Power is the ability to impose consequences, on the world,
and on people. It is the ability to impose positive consequences, or negative
consequences. Usually, these consist of rewards, for behavior pleasing to the
powerful, or punishments, for behavior displeasing to the powerful. Of course,
consequences may also be applied arbitrarily, but this wastes power. Power may
also be applied inefficiently, which is also wasteful of power.
In today’s world, the wealthy and many political leaders
have the most power, and thus the ability to impose the most consequence. The power of other institutions to influence
the evolution of society and the economy has been significantly reduced. While there are also other indicators of this,
the reduced influence of these institutions can be seen in the combination of
diminished material income, and increased dependency upon capital for such
income as they retain.
In a democracy, political leaders are expected to represent
the will of people, and the interest of the people and the wealthy do not
coincide. While both the wealthy and the people desire order and security, the
wealthy and the people are always in competition for wealth and power. Since
the people are dispersed, and the difference between what they have and what
they need is less, unless they unite in will and action, they are at a decisive
disadvantage to wealth. The most
important and unified instrument of the will and action of the people is their
government. Where the government is the
strongest and most coherent agent of the wealth and power of the people, the
wealthy will always seek to overcome, corrupt and capture it, that they may use
it to help gather the wealth and power of the people to themselves. On the other hand, seldom does an established
government seek to take the wealth and power of the wealthy from them, since
these tend to be regarded by the government and the people as legitimately
acquired, and generally supposed to be applied to the benefit of the people.
The wealthy are not monolithic. However, they all share the same desire to
enhance their own personal wealth. While
some are less principled in seeking and achieving this goal than others, none
is so principled as to willingly give any substantial portion of his wealth and
income to the people. And so, few can
afford to allow the unprincipled behavior of other wealthy to go without
answer. Where some of wealthy still act as a check of the unprincipled behavior
of other wealthy, the efforts of the wealthy to seize control of the government
may be mitigated. However, where the
rewards for unprincipled behavior become substantially greater than the rewards
for more responsible behavior, the ability and inclination of those wealthy who
might be regarded as responsible, must be expected to decrease. The pressure on the government to first pass
laws and adopt policies allowing for its corruption, and then laws which
further its corruption, thus increases, along with the degree of control of the
government by the wealthy. Efforts to
oppose this process by interest groups from among the people are also
increasingly repressed. It
should be noted that the effective transfer of control of government is an
enormous transfer of wealth and power from the people to the wealthy, a transfer
which usually goes unremarked.
As wealth becomes
concentrated, and its influence on politics increases, the political leaders
lose effective power, however, and become mere agents of the wealthy in the
application of their power. As this
happens, political leaders, through the government, increasingly impose the
will of the wealthy upon the people, whose interests they, and the government
no longer represent. Interestingly, even
those interests the people once had in common with the wealthy, order and
security, no longer completely serve the people, since they now also serve to
enable the oppression of the people by the wealthy. Once their government is captive of the
wealthy, so long as the people are orderly and seek security, the wealthy and
their captive government, through commerce and law, will strip the people of
their property and rights. In this respect, an important instrument of positive
power becomes degraded, as the people increasingly perceive their desires for
order and security to be in, the net, harmful to themselves.
In theory, of course, in a democracy, political leaders
never ‘had power,’ as they were expected to be agents of the people, in transmitting
and executing their will. However, the ability of the people to control these
agents, that is the power of the people over them, was always limited. The people were always limited in how and how
much they could reward their representatives.
While they could offer rewards besides the material, those material
rewards they could offer were in principle limited. Further, the perceived
value of these non-material rewards were always under attack by the wealthy. And
in general the people could only punish their representatives by not
re-electing them to their office. The people were also limited in their ability
to acquire information about many of the actions of their representatives. For these
reasons, and also because there were often a variety of ways to accomplish
goals, political leaders always possessed a certain amount of discretion. That is, a certain amount of their power
actually originated from their own office.
Where, however, they are ‘elected’ by the wealthy, the wealthy have much
more control over them, being able to both reward and punish them more, and
also being more informed as to their actions, so most of this discretion is
absent. (Because the wealthy are able supply greater reward, the expectation of
that reward is higher. Thus the
punishment associated with the withdrawal of that reward would be greater.)
Because of this, an ‘elected’ government can be expected to become a more
effective agent of the wealthy than it ever was of the people. Since the rewards to politicians change, we would
expect the people who choose to become politicians to change, also. We would expect them to become more self
interested, and less public spirited. We
would also expect them to become more authoritarian and dogmatic, and less
authoritative and pragmatic. We would
also expect them to be more sectarian and divisive, and less inclusive and
unifying.
We would expect them to identify with and seek to emulate their
wealthy patrons, and devalue the rest of the population, especially the poor
and other groups whose interests diverge from those of their patrons. Indeed,
we would expect many to become wealthy themselves. However, so far as they must
maintain the appearance of serving the interests of the people, they may be
expected to engage in tactics which enable this. Since their actions no longer serve the
people, but favor the wealthy, those actions must be hidden from the people and
obscured. The people must be misled, and
distracted by other activities which are irrelevant to the projects of the
wealthy. In particular the wealthy are
indifferent to the divisions of the people, Yet, because these divisions are a
powerful distraction to the people, the wealthy are prepared to exploit and
aggravate them.
In this they are aided so far as the wealthy control the
media. The media serves its owners. As society is segmented, so too is the
media. Through the media the attention of the people is channeled, directed,
and to a large extent, molded. The real actions of the wealthy and their
servants in government, and the consequences of those actions, are downplayed
or even ignored. The importance of
events which distract the people is exaggerated and those events dwelt upon. The
information provided by the media increasingly diverges from reality, and
action based on that divergence becomes counterproductive. However, the information provided by the
media is also what the wealthy wants the people to hear. The
wealthy are aware of this process. It is
circular, and insofar as it progresses, it
is perceived by the wealthy, and at some level at to some extent perceived by
the people themselves, to render the people unfit for self-government, and requiring
outside control of their activities. It
is this self-perception which renders the police state increasingly palatable
to the people. It is, however, not
because they see themselves as requiring greater external restraint, but
because they see their neighbors as requiring greater external restraint. This heightened level of fear also increases
the motivation in the individual to arm himself.
Different segments of society become aware of the unresponsiveness
and even the oppressive nature of their government at different times. Those
people long at the bottom of the economic ladder do not notice, since they are most disadvantaged in any society. However, as society is plundered, each level of society plunders the levels below it. Awareness thus tends to progress up the economic scale, but may be uneven, depending on the institutional and economic relationships between the levels. This awareness erodes the belief in
the legitimacy of the government by the people.
So wealth, or capital, has power so far as it is able to
impose both positive and negative consequences on labor and consumers. It gives
rewards to labor through increases in wages and grants of authority, and
punishes labor by discharging it, or laying it off. (Of course, capital does not always interpret
its own actions this way.) However, as society becomes increasingly
unequal, the ability of the wealthy to impose positive consequences decreases, This because the rewards to labor that the
wealthy bestow come from the income consumers spend on goods and services, and
this income is decreasing as the wealthy increase their share of both that
income and the wealth that comes from accumulating it. Indeed, this quantity
can only decrease, unless compensated for by a greater rate of growth, or
transfer of income from the wealthy to the worker. This transfer, however, is contrary to the
goal of the wealthy, which is an ever increasing stream of income to
themselves.
The reward the wealthy offer to labor of accumulated wealth
is decreasing, and the income from that wealth also. And, in its reduction of everything to
material worth, the intrinsic value of labor, of work for works sake, is also
devalued. The wealthy see actual work as
degrading, and this is eventually understood by labor; that laborers are
regarded as fools, a vision that is reinforced by the abstract forms that work
takes among the wealthy, and the disproportionate rewards the give to
themselves and each other for such work as they do perform.
This means the wealthy must increasingly rely on negative
consequences to exert their power. In particular, they must increasingly use
force to contain and restrain the activities of labor. Further, these negative consequences must
continually escalate, to compensate for the negative consequences of the
diminishing reward schedule given labor.
It is intrinsic to capital and the wealthy that they devalue
the other rewards that a society has to offer its members, since this
relatively enhances the value of the rewards they offer society, and so
enhances their power. They do this through their control of the media, through
their control of government, and directly by how they invest their capital. (And
of course, they also spend resources exaggerating the value of the rewards, and
diminishing the apparent costs of those rewards, that they offer.) It is necessarily part of their strategy to
corrupt and co-opt the social, intellectual, and spiritual institutions that
otherwise would provide these rewards, and which otherwise might provide a
countervailing authority to their exercise of power. Doing so, they necessarily corrupt and
devalue the rewards that these institutions themselves provide. But this process is part and parcel of
capital’s decapitalization and plundering of society. All institutions require both wealth and
income to sustain themselves. Where the
wealth and income of these institutions can remain independent of capital, they
can remain an independent and countervailing force. Therefore, capital seeks to both erode and
co-opt the sources of wealth and income that support these institutions. Once the sources of wealth and income of
these opposing institutions are co-opted, they may be withdrawn, and the
institutions destroyed. Institutions that are dependent on income from the
government, thus become vulnerable when the wealthy gain effective control of
that government. Indeed, it is evidence
of capital’s control of government that they are able to do this. And even where these institutions are not
destroyed, they will be rendered compliant to the interests of capital, since
the only other source of income is increasingly capital itself.
Further evidence of
the control of the government by capital is that the government is set to tasks
which, while beneficial to the wealthy, are either of no benefit to the people,
or damaging to the wealth and income of the people. Further, tasks which might be beneficial to
the people are attacked and diminished, especially if they cost the wealthy
income. Most
importantly, while war may be beneficial to the people, despite its costs to
the people, and on occasion also be necessary, war need not be either of
these. However, whether or not war is
either beneficial to the people or necessary, it is always a great source of
profit to the wealthy. When war is
fought for profit, however, its goal is not victory, but perpetuation, and the
maximization of that profit. Since
without victory, there can be no profit from the capture of foreign resources,
all profit must be taken from the people.
What also must be taken from the people is the stream of resources from
which that profit is derived. These
resources could otherwise be spent to the benefit of the people, and instead
are effectively destroyed.
So, the question arises, why hasn’t capital captured the
government before now?
The first reason is the fact that the activities of
government are, of themselves, not particularly profitable. This is because, ordinarily, the discount
rate for government investment is much lower than that of private capital. One could say that, ideally, and in the
limit, government is in the business of the preservation of resources, and the
discount rate goes to zero. Thus, a government responsive to the needs of its
society will maintain its infrastructure. When government is captured by capital,
however, the discount rate goes up, public assets are sold at a discount, and
infrastructure is allowed to decay. (The discount rate goes up because capital
is effectively taking its profits from government in reduced taxation.) The
second reason is that it is often much more difficult for a private entity to
capture the return on these kinds of investments, than it is for the larger society. (For these reasons together, education tends
to be relegated to the public sphere.)
So taken together, these reasons imply that ordinarily capital will
seek greater profits elsewhere. And as
long as it can do so, that is where its efforts will lie. And as long as it has access to an expanding
base of resources, capital will remain dispersed. That is, as long as access to
resources expanded faster than the profit rate, capital would remain dispersed.
But in recent times, this has ceased to happen, and return to real capital has
declined.
However, the acquisition of resources and their modification
and distribution throughout society, the provisioning of society, is merely an
instrument to capital’s actual goal of acquiring a society’s wealth through ever
greater monetary profits. Where
greater profit can be obtained through manipulation of an economy, rather than
providing for it, this is where capital will next turn. Since this is process is essentially the
wealthy transferring assets from the people to themselves without any
substantial compensation, it can be expected to be resisted by the government.
Thus, the government must be captured by the wealthy before it can be done
efficiently.
And the final reason that we haven't previously observed capital to capture the government
is that one of the most important activities of government is to counterbalance
the accumulation and concentration of profit in society. The government must distribute final demand throughout the economy, in order to sustain the people and their institutions. When government ceases to do this, the ability of the people and their institutions to sustain themselves collapses. So the final reason is that no society long
survives the capture of its government by the wealthy.
