During those years, the predominant logic among the political and intellectual left was that the state was a machine of oppression of the popular classes. However, what this mechanical conception cannot answer is why the state, a ‘mere instrument of domination’, is paradoxically continually claimed by the struggles of the working classes to inscribe their new rights or to institutionalise many of their social conquests. The response that the popular classes are living a ‘deception’ because they do not understand that the state is merely the machine of their own oppression, or that they are involved in conditions of domination which oblige them to see the world from their position of domination, in order to continue to be dominated, condemns the subaltern classes to a condition of perpetual idiocy which can only be overcome by the work of those who, due to the magic of the holy spirit, possess the ‘truth’ and have not fallen into the clutches of deception: the party, the intellectuals, etc.
Even if true, so what? One answer to that question is “dual power”:
Every form of social dual power arises outside the state and against the state because it is a way of democratising the decision-making and management of some common societal issue. But, at the same time, dual power arises initially to demand something from the state and, if there is no universal irradiation of dual power that allows the state form to be overcome, dual power will seek to enshrine in the (new) state itself the institutionality, the management of the new right, of the new resource or recognition achieved in the collective struggle. At the same time, the state will have to reconstruct its social legitimacy if it manages to incorporate the imprint of dual power in its new legal order, in its institutional reorganisation and in the social composition of its officials. It is a paradoxical relationship. Dual power is the antagonist of the state; but, at the same time, so far, neither can live without the other.
(both quotes from https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/article/state-counter-power-and-post-fascism-from-poulantzas-to-the-present-interview-with-alvaro-garcia-linera-and-sandro-mezzadra/)
An example: the COVID-19 pandemic and its impacts on emergency responders and critical infrastructure operators in Oregon and Washington State.
The pandemic had been a clear wake-up call to those we interviewed. “COVID had catastrophic effects on everybody, including critical infrastructures,” said a state emergency preparedness manager with long experience, adding the response had been and had to be “unparalleled”. “We have wind events, we have fire events, we have power events, then the biggest event of all, COVID,” said a senior city public works official.
And what were COVID’s major impacts from the perspective of these informants? First and foremost: the pandemic’s interconnectivities. An experienced emergency management expert put it this way, “the one thing that the pandemic is bringing out is a higher definition of how these things are interconnected and they’re not totally visible”.
This was so because the pandemic combined with other emergencies at the same time. A heat dome emergency required a treatment plant’s staff not to work outside, but in so doing created COVTD-19 distancing issues inside. The intersection of lockdowns and winter ice storms increased restoration times of some electrical crews, reported a state director of emergency management for energy. A vaccination mandate for city staff added uncertainty over personnel available for real-time line services. Who gets to work at home and who gets to work in the plant also created unexpected issues.
That what had been invisible before had become defined and visible in the pandemic period describes a seeming paradox: Immediate response to a heat dome or winter ice storm can have a logic, clarity and urgency in response: Secure electricity and water first. Yet add after-effects or a different crisis, in this case the pandemic, and some important things turn much less clear at the same time. “It’s almost impossible” to reconstruct after-the-fact the welter of timelines and organizational scrambling in immediate response, an experienced wastewater coordinator and planner underscored. It’s by no means always certain how response happened. “How did that work? Great question,” said a state emergency preparedness official before trying to explain.
What does this have to do with “dual power”? The fact that those left alive after a major disaster often self-organize–especially when the state and its resources are unexpectedly missing-in-action–is a well-known and documented example of social movement as “self-government” and “autonomous.” But: The state must do better the next time we have a pandemic! Less well-known yet just as important are the struggles within the state over who best to take immediate action, those insiders at the rock-face of disaster or those further up in hierarchical chains of command.
If your starting point is “the state is a means of domination,” then that was not what our interviewees saw in the Oregon and Washington State emergencies of the early 2020s.
WHEN COMPLEX IS AS SIMPLE AS IT GETS 