Part 3 : Power

Part 3: Power

Power in the Libertarian Tradition

In social and political life two spheres weave around each other and the events that make up our reality. On the one hand there is the experience of living as individuals with all of our senses, feelings, perceptions, and thoughts. We are creatures with subjective experiences of the world. On the other hand, there is the construction of the social world by large-scale emergent forces that shape us even from before we’re born. The cities we live in, political institutions, cultural patterns, and group behaviors all are living forces around us that are greater than the sums of the individuals within them, and in fact make up part of how we become who we are. We inhabit a socially-constructed order of powers that divide, arrange, organize, and rearrange society’s many divisions. We ourselves are shaped by our relationships to these forces in all their manifestations, whether classes, genders, races, or more mundane structuring like beauty, charisma, and urban/suburban/rural life. Yet we come at that world as beings with senses, and we enter into political activity through our experiences, desires, and intentional and motivational subjectivity.

As we saw in the last chapter, linking these two aspects of our world is the concept of emergence. Emergence, a concept borrowed from the biological sciences, describes the process of events happening based on higher-level behaviors being produced by lower levels through complex and adaptive means. Just like countless cells having chemical reactions eventually producing our thoughts, systems of domination emerge from countless individuals’ experiences and actions. The rules at different levels of analysis are themselves distinct. For example, our neurons use sodium, calcium, and potassium to create signals and patterns in our brains. Those electrolytes however don’t feel longing for a lover, but the lovers’ loving is made up of and caused in part because of the action of the electrolytes working to make our neurons do what they do.

In a way the world of our experiences and the world of emergent social forces are separated by a great chasm. Individuals function at a level of organization with different rules from, say, capitalism. Our actions produce capitalism, but do so generally without our knowledge and only through the relationships of the system (between individuals, individuals and groups, and between groups and groups). Emergence bridges the world of our mental lives and the world of systems like capitalism.

There is a parallel distinction in the political sphere between emergent social forces and the perspectives of political actors. Power, like emergence, is a concept that functions with our subjectivity and in social relationships or intersubjectively. This aspect of power is underappreciated, and carries with it the potential to understand how our agency interacts with the context we act within.

Anarchism and Power

One of the central insights and value of the anarchist tradition is that power lies at its core. Anarchism builds a critique of existing society and the potential to transform it from an analysis of power in human life. Power itself, however, has been greatly overlooked primarily by the historic left, who have followed selective readings of Marx.[92] They sought to explain power only as a distant effect of economic forces; mere superstructure produced by the economic base.[93] Against this, anarchism consistently critiqued the view of power as a derivative of economic forces. Luigi Fabbri, for instance, wrote “We believe as well that political power is not only an effect of economic force, rather that one and another are alternatively cause and effect.”[94] There were, in fact, a number of different positions within the anarchist movement, which are present up till today, concerning power.

Some libertarian thinkers emphasized power as an exclusively negative concept. Power is thus a means of coercing autonomous beings to follow one’s will. In keeping with these goals, this is not typically a philosophy of power, but rather a revolutionary political orientation to the political powers of the day. Elisée Reclus, for example, argued that anarchism is defined by the resistance to the corrupting influence of power, and aims at dismantling permanent structural power.

The conquest of power can only serve to prolong the duration of the enslavement that accompanies it… It is in fact our struggle against all official power that distinguishes us most essentially. Each individuality seems to us to be the center of the universe and each has the same right to its integral development, without interference from any power that supervises, reprimands, or castigates it.[95]

Malatesta, similarly, does not give a general theory of power, but attempts to delineate its role and functioning both among the ruling class and those resisting. His treatment of power, at least in the limited writings of his we have access to in English, focuses on the State.

For us, government is made up of all the governors; and the governors— kings, presidents, ministers, deputies, etc.—are those who have the power to make laws regulating inter-human relations and to see that they are carried out; to levy taxes and to collect them; to impose military conscription; to judge and punish those who contravene the laws; to subject private contracts to rules, scrutiny and sanctions; to monopolize some branches of production and some public services or, if they so wish, all production and all public services; to promote or to hinder the exchange of goods; to wage war or make peace with the governors of other countries; to grant or withdraw privileges...and so on. In short, the governors are those who have the power, to a greater or lesser degree, to make use of the social power, that is of the physical, intellectual and economic power of the whole community, in order to oblige everybody to carry out their wishes. And this power, in our opinion, constitutes the principle of government, of authority.[96]

Mikhail Bakunin, Russian participant of the First International Workingmen’s Association and generally considered one of the most important founders of modern anarchism, wrote extensively about power in the context of its transformative effect over individuals. This was against the authoritarian socialists of his day, who believed the existing capitalist State or future potential workers’ State could be harnessed to create a free socialist society.[97] Though his view of power is largely a negative one, he made a distinction between power and authority. “In the matter of boots, I defer to the authority of the bootmaker.”[98] Power then for Bakunin consisted of institutionalized and coercive powers, while authority could be oppressive or based on some earned capacity that others could voluntarily respect. If authority is taken as a form of non-State power, his view could be construed as recognizing different forms of power, some constructive and others parasitic.

Similar to what Bakunin had done, Rudolph Rocker divided destructive power from constructive authority in his book, Nationalism and Culture. Just as power is negative and authority potentially positive, so Rocker argued against a dangerous nationalism and for a potentially sociable culture. Influenced by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, Rocker argues for the centrality of power in understanding politics when he claims that “(t)he will to power that always emanates from individuals or small minorities in society is in fact an important driving force in history. The extent of its influence has up to now been studied far too little, although it has frequently been the determining factor in the shaping of the whole of economic and social life.”[99]

Though not strictly an anarchist, British philosopher and activist Bertrand Russell was at one time a libertarian socialist and retained ties to anarchist causes late into his life. His book, Power, reflects that libertarian perspective of centering social life and analysis of power alongside a critique of the dangers of State power. Criticizing orthodox economists and Marxist views that placed economic interest as the fundamental drive of social life, he wrote:

This error in orthodox and Marxist economics is not merely theoretical, but is of the greatest practical importance, and has caused some of the principle events of recent times to be misunderstood. It is only by realizing the love of power is the cause of the activities that are important in social affairs that history whether ancient or modern, can be rightly interpreted… The fundamental concept in social science is Power, in the same sense in which Energy is the fundamental concept in physics.[100]

Russell goes on to provide an analysis of power as the ability to produce intended effects. His account ties power to the intentionality of the agent, something that will be explored more in depth in the fourth part of this book.

Emma Goldman similarly took a Nietzschean view of the will to power as the main force of life. She was not alone. Benjamin Tucker, American individualist anarchist, was one of the first to translate Nietzsche into English for an American audience. Nietzsche’s influence on anarchism was greater than one would imagine given Nietzsche’s elitism and explicit hostility to socialist and anarchist ideas. In general, it was his critiques of the State, nationalism, and the destructive aspects of power in modern society that appealed to thinkers like Goldman and Rocker, though surely many anarchists felt great disdain for the philosopher. His promotion of the positive aspects of power immanent to all humanity, however, are less easy to identify in the anarchists who explicitly engaged him.

There are other threads within anarchism however that have recognized power as a broader concept. Indeed, within Russell, Rocker, and Goldman power is seen as one of the central components of all social life, and not merely as a negative property of abusive authority. Luce Fabbri, anarchist theorist from Uruguay and daughter of the famous Italian anarchist Luigi Fabbri, argued for such in the early 1950s.

Socialism does not deny that expansive manifestation of the life instinct that is often called the will to power; it satisfies it rather in that which is higher, and that is to say more human if not for fear that we would embarrass ourselves with too many examples of animal solidarity that Kropotkin gives us in his “Mutual Aid” and that we find day to day in nature. A healthy will to power leads to the desire for freedom and self-control, in the desire to form hostile nature and inert matter to the needs of man, the appetite for work, creation of knowledge; and especially in the association that multiplies and extends, until the limits of the known universe, the possibilities and energy of individual action, in the solidarity that is the basis of the collective subconscious of the species, it becomes in the field of consciousness, fraternity, love, spirit of sacrifice. In the individual, a healthy life instinct leads both to give and to do as to take and to enjoy; and in this to give and in this to do seeks ultimately, a superiority.[101]

Here power is a feature of daily life and not merely a property of the State and hierarchies. Power indeed can be actively productive. Luce Fabbri does not make use of the distinction between power and authority, but instead focuses on good and bad forms of power. In his introduction to anarchism, Angel Cappelletti similarly dismisses the idea that anarchism is against power per se.

‘Anarchism’ does not want to call for the negation of all power and all authority: it wants only to call for the negation of permanent power and institutionalized power or, in other words, negation of the State… The socalled primitive societies are not unfamiliar with power (and even as Pierre Clastres[102] wishes, political power) but are characterized essentially against civilized people to ignore the state, that is, permanent and established political power. Anarchists aspire to a society without divisions between rulers and ruled, a society without fixed and predetermined authority, a society where power is not transcendent to the knowledge, moral, and intellectual capacity of each individual.[103]

Proudhon interestingly attempted to give an account of power, even emergent power, in terms of individual and collective force. He begins by questioning what makes up the reality of social power and answers, “collective force,” which he defines as “the faculty or property…of being able to attract and be attracted, to repulse and be repulsed, to move, to act, to think, to PRODUCE, at the very least to resist, by its inertia, influences from the outside.”[104] Power is something then that expresses itself differently in the entities that contain it. It is a property both of the rulers and the ruled; there is liberating force and repressive force but also mundane force. Proudhon uses this basic concept of power to demonstrate how collective force takes on its own powers beyond the “sum” of its individuals.

Anticipating theorists of power today, Proudhon places the power of the State not in its purely violent force, but in its capacity to reproduce obedience. “It is…not actually the exploiter, it is not the tyrant, whom the workers and citizens follow… It is the social power that they respect, a power ill-defined in their thinking, but outside of which they sense that they cannot subsist.” Rulers thus appeal to a broader force to sustain themselves, and the failure to do so leads to revolt Proudhon argues. The nation itself is not its rulers or institutions, but “…the grouping of individual forces, and through the relation of the groups, the whole nation forms one body: it is a real being of a higher order, whose movement implicates the existence and fortune of everyone.”[105] This approach of connecting emergent social force to maintaining hierarchical power that is dependent on those emergent networks has not been given its due. Proudhon lays out a barebones emergentist understanding of the State and power in these passages and connects them to a liberatory politics, something unique in his time and rare still today.

Though there are differences between these positions, the commonality is the belief in the centrality of an understanding of power within society, in pursuit of liberation, and against specific forms of power that sustain exploitation and oppression. Building upon this current with its analysis and critique of power, complex systems and emergence offer another view of how power operates within social groups. Power’s unique character that crosses between agency and the world of emergence can give us new ways to understand and transform our reality, not merely as a critique of institutional power, but as a living concept of social systems and individuals.

Emergence and Power: Defining Power

Pinning down power is tricky in part because we use it so often. Our daily lives are shaped by the contours of power in all our relationships, intimate and political. It is such an integral part of human experience, it’s not surprising to find power peppered throughout our language, culture, and thinking about ourselves and the world. Understanding power means having to grapple with different aspects of the concept. There are so many senses, applications, and uses of power that any analysis of it as a concept will struggle to navigate all of its varied uses. We tend to define power in terms of other concepts that invoke it like potential, potency, ability, and so on. At its most basic, having power means someone can or could do something.

Consider the sentence, “Jane has the power to inspire.” If we dissect power, a few elements stand out. There’s the relationship between Jane and whatever she has the power to do or over; there’s the power itself; and then there’s Jane as a powerful person. These three pieces are the relationship of power, what power itself is, and the subject of power. Exploring those different aspects of power will help unpack the problem.

Traditionally most political analyzes of power have been about its exercise by political institutions: the power of police or military as armed forces, the power to reconstruct society through State intervention, contestation of the State machinery, and so on. In English, we commonly refer to this as power over something or another. The police have power over this neighborhood. A patriarchal husband holds power over his wife. Parents have power over their children. Foucault famously made a lot out of its comparison with another sense of power, the power to do something.[106] One can have the power to persuade others to listen, the power to seduce a lover, the power to inspire action. Power over is about the potential to get others to do what you wish, whereas power to is about abilities to act. Both are forms of capacities, one as influence and the other as capabilities.

Discussions of power typically rely on concepts like abilities, potential, potency, or possibility to explain it. Yet such concepts reference power in a basic sense. Defining power in terms of capacity, influence, or ability covertly makes reference to the power to do something in other terms. If Jane is able to jump, she has the power to job; she can or could jump; she is jump-able.

These definitions are circular because power is such a deep component of our mental and social lives that much of our thinking is constructed out of it. Our thinking about actions are built upon our own abilities and limitations, patterns of behavior structures surrounding powers, the abilities of others, and the imposition of the powers of the natural world on our wills. So we drive differently in rain or snow, walk with caution in dangerous neighborhoods, greet friends and loved ones distinctly from others, and exercise rage within the boundaries of acceptable targets and circumstances.

Lewes in his early emergentist text takes up power during his discussions of cause and effect. For similar reasons to above he concludes that power is merely a concept we use to talk about causality with agents. He is a power skeptic therein arguing that there is no thing beyond the cause and effect itself.[107] In a sense this is true, but he is missing a few things. Most importantly such an account would not explain the social notions of power or more abstract potentials. Having a concept like power gives us additional mental tools to understand and describe such states. Perhaps power is merely a robust form of causality, but if so it is a special one, and one we can’t manage to think without.

Power shapes both our own thinking about how to act and the society we live and grow in. It stands intimately close to our basic mental processes surrounding action and relationships with others because power is part of our fundamental conceptual vocabulary and is something that resists further breaking down into conceptual parts. Power’s closeness to our mental life and its operation throughout society gives it strength as a potential tool for understanding societies and politics.

What about who and what can have power? People can have power, but we also apply the term to other things as well. For instance, power can be discussed as a concept of social events, institutions, and behaviors. In this sense it is described as property of powerful institutions, groups, and people. Governments hold power over people, the working class has the power to shut down production, and a riot has a powerful resonance in the history of a city.

Another framing for power is as a subjectivity and element of experiential life. This is the way in which one experiences power nearly as a sensation. There is a particular feeling when our words inspire others, when another dominates us and we are powerless to fight back, when we are aware of our ability to wrong or violate others, but choose not to, etc. We experience the power of our words, the power of touch, the powerlessness we feel with lovers, and the feeling of power building up in us that we fail to exercise when calming down from a rage. There are then experiences of power as agents, and structures or forces of power in societies. Both can be the agents of power, and in fact individual agents themselves interlinked in a society produce the larger emergent forces of power.

What kinds of things can be in relationships of power? The most common discussions focus on power relationships between people or groups. Yet only looking at the relationships between people gives an incomplete picture. We talk about the power of a politician over a country, the power of the US military to impose its will, or the power of Wall Street in Washington DC. Power is not simply a social relationship, however, because power can also exist not just in relationship to other people, but also in relation to ourselves and to the natural world, such as the power to change one’s environment and oneself. We exert power on inanimate objects like lakes, trees, animals, and mountains. Our ability to impose changes on our own personality, habits, or thinking (or the inability to do so) is also a kind of potency.

Additionally, power can be abstract and exist between forces rather than people or groups of people. Emergent forces themselves (which are not people) stand in relationships of power to each other. Think about things like the stock market of futures in commodities like cattle and agencies’ predictions of weather. Bad weather predictions have the power to change the price of futures markets because of the anticipation of shortages from things like drought, or good corn years making feed cheaper, and so on. The institutions generating the predictions have power that influences the market. Both the institutions and the behavior of the market are connected to real things like cows, people, weather, feed, and so on, but the relationship of power occurs at a higher level of organization between the forces of the market and the predictions (both of which can be absolutely wrong about what is actually happening). Agents of power can thus be people or emergent forces.

It’s important to consider that power is not simply exercised by powerful bodies, but also linked as relationships across society. Exercising power makes good on the potentials actors have. Society is built upon powers, exercised and latent, standing between individuals and groups. The power of the police, for example, structures the behavior of individuals through existing balances of forces. Power influences society without being exercised at each moment, however. Stable relationships develop based on balances of power, experiences of individuals in relationship to powers, and the collective patterning of relationships.

We don’t obey the State, for example, simply because there are armed people who will harm us if we don’t. Instead respect of State authority is transmitted and reproduced constantly in smaller ways (i.e., deferring to State authorities in trying to solve neighborhood problems, framing discussions with friends in terms of the boundaries laid out in official channels, affirming each other’s need to go through established hierarchies, and so on). Similarly, when the respect for authority breaks down or is resisted, it often happens because of subtle acts of defiance and power being reproduced within social groups.

Consider workplaces. They are structured to enforce the existing power relations between bosses and workers, but also between workers. Offices are arranged to reinforce the perception of the boss as powerful and in control (management’s offices, parking schemes, break rooms, freedom and direction of foot traffic, and so on), to divide workers from each other, to minimize unproductive social interaction, and so on. This happens through layout design of the rooms, surveillance equipment installation, active patrols by managers, and building in tasks that need perpetual monitoring to keep workers busy. Workers can reinforce the power of management through enforcing management’s rules on each other, giving gifts to the boss, hiding conversations between coworkers, and seeking out management to solve interpersonal problems rather than settling them among themselves. The power of the boss is constructed through the structures and framework that management organizes, yet the actual power they hold over workers comes in large part from reproducing the respect and order management seeks among the workers.

Conversely, the power of the boss is threatened by the failure of workers to reproduce it. When they disobey and start following their own rules, the authority of the boss can evaporate. This is precisely what happens in strikes and job actions that target the workflow inside, such as sit-down, working to rule or slow-down strikes, and even workplace occupations and seizures. Such breaks from the power of bosses are things we see emerge again and again in periods of militancy when workers have begun reorganizing their workplaces with their own desires and perspectives in mind.

In our interactions with countless individuals, we transmit and maintain relationships of power through our actions and thinking. Social interactions are opportunities to express the language of power through our actions. Those relationships, constantly reproduced and modified in daily life, provide the terrain for the construction of power relations across society. Emergent powers come out of those interactions, and draw their life force from the decisions individuals make in groups responding to the structures, patterns, and mechanisms of emergent powers within society. Different power relations are transmitted when we break from established power, and social unrest spreads, creating new relationships and capacities. Protests, strikes, riots, revolutions, and other forms of political events are alterations in the networks of power, and they transmit activity and information through the social networks constitutive of society. When we struggle, we are creating new abilities—powers to do things that were not or could not done previously. The bedrock of power then is our actions and interactions either to confirm, reject, or change the flow of power relationships in society. Emergent social forces like the State or the capitalist class exercise power on individuals and social classes. The State uses its power over the population in crackdowns, propaganda efforts, and social engineering. Capitalists use their power to mobilize vast resources to create new markets. Just as individuals have and transmit power, so do groups and emergent social forces.

Looking at the role of power takes us to its relational aspect. Remember that power can be both experiential and social; it can exist between individuals and the world, individuals and themselves, between individuals, and between groups. A power relationship then is the type of relationship between an agent or force, the object of their power, and the capacity to do something or another. The power to make others laugh is characterized by ability to humor, to bore, and so on. Powers carve out sets of capacities that are related in such a way. They then are constituted by particular sets of relations between abilities and inabilities of individuals and/or groups.

Power relations take the form of a potential of an actor A to do action X, when that possibility may invoke some B that is another person, group, or institution, or A themselves or itself. Power is thus a concept based on possibilities that modify relationships between people, objects, and their strength to do or not do various things. Each power has a different relation. The power to seduce is about the relationship of someone’s presence to the motivational states of others. The power to run quickly is about the states of the body, someone’s capacity, and facts about the world. The form of those relationships represent power in general in its role. A better understanding of the concept is had by seeing it as a way of correlating relational states of agents and potential agents to different actions. Politics has largely been concerned with specific types of power rather than power itself. We can think of political power as a set of particular capacities (political ones) between people and social forces. Other forms of power are constructed around different sets of abilities.

Emergent Power

These relations are divvied out in a tiered manner. Power is organized according to the relations and states between actors. As said before, power relations can be between individuals and the world, individuals and others, and emergent forces with any combination of individuals/the world/other emergent forces. For the agents of those relationships, power has different effects as well. These relations manifest at three levels: states of mind, social relations, and as emergent behaviors of groups.

It’s important to note the internal subjective or phenomenological component of power, because it can be easily ignored in the more obvious examples of power between people. There is an experience of power that we go through as beings. Even more still, there are power relationships we can have to ourselves reflexively. For example, the experience of being powerless to overcome one’s challenges as a rock climber is a form of power, and one with a reflexive subjective character that is inherent to that power itself. Without being an agent that is capable of experiencing, willing, and struggling, we couldn’t make sense of that type of power or powerlessness.

Taking a similar example, the experience of being crushed by a rock, but unable to free oneself is again a power relationship. It is a power relationship with an inanimate object, something incapable of having agency, and yet it is still a power relationship. Out of the basic relationship of power, a number of things emerge. Individuals’ power relations produce subjective states. There is a particular kind of terror to being rendered powerless by natural disasters or from attacks by wild animals. There are distinct sensations of pleasure from our power to please others. Our subjective states of power derive in part from our relationship to those powers.

This is not merely metaphorical. Power is a fundamental experience of human life only because we have agency and will to do things. Yet our existence in a social and physical world outside our creation both constitutes and inhibits our will within all the dizzying complexity of our environment. Power doesn’t only enter our life once we enter into all the loves and struggles of being a social creature. It resides deeper in the basic make up of our minds since we are perceptual and cognitive beings.

As agents, we exist in a world of other agents with their own powers and relationships throughout societies. Individuals systematically interact with groups and other individuals, and in doing so sustain the social aspect of power. Power as a relational force of possibilities fundamentally shapes our activity as social creatures, causing us to pursue or avoid each other, and providing basic underlying drive and logic to our interactions. These interactions create social force. The social relationships between workers produce the power that can maintain or stop production. Power relations between lovers can sustain or prevent abuse. People exercise, withhold, and transmit power among each other.

With groups, power relations produce emergent forces, events, and even structures. Within the State, ruling forces battle for dominance. Countries engage in power struggles over territory, resources, and position within global hierarchies. Emergent blocks among capitalists struggle for market dominance. Power has an animate life within society that emerges at the level of social forces. Beyond the individuals within, we can see the conquest of power by institutions and emergent powers, such as social organisms (or perhaps ecologies) like the State, classes, and social formations.

At each stage (individual, intersubjective, and emergent social) power relations influence each other in a broad social system. Individual experiences of power influence actions. Transmitted between individuals, they sustain large scale power structures like domination. Regimes’ power is challenged or sustained by the actions of individuals working in groups. Power is part of the living system of society, and flows through the different levels, creating new forms and structures. Working between subjective and intersubjective worlds, power is constructed, reproduced, modified, and transmitted between humans throughout society.

Power is either a capacity or an incapacity that people and groups have. Likewise, power is not simply exercised, it may be retained and implied without ever having to be realized. Therefore, power is inherently contextual between the social relationships of its actors and the total environment of an individual with powers. In other words, to understand power we have to understand both the actors that have the powers, the powers themselves, and the total situation that created both the actors and their situation. To understand the ability to go to war, we must understand the nation, the soldier, the means of producing war materials, living, the species, etc.

Power then occupies a unique position in human life. It is both a constitutive element of our experience of the world, and at the same time a social relationship with emergent powers and properties beyond our individual experience of such. Power is part of who we are, and an expression of our intentionality in the world as actors. At the same time, it makes up our social reality and its force bears down upon us. It comes from within, and while acting from without changes our very being. By occupying this space, a common substance of different arrangements in the subjective and intersubjective realms, power gives us a gift. It can both account for the breadth of much of political life and our experience of such. It is a unifying conceptual force in the hands of political actors.

An Example: The State

It’s beyond the scope of this text to provide an adequate analysis of the State. Still looking specifically at power, we can lay out some of the ways that emergence and power can be used for political action. In the realm of the State, for example, power gives us the ability to understand why it is naïve to believe that building a State with the exploited rather than a dominant class would insulate any movement from the corrupting influence of capitalism. If we analyze movements and the State not simply in terms of their class character, but also in terms of an underlying foundation of power relationships, the falsity of that view becomes evident.

This gets at the center of anarchism, which is to center constructive proposals for society in juxtaposition to a critique not of particular elements of power, but in more fundamental power relationships that penetrate society. Bakunin warned against such a simplistic perspective of the corrupting influence of State power in his debate with statist socialists.

There can be no equality between the sovereign and the subject. On one side there is the feeling of superiority necessarily induced by a high position; on the other, that of inferiority resulting from the sovereign’s superior position as the wielder of executive and legislative power. Political power means domination. And where there is domination there must be a substantial part of the population who remain subjected to the domination of their rulers: and subjects will naturally hate their rulers. who will then naturally be forced to subdue the people by even more oppressive measures, further curtailing their freedom. Such is the nature of political power ever since its origin in human society. This also explains why and how men who were the reddest democrats, the most vociferous radicals, once in power become the most moderate conservatives. Such turnabouts are usually and mistakenly regarded as a kind of treason. Their principal cause is the inevitable change of position and perspective. We should never forget that the institutional positions and their attendant privileges are far more powerful motivating forces than mere individual hatred or ill will. If a government composed exclusively of workers were elected tomorrow by universal suffrage, these same workers, who are today the most dedicated democrats and socialists, would tomorrow become the most determined aristocrats, open or secret worshipers of the principle of authority, exploiters and oppressors.[108]

Today we can see that he had great clarity about the ability of the internal institutional dynamics of the State in sustaining the participation and investment of its members reaching beyond their ideologies. This mechanism of power can be separated from the repressive mechanism Bakunin describes. In the modern nation state, recuperative functions have perhaps transformed that dynamic that may have seemed more plausible in the 19^th century than today. The awareness of the emergence of power through the collective entity of the State transforming individuals into guardians of privilege here sets the libertarian critique of the State apart from the more selective critiques in terms of the composition of the State, its laws, or the embrace of hypothetical class/racial/national reconstructed states.

Reproducing hierarchical power relations within an authoritarian state carries the potential for capitalist relationships to reemerge. Even if one makes the argument that destroying the economic basis for capitalism is a form of intervention against capitalist power relations, it is insufficient because power relationships do not only flow from single sources, such as the State. Hierarchical power can be constructed from countless points in a decentralized manner and emerge just as our actions emerge not from a single core, but instead they are the products of innumerable chemical reactions in cells. If the statist power relations are not destroyed and an institutionalized form of hierarchy remains within the control of a privileged class of State bureaucracy, from the perspective of power, there’s no reason to believe that class tyranny won’t reemerge. That is, unless we specifically undermine such relationships and reproduce new ones on a different basis, it’s unlikely if not impossible that statist and capitalist power would be overcome.

The State itself is an emergent product of power relationships built in hierarchical society. Yet if we take the analysis of power seriously, then the structure of the State itself is not enough to grapple with it. Just as we cannot expect the class character of its participants to automatically abolish its role, the abolition of statist relationships is bigger than its structure. If power is emergent and emergent from the reproduction of its relations in a diffuse manner, then simply attacking its structure doesn’t guarantee a liberatory outcome. Replacing the State with a system of direct democracy, for example, doesn’t ensure that the State will not reemerge. It is necessary that people and society produce new social relationships, and in essence are transformed in order to make the State’s reemergence unlikely.

The problem then with the State is not simply who is in charge of it, but rather the basis for statist relationships throughout society. Here the analysis of power shows its use not only as a tool for understanding, but also as a tool for action. We need to destroy not only the institutionalized hierarchies of the State, but also their basis for ruling throughout social relationships.

This does not mean however that we will understand the State only by looking at power. Power is a foundation for understanding and acting on social struggle. On top of that foundation, the whole social world is built. To understand the State, we need to look the particulars in the context within the development of the situation.[109] This is to say that power is a fundamental concept, but one concept among many, and we should not make the confusion of seeing the importance of comprehending power with overlooking the need to have specific contextual analyzes of our situation and moment. For example, to give a full account of the State one must grasp not only the State as social relationships, but also its history, institutions, its class basis and role, relations between force and consent, divisions, and so on. The examples offered here are illustrative and should be taken as demonstrating directions that theorists could develop using such a concept, rather than being sufficient in themselves.

Still with the example of statist social relationships, it should be noticed that the understanding of power offered outlines a concrete historical approach itself. Power is a bridge between the subjective and intersubjective worlds, and is so only in reference to concrete social and physical contexts that make power possible. This understanding is part then of a method of rooting political work both in the ethical challenges of liberatory struggle and in a concrete reality of social struggle across different specific historical points.

Power in Action

The concept of power is nearly physical; it is so close to life. One can practically feel it whenever we find ourselves in families, schools, among feuding friends, and in the clutches of the disciplinary State. Though there isn’t space to lay out a specifically anarchist conception of power here; emergence and social systems provide some interesting directions in that effort for integrating power into the core of our thinking and work. Power traditionally had been thought of as something exercised against people (by political science and sociology), or either ignored or denied beneath economic foundations (by portions of the Marxist tradition.) Yet as Foucault[110] and indeed many anarchist thinkers argued,[111] power is something that is as much an ability as something repressive. We have the power to do things and powers over others. Most importantly, Foucault argued that power isn’t simply mirrored from the powerful through individuals nor merely exercised against people, but indeed transmitted as a social relationship across individuals and groups throughout society. Power within society is an emergent product of social relationships alongside the institutions and forms of the State, instead of simply a property of the State itself (and its police, military, and so on).

Emergence can help us integrate these ideas into a broader framework. The State can be seen as an emergent product, in part, of power relations throughout society that maintain institutions and hierarchies of power, rather than simply being exercised by them. The vast interactions acted out daily by all of us help reproduce the dominance of the State in reaction to the State’s institutions and actors. The reach of the State goes beyond its forces of violence, social services, and propaganda in so far as it is able to be created perpetually out of the emergent order of our actions.

This also shows a distinct weakness of State powers. If we participate in the maintenance and construction of power at its most basic level, it’s both the case that there is a field of struggle (power) and that we are able to produce different forms of power should the possibility of systemic change arise through emergent power relationships. Where we create and sustain State power comes the potential to disrupt. Since the more obvious displays of State power (police, prisons, and the military) depend on the reproduction of statist relations, new investigations into the conditions that help sustain or interrupt power relations could expose different moments and areas susceptible to liberatory alternatives and resistance.

Emergence places the power to create and destroy oppressive powers in our hands, and the ability to construct alternative human organization for society through emergent social organization. We have then not merely a theory that explains existing power, but a direction on the path towards libertarian society. Coming to think with power and emergence brings additional tools for confronting decisions for how we move against dominant power, and constructions of proposals for action in our context.

On a critical note these reflections feed a skepticism towards revolutionary aspirations for new states. The composition of the ruling powers will not substantially change the operation of the State itself, which as an emergent entity is the product of the complexity of forces producing it, of which its powerful individuals may try to imprint their will, but ultimately themselves are merely responding to a complex and adaptive system beyond their total control. Domination is maintained by ruling elites only through that system in which their will and influence of course plays a role, but a much more limited one than many believe.

Likewise, this explains how so-called revolutionary states often end up reproducing exploitation despite changing the people and goals. It is not enough to merely destroy the State apparatus or its institutions unless the void of the State can be filled with new forms of emergent orders that disorganize and replace statist ones. Otherwise the State will grow from the forces whose activity becomes organized and coordinated around the functions and relationships of statist power. Instead, we must destroy both the central organs of repression as well as the transmission and emergent relationships that stabilize the State and replace it through new relationships that produce and sustain a libertarian order. Emergence thus shifts our targets of struggle and understanding of where the strength of the State lies.

To the connection between emergence and power, we should add a third concept: cognition. Cognition is where thought and action interact within the minds of agents. At this point the discussion has largely been about largescale forces produced by numbers of actors without delving into the functioning of action. Given the stress on the maintenance or disruption of order by a multitude of agents, it is important for our argument to know how individuals come to act in revolutionary ways, as well as arrive at mental commitment to radical action. Exploring the connections between cognition, emergence, and power can offer us a different approach to how liberatory forms of cognition can emerge. The next sections of this book will explore the relationships between cognition, action, and power.