Defeating Power

Power. Some have it, most don't. One of the most pressing and widespread problems of today is how we respond to the way power is exercised and how we deal with the fact that most of us feel completely excluded from the processes through which it is exercised.

Contrary to what we've been taught in this neoliberal and capitalist world, power does not reside in individuals. We're told each day that we're powerful, which is the exact opposite of the truth, the exact opposite of how we've evolved and how we've managed to sit on top of all of the food-chains on this planet. Our power is our ability to cooperate, to communicate, to transfer ideas from one mind to many minds. We hunt in groups, because on our own we're just the lion's next meal and the vultures' next heap of bones to pick. We're even depending on the group to have a sense of individuality to begin with.

In decades past we've been taught to forget all that; everything is boiled down to the individual and individualism. "Be the change you want to see in the world." "Pull yourself up by your own bootstraps." This is, and has been, the goal of the neoliberal social experiment popularized by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in the 1970s and 1980s. "There is no such thing as society," and TINA, which stands for "There Is No Alternative" (for capitalism and liberal democracy). The overwhelming focus on individualism and the power of the individual isn't coincidental; individuals are no match for the gargantuan power structures that leave us feeling utterly powerless to make meaningful change in our individual and collective lives. It's no coincidence that history is being taught as a succession of flash-points with uniquely brilliant (or uniquely evil) individuals at the helm, in accordance with the Great man theory, instead of a continuous process of cause and effect, action and reaction, involving all concerned.

We've been raised in a world of winners and losers. If you're right wing you believe that's fair, because the winning and losing is determined by a process of competition on a mostly equal playing field. If you're left wing you believe the same, only the losers shouldn't be left to starve and the winners should pay a little more to achieve that. According to Marx, and myself, both views are just wrong because they leave out the third party. Asides from the winners and losers there's a third group that's completely outside the game, which are the ones who write rules of, and manage the game.

And there's the crux of the matter. We've been stuck for more than a century of debates between left and right, where the left says that the government needs to do stuff, needs to protect us against the markets under capitalism, and the right says that the markets generate better outcomes, and government intervention leads to corruption. The problem is that governments and other power wielding institutions are indeed corrupt, but that corruption stems from the fact that they're in the pockets of multinational corporations, the end product of capitalist wealth accumulation.

It's a travesty that the popular expression of the "Red Pill" has been claimed by the political right, producing a perfect online storm of neo-fascism, misogyny, racism, bigotry and transphobia. That's the fruit of the neoliberal deification of the individual. When you, as an individual, take the Red Pill, when you peek behind the veil of the overall power structures that shape you daily decisions, you can't help but feel utterly powerless. When you see that after the financial meltdown of 2008 a small group of powerful men decides which banks survive on your tax dollars, and that same group decides during the pandemic which businesses receive aid paid by your tax dollars, it's all too easy to believe in the conspiracy that a room full of powerful individuals rules the world, and that they convene each year at the World Economic Forum.

It's not true though. There is no conspiracy. There's an elaborate system of state- and corporate institutions and think tanks geared towards the reproduction of capitalism and the social structures that allow capitalism to survive for yet another generation. When socialist and communist movements were gaining unprecedented power in the run up to and the aftermath of the Great Depression, Roosevelt quieted the revolutionary forces down by raising taxes on the rich, creating government jobs and instituting a social safety net. He may have saved capitalism as we know it. Right now we see big corporations advertise how "green" they are, and we see the WEF advertising ESG investments. ESG stands for "environmental, social, and corporate governance", and corporations are rated on those aspects. See it for what it is though: just another move to justify the continuation of a game that's rigged for us all to lose, to never have any power to make changes to the (rules of the) game.

When and how we respond to power depends on our assessment of where that power resides, who wields it and how it can be undermined. Of course, when you're right or left wing you don't see anything wrong with the game, besides maybe that the game isn't "pure" enough or too pure. Well, both are wrong, as I stated earlier. Power resides with the institutions and individuals who can make the decisions that affect us all, and steer all our individual decisions on a daily basis. There's only one cure for that kind of power, and that's democracy. Whenever there's a decision to be made that affects me, I should be consulted and I should have a say in that decision.

This starts not at the level of national, regional or local government; it starts at the workplace. What we see in society at large is a copy of what we see at our workplaces; we're a cog in a large machine, far removed from the ones who press the buttons and pull the levers. The button-pressers and lever-pullers of the capitalist machine accumulate the wealth they use to buy power, which is how they manipulate governments on all levels. That's why we need material democracy next to political democracy, that's why workplaces should be democratically governed by the workers. This eliminates that third party above the game of winners and losers. This sets us free from the capitalists' freedom to accumulate all the wealth that they use to rig the game against us.

The capitalist organization of production is antithetical to democracy because of what I've just explained. Capitalism preserves the same power structures that existed under the kings, feudalism and slavery; there's a tiny minority that owns the stuff we all need to survive, "the means of production" in Marx's critique of capitalism. Under feudalism the means of production was the land on which small farmers were allowed to grow food. Under slavery it was the land and the slaves. And now it's the land, the workers, the machines, the computers and so on. It's all privately owned, and it does not matter who owns it, whether it's the Lord, the King, the Slave Master or the board of shareholders. The king wasn't powerful just because he himself was powerful, but because there was an entire social, cultural and political system with institutions that justified, maintained and reinforced his position of power. Today it's the same; from our upbringing, education, the media we're fed to consume, everything is geared to not question the status quo.

There's no way that under a worker democracy one person would earn hundreds of times more wages than another. There's no way that under a worker democracy the factory would be shipped to a low wage country. There's no way that under a worker democracy poisonous waste would be dumped in the river or the lake, because the workers' children swim in that river or lake. And there's no way that under a worker democracy a tiny group of owners would accumulate the insane amount of private property we now see used to rig the game against those same workers. When the real producers, the workers, are also the owners of the means they use to produce, that's when we'll have true democracy.

Of course such a worker democracy needs a lot of fine tuning, and of course it's not the only thing that needs to change, but it would be a good start on the road towards a more just and a cleaner world. The banking system would need to be overhauled as well of course as would the justice system. I'd wager that large pats of the justice system would become redundant, as most crime is rooted in the gross wealth- and income inequality of our outdated capitalist ideology. And there's more to be done, of course. I don't have all the answers, and they're not my answers to begin with as countless thinkers, writers, activists, philosophers and so on have done all that work for me. As an individual I would have no answers at all. And without you, dear reader, I would have no reason to share my second-hand answers at all. So, thank you.

Linked below is the speech by Grace Blakely that inspired me to write this little rant. It's about the current "cost of living crisis", as it's called in England, that we all endure right now; the price housing, groceries, energy, everything is going up way faster than our wages, and it's getting increasingly more difficult to make ends meet for millions upon millions of people. She starts strong by calling it not a cost of living crisis, but a cost of greed crisis, as the power structures between corporations, governments and central banking are geared towards serving their own greed. Greed for money and power (they're the same). Please watch it; it's really good.

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