Dual power is the strategy of building alternative institutions that meet real needs outside the structures of the state and capital, creating a lived alternative that makes existing power arrangements unnecessary rather than seizing them.
The term originates with Vladimir Lenin’s description of the 1917 situation in which workers’ soviets and the provisional government coexisted. In anarchist and autonomist use, however, dual power means something different from Lenin’s tactical analysis. It does not describe a temporary condition to be resolved by a vanguard seizing the state. It describes a sustained practice: building the infrastructure of a different social order — food systems, mutual aid networks, conflict resolution processes, cooperative economies — that operates on its own logic alongside (and against) the dominant order.
This distinguishes dual power from reform (which accepts existing institutions and modifies them from within) and from insurrection (which targets existing institutions for destruction). Dual power creates, and what it creates erodes the dependency that gives existing institutions their hold.
The Zapatista autonomous municipalities, Cooperation Jackson in Mississippi, and Indigenous land defense camps all practice forms of dual power.