Social and political power

Social and political power is the ability to influence the behaviour of people.

Sources of power

• Delegated authority (e.g. authority) (seen as legitimate power)
• Social class 
• Resources (e.g money, property, food)
• Personal or group charisma (Personality)
• Ascribed power (acting on perceived or assumed abilities)
• Expertise (ability, skills) 
• Persuasion (direct, indirect, or subliminal)
• Knowledge (granted or withheld, shared or kept secret)
• Celebrity
• Force (violence, military might, coercion)
• Moral persuasion (including religion)
• Operation of group dynamics (such as public relations)
• Social influence of tradition (compare ascribed power)
• In relationships: domination/submissiveness

Tactics to gain and maintain power

In everyday situations people use a variety of power tactics.

Tactics include: Bullying, collaboration, complaining, criticizing, demanding, disengaging, evading, humuor, inspiring, manipulating, negotiating, socializing, and supplicating.

Erica Grier: Agressive (force) v. Manipulative (persuasion)

Tactics can be classified along three different dimensions: 

— Softness: Soft or hard (direct or indirect)

Soft tactics take advantage of the relationship between person and the target. They are more indirect and interpersonal (e.g. collaboration, socializing, diplomacy).

Hard tactics are harsh, forceful, direct, aggressive.

Hard tactics are not more powerful than soft tactics. In many cases, fear of social exclusion can be a much stronger motivator than some kind of physical punishment.

— Rationality: Rational or nonrational

Rational tactics use of reasoning, logic, and sound judgement

Nonrational tactics use on emotion and misinformation.

— Laterality: Unilateral or bilateral

Bilateral tactics involve both the powerful and weaker parties working together (e.g collaboration and negotiation)

Unilateral tactics are tactics without participation of the other parties.
(e.g. disengagement and fait accompli.)

Five bases of power

French and Raven argue that there are five significant categories

— Legitimate power (positional power)
Power due to position and duties within an organization (formal authority) 

— Referent power
The power or ability of individuals to attract others and build loyalty. A person may be admired because of specific personal trait. The admirer  desires to identify with these personal qualities, and gains satisfaction from being an accepted follower. (e.g. nationalism, patriotism, religion) 

This is the second least obvious power, after legitimate power, but the most effective.

Advertisers have long used the referent power of sports figures for products endorsements, for example.

When someone that is likable, yet lacks integrity and honesty, rises to power, they can abuse their power for personal gain.

— Expert power
Power deriving from the skills or expertise. 

This type of power is usually limited to the particular area in which the expert is trained and qualified. The views of experts are highly valued and, as such, experts are trusted and respected.

— Reward power
Power derived from the ability to give rewards (e.g. benefits, time off, desired gifts, promotions or increases in pay or responsibility).

If others expect that you’ll reward them for doing what you want, there’s a high probability that they’ll do it.

This type of power is ineffective if abused. Abusers can become pushy or quick to reprimand poor performance.

When available rewards run out, power is lost or weakens. Rewards often need to get bigger each time if they’re to have the same motivational impact. Overuse also lessens their effectiveness. 

— Coercive power: 
Application of negative influences (which are carried out or threatened) 

Coercive power tends to be the most obvious but least effective form of power as it builds resentment and resistance from the people who experience it.

Other theories 

— Toffler: Three main kinds of power are:

• Violence (can only be used negatively, to punish)
• Wealth (can be used both negatively, e.g. by withholding money, and positively, e.g. by advancing/spending money)
• Knowledge (can be used in negative and positive ways, as well as a transformative way, e.g. sharing knowledge on agriculture to ensure that everyone is capable of supplying himself and his family of food)

Toffler argues that the very nature of power is currently shifting. Throughout history, power has often shifted from one group to another; however, at this time, the dominant form of power is changing. During the Industrial Revolution, power shifted from a nobility acting primarily through violence to industrialists and financiers acting through wealth. …. Today, a The Third Wave (Toffler) of shifting power is taking place with wealth being overtaken by knowledge.

— Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld: power is the ability to unilaterally alter rights.

— Origins of power

Tarnow: A leader’s power comes from how the group responds to to the leader’s commands. If the group conforms, the leaders power is enhanced. If the group doesn’t conform, the leader’s power over an individual is nil.

Gene Sharp: Power does not originate from those in power but from subjects of the state. A political regime maintains power because people accept and obey its dictates, laws and policies.

Psychological aspects

Powerful people are also more likely to take action.

Researchers have found that powerful people are three times as likely to first offer help to a “stranger in distress” (Bystander effect)

(Source: Wikipedia)

"Graziani’s brilliant insight was that, for a monetary economy to be clearly distinguished from a barter economy, the monetary economy could not use a commodity as money. Therefore money had to be a non-commodity—something that was intrinsically worthless, and which could not be simply produced as commodities themselves can: “a commodity money is by definition a kind of money that any producer can produce themselves. ….” This lead to a simple but profound principle: “A true monetary economy must therefore be using a token money, which is nowadays a paper currency"

Steve Keen / Debunking Economics Ed.2 / p.360

"[W]hat’s so pernicious about the morality of debt [is] the way that financial imperatives constantly try to reduce us all, despite ourselves, to the equivalent of pillagers, eyeing the world simply for what can be turned into money—and then tell us that it’s only those who are willing to see the world as pillagers who deserve access to the resources required to pursue anything in life other than money. It introduces moral perversions on almost every level."

Debt: The First 5000 Years | David Graeber | p. 389

"[C]ommunism may be the foundation of all human relations—that communism that, in our own daily life, manifests itself above all in what we call “love”—but there’s always some sort of system of exchange, and usually, a system of hierarchy built on top of it. These systems of exchange can take an endless variety of forms, many perfectly innocuous. Still, what we are speaking of here [debt-based capitalism] is a very particular type [of] exchange, founded on precise calculation. … [T]he difference between owing someone a favour and owing someone a debt is that the amount of a debt can be precisely calculated. Calculation demands equivalence. And such equivalence …. only seems to occur when people have been forcibly severed from their contexts, so much so that they can be treated as identical to something else, as in: “seven martin skins and twelve large silver rings for the return of your captured brother,” “one of your three daughters as surety for this loan of one hundred and fifty bushels of grain."

Debt: The First 5000 Years | David Graeber | p. 385-386

Debt and endless greed

[Herman Cortes had before undertaking his conquest of Mexico] been living beyond his means, got himself in trouble, and decided, like a reckless gambler, to double down and go for broke. Unsurprising, then, that when the governor at the last minute decided to cancel the expedition, Cortes ignored him and sailed for the mainland with six hundred men, offering each an equal share in the expedition’s profits. On land he burned his boats, effectively staking everything on victory. ….

We are not dealing with a psycholoy of cold, calculating greed, but of a much more complicated mix of shame and righteous indignation, and of the frantic urgency of debts that would only compound and accumulate (these were, almost certainly, interest bearing loans) ….

If all this seems suspiciously reminiscent of the fourth Crusade, with its indebted knights stripping whole foreign cities of their wealth and still somehow winding up only one step ahead of their creditors, there is a reason. The financial capital that backed these expeditions came from more or less the same place (if in this case Genoa, not Venice). What’s more, that relationship, between the daring adventurer on the one hand, the gambler willing to take any sort of risk, and on the other, the careful financier, whose entire operations are organized around producing steady, mathematical, inexorable growth of income, lies at the very heart of what we now call “capitalism.” …..

All of this helps explain why the Church had been so uncompromising in its attitude toward usury. …. Money always has the potential to become a moral imperative unto itself. Allow it to expand and it can quickly become a morality so imperative that all others seem frivolous in comparison. For the debtor, the world is reduced to a collection of potential dangers, potential tools, and potential merchandise. Even human relations become a matter of cost-benefit calculation. Clearly, this is the way the conquistadors view the worlds [as objects] that they set out to conquer. ….

It is the peculiar feature of modern capitalism to create social arrangements that essentially force us to think this way [as cold calculating profit seekers]. The structure of the corporation is a telling case in point …. It’s structure is designed to eliminate all more imperatives but profit. The executives who make decisions can argue—and regularly do—that, if it were their own money, of course, they would not fire lifelong employees a week before retirement, or dump carcinogenic waste next to schools. Yet they are morally bound to ignore such considerations, because they are mere employees whose only responsibility is to provide the maximum return on investment for the companies stockholders. 

~ Debt: The First 5000 Years | David Graeber | p. 316-320

"[In language] words are sounds we use to refer to objects, or ideas, but he relation is arbitrary: there’s no particular reason, for example, that English-speakers should choose “dog” to refer to an animal and “god” to refer to a deity, rather than the other way around. The only reason is social convention: an agreement between all speakers of a language that this sound shall refer to that thing. In this sense, all words were arbitrary tokens of agreement. So, of course, is money—for Aristotle, not only worthless bronze coins that we agree to treat as if they were worth a certain amount, but all money, even gold, is just a symbolon, a social convention."

Debt: The First 5000 Years | David Graeber | p. 299

Coinage, religion and philosophy

The following is a summary of  ”Chapter 9: The Axial Age”  of ‘Debt: The First 5000 Years’ by David Graeber, pages 223-250

The core period of Jasper’s Axial age [800 BC to 200BC] — the lifetimes of Pythagoras, Confucius, and the Buddha—corresponds almost exactly to the period in which coinage was invented. What’s more, the three parts of the world where coins where invented were also the very parts of the world where those sages lived; in fact, they became the epicentres of Axial Age religious and philosophical creativity: the kingdoms and city-states around the Yellow river in China, the Ganges valley in northern India, and shores of the Aagean Sea.

….

Within human economies [as opposed to monetary ones], motives are assumed to be complex. When a lord gives a gift to a retainer, there is no reason to doubt that it is inspired by a genuine desire to benefit that retainer, even if it is also a strategic move designed to ensure loyalty, and an act of magnificence meant to remind everyone else that he is great and that the retainer in small. There is no sense of contradiction here. Similarly, gifts between equals are usually fraught with many layers of love, envy, pride, spite, communal solidarity, or any dozen other things. Speculating on such matter is a major form of daily entertainment. What’s missing though, is any sense that the most selfish (“self-interested”) motive is necessarily the real one ….. Neither is any of this likely to have changed much in the rise of early credit markets, where the value of an IOU was as much dependent on assessments of its issuer’s character as on his disposable income, and motives of love, envy, pride etc., could never be completely set aside. 

Cash transactions between strangers were different, and all the more so when trading is set against a background of war and emerges from disposing of loot and provisioning soldiers; when one often had best not ask where the objects traded come from, and where no one is much interested in forming ongoing personal relationships anyway. Here, transactions really do become simply a figuring-out of how many X will go for how many of Y, of calculating proportions, estimating quality, and trying to get the best deal for oneself. The result, during the Axial Age, was a new way of thinking about human motivation, a radical simplification of motives that made it possible to begin speaking of concepts like “profit” and “advantage”—and imagining that this is what people are really pursuing, in every aspect of existence, as if the violence of war or the impersonality of the marketplace has simply allowed them to drop the pretence that they ever cared about anything else. It was this, in turn, that allowed human life to seem like it could be reduced to a matter of means-to-ends calculation, and hence something that could be examined using the same means that one used to study the attraction and repulsion of celestial bodies.  ….

[T]his picture of humanity [as tying to get the best deal for oneself: profit seeking] does begin to appear, with startling consistency  across Eurasia, whenever we also see coinage and philosophy appear. 

China provides an unusual transparent case in point. Already in Confucius’s time, Chinese thinkers were speaking of pursuit of profit as he driving force in human life. …. [Political theorists addressing rulers insisted, for example, that] “war and peace are considered solely from the point of view of profit”—of amassing wealth to create a more effective army, of using the army to dominate markets and control resources to amass more wealth, and so on. …..

That intellectuals are willing to produce such theories should win the ears of princes is hardly surprising. Neither is it particularly surprising that other intellectuals should have been so offended by this sort of cynicism that they began to make common cause with the popular movements that inevitably began to form against those princes. …

Mo Di, the founder of Mohism, … [using the concept of profit] attempted to demonstrate that war itself is, by definition, an unprofitable activity. …. His conclusion: if one could add up the total costs of aggression in human lives, and animal lives, and material damage, one would be forced to the conclusion that they never outweighed the benefits—even for the victor. In fact, Mo Di took this sort of logic so far that he ended up arguing that the only way to optimise the overall profit of humanity was to adopt a principle of what he called “universal love” ….

The Confucian ideal of ren, of human benevolence, was basically just a more complex inversion of profit-seeking calculation that Mo Di’s universal love; the main difference was that the Confucians added a certain aversion to calculation itself. 

 ….

[I]f one relegates a certain social space simply to the selfish acquisition of material things, it is almost inevitable that soon someone else will come to set aside another domain in which to preach that, from the perspective of ultimate values, material things are unimportant, that selfishness—or even the self—are illusory, and that to give is better than to receive. If nothing else, it is surely significant that all the Axial Age religions emphasized the importance of charity, a concept that had barely existed before. Pure greed and pure generosity are complimentary concepts; neither could really be imagined without the other; both could only rise in institutional contexts that insisted on such pure and single-minded behaviour  and both seem to have appeared together wherever impersonal, physical , cash money also appeared on the scene. 

Notes: Debt — Ch 8: Credit vs Bullion

The following is a summary of a section of ‘Debt: The First 5000 Years’ by David Graeber, pages 211-221

Coinage appears to have arisen independently in three different places, almost simultaneously: on the Great Plain of northern China, in the Ganges river valley of north east India, and in the lands surrounding the Aegean Sea, in each case, between roughly 600 and 500BC. This wasn’t due to some sudden technological innovation …. It was a social transformation. ….

[F]or some reason, in Lydia, India and China, local rulers decided that whatever long standing credit system had existed in their kingdoms were no longer adequate, and they began to issue tiny pieces of precious metals.

…..

If we look at Eurasian history over the course of the last five thousand years, what we see is a broad alternation between periods dominated by credit money and periods in which gold and silver come to dominate. ….

Why? The single most important factor would appear to be war. Bullion predominates, above all, in periods of generalized violence. There’s a simple reason for that. Gold and silver coins are distinguished from credit arrangements by one spectacular feature: they can be stolen. …. As a result, while credit systems tend to dominate in periods of relative social peace, or across networks of trust (….states, …. merchant guilds or communities of faith), in periods characterized by widespread war and plunder, they tend to be replaced by precious metal.

"the OLD Bottom Line: maximize money, power, or fame
the New Bottom Line: loving and kind, generous and caring for others, ethically and ecologically sensitive in our behavior, able to see others as embodiments of the sacred"

(Source: spiritualprogressives.org)

Notes: Debt by David Graeber — Chapter Three: Primordial Debts

[W]e simply assume that when valuable objects change hands, it will normally be because two individuals have both decided they would gain a material advantage by swapping them. One interesting corollary is that, as a result, economists have come to see the very question of the presence or absence of money as not especially important, since money is just a commodity, chosen to facilitate exchange ….. “Even in the most advanced industrial economies. ” he [Paul Samuelson] insisted, “if we strip exchange down to its barest essentials and peel of the obscuring layer of money, we find that trade between individual nations largely boils down to barter.” …… The problem is that history shows that without money, such vast barter systems do not occur.

State and Credit Theories of Money

Credit Theorists insisted that money is not a commodity but an accounting tool. ….. historically such abstract systems of accounting emerged long before the use of any particular token of exchange.

The obvious next question is: If money is just a yardstick, what does it measure? The answer is simple: debt. A coin is, effectively, an IOU. Whereas conventional wisdom holds that a banknote is, or should be, a promise to pay a certain amount of “real money” (god, silver)

How could credit money come about? …. Say, for example, that Joshua were to give his shoes to Henry, and, rather than Henry owing him a favour, Henry promises him something of equivalent value. Henry gives Joshua and IOU. Joshua could wait for henry to have something useful and then redeem it. In that case Henry would rip up the IOU and the story would be over. But say Joshua were to pass the IOU on to a third party—Sheila— whom he owes something else. He could tick it off against his debt to a fourth party, Lola—now Henry will owe that amount to her. Hence, money is born, because there’s no logical end to it. …. In principle, there’s no reason that the IOU could not continue circulating around town for years—provided people continue to have faith in Henry.

What credit theorist …. [argue] is that even if Henry gave Joshua a gold coin instead of a piece of paper, the situation would be essentially the same. ….. [A] gold coin is not actually useful in itself. One only accepts it because one assumes other people will.