I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the way to do effective base building in the US, and my thoughts returned to this Liberation School article from a few years ago that analyzes dual power, mutual aid, and direct service. I’d love to hear the thoughts of comrades on this piece and the concept generally.
Some excerpts:
The Black Rose Anarchist Federation is among the more prominent organizations popularizing this new understanding of dual power. This reformulation of the concept has its roots in anarchist writings on the subject that emerged in the early 2000s, in the aftermath of the anti-globalization movement. As an expression of its current position, this organization republished an article last year called “Active Revolution”, originally written in a 2002 issue of the publication The Northeastern Anarchist. It defines dual power this way:
Dual power theorizes a distinct and oppositional relationship between the forces of the state/capitalism and the revolutionary forces of oppressed people. The two can never be peacefully reconciled.
With the theory of dual power is a dual strategy of public resistance to oppression (counter-power) and building cooperative alternatives (counter-institutions). Public resistance to oppression encompasses all of the direct action and protest movements that fight authoritarianism, capitalism, racism, sexism, homophobia, and the other institutionalized oppressions. Building cooperative alternatives recreates the social and economic relationships of society to replace competitive with cooperative structures.
It’s hard to imagine what doesn’t fall under such a broad definition. Instead of institutions like Venezuela’s National Constituent Assembly or the Soviets of the Russian Revolution that have the capacity to exercise state power — to enforce the rule of either workers and the oppressed or the capitalist class — the “power” in dual power simply refers to the fact that there are two camps in society locked in conflict with one another. That the interests of the exploited and oppressed are opposite and irreconcilable with the interests of the exploiters and oppressors is no revelation. This is simply a restating of the materialist conception of history. That revolutionaries should participate in politics — the struggle for power in society — is a concept so elementary that it has little utility for those looking for a concrete strategy to pursue.
take a moment for a minor anti-anarchist polemic
For revolutionaries, base building refers to long-term efforts to create a durable reserve of support within a particular section of the working class. This is usually constructed on the basis of a workplace or a neighborhood. The provision of services is an important element of base building work. But this needs to be done in a way that does not promote the view that the creation of a vast network of worker-owned cooperatives or activist-administered social programs is a path to power. Properly applied, “serve the people” programs are primarily an outreach tactic with the goal of identifying sites of potential class struggle, rather than a manifestation of dual power.
To consider some practical examples, the Philadelphia branch of the Party for Socialism and Liberation is involved in a number of base building activities that utilize direct service events along these lines. In May, we organized a block party through our Kensington-based community center called the Philadelphia Liberation Center. At the block party, we distributed bags of household essentials and childcare goods marked with our Party logo, and also organized music, childrens’ activities, and a cookout to give neighbors a chance to socialize. Events geared towards meeting residents’ cultural and recreational needs can be just as effective as those aimed at meeting material needs, and has the added benefit of attracting in greater numbers the layers of the neighborhood with a baseline level of stability conducive to future organizing efforts.
Kensington is being intensely targeted by the big banks and real estate firms for gentrification. We made the right to housing the political theme of the block party, produced a special pamphlet for it, and promoted the event with the framing “strong communities can resist gentrification.” In the course of our outreach for the block party, we met a long-time, well-respected resident of the neighborhood who was fighting the construction of a massive, luxury apartment complex on the small residential street where she lived. She invited us to attend an upcoming hearing on the construction, and from there to join the fight on an ongoing basis. The practical commitment to the well-being of people in the neighborhood demonstrated by the PSL’s cadre earned the trust of the people, who invited us to intervene in this local issue. From there, we were able to help launch the Norris Square Community Action Network, which carried out a well-attended picket of the construction site and is also moving forward with other projects in the neighborhood.
I think it’s a nice polemic on correcting the vulgarizing the anarchists have been doing with communist tactics. Even the examples given are quite pleasant small-scale actions that are practical and achievable for the varying communist cells across the nation
That is not what I understand dual power to reference. And I’m not just being a big nerd because I also can’t understand what their own stated meaning is.
The anarchist quote or the Lenin quote?
The anarchist one!
Yeah it basically just boils down to calling all leftist organizing dual power.
Ah. That seems… incorrect? Lots of “leftist” “organizing” is counterproductive which is why the feds promote it.
To me it is usually a red flag when people talk about building dual power given the Bolshevik context. That is a fact of thr Russian context of soviets against a weakened monarchy and a weak national bourgeoisie. There is no reason to expect that mode to be the model for revolution in, say, the modern imperial core. It feels LARPy to me. Usually the people I have had say it to me are people reading Marx and Lenin for the first time.
More accurately to the article, dual power can not exist and be built during regular periods, it has to be built and introduced during times of crisis (historically this has been done rapidly by having a well-equipped and well-connected communist party as the article suggest). You’re right that we’re not going to build those institutions now, and that’s exactly what the article is saying, but instead that these things function and work in periods of instability in society; and are successful based off of being able to bring regular people into them and have regular people put their trust and faith moreso into them than their fear of the currently existing government.
The article says that “dual power” tactics as we commonly see them are best done for outreach, not to be done for their own ends, but instead as ways to access sections of the community and create the potential to really bring people into a revolutionary party and eventually building dual power structures when periods of serious crisis occur.
Matching the framing of the article, that makes the “dual power” presented a catch-all again, though. Those tactics are those of party organizing, community embedding, mutual aid, organized labor (and embedding) etc. Standard socialist things.
In my experience, people getting too far in the weeds on misapplying jargon end up missing the basic facts we all need to focus on in order to realistically imagine success. How many of us are there? What are the key aspects of what makes us “us” versus “them”? How do we create more of “us”, which means both increasing org membere but also maintaining reasonable lines, not simply expanding by acquiring liberal/reactionary character. Community embedding is not an end to itself and if is treated that way it tends to be inauthentic or anemic.
Example: Like, great, you [not you prrsonally] have a mutual aid program in the poorer X neighborhood, though it actually functions as a charity. Where does this embed you? Do locals have a favorable opinion? Are they joining you, creating coalition orgs? Are NGOs and capitap investment winning out over you? Are people more sympathetic to having more cops than they are to your org because the cops did their version of a capital strike and everyone is now afraid of gang activity and your org pushed a line before developing sufficient community buy-in? Were you ready for the liberal/NGO recuperation? It’s possible that this sounds like a condescending lecture but from experience I can tell you that there is no lack of orgs and individuals plodding around and not considering these things seriously but still throwing around terms like mutual aid to describe charities and dual power to describe [undefined] and actually building distrust of socialists in communities (especially incompetent white orgs in black communities).
I don’t think the article is saying these tactics constitute dual power. Rather, it is saying that, while leftists often associate these tactics with dual power, the tactics are better understood as outreach. I think this is also what CutieBootieTootie meant by putting “dual power” in quotes here:
The article says that “dual power” tactics as we commonly see them are best done for outreach
They’re not dual power tactics, they’re “dual power” tactics.
Here’s an excerpt from the article itself:
The bulk of the current debate over the role of dual power in a strategy for revolution in the United States rests on a relatively recent redefinition and decontextualization of the concept, in which it is effectively stripped of its meaning by becoming so broad that it could refer to almost anything. This, in turn, results in the misunderstanding and misapplication of tactics related to directly meeting the needs of the working class, building a base of support, and ultimately making a revolution.
