Dual power building is a liberal, anti-revolutionary idea, coopted by the bourgeois.

In attempting to theoretically and historically justify the conception of bottom-up, direct democracy assemblies establishing dual power and then supplanting bourgeois rule, Kali Akuno, overall an excellent model of honesty and critical summation, sinks to his one disingenuous line of argumentation: During pre-revolutionary periods an Assembly can function as a genuine ‘dual power’ and assume many of the functions of the government (state). Perhaps the best example of this over the past 10 years comes from the revolutionary movement in Nepal, where the revolutionary forces stimulated and organized Assemblies to act as a direct counterweight to the monarchical government and the military. What is disingenuous here is the use of the vague term “revolutionary forces.” As Akuno knows, the revolutionary forces in question were the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) and the People’s Liberation Army under its leadership. To say that these forces “stimulated and organized Assemblies” mischaracterizes the way a communist vanguard party organized and led local forms of revolutionary political power involving the oppressed masses in territory liberated by the People’s Liberation Army running the local authorities and the enemy’s police and military out of Dodge. The so-called “Assemblies” were not the main “direct counterweight to the monarchical government and military”— it was the People’s Liberation Army that performed this function. Furthermore, the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) never characterized this situation as “dual power,” but as the stage of strategic equilibrium within the strategy of protracted people’s war. It is a telling indication of the inability of direct democracy-style assemblies to ever supplant bourgeois rule that Akuno, referring to this dual power assembly strategy, calls the people’s war in Nepal “perhaps the best example of this over the past 10 years” when this best example directly contradicts his line (and so he distorts the reality and revolutionary strategy in Nepal).