Ep.34 What is power? Who has the power? Is wielding power ”bad.”

The Mindcrime Liberty Show discusses power. Who has the power and what exactly is it? Does the "patriarchy," "matriarchy," "ruling class," "elites," "the state" "corporations," "white coat priesthood," "the deep state" or anyone have the power? Is wielding power "bad”? Who exactly gets to say what is "bad" and "good", or what is legal and illegal. Are there such things as powerless persons and does power flow both ways as Michel Foucault and Thaddeus Russell argued? Does the slave have more freedom in certain ways then the master as Thaddeus Russell has argued in his book Renegade History of the US and Michel Foucault's concept of the "shade." Even Christ and Paul in a way have a kind of inverted power hierarchy saying that the first shall be last and the last shall be first (Nietzsche of course argues that Christianity is a slave morality for weak people).

Isn't power a great thing? Man has the ability to turn buried fossils, running rivers, and atoms into productive energy. The population of the earth has exploded and if one is an honest humanist isn't more people a good thing? I know John Stuart Mill and Margaret Sanger  thought otherwise as well as many climate change fundamentalists.  Man also has come to some understanding of the way in which diseases and other ailments work and have reduced the infant mortality rate to the lowest in history and life expectancy still remains fairly high even with a recent slight drop off. After all classical Marxists believe that communism is superior to capitalism in terms of productive capability as a social organization and its not some sort of "anarcho-primitivism."  Marx himself praises capitalisms as breaking down the idiocy of ruling life and although complexities and nuances exist rural life tends to be quite "patriarchal" or backward.  So its quite clear that liberals, many conservatives, Marxists, and feminists (not merely randian objectivists,  misean libertarians or fascists) believe that exercising ones will or power upon nature or fellow man through social or material processes is a useful thing. Without industrialism its unclear that the feminist or Marxists would have anything to complain about.  Long live the bourgeoisie!  

 

"“The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life."  Karl Marx.