Overall, the term ‘power’ seems, to me, to be a negative one – we talk about having power over someone or thing, people taking power, abuse of power, political power and so forth. This is probably because, in capitalistic society, power is linked to competition: power gives us an advantage over others, it is a means to an end in the sense that it links to profit and personal gain.
There’s a certain irony when we’re told that politicians, of all colours, want to “give power back to the people” because what is actually meant is that this power can only be exercised in a strictly delineated way – within the rules that have been laid out for us. Therefore, we can, I think, see the exercise of power as similar to the exercise of choice: I apparently have free will, and can express that free will by making choices. That is, however, a secondary concern. The primary concern is who decides what those choices are or, put another way, who defines “free will”?
As Badiou argues in The Communist Hypothesis, ‘freedom’ in a capitalist society is freedom to own and freedom to exploit. My freedom is involved i a constant struggle with your freedom; to be an individual, and to express my freedom, I must defeat your freedom – my freedom to be free always comes at the expense of your freedom to be free and vice versa. The choices I have within this system are mere facsimiles of choice because they have already been dictated by the system – in exercising my freedom I am, knowingly or not, serving the system, maintaining it. If we interrogate each of our choices, from the trivial to the serious, they have been decided on already by the limited and narrow range from which we are allowed to select. Within capitalism, this web of freedom and choices is inextricably bound to the corresponding web of oppression and repressions so, as I’ve stated above, my expression of my freedom comes at the price of the repression of your freedom.For example, as unions have ‘won’ concessions from employers in the West, those employers have sought countries where unions are not as strong/virtually non-existent (often due to government prohibition) where they can exploit cheap labour, weak health & safety laws, continuing to make a profit for their shareholders by offering us cheap products. Another irony here is that the workers who produce our goods will never be able to buy them because of low wages – in a similar way to, say, the craftsmen who built mansions for the wealthy in the eighteenth and nineteenth century.
This idea of freedom of choice always strikes me as being akin to Art and interactivity – video games that ley you choose what to do next; plays that take votes on which direction the narrative will go in; online ‘novels’ that let you choose how to proceed (not too keen on calling them online ‘novels’, particularly when there seems to be a notion that making an online book should mean “trying to reproduce the material novel”…which obviously it shouldn’t; all that space for creativity and it’s “Look! You can flick through the pages like a real book”). All of which have the ‘choices’ inbuilt before you start: oh, you can do X, Y or Z, but only because the makar has given you those choices (so they’re not so much choices as options). It’s much the same as language and our sociopolitical system: we are born into these, so our ‘choices’ are pre-programmed – as are the (apparent) ‘values’ by which they operate. I’m not suggesting that because these systems (all subsumed in the over-arching system, capitalism) pre-exist us that we can’t recognise them for what they are and alter/change them (or even sweep them away altogether). In fact, I’d go so far as to say that the “first step” (apart from being an album by The Faces) is to recognise this structure. All one has to do then is work out how to overcome them.
We could go back to Plato and Aristotle, and identify them as being the founding philosophers of what we call “Western Civilisation”. If we think of our conceptual scheme, and everything that flows from this, as a calculus, it is possible to argue that all we are doing (even 2000+ years later) is enumerating the propositions of this calculus. However, I’d also argue that recognising this is the first step in engaging with it and thinking ways out. I’ve phrased that deliberately, “thinking ways out”, to draw attention to it. As Marx wrote, not only do the owners of the means of production own the means of production, they also control the flow of concepts and what those concepts consist of and in. The fundamental basis of capitalist ideology is to convince the majority, the proletariat, that the interests of the minority, ruling class are their interests too (false consciousness). We can see this at the moment in the wrangling over inflation: apparently, if we all get wage increases that are in line with inflation, Armageddon will be the result. Somehow, this isn’t the case for companies making ever-increasing profits. Rent control is ‘bad’. Having utilities like water, electricity and gas in public ownership is ‘bad’. “The Market” is the solution to all our problems (as was God in centuries past – and look at the similarity in language), it all provide, find the “right level”. Inflation is the cause of austerity, not the blatant greed that lies at the core of capitalism, and the subsequent disregard for the millions of lives destroyed by, and lost to, it. Go back to that idea of the web: what it allows is for the imposers of austerity, who oddly enough never suffer its effects, to claim an entirely bogus distinction between ‘direct’ and ‘indirect’ impacts. These are all directly connected: austerity requires cuts in jobs (always for those at the bottom of the heap, and to maintain profits) and public services, which means support for those who become jobless, who homeless and who are then afflicted by metal health problems (as a result of the values imposed on them by capitalist ideology) for which there are no supports. People are plunged into abject misery, which turns groups against one another, turns people against one another, turns partners against one another, turns parents against children. People turn to ‘crime’ (although it’s arguable how we define this), turn to drugs (of which alcohol is at the top of the list), turn to self-harm, turn to suicide. There is no ‘indirect’ cause here. All of these are directly connected by this web of ideas. It is, quite simply, a case of thinking it through – of identifying the system and its effects. Having done this, to still take/approve (vote for) actions that will result in condemning those in misery to yet more misery is a deliberate act. A choice for which you can be held responsible. A value (that you see your own well-being and profit as more important than other human persons’ welfare) that you display publicly. An aside here: If politicians do not recognise that what they are doing to people is wrong, then why do they deny doing whatever it is, why try to spin it?
One might argue that the greatest ‘value’ in the capitalist armoury is apathy. The power to convince people that they are powerless, that whatever they might do or say will be ignored or sidelined. Apathy is the most dangerous weapon the neoliberals/anarcho-capitalists wield. It cuts down opposition before it becomes opposition but it also has an aspect that is more insidious: it causes people to feel that have have failed, failed themselves and failed others and, thus, accept the blame for the state of society while recognising their own powerlessness.
However, in the past two decades or so, a far more sinister weapon in the fight for apathy has emerged: mindfulness.
Murmurs from the Forest 