(Rough draft for now)
The people have power, but only so long as they can use it. Here, the theory of Michael Mann is useful. Now I haven't read his last three volumes, but am generally aware of the structure of his theory - there is political, ideological, economic, and military power networks. Let me give an example of such analysis, when Mann discusses the burghers as the 'end' (more or less) of feudalism (I have put at the end of the post). Mann's framework is about the sources of social power - when we evaluate these sources, we can identify the networks which constitute a certain society or civilization. Key to notice is that fundamental change occurs at the interstices of institutional power. We can see this today - trying to address institutional change within the institution, while necessary, does not change the institution. And our institutions today (as I will explain) cannot sufficiently address the dangers in the future - climate change (and the resulting refugee crises, and likely fascistic regimes that would follow), water wars, oil wars, and the lack of stability and safety in many parts of the world today, as group X has power, and group Y has no power and suffers at the hands of group X. How can we understand these power differentials? As a growing majority of the world comes to accept that climate change is real (rebuking fossil fuel propaganda), how can we actualize this democratic consensus into effective and meaningful policy decisions? As breadtuber Vaush warns, how can we avoid or mitigate the fascism and genocidal tendencies which will likely arise in the following decades as millions of people are displaced by climate change? How can we minimize the threat of extremism and terrorism amongst systemically underprivileged and systemically abused groups? These are real possibilities, and the profit motive is not sufficient to deal with it. Is there a way to maintain our current configuration (the global market) and empower democracy and the people? I believe there is. And if we empower the people soon enough, if we sew the seeds of class consciousness enough, we can better fight the tide of xenophobic extremism (already evident today) which will surely skyrocket as climate change and capitalist failures displaces millions more.
Hell, the current ideal framework today (European social democracy) can barely defeat far-right extremism; even today, right wing extremists dominate Hungary and Poland, eek close to victory in France, loom in Sweden and Germany, and just now triumph over the so-called 'labor' party in the United Kingdom. Along with the tides of extremism in nations such as India and Brazil, the victory of Biden looks more like a chance to catch our breaths and go in four serious change, rather than an endorsement to do 'same old same old'. In the coming decades, the far-right's strength will only grow, unless we can defeat their big lie with economic justice and democracy. Democracy in the workplace is, so far as I can see, the only viable way to systemically empower workers and displace the big lie (that immigrants are here to take our Z, that the elites sent them here to water down 'our voting power', etc., whereas these problems are driven by a false-scarcity entrenched by capitalist greed), the only way to safeguard political democracy, the best way to institutionalize democratic morale (ie to see the power of democracy, by voting on policies in the workplace), and the best way to avoid the tragedies of centralized power in Maoist China and Stalinist USSR. Fundamentally, we need to diffuse the power inherent to capitalism, while retaining the market scaffold that has developed because of it (to avoid global instability, risking say, terrorists getting their hands on nukes in Pakistan). In this way, we can prepare institutions that can effectively tackle climate change, while effectively bracing for the future.
Key to the criticism I have is that the dominant and dynamic framework today - Capitalism - is immanently self-reinforcing, exploiting institutionalized sources of power to the fullest extent to push its interests. Capitalism dominates the economic power source in a fairly obvious way, but notice that here there is a self-reinforcing mechanism - the more profit generated by a capitalist, the more money they accrue. That money can be used to dominate the military, political, and ideological frameworks. On this last point, which is easy to overlook for the American positivist, Zizek would adamantly point out, we do not live in a post-ideology world, we are deeper in it now than ever. Fisher puts it in his book 'Capitalist Realism', 'it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism' - many of us are so entrenched in capitalist ideology that we cannot imagine a world (with all of the luxuries, like grocery stores, drinkable water, the internet, as opposed to some stone-aged post-apocalyptic nightmare) without capitalism. So much of what we do today is about how we as a consumer can refashion ourselves as unique individuals who consume responsibly, worry about our carbon footprint, etc., even as we all know this is a superficial game, and the real polluters are the capitalists. It's more subtle than this, but you get my point, I hope. This system leads to something like 'liberal authoritarianism' - privately allowed to do whatever (actually, encouraged to - be yourself!), even allowed to criticize the system (but actually organizing labor is a different story), and allow 'Big Brother' to take care of things. Every now and then, maybe you get to vote - but really this is unnecessary for efficient operation (as in the case of 'Capitalism/Socialism with Chinese characteristics'). This is the world we live in.
The main problem here is that our global framework centralized power like never before - this happens in the economic, Capitalist sphere, where the capitalists say jump, and the workers ask how high. And power, in the hands of the few, inevitably leads to brutal negligence and mismanagement. How then can we decentralize power? Turning to a Mannian analysis, we can confirm the suspicions of leftists since Marx: the most intersticial aspect of this entire framework is labor (and thus the one most capable of 'changing the system'). This is because labor is largely excluded from the benefits of this system - these are the people 'who suffer what they must'(? - the question mark, as Varoufakis reminds us to put). They are exterior to the siphons and bellows of the capitalist machine. Political power is essentially neutered in the face of capitalism, because capitalism fuses the two together into a political economy. At best, a political route promises the social democracies of Europe which are failing - see the rise of the far right, the yellow jacket protests, the surrender in COVID-policy, threats of coups in France, etc (that is to say, European-style social democracy is not a real option). Military power is not a way to go, as the United States is unbeatable, and threats of violence agains the US state will only destabilize the world. And ideological power is extremely difficult to beat, at best offering memes for the left. We lack the capital and institutional power to mount an effective media revolution - and to get those pre-requisites, we need changes in the economic (or political, which leads back to economic) power network. Memelords are insufficient to change the institution - more likely, Capitalism will co-opt their efforts. While there is a moral argument to make (and I endorse) for workers rights, there is also a pragmatic one. The economic sphere is at the heart of the Capitalist system, but it is also the location of interstitial worker power (which a Mannian analysis implies is the most likely source for a robust change to the system). Furthermore, by learning from the mistakes of Leninism/Stalinism, we can avoid the pittrap of vanguardism, and instead support democratic workplaces. This diffuses the immense economic power given to enterprises in a market amongst its constituent workers, lowering the capacity for such power to be abused.
Here then we flip the power imbalance between economic and political - the United States government could support this effort, with NIH/NSF style grants (among other things), tax incentives, and so on. The main point is that power is diffused from "the 1%", and given to the workers, giving them a better life, and who will have less ability to abuse the international system. As Western Capitalism is currently the primary driver for international exploitation, this will also provide relief to other nations around the world. Capitalism is self-amplifying, but if you swap out its core, that power feedback is weakened. Strongmen, militias, and corrupt governments around the world would no longer be propped up by the multinantional corporations such as ExxonMobil, Chevron, or Glencore (for example). Large companies couldn't sew corruption and destruction in a nation, such as Odebrecht. Importantly, this requires financial reforms which fundamentally outmode exploitative and explosive capitalism. How would this happen?
This would happen via political means, back in the States, the beating heart of Capitalism. As worker democracy would be on the rise, the people would in turn would have (by definition) much more class consciousness. They would see the unnecessary exploitation and destruction wrought by finance markets, and move to regulate them to an appropriate level. This is to say, in a Mannian sense, worker democracy in the US would enable a 'reorganizational spurt, a regrouping both of the myriad networks of society and of its dominant power configurations'.
This would still allow keeping the market. The market has to exist for now, largely to maintain global stability. Enterprises can work just as well (or better) under worker control, rather than a dictator. That is, if we treat enterprises like a black box (and not looking if they are constituted as a dictatorship [capitalism] or democracy [socialism]), the market functions the same. This is not to say that economic networks won't evolve following this reorganization (they probably will), but the process will not require revolution or central planning. Like Capitalism, it will evolve into new forms, adapting to the historical contingencies of its moment. Markets are something we have right now, and we can reorganize within the black box of the enterprise to decentralize power, un-yoking the power of wealth from the ideological, political, and military spheres.
But let us try to look at the military innovations in a different, organizational light. Of course, they had economic, ideological, and other preconditions. But they also had an intrinsically military, emergent, interstitial power of reorganization - a capacity through particular battlefield superiority to restructure general social networks distinct from those provided by existing dominant institutions. Let us call the latter "feudalism," - comprising a mode of production (extraction of surplus from a dependent peasantry, interrelation of peasant plots of land and lords' manors, delivery of surplus as commodities to the towns, etc.); political institutions (the hierarchy of courts from the vassal to lord to monarch); military institutions (the feudal levy); and a European-wide ideology, Christianity. ''Feudalism" is a loose way of describing the dominant way in which the myriad factors of social life, and, at the core, the four sources of social power, were organized and institutionalized across medieval western Europe. But other areas of social life were less central to, and less controlled by, feudalism. Social life is always more complex than its dominant institutions because, as I have emphasized, the dynamic of society comes from the myriad social networks that humans set up to pursue their goals. Among social networks that were not at the core of feudalism were towns and free peasant communities. Their further development was relatively interstitial to feudalism. And in a crucial respect two of them, in Flanders and Switzerland, found that their social organization contributed a particularly effective form of ' 'concentrated coercion" (as I shall define military organization later) to the battlefield. This was unsuspected by anyone, even themselves. It is sometimes argued that the first victory was accidental. At the battle of Courtrai the Flemish burghers were penned against the river by the French knights. They were unable to engage in their usual tactic against charging knights - flight! Not desirous of being slaughtered, they dug their pikes into the ground, gritted their teeth, and unhorsed the first knightly rank. It is a good example of interstitial surprise - for everyone concerned.
But it is not an example of "military" versus "economic" factors. Instead it is an example of a competition between two ways of life, one dominant and feudal, the other hitherto less important and burgher or free peasant, which took a decisive turn on the battlefield. One way of life generated the feudal levy, the other the pike phalanx. Both forms required the myriad "factors" and the functions of all four major power sources necessary for social existence. Hitherto one dominant organizational configuration, the feudal, had predominated and partially incorporated the other into its networks. Now, however, the interstitial development of aspects of Flemish and Swiss life found a rival military organization capable of unhorsing this predominance. Military power reorganized existing social life, through the effectiveness of a particular form of "concentrated coercion" on the battlefield.
Indeed the reorganization continued. The pike phalanx sold itself (literally) to rich states whose power over feudal, and town, and independent peasant networks was enhanced (as it was also over religion). An area of social life - undoubtedly a part of European feudalism, but not at its core and so only weakly institutionalized - unexpectedly and interstitially developed a highly concentrated and coercive military organization that first threatened, but then induced a restructuring of, the core. The emergence of an autonomous military organization was in this case short-lived. Both its origins and its destiny were promiscuous - not accidentally so, but in its very nature. Military power enabled a reorganizing spurt, a regrouping both of the myriad networks of society and of its dominant power configurations.