Abolition of Power ?
 I am happy, for example, to have the liberty to submit myself to the power of the conductor, the musician and the composer who will presently plunge me into ecstasy. I am less than happy to have the « liberty » to submit to the carving up of my time by the economy, or to the need to lose my life in order to gain it, or to the making of profit from musical emotion... In short, the liberty to go to the concert after finishing work means little to me. In the same way, it isn't unimaginable that I might freely choose to submit myself, whether for a short time or forever, to the rhythms, the symbols and the rules of a community. But when the State occupies the whole horizon of time and social codes, this is only liberty in the service of a great renunciation. For a revolution to pretend to abolish power would be as illusory as for a dictatorship to want to suppress all liberty. However totalitarian it is, a society cannot survive without leaving its members a minimum of initiative. However libertarian it is, it could not exist without power being exercised. The « chief » of a tribe of Ouvéa who is constrained by custom to speaking with his back turned to the assembly, so as not to risk infuencing it by his facial expressions, or those guayaqui « chiefs » which Clastres descibes in The society against the state, are they really without power ? One can say that the influence they exert on those who belong to their tribe doesn't resemble that exercised by Heads of State, feudal lords, kings, etc. But the acts and gestures of these same individuals still exercise an effect on their counterparts which can be exercised by no-one else. In these societies without a State which are ( which were ) primitive society, power exists. It is set in a whole network of relations which delimit its interventions and scope, but the exercise of this power is no less a decisive moment of the expression of the collective will. To dream of the abolition of the State and, better still, to attack it from the point of view of its abolition, is to oppose a society in which power is frozen, hierarchical and concentrated by and for the perpetuation of class division. It is not to dream of the abolition of all power, because power and liberty are inseparable. Liberty is a « power to act or not to act » ( according to the definition of Littré ), and the power to act on things, and on the conditions of existence, is inseparable from the power to act on men : whatever activity I have to undertake, I won't avoid it because it exercises, in its own way, an influence, a power over others. Whoever wishes to avoid handling grand empty words must fill them with history. An idea born with the practical emancipation of the individual, liberty is a historical creation. |