Carrol Cox wrote:
I don't think anyone has produced an acceptable definition of power. Power doesn't explain anything, it merely gives a (provisional) name to the historically generated relationships that need to be explained. It's just another name for Smith's Invisible Hand, which was another name for the god of the deists. In other words, we are mostly getting theology rather than historical analysis here.
In general, the notion of social power is simple. Social power is human productive force. The limits of productive force are the limits of our social power: natural laws and what we humans do to get in the way of one another. What Hegel called "necessity" (the laws that govern the world). Power is understanding "necessity" and acting accordingly to achieve human ends. So Bacon was right as well: "knowledge is power."
Productive wealth (means of production) is productive force, i.e., social power. Labor power is... well... power! Ultimately, all power is the productive force of labor (or labor power) because a stock of productive wealth is nothing without living labor. The attributes of labor power (physical and mental abilities humans possess and use to shape up the environment to their purposes) are power. Therefore, ideas can be powerful.
Power is productivity. Anything that meets a need is a piece of power. In a commodity society, commodities are power, money is power, sex appeal is power, anything that can be exchanged in markets is power. In a capitalist society, capital is power. (For those who prefer to have references to authority, I'm sorry I don't have the exact pages, but in the Contribution Marx wrote that money is "a social power," and in various passages in Capital he wrote that capital is "a social power.") So, you can put it this way, power is the ability of people to get away with what they want. Another term for that is "freedom." (I know, there are subtle differences in the uses and etymologies of these terms. Said with all due respect, Amartya Sen made a career splitting hairs on matters like this. But broadly speaking, these terms are equivalent. Hegel: "freedom is the knowledge of necessity.")
Now if you refer to *political* power in particular, then you're just talking about a particular area of application of the productive force: the building, reinforcement, or dismantling of social structures. So, political power is our ability to establish, reinforce, or dismantle social structures (sets of social relations). To do this, you need people to behave in certain ways systematically. Social structures are the objectification of social behavior into somewhat rigid social conditions. So power is our ability (productive force) to make one another behave in certain systematic ways.
How do you make others behave the way you wish? Well, people have needs. You use that fact. The basic need is survival. But there are a bunch of other needs. So one way to make people behave is by (1) sheer force, or threat thereof. Slavery was a mode of production based on forcing masses of people (slaves) to produce a systematic surplus product for the benefit of the slave owners. So, the whip is power. So, "power comes from the barrell of a gun." But this is the basest, cheapest form of power.
Another form of exercising power is by (2) depriving people from their "necessities" (or seducing them with "luxuries") and limiting their provision as people do as you wish. Societies with private ownership and markets, to the extent such institutions are stable, tend to conduct their power business this very way. A not very subtle stick (hunger, poverty, deprivation) is combined with the carrot (greed) in different proportions.
Also, especially in rich capitalist societies, a form of power that has acquired a lot of sophistication in the last century or so is (3) psychological manipulation -- particularly in the area of commerce (marketing, advertising) and politics (PR, political consulting). In the last five centuries, capitalism's stick-and-carrot combo has proven to be formidable in transforming the globe's economic landscape. Wage labor has shown to be more effective than forced labor. Capitalist accumulation proper has shown to be more effective than primitive accumulation (which is just reshuffling the existing capital). It's what we call the capitalist mode of production. So the study of the economy, of value (and prices) is the study of the way social power is generated, allocated, and consumed in capitalist societies.
The capitalism's stick-and-carrot combo has limits. Ultimately, to uphold the rules of the game (private ownership, markets, contracts) when all else fails, class societies resort to the "ultima ratio" (as the Romans used to calle the stick). The problem is that (as the neocons have been unable to understand in spite of millennia of historical experience), unregulated violence without ample social legitimacy winds up being totally ineffective, noneconomical. As they say in Mexico, what's cheap turns out to be expensive.
Now, the highest form of power, the kind of power Michael Perelman consistently displays on the list, is (4) the ability to elicit cooperation based on respectful dialogue and friendly debate. That's power raised to its highest... power! And that's an extra argument in favor of the struggle for communism: Over time the cheaper forms of power will tend to lose effectiveness. That's something one notices with kids nowadays, from one generation to the next. There's no way that advanced, productive, interconnected people (the kind of people educated in modern production and life), if they are to keep their self-respect, will accept other form of conducting their mutual relations than cooperation.
Julio
