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Title: Power Author: Todd May Date: February 2012 Language: en Topics: Lexicon, Institute for Anarchist Studies, power Source: http://anarchiststudies.wordpress.com/lexicon-pamphlet-series/lexicon-power/
Power is one of the most elusive aspects of political space. People are
said to seek, hold, exercise, or lord it over others. On the Right, it
is thought to be a reality that has to be seized. The world is a place
where power speaks. Better it be ours than theirs. On the Left, power is
often considered something dirty. It is something we must rid the world
of if we are to achieve peace and equality.
Speaking of power in these ways bars us from reflecting on what it is
and how it works. After all, what does it mean to say that “power
speaks” or that power is something we can rid the world of? When these
phrases are used, do we really know what is meant by the word power?
Rather than taking a stand on power itself, or else deciding whether it
is good or bad, it would be best to understand it. It turns out that
power is more complex than the simple stances toward it would have us
believe. It works by repression and also creation. It can be a good
thing or a bad one. It is sometimes in the hands of particular people,
but frequently it isn’t. Instead, it arises and circulates through
social relationships in a way that resists being appropriated by
individuals or organizations.
We might think of power, at least political power, as the exercise of
constraint on people’s actions. We should not confuse the term
constraint with the word restraint. To constrain an action is to
influence it to be a certain way. It is not necessarily to stop it from
happening, although it could be that. It could also be a matter of
making an action happen where it otherwise wouldn’t, or of influencing
an action in one direction or another. And still we must be careful. To
influence an action is not necessarily to influence someone to do
something that they would not otherwise do or influence them in a way
they don’t like. Sometimes things happen like that, but not always. When
an educational system is set up that influences people to reflect on
their social situation and change it when they find it intolerable, that
is an example of the operation of power. But it is an operation that
many people would approve of.
The idea of power as a constraint rather than as a restraint or
repression is a new idea. For most of the history of political thought,
power was understood to be a way of restraining people. That is why it
is often associated with the state. The state, after all, is the most
powerful restraining force in a society. Through the police and judicial
system, the state can throw people in jail, taking away their freedom.
In our society, it can also kill people. What could be more restraining
to people than taking away their freedom or lives?
And indeed, the state has power in this sense. It is not an irrelevant
power, as many who have protested against government policy have
discovered. When people on the Left criticize power, it is usually this
kind of power they are thinking of.
Yet power need not be only repressive. Think of how our parents,
schools, employers (when we can get a job), and even peers mold our
behavior. This molding doesn’t just stop us from doing certain things.
It makes or encourages us to do things. And there is more. The power
from these people and institutions not only makes us do certain things;
it can make us want certain things. Far from being exercised against our
will, power can operate in such a way as to form our will. Recently, we
have seen not just the actions but also the will of both the Democrats
and Republicans formed by those in the top 1 percent.
It would be a mistake, though, to think that the exercise of power in
forming people’s actions and wills is solely a matter of individual
decisions. Much of the way power operates is structural. That is to say,
it is part of the way a society is structured that people are formed to
be the way they are. To see this, we can use a current example. It is
been noticed that over the period of neoliberalism (roughly dating from
the late 1970s or early 1980s), people have been encouraged to think of
themselves as entrepreneurs. This is true not only of our economic
activity but also of our lives in general. We are encouraged to see
ourselves as having a particular set of resources—our skills, genetic
inheritance, or social intelligence—and using those resources to
maximize our goals or desires. Through networking, peers are considered
to be investments. Clothing is not only adornment but an investment in
our social standing as well. Even children can be seen as an investment
in one’s future security.
All of this is in keeping with the neoliberal arrangement of power. We
are encouraged, and we encourage ourselves and one another, to act like
entrepreneurs. And in acting like entrepreneurs, we diminish the
possibility of solidarity with one another.
How does this entrepreneurial orientation diminish solidarity?
Entrepreneurs, in our neoliberal period, are taken to be individual
investors, each on their own, alone and without support. It is no
accident that social services are reduced or abandoned by neoliberal
economics. Social services, like environmental regulation or
infrastructure development, are collective projects. Entrepreneurs are
individuals acting alone, investing their resources to develop their own
vision.
All of this is convenient for those at the top of society. When we think
of ourselves as individuals rather than as collectives, we fail to
consider the importance of solidarity and collective resistance. We are
more likely to treat others as competitors as opposed to comrades.
We should recognize, however, that this way of thinking and being does
not arise because someone or some group decided that it should be this
way. The elites did not get together at some secret meeting and say to
themselves, “Hey, if we make people think of themselves as
entrepreneurs, then we can keep them divided among themselves and hold
all the wealth without being challenged.” Thinking of ourselves as
individual entrepreneurs—indeed, making ourselves into entrepreneurs—is
not the product of a conspiracy. It is structural.
The idea that power is often structural rather than conspiratorial is an
old one. It can be found in the writings of Marxists, anarchists, and
more recently with such thinkers as Michel Foucault. The rough idea is
that power—whether it represses or creates us to be certain ways—arises
from the particular historical practices of a society. To be sure, it
tends to benefit those at the top. But there is a difference between
saying that power arrangements benefit those at the top and saying that
the top few created those power arrangements for their own benefit.
Entrepreneurship as a way of living benefits those at the top; they did
not introduce it. It arose as the product of a number of elements that
came together in the late 1970s and early 1980s, such as the oil crisis
and consequent theoretical crisis for Keynesian economics, rise of
neoliberal theory, and increasing ability to communicate and thus invest
across larger geographic areas.
Political power, then, can be either repressive or creative, and either
individual or structural. It can also be either good or bad. As we saw
earlier, educating people to be reflective about and engaged with their
social situation is a creative form of power that is good rather than
bad. Among people who think of themselves as progressive, there is a
tendency to think of power solely as a bad thing, something that must be
overcome. This is largely because we confront power arrangements that
are deleterious or even intolerable. When we look at how power works in
the world, we are likely to think of it as something to be struggled
against or overcome.
There are two mistakes here. First, we cannot rid the world of power. If
power not only represses us but also makes us into what and who we are,
then there is no outside to power. The task is not to eliminate power
but instead to see how it operates in a society. That way, we can assess
it, assess its effects, and challenge the specific arrangements of power
that are oppressive to people’s lives.
Second, power can be used positively. Power, let’s recall, is the
exercise of constraints on people’s action. We are not only the object
of constraint; we can also be its subject. We can be the agents of
constraint, constraining the actions of others and “unconstraining”
particular actions of ours.
We unconstrain our own actions when we come to understand how we have
been molded to be otherwise than we would like to be (or more precisely,
otherwise than we would like to be when we reflect on ourselves—since,
as already noted, our desires can also be created). When we recognize
the ways in which we have been molded into entrepreneurs, for instance,
we can begin to resist that molding. We can open ourselves up in order
to consider other ways of being, ways that involve solidarity with
others. We stop thinking of ourselves in the ways we’re told to, and
start asking ourselves who else we might be and how else we might be
together. This, in turn, may lead to new constraints. But if we have a
positive vision, those constraints will replace the bad ones we are
currently under with better ones.
In addition to unconstraining ourselves, we can constrain the actions of
others. We have been taught to think that both wealth and poverty are
earned. Really? Are those who struggle to make ends meet really less
deserving than those with power and wealth? Perhaps it is time to
constrain the behavior of others through the means at our disposal.
Moreover, when we see how political power operates, we can also see that
those means are many. As long as we think of power solely as repressive,
then struggle can only be a massive act of refusal. At times this is
what is called for, and there is certainly much to refuse in the current
arrangement of power.
But there is more. We can act in order to call attention to the way
power operates. Civil disobedience and protest demonstrate for people
who have not seen it yet the way that the forces of the police are
aligned with the forces of wealth. They also empower people to think of
themselves as actors rather than simply victims. Also, we can educate
one another. If we have been taught to be entrepreneurs, we can teach
one another to think and live otherwise. This education does not have to
be, and should not be, simply among those who resist. It should also be
an education of the larger public, so that rather than being constrained
to live as they do, they might see other and healthier possibilities.
Political power, as constraint, is diverse, complex, and subtle. That
might seem to be a source of despair. It is frequently difficult to see,
operating in subterranean ways. Yet it is also a source of hope. If
power is diverse and complex, this means that our tactics can be diverse
and complex. To confront the current arrangements of power, we can
develop alternative practices of power on a variety of levels, from
reflection to confrontation to education to direct democracy. The
difficulty is in seeing the ways in which power has not only blocked us
but also has actually created us. The task is to create ourselves and
our world differently.