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Title: Building Dual Power Author: Wesley Morgan Date: 2005 Language: en Topics: Dual Power, Northeast Federation of Anacho-Communists, Black Rose Anarchist Federation, Northeastern Anarchist Source: Retrieved on 2020-04-12 from https://blackrosefed.org/retreat-advance-dual-power/ Notes: Originally published in The Northeastern Anarchist, #10, Spring/Summer 2005 under the title “Where They Retreat, We Must Advance: Building Dual Power.”
“We will take or win all possible reforms with the same spirit that one
tears occupied territory from the enemy’s grasp in order to go on
advancing, and we will always remain enemies of every government” –
Errico Malatesta
Reformists have been accused of sacrificing long-term goals to
short-term expediency, and revolutionaries, on the other hand, have too
often sacrificed the concerns of today to a vision of tomorrow. Building
a revolutionary strategy means/implies thinking about how our
short-term, medium-term, and long-term activities are linked, as what we
do today influences what we do tomorrow.
Questions of strategy loom large in anarchist discussions, as do
concerns regarding our marginalization as a movement — I am sure that
there are no anarchists who have not been told that anarchism is “just
not possible”. Moreover, revolutionary groups face an uphill battle
because most revolutionary situations have led, in the end, to tyranny.
In the chaos that often follows revolutions, so-called revolutionary
groups have generally re-created the institutional life of the “Old
Regime”.
Abstract promises of a grand liberatory revolution are simply not
sufficient. While I am a committed anarchist, I cannot fault people who
see an anarchist revolution as unachievable. Social domination
structures our experience so systematically that it begins to acquire a
“facticity”, it appears to be “just the way things are done”. It is very
sensible and practical not to worry about changing things that you can
do little about, like the weather. We always make decisions within the
context of external constraint, getting on with life means accepting
these constraints and making decisions within those limits. Because
domination is so pervasive, addressing it literally involves a
revolution, it requires fundamental changes in the way that we organize
our social, political, and economic institutions. If we reject
domination, which is the basis for the dictatorial “one-man rule” model
of workplace organization [1], the ability of a person to control others
on the basis of a specific organizational role, what do we have? How
will things get done? Does it mean breaking society apart and going off
to live in the woods? In contrast to “one-man rule,” advocates of
self-management have long advanced radically democratic models of
workplace organization.
For most sensible people, however, self-management might be a nice idea,
but it is simply not possible, domination is just “how things get done.”
All individuals construct their frameworks of interpretation and
understanding in terms of their concrete, material experiences. The
compelling force of a lifetime of direct experience with authority
suggests that authority is necessary, although unpleasant. People might
think that it would be nice to sprout wings out of their backs and fly
around, but their materially-rooted interpretive frameworks, based upon
concrete, material experience tell them that this is unlikely to happen.
Unfortunately, for many, self-management goes into the same category. It
is noteworthy, in this context, that a study of attitudes towards
workplace democracy found that for both managers and workers the single
greatest predictor of support for workplace democracy was experience
with workplace democracy (Collom, 2003: 88). Why? Because people who
have experienced workplace democracy have had the experience of
democratic workplace relations actually working. Revolutionaries,
anarchist communists in particular, need to offer more than dreams and
critiques of the status quo. These creative and critical skills are
necessary but not sufficient. The challenge lies in building practical,
livable alternatives. The only thing that can puncture the hegemony of
dictatorial workplace ideologies is concrete, material, living proof of
democratic workplaces, and practical experience with these modes of
organizing. As the saying goes, actions speak louder than words, and
what might be termed the “propaganda value” of dual power[2]
organizations is crucial in building a strong, broadly based mass
movement. If anarchists can actually show people that self-management
works, then we can be taken seriously when we agitate for a self-managed
society.
However, beyond the “propaganda value” of dual power organizations, dual
power is an essential element of going beyond an insurrectionary
politics, towards a more broadly revolutionary politics. Beyond
practically demonstrating that self-management works, building dual
power organizations is valuable because it begins to develop the
infrastructure of the revolution, to create the active capacity for
self-management. As Errico Malatesta suggests,
“…the origin and justification for authority lies in social
disorganization. When a community has needs and its members do not know
how to organize spontaneously to provide them, someone comes forward, an
authority who satisfies those needs by utilizing the services of all and
directing them to his liking …organization, far from creating authority,
is the only cure for it and the only means whereby each one of us will
get used to taking an active and conscious part in collective work, and
cease to be passive instruments in the hands of leaders.” (1965: 86)
Social structure and organization are both crucial because an industrial
society requires a high degree of coordination, which involves a great
deal of complex organization. In every insurrectionary moment that we
can observe, chaos and difficulties centering on issues of coordination
were acute in the opening phases of the revolution. In each case,
purportedly revolutionary juntas recreated the institutional structure
of the “Old Regime”. As deeply flawed as the “Old Regime” was, as much
as these groups railed against it, they re-created it because at least
it got things done. As Malatesta suggests to us, this is only to be
expected. Unless revolutionaries have practical solutions, and have
already begun to be able to provide revolutionary means of re-organizing
social life, in all of its concrete details, chaos will ensue the
insurrection. In general, in times of uncertainty people naturally fall
back on what they know, their sense of “how things get done”.
In particular, a recurrent theme of revolutionary crisis centers around
problems with supplies and the transportation of raw materials and
important goods. In both the French and Russian Revolutions, the problem
of getting food from the countryside into the cities was acute, to say
the least. The Bolshevik’s New Economic Policy (NEP) in 1921
re-introduced capitalistic reforms in the context of a bureaucratic and
authoritarian state- not unlike the basic relations of production that
marked the Czarist era (Pollack, 1959: 61). As bad as this arrangement
was, and as much as they had ideologically railed against the exact same
things under the Czar, the Bolsheviks found that this bureaucratic, or
state capitalism [3], at least formed a basis for social coordination.
Franz Schurmann reported that the land reforms introduced in the Maoist
era were comparable with traditional imperial forms, with the
collectives and communes resembling patterns of state control and
militarization of the peasantry in projects of corvee labour in imperial
China (cited in Rapp, 2001: 15). In fact, he compares the Maoist rural
collectivization policies with the military farms policy, or tuntian, of
imperial China (14). In the Spanish Revolution, problems of coordination
proved problematic, specifically centering around exchange. In some
regions of Spain, they tried to abolish money altogether, but found
themselves resorting either to rationing of one sort or another, or the
production of local currencies. Once again, in a problematic situation,
they fell back upon the old routines which were familiar, and which
coordinated action in the past.
It is not sufficient to create a negative contradiction within society,
that is, to create a revolutionary rupture through organized opposition.
This is necessary, but not sufficient. It is necessary to move from an
insurrectionary strategy, focused on the creation of a negative
contradiction (against all forms of social domination), to a
revolutionary strategy, the creation of a positive contradiction. As I
suggested, times of crisis tend to breed reaction more than they breed
revolution, as people will fall back on what they are familiar
with—social organization based on authoritarianism. Indeed, one of the
key crises of capitalism in the last century was the Great Depression,
which gave rise not to an international proletarian revolution but
Fascism. We need not only a strong oppositional movement, but we need to
be able to organize social life on a self-managed basis, to provide the
practical basis for a revolutionary society. Indeed, Malatesta suggested
that not only must revolutionaries be able to maintain social
production, but we must be able to increase production, to eliminate
poverty [4]. To fail to do so is to breed counter-revolution and
reaction, as post-insurrectionary chaos breeds uncertainty. In this
context, there is a general tendency to revert back to the old ways of
doing things (i.e. through authoritarian institutions), as these old
solutions may be problematic, but they at least coordinate social life
on a day-to-day basis.
While this discussion has been focused at the level of general
revolutionary principles, these general principles are only meaningful
when they are applied to specific historical contexts. At this juncture,
we are living in a period where neo-liberalism has been bringing back
the aggressive forms of capitalism that had created such militant
struggles as those of the IWW a century ago. Indeed, many of the issues
are similar, such as the use and abuse of temporary workers, the
marginalization of whole groups of workers in the economy, and basic
trade union freedoms.
In the last 30 years in particular, the State and the capitalist class
have acted in a highly coordinated fashion, causing the on-going
breakdown of the “class compromise” of the post-WWII period. In this
process we have seen the disciplining of the industrial working class
and the creation of the “rust belt” in Canada and the USA. However, at
the same time, in the post-WWII class compromise (i.e. the welfare
state), a large public sector was created—healthcare, education, social
services—and all of these areas are increasingly being cut adrift by the
state, often being privatized. Even in the cases where the jobs in these
sectors remain public, quasi-market reforms are introduced.
Neo-liberal reforms have had the general effect of creating real
contradictions in the lives of public sector workers. In the era of the
welfare state these areas of the economy were made part of the public
sector, and these jobs were ones that tended to revolve around the
provision of “caring” for members of the public (i.e. nurses, teachers,
etc). While there are real differences between the labour processes of
public sector workers, in general the labour processes associated with
caring labour in the public sector have created loyalties, commitments,
and allegiances that reflect the caring orientation of most of these
jobs. These values, commitments, and allegiances were not
anti-capitalist when they existed alongside the private sector. However,
when market mechanisms are imposed in the public sector, these values,
commitments, and allegiances are drawn into active contradiction with
the pursuit of profit.
It seems that, in general, when work in the caring sectors of the
economy is subjected to market mechanisms, the priority shifts from the
provision of service and building relationships with members of the
public to the maximization of profit. Performing caring labour is taxing
both in terms of the time it requires and the emotional investment it
involves. However, profit mechanisms reorient workplace priorities to
ensure that workers who perform caring labour spend less time with the
individuals that they are working with—spending less time with more
patients is more profitable than spending more time with fewer patients.
Both the quality of care that these workers are able to deliver, as well
as the quality of the work life of these workers, decline as neo-liberal
managers reorganize work. Throughout this sector of the economy these
largely female groups of workers are seeing their work intensify
dramatically, their earnings stagnate or decline, and their ability to
care for the people they work with also decline. In these situations,
burnout becomes increasingly common and endemic, and attempting to care
for the public becomes more and more difficult. As a clerical worker who
was involved at a staff strike at McMaster University put it, “it wasn’t
about people anymore, it was a business, it was about making a profit.”
Neo-liberal restructuring of the public sector creates a contradiction
between the work that these workers want to do and their ability to do
it, and because of this, it has begun to create not only an a-capitalist
ethic, but an anti-capitalist ethic among these groups of workers.
As capitalists and politicians re-structure the public sector according
to the demands of the market, and as these market mechanisms undermine
the ability of public sector workers to engage in caring labour, it is
the operation of the market itself that becomes problematic, and the
profit-motive is increasingly identified as the source of crises in the
daily labour of these workers. It is through the State that these
reforms are being imposed, meaning that both the State and the
capitalist class are implicated in these reforms. Furthermore, the
imposition of neo-liberalism has had a disproportionate effect on female
workers, creating contradictions not only in terms of the class
relations which these workers are drawn into, but also highlighting
their subordination in a patriarchal division of labour. It is for these
reasons that it was precisely these groups of workers who almost went on
a General Strike in British Columbia (BC) this year. While bargaining
with hospital workers the provincial government of BC not only attempted
to engage in concession bargaining, they also aggressively pursued
contracting out and privatization, causing lay-offs. When these workers
went out on strike the government attempted to legislate them back to
work. In response, provincial teachers, transit and ferry workers, mill,
steel and forestry workers, garbage and city maintenance workers, as
well as library, community and recreation centre employees came close to
joining a general strike, before labour leaders negotiated a settlement
that was widely condemned as a sell-out.
Anarchists have been active in fighting neo-liberalism, but we also have
to recognize that capitalism in its less sophisticated form (i.e.
neo-liberal versus welfare state models of capitalism) creates certain
openings in revolutionary strategy. The withdrawal, or retreat, of the
State from the public sector opens up the space for the creation of dual
power, the organization of an autonomous, community-based public sector
that is organized according to principles of self-management, an
anti-State public sector.
It is difficult to understate the revolutionary effect of organizing to
create, and support, self-managed community services. There are even
examples of this in North America— the Black Panther Party, at their
strongest, ran over 60 social programs, such as schools, meal programs,
and shoe programs. While the Black Panthers fell victim to their
marginalization in ghetto communities, police repression, and internal
power struggles that were partially related to the effects of the FBI’s
counter-intelligence program (COINTELPRO), this model of community
organization is one that still holds a great deal of potential. In the
case of the Spanish anarchist movement in the 1930’s, part of their
strength relied upon the mutual aid societies, schools, and workers’
centers that they organized. Indeed, a not insignificant proportion of
the literate working class was educated in anarchist schools in Spain in
the 1920’s and 1930’s. It should come as no surprise that after the
Spanish revolution/civil war broke out, anarchist schools
flourished—anarchists had a great deal of experience at organizing and
running schools.
By advancing where the state has retreated, by beginning to create a
community-based, self-managed, anti-State public sector, anarchists can
begin to generate a broad-based movement that has the organizational
capacity to create a fully self-managed society. The public sector is
strategically crucial also because of the fact that these institutions
would not only re-organize the work life of public workers, but they
would also be central and tied into life in the community more
generally. Moreover, it would begin to develop the revolutionary
capacity of anarchists to manage public life more generally, through
federated institutions that are genuinely democratic.
Unfortunately, anarchist attempts to create “dual power” through the
creation of cooperatives often create what might be termed “market
syndicalism.” While these cooperatives are internally self-managing,
they exist as units in a market economy, they still rely upon access to
the market. Building an autonomous public sector begins to develop the
practical revolutionary infrastructure to make not only the State, but
also the market irrelevant in social life.
This is the general strategy, to attempt to create dual power in the
public sector, to build autonomous, community-based, self-managed social
infrastructure—schools, clinics, mutual aid organizations, perhaps
hospitals one day—to help a create a revolutionary process of organizing
without hierarchy or domination. Where the state has retreated, we must
advance, and begin organizing to fill the gap in a liberatory manner, to
build the revolutionary capacity and potential for an end to all forms
of domination and hierarchy.
On a final note, however, I should add that, as anarchists, it is our
duty to support all workers. However, in relation to these workers in
the public sector, I would suggest that it is particularly important to
support and organize. In doing so we should agitate and organize to
begin to introduce radical critique and direct action where it is
appropriate. In solidarity organizing, anarchists can begin to develop
ties with workers in these sectors, and begin to discuss and organize
dual power. It is also crucial to recognize that, in our capacity as
revolutionary organizers, most of us don’t have the skills or the
knowledge to build these organizations from the ground up. Rather, in
solidarity with workers who work in these sectors, we can begin to
organize with them and their unions.
Malatesta, Errico. 1965. Malatesta: Life and Ideas. Freedom Press:
London, UK.
Pollack, Emanuel. 1959. The Kronstadt Rebellion. Philosophical Library
Inc: New York, NY.
Rapp, John A. 2001. “Maoism and Anarchism: Mao Zedong’s Response to the
Anarchist Critique of Marxism.” Anarchist Studies 9 (1): 3- 28.
[1] As a key form of social organization
[2] That is to say, practical institutions, which are organized in a
revolutionary fashion, that are autonomous from, and opposed to, capital
and the State.
[3] Lenin, incidentally, coined this term himself for the purposes of
describing Bolshevist Russia.
[4] Of course, this does not mean the mindless pursuit of productivity
gains, the very nature of production needs to change in the process,
away from profit and towards need.