Dual power makes alliances with state workers impossible- they sabotage the alt , their support is key to avoid state crackdown

(Paul Christopher, Labour@Brock, https://socialistproject.ca/2019/06/transforming-capitalist-power-from-streets-to-state/, 6-25)

Any attempt to fundamentally transform capitalist society also needs to form alliances with state workers, especially the front-line providers of public services (Therborn 1978, 279-30). But attempts to create dual power institutions on large scales will not win support from otherwise sympathetic state workers. Since their jobs depend on the public sector, they “would support the democratization of administrative apparatuses, but hardly their decomposition” (Sirianni 1983, 114). It is not merely that disaffected state workers are capable of wide-ranging sabotage of revolutionary efforts. More importantly, public sector unions can also be positive, active participants in democratizing state structures and empowering egalitarian social movement and labour movement organizations. This is possible even in some of the more coercive institutions of the state. For example, Toronto immigration officers in the late 1980s who were fed up with the lousy services they were forced to provide, formed coalitions with immigrant rights groups, and, in coordination with them, engaged in a work-to-rule campaign for more resources, boycotted overtime and excessive caseloads, and dealt only with those clients who could be reasonably seen during the working day. The joint picket-lines of these producers and users of public services garnered such significant community support that the government was forced to respond by hiring 280 new immigration officers (McElligott 2018). Indeed, establishing councils between the producers and users of public goods would go beyond specific reforms and begin to transform the state. Another reason why alliances must be formed with state workers is that dual power institutions have never managed highly integrated and complex administrative systems above local scales. The knowledge necessary to plan and run industry on national scales cannot be cultivated merely through improvisation (Sirianni 1983, 118). Furthermore, a sum of autonomous institutions linked by a system of mandates likely cannot develop a ‘collective will,’ a spirit of compromise within the bounds of a generally recognized solidarity. For example, during popular participation in urban planning, if a town opposes having a waste collection centre that they would rather pass off to their neighbours, this will require some form of centralized arbitration to distribute benefits and burdens between legitimate interests (Bensaid 2007). Indeed, this would be crucial for, among other things, ending the environmental racism that locates undesirable facilities in racialized communities.