Monday, July 30, 2007

Dual Power (Keith, X.,Tommy D) by X.

At its core, Revolutionary Democracy is a strategy of dual power. The revolutionary democratic movement literally seeks to build a new, parallel society – however embryonic or preliminary – right in the middle of the oppressive system. Revolutionary Democracy mobilizes people to build their own democratically-controlled grassroots institutions (focused on the collective gathering and provisioning of social necessities such as education, healthcare, or even food, as well as on the production and dissemination of art and music, for example), organizations (neighborhood councils, student groups, tenant unions, etc.) and events (campaigns, festivals, rallies, etc.) that exist parallel to and in defiance of the system. These alternative instutions organized alomng revolutionary democractic line where people work together and decide togther are the base areas from which we can subvert, undermine, takeover, and overthrow the systems power. Dual power, for revolutionary democracy, is not only the building of an alternative, dual power is also the dismantling of the systems power.

The revolutionary democratic movement enables people to penetrate and take over the system’s organizations (city councils, school boards, trade unions, etc.) and institutions (universities, libraries, businesses, etc.) and to put them increasingly under the democratic control of those that do the work (i.e., not the millionaire politicians and appointed boards of trustees/directors) and those that live in the communities that these entities are intended to serve. In this dynamic of dual power, the alternative revolutionary democratic institutions and organizations provide the initial backbone for the movement and make it possible for organizers within the system to remain connected, to liberate resources (most of which are currently underutilized or even wasted) and to practice revolutionary democracy at every opportunity (within a union local, a project team at the office, a church group, a student government, etc). Revolutionary Democracy calls for the establishment of revolutionary democratic practices in our own spaces as well as within the system’s institutions (from city hall to the office to the church).

As the people that produce the resources (whether material, cultural or intellectual) begin to establish a regular practice of controlling those resources collectively and democratically, revolutionary democratic institutions increasingly become a direct challenge to the system, and to the system’s methods of garnering resources through exploitation and plunder.

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