#coordinationaspower — Public Fediverse posts

Hierarchies of domination are often used interchangeably. When it becomes untenable for those with Power Over others to dominate a marginalized community in one way, that community will face a new form of domination, while those with Power Over them will signal and celebrate the freedom and release of the oppressed from the untenable hierarchy, and depict the new hierarchy as a form of freedom.

#CoordinationAsPower

Class, when viewed through the lens of power, instead of as a relation to production, is a kyriarchal power relation.

The person working at Goldman Sachs as a mid level employee earning a 7 figure salary annually, has more power than the small business owner clearing 10K profit annually.

When someone wishes to mobilize people to do their bidding, under capitalism, this means treating people's labour like a commodity for sale. The 10k small capitalist can get a few people to do some things, while the Goldman Sachs employee can get a much larger group of people to do things.

This is Power Over people.

If we were to treat class as a relation to means of production. The Goldman sach employee would be working class, while the Small Business owner would qualify as petite bourgeoisie. Clearly, relation to Means of Production is not a good lens for viewing class.

And I say it is Kyriarchal, because that Goldman Sachs worker might be a Black Trans Woman facing other forms of oppression, while one of their coworkers is a White male earning the same salary. Both of them might have the same capacity for exerting their will, but they do not have an equal confidence in the obedience of those they seek to mobilize to enact their will.

Class should be viewed through this complex lens of Power relations that include matrices of intersectional domination.

#CoordinationAsPower

Statecraft is the opaque organization of the different elements of a complex body or activity such that elements that would allow for self-governance are disabled, while elements that enforce domination and control, are enabled.

In this perspective, Capital is an enabled element of Statecraft, just like enforced bureaucracy, and legally codified social divisions are.

Rebellion is enabling the disabled elements within a state and thus empowering people to self-govern and resist the domination of the state. The state doesn't want you going on strike, and so makes strike actions and protests illegal, and the only way to fight this, is to coordinate strike actions and protests in spite of the state's attempts to disable these elements of self-governing.

Dismantling the state must begin by turning opacity to full transparency, thus revealing the disabled part of the system.

In the same vein, anarchism is the transparent and participatory organization of the different elements of a complex body or activity so as to enable them to work together effectively as self-governing.

#Anarchism #CoordinationAsPower

Heterogeneity of ability, within specified bounds, is desirable. We want people to be capable of different things, and to varying degrees, because it facilitates a broader interconnectivity required for co-operation, and undermines the potential for hierarchies of domination.

The myth that the division of labour is specifically necessary for society to function, is exactly that... a myth. While it is partially beneficial to have groups divided up when into different specializations in the completion of a task, that division is not always concrete, and most subtasks do not require a high degree of specialization.

It is also relatively obvious to anyone who has worked with others on a task, that it is a good thing to have multiple people be able to work on a specific subtask, because redundancies are how we prevent task failure.

it's also extremely unlikely that those around you are absolutely incapable of doing more than one specialized task. Almost everyone has multiple skill sets that can contribute to different tasks in different ways.

#CoordinationAsPower

The effects of social movements are not limited to the actions of those performing direct action on behalf of the social movement, and the agents against whom those direct actions are taken. Unpredictable social effects will result, regardless of the intent of the direct action.

People observing will take actions, influenced by the actions of the social movement, that have knock-on effects. Power dynamics will shift, resource flows will adjust, and social sentiments will have explicit and implicit impacts

The more aware we are of these unintended effects, the better our planning to deal with them can be.

#CoordinationAsPower

Models and frameworks for assessing reality must reduce complexity in order to be useful. So there is a fine balance that must be struck between simplification and accuracy in order for the model or framework to not leave out so much detail that it becomes useless.

The question to ask yourself is: "what is being left out of the model?"

As an example: If we are modeling the social power of a group of individuals, and we are looking at their economic standing, educational backgrounds, and social interconnectedness, but we are leaving out their cultural background and historic access to resources, then our model is going to provide skewed results that give us a terrible depiction of some individuals within the group. This kind of modeling has often resulted in things like racism.

So being aware of what is excluded is often even more important than what is included.

#CoordinationAsPower

Hypothesis:
Proximity to Law is the biggest predictor of Domination.

Through this lens, it is not the practitioners of Law that have Power Over society, but those who shape it, and those who influence the people that shape it.

Counterintuitively, the most power is not held by those with direct access to the creation and re-shaping of law, but rather by those with influence over the law-makers.

We can theoretically measure this by assigning a kind of heat index to legislation and regulation and policy. The hotter a specific legal structure is, the more important indirect contact is for attaining power through that legal structure. Those having direct access easily get burned (sacrificed like a scapegoat) in order to spare the influential entity from the heat. For the colder legal structures, influencers are far more likely to attempt more direct access in shaping the legal structures.

This is an avenue of inquiry that I don't know how to pursue yet, but I am very interested in seeing how to investigate the hypothesis and comparing it to real-world data to see if it has any merit.

Any suggestions on where to begin would be greatly appreciated.

#CoordinationAsPower

Protecting someone's ability to defend themselves is empowerment.

Negating their ability to defend themselves, is disempowerment.

When we coordinate our power with others who are empowered the same way we are, that is building community.

When power is coordinated to deprive people of their power, and to give it to others, such that the others then get wield people's power over them, that's hierarchy.

We see this manifest as patriarchy, as racism, as homophobia, as transphobia, as xenophobia, as statism, as ultra nationalism, and as capitalism.

And when we see people that have been disempowered and marginalized when we have not, a failure to provide them with power through a horizontal community, is no different than maintaining their disempowerment. If they have no power, we must defend them, as a community.

Coordinate power horizontally, build community, and prevent the disempowerment of the community by hierarchies of domination.

#CoordinationAsPower

We often think of Power as a terrible force used to subjugate society, and with good reason. Compared to the Power of Dominant Capital, our individual power, or the power we have as groups, seems incredibly small and inconsequential. But when we combine and coordinate our power, working together, we are capable of challenging even the power of the global ruling elite.

"Over the past century, capitalists have managed to impose the belief that their regime is natural and therefore unalterable. They have constructed a power architecture that is more sophisticated, encompassing and supple than anything the world has ever seen. And they have successfully concealed this state of capital by erecting an anti-scientific front that fractures the consciousness and dresses up the power institutions of capitalism as if they were mere technical aspects of a narrow ‘economic narrative’.

This edifice of power and deceit hinges on the normal rate of return and the ability of dominant capital to beat it. As long as ‘business-as-usual’ sabotage and dissonance keep capitalists convinced that profit is normal and the growth of capitalization natural, and as long as dominant capitalists are able to exceed the normal and increase their power, the state of capital holds steady and its patterns remain ‘deterministic’.

But this ‘determinism’ is not an external law of nature or a historical law of motion. Instead, it is merely the ‘determinism’ of the capitalist rulers. The patterns of this ‘determinism’ reflect the consensus of those who dominate society. They show the conviction of the rulers that they are in command — and that those whom they command cannot resist. This conviction, though, is never certain. Confronted with sufficient opposition, whether explicit or implicit, it can crumble. And when it does crumble, the result is to shatter the ‘determinism’ of the rulers, the patterns of their differential accumulation and, possibly, the entire state of capital that defines their rule."

https://bnarchives.yorku.ca/259/

#CapitalAsPower #CoordinationAsPower

There is no 1 single correct way to develop and practice anarchism and achieve anarchy... but there are a number of ways to get it wrong.

if all you do is fight against the status quo, but you never build community... you're gonna get it wrong

if all you do is build community, but you never fight the status quo... you're gonna get it wrong

if you reduce your analysis and your praxis to focusing just on the working class... you're gonna get it wrong

if you exclude the working class... you're gonna get it wrong

if you reject the work being done inside the system to sabotage it and dismantle it... you're gonna get it wrong

if you think the whole system can be dismantled from the inside, and that's all that is needed... you're gonna get it wrong

if you listen only to the voices of the classical anarchists... you're gonna get it wrong

if you don't learn from mistakes made in the past... you're gonna get it wrong

if you dont prioritize listening to the voices of the oppressed, the marginalized, and those on the fringes... you're gonna get it wrong

if you hold the voices of the oppressed, the marginalized, and those on the fringes, as sacrosanct and infallible... you're gonna get it wrong

there are so many avenues that lead to the wrong end.

but that doesn't render all approaches invalid.

it means that you need to be critical of your starting point, and vigilant throughout the journey. making sure that if your starting point is solid, you stick to those values

but above all, it means that all valid approaches must be taken.

they must be taken strategically.

and so there needs to be coordination between approaches

#anarchism #DiversityOfTactics #CoordinationAsPower

There is no mode of power, or form of power, or concept of power, that can exist in isolation. It might be vested in, and wielded by a single entity, but it requires coordinated effort to create it, accumulate it, maintain it and exercise it.

Every cog, and spring, and sprocket, and lever in the Co-ordinated Power Machine, must by definition, gain more benefit from their coordinated support, than the average benefit of those over whom the power is exerted.

This means that any individual entity can benefit differentially, compared to the average benefit of society, or even a sub-sect of society, by participating in the creation, accumulation, maintenance, or exercising of Power.

It doesn't matter that they dont benefit as much as the individual entity or small group of entities at the top of their coordinated power machine. All that matters is that they benefit more than the average.

In this way we can see how patriarchal systems, which ultimately benefits a small group of white men far above the average, allows even the lowest ranking man willing to participate in the system, to benefit more than the average.

We can see how participating in fascist movements benefits even the lowest ranking people within that movement, more than the average.

It becomes obvious how upholding authoritarianism benefits the upholder, even when they are at the bottom of the internal hierarchy, because they still get to hold more benefit from authority than those who refuse to participate in Authoritarian Power.

A high-ranking politician might be the ultimate recipient of power, but it's not an inherent power accumulated by that individual alone. It is the result of coordinated support.
So this begs the question of the origin of power. And the obvious answer is in coordination.

Power is created by the act of coordinating efforts.
This is not to suggest that coordination of efforts is necessarily a bad thing. On the contrary, only through the creation, accumulation, maintenance, and exercise of power, can harmful power be overcome.

It takes coordination to dismantle hierarchies of control

It takes coordination to prevent environmental destruction

It takes coordination to eliminate commons enclosures

It takes coordination to restore healthy ecologies

It takes coordination to achieve social justice

And to be clear, coordination is not always consensual. In fact, it is often conflictual. And even when it appears consensual, the explicit consent may be masking implicit or indirect conflict, coercion, and (dis)incentives.

So what we need, is a definition of Coordination as Power. A testable framework that allows the measurement of the magnitude of coordination, the network structures of influence, and the differential benefits given to support coordinators.

And this is my journey. To map out how power is, and can be, coordinated. To understand the formats such coordination can take. To unpack the mechanisms by which this coordination takes place. It is a slow journey, because my life is full of distractions, but I hope to deliver this framework in full and to see it used to eliminate Power Over others, while strengthening everyone's Power To govern their own lives, to combine their Power With that of the community, and to empower the disempower with Power Through a supportive and surrounding community.

#CoordinationAsPower #PowerOver #PowerTo #PowerWith #PowerThrough

@foment @robcayman this is funny. It’s also a pretty good example to talk about power dynamics, in my experience.

We parents start with the Power To - the power to be parents at all, and the power granted by the Power Over us (government, community): the conditional permission to make day to day parenting decisions.

By virtue of being big people physically capable of moving small people, we have Power Over the children. But we soon learn that our power does not extend to making them sleep. Even if we weren’t interested in raising independent autonomous humans, no amount of power could make a child sleep that doesn’t want to sleep.

I think many of us parents just grind through this during infancy, and try to muster power when the kids learn language - “get in bed now or no tablet tomorrow!!!” But some of us are fortunate to have advice or natural disposition to be more collaborative. For us, the NICU provided some Power With, and live-in grandparents did also.

Different kids have different needs regarding sleep timing, and different parents have varying resources. Many of us need to rest for work. It was easier for us when we could be flexible. The healthiest approach would be to allow kids freedom to learn to manage their sleep habits, but we always have to work within our current constraints. Also, physical sleep arrangements mage a huge difference. Our family lives in a place where it is conventional fir children to sleep in their own rooms at an early age. That works great for some kids and terrible for others. It has helped to learn that more families Fo co-sleeping, for at least some nights, anyway.

It’s a big boost when the kids can start engaging in the Power With. They learn they have some power (tantrums are very effective, at times), but it is an additional step to learn that the satisfaction of exercising that power in conjunction with parents. But parents have to engage that process, I think, because parents face the power advantage at the start. When we started doing this around bedtime, we made huge strides in a short amount of time.

If parenting and housing more communal than what I have experienced, then maybe there could be Power Through for bedtimes - mostly as a way to free up or move resources and attention so that kids could have flexibility to learn their best sleep habits and parents could get their rest. In my modern US experience, however, the Power Through stuff can’t really kick in until school age.

#PowerTo #PowerOver #PowerWith #PowerThrough #CoordinationAsPower

#PowerTo #PowerOver #PowerWith #PowerThrough #CoordinationAsPower

The majority of my analysis and theorizing over the last 2 years, has been focused very strongly on the concept of Power.

So I feel like it might be a good idea to contextualize what I mean when I talk about Power, ahead of posting on this platform in the foreseeable future. I want to note that my theory is my own, and while I draw from existing viewpoints, there are aspects of my hypothesis on Power that I have not encountered anywhere else. Also, I am open to having my mind changed by convincing arguments, and better yet, evidence.

To begin with, I view power as a phenomenon created by the process of coordination. Power as used here, is the ability to enact will. Coordination, as used here, is the management of the dependencies between activities and the entities enacting activities.

Thus, power is the result of the management of dependencies between entities, and management of the entities themselves., according to a specified will.

How coordination is enacted, will drastically influence what kind of Power results. Note that I do not take the deterministic stance, because all components of a complex system cannot be known, and as such we cannot guarantee that a specific type of coordination MUST result in a specific type of Power.

But, we can get close to certainty.

First, we have Power To. This is often referred to as Ability or Capacity. When we find the coordination of physical capability, and cultural setting, and historical influences, and intellectual capacities, and material conditions and kin relations, and social influences (to name but a few entities/components/activities), we arrive at the individual or small group's Power To enact their will. Power To is the basis for the other manifestations of Power, because it is the coordination of the individual or small group within larger contexts that provides the functionality required to enact will at larger scales.

Next we have Power Over, more commonly referred to as Domination, or Authority. Power Over is achieved by one individual or group, subsuming, or extracting, or suppressing the Power To of another individual or group. This type of Power can occur at the interpersonal level, such as in relationships, or within families, or social groups, or it can happen at larger scales, such as within organizations, or institutions, or political parties, or social movements. But it's defining characteristic is that it always has a deliberate power imbalance that is exploited and self-perpetuating. Power Over is, by its very nature, hierarchical. Meaning that in order to exist, and to continue existing, it must coordinate hierarchically.

Then we have Power With, which is commonly referred to as community, or cooperation, or collaboration. Unlike Power Over, Power With is the combination of the Power To of 2 or more individuals seeking to enact the same or similar wills. Power With can occur at the interpersonal level, and it can occur at larger scales, but it's defining characteristic is that it is coordinated horizontally, eschewing hierarchies wherever possible (there are points I will clarify at a later stage about horizontal coordination within hierarchical hegemonies, that require communities to enact pseudo-hierarchical coordination at times)

Finally is Power Through. This is when it is not possible for an individual or small group to enact their Power To, and the surrounding community must eliminate the obstacles preventing such enacting, and set up the structures that will empower those individuals or groups to claim their power and enable them to enact their power.

Now. These are the 4 types of power I have identified thus far, and there may be more, but for the moment, these suffice as a framework to explain almost all aspects of the modern world in which we find ourselves. And if you have read this far, I hope that this clarifies what I'm talking about when I reference these terms in future posts.