On 2012-01-15, at 9:01 AM, shag carpet bomb wrote:
> This story reminds me of what I read in the intro to Corey Robin's book, The Conservative Mind. Robin says that what has always scared the crap out of the powerful is that people could actually provide what government and (Corey says) management does. Thus, Robin says, what scared people during the general strike in Seattle 1919 was the capacity people had for organizing themselves and then policing the community on their own, or taking over the places where they worked and doing the work without government officials, bureaucracy or managers.
In revolutionary literature, this has been referred to as "dual power" - the taking over of administrative and policing functions by the people from the crumbling state apparatus. The organizations through which this power from below was exercised were typically called "workers' councils", or in the Russian Revolution, "Soviets". This represents the decisive stage of a revolutionary insurrection. Dual power cannot coexist indefinitely. Either the armed and organized masses take power from the state or, as in the Paris Commune, the state crushes the insurrection. The Seattle workers were, of course, powerfully inspired by the example of the Russian Revolution.