Dual Power Part 2

What happens when the right gets their hands on dual power and prefigurative politics?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
It's been three months since you and your co workers
took control of the hospital. Things aren't back to normal yet.
You're not even really sure what normal is anymore, but
the days have fallen into a kind of routine. It's Thursday,
which means it's your turn to go report back to
what a friend jokingly referred to as the Endless Meeting
Assembly was now forever known as the e m A.

(00:24):
The e m A is technically the closest thing left
to a central government in Seattle. It was formed as
a sort of coordinating council between the various organizations and
workers councils that had emerged or simply emerged from the
woodworks in the wake of the collapse of the police.
Two things have become clear very quickly. One, there was
need for some kind of coordinating committee between the different

(00:45):
bodies to The only people who had any idea what
was going on in their portion of the city or
in their workplace were the members of the local council,
which meant there was no way in hell any kind
of central apparatus could dictate to them what actually needed
to be done. They're just wasn't a way to move
the information around the solution had been decentralization. Let the
councils do their work, let them work out who they

(01:07):
needed to talk to, but make sure there was some
kind of daily council that people could show up to.
Were the various groups we do report backs and what
they were doing and what they needed. The structure was messy,
but it mostly worked, and at least someone had had
the idea to make sure if the delegate to the
e m A rotated so one person wasn't stuck spending
after life showing up every day. The problem really was

(01:29):
the same problem you've been dealing with for months now.
Even with the pooling of resources and people donating their
last precious American dollars to paying people to import more supplies,
the blockade was taking its toll. Nobody wanted to try
to force their way through the blockades and the cascades.
There's been some attempts to get in touch with groups
in Portland, but the control map was so ugly there

(01:51):
was no real chance of getting any assistance. Besides, the
real problem was the port. When the cops had fled,
the ships should simply stopped coming. They routed further south,
many of them to Oakland, or so you'd heard. The
logistics lines were collapsing faster than anyone could piece them
back together. What the long term consequences would be no

(02:11):
one knew, but something was going to have to change.
The calls to start engaging in piracy were only half oaks. Now.
A week later, an answer of sorts arrived. It wasn't
precisely what anyone had been expecting. You'd heard about negotiations
between workers councils, shipping companies, and a couple of governments

(02:31):
to try to prevent a bloodbath the docks with the
porter to Seattle already at a commission, no one could
afford another stoppage. You hadn't really been sure what to
make of it, but the representatives were here now. What
they proposed in front of the largest assembly you'd ever
seen was a kind of under the table deal. In essence,
the port workers would go back to work in both
Oakland and Seattle in exchange for seeding part of Oakland

(02:54):
itself to a newly formed federation. No one was sure
how any of this was actually supposed to work, but
it was the first chance you'd seen in months to
start solving the supply problem. That didn't mean everyone else
would agree to it. Democracy is still democracy, after all,
But maybe, just maybe, with a toe hold in Oaklands,
the Council's would start to spread, and that so called

(03:15):
government in California was looking shakier every day. Who knew,
maybe next time you wouldn't be negotiating at all. In
March or two thousand four, American occupation forces in Iraq
attempted to shut down the newspaper of a Shiite cleric
named Matada el Solder. The Americans had expected Sodder to

(03:39):
simply fold under the weight of the coalition's pressure. Instead,
they triggered mass protest that quickly turned into an armed uprising.
This was a new force at a Rock. The American
occupation Force, who've been expecting to be fighting al Quaeda
and maybe the rump of the remaining Baptists, were stunned
to suddenly be facing a working class uprising among a

(04:00):
rock a population. This new body Army, as it began
to call itself, was extremely well organized and were initially
able to route coalition forces. So what was this body
army that had so thoroughly rewritten the rules of Rock?
Shortly after the US to posted on musse in two
thousand and three Booktato Sauder, the son of another famous

(04:21):
Rocky shi At religious figure. Both Sauders had been famous
for this support and care for the poor. So when
Sauder returned to a Rock, he began to build a
political base among the Rocks working class, particularly in Solder City,
a working class suburb of Baghdad. He used his organization
to redistribute wealth, providing form of welfare states in an

(04:42):
almost completely shattered country, but are In his allies also
began to set up a network of freak clinics for
pregnant and nursing mothers. They used these clinics, which were
enormously popular, to build a base of support. It is,
after all, extremely difficult, no matter what your ideological or
political agreements with the group, to attack them when they're

(05:02):
running free clinics for pregnant mothers. They protected these clinics
with militias, which allowed them to transform the community organizations
and good will that they had gained from the clinic
into the military power necessary for self governance and eventually
for resistance against the American occupation. Strategy proved enormously successful.
Mattato Sauder is still today one of the most important

(05:24):
political figures in Iraq despite sustained coalition and occupation force
attempts to stamp them out. But for all their working
class support, the Solderists were by no means leftists. In
late twenty nineteen, massive anti asterity, anti imperialists, and anti
sectarian protests erupted in Iraq as a reaction to the
murderous incompetence of the Iraqi government, who, among other crimes,

(05:48):
managed to poison a hundred and eighteen thousand people in
Bosra through the mismanagement and subsequent contamination of the water supply.
Also are initially backed the protest, but turned on them
in early at which point soteristm militias begin to carry
out a brutal campaign of repression against the protest camps
that culminated in outrent massacres of protesters. These massacres became

(06:12):
semi regular features of soterist mass mobilizations, and alongside state
and paramilitary disappearances of activists, the attacks essentially crushed the uprising.
The violent homophobia and sexism of the soderust may see
met odds with their anti imperialism and concern for the poor,
but right wing organizations have often adapted specific policies, positions,

(06:34):
and organizational structures from the left, and in this case
the Soderius mobilizations have been extremely effective. Indeed, writing organizations
are often more effective at utilizing dual power tactics and
organizations and leftist movements. This is partly because of a
fundamental asymmetry between the right and the left. Right wing
organizations can almost always pend on financial support from wealthy

(06:55):
political backers, who, when push comes to shove, can simply
create a movement with pure money, as the Cokes did
to create the Tea Party. Leftists the ravings of right
wing conspiracy theorists, notwithstanding, have no such backers. This funding

(07:21):
and support can go a long way towards explaining the
successive groups like Hezblah. It is certainly true that without
Iranian support, Hezbollah would not be the movement that it
is today, but a great deal of their success is
simply attributable to the tactics themselves. This does not escaped
the notice of the U. S. Army Joint Special Operations Universities.
Major James Love wrote a monograph entitled hes Bellah Social

(07:44):
Services a Source of Power. In it, he writes the
most important branch of the Hezbillah organization is a social
service section, which can be demonstrated by the allocation of
an estimated fifty of hesbla's two thousand seven budget service efforts.
It is through the work of the Social Service Section
that all party activities are possible. Hesbalah's Social Service Section

(08:07):
was designed to influence all aspects of Lebinezia society. The
original intent of providing needed services to an oppressed people
appears to have been manipulated by Hesbillah as a vehicle
to bolster its ranks, provide a humanitarian shield to the organization,
increased influence within the Lebanese government, and combat at Shia
arrival on Ball. The Social Service Section serves as an

(08:30):
equal arm within the organization and is used as much
as the military and political wing in terms of leverage.
Hesbilah's Deputy Secretary General describes the purpose and intent of
the Social Service Section and the following passage. Hesbalah paid
particular attention to social work. Not one aspect of aiding
the poor was neglected, as the party work towards achieving

(08:52):
joint social responsibility, answering their urgent needs, and introducing beneficial
programs such work was policy considered party duty and concentrated
effort towards raising funds and making available social service resources served.
Towards achieving these goals, the party worked the best of
its capacities, cooperating with official institutions to his bond societal needs.

(09:16):
Has Blah's provided medical aid, reconstruction assistance, education programs, and
particularly programs that take care of patrons and widows, which
have served to solidify their base. These organizations were critical
to has Belah's meteoric rise from a political nonentity to
arguably the most powerful factuated side of Lebanese politics. Has
Bela's state within a state, as it's become known, it's

(09:39):
capable of even resisting the Israeli Army. Major Love's frustration
with the inability of the American Army to either deny
has Blah's own aid efforts or replicate them in a
way that could strengthen American power are testaments the effectiveness
of such a technique and the dangers they posed to
the American imperial and state project. One of his Love's
major concerns is that American aid program ms are simply

(10:00):
caught up in red tape. They're unable to respond as
fast as community led efforts, which means that those efforts
will get off the ground faster, get to the scene faster,
and thus route the political benefits. When the state is
unwilling or unable to provide services, especially in the wake
of disasters, it leaves a power vacuum for organizations to exploit.

(10:20):
May not have heard of the RSS before. It's a
paramilitary group affiliated with India's ruling party, the b j P,
counts among its members India's Prime Minister Modi. It's also
probably the world's largest fascist organization. The RSS was founded
in a group nominally dedicated to protecting and promoting Hindu interests.

(10:43):
What this means in practice is that the RSS is
dedicated to creating a Hindu state and maintains and promotes
a violent hatred of Muslims. The results in RSS members
being at the forefront of anti Muslim programs. The r
s s is pre World War Two leaders were open
admirers of Hitler and Mussolini, and while they eventually abandoned
those positions at the start of World War Two, the

(11:04):
rsss politics have remained thoroughly fascist. In the intense communal
rioting that both preceded and followed the partition of India
and Pakistan. After independence, which saw mass population transfers of
Hindus and Muslims and the death of somewhere between two
hundred thousand and two million people, the RSS established itself
as a protector of Hindi refugees against Muslim violence, provided

(11:26):
protection and aid to those trying to survive the chaos.
The good will is generated, however, collapse After a former
RSS member did the singa most famous thing anyone associated
with the RSS has ever done, assassinated Gandhi. The RSS
was almost immediately banned, but in light of the terrible
pr you get when you're associated with killing Gandhi, the

(11:49):
RSS became increasingly involved with disaster relief. Over half a
century of painstaking organizing, it created schools and youth programs
to spread its influence and use them the fuel further
anti Muslim violence. In two thousand one, the organization gained
national acclaim for its response to a massive earthquake and Gunjarat.

(12:09):
The RSS heavily emphasized the non discriminatory nature of their
aid work in their propaganda, but in reality, many of
the villages the RS s had rebuilt after the devastation
had been transformed into miniature versions of the fabled Hindu
state that the RSS seeks to impose on all of India. Strategically,
this should look familiar to us now. It's essentially a

(12:32):
fascist form of prefigurative politics. The RSS used an earthquake
to build the structure of the new Hindu society in
the shell of the old. The BJP's dominance over Indian
politics while led by a member of the RSS, and
the brutal crackdowns body carried out in Kashmir our bloody
testament to the success of their strategy. Christian fundamentalist organizations

(12:55):
have also been extremely effective and utilizing their own form
of routing profigurative politics, so in a somewhat different way.
In the RSS, their new world is defined above all
by theocratic patriarchal authoritarianism. Like the radicals that occupy the

(13:20):
religious right was operating off the form of contagian theory,
theory that exposure to their social organizations and forms would
essentially be contagious and spread. But the Christian rights preferred
form as the patriarchal family, which serves as a microcosm
of the kind of hierarchy and patriarchal violence that dominate
their long dreamed of theocratic society. The Christian Right would

(13:44):
instill these values into their children and send them off
into the world to propagate their ideology. Ettinger, an expert
on the Christian Right, wrote this about the second phase
of the strategy. In several church leaders came up with
a new approach, identifying seven spheres of culture to focus
on one after another to try to bring about the

(14:04):
lasting change and have a significant impact on the superstructure
of American culture. Lauren Cunningham, founder of Youth with the Mission,
a Christian missionary group coordinating international and national mission church
for young Christians, describes these seven areas as such, these
are the areas you can go on as missionaries. Here

(14:24):
they are first, it's the institution set up by God.
First the family. After the family was the church or
the people of God. The third was the area of
school or education. The fourth was media public communication in
all forms printed in electronic. The fifth was what I

(14:45):
call celebration, the arts, entertainment, sports, where you celebrate within
a culture. The six would be the whole area of
the economy, which starts with innovation and science. And technology, productivity,
sales and service. The whole area. We often call it business,
but we leave out something. We leave out the scientific

(15:06):
part which actually raises the wealth of the world, anything
new like making sand and chips for a microchip that
increases wealth in the world. And then of course prediction,
sales and service helps to spread the wealth. And so
the last area was the area of government. This is
a need encapsulation of the rights p Refigurative politics start

(15:28):
first with the family, and then with the church. Then
reshaped school and education and mass media in their image,
and from there you can begin to take the entire economy.
Churches have also long used aid programs to proselytize and
also expand their control over the population, which becomes dependent
on their aid. In the places where the left has

(15:48):
failed to provide for their community, the far right has
stepped in and has been able to rapidly and effectively
reshape the political landscape. This does not mean, however, that
they can't be beaten. Cooperation Jackson has offered one of
the most powerful visions of dual power in the modern US.
A product of the New African People's Organization and the

(16:09):
Malcolm X grassroots movements Jackson Cush Plan Cooperation. Jackson has
put forward a radical and democratic bottle of dual power
with the aim of turning over control of the land
and the means of production into Jackson's black working class
and allowing it to achieve its own self determination corporation.
Jackson has formed mutual Aid Networks, started an incubated program

(16:30):
to help workers cooperatives get off the ground, and formed
a community land trust that purchases abandoned buildings in Jackson
and turns them over to the community. They've also somewhat
unusually wound up engaged in the electoral process after the
untimely death of Ally and Jackson Mayor Choqua la Boomba,
which led to the election of his son Choqua at
La Bomba, displaced the movement in a somewhat awkward position

(16:52):
of having allies, even if constrained by the realities of
state power in the state itself. But Paul Politics in
the real world is never as clean as the models
we create to describe it. It is only in our
ability to adapt the changing conditions of struggle while maintaining
our political principles that we can build the new world

(17:13):
in the shell of the old and we can build it.
The question simply, will we? It could Happen here as
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(17:36):
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