this isn’t the best of arguments, but so-called “council” communists often fail to understand that the government of the USSR was itself a council and named such. “Soviet” translates almost directly to “Council”. It wasn’t a system that just empowered the secretary-general. Rather the Central Committee of the Communist Party voted on most things, and acted as a coherent governing body for the socialist republics in conjunction with Congress and the public. In essence, it was a state apparatus that was led by a council of elected officials who elected a secretary, this was the body that denied Stalin’s requests to step down, this is the body that ran the union. The secretary’s relative power was less by a significant margin to the central committee.

They also tend to fail to understand that “state” socialism forms state-approved labour unions and enforces proletarian control of the means of production. Through this, they ensure that the proletariat has equal and ample access to workplace democracy, and are capable of manually adjusting political groups that sought to undermine the dictatorship of the proletariat. Or, in more direct words, by creating the labour unions - the state has the upper hand in protecting socialism against counter-revolutionaries.

In reality, “libertarian” Marxists are nothing more than anti-communist revisionists who entirely fail to understand Marx and Engles, and instead lace in their own western leftist narratives. Borrowing bits and pieces of Marxist ideology, but ultimately never letting go of their false profit “democratic” socialism, and thus degrading Marxism in the process. These folk, if they don’t use the pointless moniker “council communism” often refer to themselves as “anarcho-communists” - a fake ideology of white radicals - or “Libertarian Communists” - yet another fake ideology of white radicals. They’re not bad people, and they’re not inexcusable, just deeply misinformed by anti-communist propaganda, and unwilling to divorce themselves from that propaganda. It’s a common scourge that you’ll only find - primarily - in the west and European-language regions of the third world. That last sentence should tell you what you need to know about the people who believe in this stuff.