Thread by @BlackSocialists

Something that must be understood:

The term “dual power” was coined by Lenin in 1917, but most of the core conceptual underpinnings for this term were spoken to by Proudhon in 1851, over half a century earlier (please see here: panarchy.org/proudhon/econo…).

This is worth unpacking.

Let’s start with Lenin’s first use of the term in 1917 (see here: marxists.org/archive/lenin/…) when he began to observe workers self-organizing + self-governing, cultivating power that ran parallel to the power of the Russian Provisional Government set up after Nicholas II abdicated.

While Lenin emphasized characteristics of the soviets and their use of power that we’d certainly admire today, this was, for him, ultimately contextualized around the idea of this power being used to develop state power (as opposed to making the state obsolete and destroying it).

Lenin’s statements on this “dual power” situation, paired with his publication of “The April Theses” in 1917, were so bottom-up and libertarian in framing, however, that even some of his closest Bolshevik comrades viewed them as opportunistic and sympathetic to Anarchist outlook.

When Lenin stated, “Nobody previously thought, or could have thought, of a dual power,” this couldn’t have been further from the truth.

Anarchists had spoken to the broader, bottom-up dynamics he was observing for decades already.

See 1917 Lenin (1) and 1851 Proudhon (2) below.

In 1851, Proudhon put most stress on a broader economic process initiated by poor and working-class people allowing us to free ourselves of “all authority” (coercive/imposed authority is the issue), though some of his economic + political suggestions were incomplete or incorrect.

Our org understands that, in addition to new economic processes of cooperation and solidarity germinating, we also need new political vehicles, institutions, and/or forums that allow people to address the matters/issues impacting their everyday lives in a directly democratic way.

Some describe the building of new, directly democratic economic and political institutions as building “counterpower” as an alternative to “dual power.” While this is useful, to reduce usage of “dual power” to statist orientation taken by Lenin over one century ago is antiquated.

It could be argued that rejection of the use of the term “dual power” simply because of its associations with Lenin and his statist orientation is a rejection of rightful appropriation of language describing frameworks steeped in centuries of anti-authoritarian theory + practice.

All of this is why many Libertarian Socialists and Social Ecologists have appropriated the term “dual power,” and why it has been frequently used in Libertarian Socialist and Social Ecology spaces for the last few years.

It is something we encourage as an anti-authoritarian org.

We know our org may have used (or uses) terms/language that could be interpreted as statist at times.

Thus, to be clear, while we understand the state must be dealt with, our focus is prefiguration: building a new world that can make the old world (including the state) obsolete.

You can find more on what we mean by “dual power” in the thread below.

https://twitter.com/BlackSocialists/status/1269072449351618562?s=20