The People’s True Power

Aydin Areta

In a society where the majority of society and the political government no longer stand together, and where the foundation of state–nation solidarity has collapsed, the fundamental question is never whether people participate in elections.

In the absence of this solidarity, what remains is the “power” of these two sides in relation to one another. Pierre Bourdieu, the renowned French sociologist, offers a thought-provoking definition of “power.” In Bourdieu’s view, power is the “capacity to shape the range of another’s possible actions.” In this definition, the powerful party is the one capable of shaping and limiting the other’s field of choice and action. Power means that one side can compel the other to choose among a restricted set of possibilities that it has itself created, and to choose something that under ordinary conditions the other would not have chosen.

The task of intellectuals in a society is not to tell people what they ought to do. Their task is to articulate what has reached the threshold of consciousness in society’s unconscious and bring it into consciousness. In my view, our society has reached the threshold of becoming conscious of its own internally grounded power. Two subsidiary questions concerning the election are therefore:

- Was it the people who, by boycotting the parliamentary election, restricted the government’s range of choices and, through the exercise of their power, compelled it to accept electoral conditions it had refused to accept in the previous two elections?

- Or is it the government that holds the upper hand in power and is trying to shape the people’s range of choices solely within what it itself wants and what it regards as serving its own interests?
On this interpretation, participation in the election is surrender to governmental power and a weakening of the people’s power.

If the first question is correct, the next question is whether the nation should use the choice it created through the power of its previous boycott to expand its own possibilities and restrict those of the government, making larger change possible step by step. Or, fundamentally, whether what emerges after this choice can be translated into social capital, a stronger position of popular power, and genuine progress along the path of social empowerment.

If the second question is the more accurate one, then the exercise of society’s power can be realised only through boycott and through refusing to surrender to the government’s power to shape the nation’s choices. On this view, the people expand the range of their genuine choices and, at the next stage, civil society itself will shape the range of choices available to government—choices that do not lie within what the government wants and that can therefore translate into nothing other than a stronger position for the power of the nation.

Which of these questions, and which hypothesis arising from it, is correct is, in my view, a subsidiary matter, because there is no absolute answer to it. The question that should be our principal question is this:

- Which power, by creating the larger binary of participation and boycott, has restricted the range of choices available to us, the people? That is where the principal party in our equation of power—the party restricting our power—is located.

When the range of thought and choice is restricted, the social mind becomes structurally confined between two secondary alternatives. Within this binary, even what we negate through boycott has already contaminated our thinking by determining the terms within which we think.

In my view, if society is to increase its power, it must break the limits of this range. But by what power has this range been imposed upon the people?
The truth is that this range has not been imposed upon society by an external power. The greatest enemy of the power of any society lies in that society’s own “restrictive mentality”: where it sees its choices as limited; where, on the basis of limited thinking, it divides and categorises society; where it becomes trapped in less important binaries such as boycott versus participation and, by creating these binaries, fractures the power of its own internal solidarity.

In my view, our society must first move beyond this binary. It must preserve its internal solidarity above this division; only then will it develop its inner power. Boycotting or participating in an election is merely a subsidiary issue within the totality of our social struggle for change.

My answer to neither of the first two subsidiary questions is absolute or maximalist. What translates, in my view, into society’s true power is standing above these subsidiary questions: ensuring that a society seeking change does not break its own inner power by creating a fault line within itself; ensuring that it does not manufacture “boycotters” and “inked fingers” as problems for itself.

In individual and social life, we repeatedly encounter binaries created by our own minds. To become larger and more powerful, we must first become larger and more powerful than the binaries of our own minds. Jung has a phrase to the effect that where power is, love is absent, and where love is, power is absent.