Let’s take a step further back, near to the beginning, in the Communist Manifesto:

“The immediate aim of the Communists is the same as that of all other proletarian parties: formation of the proletariat into a class, overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by the proletariat.”

In modern parlance, the first two goals are the transformation of the working class in itself into a class for itself and the establishment of worker-class hegemony at the expense of bourgeois hegemony. The third goal expresses itself in the implementation of the recovery-in-progress Marx-Engels minimum program, whereby individual demands could easily be implemented without eliminating the bourgeois state order, but whereby full implementation would mean that the working class will have expropriated ruling-class political power in policymaking, legislation, execution-administration, and other areas. This Marx-Engels minimum program can be implemented without workers councils at all, though it cannot be implemented without worker-class party-movements as big or bigger than the pre-war SPD.

So what exactly is this Marx-Engels minimum program in today’s terms? Something like these:

http://communiststudents.org.uk/?p=524 (“Debating the Marxist programme”)
http://www.revleft.com/vb/class-strugglist-democracy-t112390/index.html (“Class-Strugglist Democracy and the Demarchic Commonwealth”)