AND
we are disputing the meaning of everything. There are many who are allergic to the mere reference to can
. Even without investigating which power, whose power, its bases and its scope. Some would like power to depend on sympathy
or the charisma
individual, of the beauty
or of wit
particular. Others enjoy reducing the secrets of power to the exhibitionism of the privileges or wealth of the defected. There are those who are not at all interested in power and there are those who voluntarily, or intoxicatedly, ignore its meaning and core influence on life. There are even those who believe that it is an extraterrestrial gift. What is the point of building and accumulating power?
What cannot be done is ignore that the can
It must be analyzed as a multifactorial social phenomenon that has its historical roots in the first human settlements and runs, unevenly and combined, through the most intricate contemporary structures. Analyze the can
in its broadest sense and in its concrete expressions, demands a thorough understanding of how it has been defined and not infrequently distorted. Sometimes, civilizational social achievement and sometimes, too often, collapse of the collective will subjected to the whims of sect or class.
In the communities loans
Simply put, power was based on leadership skills in hunting, gathering, and community organization. Whoever exercised power served as a mediator, not as an owner, whose authority was limited to expressiveness and situational example. A type of power that is not necessarily coercive, is consensual based and linked to the survival of a community. Another definition appears with the emergence of the coercive nature in the use of power under the development of agriculture and sedentarization, where for multiple reasons, not necessarily linear, hierarchies were established. The division of labor implied the appearance of a class that controls the means of production and another that produces under its subordination.
(Marx and Engels explained in The German ideology1845). A type of power organized as control over matters and people. The dispute over the meaning of power is marked by class struggle.
There is a type of power deeply linked to the sacred, since Egypt, for example. Classical Greece did its part in another form of power with a legal-political dimension with the emergence of the polis. Legitimate power must be based on justice and exercised by the wisest
(Plato). Aristotle added his distinction between governments: Tyrannical power is exercised for the benefit of the ruler, not the governed.
. And then Rome imperialized its idea of institutional power with the invention of its law and, according to Cicero: The law is the greatest bond of civil society
.
This logic of power intoxicated many ambitions that, in the Middle Ages, naturalized as divine authority
to feudalism and its ideas about the kingdom of heaven on earth. Saint Augustine of Hippo finishes with that charm of the time: All power comes from God, who grants it to guide humanity towards good
. Thus, feudalism and what remains of it to date yearn for a dissolution of political power, they even hate the State and fight it, so that the lords who own the fiefs can exercise dominion over lands and vassals at will. And monarchs would not be exempt from temptations in the face of such a logic of power that centralizes all beings under monarchical power. Owners of all life. Thomas Hobbes helped them with his Leviathan (1651): Without sovereign power, man’s life would be lonely, poor, unpleasant and short.
. Some felt ashamed of such excesses and certain ideas of the Enlightenment moderated, with some criticism, the drunkenness of power and Locke put an intellectual brake: The government must protect life, liberty, and property; When it fails, the people have the right to rebel
( Second treatise on civil government1689). Always without the help of the people.
Nor did bourgeois democracy serve to revolutionize power and guarantee its social base. And nothing like the arrogance of bourgeois power that, with the rise of capitalism, metabolized and worsened all previous ideological scoundrels. Political power, in its strict sense, is the organized power of one class to oppress another.
( Communist Party Manifesto , 1848). In the history of power, the constant transformation of the class struggle is revealed where the oppressors have invented unlimited perversions to infiltrate them as natural forms of social, economic and cultural organization. Unbridled camouflages to legalize everything from physical coercion to symbolic control, and protect the dictatorship from its power at the price of disfiguring the very history of the human species. One of the most complex and fundamental social problems of the present is the transformation of social, economic and political relations that urge us to practice against the capitalist mode of production. Now we want for everyone everything
.
Yes, power must be absolutely transformed into its being and its way of being. Either it’s from the community or it will be more of the same and enough of that. It should not mean a form of domination of one class over another, no matter how sweetly it is made up. It will be our power to emancipate ourselves, to ensure equality of conditions, to give us collectively what the community needs one by one, one by one. Our power to direct the meaning and scope of the means, modes and relations of production, subordinated to the good of all. Not an abstraction, but a concrete form of justice, morality and ethics, not only based on economics. Command by obeying.
This includes creating another symbolic power capable of expressing the force of ideas, struggles, values and representations that legitimize and strengthen new social relations without exploitation or domination. We need another symbolic power of the popular masses to dismantle the illusions that sustain bourgeois power. A new symbolic power born from social depths to dignify relationships where people acquire collective awareness of their cultural hegemony, as an emancipatory quality against all forms of exploitation. New symbolic power to build a safe path towards material and ontological emancipation. And a world, yes, where many happy worlds fit.
* PhD
