It’s…the social view of power

I need you in order to become me

Ever the diva, Goodrich insisted on keeping the diversion into Hegel. Since he filed relatively clean copy, we let him keep it. Please direct all complaints to management, after you’ve refreshed your memory of Part One.—Eds.

What do you do about a tyrannical superpower threatening to annihilate its subordinates?

That was the question animating Mark Carney’s speech at Davos when he compared the Trumpist United States to the ancient city of Athens. “What at our options?” the Canadian prime minister asked his fellow middle powers reckoning with a new international order, though what he meant was “what is to be done?”

Carney’s answer, however, was a head scratcher. Instead of a rousing speech in which he claimed the mantle of war-time resistance leader, Carney offered a far humbler solution. “It is time,” he announced, “for companies and countries to take their signs down.”

Pause. Awkward clapping. Not exactly, “once more unto the breach, dear friends.”

There might be something poetic about facing down one’s enemies when the odds are stacked against you, but Carney is in the business of winning, not righteous failure. How do you reclaim your power when you’re staring down a stronger opponent?

The gambit Carney banks on begins, he says, with “honesty about the world as it is.” And an honest assessment of the actually existing conditions in the world order leads him to the same conclusion reached by resistance movements across the globe: the United States needs us just as we need them.

It’s…the social view of power.

This concept was first articulated to me by the Momentum community, the social movement trainers I’ve learned from and worked with for more than a decade. “The social view of power” as a term, I believe, comes from Gene Sharp, a student of peaceful resistance dubbed the “Machiavelli of nonviolence,” in his book Social Power and Political Freedom.

When most people picture power, they see something like the authority of a ruler: the boss, the king, the father. Power flows downward from him — and it’s usually a him, though it can just as easily be the authority of a mother or a rulebook or a government.

Understanding power this way is not wrong so much as incomplete. The law does indeed have authority over the citizen, the parent over the child, the hegemon over the vassal state. But the trick that the powerful have played is to turn this relationship into something natural, logical, or even beneficial (the divine right of kings, for example, or the mercy of the slave master). The way things are is the way things must be — such an insistence freezes what should be a dynamic relationship, allowing the powerful to hide the source of their power.

You can hear the fragility of this assertion in the timeless debate between a child and a parent. The power struggle beneath the supposed natural order comes to the fore when the child asks “but why” and the parent eventually must take up their power — “because I said so.”

from Momentum 101 Concepts

The Momentum community calls this the “monolithic myth:” that power only flows in one direction, from the leader on down. It is a story that serves the interests of the ruler.¹

The monolithic myth insists on power from the top down. But we can invert it and look at power from the bottom-up. If you’ve ever been a substitute teacher trying to command a room full of boisterous students, you know how much your power depends on simply upon your authority but on the students actually respecting your authority.

If we conceive of power as something more plastic than a static law of nature, we can see how fragile power is. If the pharaoh orders his slaves to build the pyramids, but the slaves do not obey, is he really pharaoh?

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The social view of power undergirds modern political philosophy (it may even be what makes it “modern”). It’s essential to social contract theory, in which the state is formed out of a compact between parties. The idea is embedded in the fabric of the United States. One of the most famous lines from the Declaration of Independence reminds King George that “Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” Withdraw consent, and the government needs to enforce its authority through force of arms.

But for my taste, the social contract theorists of the English tradition do not offer a psychologically robust account of the encounter between the powerful and the powerless. For that, we need to look to a 19th century German: G.W.F. Hegel.

If we were to trace the idea behind the social view of power to its origin, it would probably lie in Hegel’s famous master-slave dialectic, from one of the trickiest texts in the history of philosophy.² But the core idea is, I think, intuitive: I need you in order to figure out who I am.

The master-slave dialectic conceives of power as a relationship. The ruler and the ruled depend on each other, not simply for sustenance or safety but something psychologically deeper: self-definition.

Hegel writes about two entities coming into consciousness of themselves through the other. The power dynamic between the lord and the bondsman is a struggle with existential stakes.³ Self-consciousness “exists only in being acknowledged,” and so the self requires the other. Realizing my own power, agency, and ability requires another to recognize it. We come to know who we are through the other. The self exists through the other; the lord is only lord in relation to the bondsman. No bondsmen, no lord.

The master-slave dialectic, then, conceives of power as a two-way street, not only top-down but also bottom-up. The power dynamic between the master and the slave is, indeed, dynamic. It can change. It’s a fight, a struggle, what Hegel calls Kampf um Anerkennung, a struggle for recognition.

This is why class struggle is so important for Marxists. It is through the struggle with another class that the working-class comes to know itself and its power.

*

Funnily enough, however, it the fall of a (pseudo?) Marxist regime that Carney evoked in his speech at Davos.

The Canadian prime minster was citing the lessons of anti-communist dissidents in Eastern Europe in the later half of the 20th century, and in particular, a manifesto called “The Power of the Powerless” written by the Czech playwright Vaclav Havel in October 1978.⁴

In the essay, Havel considers one of the least powerful figures living under the totalitarian regime: the “manager of a fruit-and-vegetable shop.” This greengrocer, though he doesn’t know it, actually plays an essential role in propping up the dictatorship. Every week, he receives his supply of onions and carrots from the state alongside a poster with the old communist exhortation, “workers of the world unite.” And every week, the greengrocer places the poster in his shop window.

The greengrocer is no Marxist ideologue. He doesn’t put the sign up in his shop because he believes that the workers of the world should unite. He does it, Havel writes, “simply because it has been done that way for years, because everyone does it, and because that is the way it has to be.” Refusal could mean reproach, persecution, or disappearance. Though he does not believe its message, putting the sign up is a costless act for the greengrocer. It is the path of least resistance.

The words on the sign, then, do not reflect its meaning. Its message is not “workers of the world unite,” but, per Havel, “I, the greengrocer XY, live here and I know what I must do. I behave in the manner expected of me. I can be depended upon and am beyond reproach. I am obedient and therefore I have the right to be left in peace.”

The words on the sign also afford the greengrocer the dignity of plausible deniability. If the sign had said “I am afraid, I am obedient” — which, Havel points out, would be more-or-less true — the greengrocer might have more compunction about putting it in his shop window. But because it says “workers of the world unite,” an unobjectionable message, the sign helps the greengrocer lie to himself. Havel: “Thus the sign helps the greengrocer to conceal from himself the low foundations of his obedience, at the same time concealing the low foundations of power. It hides them behind the facade of something high. And that something is ideology.”

In placing the sign in his shop window, the greengrocer contributes to the “panorama of everyday life.” Havel means to evoke the panorama’s unreality — a lookalike, doppelgänger, simulation, Potemkin village, something that is almost but not quite. This is the stuff of ideology for Havel, “a world of appearances trying to pass for reality.”⁵

I have trouble with Havel’s use of “ideology” because it implies there is solid ground beneath the ideological rubble. I am not so sure. But I do think Havel was responding to something that felt alive in the waning days of communism: the hollowness of the ideology. The regime’s proponents became tired (a dying empire led by bad people?). The system no longer believed itself. The distance — a “yawning abyss,” Havel writes — between what people experienced and what they were told became too great. Fantasy overtook reality.

But in placing the sign in his window, the greengrocer becomes an active participant in papering over that distance. He might say he is doing so only passively, or that he must because he has no other choice, or that it is so small an act it bears no real meaning. Havel isn’t willing to let him off so easily. “By accepting the prescribed ritual, by accepting appearances as reality, by accepting the given rules of the game,” the dissident writes, the greengrocer “has himself become a player in the game, thus making it possible for the game to go on, for it to exist in the first place.”

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At Davos, Carney was effectively engaged in consciousness raising, of urging the middle powers to engage in a struggle for recognition that they themselves have power. Taking down the signs of the liberal international order means “stop pretending” that it still exists, if it ever really did. It means renouncing the monolithic myth of political realism — that the strong will do what they can and the weak will suffer what they must. It means refusing to prop up the facade.

1. I assumed the term “monolithic myth” came from Sharp. But when I looked inside Social Power and Political Freedom, I found something surprising. Sharp took it from Hannah Arendt! From Eichmann in Jerusalem: “the student of totalitarianism…knows that the monolithic quality of this form of government is a myth.”

2. Hegel renders it Herrschaft und Knechtschaft, which A.V. Miller translates in my English copy as “lordship and bondage.” Apparently, the “master-slave dialectic” — dialectique du maître et de l’esclave — was popularized through Alexandre Kojève, the Marxist whose lectures on Hegel were widely influential. I admit that I am not confident how much of my interpretation of Hegel has been influenced by Kojève, whom I have never read.

3. Miller’s Hegel: “it is only through risking one’s life that freedom is won.” I like that.

4. Or in Czech, Moc bezmocných. The major English translation is from Paul Wilson, a Canadian who was teaching language classes in Prague during the late 60s and early 70s. Because of his proficiency in translating between Czech and English, he was asked to join an underground resistance rock band called The Plastic People of the Universe, modeled on American countercultural acts like the Velvets and the Fugs. The regime’s persecution of the Plastics in 1976 motivated Havel, in part, to write The Power of the Powerless.

5. Readers may recognize the motif of a “world of appearances” from an earlier post on metaphysics. Finding the real beneath the artificial is a recurring theme in political philosophy from Plato’s Republic to the Velvet Revolution of 1989.