for robin, the idea is that reactionary political thought *and* practice is a situational response to a condition where people personal feel, are emotionally jarred by, losing their power, most especially in one-to-one personal or intimate relationships with people over whom they traditionally were assumed to be superiors in social status/position/authority. He speaks of wives being subservient to husbands, slaves being subservient to masters, serfs subservient to lords, factory workers subservient to managers, secretaries subservient to bosses.
Throughout the first quarter of this book, Robin has constantly shifted to speaking of relations of hierarchical social power in these personal, intimate terms: where someone has a social status of superior to those considered inferior. The reason why he does is because his theory is that reactionary political thought and practice, indeed, all important social rebellions associated with modernity. Thus, he insista that such acts of rebellion - wars, uprisings, etc. - played themselves out in terms of an individual(s) standing up to their superiors in a "private" setting and rejecting the social hierarchy (whatever it might have been):
"One of the reasons the subordinate's exercise of agency so agitates the conservative imagination is that it takes place in an intimate setting. Every great political blast . is set off by a private fuse: the contest for rights and standing in the family, the factory, and the field. Politicans and parties talk of constitution and amendment, natural rights and inherited privileges. But the real subject of their deliberations is the private life of power." (no idea what the page number is in the print edition b/c i'm on Kindle).
For Robin, then, the issue IS very much about intentional exercises of power among individuals, where a husband asserts his authority over a wife, where Natasha Lennard gets fired from the NYT for participating in OWS (Robin's example on his blog), where families refuse to allow their housekeepers to use the same bathroom facilities or where the woman of the house stands of the maid while she makes her scrub the floor on her knees, etc.
His thesis is that reactionary political thought and practice emerges out of these instances where people once in a position of social power over others lose that authority, have a felt experience of that loss, and then, even though it's quite clear that they will never get back the world they loss, they shape a political philosophy and practice that seeks to regain that lost world.
so I'd say that your critique is probably more relevant to Robin because he is very interested in hierarchies of social status seems to me.
At 05:52 PM 1/22/2012, Carrol Cox wrote:/
>This is the same mistake writ small. Power, apparently, is something people
>create, exercise: Crudely, it is an intentional or unintentional act. They
>are conscious that is of their own tendency to exercise, to want to
>exercise, power over others. Put otherwise, power is state power, but there
>can be little states (a given anarchist project).