike from the standpoint of what is historically inevitable.
Rosa Luxemburg. The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions, 1906
But if the mass strike is the primary form taken by the constitution of the class in the imperialist era, the constitution of the class as the party of society will come from the extension and fusion of the workers' assemblies in the course of those struggles. Assemblies that elect committees accountable to them and revocable at any moment. These committees, an evolution of the strike committees, become councils (in Russian, "soviets") of delegates, which will expand to become territorial structures of class organization.
The soviet organized the working masses, led strikes and demonstrations, armed the workers and protected the population against pogroms. However, other revolutionary organizations did the same before it, at the same time and after it, and they never had the same importance. The secret of this importance lies in the fact that this assembly arose organically from the proletariat during a direct struggle, determined in some way by events, which the working class waged "for the conquest of power".
If the proletarians on the one hand, and the reactionary press on the other, gave the soviet the title of "proletarian government", it was because this organization was in fact nothing other than the embryo of a revolutionary government. The soviet held power to the extent that the revolutionary might of the working-class districts guaranteed it; it fought directly for the conquest of power to the extent that power still remained in the hands of a military and police monarchy.
Before the appearance of the soviet we find among the industrial workers numerous revolutionary organizations, led above all by social democracy. But these were formations "within the proletariat", and their immediate aim was to struggle "to gain influence over the masses". The soviet, on the contrary, immediately became "the very organization of the proletariat"; its aim was to struggle for "the conquest of revolutionary power".
Being the point of concentration of all the revolutionary forces of the country, the soviet did not dissolve into revolutionary democracy; it was and remained the organized expression of the class will of the proletariat. In its struggle for power it applied methods that naturally proceeded from the character of the proletariat as a class: these methods relate to the role of the proletariat in production, to the importance of its numbers and to its social homogeneity.
Moreover, while fighting for power at the head of all the revolutionary forces, the soviet did not for a moment cease to guide the spontaneous action of the working class; it not only contributed to the organization of the trade unions but even intervened in particular disputes between workers and employers. And precisely because the soviet, as the democratic representation of the proletariat in the revolutionary epoch, stood at the crossroads of all its class interests, it came from the start under the all-powerful influence of social democracy.
That party then had the opportunity to use the immense advantages that its grounding in Marxism gave it; being capable of orienting political thought in the existing "chaos", it had no need to make any effort to turn the soviet, which formally belonged to no party, into the organizing apparatus of its influence.
Leon Trotsky, Conclusions of 1905, 1909
Committees and trade unions in the great revolutionary wave of 1917-37 and after
These workers' committees and councils, or "soviets", will also be the protagonists of the revolutionary wave opened by the first great imperialist world war, confronting and overcoming the trade unions, which by then were already openly defending the state into which they were being integrated. Within the framework of the mass strike they evolve from strike committees into "soviets", from a system of mass organization into an organ of class power in the very course of the revolution.
The Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917 gave rise to a new fighting body that springs from social reality itself: the factory committee or council, democratically elected in the workplaces, whose members are revocable at any moment. They were seen to appear in St. Petersburg and Moscow at the end of the 1905 revolution, whose high point they mark. However, still too weak and inexperienced, they proved incapable of fulfilling the task they had set themselves, the overthrow of tsarism.
They are seen to reappear from the very beginning of the 1917 revolution, now more sure of themselves, and they would soon spread throughout the country. Spurred on by Lenin and Trotsky, they carry out the October revolution. Meanwhile, the trade unions trail behind them, holding back the movement with all their might. Not a single revolutionary initiative is owed to them; on the contrary. John Reed, in his "Ten Days That Shook the World", brings out their hostility to the soviets on several occasions, to the point that the railway workers had to break union discipline in order to carry from Petrograd to Moscow the reinforcements needed to put down the counter-revolution of the junkers in the latter city.
The German workers, soldiers and sailors who rose up in 1918 did not for a single moment think of turning to the trade unions to lead their struggle against the imperial regime; in the midst of the fighting they created their committees of struggle, which took over the factories and the ships and drove out the capitalist authorities. The trade unions intervened only later, to put a brake on the struggle, to contain the revolution within bourgeois limits, that is, to betray it. That spectacle definitively clarified the thinking of the German revolutionaries and showed Herman Gorter and the German-Dutch left the way forward, making him in that period one of the first theoreticians of left communism and of a genuine class-against-class tactic.
In the Spanish revolution of 1936, from the first days of the insurrection committees sprang up everywhere, like mushrooms after a storm. But unlike in Russia, where the soviets relegated the trade unions to the background, here the latter smothered the committees (juntas). The result: Stalinism triumphs without the trade unions really opposing it. They even come together to collaborate in its triumph, through a CNT-UGT liaison committee, and the revolution is betrayed by Stalinism, which opens the door to Franco.
G. Munis, "The factory committees, motor of the social revolution", in "Unions Against Revolution", 1960
When the miners' strike in Asturias in 1962 gave the first sign of a new sharpening of the class struggle after the reconstruction that followed the second imperialist world war, the phenomenon was reaffirmed. The strike committees in the pits spontaneously began to organize themselves into "workers' commissions" as the isolated strikes turned into a mass strike. Francoist repression would give the Stalinist PCE the opportunity to capture them and "unionize" them. A "two-pronged" (pincer) strategy that we will see again and again from the mass strikes of 1968-69 onwards, and which in Poland would reach its peak with the enthronement of "Solidarność".