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 decided on what their agenda is and what their needs are. They also 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 decision power and organization is based on the delegates system.
On a larger scale, a group of delegates may in turn elect a delegate in a higher position 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 rises from bottom to top 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.
Read more about Workers' Council: Historical Examples, Organization Details, Councils Against Unions and Stalinists
Famous quotes containing the word council:
“Daughter to that good Earl, once President
Of England’s Council and her Treasury,
Who lived in both, unstain’d with gold or fee,
And left them both, more in himself content.
Till the sad breaking of that Parliament
Broke him, as that dishonest victory
At Chaeronea, fatal to liberty,
Kill’d with report that old man eloquent;—”
—John Milton (1608–1674)