Dual Power Part 1

Have you ever wondered what dual power actually is? It's time to find out.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
You were out of town when the last cop left Seattle.
It had been unseasonably cool that week, the seventy degrees
of old and not thee you had come to dread
every summer. But you had already promised you'd visit your
family in Montana, and so when the riots started in
the National Guard open fire into the crowd, you watched
it on Twitter from your couch like everyone else. The

(00:25):
Second Battle of Seattle, they were calling it. You wondered
briefly what the first one was. They've been fighting in
Portland too, some kind of massacre in Oakland, and no
one was quite sure what was happening in that Appa Valley.
Couldn't be anything good, you thought, But it was Seattle.
Everyone was talking about. The mayor fled the city and
the helicopter when it became clear the police were losing.

(00:47):
After that, the cops had simply broken retreated across the Cascades.
No one knew who was running the city now, and you,
share as hell didn't want to be the one to
find out. But after two weeks, you've burned through a
vacation day in every favor you'd ever accumulated at the hospital,
and besides the rent was due, no one was sure

(01:07):
if the postal service was even still functioning, and with
the eviction moratorium lifted, you weren't going to risk getting
evicted because you weren't there to hand your landlord a check.
So with ray resignation, you pile into your battered car
and head towards snow Qualmy Pass. What surprised you most
when you hit Seattle was the art you've been expecting.

(01:28):
Burnt out buildings and streets filled with burning cars, and
there were some A few streets were still blocked by
what looked like improvised barricades, but every surface of every building,
it seemed, had some kind of mirror on it. Someone,
and no one seemed to be quite sure who had
first come up with the idea, had blocked off an
entire street up near Capitol Hill, and people were painstakingly

(01:49):
painting portraits of every protester killed in the fighting and
Seattle on it. As you walk past, they were discussing
doing the same for the dead in Oakland. The second
surprise came when you tried to pay your rent. A
woman you'd never seen before was sitting at the office's
reception desk. When you tried to handle your check. She
laughed and handed it back to you, explaining that after

(02:11):
the cops fled, the local tenants union had taken over
most of the apartments in the city and placed them
in something it called a community land trust. You didn't
quite get the details, but no one was going to
evict you, so you decided to just take the win. Besides,
your friend had convinced you to do some child care
for the tenants union in college, and they always seemed
like a decent sword, so it didn't seem to be

(02:32):
any immediate cause for concern. The hospital was another matter entirely.
From what you could gather, there had been some kind
of labor dispute between the chaos. Management seemed to have
fired a group of nurses for giving injured protesters shelter
from the police. Your word had already been understaff due
to COVID and budget cuts. Now the situation was intolerable.

(02:54):
Where still many of the senior administrators had fled the
city with the police, no one seemed to know who
was in charge, Supplies were starting to run low, and
with so many administrators missing in the insurance situation completely
up in the air on account of nobody being entirely
sure if Seattle was even still part of the United States.
It wasn't clear if anyone was going to get paid.

(03:15):
So when a co worker pulled you aside and asked
if you'd be interested in doing something about the management problem,
you figured, what the hell, Maybe it was time for
a change. It wasn't like it could possibly make anything worse.
The fired nurses, it turned out, had started to set
up a community health center with the help of the
local neighborhood council. But some of the nurses still working

(03:38):
at the hospital had another idea. Why not just turn
the hospital into the community health center. After all, the
hospital already had more equipment than any new center could
possibly assemble. All they needed was some help from the community,
and the whole thing could be run by a council
of the hospital workers. Insurance companies be damned. Besides, if

(03:59):
all the hospitals started pulling their resources together, they might
be able to solve some of the shortages. At the
mention of solving the supply shortages, even the more skeptical
workers started to come around. By the next morning, the
Seattle Hospital Workers Council was marching on the hospital. The
remaining management found out somehow and tried one final lockout

(04:20):
to hold on to their property. But as you saw
yet another column of protesters joining the crowd surrounding the hospital,
you knew this wasn't their city any longer. On April eighteen,
two thousand, one, military police in the Cabiliar region of
Algeria shot an eighteen year old high school students. Almost immediately,

(04:43):
hundreds of thousands of people took to the street, chanting,
you can't kill us, we are already dead at the
lines of policemen assembled to attack them. The police would
kill over a hundred people and severely wound five thousand
more in the months long battle for control of the
streets that followed, but protesters burned police stations, government offices, courts,
and the offices of Islamic fundamentalist parties. Until the government

(05:06):
agreed to give ethnic minority groups language and cultural rights.
The hated military police were driven from the region entirely,
and so few regular police stations survived the uprising. At
the regular police likewise ceased to function across broad swaths
of Kabilia. They were replaced on a local village level
by self organized security committees, which would assemble on the

(05:27):
rare occasion trouble emerged. Contrary to the expectations of the state,
crime plummeted, but the Algerian government otherwise continued to function
as usual for over a decade until the local government
and a small region cover Baca, attempted the regular local elections.
After banning the most popular political party in the region,

(05:48):
they installed an unpopular coalition governments. The people of Brabaca
responded by storming the city hall, season control of it
and setting up a democratic General Assembly inside the newly
dubbed House of the People to replace the existing government.
This was dual power in its original sense, a council
of the people facing off against an increasingly illegitimate parliamentary

(06:11):
representative in a struggle for control over the fate of
a new society. If you google dual power, you are
likely to encounter a pamphlet written by Vladimir Lenin entitled
The Dual Power, describing the conundrum of the situation following
the First Russian Revolution in February of nineteen seventeen, after
the overthrow of the Czar, political power was split between

(06:32):
two competing bodies. On the one side, a new provisional
government of liberal and social democratic politicians holdovers from the
old Duma from the previous regime. On the other side,
revolutionary social forces rallying around assemblies popular power called soviets,
which were councils of delegates sent by directly democratic factory,

(06:53):
soldiers and sailors committees. Lenin solve this as a situation
to be overcome by the seizure of state power by
a socialist party. For Lenin and his Bolsheviks, dual power
was a problem because, after the Czarist state ceased to
exist in the middle of the World War, the new
provisional government failed to fill the vacuum left in its
wake by its collapse. To Lenin, the solution was obvious,

(07:16):
fill that vacuum with Lenin. For the peasants, soldiers, and workers,
who made up the majority of Russia's population, however, dual
power was their first fleeting taste of freedom and autonomous
control over their lives. Lenon used the Soviets to seize power,
but almost immediately began to turn on these democratic assemblies
of popular autonomy. Over the course of the Russian Civil War,

(07:39):
Lennon and the Bolsheviks strip power away from the workers, peasants,
and soldiers, sometimes by bureaucratic fiat, often at the point
of a bayonet, until the Soviet had been stripped of
all meeting in the very state named after their democratic
form and became synonymous with dictatorship. Dual power today draws
from the potential of that post revolutionary crisis from the

(08:00):
bottom up direct democracy that was so threatening to the
social order that Bolshevik revolutionaries and Czari's police buys alike
conspired to wipe them from the historical record. Just as
Russia was haunted by the memory of the French classes,

(08:22):
so is America today haunted by a memory of dual
power that, against all Ladge refuses to die. We are,
after all, still ruled by a greedy, bloodthirsty, and out
of touch elite who have chosen to march us to
our deaths by the hundreds of thousands by forcing us
back to work during a plague. But the Russian Revolution
is as far away from us today as Napoleon and
his brass cannons were from the Russian revolutionaries and their

(08:45):
machine guns. Times have changed. There is no Bolshevik party
waiting in the wings to seize power as the state crumbles.
The vacuum of the state leaves in its wake as
its power deteriorates, be filled by any number of organizations,
most even more hostile to the working class and the
Bolsheviks had been. It could be war lords with the
personal allegiance of the remains of the military. It could

(09:06):
be organized crime. It could be religious fundamentalist militias. Most likely,
it will be an uneasy combination of all of the above.
Or it could be you. It could be your family,
your friends, your neighbors, your co workers, the person you
waved to every morning at the bus stop when you're
on your way to work. The past to that world,

(09:28):
the world run not by capitalists in their cops or
by war lords in their armies, but by autonomous communities
free to decide for themselves what to produce and how
to best use their resources to care for each other.
Is dual power in the twenty first century. At its core,
dual power is about creating a counterpower against the state.
During the Russian Revolution, this counterpower was formed essentially by

(09:51):
historical accidents, as two governing bodies emerged from the course
of the Fibrrian Revolution. But modern dual power does not
arise from the whims the course of revolution or from
an innate instinct of the working class. It is something
we've built together by creating organizations that resist the power
of the structures of violence, capitalism, racism, homophobia, and the

(10:12):
state name a few that control this world. Dual power
organizations can take many forms, from tennis unions, the debtors councils,
childcare cooperatives, to land occupations, workers councils, to rank and
file labor unions, mutual aid networks to community self defense organizations.

(10:32):
These organizations seek to build autonomy from and against capitalism.
In the state alone, there are no match for the
state's wor all power to inflict violence and corporate control
over our resources. But by joining together to form federations
and pooling their resources and expertise to coordinate their efforts,
they can become a powerful enough force to challenge the
state both directly and indirectly. These dual power organizations are

(10:56):
designed to be the state's successor. As the industrial workers
of the world famously put it, they form the structure
of the new society and the shell of the old.
In order to fulfill that task, they take the shape
of new society. They need to create academics, called this
prefigurative politics, organizing that employs the values and organizational structures
that they seek to create in the world. As we

(11:18):
will discuss in the next episode, there are right wing
forms of both dual power and profigative politics, but for
most of the people who employ it, prefigurative politics means
creating direct democratic institutions without bosses, managers, bureaucrats, or party apparatus.
The means of creating the new world are thus the

(11:39):
same as the ends. Dual power organizations serve multiple purposes.
Their long term goal is to replace the state and
the corporation with free and autonomous forms of organization. One's
organized and powerful enough to protect themselves and manage the
logistical challenges of a new world with previous forms of
organization and power no longer exists. But even reaching a

(12:03):
point where this is remotely plausible requires not just the
painstaking construction of counterpower and organization out of a fragmented
American population. It requires a profound cultural transformation and how
we make decisions. As the anthropologist David Graeber put it,
it is assumed in many parts of the world that
democracy is a group of people facing a certain problem

(12:25):
who come together to solve it in a way where
everyone has an equals say. It's true that most Americans
think of themselves as living in a democratic country. When
was the last time that any Americans actually sat down
and came to a collective decision? Maybe if they were
ordering pizza, but basically never. Dual power organizations thus also
service schools for democracy where people can learn, experiment with, create,

(12:49):
and spread their own forms of democracy and collective decision making.
When these spaces of democratic experimentation are functioning properly, their
very organizational structure serves as a kind of recruitment tool.
This was the original theory behind Occupy Wall Street, that
democracy and the experience of autonomy were contagious and would
spread rapidly as more and more curious people experienced it

(13:10):
for themselves. That experience, in turn, would create a new
generation of people trained in democratic practices who could go
forth and transform the world. Obviously, this didn't quite happen.
Occupies model of democracy was limited in many ways, not
the least of which was that it required a public,
physical meeting space that could be closed down by police violence.

(13:31):
But the initial premise worked. Occupy itself, of course, had
been inspired by the mass democratic assemblies in Spain, in
Greece in two thousand eleven, and the direct democratic coops
and factory occupations that engulfed Argentina for the better part
of the two thousand's. At the most basic, short term level, however,

(13:59):
dual power organizations are designed in people's needs. The cornerstone
of this effort is mutual aid. Probably the most famous
example of such a project was the Black Panther Party
survival programs. Former Black Panther Janina Irvin describes them in detail.
The Black Panther Party survival programs were, in fact an
example of an effort, a successful effort, while it lasted

(14:20):
to create dual power in the United States. The Black
Panther Party had a school, had free food programs. One
of its most respected survival programs was a breakfast for children,
which was overall a response to hunger and poverty in
the country, particularly among poor, low income Black people. We
had free medical clinics in Winston Salem, North Carolina. We

(14:41):
had free ambulances, free past control, free shoes. We had
free bussing to prison programs, legal aid programs to help
people get attorneys who needed them. And we had a
program that was called the Safe Program Seniors Against a
Fearful Environment, in which we provided free transportation and escort
service the senior citizens who needed to get out and
take or of their errands their business. They were often

(15:02):
being attacked, so this was a hour protection for them.
The Panthers were able to grow their influence by keeping
their communities safe, healthy, cared for, and increasingly autonomous for
the state. But most importantly, they were able to keep
people alive. As Black Panthers co founder hughe P. Newton
famously said, these survival programs satisfy the deep needs of

(15:24):
the community, but they are not solutions to our problem.
That is why we call them survival programs, meeting survival
pending revolution. The existence of the survival programs themselves reflect
the necessity of keeping people alive, especially people who the
state would rather kill or leave to die for building
any kind of power. These programs are also necessarily insufficient.

(15:47):
No mutual aid program, no autonomous project, no liberator territory
can provide for the entire community. While the corporation's capitalists
and states maintain their stranglehold over the resources and production
capacity at the working class collectively created over centuries of
grueling labor and struggle. Dual power, more than just survival,

(16:10):
is about building the counter power to take it back.
Building powers withdraws the line between what is and isn't
dual power. Growing food for you and your friends, make
cut down on bills, and make some killer pesto, but
it's not necessarily challenging the capitalist system. Autonomy for its
own sake is not necessarily dual power if it doesn't

(16:32):
actively aid and struggle or better organize the community. That
from the perspective of building counter power, that autonomy is meaningless.
Making food for striking workers to allow them to stay
on strike longer is building dual power. We're simply producing
it for general consumption is not. While dual power organizations

(16:52):
necessarily serve the needs of the community, they must also
be able to pivot and attack the state in capital
and provide solidarity and beach fual aid to those in
their community who are already in struggle, or they simply aren'
dual power organizations at all. The simplest solution to this problem,
of course, is to organize around a specific side of resistance.

(17:12):
Organizations that build up the capacity to fight can everge
from almost anywhere. The Symbiosis Research Collective described how dual
power organizations emerge from Palestinian prison organizing bring the First
into Fata and uprising against the Israeli governments in late
nineteen eighties. Most discussion of the First into Fata focuses
on the role of mass protests in making Palestinian society

(17:34):
ungovernable for the Israeli occupying forces. Less discussed is the
role of community organizations of mutual aid and confederated participatory
democracy and making such mass protests possible. Organizing from within
the political system was a political incubator of the Palestinian
resistance movement and offers a micro cosmic example of the

(17:54):
development of dual power in the much larger prison of
the occupation with hunger strikes, political prisoners eventually won concessions
for their own self administration within the prisons. They assembled
structures of political organization and representation, forced prison authorities to
recognize their representatives, and developed a division of labor around hygiene,

(18:15):
education and other daily tasks. Palestinian prisoners described this arrangement
as internal organization, similar to the concept of dual power.
Even the least free of circumstances. These prisoners carved out
space for self governments and created the preconditions to revolutionary struggle.
Prisoners taught and studied everything from Palestinian history to Marxist

(18:36):
political economy, often from eight to fourteen hours per day.
As freshly educated and trained political activists were released back
into society, the resistance movement was galvanized. Illiterate teenage boys
arrested for throwing stones re entered the fray months later
as committed, competent organizers who had studied movement building, strategic resistance,

(18:56):
and dialectical materialism. Meanwhile, the organizing context outside of the
prison transformed dramatically. Saleh Abou laban of Palestinian political prisoner
from nineteen seventy until nine, stated, when I entered the prison,
there wasn't a national movement. There were only underground cells
that performed clandestine lee. When I got out, I found

(19:18):
a world full of organizers, committees, and community institutions. Central
to this new world of community organizing was the Palestinian
labor movement. Unions were formed out of workers places of
residents rather than workplaces, because migrant labor was prevalent in
Palestinian unionism within Israel had been criminalized. Unions then formed
strong alliances with local organizations in the national movement with

(19:41):
rapid growth in the early nineteen eighties. Labor unions found
it necessary to centralize and democratize their structures to become
more resilient as Israeli repression intensified against union leaders and organizers.
These local unions were networked together through the Palestinian Communist
Party and the Workers Unity Block, creating a web of
labor organizers and community groups that linked their class struggle

(20:03):
to the larger projects of national liberation. This wave of resistance,
carried out largely outside the purview of the major Palestinian
political parties, showed that even communities and the most dire
circumstances can assemble astounding levels of organization and resistance, as
was also true in the United States. Although today the
memory of these prison radicals is largely forgotten, Palestinian organizing

(20:26):
emerged from the sites of deepest depression in their society.
But this kind and level of organization is not just
the property of the left, and in Part two we'll
see what happens when the right gets hold of it.
It could happen here as a production of cool Zone Media.
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(20:46):
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