10.6: Inquiring into the Notion of Power- Analyses of Justice, Community, and Social Movements--Classroom Activity

 

Power is of two kinds. One is obtained by the fear of punishment and the other by acts of love. Power based on love is a thousand time more effective and permanent than the one derived from fear of punishment.

Mahatma Gandhi, An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth

 

Those who profess to favor freedom yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground; they want rain without thunder or lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters…Power concedes nothing without demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blow, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.

Frederick Douglass, “West Indian Emancipation Speech (1857)”

 

In times of national difficulty, when the existing order of things appears unequal to its challenges, Americans have often sought new visions of social life. But when new visions have appeared, they typically have done so not through political parties, as is many European societies, but in the form of social movements. The social movement has a long history in the United States, reaching back to the agitation for independence itself. As an expression of political involvement and citizenship, it operates in the undefined middle ground between private power of the market on the one hand and the public power of government on the other. American social movements have been of various types, from Abolition to Prohibition, from organized labor to Civil Rights. They have developed in the relatively unstructured public spaces in which opinion is formed but have often drawn leadership and support from churches and other established groups. Energetic social movements have frequently led to the creation of new public institutions, sometimes powerfully changing the course of national life.

Bellah, Madsen, Sullivan, Swidler, and Tipton, Habits of the Heart

 

The ideal of community privileges unity over difference, immediacy over mediation, sympathy over recognition of the limits of one’s understanding of others from their point of view. Community is an understandable dream, expressing a desire for selves that are transparent to one another, relationships of mutual identification, social closeness, and comfort. The dream is understandable, but politically problematic, I argue, because those motivated by it will tend to suppress differences among themselves or implicitly to exclude from their political groups persons with whom they do not identify. The vision of small, face-to-face, decentralized units that this ideal promotes, moreover, is an unrealistic vision for transformative politics in a mass urban society.

Iris Marion Young, “The Ideal of Community and the Politics of Difference”

 

As with any society, the counter-society is based on the expulsion of an excluded element, a scapegoat charged with the evil of which the community duly constituted can then purge itself; a purge which will finally exonerate that community of any future criticism.

Julia Kristeva, “Women’s Time”

 

Power is not a thing, it’s a relation. It seems to me that the idea of justice in itself is an idea which in effect has been invented and put to work in different types of societies as an instrument of a certain political and economic power or as a weapon against that power.

Michel Foucault, “Human Nature”