left-reminders:

all-is-for-all:

Liberal documentary: Things are bad in this one industry because hierarchical profit-seeking entities are corrupting it and we’re making this documentary to shed light on the problem and maybe we can use government effectively to regulate the corporations in this one particular area – a well-placed bandaid will fix this third-degree burn.

Me:

They’re the most-consistently proposed socio-economic formation for the socialist future. Basically, they’re bottom-up alternatives to capitalism that root workplace and community power in the people directly impacted by social/economic/political outcomes – the opposite of what capitalism does. Capitalism creates a multitude of problems because bosses make all the major economic decisions and the problems (the ones liberals make documentaries about) are externalized onto vulnerable populations. This profit-driven top-down power structure is the cause of wealth inequality, environmental destruction, social alienation, imperialism, and a whole host of other calamities. Socialist councils seek to remedy these problems by democratizing the sources of wealth – the workplaces, the infrastructure, the resources – and producing goods for direct use rather than for the profit of a small elite portion of the population. It’s about bringing democracy into the workplace and into the economy, and it’s about overcoming the vast limitations capitalism places upon us.

That’s just a quick summary, but you can find more info here:

• Workers’ Council wikipedia page
• Council Communism wikipedia page
• Rosa Luxemburg wikipedia page
• “Workers’ Councils” by Anton Pannekoek
• “Ours To Master and To Own: Workers’ Control from the Commune to the Present” by Immanuel Ness and Dario Azzellini
  
• Verso Books page for “Building the Commune: Radical Democracy in Venezuela” by George Ciccariello-Maher