Revolutionary Power Without the State

Introduction

Revolutionary power is the most misunderstood phrase in activism.

For some, it conjures images of stormed palaces and red flags raised over shattered ministries. For others, it signals a tragic error, the moment when liberation curdles into a new domination. Between these poles lies a strategic riddle that every serious movement must solve: how do you dismantle state power without becoming a new state?

The fantasy of pure refusal has proven insufficient. Capitalism does not dissolve because you build a cooperative bakery. Nor does repression vanish because you hold a meditation circle. Yet the opposite error is just as fatal. To seize the machinery of the state and simply repaint it is to inherit its habits of hierarchy and coercion.

The task is harder and more imaginative. You must confront and disable the institutions that dominate society while simultaneously cultivating nonstate, self-managed forms of life that make the old order obsolete. You must learn to wield power without crystallizing into a state.

This is not a philosophical puzzle. It is a practical one, sharpened by the risk of repression and the ever-present specter of counterrevolution. The movements that endure are those that treat confrontation and construction not as rivals but as two currents of the same uprising.

The thesis is simple yet demanding: revolutionary success depends on synchronizing militant disruption with the steady construction of autonomous institutions, while transforming internal fear into a disciplined, shared resilience that outlasts repression.

The False Choice Between Seizing Power and Refusing It

Movements often split over a binary: take state power or reject it entirely. This debate can paralyze strategy before it begins.

The Mirage of Purity

Some currents argue that any engagement with power is contamination. The state is a trap. Authority corrupts. Therefore the only ethical stance is refusal. Build alternatives in the cracks. Withdraw consent. Let the system rot.

This approach has moral clarity. It also has strategic blind spots.

Capitalism is not merely an idea. It is enforced through police, courts, militaries, financial systems and border regimes. These are not metaphors. They are institutions with budgets and weapons. To imagine they will wither because you model a better world is to mistake symbolism for force.

Occupy Wall Street revealed both the power and limits of refusal. By occupying public squares, it redefined inequality for a generation. The slogan of the 99 percent reentered mainstream vocabulary. Yet when the encampments were evicted in coordinated raids, the absence of parallel institutions capable of defending territory or delivering ongoing services left the wave vulnerable. The meme survived; the infrastructure did not.

Refusal without confrontation risks becoming lifestyle politics.

The Trap of Substitution

The opposite error is to imagine that the solution lies in capturing the existing state. Win elections, appoint new ministers, redirect the police. The assumption is that the machinery is neutral and can be repurposed.

History counsels caution. The state is not an empty vessel. It is structured to centralize authority, monopolize violence and defend property relations. When revolutionaries inherit it, they inherit its gravitational pull.

The twentieth century is littered with movements that promised workers’ councils and delivered party bureaucracies. The dream of emancipation hardened into a new command structure. Even when intentions were sincere, emergency measures became permanent. The revolution froze into administration.

If you seek a stateless society of federated communes, you cannot simply nationalize the old state and call it freedom.

The Third Path: Overthrow Without Replacement

The strategic horizon that remains is more difficult and more creative. It requires overthrowing the existing state apparatus while refusing to reconstruct it in similar form. It demands exercising power to dismantle oppressive institutions, defend gains and reorganize social life through councils, assemblies and federations that do not ossify into a new ruling layer.

This is not naïve anti-power romanticism. It recognizes that dismantling capitalism requires forceful action. But it asks a deeper question: how can the exercise of power be diffused, participatory and accountable from the beginning?

Here the concept of dual power becomes useful, not as dogma but as orientation. The old order is confronted and weakened while new organs of collective self-management emerge and gradually assume functions once monopolized by the state.

The tension is real. The old power will not surrender gracefully. Counterrevolution is not a hypothetical. It is the predictable response of entrenched elites.

So the question becomes tactical: how do you choreograph confrontation and construction so they reinforce rather than undermine each other?

Twin Temporalities: Confrontation and Construction

Revolution is not a single event. It is a rhythm.

Movements that endure learn to operate in twin temporalities: fast bursts of disruption and slow cultivation of institutions.

The Fast Current: Disruptive Confrontation

There are moments when escalation is necessary. Strikes that halt production. Blockades that freeze supply chains. Occupations that expose the illegitimacy of authority. These acts operate in compressed time. They exploit contradictions when they peak.

Consider the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi in Tunisia. One act of desperation, amplified by digital networks and preexisting grievances, cascaded into nationwide uprising. The speed of diffusion overwhelmed the regime’s initial response. The fast current opened a breach.

Disruptive confrontation has several strategic functions:

• It reveals the coercive core of the system, stripping away liberal pretenses.
• It forces neutral observers to choose sides.
• It tests the regime’s cohesion and exposes fractures.

But confrontation alone cannot sustain daily life. A strike that lasts forever without alternative distribution systems risks turning the population against itself.

The Slow Current: Institution Building

Parallel to confrontation must run the slow, patient construction of self-managed institutions.

Neighborhood councils that coordinate food distribution. Cooperative clinics. Community defense teams accountable to assemblies. Mesh communication networks. Worker-managed enterprises.

These institutions do not wait for victory. They prefigure and prototype it.

The Québec Casseroles of 2012 offer a glimpse of how decentralized participation can become infrastructure. Nightly pot-and-pan marches diffused block by block. Households became nodes. The sound was protest, but the practice was coordination. It habituated people to collective action without central command.

The slow current accomplishes different tasks:

• It builds legitimacy by meeting concrete needs.
• It trains participants in self-governance.
• It reduces dependence on state services.

Over time, the population begins to look to these institutions for water, childcare, conflict mediation and meaning. Sovereignty migrates quietly.

Synchronizing the Currents

The art lies in synchronizing these currents.

If confrontation surges without institutional depth, the movement burns hot and collapses under repression. If institution building proceeds without confrontation, it risks marginality or cooptation.

Think in cycles rather than permanence. Escalate. Crest. Consolidate. Withdraw before exhaustion hardens into demoralization. Use lulls to fortify councils, refine logistics and train new participants. Then relaunch with greater capacity.

This cyclical approach exploits bureaucratic inertia. States respond slowly, drafting reports and reallocating budgets. Movements can surge and recede within weeks. Speed is leverage.

Yet even with perfect timing, an obstacle remains more intimate than police lines: internal fear.

Repression, Fear and the Inner Battlefield

Before counterrevolution arrives as tanks, it often appears as hesitation in a meeting.

Movements fracture not only because of external attack but because of unspoken anxieties.

Moral Dilemmas and Identity Conflicts

Within any organizing team, you will find divergent moral intuitions.

Some comrades are shaped by traditions of nonviolence. For them, militant confrontation feels like betrayal of ethical core. Others believe that without readiness for forceful disruption, the movement is theater.

These positions are not simply strategic disagreements. They are identity claims. To challenge them can feel like questioning someone’s integrity.

Left unaddressed, this tension hardens into subcultural camps. The street militants mock the institution builders as timid social workers. The builders see the militants as reckless romantics.

The result is paralysis.

Class and Risk Asymmetries

Fear is also stratified.

For a tenured academic, arrest may be an inconvenience. For an undocumented worker, it can mean deportation. For a precarious tenant, a criminal record can trigger eviction.

When movements romanticize risk without acknowledging these asymmetries, trust erodes. People self-censor. Strategic debates become coded expressions of personal vulnerability.

If repression hits, those who cannot afford the consequences may feel sacrificed for someone else’s theory.

Naming Fear as Strategy

The counterintuitive move is to treat fear not as weakness but as data.

Structured fear-sharing circles can transform private anxiety into collective intelligence. Anonymous “black box” exercises where participants describe worst-case repression scenarios can surface hidden concerns. For each scenario, draft paired responses: one confrontational, one constructive.

A raid on a community center? Confrontation might involve rapid mobilization at the police station. Construction might involve activating decentralized meeting spaces and digital communication nodes.

When fears are named publicly, they lose their isolating power. The narrative shifts from paralysis to preparation.

This is not group therapy detached from politics. It is psychological armor. Movements that ritualize decompression after actions, that tell the story of both audacity and care, are less likely to implode under stress.

The inner battlefield determines whether the outer one can be sustained.

Ritual, Role Rotation and the Culture of Resilience

Strategy is not only about targets and timelines. It is about culture.

If you want militant confrontation and institution building to feel like two expressions of the same project, you must design rituals that embody that unity.

Fear-Sharing Circles as Political Technology

A fear-sharing circle is not sentimental. It is a rehearsal for repression.

Phones off. Candles lit or lights dimmed. Each participant speaks to a specific anxiety: imprisonment, public defamation, burnout, moral compromise. Others listen without interruption.

The group then translates each fear into a strategic question. What infrastructure would reduce this risk? What skills would increase confidence? What alliances would distribute vulnerability?

The ritual ends with a concrete commitment: a training scheduled, a fund created, a protocol drafted.

Fear becomes fuel.

Rotating Roles to Break Silos

Silos are silent counterrevolution.

When the same people always handle security and others always handle childcare or food logistics, hierarchies congeal. Skills concentrate. Empathy narrows.

Instituting a rotating “dual power dojo” can counter this drift. One week, participants practice de-escalation, secure communication and legal observation. The next, they facilitate consensus meetings, manage cooperative budgets or mediate internal conflicts.

Role swaps can be intentionally uncomfortable. The most vocal militant facilitates a food distribution meeting. The quiet organizer who excels at care logistics plans a disruptive banner drop.

Temporary disorientation exposes assumptions. It cultivates mutual respect. It embeds the understanding that confrontation without care is brittle, and care without confrontation is vulnerable.

Archiving Emotional Memory

Movements suffer from amnesia.

New recruits arrive without knowledge of past mistakes or hard-earned lessons. Fear-sharing insights evaporate if not preserved.

Consider creating an encrypted resilience codex. An evolving document that records anonymized stories of repression, strategic responses and emotional reflections. Each new member reads it, contributes a page and trains in both a confrontation skill and a caretaking skill before public action.

This codex is collective muscle memory. It reduces panic when repression arrives because the scenario has been imagined before.

Culture, when intentional, becomes a shield.

Designing for Counterrevolution Without Becoming It

The ultimate test of revolutionary maturity is how you prepare for counterrevolution.

Every uprising that threatens entrenched power will face attempts at sabotage, infiltration and violent repression. The question is not whether this will occur but how you respond.

Segmentation Without Secrecy Fetish

It can be wise to differentiate roles. Overt assemblies handle public services and communication. Smaller affinity groups manage high-risk actions.

But segmentation must not devolve into opaque cliques. Transparency in decision-making structures and accountability mechanisms prevents charismatic gatekeeping and internal coups.

Counter-entryism is a practice of radical clarity. Publish criteria for roles. Rotate responsibilities. Document decisions. When power is visible and distributed, infiltration has less leverage.

Social Defense Beyond the State

If you reject the state, you must still address defense.

Community defense teams accountable to assemblies can monitor threats, coordinate rapid response and de-escalate conflict. Legal funds and rapid solidarity mobilizations can transform arrests into public scandals rather than isolated traumas.

Repression can sometimes catalyze rather than crush. Mass arrests during Occupy generated sympathy and media attention. But this catalytic effect only occurs when a movement has sufficient support and narrative coherence.

Defense must therefore be paired with storytelling. Each act of repression should be framed as evidence of the old order’s illegitimacy and the necessity of the new institutions being built.

Ending Offensives Intentionally

One of the most underappreciated skills in activism is knowing when to pause.

Staying until you win can be heroic. It can also be strategically foolish. Prolonged escalation without consolidation exhausts participants and clarifies targets for repression.

Design campaigns in arcs. Declare victory in partial gains. Withdraw to regroup. Use quieter periods to strengthen cooperatives, councils and training programs.

Temporary withdrawal is not surrender. It is energy conservation for decisive re-entry.

Movements that survive are those that treat time as a weapon.

Putting Theory Into Practice

To balance militant confrontation with self-managed institution building while preparing for repression, consider these concrete steps:

• Establish a dual-track strategy document. Clearly articulate which teams focus on disruptive action and which on institution building, while defining how they support each other. Revisit quarterly.

• Institutionalize fear-sharing rituals. Schedule regular circles where repression scenarios are named and translated into protocols. Pair each fear with one confrontational and one constructive response.

• Create a rotating skills calendar. Ensure every member trains in at least one high-risk action skill and one governance or care skill each quarter. Break down subcultural silos deliberately.

• Build a resilience fund and rapid response network. Legal defense, bail, media amplification and childcare support should be prearranged, not improvised after arrests.

• Measure sovereignty gained, not crowd size. Track how many people rely on your institutions for daily needs, how many decisions are made through assemblies, and how much material dependence on state systems has decreased.

These steps are not glamorous. They are the scaffolding of durability.

Conclusion

Revolutionary power without the state is not a slogan. It is a discipline.

You must be willing to confront and dismantle oppressive institutions, recognizing that elites will not abdicate politely. Yet you must also refuse the temptation to rebuild domination in new colors. The answer lies in synchronizing fast bursts of disruption with slow construction of self-managed life.

Internally, you must transform fear into shared intelligence. Ritualize vulnerability. Rotate roles. Archive lessons. Prepare for repression not with bravado but with infrastructure and culture.

Externally, you must design campaigns that crest and consolidate, exploiting speed while building institutions that make the old order irrelevant.

When people begin to look to your assemblies for justice, to your cooperatives for bread, to your networks for meaning, sovereignty has already shifted. The state may still stand, but its authority will be hollowing.

The revolution does not begin when you seize the palace. It begins when you stop asking permission to govern your own life.

So ask yourself: which existing project in your movement could evolve, this year, into the first indispensable public service of a post-state city?