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.

From the article by Parenti below, which is an excerpt from his book blackshirts and reds:

Decentralization vs. Survival

For a people’s revolution to survive, it must seize state power and use it to (a) break the stranglehold exercised by the owning class over the society’s institutions and resources, and (b) withstand the reactionary counterattack that is sure to come. The internal and external dangers a revolution faces necessitate a centralized state power that is not particularly to anyone’s liking, not in Soviet Russia in 1917, nor in Sandinista Nicaragua in 1980.

Engels offers an apposite account of an uprising in Spain in 1872-73 in which anarchists seized power in municipalities across the country. At first, the situation looked promising. The king had abdicated and the bourgeois government could muster but a few thousand ill-trained troops. Yet this ragtag force prevailed because it faced a thoroughly parochialized rebellion. “Each town proclaimed itself as a sovereign canton and set up a revolutionary committee (junta),” Engels writes. “[E]ach town acted on its own, declaring that the important thing was not cooperation with other towns but separation from them, thus precluding any possibility of a combined attack [against bourgeois forces].” It was “the fragmentation and isolation of the revolutionary forces which enabled the government troops to smash one revolt after the other.”

Decentralized parochial autonomy is the graveyard of insurgency–which may be one reason why there has never been a successful anarcho-syndicalist revolution. Ideally, it would be a fine thing to have only local, self-directed, worker participation, with minimal bureaucracy, police, and military. This probably would be the development of socialism, were socialism ever allowed to develop unhindered by counterrevolutionary subversion and attack. One might recall how, in 1918-20, fourteen capitalist nations, including the United States, invaded Soviet Russia in a bloody but unsuccessful attempt to overthrow the revolutionary Bolshevik government. The years of foreign invasion and civil war did much to intensify the Bolsheviks’ siege psychology with its commitment to lockstep party unity and a repressive security apparatus.

brilliant talk by Micheal Parenti, or read his article, Left anticommunism, the unkindest cut, audiobook