What is power? Max Weber defined it as the ability to get people to do what they don’t want to do while influence is to be defined as the ability w to convince people to do what it is you want them to do. Employers have power over employees because they can fire them and so those who have unequal power will do what the boss wants because the employee wants his or her paycheck. A priest has power because a member of the laity believes there are serious consequences if the churchman decides the member to be engaged in sinfulness. On the other hand, a charismatic churchman can lead a follower to prefer to do what the churchman thinks is the right thing. That is influence rather than power. So far so good. The difficult question about power is whether all the different kinds of power are versions of the same thing or process, to be known properly as power itself, or whether each form of power is independent of one another and arises out of the particular process under observation. In that case, and here I follow Weber in his view of power, there is no need to even any longer use the term “power” except as a metaphor for some of the consequences of deploying some of the traits of the process under examination. An employer has power because he or she can fire someone when firing people is just an aspect of being in an employment arrangement in the first place just as social power is just a fanciful way of saying that men will disparage ugly women and so in this way men have power over women. Moreover, whether to think or not that there is an essential quality called power has consequences for understanding how society operates and also taking sides on particular controversies.
Weber notices a number of social structures that provide what we would now identify as inequalities. There is social class, which means the relative likelihood of achieving opportunities, whether of food, housing, clothing, property and other goods, and so can be considered economic power. Social class therefore means access to money. But it is not by definition that greater access to money means the appropriation of money from other people, as if there were a zero sum game by which money for one is taken from another, as in a Marxist view that the corporate elite get their money from exploiting those who work in the factory floor or as minor level analysts or as tellers at a bank. Wealth is created by a good many things, such as creating entertainment, or stocking shelves, or churning wealth itself, which is what financial people often do, claiming that it is a useful function rather than simply an opportunity created by the intricacies of the financial system so that people can take off the top for buying and selling money and stocks. Power is then no more than an artifact of economic processes and is one or more of the consequences of engaging in the economy. You make more money because there is an economic incentive which leads you to engage in commerce or manufacturing. The economic system is not designed to produce differential wealth, which is the claim by those who are reckoned as the titans of finance and industry; it just does so and economic power simply means any advantage in the economic system.
The same analysis holds true for another basic Weberean category: status. That means the prestige a person holds as a member of a group. Ethnic groups in the United States have differential prestige in that, in the Twentieth Century, one could say that WASPS had the most prestige and that white ethnics like Jews and Italians had lesser prestige, while Black and Brown people had even lower prestige, though it would have been fair to say that Blacks were so low on the totem pole that it was possible for movies in the Thirties and Forties to portray poor Mexicans women as consorting with white men because the association of white men with Black women was regarded as so reprehensible. Tables have turned in that Black people, now having arrived at status, are able to flaunt their previous inferiority and are celebrated for their fame and successes. But the key thing is that status rankings are not the result of power but are power in that the appurtenances that go on with an ethnic group can lead to advantages in and of themselves rather than because of something else, called power, which leads them to happen. Law may lead people to be able to vote or be disadvantaged in voting and law can lead people to be thought of as less accomplished or enabled than people in another ethnic group, but at any given point there is some sequence of relative advantage by being in one or another group, people climbing up through business or entertainment so as to claim their prestige now that it is acquired. Power is the name of other forces to realign relative positions but the relative positions are things in themselves, glamorous or castigated or just dull and being offered jobs and contacts with money because of those status positions.
There are other social structures not mentioned by Weber that have consequences that are regarded as power even though they are part and parcel of the operation of the social structure itself rather than through the application of this independent entity known as “power”. One of these is culture, which Weber would not even regard as power at all, but as persuasion or influence, as in the case of religion, which leads Protestants and all other religious people to exhort and live according to the scruples admired in those religions and so have the effect to make Protestants economically productive and Catholics more concerned with what we would call the humanities. Culture, in its own dynamics, finds that some performances or books are ones that are more appealing to a population than others and that authors and performers will use what they can find as ways to engage their audiences and so “West Side Story” is taken from or stolen from Shakespeare, or that a new thriller uses motifs from thrillers of the past. Noone uses or, at least, very few people, do something completely original. Borrowing is the nature of culture. But sometimes people will use the lens of power to analyze cultural influence and so will say that white people have appropriated the cultural ideas and forms of Black and other colonial literatures and art just as colonialists appropriate mineral wealth or take the Elgin Marbles to a London museum. Colonized people should restore their own monuments and, moreover, have the power, now that they can do so, to delegitimize the symbols and monuments that had been established under a time of Black oppression, and so eliminate statues of Confederate Generals or the flag of the Confederate states. Culture is just another expression of power and if you can get your way get rid of questionable figures like Jefferson or Christopher Columbus.
But to do so is a cockeyed way of understanding culture. It treats culture as a commodity to be bought or sold or, in this case, to be established or eradicated, depending on who has the power to do so, without regarding the intrinsic aspects of culture, which is precisely to put a contemporary visitor into a different time and place and be exposed to different kinds of characters and milieus. We want to preserve Reifenstahl’s “The Triumph of the Will” precisely so we can see why Naziism was appealing, what with its handsome and able men, and with a pagendry so elaborate that it can appeal to anyone’s patriotism and to the inspiration of a leader. Maybe also say “beware” but mostly see oneself for a moment in a different life experience not so different from one’s own. Moreover, to appropriate or reappropriate culture is to narrow it. Yes, by our likes, Jefferson was a flawed man because he owned slaves, but also take into account that he offered an idea of equality unparalleled in human history and do you want to be rid of that as well? And moreover again, if you end expropriation of other cultures, then is it necessary for African Americans to abandon English and replace it with a language based on a native West African one? The early settlers of Jewish Palestine decided to do that and modernized Hebrew to become the language that the disparate Jews from all over Europe could have as a common tongue. I doubt many would follow that example, particularly nowadays when Hebrew is a language that doesn’t travel far when Israelis leave Ben Gurion Airport. Languages cling on for reasons of power, English the language of the First and Second British Empires, but people also cling to English because the language is so good that it can be shaped by Chaucer and Shakespeare and T. S. Eliot and James Joyce. The power of literature is within itself, to transform people by allowing them to have vicarious experiences, rather than simply ways to exemplify and enforce political beliefs. All of this is so obvious that cultural appropriationists couldn’t possibly mean it, except that they say so, as do the white culture warriors who want to eliminate Toni Morrison because she uses cuss words and displays slavery as it was. Culture, in short, can create politics and be the concern of politics, but it is something that has its own processes independent of power.
The most important and well discussed instance of institutions that are analyzed as subject to forces other than themselves and so power undercutting the autonomy of those institutions is politics, as a process, or government, as an institution. There is a longstanding idea that verges sometimes on mere cynicism that the apparent institution of government is “really” controlled by other institutions and forces that are the real powers of government. These include the idea of C. Wright Mills that the military-industrial complex was the real power in government. People in leadership in both the Republican and Democratic parties went along with the combination between high level officials in government and in the munitions sector to allow or inspire wars to happen just so the captains of these industrial giants made gigantic profits. Wars were just a subterfuge whereby rich people could make even more money, never mind that wars killed millions of people or might lead to a world wide atomic apocalypse. The powerful were selfish and the people, as a whole, were not aware of who pulled the strings. A modern day version of the Mills model is that the rich fight one another over oil or other exploited resources or that China and the United States compete over patent rights so that the rich people in both get even richer even at the risk of starting a war between them. The apparent government is controlled by the power of those who provide campaign contributions to the candidates despite the fact that opposing candidates such as Trump and Biden are able to raise more than enough money, as even Bernie Sanders could, so as to contest their elections.
The truth of the matter is that the apparent and legitimate processes of government are the ones that have power in their own right rather than as a facade over the really powerful people. A Senator has power because of his or her warrant to pass legislation and is endowed with that power because the Constitution gives each state two senators and because the rules of the Senate allow for a filibuster that allows sixty Senators are needed to pass legislation. Joe Manchin is powerful because he has been elected as a Senator from West Virginia and because he is needed to make up the fifty vote members of the Democratic Caucus so as to get through a reconciliation bill. Whether he sides with the coal industry is irrelevant to what are his powers as a Senator. So the apparent power is the real power even though there are people who are cynical and say his powers are otherwise, beholden as he might be to industrial giants or to popular opinion in West Virginia. He might be misconceived or mischievous but he is what he is, one Senator exerting his prerogatives. That makes people like me frustrated but in no way reduce what is happening to cynicism about his motives or about the powers that be that undergird the institution. It may be that there are other nations whose governments are indeed a cover of other powers. That seems to be the case in Russia, where people are killed or nearly get that done if they oppose Putin and where elections in Russia are probably rigged, but there is no evidence of that happening in the United States, side from the claim of Trump otherwise, and even though there are efforts in Florida, Texas and elsewhere to make it more difficult to vote so that elections are a facade, as was the case during Jim Crow when Black people were not allowed to participate, by hook or by crook, from being part of the electorate. Not yet again and so let us think about elections and laws passed by legitimate officials until otherwise.