Part of an occasional series: ideas from outside the usual solarpunk reading list.
Political movements that reject both the ballot box and violent revolution often reach for a phrase: „dual power.” It shows up constantly in movement literature, usually without much explanation of where it comes from or what it actually requires structurally. Murray Bookchin — a lifelong radical who moved from Marxism through anarchism to a political philosophy he eventually called Communalism — spent much of his later career trying to give that phrase an actual institutional shape, not just a slogan.
The diagnosis: ecological crisis is a social crisis
Bookchin’s political proposal grows out of a broader theoretical project he called social ecology. His central claim: the ecological crisis has social roots, not technical or demographic ones. It isn’t „humanity” in some undifferentiated sense that generated the idea of dominating nature — it’s hierarchy and class relations specifically. He’s explicitly critical of two opposite tendencies he sees as equally evasive: biocentric reductionism, which treats humans as just another species, a kind of parasite no different from any other organism on the planet, and a certain mystical strain of „ecological spirituality” that he reads as a way of avoiding direct confrontation with actual social and economic structures — most pointedly, capitalism’s impersonal „grow or die” logic.
His alternative framing distinguishes what he calls first nature (the biological world as it emerged through evolution) from second nature (the social and cultural world humans have built) — with the important move being that second nature is itself a product of first nature, not something standing opposed to it. Humans, in this view, are neither aliens visiting the planet nor simply another animal among many; they’re a product of evolution capable of reflectively and purposefully shaping their own social world, for better or worse.
What „dual power” actually means
This is where Bookchin’s proposal gets concrete, and where it turns out to be the direct source of a phrase used constantly, often without attribution, across the broader ecological and anti-authoritarian left.
Dual power, in Bookchin’s specific formulation, means a free municipality — a genuinely self-governing local political community — existing in ongoing, unresolved tension with the nation-state. It’s institutionalized through direct, face-to-face democracy: citizen assemblies where people who live in a place actually gather and deliberate together, rather than delegating that deliberation away. Those assemblies are then linked into a wider confederation through delegates who are mandated (instructed how to vote by the assembly that sent them) and recallable (removable if they stop representing that assembly’s actual decisions). Bookchin calls this specific institutional program libertarian municipalism, and it’s the practical core of what he named Communalism — a term he proposed as a more precise replacement for „anarchism” as a self-description, one that names the actual institutional target rather than just an oppositional stance.
Crucially, this isn’t framed as a single revolutionary rupture. It’s a standing, ongoing institutional tension — a persistent structural challenge that free municipalities pose to the centralizing power of the nation-state, sustained continuously through practice rather than achieved once and then defended.
Why the old political subject stopped working
Bookchin also diagnoses something he sees as a real shift in political conditions: the classical Marxist picture of the industrial proletariat as history’s privileged revolutionary subject has, in his assessment, eroded. In wealthy countries, the working class has become substantially „petty bourgeois” in its consumption patterns and daily life, while newer axes of conflict — hierarchy as such, gender, race, ecology — have taken on political significance comparable to class, not subordinate to it.
His proposed response is a broader political identity: the recovery of the citoyen, the citizen in a specifically republican sense — someone whose political identity comes from participation in self-governance, not simply from position in an economic system. This is meant to be wider than any single class category, capable of drawing together people whose primary stake in transformation isn’t necessarily their position in a factory.
A concrete historical lineage, not a thought experiment
Bookchin doesn’t present dual power as a purely theoretical proposal. He grounds it in a specific, if intermittent and repeatedly suppressed, historical lineage: Athenian democracy, the Parisian sectional assemblies of 1793, the New England town meeting tradition, and — closer to his own time — attempts at neighborhood assembly governance in cities like New York and Paris, which he documents as having been repeatedly undermined by elites pushing toward centralization. The pattern he traces isn’t one of steady progress; it’s one of recurring attempts, recurring suppression, and the argument that the suppression itself is evidence of how genuinely threatening face-to-face democratic institutions are to concentrated power.
A real disagreement inside the anti-authoritarian tradition
One detail is worth surfacing precisely because it complicates any simple „anarchism says X” narrative. In a pointed aside, Bookchin criticizes Kropotkin — one of anarchism’s foundational theorists — for rejecting formal democratic decision procedures in favor of consensus. Bookchin himself argues explicitly for majority voting within fully empowered assemblies as the mechanism that should legitimate confederal decisions, not consensus. His reasoning: majority rule, exercised by assemblies where everyone genuinely has standing and voice, is in his view more accountable than formal consensus, not less — consensus can quietly hand a veto to whoever is most persistent, most comfortable with conflict, or most willing to hold out.
This matters because it means the broader tradition Bookchin writes from — green anarchism and libertarian municipalism — doesn’t speak with one voice on this specific question. Bookchin, writing as a committed anti-authoritarian, still prefers majority democracy in assemblies over consensus, precisely because he thinks it produces more real accountability. That’s a genuine, unresolved disagreement inside a tradition that’s sometimes treated from the outside as if it agreed on questions like this.
Why this is worth having on your radar
If you’ve encountered „dual power” as a phrase in movement writing without ever tracing it to a specific institutional proposal, Bookchin is likely where a lot of that language ultimately comes from, at least in its green-anarchist lineage. What he offers isn’t just a stance or a mood — it’s a specific, historically grounded institutional design: assemblies you can physically attend, delegates who can be recalled, confederation without central command, and an explicit argument for why majority voting inside genuinely empowered assemblies might do more real accountability work than either top-down hierarchy or formal consensus.
Whether that specific design is the right one is a separate question from whether the underlying diagnosis is worth taking seriously: that power, left unaddressed, doesn’t stay diffuse on its own — it needs a deliberate institutional structure to keep it that way.
Did we get something wrong?
This piece is drawn from our own reading notes, not a translation of the source essays. If something above misrepresents the argument, or just sounds off, tell us — publicly or privately, whichever you’d rather.
Want the fuller picture?
This is a survey, not the whole collection of essays. The deep-dive version is here: deep-dive PDF.
What should we read next?
This is one piece in a loose series drawn from our own research reading. If there’s a thinker, a book, or a tradition you think belongs in a series like this, we want to hear it.
