(Previous: Economy)
(Introduction and Table of Contents)
We have seen that who gets how much of what is a political decision, that the economy and economics is downstream from politics.
Power is the ability to make people do what you want, or not do what you don’t want. Ideology determines what the good life is and power determines who lives it. All political power ultimately derives from control of people’s consciousness.
Violence seems like the exception, but it isn’t, because you must convince some group to be violent on your behalf; those are the people whose consciousness you control. No individual is truly powerful without control of other people’s consciousness, because all individual power is based on “don’t kill me while I’m asleep or knife me when my back is turned.”
Even groups that are controlled by violence usually have some level of consciousness control. It’s very hard to stop people from committing suicide rather than complying. Short of that, in the case of some Native American groups, treatment was so horrible they stopped breeding, and died out. Fear can force a lot of compliance, but even terror has its limits.
That said, using fear and violence is inefficient. It requires too much effort and supervision, and destroys initiative. Slaves, whether they recognized as such or not, do not work enthusiastically. Degrees of power over consciousness can be divided into tiers.
First Tier: People who feel they want to, ought to, or should do what those with power want. These can be quite downtrodden. In many patriarchal societies, where women had and have few rights, and have been subject to violence by their husbands and menfolk, many women believe this is right and good, that they should be controlled by men. There are good peasants, content with their places; workers who think the bosses know best, and; soldiers who volunteer and die in their millions for wars that benefit them not at all.
Herman Goering, the Nazi minister, was interviewed by Gustave Gilbert after World War II, and the exchange is worth quoting in full.
Gilbert asked Goering how it was possible to build and sustain public support for a war effort, especially in Germany, which had barely recovered from the still-recent disaster of World War I.
“Why, of course, the people don’t want war,” Goering shrugged. “Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece. Naturally, the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood.
“But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship.”
“There is one difference,” [Gilbert] said. “In a democracy, the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars.”
“Oh, that is all well and good,” replied Goering, “but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.”
This is control of consciousness, convincing people to do what you want, even though it is clearly against their self interest, and to do it willingly and enthusiastically.
Second Tier: Informal negative social consequences. Things like disapproval, shaming, scorn, minor violence, and discrimination when seeking housing and employment. This is where there is no official sanction, but some people believe so strongly in what those with power want that they make those who resist miserable.
In World War I Britain, for example, white feathers symbolizing cowardice were given to men out of uniform and women, in particular, scorned able-bodied men who were not in the military. Almost 900,000 British men died in the war, charging machine guns or from disease and other hazards, and many came back maimed. It’s hard to make a case that anything ordinary soldiers gained from the war (in any nation) was worth that.
Third Tier: Formal sanctions to make people do what those with power want. Most commonly, this includes the civil justice system, schools, and corporate discipline systems. If you don’t do what teach wants, there are consequences. If you displease your boss, likewise. If you don’t pay bills on time, you get a bad credit record and can’t rent good homes, etc. A criminal record means you will probably never have a good job again.
These consequences work on people who don’t want to what those who are in power want, but do them out of fear of what will happen if they don’t.
Fourth: Violent Sanction. For those whom all the other methods of control fail, there is violence. Police, courts, and prisons. In the past, and in some countries still, beatings from teachers. Parental violent discipline also falls into this category; parents have power, and some hit children who don’t obey.
Now, power isn’t always bad. Perhaps those in power genuinely want what is good for you, and you agree and do it, and that’s wonderful. Take your medicine, see the doctor regularly, don’t drink and drive or do meth. Perhaps a little mild social disapproval makes you not bully people, or steal, or drink too much, and that’s likely a good thing, though it’s still coercive.
But ultimately, power is about someone else deciding what you do, and when it works smoothly and well, controlling your consciousness so that you want what they want, whether it’s good for you or not.
Let’s bring this back to legitimacy, to the start of our chain. We conceive of some uses of power as legitimate, and others not. If police arrest a rapist or murderer violently, we think that’s good (unless we’re right-wing religious types who think husbands can’t rape wives). If we think drugs are bad, we will think it’s okay for government to restrict access to them and hurt those who insist on using them anyway. If we think that property rights are the most important thing, we will be okay with police rousting homeless people who are reducing property values. If we believe in vaccination, we will feel coercing people who don’t want to be vaccinated is acceptable, and in fact, even good.
Coercion causes legitimacy damage to decline when a group doesn’t agree that the coercion is legitimate. If the group is relatively powerless, that may not matter much (US blacks and drug laws that discriminated against them, or Native Americans and various genocidal policies), but if they do have power or if some of those with power identify with them (and thus feel with them), this can cause great legitimacy damage.
In the Russian revolution, when the palace was surrounded and then invaded, the armed guards did not fight back; an important chunk of the enforcer class no longer felt it had the legitimacy to resist. With those taking the palace were many members of the Russian navy; for them legitimacy had switched entirely.
When the USSR and the Warsaw pact fell, the Communist leaders declined to use the Red Army to keep it together. The Red Army was certainly large enough to stop any breakup, but Communist Party legitimacy was too low to allow its use.
Coercion works when elites and enforcers are willing to use it, and not when either of the pair won’t. Coercion is thus downstream from legitimacy, and coercion by force is usually a sign that more efficient forms of power are failing to reach certain groups in society.
The exception is that coercion by force is often used on outsider groups as a way of increasing legitimacy in core groups. If a group is not considered “one of us,” or if core identity groups don’t identify with an out-group such as blacks, or slaves, or natives, or poor people, or Irish, or whatever, then enforcement against them does not reduce legitimacy. Instead, it increases legitimacy with those who aren’t in the out-group.
What is seen is the ruling ideology being enforced. That provides good feelings because of identification with the ideology, without negative feelings because the groups it is being enforced against is not identified with.
As long as whoever enforcement is used against can be made into “not one of us,” enforcement is a positive for creating legitimacy and identification with the ruling ideology. Entire groups are possible, but when someone is accused of a crime, the process is meant to strip them of as much of their in-group identity as possible, to make their punishment feel good. (Again, remember, if we identify with someone, them being hurt, hurts us.)
There’s a corollary to this: Because coercion is done for ideological reasons (because people are not obeying the “rules”), if the “rules” are not seen as legitimately part of a group’s ideology, it renders any coercion illegitimate. For many Americans, locking people up for drug use is illegitimate. For others, any protest by someone they disagree with obviously requires those people be locked up. Stopping blacks from voting was and is considered legitimate by many, but for others it is a wrong, and so on. You can come up with hundreds of examples, historical and contemporary.
However, when coercion, especially violence, fails, it is powerfully de-legitimizing. Coercion in service of an ideology / an identity is an extreme form of ritual, and if the ritual fails, then legitimacy is harmed. In extreme cases, like the Russian defeat in World War I, it can lead to revolution.
Coercion, then, both relies on legitimacy to even be possible, and its exercise increases or decreases both the legitimacy of the people who do it and the ideology with which they identify. If a group or ideology’s legitimacy collapses, so does the ability to coerce. All power does not come out of the barrel of a gun, as per Mao, bur rather from the ability to convince someone to use that gun.
Powerfully legitimate ideologies often barely need to use force at all to sustain themselves, except against any out-groups — members self-regulate and deal with almost all deviation through social pressure at most.
An out-group can be a powerful source of legitimacy to the ruling ideology, though, by allowing the ideology to be seen to be enforced without any backlash in the form of feeling bad about those who are hurt during enforcement.
The most important user of power and legitimacy is the government, and it is to them we will turn next.
Next: Government
DONATE OR SUBSCRIBE
