Speaker 1: You were out of town when the last cop left Seattle.
Speaker 1: It had been unseasonably cool that week, the seventy degrees
Speaker 1: of old and not thee you had come to dread
Speaker 1: every summer. But you had already promised you'd visit your
Speaker 1: family in Montana, and so when the riots started in
Speaker 1: the National Guard open fire into the crowd, you watched
Speaker 1: it on Twitter from your couch like everyone else. The
Speaker 1: Second Battle of Seattle, they were calling it. You wondered
Speaker 1: briefly what the first one was. They've been fighting in
Speaker 1: Portland too, some kind of massacre in Oakland, and no
Speaker 1: one was quite sure what was happening in that Appa Valley.
Speaker 1: Couldn't be anything good, you thought, But it was Seattle.
Speaker 1: Everyone was talking about. The mayor fled the city and
Speaker 1: the helicopter when it became clear the police were losing.
Speaker 1: After that, the cops had simply broken retreated across the Cascades.
Speaker 1: No one knew who was running the city now, and you,
Speaker 1: share as hell didn't want to be the one to
Speaker 1: find out. But after two weeks, you've burned through a
Speaker 1: vacation day in every favor you'd ever accumulated at the hospital,
Speaker 1: and besides the rent was due, no one was sure
Speaker 1: if the postal service was even still functioning, and with
Speaker 1: the eviction moratorium lifted, you weren't going to risk getting
Speaker 1: evicted because you weren't there to hand your landlord a check.
Speaker 1: So with ray resignation, you pile into your battered car
Speaker 1: and head towards snow Qualmy Pass. What surprised you most
Speaker 1: when you hit Seattle was the art you've been expecting.
Speaker 1: Burnt out buildings and streets filled with burning cars, and
Speaker 1: there were some A few streets were still blocked by
Speaker 1: what looked like improvised barricades, but every surface of every building,
Speaker 1: it seemed, had some kind of mirror on it. Someone,
Speaker 1: and no one seemed to be quite sure who had
Speaker 1: first come up with the idea, had blocked off an
Speaker 1: entire street up near Capitol Hill, and people were painstakingly
Speaker 1: painting portraits of every protester killed in the fighting and
Speaker 1: Seattle on it. As you walk past, they were discussing
Speaker 1: doing the same for the dead in Oakland. The second
Speaker 1: surprise came when you tried to pay your rent. A
Speaker 1: woman you'd never seen before was sitting at the office's
Speaker 1: reception desk. When you tried to handle your check. She
Speaker 1: laughed and handed it back to you, explaining that after
Speaker 1: the cops fled, the local tenants union had taken over
Speaker 1: most of the apartments in the city and placed them
Speaker 1: in something it called a community land trust. You didn't
Speaker 1: quite get the details, but no one was going to
Speaker 1: evict you, so you decided to just take the win. Besides,
Speaker 1: your friend had convinced you to do some child care
Speaker 1: for the tenants union in college, and they always seemed
Speaker 1: like a decent sword, so it didn't seem to be
Speaker 1: any immediate cause for concern. The hospital was another matter entirely.
Speaker 1: From what you could gather, there had been some kind
Speaker 1: of labor dispute between the chaos. Management seemed to have
Speaker 1: fired a group of nurses for giving injured protesters shelter
Speaker 1: from the police. Your word had already been understaff due
Speaker 1: to COVID and budget cuts. Now the situation was intolerable.
Speaker 1: Where still many of the senior administrators had fled the
Speaker 1: city with the police, no one seemed to know who
Speaker 1: was in charge, Supplies were starting to run low, and
Speaker 1: with so many administrators missing in the insurance situation completely
Speaker 1: up in the air on account of nobody being entirely
Speaker 1: sure if Seattle was even still part of the United States.
Speaker 1: It wasn't clear if anyone was going to get paid.
Speaker 1: So when a co worker pulled you aside and asked
Speaker 1: if you'd be interested in doing something about the management problem,
Speaker 1: you figured, what the hell, Maybe it was time for
Speaker 1: a change. It wasn't like it could possibly make anything worse.
Speaker 1: The fired nurses, it turned out, had started to set
Speaker 1: up a community health center with the help of the
Speaker 1: local neighborhood council. But some of the nurses still working
Speaker 1: at the hospital had another idea. Why not just turn
Speaker 1: the hospital into the community health center. After all, the
Speaker 1: hospital already had more equipment than any new center could
Speaker 1: possibly assemble. All they needed was some help from the community,
Speaker 1: and the whole thing could be run by a council
Speaker 1: of the hospital workers. Insurance companies be damned. Besides, if
Speaker 1: all the hospitals started pulling their resources together, they might
Speaker 1: be able to solve some of the shortages. At the
Speaker 1: mention of solving the supply shortages, even the more skeptical
Speaker 1: workers started to come around. By the next morning, the
Speaker 1: Seattle Hospital Workers Council was marching on the hospital. The
Speaker 1: remaining management found out somehow and tried one final lockout
Speaker 1: to hold on to their property. But as you saw
Speaker 1: yet another column of protesters joining the crowd surrounding the hospital,
Speaker 1: you knew this wasn't their city any longer. On April eighteen,
Speaker 1: two thousand, one, military police in the Cabiliar region of
Speaker 1: Algeria shot an eighteen year old high school students. Almost immediately,
Speaker 1: hundreds of thousands of people took to the street, chanting,
Speaker 1: you can't kill us, we are already dead at the
Speaker 1: lines of policemen assembled to attack them. The police would
Speaker 1: kill over a hundred people and severely wound five thousand
Speaker 1: more in the months long battle for control of the
Speaker 1: streets that followed, but protesters burned police stations, government offices, courts,
Speaker 1: and the offices of Islamic fundamentalist parties. Until the government
Speaker 1: agreed to give ethnic minority groups language and cultural rights.
Speaker 1: The hated military police were driven from the region entirely,
Speaker 1: and so few regular police stations survived the uprising. At
Speaker 1: the regular police likewise ceased to function across broad swaths
Speaker 1: of Kabilia. They were replaced on a local village level
Speaker 1: by self organized security committees, which would assemble on the
Speaker 1: rare occasion trouble emerged. Contrary to the expectations of the state,
Speaker 1: crime plummeted, but the Algerian government otherwise continued to function
Speaker 1: as usual for over a decade until the local government
Speaker 1: and a small region cover Baca, attempted the regular local elections.
Speaker 1: After banning the most popular political party in the region,
Speaker 1: they installed an unpopular coalition governments. The people of Brabaca
Speaker 1: responded by storming the city hall, season control of it
Speaker 1: and setting up a democratic General Assembly inside the newly
Speaker 1: dubbed House of the People to replace the existing government.
Speaker 1: This was dual power in its original sense, a council
Speaker 1: of the people facing off against an increasingly illegitimate parliamentary
Speaker 1: representative in a struggle for control over the fate of
Speaker 1: a new society. If you google dual power, you are
Speaker 1: likely to encounter a pamphlet written by Vladimir Lenin entitled
Speaker 1: The Dual Power, describing the conundrum of the situation following
Speaker 1: the First Russian Revolution in February of nineteen seventeen, after
Speaker 1: the overthrow of the Czar, political power was split between
Speaker 1: two competing bodies. On the one side, a new provisional
Speaker 1: government of liberal and social democratic politicians holdovers from the
Speaker 1: old Duma from the previous regime. On the other side,
Speaker 1: revolutionary social forces rallying around assemblies popular power called soviets,
Speaker 1: which were councils of delegates sent by directly democratic factory,
Speaker 1: soldiers and sailors committees. Lenin solve this as a situation
Speaker 1: to be overcome by the seizure of state power by
Speaker 1: a socialist party. For Lenin and his Bolsheviks, dual power
Speaker 1: was a problem because, after the Czarist state ceased to
Speaker 1: exist in the middle of the World War, the new
Speaker 1: provisional government failed to fill the vacuum left in its
Speaker 1: wake by its collapse. To Lenin, the solution was obvious,
Speaker 1: fill that vacuum with Lenin. For the peasants, soldiers, and workers,
Speaker 1: who made up the majority of Russia's population, however, dual
Speaker 1: power was their first fleeting taste of freedom and autonomous
Speaker 1: control over their lives. Lenon used the Soviets to seize power,
Speaker 1: but almost immediately began to turn on these democratic assemblies
Speaker 1: of popular autonomy. Over the course of the Russian Civil War,
Speaker 1: Lennon and the Bolsheviks strip power away from the workers, peasants,
Speaker 1: and soldiers, sometimes by bureaucratic fiat, often at the point
Speaker 1: of a bayonet, until the Soviet had been stripped of
Speaker 1: all meeting in the very state named after their democratic
Speaker 1: form and became synonymous with dictatorship. Dual power today draws
Speaker 1: from the potential of that post revolutionary crisis from the
Speaker 1: bottom up direct democracy that was so threatening to the
Speaker 1: social order that Bolshevik revolutionaries and Czari's police buys alike
Speaker 1: conspired to wipe them from the historical record. Just as
Speaker 1: Russia was haunted by the memory of the French classes,
Speaker 1: so is America today haunted by a memory of dual
Speaker 1: power that, against all Ladge refuses to die. We are,
Speaker 1: after all, still ruled by a greedy, bloodthirsty, and out
Speaker 1: of touch elite who have chosen to march us to
Speaker 1: our deaths by the hundreds of thousands by forcing us
Speaker 1: back to work during a plague. But the Russian Revolution
Speaker 1: is as far away from us today as Napoleon and
Speaker 1: his brass cannons were from the Russian revolutionaries and their
Speaker 1: machine guns. Times have changed. There is no Bolshevik party
Speaker 1: waiting in the wings to seize power as the state crumbles.
Speaker 1: The vacuum of the state leaves in its wake as
Speaker 1: its power deteriorates, be filled by any number of organizations,
Speaker 1: most even more hostile to the working class and the
Speaker 1: Bolsheviks had been. It could be war lords with the
Speaker 1: personal allegiance of the remains of the military. It could
Speaker 1: be organized crime. It could be religious fundamentalist militias. Most likely,
Speaker 1: it will be an uneasy combination of all of the above.
Speaker 1: Or it could be you. It could be your family,
Speaker 1: your friends, your neighbors, your co workers, the person you
Speaker 1: waved to every morning at the bus stop when you're
Speaker 1: on your way to work. The past to that world,
Speaker 1: the world run not by capitalists in their cops or
Speaker 1: by war lords in their armies, but by autonomous communities
Speaker 1: free to decide for themselves what to produce and how
Speaker 1: to best use their resources to care for each other.
Speaker 1: Is dual power in the twenty first century. At its core,
Speaker 1: dual power is about creating a counterpower against the state.
Speaker 1: During the Russian Revolution, this counterpower was formed essentially by
Speaker 1: historical accidents, as two governing bodies emerged from the course
Speaker 1: of the Fibrrian Revolution. But modern dual power does not
Speaker 1: arise from the whims the course of revolution or from
Speaker 1: an innate instinct of the working class. It is something
Speaker 1: we've built together by creating organizations that resist the power
Speaker 1: of the structures of violence, capitalism, racism, homophobia, and the
Speaker 1: state name a few that control this world. Dual power
Speaker 1: organizations can take many forms, from tennis unions, the debtors councils,
Speaker 1: childcare cooperatives, to land occupations, workers councils, to rank and
Speaker 1: file labor unions, mutual aid networks to community self defense organizations.
Speaker 1: These organizations seek to build autonomy from and against capitalism.
Speaker 1: In the state alone, there are no match for the
Speaker 1: state's wor all power to inflict violence and corporate control
Speaker 1: over our resources. But by joining together to form federations
Speaker 1: and pooling their resources and expertise to coordinate their efforts,
Speaker 1: they can become a powerful enough force to challenge the
Speaker 1: state both directly and indirectly. These dual power organizations are
Speaker 1: designed to be the state's successor. As the industrial workers
Speaker 1: of the world famously put it, they form the structure
Speaker 1: of the new society and the shell of the old.
Speaker 1: In order to fulfill that task, they take the shape
Speaker 1: of new society. They need to create academics, called this
Speaker 1: prefigurative politics, organizing that employs the values and organizational structures
Speaker 1: that they seek to create in the world. As we
Speaker 1: will discuss in the next episode, there are right wing
Speaker 1: forms of both dual power and profigative politics, but for
Speaker 1: most of the people who employ it, prefigurative politics means
Speaker 1: creating direct democratic institutions without bosses, managers, bureaucrats, or party apparatus.
Speaker 1: The means of creating the new world are thus the
Speaker 1: same as the ends. Dual power organizations serve multiple purposes.
Speaker 1: Their long term goal is to replace the state and
Speaker 1: the corporation with free and autonomous forms of organization. One's
Speaker 1: organized and powerful enough to protect themselves and manage the
Speaker 1: logistical challenges of a new world with previous forms of
Speaker 1: organization and power no longer exists. But even reaching a
Speaker 1: point where this is remotely plausible requires not just the
Speaker 1: painstaking construction of counterpower and organization out of a fragmented
Speaker 1: American population. It requires a profound cultural transformation and how
Speaker 1: we make decisions. As the anthropologist David Graeber put it,
Speaker 1: it is assumed in many parts of the world that
Speaker 1: democracy is a group of people facing a certain problem
Speaker 1: who come together to solve it in a way where
Speaker 1: everyone has an equals say. It's true that most Americans
Speaker 1: think of themselves as living in a democratic country. When
Speaker 1: was the last time that any Americans actually sat down
Speaker 1: and came to a collective decision? Maybe if they were
Speaker 1: ordering pizza, but basically never. Dual power organizations thus also
Speaker 1: service schools for democracy where people can learn, experiment with, create,
Speaker 1: and spread their own forms of democracy and collective decision making.
Speaker 1: When these spaces of democratic experimentation are functioning properly, their
Speaker 1: very organizational structure serves as a kind of recruitment tool.
Speaker 1: This was the original theory behind Occupy Wall Street, that
Speaker 1: democracy and the experience of autonomy were contagious and would
Speaker 1: spread rapidly as more and more curious people experienced it
Speaker 1: for themselves. That experience, in turn, would create a new
Speaker 1: generation of people trained in democratic practices who could go
Speaker 1: forth and transform the world. Obviously, this didn't quite happen.
Speaker 1: Occupies model of democracy was limited in many ways, not
Speaker 1: the least of which was that it required a public,
Speaker 1: physical meeting space that could be closed down by police violence.
Speaker 1: But the initial premise worked. Occupy itself, of course, had
Speaker 1: been inspired by the mass democratic assemblies in Spain, in
Speaker 1: Greece in two thousand eleven, and the direct democratic coops
Speaker 1: and factory occupations that engulfed Argentina for the better part
Speaker 1: of the two thousand's. At the most basic, short term level, however,
Speaker 1: dual power organizations are designed in people's needs. The cornerstone
Speaker 1: of this effort is mutual aid. Probably the most famous
Speaker 1: example of such a project was the Black Panther Party
Speaker 1: survival programs. Former Black Panther Janina Irvin describes them in detail.
Speaker 1: The Black Panther Party survival programs were, in fact an
Speaker 1: example of an effort, a successful effort, while it lasted
Speaker 1: to create dual power in the United States. The Black
Speaker 1: Panther Party had a school, had free food programs. One
Speaker 1: of its most respected survival programs was a breakfast for children,
Speaker 1: which was overall a response to hunger and poverty in
Speaker 1: the country, particularly among poor, low income Black people. We
Speaker 1: had free medical clinics in Winston Salem, North Carolina. We
Speaker 1: had free ambulances, free past control, free shoes. We had
Speaker 1: free bussing to prison programs, legal aid programs to help
Speaker 1: people get attorneys who needed them. And we had a
Speaker 1: program that was called the Safe Program Seniors Against a
Speaker 1: Fearful Environment, in which we provided free transportation and escort
Speaker 1: service the senior citizens who needed to get out and
Speaker 1: take or of their errands their business. They were often
Speaker 1: being attacked, so this was a hour protection for them.
Speaker 1: The Panthers were able to grow their influence by keeping
Speaker 1: their communities safe, healthy, cared for, and increasingly autonomous for
Speaker 1: the state. But most importantly, they were able to keep
Speaker 1: people alive. As Black Panthers co founder hughe P. Newton
Speaker 1: famously said, these survival programs satisfy the deep needs of
Speaker 1: the community, but they are not solutions to our problem.
Speaker 1: That is why we call them survival programs, meeting survival
Speaker 1: pending revolution. The existence of the survival programs themselves reflect
Speaker 1: the necessity of keeping people alive, especially people who the
Speaker 1: state would rather kill or leave to die for building
Speaker 1: any kind of power. These programs are also necessarily insufficient.
Speaker 1: No mutual aid program, no autonomous project, no liberator territory
Speaker 1: can provide for the entire community. While the corporation's capitalists
Speaker 1: and states maintain their stranglehold over the resources and production
Speaker 1: capacity at the working class collectively created over centuries of
Speaker 1: grueling labor and struggle. Dual power, more than just survival,
Speaker 1: is about building the counter power to take it back.
Speaker 1: Building powers withdraws the line between what is and isn't
Speaker 1: dual power. Growing food for you and your friends, make
Speaker 1: cut down on bills, and make some killer pesto, but
Speaker 1: it's not necessarily challenging the capitalist system. Autonomy for its
Speaker 1: own sake is not necessarily dual power if it doesn't
Speaker 1: actively aid and struggle or better organize the community. That
Speaker 1: from the perspective of building counter power, that autonomy is meaningless.
Speaker 1: Making food for striking workers to allow them to stay
Speaker 1: on strike longer is building dual power. We're simply producing
Speaker 1: it for general consumption is not. While dual power organizations
Speaker 1: necessarily serve the needs of the community, they must also
Speaker 1: be able to pivot and attack the state in capital
Speaker 1: and provide solidarity and beach fual aid to those in
Speaker 1: their community who are already in struggle, or they simply aren'
Speaker 1: dual power organizations at all. The simplest solution to this problem,
Speaker 1: of course, is to organize around a specific side of resistance.
Speaker 1: Organizations that build up the capacity to fight can everge
Speaker 1: from almost anywhere. The Symbiosis Research Collective described how dual
Speaker 1: power organizations emerge from Palestinian prison organizing bring the First
Speaker 1: into Fata and uprising against the Israeli governments in late
Speaker 1: nineteen eighties. Most discussion of the First into Fata focuses
Speaker 1: on the role of mass protests in making Palestinian society
Speaker 1: ungovernable for the Israeli occupying forces. Less discussed is the
Speaker 1: role of community organizations of mutual aid and confederated participatory
Speaker 1: democracy and making such mass protests possible. Organizing from within
Speaker 1: the political system was a political incubator of the Palestinian
Speaker 1: resistance movement and offers a micro cosmic example of the
Speaker 1: development of dual power in the much larger prison of
Speaker 1: the occupation with hunger strikes, political prisoners eventually won concessions
Speaker 1: for their own self administration within the prisons. They assembled
Speaker 1: structures of political organization and representation, forced prison authorities to
Speaker 1: recognize their representatives, and developed a division of labor around hygiene,
Speaker 1: education and other daily tasks. Palestinian prisoners described this arrangement
Speaker 1: as internal organization, similar to the concept of dual power.
Speaker 1: Even the least free of circumstances. These prisoners carved out
Speaker 1: space for self governments and created the preconditions to revolutionary struggle.
Speaker 1: Prisoners taught and studied everything from Palestinian history to Marxist
Speaker 1: political economy, often from eight to fourteen hours per day.
Speaker 1: As freshly educated and trained political activists were released back
Speaker 1: into society, the resistance movement was galvanized. Illiterate teenage boys
Speaker 1: arrested for throwing stones re entered the fray months later
Speaker 1: as committed, competent organizers who had studied movement building, strategic resistance,
Speaker 1: and dialectical materialism. Meanwhile, the organizing context outside of the
Speaker 1: prison transformed dramatically. Saleh Abou laban of Palestinian political prisoner
Speaker 1: from nineteen seventy until nine, stated, when I entered the prison,
Speaker 1: there wasn't a national movement. There were only underground cells
Speaker 1: that performed clandestine lee. When I got out, I found
Speaker 1: a world full of organizers, committees, and community institutions. Central
Speaker 1: to this new world of community organizing was the Palestinian
Speaker 1: labor movement. Unions were formed out of workers places of
Speaker 1: residents rather than workplaces, because migrant labor was prevalent in
Speaker 1: Palestinian unionism within Israel had been criminalized. Unions then formed
Speaker 1: strong alliances with local organizations in the national movement with
Speaker 1: rapid growth in the early nineteen eighties. Labor unions found
Speaker 1: it necessary to centralize and democratize their structures to become
Speaker 1: more resilient as Israeli repression intensified against union leaders and organizers.
Speaker 1: These local unions were networked together through the Palestinian Communist
Speaker 1: Party and the Workers Unity Block, creating a web of
Speaker 1: labor organizers and community groups that linked their class struggle
Speaker 1: to the larger projects of national liberation. This wave of resistance,
Speaker 1: carried out largely outside the purview of the major Palestinian
Speaker 1: political parties, showed that even communities and the most dire
Speaker 1: circumstances can assemble astounding levels of organization and resistance, as
Speaker 1: was also true in the United States. Although today the
Speaker 1: memory of these prison radicals is largely forgotten, Palestinian organizing
Speaker 1: emerged from the sites of deepest depression in their society.
Speaker 1: But this kind and level of organization is not just
Speaker 1: the property of the left, and in Part two we'll
Speaker 1: see what happens when the right gets hold of it.
Speaker 1: It could happen here as a production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 1: For more podcast on cool zone Media, visit our website
Speaker 1: cool zone media dot com, or check us out on
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Speaker 1: listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It could
Speaker 1: happen here, updated monthly at cool zone Media dot com
Speaker 1: slash sources. Thanks for listening.