If you make a revolution,how do you come to "power"?

[Ernesto Che Makuc]

Just wondering if you start an revolution you have massive people on your site how can you come to "power" to change state policy so you can introduce socialism to that state?

[graymouser]

What history has shown is that there are situations that can be called "dual power" - where the existing bourgeois government is losing its authority and the real authority goes to a second government. In the Russian Revolution this was the split between the Provisional Government and the Soviets - the latter was a bourgeois government and the former a workers government. There have been other conditions when dual power existed, such as the militias and the republic in the Spanish civil war, but did not actually take sole power. They were then outmaneuvered and defeated.

In situations where a genuine dual power exists, one power eventually will militarily defeat the other - although, as in the Russian revolution, in some cases this can really only be a matter of formality. The Soviets were so thoroughly ingrained in their power that it took only the seizure of the Winter Palace for a Soviet-based government to take control of the country. Now, we can talk about the problems of the Russian revolution in history, but the general picture of dual power that it represented showed, I think, the main way that the transition of power from a bourgeois to a proletarian government happens.

[eyedrop]

Build alternate power structures, in the historical form of workers councils (or workers syndicates if you'd like) and neighboorhood councils, that struggles with the state and capitalists for power. When we 'win' we already have a rough groundwork of post-revolutionary organization which will be revised based on practical problems.

[Zealot]

I would have to agree with graymouser, I know that in my own country some of the earlier settlers from England had attempted to set up a NZ Republic. Eventually they were crushed but you also see this "dual power" idea operating in the Paris Commune, previously Libya, and even America at one time.

What I really want to know is how a government with little support is able to establish itself, like the current Egyptian government.

[Die Neue Zeit]

There should be construction of alternative power structures, but in this day and age this premise cannot be separated from the premise of mass party-movements. Such alternative power structures should be internal structures of mass party-movements. Think of branch meetings that do way more than typical branch meetings.