What Is Politics & What Is the Political?

Yves here. We published a piece, Populism and State Power, by Tony Lynch earlier this year. His latest offering reflects some deep thinking about what the fundamental essence of politics really is.

Hopefully this post will generate similarly serious pondering from the members of the commentariat. But not to act as a bit of a spoiler, but I take issue with his thesis, that politics at its core is about organized force, as in asserting dominion over members of the political group.

Perhaps this is a just so story, but when one looks at ancient and even as recent as medieval cities, one of their frequent characteristics is fortified walls. I would posit instead that people came together significantly if not primarily for the purpose of sharing resources and otherwise organizing against external threats, such as bands that would steal their women and say food stores. Now in the process of that organizing, internal violence, so as to assure cooperation, and potentially also to steal internally (as in abuse authority) would come into play, but I find it hard to see violence against members of the political group itself as foundational.

Another counterpoint is that there are entire societies that do not engage in meaningful violence. The Hopis are often cited and there are other examples. Now admittedly, the discussions of them focus on the fact that they have had peace with their neighbors for long periods of time, as opposed to their internal organization, as for instance described long-form in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in 2021. But not having to devote a considerable potion of tribal/community effort to defense and valuing warlike behavior in young men has to reduce the demands and needs to enforce compliance internally, and thus the need for internal violence.

Again, hopefully Tony will respond in comments, but this piece seems to project how think of ourselves back into time and seems to reflect the decline in trust and cooperation in many advanced economies.to

By Tony Lynch, adjunct senior lecturer in Philosophy and Politics at the University of New England, Australia. He has written and taught philosophy for forty years

A preliminary sketch

Introduction

If there is – as is the common conviction among us who deploy the term[1] – a point to talking about  “politics” and “the political”; if, that is to say, such talk helps us understand ourselves and the world we collectively inhabit – then this can only be true if “politics” and “the political” does not reduce to something else, perhaps the ethical, economic, symbolic, cultural, or whatever, so is, for whatever reason, merely (and at best) a metaphorical or otherwise rhetorical use of language.  If it does not reduce in this way then, in some defining, “essentialist”, sense, it has – while being in the world like anything else – its own nature, its own domain and logic, just as Plato and Aristole, introducing the term, thought.

Locating Politics

How might we approach this point?  The first thing to see is that politics is not something one can do simply as an individual alone (here one looks out for and after oneself), nor is it something that appears if we add one to one, so that we have two people together.  Here, with simply me and you, we have the domain of cooperation, conflict and indifference, of liking or not liking, of hating or loathing or loving, disdaining or simply ignoring.  That is to say we have, in its most basic and primitive form, the domain of the ethical in life.

What about three people then?  Why might politics, apart from the merely self-directed and the simply ethical, come about now?  One answer – Hobbes’ answer – is that now organised force (violence, coercion) may come into play, and, where it does, there is the possibility of ruling over another.

If, with only two, there can be violence and so on, it is not organised violence and does not amount to rule, because, short of murder (and so back to one), even the perpetrator will age, must sleep, will get sick, and so on, thereby opening the season for revenge.  But with three there is a new possibility – alliance between two for the exploitation of the third[2], where exploitation means “us[ing] another person’s vulnerability for one’s own benefit”.[3]

Here, I think, is to be found twhat it is that distinguishes politics from other things.  And it is there (always, even if one must look beyond self-flattering rhetoric) in political philosophy and theory from the start.[4]  Politics presupposes, demands, rests on, organised force as rule and – its point and benefit – the organised exploitation of others.

And, even in the basic situation of two organised to exploit a third, we have more: for this organised violence backed coercion for exploitation involves a necessary deeping of the political beyond that of straightforward, alliance grounded, ruling over another, for any of the three can, in principle (for they remain prudential and ethical beings), make an alliance with any of the other, and so there may be interested bargaining involved that has the implicit possibility of, in the simplest of sense, ‘revolution,’ as a new alliance – between exploiter and (thus far) exploited – emerges (violently, no doubt)  in and through the rivalries of the exploiters.

But if three people may open the space for political relationships, threeness itself is not enough to guarantee the emergence of organised violence for purposes of exploitation.  For the possibility to be actualised there are further conditions to be met.  The most obvious one is that exit has to be difficult or otherwise discouraged, for if not, any exploitation-aimed alliance will be met by the potential exploitee moving elsewhere, successfully or not.  Obviously the exploiting alliance depends on preventing such escape, but the costs of exploitation have to outweigh the costs of imposing it.  Yet here we are, one of us watching, the other sleeping, and our productive labour force, our base of exploitation, has gone from three to one.

What more must be added to the mix?  Obviously, conditions which make joint exploitation properly rewarding (received benefits outweigh imposed costs).  For example, as with the rich alluvial soil found in ancient Mesopotamia, where one person’s dedicated labour might produce sufficient food for three, even if three might collectively produce more.[5]  Here we see that it is not scarcity that lies at the heart of politics, but rather a certain conception of plenty, for there must be available sufficient resources that exploitation can produce a relative surplus: a surplus that exceeds the costs of rule, and is, as Hobbes said, for ‘the delectation’ of the exploiting power.

Why, by organising to exploit, do it if being sociably working together may mean more of the good and socisable ends of life?  Why be political and politic, rather than work productively oneself in a productive community of workers?  Because while there may be plenty enough to live together, collabratively created and organised power over another has its own attractions.  For there is pleasure, sociability, and an increase in the joy of life, in being the (or one of the) exploiters, lording it over the exploited: it is what Plato calledpleonexia, and what Nietzsche and Simone Weil, though otherwise as different as could be, understood as a matter of the psychopathology of power, for power divides the human world into “two categories of men: those who command and those who obey”, and commanding has its own special pleasures, above and beyond the brutely material or utilitarian, for it is power over another human being, ultimately, indeed, power of life and death, and so one that elevates its wielder in their own eyes, just as it diminishes the exploited.[6]  It is just this fact that makes the alliance of organised exploiters always vulnerable to dangerous competition and schism that ‘revolution’ requires, for there may and will be intra-elite competition over and for (more) power, and the exploited are, after all, a resource for the power of the exploiters.

So, we have threeness, we have the joys of power/command, we have sufficient resources for exploitation, and we have exit barriers.  Here, I say, politics emerges and lives, and it does so in two connected ways.  For we have a political system – the organised exploiters and the exploited – and political relationships that  (revolution aside) exist only between the exploiters.  This point was obvious to both Plato and Aristotle, and it can be illustrated by looking at Hegels’ so-called master/slave dialectic which he himself mispresents as absolutely fundamental to self-consciousness, but which is, in fact, the basic manifestation of the political.  After all, the master/slave relationship itself only arises if there are more than simply the two involved (as Hobbes saw).  It arises only in a system of organised violence that the two cannot deliver or sustain alone, and so it is from the start a political, not an ethical, creation as Hegel thought.[7]  Slavery is the product (the essential product) of a political system as an alliance for exploitation.   But while the possibility of slavery is the product of an encompassing political order, master and slave considered as a twoness relation, is not political, for the slave is simply a device for furthering the masters demands and desires, a means, but not an agent.  Thus it is that slaves and slavery disappear when politics as agency, as self-understanding, as something worth thinking and talking about, occupies our reflections as with Plato’s Republic, or, if they appear, as they do in Aristotle’s Politics, then it is as ‘natural slaves.’

Political Legitimation

 

One consequence of this understanding of politics and the political as grounded in the organised exploitation of another that is, in its brute form, slavery, is that legitimation can be seen not as a device whose purpose is to hoodwink or bamboozle the exploited, but as fundamentally a matter  between – and for – the exploiters.[8]  Of course, it is a further benefit to the extent that the ‘legitimation’ is internalised by the exploited, but that is a frail reed.  Exploitation itself creates resistance, and in the face of this the best defence lies with the unity, the self-interested awareness, of the exploiters, and this is grounded in the fact, for them, there too is  an exit barrier. A fact that presses down on  them as exploiters, for they need the exploited to provide the conditions of life they no longer provide for themselves; indeed, disvalue and treat as something beneath them and (so) contemptible.  For the exploiters, rather than the exploited, There Is No Alternative, and it is this that their legitimating ideology – that general and explanatory moralising story of power – dignifies for them, not as weakness, but of their Strength, Goodness, Trueness, Beauty!  They need and naturally produce an ideology that naturalises and celebrates their ‘superiority’ and dominance over others, and, in doing that, they (re)form themselves not as mere exploiters but as ‘right and proper’ rulers without which disaster and degradation must inevitably follow.

Two Political Systems

If it takes three for politics to be a possibility, then it only takes two political systems if that possibility is to begin articulating itself in all its complexities the simplicity of the organised violence-exploitation foundations on which it stands.  For with two political systems – for simplicity, let us say, for two groups of three-person exploiter/exploited – and assuming some exit restrictions, if only those involved now in the pleasure and desire for power/wealth on behalf of the oppressors and the fear that produces in each exploiter alliance, we have (the possibility of) war.  Equally, one may think, there is the possibility of cooperation, for might not two political systems grounded in exploitation cooperate, and so meld, as a new set of exploiters (four now) over two exploited?

In the sense of pure possibility, such melding alliance making is certainly available, but it is in practical terms, very unlikely.  After all, while the exploited are doubled to two, there are now four exploiters who must share the pleasures of command, and – because of this – have their freedom to command restricted, for while each of the four may command the exploited two, none can command each other.  More than this, each will be tempted to connive with others in order to increase the pool of exploited and exalt their own privilege at the expense of one of their fellows, and so three may ally against the fourth so that they may be added to the exploitation pool.  In short, the elites cooperative strategy will be politically precarious, vulnerable to inter-elite rivalries that threaten any and all with becoming one of the exploited, and that, because of this, also increases the threat of revolution, now in the guise of civil war, for if any of the four connive with the two presently exploited they will constitlute three against three…

For these reasons we may expect war rather than cooperative incorporation to be the dominant strategy when two political systems meet.  On both sides such war will be a matter of offence, as the opposed exploiter elites seek to increase the pool of those they exploit through capture and enslavement, conquest and subjugation; and a war of preemptive defence against the aggressive intentions of the other.  And in both cases the role of the exploited is a matter concern for the political agents that manage and benefit from the exploitation regime.  One needs to be able to use the exploited – one’s own and, perhaps, the others – as agents of violence, and one has to do this without unleashing the potential for revolution at home.

Many bring in legitimation as the key legitimating device, but as we have seen, that is far from what is really important.  Legitimation is primarily a device – a narrative of benevolent and essential necessity – that unites the exploiters into a shared, so public, self-consciousness of the righteous, so rightness, status as exploiters, only secondarily and derivatively to deceive or bamboozle the exploited.  And it can and will only tend to deceive and bamboozle because of what does matter and is basic here – exploitation.[9]

War, Hierarchy & Organisation

So, consider our two political systems of three, two allied exploiters and the exploited.  Here, in the basic case, when one system conquers the other, we have our two exploiters, but we now have more than one (to be) exploited (say 3 or 4), and there is an obvious problem: there are more exploited than exploiters, so what is to be done to sustain the privileged regime?  The obvious strategy is to divide the exploited such that they themselves do (much of) the enforcing.  And the obvious way to do that is to introduce a hierarchy of exploitation so that some of the exploited may, through obedience to those above them, become (partial) exploiters of those (now) ‘below them.’  Given the emotional charge that accompanies the capacity to order others about under threat of organised violence, this will have attraction for certain among the exploited, and so they will now – through their own exploitative relationships within the system – have a stake in its survival and continuity.  It is this delegated capacity for exploitation, rather than any intellectual ideological superstructure, that provides the system with a certain aura – at least among those who count – of righteousness necessity: for they have a stake in the system of exploitation, even if they are themselves exploited; and they have the existential pleasure of knowing they can lord it over at least some others, so long as they accept the lordship of those above them in the exploitation hierarchy.

While this complexity of exploitation/exploiters relations is an organisational requirement, it has the further effect of reinforcing the standing “joy of power” pressures that generate the inter-political body rivalry that is war, civil war and revolution.  Preventing the threat of these demands growth and expansion of the exploitation base.  Only then can the stake in the system of those who are both exploited and exploiters (of those below and with less than them) be reliably secured.  Without such growth or expansion – so war – internal disquiet and conflict will tend to be endemic, for the pleasures of moral and material power over another are jealous pleasures, easily slighted, always alert for advantage. And thus arises the growth imperative of empire, as the complexification of the exploiter/expoited dynamic it requires seeks stability in the only secure way – growth – that itself simply deepens and furthers the need.

Thus the ancient Athens so many celebrate as the ground zero of democracy’s explosive appearance in the political world saw the (relative) spread of political participation in the system as citizenship broadened for ‘free’  adult males of Athenian birth (women, metics and slaves remained inside the system, but without political agency), as the newly enfranchised Thetic class (the class of free men who were artisans and labourers, and so lacked sufficient resources to be hoplites) manned the Athenian naval forces of imperial expansion and extraction that culminated in the Peloponnesian War that saw Athens pay for its imperially funded extension of political participation with defeat at the hands of the Spartans.

Summary Reflections

When we talk of politics, and to the extent that this talk is neither idle or redundant, we are talking of the system and operations of organisational alliance aimed at ensuring an organised exploiter/exploited relationship.  Such arrangements have their preconditions.  Minimally, 3 people with a 2/1 exploiter/exploited ratio, under conditions that restrict exploited exit, along with a sufficiency or ‘plenty’ of resources that enables such exploitation even as the exploiters themselves cease to provide the labour now fully externalised onto the exploited.  This basic situation/condition lets us see the permanent possibility of ‘revolution’, and let’s us also see that political relations exist in a political system only between exploiters, not the exploiters and the exploited.  The political system makes political relationships possible, but this does not exhaust the domain of the political.

Adding a second political system brings embryonic state-building, as Hobbbesian reasons lead to war, its management, benefits and costs.  And the war is never ending, for the hierarchical dilution of the exclusive exploiter/exploited relationship means it can’t end, for without it the political system collapses.  A single political ‘community’ of exploiters and exploited can exist as a steady state, whether we like it or not.  But once there are two or more political systems the impetus to warfare is initiated as each exploiter elite eyes off its neighbour as a potential resource for exploitation, and in which each lives in fear of the other succeeding.  Such a threat and reality require the sharp exploiter/exploited divide to be blurred as organisational complexity increases, so that between the simply exploited and their exploiters there emerges an intermediary class of those who are exploited by those above them, but who are exploiters of those below.  Such mixtures help both to stabilise the system as an organisational structure, but equally, it makes it potentially unstable, for those who have had a taste of the joys of exploitation, even especially when they remain in many ways themselves (still) exploited, are easily prone to resentment if those privileges are reduced.  Even if they are not, the very fact that we have people at various levels on the exploiter/exploited scale, will see increased envy and competition for advantage.  The only reliable way to navigate these circumstances is then, through ‘growing the pie’ by subjugation and integration of other people and political communities into one’s own.  Here we have war.  And the promise, if successful, of greater numbers to be exploited, even as more have to be allowed to be, in some degree, exploiters themselves.

All this,  I think, constitutes the core of our understanding of politics in so far as the term has point for us.  But by itself it is simply the conceptual logic of that understanding.  It’s articulation into practice is a matter of history, context and contingency.  The way the exploiter-alliance/exploited triad plays out is not something a priori, even if we can, as it were, locate the a priori core to that possibility by the kind of ‘state of nature’ analysis offered here.  How it plays out in early Sumer and how it does so in China or India or elsewhere is something that to be discovered in all its particularity even as the universal ground of organised exploitation remains unchanged.  Conceptual analysis is not by itself historical understanding, however much conceptual clarity is essential to history.

__________

[1]    We should not assume, falsely, that people always and everywhere have had a concept ‘politics’, nor that if they have not that they are thereby missing something.  By asking the point or purpose of politics we are asking about our use and understanding of the term.  Thus, what follows, is to be understood as account of what it is that we mean when we talk this way.

[2]    Note that politics begins with (what is now) the majority.  This is the most basic demand and condition of exploitation.  It is also why politics does not begin as an ‘elite project’ in the sense that term we find in Mosca where it is identified as an (organised) minority ruling over a (disorganised) majority.  We shall see how the original majoritarian exploiter-alliance expands its rule by complexification of exploiter/exploited relations in ways that complicate any simple dichotomy of minority/majority, elite/non-elite of the kind Mosca, Michels and Parato utilised.

[3]    Zwolinski, Matt, Benjamin Ferguson, and Alan Wertheimer, “Exploitation”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2022 Edition), Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman (eds.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2022/entries/exploitation/>.

[4]    Aristotle is explicit.  Politics is an elite affair, and that demands a luxury insulated from the material reproduction of its enabling conditions.  Plato, in the Laws, where politics must be actualisable, not an impossible ideal as in the Republic, insists that the distinction between freeman (political agent) and slave is “a necessary distinction.”  That necessity is, of course, the “necessity” fof organised exploitation.

[5]    The “plenty” condition seems to have characterised the first states in Sumer and that of those other places (China, India), but it was also met on the north northwestern coast of north America.  This shows us that politics as organised exploitation grounded in violence is not restricted to agriculturalists, but is there, under certain conditions, for ‘complex hunter-gathers’ as well.

[6]    All of this is brilliantly explicated in Simone Weil’s essay, “The Iliad, or The Poem of Force.”

[7]    Carl Schmitt famously claimed politics articulated itself about and through the Friend/Foe distinction and, properly understood, there is something to this.  Recall that we have distinguished analytically between the political system itself and the domain, within that system, of political life and decision.  The political system is, inclusively, the relationship of exploited to organised exploiters, but political living – political choice, decision, policy, etc. – exists only among and between the exploiters.  The exploited are not, as such, foes – just as, in a related way, a slavers slave is not a foe, nor does friendship come into the matter, though patronisation and condescension and so on, may.  But one’s fellow exploiters in the system of organised exploitation are of the right kind to be friends or foes, and such relationships here are, of their nature, politically valenced.  In particular – and this is crucial to the legitimation strategy – friend and foe here must exhaust their relationship before it seeds (potential) revolution, and so their relations of friendship or enmity must express itself in ways that do not threaten the exploitive regime itself.  Political competition and conflict, in other words, must be a matter of intra-exploiter relationships, not the fact, let alone ‘problem’, of exploitation and the exploited.

[8]    They may indeed – as did the sophists that set Plato off even as he followed them – absolutely love it for doing that.

[9]    Here we have the possibility of ‘false consciousness’ understood as something that is believed – say, “Our rulers are naturally better men than we” – but which is believed simply because of the the power of the rulers themselves.