Democracy: A Social Power Analysis

Democracy: A Social Power Analysis

By Dr. John S. Atlee, with Tom Atlee

We live in a world where power is very unbalanced.
Power imbalances are at the root of most social problems.
Correcting power imbalances will go a long way towards solving many problems at once.
We'd be wise to attend to this no matter what issues we work on.

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Summary

When we're involved with other people (children, bosses, IRS agents) our ability to satisfy our desires (freedom) has a lot to do with how successfully we influence those people or resist their efforts to influence us in ways we don't want.

The ability to influence or resist is what social power is all about. People with lots of money, muscle, status, intelligence, etc., can usually successfully influence other people. In most (but, significantly, not all) circumstances, they have more social power.

When a person or group has substantially more power than others, their relationships are not democratic. Democracy requires that social power be equal or balanced.

Sometimes everyone having equal power doesn't make sense - like in a large company. In such circumstances, certain people may be given extra power. Such concentrated power can still be democratic, as long as those in charge are answerable to whomever they're managing and relinquish their power when duly called-upon to do so.

The main point is this: if people are going to be affected by something, they should be able to influence or resist what happens. This doesn't mean everyone gets everything they want. It just means that people's desires should be fairly balanced with the desires of everyone else involved. Any system that ensures that kind of balance-of-power is democratic.

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Democracy: A Social Power Analysis

Democracy and freedom are the central values of American society. But they've come to mean so many different things that they're almost meaningless. We find them being used to support the most anti-democratic policies. As mere propaganda slogans, they're utilized by individuals and pressure groups to lend a halo of "Americanism" to their own private conquest of an ever larger share of the people's power.
The social power analysis described in this essay provides solid, objective, social-scientific definitions of these badly-mauled terms - definitions against which to measure the propaganda of groups from the National Association of Manufacturers to the Communist Party.
The most important function of a new social theory is to provide a rationale and intellectual and moral sanction to what people are already doing - or what they want to do yet don't quite know how because it is at variance with traditional theories and institutions. This social power analysis is intended to serve that purpose for people who are concerned about the concentration and irresponsibility of power in our society. They will find it provides a framework of ideas within which they can create solutions consistent with democratic institutions and ideals.



SOCIAL POWER
 
Social power is the basic, common element in politics, economics, and all other social relationships. It is possessed by all individuals and social groups and arises out of their connections to each other. Robinson Crusoe, marooned on a desert island, didn't have to deal with it until he met Friday.

Social power has two aspects:

1) The ability to influence others so as to further our own interests or desires.
2) The ability to resist the activities of others.

In theory it is possible to be socially neutral - to further our own interests or desires in ways which do not affect other people. In practice, however, the vast majority of our activities have some social impact.
Social power comes in many forms, some of which are outlined in the box at the bottom of this page. There are many more.

SOCIAL POWER IS TRANSMUTABLE AND FLUID
Physical energy can be easily changed from heat into light, motion or electricity by the engineer. Likewise,

social power can be changed from one form into another by those who know how to use it.

And just as electricity is more easily tranformed than most other forms of physical power, so there are differences in the various forms of social power.
Which form is most transmutable depends on the circumstances. For example, in a war, physical force is probably most transmutable. In highly industrialized, interdependent money economies, financial power is usually the most transmutable.
Again like physical energy, social power may be either active or merely latent -- like the power in a taut spring or a can of gasoline.
Not infrequently possessors of social power fail to realize what power they have (e.g., India's poor, prior to being organized by Gandhi; or industrial workers prior to being organized into unions; or citizens who don't vote).
On the other hand, what seems like great social power is often based mainly on bluff, its effectiveness due to the ignorance or false beliefs of those over whom it is exercised. This is most obvious in games like poker, but it is a basic element in all power strategy, whether military, business, or political. This has been a chief reason for the lavish costumes, pageantry and ritual of authoritarian ruling groups throughout history. It's a major reason why knowledge is such an important form of power - to reveal the hidden weaknesses and bluffs of powerholders.

POWER DOESN'T COME IN SEPARATE PIECES
One of the commonest mistakes made by those attempting to analyze social power is thinking solely in terms of the individual forms of power. In the real social world these interlock and ramify in so many directions that it is almost impossible to isolate them. Social power usually occurs in big chunks, organized into systems or structures of power - family, community, religion, interest group, class, movement, political party, etc.
The individual forms of power are important chiefly as the instruments of power strategy, manipulated by competitors for social power as generals manipulate soliders, supplies and weapons.

No one form of power is "best." Forms of power - and strategies for using them - are best chosen in response to specific circumstances.

A champion prize fighter wouldn't necessarily have much power in a chess tournament, nor a college president on a battlefield.
The social power possessed by any individual or group cannot be adequately evaluated by the mere sum of individual forms of power possessed - even where they can be added up. With social power, as with most other social phenomena, the whole is often greater (or less) than the sum of its parts, and is often different in kind. When one person becomes wealthy and another poor, there usually develops a greater difference between their relative social power than can be measured solely by their respective fortunes. This social truth underlies the Biblical saying, "To him who hath shall be given; from him who hath not, even that which he hath shall be taken away."
On the other hand, going to the other extreme and lumping all forms of social power together into a single concept such as social class also leads to errors of social analysis.


FREEDOM
 
Freedom does not exist in any absolute form. It exists only in relation to our desires and our ability to satisfy them. People generally become conscious of freedom as a political problem or objective only when a gap develops between their desires and their ability to satisfy them.
Although most people think of freedom as an absence of restrictions, that is only one facet of it.

Real freedom is the ability to satisfy our desires. It has three aspects:

1) AWARENESS: Knowledge and recognition of our desires and of possibilities for expressing and fulfilling them.
2) "FREEDOM TO": Availability of means and opportunities (including the statistical probability) for satisfying our desires.
3) "FREEDOM FROM": The absence of restrictions, coercion, and other factors blocking self-determined realization of our desires.

These three aspects of freedom are inseparable; there can be no real freedom unless all three are present.

Freedom is intimately related to social power. On the one hand, social power usually generates greater freedom for whoever uses it. On the other, patterns of freedom greatly influence the extent to which various forms of social power can be exercised.
There are objective and subjective dimensions to freedom.

Most people believe they have more or less freedom than they actually have, and these delusions are manipulated by social powerholders to influence public behavior.

"Empowering" or "radicalizing" people often involves helping them discover the actual patterns of power and freedom in their lives.

SOME INSIDIOUS RESTRICTIONS ON FREEDOM
Statistical improbability: Everyone may be free to enter a lottery, but they don't really have freedom to win. With a limited number of prizes, many are forced to be losers. Likewise, to the extent there is high unemployment, workers are not truly free to work, but are forced by necessity to enter a "game" in which they have a high chance of losing. Saying that "every man is free to own his own business" is a lie when 80% of adults work for a wage or salary. In these cases, there aren't enough opportunties to make these "freedoms" realistic.
Practical social necessity: There are many extended families with ten or more children in the world whose main breadwinner gets only a few dollars a day. The children have to start work as soon as they are able. To say these children have "freedom" to get an education would be ironical.
Ignorance of opportunity: Children with great musical talent who grow up without hearing good music or knowing where to get a musical instrument don't realistically have "freedom" to develop their talent.
Private coercion: Coercion and restrictions by government have traditionally been recognized as basic limitations on individual freedom. But coercion by private individuals and groups can be equally serious. If thieves were free to steal, there would be no freedom of property ownership. When employers hire thugs to beat up union organizers, there is no freedom of union organizing.
Threatening environments: Widespread crime, pollution, militarism, homelessness, racial and sexual abuse, and so on, can make streets, communities, even food, air and water seem dangerous. People "hole up" in their homes. They don't know what's safe to do so they don't do anything. When parents or spouses become threatening, even homes can be dangerous, causing people to withdraw even further, into their frightened minds. Despite all the VCRs, water purifiers, and shopping malls, we can question how "free" people are to enjoy life.
Controlled options: People often feel like they are free to choose, even though the options presented to them were created by someone else. Many supermarkets, for example, have thousands of products, none of which are organic. Shoppers experience the wide variety as freeing them to choose. Very few of them experience the omission of organic foods as a limitation.
Stimulus-response manipulation: Psychologists, con men, and PR professionals have developed powerful technologies of manipulation that can cause people to act for reasons that are outside their control or awareness. People can think they are behaving freely and rationally when actually they are being heavily influenced by "compliance professionals." (See INFLUENCE, by Robert B. Cialdini [1984] for a fascinating introduction to this subject.)

FREEDOM AND SOCIAL POWER
There is no such thing as absolute freedom. Freedom is a function of social power. There is only freedom for particular individuals and groups to do certain things.
Where there are fundamentally opposing interests, an increase in the power (and freedom) of one individual or group necessarily means a relative decrease in the power (and freedom) of the others.
Unemployment increases the freedom of employers to get their pick of job applicants, to pay low wages, and to avoid protests from workers. For the same reasons, unemployment decreases the freedom of workers. Likewise in a drought in India, thousands of peasants may starve while grain merchants get rich.

The total amount of freedom existing in a society as a whole depends on the overall distribution of social power. A free society is not achieved by trying to maximize the freedom of people as individuals, but by pursuing a balance or equality of social power among all individuals.

This is because our individual freedom is necessarily limited by our living with each other in society.
Traffic lights offer an excellent illustration of this. If a new traffic light is set up at an intersection, does it increase or decrease freedom? You have to stop if the light is red. On the other hand, if it is a busy intersection, you'd have to stop anyway to avoid accidents. Now while the light is green you are free to go through without stopping. If both streets are busy thoroughfares, with equal amounts of traffic, the new light would obviously increase the net amount of freedom for everybody.
But what if one road were a busy superhighway and the other a small country road with only a few cars which had to wait half an hour for an opportunity to cross? Maybe the freedom of the minority should be given consideration by a light which stopped the superhighway traffic for brief periods at infrequent intervals. The timing of the light would make the difference. Or the total amount of freedom might be still further increased by constructing an overpass.
Freedom, like social power, depends on circumstances. What increases freedom in the country may restrict it in the city. What increases freedom in self-sufficient economies may limit it in interdependent industrial societies. Restrictions on individual freedom tend to increase as societies become more populous and integrated, in order to preserve the maximum possible freedom for all.