Talk:Workers' council

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Venezuela and Argentina don't have workers' councils, they have comanaged factories (in the first case) and cooperatives (in the second case.

Actually, Venezuela has true workers' councils, even though Chávez is holding them back. A workers' council does not have to actually be in control of their workplace to be considered a workers' council. I'll find and post references. Ahuitzotl (talk) 23:43, 5 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] One-sided

I slapped the {{totally disputed}} label on this articles, because it presents the Soviet POV as if it were historic fact.

Many Western analysts deny the contention that these councils or soviets had any autonomy. Rather, they were completely controlled from above. I could use some help documenting this. --Uncle Ed 20:36, 5 May 2006 (UTC)

I removed the tag. Unless you have a cite for this, and one better than "Many Western analysts..." there's no need for the tag. •Jim62sch• 23:39, 5 May 2006 (UTC)

Well, isnt the kronstadt rebellion evidence in itself? It was demanding the return of the autonomy to their soviet, so one could logically conclude that they did loose their autonomy. I dont understand how this even needs some special documentation, seems to me to be common knowledge, but I can mention one book Ive read about it, i should check the title, i think simply, 'radnicki savjeti', that is "workers councils", published in belgrade just as yugoslavia was beggining to disintegrate in 1989 so there was some exploration of this newly found freedom, about the history of workers councils. Part of it studies the russian revolution in an allmost day-by-day fashion, and it does conclude that though when the first 1917 revolution started they were largely autonomous, as lenin rose to power he wery swiftly took their autonomy away. In yugoslavia, I spoke to many people about them, and most agree that they were only a thin overlay to a largly stalinistic system, but they did give some significant liberties to people in their daily working lives, so they did have some, and not insignificant, but only 'low level' autonomy. Higher up, the party rules absolutely. I know this anecdotal evidence doesnt mean a thing, but again, Im first puzzled that this is unknown, and second not really sure what this question of authonomy has to do with this article anyways.

Where does this article speak about the reality of the autonomy of soviets in russia? It seems to speak of workers councils in general, as it should. The word soviet, is simply 'council' (or 'advice') i never undestood why people who dont speak slavic languages spoke of the soviet union... Its a general idea and has little to do with russia and their revolution, exept that maybe for the first year or so of the revolution they existed there, among many other places..Hell, even the Works councils in current germany and their companies, and in the european regulation of corporate statutes, seem pretty much an incarnation of this idea, so it really has nothing especially to do with post-revolutionary russia...

--83.131.141.59 17:30, 2 October 2006 (UTC)

The mutinous sailors definitely listed "Soviets without Bolsheviks" as one of their demands, but this has to be taken in the context that the Bolsheviks still enjoyed popular support in most Soviets. The sailors' resolutions, supposedly on behalf of the Kronstadt Soviet, were actually forced upon the townspeople. Once the sailors marched off to fight the Red Army, before they had even been defeated, the local council reconvened and voted to rejoin the RSFSR. The British had forcibly put Mensheviks in power in a lot of southern Soviets, and followed that up with campaigns of terror and executions of Bolshevik leaders and supporters, and the Kronstadt mutineers were communicating with the same Mensheviks and Whites who had championed such undemocratic British adventures, so the Red Army was--far from quashing a democratic uprising--merely preventing the interventionists from opening up another coastal bridgehead against the Soviet republic. If, during the US Civil War, a naval base in Maine had voted to join the Confederacy and welcomed the Franco-British fleet into port, the Union army would have stomped that uprising and no one would be crying about it today.

Lenin's government did deny Menshevik-run Soviets the right to secede and join the Whites, but it was Stalin and his clique who rewrote the Soviet constitution and butchered the opposition, because they were clamoring for more autonomy in the councils, and fiscal accountability on behalf of the rich bureaucrats who supported Stalin. Revolutionary figures like Trotsky, Tukhachevsky, Bela Kun, and Lenin's entire politburo, had to be executed because their democratic leanings did not mesh with Stalin's mafia-style relegation of the Soviets to the position of rubber-stamp parliament. Therefore, Lenin can't be called a dictator any more than Lincoln can.

Workers' councils are not a purely Russian phenomenon, and that is why this article is called "Workers' council" and not "Soviet." As much as you may dislike the fact that "Soviet" is a common synonym for "workers' council" in many languages, that is an indisputable fact which is unlikely to change any time soon, and can not be ignored by Wikipedia. It's common to refer to the Russian parliament as the "Duma" and the German parliament as "Reichstag" even though parliamentary democracy is not exclusive to either of these countries. Ahuitzotl (talk) 23:34, 5 January 2008 (UTC)

All links under See Also should somehow be worked into the actual text of the article. Squideshi 17:53, 30 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Sections

This article has no sections. The history of workers' councils and how they function is blended together. While this doesn't make the article that difficult to read or understand, it is detrimental to it's quality. I'll probably organize it soon, unless someone else does so before me, which seems unlikely. Furtheremore it seems unlikely that I'll organize it...(Demigod Ron 03:24, 22 May 2007 (UTC))