On Power

It was never class struggle...

Early humans, before we settled into cities and agriculture, roamed in tribes numbering anywhere from 50-500 people in size, and in these people would take on a wide variety of roles necessary to the continuation of our species, of their group. Child rearing, making clothing, hunting, gathering, fishing, making tools, practicing some form of medicine, etc. As we left our home somewhere in Africa, our ability to adapt new roles and different ways of being, of making things work, allowed us to survive and thrive in almost every corner of the earth that had the tiniest scrap of land that wasn’t covered in glacier.

As we developed new technologies and new ways of living, such as agriculture and cities, the roles available to us changed. They complexified, stratified, and had different values placed on them depending on the culture we developed and the material needs of the population in it’s place and it’s time.

The nature and relation of these roles to one another forms the basis of a culture, of an economic, and of a political system. The responsibilities and rights involved in being a wife, a husband, a laborer, a boss, an investor, a manager, an engineer, a storyteller, a leader.

The power dynamics between these roles, and it’s discordance with changing conditions, represents the driving force of historical conflict.

In the traditional leftist discourse, this is simplified to a discussion of class relations, and for good reason, the capitalist class uses the relations between these complex sets of roles to leverage roles against one another in a power game to assert dominance and extract maximal rewards from the system overall, to remind us to unite as workers against the management class. For example, capitalists using racial politics to pay minorities less than a fair wage, and then use these lower wage workers to offer the regular workers a lower market wage. While a great rhetorical flourish, it buries the complex interactions of roles and their relations, in order to build a solidarity among us. The problem is, all of how society reproduces itself exists within these complex relations at any given moment.

So what happens when a nation built on this class assumption and approach, such as the soviet union, has to figure out the relationship between it’s farmers and it’s scientific community? A great deal of suspicion, tension regarding the unresolved complexity of how these roles are going to relate, a “power vacuum” forms. In this vacuum, a man with a poor understanding of the science but a way with words filled this vacuum, pointing to the horrors of the Nazi “race science”, Lysenko, criticized his teachers, his mentors, the entire plant breeding industry and scientific community for believing in Darwinian evolution, and pushed a set of theories which his own tests had shown failure on, into a set of policies forcibly enacted on the lot of the soviet union and adopted by the Chinese with the great leap forward, resulting in more deaths attributable to Lysenko’s name than any other human being in history.

Think of power as a pyramid. At the top is death, it comes for us all, and all things, eventually. Below this, the ecosphere itself, within which we exist and are a reliant part of, but which sets the constraints for our continued existence.

Another step down it begins to get interesting: we have the most powerful people on earth, playing a game for dominance and survival, another always hot on their heels ready to take the throne, whatever that may be. Whether this is sets of tribal leaders or the competition between regional power structures who managed the rules and relations of kingdoms in the middle ages, or investment banking cartel leaders like Larry Fink, presidents, kings, billionaires with significant material holdings (ie. Musk and Bezos, the Walton family, but not a no name wall street billionaire cresting 1.2B).

Each tries to wield various forms of power to secure the support of various roles in society. For large stretches of history, a relatively minimal number of roles by complexity meant power was the exercise of managing certain kinds of roles very well, ie. the worker/investor role, a skill which specialized to become the management class (bourgeoisie), or managing the roles within family and what prolific power it gave the churches. Books like Machiavelli’s The Prince outline some of the strategic thinking involved in the games of power at this level, outlining the types of strategies and thinking that would grow into a culture of the major power class families, that would persist and evolve into new forms as society complexified into it’s present state.

Stepping below these most adept and prolific at wielding power, you get a layer or two of ladder climbers and management types, petty local politicians, HOA Karens, and at the bottom of this list is all of society. Each exploiting the games of the biggest players to leverage their own position against others to take more than they’ve earned, however we want to phrase it (rent seeking behavior, theft, tax, exploitation)

And I mean all of it. All of the relations by which society reproduces itself, by which I mean to continue on as we will.

You may ask some shit like “but are not the steel miller and the washer manufacturer at a contradictory material interest?” No. Both are people who want to do fulfilling work, have fulfilling relationships, enjoy leisure time, explore what being alive means. It is the material interest of the owner of the steel mill and the washer factor that are in conflict, made in conflict by these complex relations of systems managed by those closer to the top of the pyramid. The miller himself wants to mill as little steel as is necessary, the washer builder wants to build as few washer as he can, the engineer wants to design a durable, glorious product they can put their name on the blueprints of with pride. And when we have enough washers, the rest of that time can be liberated and redirected.

And what a terrifying prospect that is. We live in a world where the redirection/liberation of our labor is a nightmare, it can mean joblessness, unemployment, homelessness, suicide, starvation, arrest/beating by police for being homeless, etc. I understand the fear when we start talking about subjects this close to the heart and the wallet, this fear of unemployment and flirtation with extreme poverty has been a dominant state in my life since the day I left home.

So trust me when I say I’m not taking this lightly.

It’s just a reality that more of our time from labor is going to be liberated and redirected by improved productivity and automation, the question is what happens to us when it does?

The answer is largely going to be determined by the folks closest to the top of that pyramid, and what is most useful to their interests.

To me, the only way around this is not a bloody war (unless they bring it on us, and may we pray it never happen), not a liberal reformation, but a simple set of tools. Sacred tools, of immense value and whose creation would be a feat for the ages.

A set of tools that allows us to relate to one another as we will, without the pyramid climbers or power brokers, but in a direct sense. This set of tools will have to be built around the extant realities we live within, and develop over time. Some such examples already exist in the worker cooperative, in apprenticeships, in mutual aid groups, among others. Groups like the meta-currency project, the eco-region project seek to develop resource based currencies and purpose built currencies to enable community wealth building and enable cooperative program driven investment structures, and other groups are working on open source alternatives to platforms like uber, lyft, etc.

This process is sure to be fraught with difficulty and missteps, with infiltration by capitalists seeking to take over and exploit our tools. And if we fail to understand the games they play with power, they will capture our tools and exploit us, as the screeching corpse of the occupy wall street movement once red with rage at the capitalist class and it’s accomplices now retweeting Hillary Clinton yass queeen is evidence enough of.

Capturing Occupy Wall Street was easy, it was a pretty ephemeral movement, it was easy to abstract the layers between what it was as a movement and what it meant as a thing. The distance of abstraction obscures relations, and makes them capturable - the church abstracting the nature of family dynamics into a set of rules creates a level of control above the couple’s duty to each other, historically. All distance does this, including physical - and the dismantling and demolition of as much walkable infrastructure as possible and conversion to a car culture eliminates those happenstance meetings, that repeated casual contact from which the bonds of friendship and community can begin to grow.

So be real with people. Be close to them. Be there for them. Be honest with them. When you fuck up, own up. When your people fuck up, you hold them to account. The truth will out, no matter how hard it hurts and what we have to do to cope with it. When you can be available and your people need it, be there, no excuses. Let yourself be held to account but never taken advantage of.

And if you can, help build the tools.