Dual power

Dual power (Russian: "Двоевластие" Dvoyevlastiye) was a term first used by Lenin, although conceptually first outlined by Proudhon, which described a situation in the wake of the February Revolution in which two powers, the workers councils (or Soviets, particularly the Petrograd Soviet) and the official state apparatus of the Provisional Government coexisted with each other and competed for legitimacy. Lenin argued that this essentially unstable situation constituted a unique opportunity for the Soviets to seize power by smashing the Provisional Government and establishing themselves as the basis of a new form of state power. This notion has informed the strategies of subsequent communist-led revolutions, including the Chinese Revolution led by Mao.

Libertarian socialists have more recently appropriated the term to refer to the non-violent strategy of achieving a libertarian socialist economy and polity by means of incrementally establishing and then networking institutions of direct participatory democracy to contest the existing power structures of state-capitalism. This does not necessarily mean disengagement with existing institutions; for example, Yates McKee describes a dual power approach as "forging alliances and supporting demands on existing institutions — elected officials, public agencies, universities, workplaces, banks, corporations, museums — while at the same time developing self-organized counter-institutions." In this context, the strategy itself is sometimes also referred to as "counterpower" to differentiate it from the term's Leninist origins.