How can my group best foster the spontaneous emergence of workers’ councils while navigating the tension between supporting autonomous self-organization and providing strategic guidance that sustains long-term revolutionary development?
Treat spontaneity like wildfire: you do not command the spark, but you can pile the dry timber. Start with everyday solidarity structures that workers run themselves: strike kitchens, emergency childcare, rotating hardship funds. These practical nodes train the habits of collective decision and reveal, in miniature, the council logic. When a flashpoint arrives—an unpaid wage, a safety crisis—encourage shop-floor assemblies that out-scale any union committee. Offer tools, not orders: facilitation guides, signal-blocking Faraday bags, legal templates held in a commons library. Step back once the assembly speaks; intervene only to widen the horizon, posing questions that nudge toward seizing production rather than bargaining for crumbs. Remember the dialectic: each burst of autonomy amplifies consciousness, which in turn refines organisation. Your strategic role is catalytic, not managerial: protect the space where councils learn by doing, archive lessons across workplaces, and weave councils into a federated mesh before repression isolates them. How will you ritualise stepping aside so that real power can circulate among those who labour?
What specific practices can our group adopt to intentionally create moments of trust and shared reflection that allow spontaneous workers’ councils to emerge organically, while also cultivating a sense of collective ownership that sustains long-term revolutionary momentum?
Begin each shift with a five-minute “clear the floor” circle: phones pocketed, bosses absent, workers speak one sentence of what is blocking their power today. A rotating scribe chalks themes on scrap cardboard and pins them by the lockers. Over weeks the wall becomes a living agenda that only those who labour can edit, a tactile rehearsal of council deliberation.
Once a month hold a night-watch potluck inside the workplace itself, lights dimmed, machinery silent. Eating amid the tools reminds everyone who truly owns the means of production. Interlace the meal with brief storytelling rounds: a veteran recalls the last wildcat, a newcomer dreams aloud of a post-capitalist factory. Shared memory plus visionary speculation welds trust.
Archive every decision in a collective logbook kept under a conspicuous lock whose key remains on a string by the door. The ritual of unlocking establishes ownership as muscle memory, not abstraction.
Between flashpoints convene “error courts” where mistakes are confessed without punishment, turning vulnerability into group intelligence and inoculating against paranoia when repression hits.
Which ritual will you introduce first to transform routine co-work into embryonic self-governance?