raghu wrote: > 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.
If the term power has any meaning at all, it must refer to the ability to accomplish a purpose in and through our social relations. In other words, ultimately, all human power is *labor power*, the *productive power of labor*. In the last analysis, the productive power of labor is the power of humans to transform nature into wealth, freedom, etc. -- i.e. more power. All forms of human power are derivative of the productive power of labor. Political power, value, money, capital, etc. are lastly social, historically contingent, and *alienated* forms of this productive power of labor. Value, money, capital, etc. are social powers, forms that embody the productive power of labor under given, historical conditions. Just like there's a "fetishism" of capital, money, and value in general, there is a "fetishism" of political power and the concrete social formations that embody it: governments, political parties, the state. We contribute to the mystification by repeating the banalities of bourgeois pundits and ideologues. I said this before: *political power* is the productive power of labor alienated from the producers, from the laborers themselves, expropriated and deployed for the preservation, reinforcement, and expansion or -- alternatively -- the dismantling and dissolution of particular social structures. That power is the essence of the state, broadly understood. If/when/as political power gets re-appropriated by the producers and deployed by and for them, then its *political* (alienated) nature will tend to disappear. They say "Follow the money." I say "Follow the productive power of labor to its ultimate source: combined, cooperative labor." (Think of it this way: the secret of the stock is the flow.) > "Power to the masses" is as oxymoronic as "wealth to the indigent". Why oxymoronic? Can power only go to the powerful and wealth to the wealthy? Wealth to the indigent! Power to the powerless! The indigent, the poor, the powerless must appropriate the product of their labor. We only wield power vis-a-vis nature by means of social structures. When one pauses to reflect on it, wealth (its dynamic, human component) and freedom are just expressions of one and the same thing -- the productive power of labor. (Keeping all these categories as self-contained and disconnected notions is, in part, what bourgeois ideology is about.) > A working man who develops an intense appetite for power - and > succeeds in acquiring such power, would cease to be a working man. A working woman who develops an intense appetite for power and succeeds will cease to be an enslaved working woman. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
