canaz018 ‘AlpartoToscaro | Essay | Dual Power Revisit: From Civil War to Bipaltcal Islam | SOFT TARGETS v2.1 SOFT TARGETS v.21 | v1.1 | Tifek | sound | order | pross | events | H@ ALBERTO TOSCANO Dual Power Revisited: From Civil War to Biopolitical Isham Ln 1917, during the tumultuous interregnum belween the collapse of tsarism and the October revolution, Lenin stressed the unprecedented emergence of a wild anomaly in the panorama of political forms: dual power. As he remarked in Pravda, "... alongside the Provisional Government, the goverment of the bourgeoisie, another goverment has arisen, so far weak and incipient, bul undoubtedly a government that actually exists and is growing—the Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies’ ("The Dual Power," April 9, 1917}. The rather stefle disputations over the evils and virtues of the seizure of State power tend fo obscure the far greater challenge posed by thinking revolutionary polilics in terms of the sundering of power—not justin the guise of a face-off between two (or more) social forces in a situation of non-monopoly over violence and pottical authority, but in the sense of a fundamental asymmetry in the fypes of power. The power wielded by the Soviels sincommensurable with that of its bourgeois counterpart, however "democratic" it may be. because its source les in popular initiative and not pariamentary decree: because its enforced by an armed people and not a standing army; and because it has transmuted political authority from a plaything of the bureaucracy to a situation where all officials are al the mercy of the popular will and ils power of recall. The model for this power of a new type is the Paris Commune. And itis the incipient, larval form of a state of the type of the Paris Commune’ that, in the spring and summer of 1917, coexists with the parliamentary type of Slate, the “dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.” But the Soviets, which were nol yet under Bobhevik hegemony, live in the constant menace, exacerbated by the partisans of reform, of a neutralizing absorption into a State power that in principle suffers no dually. In such a conjuncture, the only strategy i to strengthen the new type of power, “clafying proletarian minds .. emancipating them from the influence of tne bourgecie,” since ong as no violence is used against the people there is no other road to [State] power.” The problem of constituting a potent communist bloc and of consolidating the new type of power into a force that can truly sap the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie is thus a problem of autonomy and separation, of the disciplined painstaking constitution of a proletarian polifical capacity that takes its distance from the apparatus of the state precisely in order to prepare its “smashing.” This process of constitution is marked by an inexorable Intputwww soft getsourralcomW2falberto_toscano ppcanaz018 ‘AlpartoToscaro | Essay | Dual Power Revisit: From Civil War to Bipaltcal Islam | SOFT TARGETS v2.1 temporal determination. The “interlocking” of two dictatorships gives rise to an exceedingly volatile amalgam, whence the axiom: ‘Two powers cannof exist in a state” ["The Tasks of the Proletariat in Our Revolution [Draft Platform for the Proletarian Party]]," September 1917). Dual power is thus both an opportunity and a menace, the terrain where autonomy and initiative can be quashed or squandered. This is the sense in which, in June 1917, Lenin, facing a capitalist offensive in the domain of production itself, declares: "The root of the evil isin the dual power" ("Has Qual Power Disappeared?’). And the culprits of this crisis, the harbingers of the “evil” are Precisely those subjects which seek to serve as hinges between the two powers, the "Naradniks and Mensheviks who lead the Soviets (the power of the majority) in the interests of the bourgeoisie (the dictatorship of the minority]. In any case, ‘his dual power cannot last long." This merely transitory kairos which dual power represents, founded on the lethal contest between the two dictatorships—the two types of power—means that Lenin cannot accept the "fetishism’ of the Soviet as an organ of sell-government (which might even be compatible with certain bourgeois parliamentary forms) but will seek, through the fundamental instance of the arty, fo "fix in the Soviet the expression and immediate paltical form of class insubordination against the general form of exploitation’ and to maintain the dyad "aufonomy-organization.” For without class autonomy there is no organization and without organization, class autonomy—independent proletarian polifical capacity dissipates (Antonio Negri, Trentatre Lezioni su Lenin, 1972-73). In this context, dual power, as Negri notes—and contrary to the Menshevik vision of incorporaling the Soviels within the state as a "regional" instance of worker's, self-government and self-management—is “not an institulionalizable juridical relationship" (for how could one make civil war into an institution?). For Negfi, the ambiguity of dual power ‘must be confronted and resolved from the workers’ perspective: fist of all, its intensification must be advocated, then the proletarian moment of antithesis must be exalted until the foundation of the dictatorship of the proletariat in its Soviet form.’ Il. As Negri presents it, Lenin's is a constant struggle against the "constitutional mummification” of dual power, the transmutation of the Soviets into organs of democratic representation and not of class dictatorship, inserted into the international process of revolution. Communists must always reject this transformation; the movement must continue, it must surpass itself Indeed, some of Negi''s most interesting pages in his lessons on Lenin bear on the manner in which capital, in its high reformist moments (e.g. the New Deal), inoculated itself with the Soviet form; how it insfitutionalized the apparatus of self-government in the guise of workers' self-management and their collaborative insertion into the mechanisms and the ideology of industrial work. Against this recuperative dialectic, the autonomist imperative is that of an insfiulionalization of antagonism, the creation of “nsfitulions of the class, in the closs, for the class,” the “institutionalization against capital of what capital can only institutionalize for the sake of domination, the consolidation of struggle in function of power, the reversibility of struggle from the point of View of siruggle ise, of the process of destruction of what exists." Negr's wager, then, is thal the task of repeating Lenin must pass through a reckoning with the transformation in class composition (that is, both in the subjective capacity of the class and its insertion into the dynamics of capitalist development) as well as in the very meaning of power. Dual power retains its pertinence, but itis no longer thought exclusively in terms of the State as separate apex and possessor of power but in view of a "tendential identification of capital and the State (a total fusion of organization and command)” Under these conditions of real subsumption, there is a plenitude of power, Intputwww soft getsourralcomW2falberto_toscano ppcanaz018 ‘AlpartoToscaro | Essay | Dual Power Revisit: From Civil War to Bipaltcal Islam | SOFT TARGETS v2.1 a fullness of capitalist power and a fullness of workers’ power: the capitalist unification of society and its totalizing organization reproduce over the entirety of the social fabric the full potency of class antagonism, which is essential fo the definition of capital. But if the overall concept of power under conditions of the real subsumption of society under capital cannot be identified with the seizure of State power per se, then, following Negri's argument, we could say that there emerges yet another "new type’ of (proletarian) power. For Lenin's vision of dual power as a critical and explosive but sii ransitory siage depended on a cerlain conception of power thal Negri calls a "non- dialectical absolute,” not so distant from the bourgeois theories of power qua monopoly. On the contrary, the workers’ struggles of the 60s and 70s, according to Negri (who does not finch, in these pages, from invoking Mao as a distant witness}, determine a new experience and a new concep! of power, understood os a "dialectical absolute" allowing "dual power to spread over a long period, as a struggle that upsets the capital relation by introducing into it the worker variable as the conscious will of destruction.” This newer type of proletarian power is paradoxically qualified as a form of extremist gradvalism, a "gradualness of power and its management which is the gradualness of the destruction of capitalist power, of the capital relation.” Whence the thesis that underies the new Sovietism which Negri, at the time immersed in the experience of Potere Operaio, proclaims to be "the transformation of the concept of insurrection into that of permanent civil war.” Without entering into the virtues of such a provocative proposal, or indeed how it might relate to a strategic [mis)calculation of class forces and class composition, itis worth remarking that the vision of this permanent civil war, and of its new lype of prolonged, gradual/destructive dual power, led lo an allempt fo practice an appropriation and defense of physical areas of autonomy and "self-valorization'—'red bases" or liberated zones. The presence of these notoriously Maoist concepts points to a key aspect of the autonomist theorization of dual power under conaitions of real subsumption, namely its fusion of two models and practices of dual power: the intensive and metropolitan "general strike scenario" (present in the Paris Commune, the Petrograd Soviet, the insurrections in Hamburg, Canton and Barcelona) and the extensive and territorial prolonged "popular war scenario,” for which the Chinese revolution serves as a paragon (Daniel Bensaid, ‘The Retum of Strategy," 2007; see also Ben Brewster, "Armed Insurrection and Dual Power,” 1971). On the basis of the conviction of the full (and ieversiole?) power of the metropolitan proletariat in its new class composition, the long duration of the people's war is injected into the fabric of the city. IIL In this more recent work with Michael Hardt, Negri has given a biopolitical twist to these earlier reflections on dual power. Writing of the legacy of guerilla warfare, he notes that it increasingly adopted the characteristics of biopolitical production and spread throughou! the entire fabric of society, it more directly posed as its goal the production of subjectivity— economic and cultural subjectivity, both material and immaterial. It was not just ¢ matter of “winning heorts and minds," in other words, but rather of creating new hearls and minds through the construction of new circuits of communication, new forms of social collaboration, and new modes of interaction. In this process we can aiscem a tendency toward moving beyond the modem guerrilla model toward more democratic network forms of organization. (Empire, 2000) Is the contemporary horizon for a recovery and recasting of the theme of dual power a biopolitical one? itis ifficull to ignore that whether we are talking about the non-antagonistic forms of participatory dual power in the "Porto Alegre” model, the Zapatista attempt to defend zones for the self-organization of “civil society" agains! oligarchic repression ("Second Declaration of the Selva Lacandona," 1994), or the attempts to articulate Intputwww soft getsourralcomW2falberto_toscano ppcanaz018 ‘AlpartoToscaro | Essay | Dual Power Revisit: From Civil War to Bipaltcal Islam | SOFT TARGETS v2.1 forms of democracy-from-below with national-popular projecis in Bolivia and Venezuela, the biopolitical element (understood both in the sophisticated sense of Hardt and Negri, but also in the simple sense of welfare) is prominent. The Lebanese Hezbollah is « key figure in this respect, representing the rise of a kind of "biopolitical Islam’ in a context of dual power. Determined by a very unique historical and political constellation —which Combines the antisraeti national resistance siruggle, a Khomeneist party ideology profoundly modulated by the conditions of a mutl-confessional Lebanon permanently threatened by relapse into bloody sectarianism, the contradictory support of Syria and Iran, and a wide proletarian Shi'ia social base—Hezbollah has thrived in the systematic use of dual power (military, teritorial, moral) and represents a variant of this political form which is ireducible both to the model of the Leninist kaos as wel fo thal of the people's war. This variant of dual power instead functions within something like a permanent interregnum, where its power is wielded forcefully {as in the recent stike) but never in the sense of o unilateral seizure. Within this volatile geometry of forces, the biopoliical element provides much of the substance of dual power. In the "planet of sums" anatomized by Mike Davis we could even say that the "biopoliical supplement’ to the neoliberal evacuation of services and solidarity is inextricable and primary vis-é-vis any mere miliary strategy. As Judith Palmer Harik remarks, much of Hezbollah’s hegemonic trajectory depends on addressing key questions of the government of ife, adopting a "process of advocacy based on extensive-fact finding and teamed with grass roots support" In these "siamist inquires." issues such as water problems are addressed through scientific-academic methods (Hezbollah's Center for Developmental Siudies) and by encouraging “the formation of residential and professional groups" that can provide the tenitorial rooting for these biopoltical ventures (Hezbollah: The Changing Face of Terrorism, 2008). In situation of prolonged dual power where the stakes, contrary fo those envisioned by Negri, ore precisely based on averting civil war whilst gaining relative hegemony over a population sidelined by a fragmented, unequal and threadbare state (wnat Palmer Harik simply calls "the abandoned), dual power is biopower, and "dally garbage collection," large-scale health service delivery’ and "emergency water delivery" ore weapons of the fist order. Though litle if anything can be directly extrapolated from a unique situation in which the notion of "balance of power’ takes on an intense and tragic connotation, Hezbollah’s important variant of ‘biopoliical slam” hints at some of the contemporary conditions for the rethinking and exercise of dual power, where the separation of an autonomous polilical capacity and the generation of new lypes of power (whether revolutionary, conservative of reactionary) cannot bypass the dimension of the production and reproduction of social ife—in shor, the question of survival Intputwww soft getsourralcomW2falberto_toscano pp