Quotes About Dual power

The autonomous municipalities established by the Zapatistas represent in many respects only the latest chapter in a long history of revolutionary dual power. In this respect they offer a contemporary example from which certain general lessons can be extracted, much as lessons might be taken from the experiences of the workers councils that sprung up across Europe in the wake of the First World War, or during the Spanish Revolution, or the Shanghai Commune during the Chinese Cultural Revolution.

Often dual power is discussed in a way that it disconnects it from the long years of thankless mass organizing work that precedes it. It is treated as if it springs spontaneously from the people in the revolutionary moment, without respect for the patient nurturance of the forces that make it possible.

Two is always better than one.

The superannuated anarchist Kropotkin, made use of the war to disavow everything he had been teaching for almost half a century. This denouncer of the state supported the Entente, and if he denounced the dual power in Russia, it was not in the name of anarchy, but in the name of a single core of the bourgeoisie.