Social revolution is not just taking power. It is changing what power is, where it lives, and how people relate to one another. Social revolution means moving from a society where people are governed from above to one where people increasingly govern themselves. Dual power means building institutions that ordinary people can rely on instead of depending entirely on institutions of domination. A tenant union becomes dual power when landlords can no longer deal with renters one by one and instead have to negotiate with organized tenants. A neighborhood assembly becomes dual power when officials cannot make decisions without confronting organized residents who speak collectively. A cooperative economy becomes dual power when workers and communities begin controlling production, distribution, and basic needs directly.

A municipalist campaign becomes dual power when it uses elections not as an end in themselves, but as a way to open public resources to movements, protect organizing, create democratic assemblies, and weaken the grip of capital over local life. The point is not to wait for one dramatic day when everything changes. The point is to make ordinary people increasingly capable of meeting needs, making decisions, solving conflicts, and governing together until the old institutions lose their monopoly over social life.

Prefiguration means building the future in the way we organize now. If we want a democratic society, our movements have to practice democracy. If we want equality, our organizations have to reject permanent hierarchies. If we want a society based on cooperation, then cooperation has to become part of how we struggle. You cannot build a free society through habits of command and obedience and then expect those habits to disappear after victory. The methods we use shape the people using them, and the people shaped by those methods are the ones who will build whatever comes next.

This is what the unity of means and ends really means. The path and the destination cannot be separated. Authoritarian methods do not become harmless because they are being used for a supposedly liberatory goal. If a movement teaches people to obey leaders, tolerate secrecy, accept coercion, and surrender judgment, it is training them for another authoritarian society. If a movement teaches people to deliberate, cooperate, recall delegates, share responsibility, and solve problems together, it is training them for democracy. The means are already creating the end. That is why dual power and prefiguration reach their fullest form through communalism, libertarian municipalism, and democratic confederalism.

Dual power without a clear democratic destination can become a temporary protest structure. Prefiguration without durable institutions can remain a small subculture. Cooperatives without political power can be swallowed by the market. Assemblies without confederation can become isolated. Municipal victories without a revolutionary direction can become ordinary local government. These ideas become socially revolutionary when they are connected into one process: build democratic institutions now, transfer real power into them, confederate them across society, and make those institutions capable of replacing systems of domination.

We build new social habits until democracy becomes something people practice every day instead of something they are allowed to perform every few years. That is social revolution: not simply changing rulers, but creating a society where ordinary people become capable of ruling themselves together.