Council Democracy by James Muldoon

Author:James Muldoon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)
Published: 2018-02-27T16:00:00+00:00

Part III

The Councils and Radical Democratic Theory

7The Councils as Ontological Form

Cornelius Castoriadis and the Autonomous Potential of Council Democracy

Christopher Holman

Introduction

Despite being the most notable theorist of workers’ councils within the influential French political group Socialisme ou Barbarie (SouB), Cornelius Castoriadis is generally not included in standard lists of those figures who are most important for the development of councilist theory. Nor do readers of Castoriadis typically attempt to specify the place of his engagement with the council tradition within his thought. This fact is almost certainly related to the unique personal trajectory of Castoriadis’ intellectual development. Castoriadis’ writings on the councils were developed in the context of his early critique of bureaucratic management as it manifested itself in both the so-called private capitalist countries and the so-called Eastern socialist ones. After these early analyses, however, the councils seemingly disappear as an object of study for Castoriadis. His thought undertakes something of a substantive shift, a shift usually associated with his self-identified break with the Marxist tradition. Some commentators go so far as to write that his earlier Marxist and SouB period constitutes only a “pre-history” within his oeuvre, his genuine political and theoretical commitments being revealed later.1 In this later period we observe the philosophical elaboration of Castoriadis’ ontology of the social-historical, and his location of the potential for democratic autonomy in the chaotic flux of the human psyche and being. However, rather than see in this transition an abandonment of a concern with the council tradition, I will instead demonstrate the extent to which it reveals a new method for interpreting the significance of this tradition.

Closer study of Castoriadis’ engagement with the council tradition has the effect of not only more sharply clarifying the trajectory of the former’s own intellectual development, but advancing more generally our understanding of council democracy and its possible ethical foundations. I argue in this chapter that Castoriadis’ defence of the positive political potential of council institutionalisation is ultimately grounded in a philosophical-anthropological principle of human beingness. Theorising the latter in terms of the radical imagination, the specifically human generation of a perpetual flux of forms and figures of meaning, social-historical creation at the collective level is considered in terms of the sublimation of this psychic energy. Castoriadis’ political project is to think the possibility of the institution of a form of society in which the capacity to reflectively institute the community is generalised, such that all citizens have the opportunity to autonomously affirm their essential creative orientation through participation in politics. The democratic council as an institutional form, therefore, can be read as a concrete field for the expression of that non-determinate creative desire that for Castoriadis constitutes the essence of the human. Contrary to all forms of representative and liberal government, the councils are an institutional order that have the potential to collectively affirm human autonomy and creativity through sublimating psychic desire. In the final instance the normative defence of council democracy is grounded in the perception of a certain ontological content contained

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