> Andie Nachgegeboren wrote:
>
> > The problem is not power, but exploitation and domination, ...
>
> I really, really like that statement. It should be writ in stone and
> those who'd argue against progressive goals on the grounds of the
> impossibility or undesirability of "radical egalitarianism" be made to
> write it 1000 times.
>
> Curtiss
=====================
Well the problem is intimately bound up with the conflicts associated with just how power[s] are defined and instantiated and who gets to define and instantiate it/them in contradistinction to the latter two terms. In politics power is always a problem because there is no non-defeasible definition of power[s] and it is that very non-defeasibility which leads some to use exploitation and domination to instantiate their ideas of what power[s] should be. Just who/how the power-to/power-over distinction is settled and stabilized and unsettled and destabilized ineluctably draws exploitation and domination and their respective definitions and instantiations into the very stuff of political life.
One persons/groups power-to may be seen by other persons/groups as power-over and thus modes of exploitation and domination. Who gets to decide which persons/groups are right? God? The State? Who? How? One need only look at the comments a couple of years ago by Alan Greenspan regarding the protests against capitalism's main institutions of international legitimation; his separation of the protest groups into three broad categories and the group daring to use the term exploitation as being by his definition illegitimate -*we* were *exploiting* the poor to advance our own agenda was implicit in his assertion that the term exploitation was beyond the pale. Was he exploiting his position of power? Was his assertion non-defeasible? Was he attempting to dominate the arguments with some illusion of finality given his institutional base? Foucauldian problems regarding the knowledge/power nexus emerge here, big time. And that's just one tiny, recent example.
[pardon the nation reference in the below]
"The world has never had a good definition of the word liberty, and the American people, just now, are much in want of one. We all declare for liberty; but in using the same *word* we do not mean the same *thing*...The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep's throat, for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as a *liberator*, while the wolf denounces him for the same act as the destroyer of liberty....Plainly the sheep and the wolf are not agree upon the definition of liberty." [Abraham Lincoln, Address at the Sanitary Fair, Baltimore, MD, April 18, 1864]
Ian