Shut up about 'dual power', tool

Anarcho-Lenin's Dual Power

From: https://raddle.me/wiki/dualpower

Dual power was coined by Lenin to describe two powers (the Soviets and the existing government) temporarily coexisting with each other and competing for legitimacy with the ultimate goal of the Soviets expelling the other power and seizing control of the state (to install state capitalism / one party dictatorship).

Dual power has nothing whatsoever to do with anarchy. Anarchists are not and have never been advocates of dual power.

We are not a political party. We are not interested in competing with other political parties for power.

We are not interested in giving legitimacy to the state or its institutions.

We are not interested in seizing control of the state to install a 'people's dictatorship'.

We are also not interested in a so-called 'democratic dual power' whereupon we plead with the states / banks / corporations to be nicer to us by lobbying the people in power (electioneering) while also participating in charity work, like this Occupy activist / wealthy art critic proposes:

(Dual power) means forging alliances and supporting demands on existing institutions — elected officials, public agencies, universities, workplaces, banks, corporations, museums — while at the same time developing self-organized counter-institutions.

  1. This is not what dual power means. Stop trying to whitewash Leninist lingo and force it on anarchists.

  2. Anarchists are not interested in participating in the state/capital mechanism, period.

We don't ask the corporations to stop polluting. We don't ask the banks to stop printing and distributing the currency that upholds the class system. We don't ask the bosses to stop exploiting our labor. We don't ask politicians to stop serving their corporate benefactors. We don't ask coal to stop staining our fingers. We don't ask sandflies to stop biting our necks. We know better than to plead with our oppressors to stop oppressing us. Because we're anarchists and we understand the workings of authority. We understand we can only have back from them what we take by force.

When you prop up state/capital, work to further the legitimacy of its agents, while also embedding yourself into the system in order to 'change it from within', the theoretical 'counter-institutions' you claim to also support are effectively negated because guess what? People who work for the state are not countering the state in any way that counts.

Functionaries of the state and capital (whether lobby groups, campaigners / canvassers, political committees or 'progressive' politicians standing in elections) are not able to mount real opposition to the state or capital because they have been successfully absorbed by the state and capital and now do the bidding of the elite class, in one way or another.

Anyone claiming they're entering the belly of the beast so they can somehow tame the beast is a deluded dipshit. The acid in that belly will melt away any anarchist inclinations they may have held in seconds. The system is designed to absorb all threats to the system. Anyone who claims they can work within the system to counter the system is nothing more than a tool of the system.

It's so frustrating how often authoritarian ideology like dual power is absorbed by red anarchists and then promoted in anarchist spaces every single day.

Anyone claiming to be anti-authority while going out of their way to organize collective action (e.g. the USA's DSA) to further the authority of politicians / a political party / the state is a liar and a coward.

You will not reform authority. Authority will reform you. Into a tool.

Once you ingrain yourself within systems of authority, specifically within the system that exploits the living shit out of billions of people: Enslaves, incarcerates, poisons, genocides, invades, bulldozes, acidifies, destertifies and burns every corner of the planet, you have abandoned any claim to anarchy you may have once held. You are not an anarchist. You are just another clink in the state's ever-expanding armor, devoting your pathetic little activist life to legitimizing, and thus shielding the state from those brutalized by it.

Your dual power tales are as useful to anarchists as the charity galas where you rub elbows with the robber barons you expect us to beg for table scraps.

There are 10 Comments

Why tangle with the concept of dual power? Regular old capitalist state power does okay.
Signed, anarchist government officials Federica Monseny and anarchist chief law enforcement officer, Juan Garcia Oliver.

Dual power emerges organically in mass revolutionary upheavals where the possibility of the old order being destroyed is on the historical agenda. People who try to turn this into the private property of Lenin would gain much by cracking open a few history tomes.

yeah, doesn't graeber's last book suggest something that seems a lot like dual power would arguably have always existed in antagonism with any centralized state since the first?

and even the leninist definition of the concept would have this problem of understanding the principle backwards, as those who were born inside a prison would have a warped understanding of what their power meant, once they managed to escape.

Lenin's doctrine aka Engels's primitive communism, i.e. the framework of Engels/Marxist doctrine was built upon the property-less indigenous society's values which Engel plagiarized from the Romanticist era methodologies of anthropists of that era.
If you understand anything about power, it requires will, and is/never will be a dualist wrestle but rather the --individual-- realizing their full potential in laissez faire market places. Forget about ideological regulatory systems, one must ultimately discard notions of collective unity and pursue freedom internally as a self-empowered entity.

Brillint. Thanx for intro to a humorous unknown kindred spirit, bookmarked!

Dual power describes the dynamic that existed in the Republican zone of Spain from roughly July 21, 1936 until the CNT became a junior partner in the capitalist state in Sept. 1936. Things could have gone a better way than that, too.

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