Power is the ability to get things done. If, in the course of fighting power you win, or your side wins, you then achieve power. If your objection to power is pure and simple, if you see all power/non-power relationships as “oppression,” then it follows that any attack upon power becomes oppressive at success. When you win, you have achieved something. You got something done. You have exerted power.
And, in politics, one achievement tends to lead to more achievement. In government, the point of “being in power” is to exert power. So the success at fighting oppression (so conceived) immediately transforms into oppression itself.
This is so obvious that one wonders how it never seems to cross the minds of the current batch of “social justice” activists now causing havoc on campuses and in the streets.
Either they would have to accept their revolutionary status as masters, as “the powerful,” whenever they get their way, or they would have to revise their theories of power, freedom, and oppression.
I recommend to them careful transactional analysis, not crude, class analysis with concepts derived from Karl Marx by way of the Frankfurt School and the Sorbonne.
twv
Wirkman Comment 