Social Power
Since writing, last week, of Marc Andreeson’s pose of powerlessness, I’ve found myself thinking about that slippery idea, “power.” The postmodernists and critical theorists get accused of stretching the concept until it is meaningless. Jason Kuznicki, who holds no particular animosity towards Foucault, recently noted that “If social phenomena are always about power, all the way down, and in all instances, then one hasn’t said anything especially interesting.” And indeed, the germ of the mistake may very well be with the notion that things are chiefly about power. It is certainly true that a lot of time and energy are spent to secure the levers of power. And there are undoubtedly people who seek power for power’s sake. But by and large one must ask: power to what?
I am reminded of a withering comment from Barbara and Karen Fields in Racecraft that:
“Probably a majority of American historians think of slavery in the United States as primarily a system of race relations—as though the chief business of slavery were the production of white supremacy rather than the production of cotton, sugar, rice, and tobacco. One historian has gone so far as to call slavery “the ultimate segregator.” He does not ask why Europeans seeking the “ultimate” method of segregating Africans would go to the trouble and expense of transporting them across the ocean for that purpose, when they could have achieved the same end so much more simply by leaving the Africans in Africa.”
There is no question that the plantation class in the American south were a bunch of control freaks. There is also no question that the system was oriented not towards the production of oppression, but towards the production of cotton, by all available means and without consideration to morality or the humanity of the people who did the work. But it was about agricultural production, and for the plantation owners personally, it was about having a big house, and a big family who was kept well fed, and high status in society.
Nevertheless, it took power to get those things. So what, exactly, is power?
Classically, it is the ability to make reality conform to your will; to either make something you want happen, or stop something you don’t want from happening or being imposed upon you. But that’s all very abstract. In the real world, there are actions which can have effects; these effects are the power that those actions have over the people who experience them. It is helpful to think not of the desired goal, but of the nature of the lever.
Andreessen for example claimed that there was some meaningful distinction between money and power. But money is simply a specific sort of lever, with very very wide application. There are few things in the social world that can be leveraged as broadly as money. What Andreessen likely believes is that it is not power if someone can say “no.” You may offer to buy someone off with money, but they can refuse. This would be to greatly underestimate the flexibility of money. Andreessen himself, who has not only his own money but represents an enormous Venture Capital firm, could quite easily end someone’s career in tech if he set his sights on them. Cash and the implied endorsement from Andreessen-Horowitz can be the difference between success and failure in the industry; if people suspected that hiring some particular person would alienate them, tech firms simply would not do it. Just the potential of future money, not even the promise, is a powerful enough lever on its own in the business world.
I mentioned, last time, that a few billionaires could transform Bay Area housing politics, if they put their resources and time into it. What I did not say is that it would likely be uncomfortable for them. Their neighbors, their colleagues, their friends—even their spouses, would likely be outraged. Their relationships, in short, would be put at risk. And for most normal people, even those who think of themselves as great titans of industry and bold visionaries, those relationships are a powerful enough lever to keep them from rocking the boat. It’s easy enough to talk about disrupting the business model of legacy corporations in a particular industry as if it were something heroic; far more difficult to actually disrupt a status quo in which your personal life is tightly woven.
This, incidentally, is the very sort of lever I think that has kept the Supreme Court from being more lawless than it has, overall, been. Ultimately, those justices go home to their spouses, in their neighborhoods, and attend parties and events—with other people. People with whom they have relationships. People who are educated and media literate and will know about any big headline-grabbing case, and whose judgment the judges must live with. The great power of the conservative legal movement, from this perspective, was not in articulating a new ideology, but in successfully splitting the legal elite by creating a separate, specifically conservative social space.
What is power? It is a truly slippery thing, because given the range of human motivations, almost anything can become a lever. Physical strength is power in some circumstances, but “A man’s natural force” alone “could never subject multitudes to the command of one.” But the role of commander-in-chief atop a military authority structure has a great deal of power, due to his ability to issue orders to people who will listen, and thereby deploy vast quantities of physical force. Authority provides many levers.
All I can say on the matter is that no discussion of power is worth a damn if it fails to be specific. To invoke the word breathlessly is to have explained nothing. Power is in many ways just a more sexy synonym for “means.” Some means are quite effective at achieving some narrow set of ends. Some means are modestly effective for achieving a broader set of ends. It is possible to speak usefully of these things. But too few try.