What is “dual power”? Dual power, most generally, is the phenomenon of the existence of two distinct powers in the social relations within the institutions of a capitalist society (the system and the people, the state and the resistance, capital and labor, etc.) – the existence of an entrenched, constituted power AND a transformative, constituent power. Revolutionary Democracy’s definitions and uses of dual power differ from previous ones.
Leninist-derived groups express dual power only vis-à-vis the state. The “second power” within this dual power relation exists only as resistance to (and for seizure of) that state power. They really only use the term “dual power,” then, to describe an event – the sufficient empowerment of the transformative, constituent power on the precipice of revolution.
Many anarchist groups also operate mostly within a state-bound formulation of “dual power,” but instead build toward a second power that exists totally outside of the state. Other anarchist groups do organize otherwise isolated examples of resistance to the state (and thus don’t completely forego engaging state power), but that dual power is still state-based, and has its ultimate goal as the unequivocal abolition of that state.
Revolutionary Democracy sees dual power differently – temporally, corporeally, and strategically.
In Revolutionary Democracy, dual power exists all the time and everywhere – at work, in your home, in the broader society, even within the movement itself. This conception of dual power is more in tune with people’s everyday experience of being forced into a labor process that creates surplus for someone else, and our many daily forms of resistance to it – from slacking at work to organizing and empowering others. And this clearly is not just an economic/labor phenomenon. Just about everyone, everywhere can measure their power against capital’s power – or against other entrenched, constituted power – and know, at a gut-level, “the system sucks.”
This recognition of dual power as an ever-present phenomenon is in no small way linked to Revolutionary Democracy’s recognition of capital (in its broadest definitions) as a social relation, not as a static “thing” – that is, once something is intended to be used as capital (or has become capital), it is inherently imbued with an exploitative social process. Transforming capital into a tool of the people – bending the machine to our will instead of raging against it – is one way that Revolutionary Democracy succeeds in making dual power (cognizant of capital as a social relation) a “living theory” (linked to practice) – a theory in action, a theory in motion.
Therefore, Revolutionary Democracy will sometimes use the term “dual power” to also mean the building or establishing of the “second power.” One might say the city machine was entrenched power, but the growth of EON (dual power as an action) created a state of more clearly discernible dual power (dual power as a phenomenon or fact). Creating consciousness-raising empowerment – direct experiences of agency and self-determination – therefore renders the phrase “dual power” an ongoing strategic process (one that both leads to radicalization as people simply “live the revolution,” and one that furthers cause of achieving specific goals – an example is the widening outreach of “Empower Our Neighborhoods” at present).
Dual Power, Strategy, and Tactics
Dual power meant as the cultivation of the “second power” then, is perhaps the very essence of Revolutionary Democratic strategy. When we strategize, we identify enemies and allies and gain a general plan of how we attack the problem. If the phenomenon/existence of dual power (two powers present in an institution/social relation) is, according to Revolutionary Democracy, omnipresent, then the ongoing fundamental answer to the question “How do we win?” is simple: “Build dual power (cultivate, strengthen the second power). Build it everywhere.” It is here that we see Revolutionary Democracy willing to utilize and infiltrate existing, constituted powers while simultaneously strengthening transformative, constituent power outside those structures. This means we do not dismiss actions such as running for elected office as revolutionaries (an example might be the People’s Campaign of 2000), or, say, building dual power even in institutions like the military or police (unlike anarchists bent on statelessness per se).The degree to which any institution, social relation, etc. is allied with the cause of the people determines how that “dual use” (of the system, and of forces outside it) will take shape. All tactics – more specific, immediate, concrete answers to that question, “How do we win?” – flow from the strategic Revolutionary Democratic theory AND practice of “dual power.”
Friday, July 18, 2008
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Brian, this is an excellent summary and statement of the essence of dual power and a phenomenon and as a strategy.
ReplyDeleteThe revolutionary democratic understanding and application of dual power is in fact a retrieval of the political core of Marx's analysis of the capital social relation in the first volume of Capital. Marx shows that the essence of that social relation is the imposition of the commodity-form on labor. This is the condition under which everyone is forced to sell his labor-power as though it were his personal commodity in order to have any access whatsoever to social wealth (food, shelter, medicine, anything we create collaboratively as a people). At bottom, the capital social relation is one in which one class, the capitalist class, forces another class to work in order to produce surplus. In this sense it is no different from any preceding class arrangement.
The imposition of work is an ongoing, contradictory process. As Marx states in the chapter on Primitive Accumulation, people are more likely to become vagabonds and criminals than they are to become wage-laborers. The capital social relation is so unnatural, so inimical to "human nature", that the capitalist class was literally forced to exterminate entire peoples like the aborginal people of North America, so great was their resistance to the barbarity of the institution of wage-slavery. The form in which the capitalist class intends work, and with it worth and value, to appear itself contradicts the content of that work, the genius and power of human creativity. At the level of things, this appears as the contradiction in the commodity between use-value (content of concrete labor) and exchange-value (form under which that labor is forced to appear). At the level of social relations, it appears as all the ways people have refused to work.
There is no extra political content to grow up out of this rebellion against the imposition of the commodity-form, since the refusal to work under conditions given by capital is already political. This is why the phenomenon of dual power and the strategy of dual power are one. Strategy is comprehension of the basic forms of class war, which latter has its source in the imposition of wage-slavery.
Class struggle and hence dual power is not thereby restricted to struggle over the wage. While imposition of the commodity-form on labor constitutes the essence of the capital social relation, and while resistance to that imposition takes the form of dual power, it is equally true that capital has structured time outside the factory so that it helps support and reproduce the capitalist mode of production. This is why "home economics" is about doing more with less, and this is why "education" is about silencing thought and creativity, stamping out anti-capitalist perceptions, and treating the world as though it were a given, natural thing rather than an absurd creation of human evil and malevolence. And this is why we need dual power strategies for the home, for education, for the unemployed, and for anyone considered on the "margins" of the "orthodox Marxist" picture of the universe.
In short, dual power is directly grounded in the condition of capitalism itself, in the resistance every rational person feels in his bones against slavery, in the aspiration every self-conscious individual has for autonomy.