I recently read a classic in political sociology – Power and Powerlessness by John Gaventa. It’s an insightful attempt to apply the Steven Lukes analysis of power – laid out in a book by that title – to the situation of coal miners in central Appalachia.
Gaventa seeks to explain why oppressed Appalachian miners refuse to rise up in revolt against their oppressors. While he argues for the intuitive view that the power of the mining companies prevents them from doing so, he gets there via an interesting and compelling route. Ultimately, he argues that the power of the mining companies consists, in part, in their ability to change the desires and aims of miners. Rebellion comes only when we alter those underlying power relationships.
I think we can learn a lot from Gaventa about power and powerlessness.
Three Dimensions of Power
Gaventa begins by laying out the Lukes distinction between three dimensions of power.
Dimension 1 amounts to power on the traditional pluralist view. Pluralists assume people aren’t naturally inclined toward politics. They engage in political activity only when they’re dissatisfied, and usually in small groups. The challenge for us, according to the pluralist, isn’t to explain why miners don’t rebel. Rather, we face the challenge of explaining why people sometimes do. The one dimensional theorist, then, would explain the quiescence of oppressed miners in terms of their cultural defects. They have good reasons to rebel, but choose not to.
Dimension 2 consists in keeping oppressed people locked out of the system. The powerful set the agenda and the rules of the game in such a way as to suppress them. A two dimensional theorist accepts the pluralist account in many cases. However, they argue that in some cases, the powerful rig the game to keep people out.
Dimension 3 adds to this the shaping or determining of the very desires of members of oppressed groups. Powerful groups control the candidates for voting and the views people hear in the media. They set and encourage social myths, push oppressed people to make psychological adjustments to accept their oppression, and so on. A three dimensional theorist argues that these forces operate in the background. They occur at a level deeper than the power one other theorists cite.
Getting at power and powerlessness, for Gaventa, requires putting the three together.
Power and Method
Gaventa thereby defines ‘power’ more broadly than either one or two dimensional theorists. On the three dimensional view, power isn’t just about making people do things they don’t want to do. It’s about a person or group acting contrary to the interests of another. And the powerful have many ways to do that. In that sense, the Gaventa view holds a great deal in common with the Herman and Chomsky thesis in Manufacturing Consent. The powerful propagandize the oppressed.
These three dimensions interrelate and reinforce one another. And these complex relations create difficulties in studying them. Toward that end, Gaventa offers some suggestions. He thinks we can ask whether oppressed groups would have acted differently if they could have freely chosen a path other than the one they took in the actual world.
And he studies miners to find out.
The Miners of Central Appalachia
The miners Gaventa studies live near Cumberland Gap at the border between the states of Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia. And Gaventa starts with the observation that, despite grinding poverty and inequality, the miners don’t rise up against the mine owners.
Why?
Historically, the people who moved to this region wanted to remain proudly independent. And they did, for many years. The initial wave of industrialization breezed right past Cumberland Gap. However, spare British capital needed a place to park itself in the late 19th century.
Mining did the job perfectly. Mining companies manipulated the rugged independent people of Cumberland Gap into selling their land. And then the companies hired them to work in the mines.
To keep them quiet, the mining companies implemented an enticing ideology – showing off the lifestyle of wealthy capital investors, teasing the possibility that locals might gain a piece of the action via hard work. The companies paired that carrot with a stick. They kept locals under near total, feudal-like control. Workers depend on the company for their job, their house, and the entire local system of public services. And so, they push workers into placing their short-term interests above their long-term interests, a common capitalist strategy.
Explanations of Power and Powerlessness and Empirical Study
To get at the complexity of all this, Gaventa draws on a three dimensional approach to power. And we can see why. One dimensional pluralists can really only explain the miners’ actions by blaming the victims. And even two dimensional theorists can’t get at all of it.
Let’s take a brief look at Gaventa’s empirical studies to say why.
Gaventa reveals, first, that the region taxes mining companies at low rates and that locals to the region vote for pro mining candidate at very high rates. This trend stops only when larger national forces intervene, such as the programs of the LBJ era.
He further notes that union members and retirees repeatedly reelect ineffective union leaders. He outlines the effort the union must exert to keep this happening. Union leaders dominate the media, rig elections, appoint leaders without even holding elections, and at one point even murdered a popular opposition candidate.
These things all show evidence, at a minimum, for the two dimensional approach to power.
But even that isn’t sufficient to explain miner behavior. Even after controlling for these factors, the area still voted for the same leaders.
And that’s where Gaventa steps in to argue for a three dimensional approach to power. Power and powerlessness alone can explain that. Gaventa argues that a sense of powerlessness pervades ordinary people and rank-and-file workers in the Cumberland Gap region. It leaves them prone to mining company and corrupt union leader propaganda.
Power and Powerlessness
In his last few chapters, Gaventa turns to questions about how we can change relationships of power and powerlessness. Because it’s only by changing these relationships that we can overcome elite power and convince people to look to their long-term interests.
And that question – the question of long-term interests – gets at the heart of socialism.
Gaventa doesn’t – and can’t – provide easy answers. None of us can. But he says a few things of note. For one, he points out that the three dimensions of power interact with one another to great a greater whole. Power, thereby, creates power.
Finally, and perhaps more helpfully, he notes that one can start by putting marginalized communities together. One can begin by putting community members in touch with one another, to provide each other with local options and begin to change power dynamics. And then one can put one community in touch with another.
This brings to mind, for example, the work of Charles Booker in Kentucky.
These, of course, are just first steps.
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