Climate, technology and chaos Blog

Some while ago I wrote about the ten different sources of social power:
Violence. Wealth. Cosmology. Communication. Organisation. Social Category. Risk. Networked legitimacy. Inertia.

Today I’ll sketch out something about violence

Monopoly and organisation of violence are important (organisation is a source of power), but disorganised violence can be effective as when a stronger or more skilled person attacks another without provocation or one person lives in fear of another. Whoever controls (or implements) the violence tries to make it ‘legitimate’, but being able to persuade people of that legitimacy is important. Legitimacy is matter of cosmology and communication (rhetoric). If Apple started using guns to murder people in MS we would probably not cheer at this moment, although court cases aimed at destroying the other company might be acceptable. However, if some news channel lies about people wiping them out of the contest, portrays them as inhuman or subhuman, or supports a military struggle against them, we may be unsure if this is violence (or indeed untrue) unless some rival news channel takes the story up in a different way; and even then we don’t know what is happening. Likewise we may wonder if selling people an addictive substance which will lead to their death is violence. So we also need to decide what ‘violence’ involves, which is possibly not going to be easy.

In this basic case I’m going to talk about physical injury or the threat of physical injury through the application of force or substances, the kind we usually associate with the military. But there may be other forms of violence (such as speech and categorising) intentional and unintentional. Violence does not have to actually be applied to be effective, indeed sometimes the threat of violence is more effective at maintaining power than the deployment of violence, as the deployment of violence can be seen to be ineffective. For example, the US had a military reputation for success, before they invaded Afghanistan and Iraq -their failures there helped the growth of opposition and the realisation they were defeatable.

Essentially violence depends upon consent of a kind, as David Hume remarked. If the troops refused to obey their commanders or see obedience as part of the nature of their world, peace might break out, class structures might fall apart. Most humans are not terribly violent (violent yes but not to killing people continually), so armies tend to build loyalties, build group identities, build obedience, or build outgroup identities, so that outgroups can be dealt with as non human. Modern armies can try and destroy a person’s identity in order to build an army identity. To be disobedient, is generally to break with the group, exhibit what the group calls cowardice (a bad thing) and not only to risk punishment but to be alone. Consent to obedience is built into this organisational communicative process.

Violence as a form of coercion, may further attract particular personality types, and usually tends to be more favoured by men than women, as women are generally smaller, less muscular, and more likely to get hurt. In general, most people do not seem capable of maintaining sustained high levels of violence and death, hence it is always a minority that exerts this form of coercion. This is reinforced because the best weapons, defense and training are nearly always expensive. Again trained, organised and well equipped violence is usually the most effective (although not always).

When the fighting forces, classes or individuals come together to plan conquest, or demand tribute from the people they defend or terrorise, they begin to form a proto-State. One can think of the relationship between the European State, feudal kingship and the violence of knights, or the Roman State and military expansion. There is perhaps little functional difference between the fighting classes and organised crime, except the fighting classes have managed to give themselves public legitimacy. They offer people (and each other) protection demanding obedience in return. Of course, this protection is generally from other fighting classes, who wish the same of those beneath them.

Because organised violence is tied in with the State, then as long as there are professional combat forces you will probably have a State, or the violent State, as professional combat forces generally need tribute and some kind of State to organise and extract it. Similarly, if the State spends a large portion of its budget on the military, it implies it is dominated by violent imperatives, rather than democratic ones. Hence, the vital importance of cutting military spending if you are serious about ending State coercion. Of course this is hard to do, while other forms of organised violence, and State violence, still exists in neighbouring territories, as dynocracies are often driven by desires for expansion, either to gain more land to keep the centre from the potential front lines, or the desire to gain more tribute. Violence begets violence up to mutual destruction. Social forms need more than mere violence.

Dynocracy can also be joined with other forms of power such as theocracy, when the basis of power is religion and violence. It is not a solution to this form of coercion to replace State combat with plutocractic privately organised combat. If you don’t somehow prevent private armies, you may end up back in an even worse place, as those private forces form their own military organisations with no ‘traditional curbs’ at all, and demand tribute. Many forms of organisation can embrace organised combat.

People, as individuals, or as part of a group or social category, can carry this kind of threat with them, as a mode of display, through visible weaponry and so on. It can be used to defend, increase or enforce economic power. For example, the East India company, the opium wars, the slave trade, rubber in Brazil etc. Over time, the military may become the social elite, and thus responsible for the ‘safety’ of all other forms of power.

However, where there is no organized violence, or class of violent people, violence can be used to destroy the formation hierarchy, relatively painlessly. Where there is such an organized class, it is much harder, and more likely to fail.

This entry was posted on August 27, 2018 at 4:33 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.