Conditioned power and the economy

Earlier in this chapter we alluded to the concept of “conditioned power” and remarked that it raised special concerns for power, particularly in terms of its connection to interest.

[C]onditioned power... is subjective; neither those exercising it nor those subject to it need always be aware that it is being exerted. The acceptance of authority, the submission to the will of others, becomes the higher preference of those submitting. This preference can be deliberately cultivated - by persuasion or education. This is explicit conditioning. Or it can be dictated by the culture itself; the submission is considered to be normal, proper, or traditionally correct. This is implicit conditioning. (Galbraith, 1983:24)

[T]he bias of the system is not sustained simply by a series of individually chosen acts but also, most importantly, by the socially structured and culturally patterned behavior of groups, and practices of institutions, which may indeed be manifested by individuals’ inaction.... Is it not the supreme exercise of power to get another or others to have the desires you want them to have - that is to secure their compliance by controlling their thoughts and desires? (Lukes, 1974:21-2, 23)

This interpretation attempts an end run around the difficulty posed by the concept of power for economics. Because of this, it has special significance for power-centered approaches to political economy. The success of ap­proaches employing the strategy suggested here depends, of course, on the interpretation of power that grounds it. Before turning directly to that strat­egy, we consider this interpretation more closely.

Most notably, conditioned power, unlike our initial concepts, does not require an imposition of the ends of some (the powerful) agents against resistance derived from opposing ends of other agents.

1. Power means the ability to achieve your real interests.

2. Those who have power correctly perceive their real interests and how those interests are served.

3. Those without power do not correctly perceive their real interests. For them conscious intentions and real interests differ.

4. Power over others means the ability of a social order to condition some into misperceiving their real interests in a way that serves the real interests of the “powerful” but works against the real interests of the powerless.

Thus, “power over” others works not directly, as in our simpler inter­pretation, but indirectly via the system or social order as a whole. Power over is the power of the social order over some (but not all) of its members.

The notion of conditioned power bears two importantly different inter­pretations.

Does the concept of conditioned power in some way increase our ability to treat the market economy as a place within which power plays a vital role? Clearly, a large part of the motivation for the concept stems from the way in which market economy presents itself as a system of voluntary transactions. Even when individuals place their labor at the service of the firm, they do so voluntarily. It can even be argued that, since individuals place their labor and not themselves in the service of the firm, strictly speaking they remain free while at work. So long as persons can separate themselves from their labor, we can sustain the idea that, in all its aspects, a competitive market economy excludes the exercise of power over persons (see Levine, 1978:226— 36). If we accept this way of thinking, then conditioned power may be the only recourse available for us to support the idea that the economy is a system of power.

As we saw in the previous section, the advantage of the notion of condi­tioned power lies in the way in which it enables us to attribute power to persons and groups without claiming the exercise of power of those individ­uals directly over others.

As we suggested, a pillar of the economist’s argument for free markets is that they achieve efficiency in the sense of maximizing welfare defined upon the basis of individual subjective preference. What if individual preferences, while expressing the individual’s direct interest, distort (even violate) the individual’s imputed (or real) interest? In this case, the capitalist economy makes the individual the victim of conditioned power acting in the service of firms bent on satisfying their need for profit by convincing consumers that they want things that they do not really need:

What is certain is the negative statement which, notwithstanding its negativity, con­stitutes one of the most important insights of political economy: an output the volume and composition of which are determined by the profit maximization policies of oligopolistic corporations neither corresponds to human needs nor costs the minimum possible amount of human toil and human suffering. (Baran and Sweezy, 1966:139)

If direct and imputed needs differ, then satisfaction of the consumer’s direct need is not in the consumer’s real interest. Consumers who go about the work of satisfying those needs are the victims of (conditioned) power.

Whether this claim about false needs (stemming from the demands of profit seeking) implies the power of the producer over the consumer depends, in part, on whether the producer’s interest in profit making and wealth accu­mulation is real or itself conditioned by his social environment.

Clearly, if we accept the inevitability or desirability of a capitalist market economy, the firm’s profitability may very well be in the worker’s interest. One of the key points about conditioned power is that it excludes important (real) options leaving its victims with a truncated set of choices all of which support the prevailing order. Lukes calls this “the supreme and most insid­ious exercise of power” (1974:24). By this criterion, the market economy can very readily be considered a system of power.

In thinking this way, we still need to confront and resolve a series of difficulties including the following:

1. By what process do we distinguish real needs from false needs?

2. For us to employ the concept of power, even assuming the presence of false needs, must we identify a person or group who knowingly exercises power (thus connecting conditioned power back to our earlier notions)? Or, can we still employ the idea of a system of power when power is exercised by no one?

The answer to the first question has to do with the way in which our social condition affects the process by which we define our interests. Some authors think of real needs as those we would have outside of society, and some define real needs as those we would define for ourselves in a society capable of nurturing and satisfying such needs. A Marxian view would define this in relation to a socialist or communist society. Thus, according to Agnes Heller’s account of the Marxian theory of need, a “new system of needs... becomes comprehensible only in relationship to the functioning of the new social body,” which she characterizes, following Marx, as the “society of associated producers” within which “radical needs come to be satisfied” (1976:98).

Whether we accept this conclusion or not, the idea of real needs opposed to direct or subjective needs involves a criticism of social organization and a project of defining the kind of social organization that would overcome the opposition. If individuals form, perceive, and act on real needs, then they must be autonomous, at least so far as need satisfaction is concerned; they cannot be subject to the power of others.

Even if we accept the disparity, within certain kinds of societies, between real and direct interest, we still need to establish this disparity as the result of the exercise of power. One way to do so is to argue that the beneficiaries of the disparity (under capitalism, the capitalists) actually exercise power over the institutions that govern and educate in society. This is the strategy, for example, of C. Wright Mills (1956) and G. William Domhoff (1967), who argue empirically that the dominant positions in governing institutions are held by members of a ruling elite connected, at least according to Domhoff, to corporate interests. This strategy allows us to use our simpler notion of power in the service of the argument for conditioned power. We do so by making conditioning the result of the conscious effort of a privileged group to hold power in order to preserve its privilege.

While the simplicity of this idea has its attractions, it is difficult to hold power over others with the sole and explicit purpose of making yourself (and keeping yourself) rich at their expense. What is required is a unity of purpose in maintaining the wealth and power of the wealthy. In face of this unity of purpose, the exercise of power to protect wealth becomes unnecessary:

Bereft of valid reasons to justify himself and sufficient forces to defend himself; easily crushing a private individual, but himself crushed by troops of bandits; alone against all and unable on account of mutual jealousies to unite with his equals against enemies united by the common hope of plunder, the rich, pressed by necessity, finally con­ceived the most thought-out project that ever entered the human mind. It was to use in his favor the very strength of those who attacked him, to turn his adversaries into his defenders, to instill in them other maxims and to give them other institutions which were as favorable to him as natural right was unfavorable to him. (Rousseau, [1762] 1983:149)

This argument for conditioned power carries a historical link to the con­scious exercise of power. It finds power in the ideological education of people to the acceptance of social institutions that, once accepted, work to benefit the wealthy with no need for the exercise of power on their part. If successful, the wealthy need not also be powerful (although they may be). Indeed, the more successful conditioned power, the less the need to exercise power. The notion of conditioned power inevitably leads to paradoxical formulations of this sort. When the legitimacy of a social order that bestows significantly unequal benefits is intact, that order depends on “proper” education rather than on the exercise of power.

Is it not, then, confusing to term this a type of power, a kind we never see, that no one need ever exercise? Is it not sufficient to demonstrate that the implied disparity between direct and imputed interest also implies a profound powerlessness (if power means ability to achieve our ends, we can have no power when we cannot know our real ends)? Why call powerlessness a form of the exercise of power?

The answer to this question implicit in Galbraith’s Anatomy of Power (1983) is that a failure to convict the wealthy of the exercise of power in acquiring and protecting their wealth necessarily justifies them in having that wealth. As Connolly emphasizes, the person wielding power is responsible for limiting choice or the ability to act upon the basis of choice. To acknowledge power “is to implicate oneself in responsibility for certain events” ([1974] 1983:97); to attribute power is not simply to describe a relationship, but to accuse. If we accept the concept of conditioned power, we can continue to accuse even if we accept the absence of any direct or apparent exercise of power. Using this concept allows us to tie benefit to responsibility for the oppression of others. Indeed, it makes oppression (and/or exploitation) a logical corollary of benefit.

Much then is at stake in deciding to accept or reject the language of conditioned power. But, in accepting or rejecting it, we must decide if it is a genuine insight or a linguistic ploy aimed at preserving the notion of re­sponsibility where none can be found. Of course, even if we deny that those who benefit are responsible for those who do not, this need not imply ac­ceptance of the legitimacy of a system of inequality. A system that renders most of its participants powerless is vulnerable to a fundamental critique even if no individual (or group) bears direct responsibility for that pow­erlessness.