Anarcho-Syndicalist Strategy for Dual Power

Introduction

Anarcho-syndicalism asks a dangerous question: what if workers simply ran the world themselves? Not petitioning the state. Not capturing parliament. Not pleading with benevolent technocrats. But taking direct responsibility for production, distribution and social life through federated unions and communes.

The tension arrives immediately. You fight for wage increases, safety standards and rent relief. At the same time you proclaim the abolition of the state and the end of private property. Critics call this naïve. Reformists warn you will scare away potential allies. Radicals accuse you of selling out the revolution one contract at a time.

Meanwhile the institutions you confront are not neutral referees. They are coercive. They have police, courts, armies and surveillance. Moral persuasion alone appears fragile when confronted by organized force. So how do you build a movement that wins tangible improvements now while refusing to be absorbed into the logic of the system? How do you collectivize small, community-based resources today in ways that prefigure and accelerate a stateless tomorrow?

The answer is neither pure reform nor premature insurrection. It is dual power grounded in practical experiments. You must transform every immediate economic struggle into a rehearsal for worker self-management. You must collectivize what is within reach and narrate those victories as fragments of a new sovereignty. Reform becomes infrastructure for revolution. The workshop becomes a school for freedom. The micro-grid becomes a crack in the myth that only centralized authority keeps the lights on.

Your task is not to shout louder than the state. It is to render it obsolete.

The Reform–Revolution Tension Is Strategic, Not Moral

Every anarcho-syndicalist movement confronts the same paradox. You organize workers to win better conditions under capitalism. Yet your stated horizon is the abolition of capitalism and the state. If you win reforms, do you stabilize the system you seek to dismantle? If you refuse reforms, do you abandon workers to immediate suffering?

This is not a moral dilemma. It is a strategic design problem.

Reform as Rehearsal

Immediate economic reforms are not betrayals if they are structured as rehearsals for worker control. When miners negotiate safer conditions, the question is not only how much ventilation improves. The question is who controls the safety committee, who monitors compliance and where surplus funds flow.

If a union contract establishes joint worker oversight of scheduling, that committee can be trained to function as a proto-management body. If a wage increase is won, a portion can be voluntarily directed into a common fund governed by the syndicate. That fund can finance a childcare cooperative, a tool library or a strike kitchen.

Each reform becomes a seed crystal around which future sovereignty forms.

Occupy Wall Street demonstrated the power of prefigurative space. For a brief season, encampments ran kitchens, libraries and conflict mediation without state oversight. They did not abolish capitalism. Yet they altered the public imagination. They showed that ordinary people could coordinate complex systems rapidly. The failure was not the experiment itself. It was the inability to translate that burst into durable economic institutions.

Your reforms must be engineered to harden into institutions.

Avoiding the Reformist Sinkhole

There is a genuine danger. Institutions drift. Administrators grow comfortable. Negotiations become ends in themselves. The movement forgets its horizon.

Guard against this by ritualizing the long-term vision. Open assemblies with a reminder of the ultimate aim: worker self-management and communal federation. Close meetings with an audit of how the latest reform expands autonomy rather than dependency.

Measure success not only in dollars won but in degrees of control gained. Did workers acquire decision-making authority? Did they gain access to information previously monopolized by management? Did they create a new collective asset?

Count sovereignty, not just concessions.

When reforms increase collective capacity, they do not stabilize the system. They prepare its replacement.

Dual Power Through Small-Scale Collectivization

Revolution is often imagined as a singular rupture. In practice it resembles slow accretion punctuated by shocks. Dual power emerges when communities build parallel institutions that meet real needs more effectively than the state or market.

You do not begin by seizing the national grid. You begin with a shared workshop, a childcare cooperative or a neighborhood energy project.

The Commons Scan

Start with what is underused. Walk your neighborhood in teams. Identify vacant storefronts, idle garages, church basements, empty lots and rooftops. Map skills as well as spaces. Who knows carpentry? Who can repair bicycles? Who understands solar installation? Who can manage accounts?

Call a public assembly and present the findings. Vote on one project that meets three criteria:

1. It can be activated within thirty days.
2. It addresses a visible community need.
3. It can be governed directly by workers or residents through a clear, democratic structure.

Speed matters. Momentum generates belief. Belief generates participation.

The Shared Workshop as Political School

Imagine you select a neglected garage and convert it into a community tool-share and fabrication space. Volunteers clean it in a weekend. Donated tools are cataloged. A simple charter defines collective ownership, open access rules and a reinvestment policy.

Within weeks neighbors repair furniture, fabricate parts for gig work and teach one another skills. Apprenticeships form. Small membership dues cover maintenance. Surplus funds accumulate in a democratically controlled account.

What has changed?

Materially, people save money and gain capabilities. Politically, they experience self-management. They see budgets debated, conflicts mediated and resources allocated without bosses or bureaucrats.

This is not symbolic. It is infrastructural pedagogy.

The Québec casseroles in 2012 transformed private kitchens into nodes of public protest through nightly pot banging. Sound turned households into participants. A workshop can do something similar economically. It turns isolated consumers into producers. It dissolves the myth that expertise belongs to a managerial class.

Energy as a Strategic Lever

Energy is another powerful candidate. A small solar micro-grid connecting a few buildings can reduce costs and provide resilience during outages. Managed by a syndicate or neighborhood cooperative, it demonstrates competence in a domain usually monopolized by corporations.

Every kilowatt produced locally is an argument. When storms knock out centralized power but your block remains lit, persuasion no longer relies on pamphlets. It rests on refrigerators humming.

Such projects also cultivate technical skills crucial for broader transformation. Budgeting, maintenance, conflict resolution and long-term planning are learned through doing. These capacities are the skeleton of a future federation of communes.

Dual power is not an abstraction. It is a network of functioning alternatives.

Moral Persuasion in the Shadow of Coercion

The state possesses coercive force. Police can raid spaces. Courts can impose fines. Corporations can sue. How then can moral persuasion matter?

Because legitimacy is the oxygen of coercion.

Narrative as Shield and Sword

Every collectivized project must be narrated publicly. Publish transparent budgets. Share stories of individuals whose lives improved. Invite journalists and skeptical neighbors to observe meetings. Stream decision-making processes.

When repression comes, as it often does, the public must see not a gang of extremists but a functioning community asset under threat.

Consider the Diebold E-CD leak in 2003. Students mirrored internal corporate emails exposing voting machine vulnerabilities. Legal threats were issued. When a member of Congress mirrored the files on an official server, corporate intimidation collapsed. The act of solidarity shifted legitimacy. Coercion retreated when faced with public scrutiny.

Your workshop or micro-grid should cultivate similar alliances. Partner with local faith groups, tenant unions and small businesses. The broader the network, the higher the political cost of suppression.

Escalation Without Illusion

Moral persuasion does not mean passivity. Prepare escalation pathways. If a landlord attempts eviction of your workshop, can allied tenants organize rent strikes? If a utility company seeks to block your micro-grid, can sympathetic electricians refuse cooperation?

Design campaigns in cycles. Intense bursts of action followed by consolidation. Avoid predictable routines that allow authorities to adapt easily. Creativity is a strategic asset. Once a tactic becomes ritualized and easily anticipated, it decays.

The global anti-Iraq war march of February 2003 mobilized millions across hundreds of cities. It displayed overwhelming moral opposition. Yet it did not halt invasion. Why? Because the tactic was familiar and lacked structural leverage. Moral spectacle without disruptive capacity often evaporates.

Pair persuasion with leverage. Pair narrative with infrastructure.

Psychological Armor

Coercion also operates psychologically. Burnout, fear and internal conflict can dismantle movements more efficiently than police.

Institutionalize decompression rituals. After intense campaigns, hold reflective gatherings. Celebrate small wins. Acknowledge losses without despair. Treat early defeats as data rather than destiny.

Movements decay when participants reconcile themselves to defeat internally. Maintain a believable path to victory. Show how each small collectivized success builds toward a larger transformation.

Legitimacy, leverage and resilience form the triad that allows moral persuasion to operate effectively even under threat.

Building Toward the Social General Strike

Anarcho-syndicalism envisions a social general strike that abolishes the state and transfers industry to workers. This is not a spontaneous miracle. It requires dense networks of syndicates capable of coordinating production and distribution.

Small collectivized projects are not distractions from this horizon. They are rehearsal spaces.

Federating the Commons

As workshops, childcare cooperatives and micro-grids multiply, they should federate. Share best practices. Standardize transparent accounting. Create mutual aid pacts.

A local federation of syndicates can coordinate resource allocation across projects. Surpluses in one sector support deficits in another. Skills circulate.

This federation is embryonic governance. It replaces the government of men with the management of things.

Historical maroon communities such as Palmares in Brazil built parallel republics that survived for decades by organizing agriculture, defense and trade collectively. They were not utopias. They were pragmatic experiments in self-rule under hostile conditions. Their endurance demonstrates that alternative sovereignties can function even when surrounded by coercive empires.

Structural Timing

Revolutions often ignite when structural crises peak. Food prices spike. Financial systems wobble. Climate disasters multiply. Anarcho-syndicalist networks must be prepared to act when such contradictions intensify.

During lulls, focus on capacity building. During crises, scale rapidly. A well-organized workshop network can pivot to produce emergency supplies. A micro-grid federation can provide power when centralized systems fail.

When people witness competence during crisis, loyalty shifts. Authority migrates toward those who solve problems.

The Arab Spring was catalyzed by economic stress and political repression. But what sustained uprisings in places like Egypt was the occupation of Tahrir Square, where participants organized food distribution, security and medical care autonomously. Crisis opened the door. Self-organization kept it open.

Your goal is to be ready when structural windows appear.

From Parallelism to Replacement

Dual power matures when parallel institutions become indispensable. At that stage, a coordinated strike can withdraw labor from state and corporate systems while maintaining essential services through federated commons.

Hospitals run by worker councils. Transport coordinated by syndicates. Energy distributed by community grids. Food supplied by cooperative networks.

The state then faces a dilemma. Suppress functioning services and alienate the public, or concede authority.

This is not fantasy. It is strategic accumulation.

Putting Theory Into Practice

To translate vision into action, begin with disciplined experimentation:

• Conduct a 30-Day Commons Scan: Map underused spaces and community skills. Convene an open assembly to select one feasible project that can launch within a month.

• Draft a Clear Collective Charter: Define ownership, decision-making processes and reinvestment rules. Ensure transparency from day one. Publish budgets and meeting notes.

• Design for Immediate Utility: Choose a project that solves a visible problem such as tool access, childcare gaps or energy costs. Early tangible benefits build credibility.

• Link Every Win to the Larger Vision: Frame success publicly as proof of worker self-management. Use signage, social media and assemblies to connect the local project to the broader goal of federated communes.

• Build Escalation and Federation Plans: Prepare alliances and rapid response strategies in case of repression. Simultaneously connect with similar projects in nearby areas to share resources and coordinate growth.

These steps are modest. They are also radical. Each functioning commons is a brick removed from the edifice of centralized authority.

Conclusion

The path between reform and revolution is not a tightrope. It is a spiral. Each immediate economic struggle can either entrench dependency or expand autonomy. The difference lies in design.

If you negotiate only for higher wages, you may stabilize exploitation. If you channel those gains into collectively owned infrastructure, you cultivate sovereignty. If you collectivize a workshop, a childcare cooperative or a micro-grid and govern it transparently, you do more than provide services. You teach self-rule. You normalize the absence of bosses. You chip away at the mythology that the state is indispensable.

Moral persuasion alone cannot defeat entrenched power. But moral persuasion embodied in functioning alternatives can shift legitimacy, attract allies and raise the cost of repression. Dual power grows quietly until crisis accelerates its relevance. When structural windows open, the networked commons can pivot from parallel to primary.

Anarcho-syndicalism is not a romantic relic. It is a strategic wager that workers can manage industry and communities without hierarchical rule. The wager becomes credible only when you begin now, with what is within reach.

Which modest resource in your neighborhood could become the first irreversible fragment of a stateless future?