On Sun, Apr 22, 2012 at 4:13 PM, Jim Devine <[email protected]> wrote: > raghu: >> Power, if it has any meaning at all, must refer to control by one >> human being over another. It makes no sense at all to talk about >> "power" held by a class as a whole. > > But "power" doesn't have to be that of an individual. The way > capitalism works (its structure and "laws of motion") in effect give > the capitalist class as a whole "power," i.e., the power to dominate > and exploit workers.
Fair enough. I should amend my original statement slightly to "Power, if it has any meaning at all, must refer to control by one human being or group of human beings over another." But my original point stands. > That means if the working class as a whole is organized democratically, it > can act "as if it were one human being" and thus > have "power." No, this is logically incoherent. Power is not an object that can be possessed. It is a relation between a subject and an object. (And no, I disagree that "power" is a difficult concept to define. It is not. I submit that the short definition I provided above covers quite well the widely accepted meanings of the term.) The "working class" cannot "have power". If it did, over whom would it have this power? Unless as Corey Robin suggests, you bring in another, even more wretched class (slaves or immigrants) in which case the term "working class" would exclude the most unfortunate and thus would lose all meaning. -raghu. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
