Social:Dual power (leftist theory)

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Dual power is a concept in the theory and practice of leftist politics, proposed in different forms by communists and anarchists. The communist conception of dual power, advanced by Vladimir Lenin to describe the division of power during the Russian Revolution, described the soviets of workers and soldiers as an incipient state whose task was to remove and replace the formal government.[1] This notion has informed the strategies of subsequent communist-led revolutions, including the Chinese Revolution led by Mao. The anarchist conception envisions the steady creation of mechanisms of self-management separate from the state apparatus. This strategy aims to create a libertarian socialist economy and polity by means of incrementally establishing and then networking institutions of direct participatory democracy to contest the existing power structures of state-capitalism. Dual power strategy was advocated by anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon in 1851: "Beneath the governmental machinery, in the shadow of political institutions, out of the sight of statemen and priests, society is producing its own organism, slowly and silently; and constructing a new order, the expression of its vitality and autonomy."[2] For some anarchists and libertarian socialists, this does not necessarily mean disengagement with existing institutions; for example, Yates McKee describes a dual power approach as "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."[3] In this context, the strategy itself is sometimes also referred to as "counterpower" to differentiate it from the term's Leninist origins.

Dual power and the Zapatista movement

Mural on the side of a "Zapatista Rebel Autonomous Primary School." The figure holds a book stating, "Autonomous education constructs different worlds into which many worlds can fit." Zapatista autonomous municipalities and their education and health systems have been described as exemplars of anarchist dual power.

With the growth of the Zapatista movement, the system of local governance has been elaborated somewhat. Among the officials selected from each assembly, there are now commissioners for health and education, as well as a representative to a Clandestine Revolutionary Indigenous Committee (CCRI). The commissioners meet and coordinate with their peers on a regional basis, while there are four CCRIs, one for each language group in the area. The EZLN is subordinate to their decisions. This has fostered cooperation between community members and the EZLN, since "when a decision is made by the CCRI, it’s a decision based on consensus. It’s based on the agreement of dozens of families."[4]

This local democracy has been extended by the creation of Rebel Zapatista Autonomous Municipalities, systems of alternative institutions that effectively replace local structures of power. On February 3, 1994, Manuel Camacho Solís, the conciliator between the government and the Zapatistas, announced the creation of two free zones in which the International Red Cross would operate and the militaries would not, unwittingly providing the Zapatista communities with a bit of national territory. On December 19, 1995, the EZLN broke the Mexican Federal Army’s encirclement and carried out the political and military seizure of dozens of towns, demonstrating that its influence went far beyond the small existing conflict zone. In this expanded area, Zapatista communities formed 38 autonomous municipalities covering more than a third of the state of Chiapas.[5]

Autonomous municipalities are the Zapatistas’ implementation of the 16 February 1996 San Andrés Accords, which the government abandoned in December 1996, after refusing to carry them out. The Accords guarantee the right of indigenous peoples to form and govern traditionally their own municipalities. In forming the municipalities, residents derecognize the official authorities and elect their own. They refuse federal government involvement and control. They name their "local health promoters [and] indigenous parliaments, and elaborate their own laws based on social, economic, political and gender equality among the inhabitants of diverse ethnic communities." Councils are constituted to plan the various areas of community action and are joined by councils of elders and, increasingly, of women. These communities are accomplishing long-ignored aspirations, like building bilingual (Spanish and the local indigenous language) education systems, and providing to all what once was only provided in accordance with political patronage. A report from the Diocese of San Cristobal de las Casas finds: "At a local level municipal presidents imposed by the PRI are left governing only themselves, without being able to penetrate into the communities. Basically this means the slow destruction of…false democracy…and its replacement by communities and organizations that construct their own history first as autonomous municipalities and eventually as autonomous zones."[6]

This eroding of the status quo has proceeded despite the attacks by the Mexican Federal Army and their paramilitary allies, providing a dramatic demonstration of the effectiveness of grassroots dual power. Whatever its accomplishments, the EZLN sees itself as a temporary formation: A "mirror image of the Mexican Army," it is "entirely unqualified to replace it" since it includes the hierarchy and violence that it would remove from society altogether.[7] It will remain only "until the armed struggle becomes an absurdity and an obstacle for the revolutionary transformation of our country."[8]

Forms of dual power institutions

References

  1. ↑ Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich. “The Dual Power.” Translated by Isaacs Bernard. Pravda, April 9, 1917. Lenin Internet Archive 1999 (2005). https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/apr/09.htm.
  2. ↑ Proudhon, General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century. Translated by John Beverly Robinson. New York: Haskell House Publishers, Ltd., 1923, 1969 [1851]. p. 243.
  3. ↑ Yates McKee, "Art after Occupy — climate justice, BDS and beyond," July 2014.
  4. ↑ "Conversations with Cecilia Rodriguez," Dark Night field notes, no. 8 (winter/spring 1997), 7.
  5. ↑ John Ross, Rebellion from the Roots: Indian Uprising in Chiapas, 1995
  6. ↑ Mariana Mora, "The EZLN and Indigenous Autonomous Municipalities," April 1998.
  7. ↑ Harry Cleaver, "The Zapatistas and International Networks of Struggles," Dark Night field notes, no. 12/13, 12.
  8. ↑ EZLN, CCRI-GC and Subcommandante Marcos, communique to the Founding Congress of the FZLN, 13 September 1997. Quoted in Joshua Paulson, "The Zapatista March and the FZLN Congress," 8–20 September 1997.




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