How does power work in society?
Chairman Mao once said that power comes out of the barrel of a gun – and you don’t have to watch many movies to see Hollywood agreeing with him that everything boils down to violence. The reality is more complicated, though: if you visit present-day China, the gun barrels are in specific places. Uighurs and Tibetans, Hong Kongers and migrant workers, have guns pointed in their faces a lot more than most Chinese citizens – who often broadly support their own state, in much the same way that most US citizens do, or for that matter most Europeans. Even when there is a lot that we don’t like, most of us, most of the time, are not actively working for a different kind of society.
Even in dictatorships or under military occupation, holding a gun to everyone’s head is not a hugely effective or very stable way of keeping power (for one thing, you need a very large army and they have to stay loyal). But this is also true (for example) for controlling the media: almost every dictatorship and every monarchy that has ever fallen, had massive media censorship – which saved none of them in the end. Power also doesn’t come out of the barrel of a screen – and so on, for any other simple, “just-so” answer to how it is that power just keeps on going despite everything.
A better way of thinking about what makes power possible is to talk about “consent armoured by coercion”: in other words, there are indeed cases where guns are pointed at people, but usually at smaller numbers of people who are poorer, less powerful, less privileged. Behind those guns (and the clubs, the teargas, the courts and the prisons) are not just the ordinary soldiers and cops who carry out the violence, but the larger numbers of people who broadly accept the existence of the nation-state – and the violence that it uses against enemies in warfare, against people defined as criminals, against racialised minorities and other groups with few rights in practice. When European policies and border agencies keep on causing deaths by drowning in the Mediterranean, many European citizens support this and very few actively oppose it (though of course many would prefer not to think about it).
Consent to a power structure does not necessarily mean active, enthusiastic consent; it can mean resigned acceptance that this is just how things are while suffering and grumbling, or even not being able to imagine that they could be any other way. It can mean seeing how things are (rising temperatures, climate disasters, ecological crisis) as a price worth paying (hopefully in the long term) if it means that we can feed and house our families now. It could also mean loudly denying that there is a problem: there are many different ways of supporting a power structure, depending on who you are and where you are.
So a power structure (whether it is fossil-fuel capitalism in its Chinese, European or US variations, or something else – 20th century fascism, slave societies in the Americas, or whatever) involves a lot of different social groups, consenting in many different ways, as well as the ones who are being coerced and the people doing the coercing – as well as the actual powerholders. This is part of what makes most power structures fairly resilient, most of the time – they don’t usually fall over at the first sign of trouble.
Of course they do also fall over sometimes, or rather they get pushed over: and the story of how this happens is part of the story of how anti-colonial movements have defeated empires, democratic movements have defeated monarchies and dictatorships, how welfare states have been forced on robber barons. But “normal times” are precisely times in which this isn’t happening.
Still, we need a way of thinking about power which makes sense of both situations – the “decades where nothing happens” and the “weeks where decades happen” – not just because it is theoretically neat but because we might find ourselves living in power structures that seem as though they are immovable, and we might realise that it is going to take a dramatic transformation to get beyond them.
If we understand that ecological catastrophe is being actively created and accelerated by today’s form of capitalism (and the forms of patriarchy and racialisation that are part and parcel of it), or if we see that our movements and our communities are directly targetted by rising authoritarian power, we need a way of thinking that we can turn into direct practical organising for a different and better world.
Where do these ideas come from?
This problem became very real a hundred years ago, in Europe in the 1920s. There had been a huge catastrophe, the First World War, which saw huge disruption to everyday life and a breakdown in deference to established authority. This had come after a groundswell of large-scale social mobilisation in many different spaces: labour organising, the first-wave women’s movement, anti-colonial resistance, a rising left. Towards the end of the war, many of these struggles escalated.
Soldiers and sailors mutinied or simply went back home to help with the harvest. Workers took over their factories and peasants took the land. One empire after another collapsed – the Russian, the German, the Ottoman and the Austro-Hungarian. New revolutionary states came into being, and popular uprisings took place across Europe and beyond. This is the period not only of the Russian revolution but also of the Mexican revolution, of revolution and independence in Egypt and Ireland, of the Indian Ghadar uprising and multiple revolutions in Germany, and more.
In Italy, too, peasants took over the land and workers occupied factories during the “two red years” of 1919-1920. In Turin, the industrial heartland of Italy, workers in the big factories moved towards self-organising in councils, a movement whose ideas were expressed in a new radical magazine edited by the young Sardinian activist Antonio Gramsci. In Italy as elsewhere, this radical wave was soon attacked not only by the police but also by paramilitary groups of ex-soldiers paid and armed by factory owners and landlords, groups who called themselves fasci. The fascist party that developed would take power in 1922; by 1926 this had become a dictatorship, and Gramsci – by now leader of the Italian communist party – was imprisoned, dying in 1937.
In the years of defeat, as his fellow activists were killed and jailed, in exile or underground, Gramsci started to reflect on how this defeat had happened, in ways that still matter today. How was it that despite the slaughter of the War, a worldwide wave of revolutions, mass involvement in radical action, and the collapse of many old forms of power, the outcome had seen a new kind of far right come to power? As fascism tightened its grip in Italy, and grew in strength elsewhere, how could its power be understood – and defeated?
In thinking about this, Gramsci drew above all on his own experience of organising alliances that today we might call intersectional. Workers in the industrial north had bought into the story of progress and modernity that had justified “Italian unification”, which in practice was a process of colonising the largely peasant south and islands (Sicily and Sardinia). Poor Sardinians like Gramsci then emigrated to northern cities like Turin in large numbers, to work in the car factories like his brother or to study like him. Here they were seen as backwards, religious, bringing down wages, uneducated – in other words, racialised in ways that enabled employers and the state to play off northern workers against southern migrants, and the peasants who stayed at home.
Overthrowing this meant making alliances between migrant and “native” workers, as well as between industrial workers and southern peasants; challenging northern racism at the same time as pushing migrants to see themselves as workers, and solidarity with peasants’ attempts at self-organising against the landlords. This alliance politics would bear its own fruit in time, in the massive Italian resistance to fascism of 1943-45 and in the strength of the Italian left and social movements for another generation, until the 1980s.
But this experience also sharpened his eye for other alliances: for how fascism could appeal to different sections of the population in different ways, offering different kinds of rewards and prestige in return for loyalty and involvement in the party’s many organisations – and to look back at how the new Italian state had previously brought together the Savoy monarchy and northern industrialists, Catholics and nationalists, northern workers and southern bureaucrats and police.
Slowly dying in prison (he had a significant disability and conditions were brutal), he was nonetheless able at times to put down ideas in notebooks which were smuggled out and later published. These ideas don’t come out of universities or social media – they come out of mass movements and revolutions that spanned continents, organising experiences of uprising and defeat, and situations in which getting it wrong costs everything; and they have contributed subsequently to many movements. Of course this doesn’t make them automatically true or beyond criticism; but it is worth thinking about some of the ideas about activism that are popular today, and asking how much basis in reality they have.
How can we make sense of hegemony?
Gramsci’s argument is basically that power in society rests on a set of alliances in which one social group leads many others, who in turn give their support – and this alliance enables violence against those groups who actively resist or are targetted by the power structure. Coercion and consent go together as part of a whole.
The leading group can be quite wide – it might, for example, include different political parties who alternate in power; different flavours of media; the leaderships of major corporations and financial institutions; key figures in powerful international bodies; leading academics and others – but shares a broad project for society, an agreed sense of how “we” are going to move forwards. In the 1990s, for example, “centrist neoliberalism” was a shared frame of reference not only across most of Europe and North America, but also in many parts of the global south and in bodies like the IMF, the World Bank, the G7, NATO and so on.
For a leading group to stay leading, though, other social groups have to broadly accept that (as Thatcher put it) “there is no alternative”. So trade union leaderships brought organised workers on board, while elite forms of feminism and LGBTQ+ traded a seat at the table for small numbers of women and queer people in return for broad acceptance of the wider direction of society; something similar happened with “multicultural inclusion” as a way of changing the faces of those in positions of power and visibility while keeping most racialised people and migrants poor. So too, despite economic difficulties most farmers and small business people accepted the leadership of their own organisations – and indeed NGOs across the board, from environmentalism to development work, preferred to apply for funding and lobby around policy to large-scale organising outside of what was then a new world order.
All of this consent enabled coercion elsewhere: warfare and imprisonment, humiliating and intimidating power within welfare and housing provision, police violence against Black and working-class youth, Roma/Sinti and the homeless, and so on. Society kept on moving in the direction presented by its leadership as the future – right up to the point that it ran into the global resistance of the anti-capitalist movement, opposition to the war on Iraq, the economic crash of 2007-08, and the anti-austerity and pro-democracy uprisings that disrupted power across the Middle East and North Africa and on the European periphery (Greece, Spain, Portugal, Iceland, Ireland).
The hegemony that can seem so powerful at one moment, can collapse very quickly: in fact very few forms of hegemony last more than a few decades. This is true not just for neoliberal centrism but before it for the “thirty glorious years” of west European welfare states; for Soviet power in Central and Eastern Europe; for European fascisms; and pretty much any other form of capitalism. There are many reasons for this, but one basic one is that the rewards that any leading group can offer to others tend to decline over time, so that others become less inclined to keep on supporting them.
In the 1980s and the 1990s, for example, many British and American voters were attracted by the promise of being able to buy their own homes and see their children go to university. By the 2010s, their children could not afford housing, the student debt crisis was on the rise – and governments had very little to offer them by way of a future.
What happens in a crisis like the present?
In 1930, in prison in Turi (Puglia), Gramsci wrote that “the crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum we can see a huge range of morbid symptoms” – or, as a popular version has it, “now is the time of monsters”. Old forms of neoliberal centrism or even “progressive neoliberalism” (paying lip service to ecology and feminism, for example) are in a terminal crisis, as we can see in state after state and at the level of EU institutions. The old social alliances that supported it are breaking down; meanwhile those like Scholz, Biden or Starmer who stand for “more of the same” have very little to offer while many of those who were once inside this tent are now breaking loose and looking for other ways forward.
The “time of monsters” is not necessarily a time of an irreversible rise of the far right – in many places it is more a time of experiments. Thus Trump 1 came in, and lost again. He may be back with a stronger alliance and more stable popular support, or not; we do not know yet. Bolsonaro came to power in Brazil, and lost it again. Brexit in Britain did not produce the long-term Conservative majority it was supposed to. Saying this does not mean that there is not a rise in racism and far-right parties across Europe and elsewhere; it does mean that these often struggle to create new and lasting forms of power for themselves on the scale of (for example) Erdoğan, Orbán or Modi.
Their challenge is to construct stable social alliances that go beyond online and offline mobs, to combine trade wars and corporate power, to find workable economic strategies and have something material to offer their voters, to keep women, racialised people and LGBTQIA+ people on board as the dogwhistles and the violence become harder to ignore.
How can we disrupt their hegemony?
Our challenge … is to disrupt them in this. Not in a liberal way – that old world cannot be resurrected, but it was always built on lies. As anyone who has been to a COP should have seen, there was never any way to have the infinite growth that capitalism demands on a finite planet, and never any real intention to break this cycle other than by kicking the can down the road and hoping for techno-fixes. Progressive neoliberalism was always built on a foundation of kinder, gentler patriarchy and a racialised global order that might see Rishi Sunak or Barack Obama in power but would still see bombs falling on Muslims abroad and brown bodies drowned in the Mediterranean.
In particular, there are two strategic tasks. One is within each major subaltern social group, to support radical self-organisation from and for the most disadvantaged in the group and a break with the conservative leaderships that claim to speak for it: at the most basic, supporting struggle rather than co-optation and the interests of the many rather than the few. This looks different in workplace organising and in racialised communities, in feminism and LGBTQ+ activism – but in all cases it calls for active solidarity and alliance-building where we can find people to work with, and refusing the lazy equation which says that people in any given positionality automatically have a politics that follows their interests. In disrupting the far right’s attempts to build a new hegemony, our job is to find and support radical, bottom-up organising which is interested in making alliances and working intersectionally.
The other is where social groups have been defeated, are resigned, subject to ongoing coercion, or have not yet come together as political actors, to try and help them come (back) onto the board as actors in their own right. This looks different in post-industrial working-class communities and among small farmers, for undocumented migrants and for people on the receiving end of neoliberal welfare rules, and we cannot wish radical movements into existence in these situations – but we can help them when we see them emerging.
This broad politics of alliances is at the same time a way of starting to make another and better world possible (social alliances around a different future to what the far right offers us) and a way of disrupting the unholy alliance between the far right and unfettered climate destruction. It cannot be done “from on high” – it is not that climate activists, today, can credibly claim to be particularly good at winning, or to have long-term strategies for mass mobilisation.
In fact taking a leaf out of Gramsci’s book and asking “what went wrong?” or even “what did we do wrong?” can be a good first step – even having the honesty to ask people in longer-standing movements that we hope to ally with what they think, and how they see climate activism couldn’t hurt. This basic orientation – seeing other movements and activists as peers, seeing that the future lies in alliances rather than in trying to elbow “our issue” to the front at the expense of other people’s, and trying to find ways of supporting one another’s struggles – is how effective alliances are built.
Lastly
This is a very short summary of a very big problem, which takes real work to think through in our own contexts, and even then is much “easier said than done”. The argument here is a quick taster of workshops for experienced activists developed for the Ulex Project’s “Ecology of Social Movements”. Here’s a longer version, more focussed on the workshop; here’s a learning activity from the Movement Learning Catalyst; here’s a related blog by Natasha Adams.
And you can of course read Gramsci in the original and in many translations – it’s not always easy but well worth doing!
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Laurence is a Dublin-based writer, teacher and activist, and one of Europe’s best-known social movement researchers. He’s been in many different movements starting with anti-war and anti-apartheid activism in the 1980s, including helping organise the anti-capitalist “movement of movements” in Ireland, media spokesperson for a summit protest, resisting Shell, networking between movements and parties, alternative schools and kindergartens, co-running a Masters for activists, helping organise a Zapatista tour and editing several radical publications. https://laurencecox.wordpress.com
