Liberatory

What would it mean to overcome or transform this? What have movements imagined, attempted, and built?

See the pedagogy document for what this lens does across all themes. The school does not resolve the disagreements among traditions. It puts them in front of the room and lets the room think.

This is the oldest and sharpest argument on the left: what do you do about the state? Take it over through elections and reform. Smash it and build workers’ councils in its place. Abolish it and refuse to build a new one. Work on its contradictions from inside while building movements outside. Each position has a century of experience and defeat behind it. This lens sets them side by side and lets the room weigh them.

Anchor questions

Smash the state or take it over? What does each side actually propose?
Reform or revolution: can the state be voted into serving the people?
If the state withers away, what replaces it, and who decides?
Anarchists and Leninists both want a world without the boss. Why do they disagree so sharply about the state?
What would self-government by ordinary people actually look like?
If you build a counter-power that governs four million people, judges disputes, and holds a border, in what sense is it not a state?
The Zapatistas have governed themselves for thirty years without taking Mexico. Is that a victory, a stalemate, or something the theory has no name for?

Materials

Free unless marked otherwise. This lens deliberately gathers positions that disagree with each other. Read them as an argument, not a syllabus.

Smash and replace the state

V.I. Lenin (1870 to 1924), The State and Revolution (1917). The strategic argument to smash the bourgeois state and replace it with the rule of the workers organized through soviets, and the fullest statement of the “withering away” thesis. The anchor of the revolutionary position. Free: marxists.org
V.I. Lenin, The Dual Power (1917). A short article defining the situation where soviets and the official government coexist. The historical reference point for later “dual power” strategy. Free: marxists.org

The parliamentary and reformist road

Eduard Bernstein (1850 to 1932), Evolutionary Socialism (1899). The founding statement of the reformist, parliamentary road, included as a genuine opposing position: that socialism can arrive gradually through democracy and reform. Free: marxists.org
Karl Kautsky (1854 to 1938), The Road to Power (1909). The orthodox strategy of building a mass party to win the state, a bridge and a foil between the revolutionary and reformist camps, and a live reference in today’s electoral debates. Free: marxists.org

Reform or revolution

Rosa Luxemburg (1871 to 1919), Reform or Revolution (1900). Her reply to Bernstein, insisting that reforms are a means and not a substitute for the conquest of power, and defending mass action. Shared with the capitalism theme. Free: marxists.org

The anarchist and council alternatives

Mikhail Bakunin (1814 to 1876), Marxism, Freedom and the State (1872). Extracts on the Bakunin-against-Marx quarrel, warning that a workers’ state would breed a new ruling class of ex-workers and bureaucrats. The anarchist prophecy the room can weigh against the Soviet record. Free: theanarchistlibrary.org
Errico Malatesta (1853 to 1932), An Anarchist Programme (1920). A practical anarchist platform on aims and methods, rejecting the capture of state power in favor of abolishing it through direct organization. Free: theanarchistlibrary.org
Anton Pannekoek (1873 to 1960), Workers’ Councils (1947). The council communist vision of workers governing production and society through their own councils rather than through party or parliament. Shared with the labor theme. Free: marxists.org

The democratic road

Nicos Poulantzas (1936 to 1979), The State, Social Movements, Party (interview, 1979). His late case for a democratic road that works on the internal contradictions of the state while sustaining autonomous movements from below. The most influential contemporary attempt to get past the smash-versus-reclaim impasse. Free: viewpointmag.com

Radical democracy and post-Marxism

Ernesto Laclau (1935 to 2014) and Chantal Mouffe (b. 1943), Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1985). The founding post-Marxist argument that socialist strategy should give up the privileged role of the working class and build hegemony through a “chain of equivalence” linking many democratic struggles: feminist, ecological, anti-racist, and more. The most influential contemporary case for a broad radical-democratic politics rather than a class-centered one. Free to borrow: archive.org
Ellen Meiksins Wood (1942 to 2016), The Retreat from Class (1986). The classic Marxist rebuttal, arguing that Laclau and Mouffe’s turn to discourse and equivalence dissolves class and cuts socialism loose from its material base. It won the Deutscher Prize and is the other half of the argument. Free to borrow: archive.org. Her short Reply to Callinicos (1987) restates the case for free: marxists.org

Dual power: what happens when it is actually built

Every position above is a claim about what should be done. These are what happened when people did it. Dual power is the strategy of building a counter-power beside the state rather than seizing it or entering it, and the interest here is in the part the theory does not cover: what the thing becomes once it has to collect the rubbish, judge a dispute, and hold a border.

Leon Trotsky (1879 to 1940), 1905 (1907). Trotsky’s account of the St Petersburg Soviet, which he chaired: the first workers’ council to work as a rival government inside a living state. This is the case Lenin’s The Dual Power is theorizing about, written by a participant rather than an observer. Free: marxists.org
Abdullah Ocalan (b. 1949), Democratic Confederalism (2011). Forty-eight pages, written in a Turkish island prison, that turned a national liberation movement away from wanting a state at all. The opening claim is the whole argument: the right to self-determination includes the right to a state, but founding a state does not increase a people’s freedom. The theoretical charter of Rojava. Free: ocalanbooks.com
Social Contract of the Democratic Federation of Northern Syria (2016). What a movement that says it does not want a state writes down when it has to govern four million people. Seventeen pages that disclaim statehood in the preamble and then legislate like a constitution. A movement-issued primary source, and the room should read it skeptically and ask which one it is. Free: rojavainformationcenter.org
Gilles Dauve, Kurdistan? (2015). The adversary, included on purpose. Dauve argues Rojava’s councils are not dual power against the state but an administration doing state work under war conditions, dependent on American air cover and on the market it says it opposes. Left communist and hostile. Read it directly after the Social Contract. Free: theanarchistlibrary.org
Black Flag, Zapatistas Put Autonomy Into Practice (2003). The 2003 turn that made the caracoles and the Juntas de Buen Gobierno, when the EZLN stopped asking the Mexican state for recognition and simply began governing. The clearest short statement of the Zapatista answer to the state question: do not seize it, do not negotiate with it, build beside it. Anarchist. Free: theanarchistlibrary.org
Chiapas Support Committee, To Govern by Obeying: 19 Years of the Caracoles (2022). Nineteen years on, including the Zapatistas’ own decision to restructure the juntas. This answers what none of the theory can: what becomes of a counter-power that neither takes the state nor is destroyed by it, over two decades. Sympathetic, from the solidarity movement. Free: chiapas-support.org

For these experiments as prefigurative projects rather than as answers to the state question, see Anarchism, Mutual Aid, and Prefiguration, which holds the Zapatistas’ own escuelita materials and the Rojava documentary.

Debates and disagreements

The school holds the disagreements open. This lens is built entirely around one of them.

Lenin (smash the state), Bernstein and Kautsky (win it through parliament), Luxemburg (reform as means, not end), Bakunin and Malatesta (abolish it), Pannekoek (replace it with councils), Poulantzas (transform it from within and without), and Laclau and Mouffe (build a radical-democratic hegemony beyond class) do not agree, and Ellen Meiksins Wood insists that last move gives the game away. Set them against each other and ask which reading of history each one rests on. The practical lens brings this argument into the present through the debate over electoral versus movement strategy.

Video

“A World Without Governments? Anarchism Explained” (CrashCourse, 2025). Roughly 12 minutes, about 310,000 views. A survey of anarchist theory and practice from a mainstream series, useful as a shared reference to complicate with the anarchist readings. youtube.com/watch?v=P-Ibq-9wulQ
“Economic Update: Reform vs. Revolution” (Democracy At Work, Richard Wolff, 2025). Roughly 31 minutes, about 169,000 views. Wolff weighs gradual reform against revolutionary change, a direct fit for the central debate of this lens. youtube.com/watch?v=77BBlVjkLbI
“Why States Fail Humanity” (Andrewism, 2024). Roughly 45 minutes, about 105,000 views. A long-form Black anarchist critique of the state itself, the anarchist voice in video form to set against the Leninist explainer in the theoretical lens. youtube.com/watch?v=-1PV02IzWpo

Status

First pass, and it may be a while before there is a second. Contributions welcome, especially first-person accounts from inside the dual-power experiments here rather than accounts written about them: the Rojava and Zapatista material is movement-issued or solidarity-written, and a participant’s own reckoning with what the councils could not do would be worth more than either. The Spanish collectives are covered in the labor theme and the anarchism theme.

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