[lbo-talk] Re: hierarchy (was woj and America)

[andie nachgeborenen]

I never used the power to/over distinction. The power I was referring to is power over at least in part. Judges can issue orders requiring the parties to act or refrain froma cting in certain ways, backed by the power of the police to throw them in jail if they refuse. Etc.  The issue of whether particular powers claimed by democratic authority are necessary or dominating cannot be settled a priori and in advance. There will be disputes about this forever. Moreover, it would not help even if we coulda nswer theseq uestions ina dvance, because there would be the further problem of getting people to comply with the correct a priori answers.  These are not objections to the existence of power, which an abolsute prerequiste of social existence. They are arguments for constitutional democracy and limited government, which constrains the use of such powers. 
jks
Ian Murray <seamus2001 at attbi.com> wrote:
----- Original Message -----
From: "H. Curtiss Leung" 


> 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

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