The surest sign that a protest is effective is if the military opens fire on it. I want to explain why this is. Of course, I’m considering both “protest” and “effective” in a narrow sense here but I think the general point is understandable on its face: as a challenge to the government, a protest’s effect can be measured by its response, and military or police using violence to put it down is the clearest sign that the protest itself, rather than other possible provoking elements, has caused that response. Explaining this means explaining how social power is constructed.
Power is the ability to achieve a result based only on the will of the enactor. If I say “I grab a can off the shelf,” I am implying that I have the power to grab the can. If I instead say “I reach my arm to grab a can off the shelf,” my power to grab the can is mediated or limited by my arm. In the first case, me grabbing the can is not dependent on anything but my decision to do so; in the second, it depends also on my arm, such that if we limited ourself to the world created by the statement, we could not grab the can without an arm. Of course, an arm (specifically its hand-part) will generally be used to grab in either case, or we could use different body parts to grab the can. Whether the fundamental facts change or not is not important. Power is not about actuality, it is about appearance, and the fact that the first case appears to be unmediated makes it appear to express more power than the second.
Process is a series of processes. This is recursive for a reason. It’s possible to understand process as “a series of actions enacted to reach a chosen end point”, but it should be understood that each of those actions in the series can be further divided into parts. The change from perceiving any process as “a series of processes” into viewing it as “a series of actions” can be called the subsuming of those sub-processes. The fact that those sub-processes are processes — series of acts/processes — is lost in favor of viewing them as whole units, as if the sub-sub-processes no longer exist. Power is constructed when processes are subsumed under an action which we will call the act of power. When I say “I grab the can” instead of “I use my arm to grab the can”, I am constructing the idea that my power to grab the can is not based upon having or not having an arm.
Power is forgetting, or rather ignoring. It is having the opportunity to ignore parts of a full operation. To some extent, we all do this as part of understanding the world. We ignore that our bodies are constantly working at respiration, digestion, etc. in order that we can turn our attention to other things. Considered on a social scale, though, power clearly presents certain dangers. People and their activities can be subsumed almost as easily as biological processes. If this were to happen fully within a society, where all people and all activities are subsumed under those of a single actor, we would call it complete totalitarianism.
Power has two faces. Power in action, or cogency, and power in observation, which I will call authority. The relationship is similar to that between kinetic and potential energy. Considered as a system, power-authority lets us know the limits and likelihoods of power while power-cogency relates to whether or not a specific act succeeds. There is a relationship between the two, especially in how the record of cogency can enhance or diminish authority, but the relationship is not definite. These aspects are also differentiated from the aspects of charisma: juice and prestige. As system, charisma is about others’ attachment to the charismatic figure, while power is about the ability to affect the world.
Most of state-society is reliant on the construction and use of power. Take “the power to tax”, for example. When a state wants to raise revenue, it can increase the tax rate and generally be assured (especially in modern Western nation-states) that it will get what it seeks. Of course, for this to happen, the people in state-society have to give up the money requested. If people delay or refuse, institutions need to exist to chase up the shortfall. These institutions have to use a variety of remedies — such as assigning fines, garnishing wages, threats of violence or imprisonment — which themselves have sub-processes and so on. These component processes must exist for the power to tax to exist, but they can be ignored if, say, the government is putting together a budget. In that situation, the fact that these institutions exist is simply taken for granted, and the fact that they will work without significant issue is similarly assumed. If a government has an unlimited power to tax, that means it does not need to spend time considering how exactly the revenue will be raised, it simply needs to order it and have the money.
The continued function of the component processes is the cogency of an act, while the perception of that cogency is the authority of the act. In the abstract, the scale of cogency is related to the actor’s technique, or technical ability. The scale of authority is measured by the actor’s fidelity, or the level of certitude others have in the act’s accomplishment. Power-fidelity is established by three interrelated aspects: first, consistency (or regularity), which is the experience of the actor’s will and the act’s accomplishment coinciding in the past; second, appeals to knowledge, such as having confidence in an act because it seeks to accomplish its goal in a way that is understood or understandable; and third, charisma, or the generalized attachment to the actor, the act, or some involved element. These aspects all clearly build off of one another but are distinct enough to consider them separately.
One of the greatest limitations on state power historically was a lack of consistency. We can see this in the various forms of tax farming, when governments accepted bids and offloaded the actual functions of menacing people and accounting for funds. If this was the most effective system we would probably still see it in use, or at least used by high-authority states, but these instead tend towards centralized and state-run tax collection. This allows for state management of fidelity in taxation. Increasing constancy in state actions is the major way that modern states have outdone historical ones, such that even many less-prestigious states are able to function with a higher degree of state power than powerful kingdoms of the past. I think there are two formations used historically (and now) to increase constancy in state actions. The first is paramilitarization (or militarization, for short): attempting to run the state entirely on militaristic lines like the chain of command. The second formation is bureaucracy, and it’s this which I’m going to focus on.
When I looked up definitions of bureaucracy, most agreed with Max Weber in saying that hierarchy was a key aspect of it. I don’t see things this way: I would place hierarchy as a tool of militarization. Instead, I see bureaucracy as being composed of four parts: provincialization, standardization, interdependency, and recordkeeping. This is not to say that bureaucracies do not generally have hierarchies or even that bureaucracies with hierarchies are necessarily militaristic in a disciplined and rigid sense. I’m only asserting that bureaucracy does not rely on hierarchy and that a non-hierarchical system is not necessarily non-bureaucratic. Militarization is about ensuring communication and rigor. Bureaucracy is about specialization and evidence.
- Provincialization, or departmentalization, is the separation of a single task into sub-tasks which are each handled by separate task-bureaus or departments. Because each bureau (in an ideal system) is devoted to its particular task to the exclusion of others, it allows those involved to narrow their efforts, intensifying their work on those fewer objects of focus, and over time specializing in completing the tasks assigned to their bureau.
- Standardization is the use of the same (or similar) procedures across different bureaus and different points in time. By standardizing, communication (both direct and indirect) is improved because all involved are familiar with the procedures being used even if the particular situation is unfamiliar. This allows for more intensely complex organizations to exist in a coherent state. Without standardization, communication between different parts would more easily break down, meaning that they could not coordinate their efforts.
- Interdependency in bureaucracy means that no bureau can exist on its own. Each bureau, considered as its own organization, has important functions which it entirely offloads to other bureaus & entities. The more that a bureau can offload these functions, the more potential effort can be spent on remaining responsibilities.
- Recordkeeping explains itself. Obviously, recordkeeping is a major enabler of standardization. It also provides evidence of the bureaucracy’s fidelity. Further, without recordkeeping, it becomes difficult for problems in the system to be discovered. If unaddressed, such problems can diminish that fidelity.
Bureaucracy (or bureaucratization) therefore works primarily based on specialization and review, approaching empiricism in its method. In a quote-unquote “pure bureaucracy”, a task of Type A is always given to the Bureau of Type A Affairs. This is in contrast to a militarized structure which is based on personal trust. Briefly, paramilitarization is characterized by chain-of-command, discipline, and veterancy (which is not experience so much as time & effort in service to the organization). In a “pure paramilitary system”, an important task is always given to a high-ranked and trusted person, regardless of the kind of task or abilities of the person. Of course, most hierarchies in the world today combine the two approaches, but understanding that there is a difference helps to explain how the development of bureaucracy added to organizational power where military hierarchy already existed.
I want to take something like a sightseeing detour here to talk about the construction of profit. It is usual, in my estimation, for people to view a company’s profit as being a straightforward result of measurable inputs and outputs from the company’s operations. It must be acknowledged, however, that even if we have two companies in the same industry with equivalent product lines and customer bases post the same revenue, it does not follow that they produced or sold the same nominal value of goods. For instance, one side may have a higher perceived brand value and thus sell fewer goods at higher prices than their essentially equivalent competitor. This is what I mean by profit being constructed.
Most people familiar with economics will know the concept of explicit vs. implicit costs: explicit costs have a specific economic value attached, implicit costs have a speculative or theoretical value attached. Because implicit costs often can be tabulated and because an implicit cost in one situation could be explicit in another (such as potential hours spent job searching vs. a severance payout), there is already a sense of choosing what does or does not count as part of a company’s accounts. This construction goes deeper than a single distinction and I think two others are more significant in this context.
The more similar new distinction is between external (or imposed) costs and internal (or managed) costs. External costs are those which are not determined by the company. Supplies bought on the open market are external costs. Internal or managed costs are ones which are paid but where the company itself effectively sets the price. The clearest example of an internal cost is employee wages, but a vertically-integrated conglomerate which has some segments producing materials for others can make those effectively internal costs. The manipulation of internal costs — wage theft, understaffing, underskilling — goes a long way in constructing profit. Though the drought of internal resources can eventually hurt the company, these concerns are still slotted firmly under implicit costs.
The third distinction is between economized and de-economized costs. This relates to a more holistic perspective about cost. A company is an interest, participated in by its owners and employees. In specific, a company (as in a modern wage labor business) is the main way in which its participants gain the money that they need to live, money which is distilled out of capital. For many if not most, a particular company will be their only reliable access to money. The company and its participants (employees, owners, etc.) form a network which relies on the company to function, and so in some sense the rises and falls of each participant can be associated with the company. Despite this, non-work losses suffered by employees are not counted by the company; from the company’s perspective, employee losses are de-economized.
If, for instance, a company store is lost in a fire, the company marks it down in their ledger. If an employee’s house is lost — even if the employee could not have afforded the house without the company wages, even if the employee will have to quit due to not being able to live in the area, even if that employee is important to the company’s bottom line — the company does not figure it into their profit & loss statements. They would readily elect instead to stop considering the employee to be one of its participants. This is not to suggest that companies should start to figure employee losses into their ledgers, my goal in making this point is only to reinforce the idea that profit is constructed out of a series of choices rather than being a straightforward reflection of commercial activity.
I began this essay talking about protest. Protest is “powerful” in the colloquial sense, but in the context of this piece, protest is the anti-power. If an act of power involves subsuming the act’s many sub-processes, protest is when a process or sub-process or sub-sub-process rejects that outcome. It’s an ache in the reaching arm, a twinge in the gripping thumb. Protest is a disruption of power processes and the potential for further disruption. Each disruption in a power process exposes the possibilities for disruptions in other elements of that process. The perception of power-authority is central to the effectiveness of power-cogency, and the effective use of power-cogency reinforces power-authority. In the same way, a failure in one side can ultimately lead to the failure of the whole power apparatus.
When the police assault peaceful protesters, when courts send people to jail for years because they block traffic for mere hours, these things have happened in some part because no challenge to the system of power can be stomached by arch-conservatives. The protest, the resistance to being subsumed, is itself what the state wants to eliminate. If my arm hurts, I’m not likely to tolerate it more because I hurt it while helping my grandmother or practicing jiu jitsu. What might help me tolerate the pain — not try to extinguish it immediately — is if you tell me it is a sign of my arm healing. For those reliant on the power process, what is important is not order or disorder as such but the effective functioning of the power system. Protest is a breakdown, and the state’s violent reaction is the clearest sign that the threat posed to the state power system is real.
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