Where There Is Power, There Is Resistance - Literature review Example

Where there is power, there is resistance 2009 The history of mankind is the history of power and resistance towards it. Be it in the context of the state, society or individual, tussle of power is present in all spheres. At the same time, history has shown that resistance towards power is also a normal reaction. Theoretical and historical evidence has shown that power and resistance go hand in hand. Karl Marx studied the capitalist mode of production in which workers are excluded from the appropriation of surplus value and is forced to sell his labor rather than keep control over his ability and fate. Here, the capitalists wield power over workers. However, the inherent exploitative nature and the alienation of labor from the capitalist methods of production eventually lead the workers to revolt and clash with the owners. Hence, the capitalist system is a transient period and the inherent dialectics of capitalism and class conflict leads to its overthrow and transformation to socialist. Weber’s concept of dehumanization of the bureaucracy has some similarities with Marx’s theory of alienation in that the modern methods of production (Marx) and organization (Weber) lay emphasis in production and organizational efficiency thereby making the workers nothing more than the means of production or organization. However, Weber argued that in a modern society, a man has no rational choice than to join a large organization and in doing so, he sacrifices his personal goals. While Marx inferred that class struggle is inevitable and the inherent clashes in the capitalist system leads towards its own topple, Weber stated that there might be alternate systems that maintain the status quo. Weber saw the society in a number of layers rather than Marx’s polarization between the capitalist and the worker (Coser, 1977). Modern world history has shown that societies have progressed through cycles of power and resistance. While the autocratic societies of Russia and China were overthrown by labor movements, the autocratic communist movements in the USSR and east Europe were also torn down by democratic movements. The capitalist mode of production has not resulted in working class revolution, as Marx predicted, but the inhuman face of capitalism has also resisted in the Weberian status quo bureaucracy. The early period of American history has been synonymous with the exertion of power over African slaves and African Americans. From the mid-15th to the end 19th centuries, African slaves were brought to America to work in plantations. European-Americans from the very beginning believed in white supremacy, which was the origin of the racist connotation based on the color of the skin that has been used in cultural texts as synonymous to religious supremacy of Christianity (Jordan, 1974). In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, legal dictates of “racial slavery” took a more definite shape, making it harder for the slaves to form families, marry, have children and make steady family units. By the early 1700s, though, planters had become conscious that they could benefit thriftily by encouraging the idea of living a familial life for their slaves. Marriage, they argued, would make slaves satisfied and hence passive. Settled family units would cause dependable progenies. The white attitude towards the blacks, or negroes, is reflected, in the 1798 entry into the Encyclopedia Britannica, which said the Negroes are “strangers to every sentiment of compassion, and are an awful example of the corruption of man who left to himself” (Hallam, n.d). By the 1830s, as political rights of the Euro-Americans advanced, racial segregation left the African Americans out of the progress. The 1820s were a cut-off point when African American identity surfaced out as American-born blacks deliberately distanced from an African identity demanding their claims to citizenship. Black Americans started nurturing more resolutely an African tradition different from the one created and despised by the Euro-Americans as savage and barbaric. In the early 19th century, Abraham Lincoln was the most prominent proponent of black rights, although he did not want a complete ban on slavery. Instead, he proposed a restriction on expansion of slavery. In 1854, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, that was designed to allow the settlers to decide whether they wanted slavery or not provoked an intense debate between Lincoln and Stephen Douglas. This set the stage for Lincoln to emerge as a political activist and issue the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. Resistance to the domination of imperial power has been in many forms in the history of the world. While most resistance movements have been violent, the non-violent civil disobedience movement that Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi used first in South Africa in the late 19th century and in India in early 20th century has been landmark. Gandhi founded political organizations aimed at fighting for repealing racial laws against Indians and finally began “satyagraha” – his unique brand of civil disobedience that included demonstrations, strikes, boycotts and other acts. Gandhi and his associates obviously had to suffer fines, jail sentences and physical abuse (Steger). By 1915, the imperial British rule used political power to extract the Indian economy for British industry. Indian salt was meant for the benefit of Cheshire, Indian cotton for the textile mills in Manchester. The British colonial rule invested little in physical and human capital for the purpose of growth on Indian incomes. As a resistance movement, Gandhi began the non-cooperation movement not only through political actions like boycotts and strikes but also heavily through symbols. Perhaps the most important movement of Gandhian civil disobedience movement was “khadi”, a variety of coarse cotton cloth woven from hand spun yarns. This type of cloth worn by peasants in pre-industrial India was made from locally grown cotton. By the 20th century, the use of khadi had declined drastically, much due to the invasion of mill-made British cloth. Gandhi raised the khadi to a symbol of the civil disobedience movement and of India’s freedom movement. He adopted the khadi as his own clothing choice and he made spinning of the khadi yarn a personal as well as swarajist symbol. It was Gandhi’s ingenuity that he could pick cultural symbols from India and use it for political statements. Not only did he discard western clothing in preference to the simple khadi dress that typified Indian peasants, the weaving of hand spun yarn became a strong symbol of protest against British economic imperialism. By 1918, Gandhi began to wear pure khadi and urged all Indians to take up the oath for swadeshi, or non-cooperation. Khadi by then became a symbol for national self-sufficiency, moral purity, political independence, spiritual humility, national integrity, communal non-violence, and social equality. The Congress Party placed the khadi as the main symbol for the non-cooperation movement of 1920s and the civil disobedience movement of the 1930s (Tarlo, 2007). Gandhi began the civil disobedience movement primarily to break the uneasy collaboration between Indians and the raj. By then, Gandhi had received mass support on his stands on various issues, including the Muslim unease on the Khalifah’s status after the defeat of Turkey by the allies and the British firing on unarmed people at a political rally at Jalianwala Bagh in Punjab in 1919. This was the first time that the call of Swaraj by Congress leaders was echoed by the masses across the country. Gandhi also managed to collect political leaders from all regions and across all political colors under the banner of the non-cooperation movement (Brown). Finally, in 1947, the resistance movement that was begun through the civil disobedience movement culminated in the British conceding to Indian Independence. Resistance to power was apparent in Vietnam’s war against the United States in the 1960s. Vietnam had a history of colonialism for long. Having suffered French colonialism, conflicting blend of ideas pertaining to “Enlightenment” and “Classic Realism”, Vietnam suffered U.S invasion which initially posed to provide trade and missionary groundwork (Tucker, 2000). By then Vietnam had already developed national attitudes through the French rule and the Indo-China War. Before the war, the Americans portrayed the Vietnamese as deceitful hordes, cruel, apathetic and unconcerned lots. The only major conflict that the U.S. fought openly during the Cold War era was that in Vietnam, the land that American war veterans love to hate as a swampy marshland. Reasons for the war are many, like in most wars, ranging from ideological to diplomatic compulsions. Some condemns the long drawn history colonization some attribute it the American external policy of combating communism. Failures are also attributed to the American misunderstanding about the ground realities of Vietnam. However, the most telling image of the Vietnam war is the resistance that the poor, unfed Vietnamese resistance to American aggression. According to Michel Foucault, the post-modern philosopher, power has been pervasive in all societies but its nature and execution has changed in modern societies. The 'juridico-discursive' concept of power (Foucault 1978: 82) in pre-modern societies was consolidated and brought together by a ruling authority implementing total control over the populace by bullying or showing aggressive strength. Since the 17th century, progress of and attention towards people became the main concerns of the state gradually. Gradually, power became integrated in the society and need not need judicial sanction any longer. Power changed its focus from state power to “bio-power”, which controls life’s main attributes like birth, death, illness, health and sexuality. Foucault calls all these social aspects of power 'disciplinary power' through which the human body and life are controlled. Foucault’s idea that the body and sexuality are cultural creates has attracted the modern by relating power with and the body. Some feminists challenge the Foucauldian explanation of power to reduce social agents to passive bodies. They disapprove Foucault’s questioning of the groupings of the subject and agency on the grounds that such doubts undercut the liberating purpose of feminism. On the other hand, there are feminists to contend that in his late work builds up a healthier explanation of subjectivity and defiance which, even as having its own problem, however has plenty to proffer to feminist politics (Rabinow, 1984). The exertion of power in the society is apparent most in the context of social powers on women. Yet, resistance to the wielding of power over women has gained ground over the last hundred years or so. The realization that economic and social rights are in fact linked with political and civil rights have been translated in the sphere of demand for gender justice. The dichotomies of women’s rights surfaced aggressively through the demands for mainstreaming of gender issues, that is, the conviction that women’s rights are no different from human rights in other spheres like health, education, freedom and justice. It is realized that without the right to legal claims, women could not expect to receive justice in settlements like land, property or divorce. Without literacy and education, women did not have the understanding of their rights. And, women had a right to motherhood as much as the choice for the number of children to bear and the right to a healthy life (UNRISD, 2000). The conservative approach to gender issues, however, concerned themselves with women’s ‘needs’ and not ‘rights’. There was a deliberate denial of approaching problems of sexual and reproductive health, or lack of access to safe and clean drinking water, sanitation, healthcare and education as matters of infrastructure inadequacies and hence denial of human rights and distributive justice. Women’s activists, on the other hand, considered women’s legal rights and the indivisibility of human rights in gender lines as fundamental to enable women to participate fully in the economic and social framework (UNRISD, 2000). Today, much of the world’s declining resources could be traced to countries that the West defines as “underdeveloped” and are populated by indigenous people who are displaced due to the expansionist ambitions of large international corporations and their exertion of power over the rest of the world. The World Trade Organization and other financial institutes of trade and finance have created the rules of trade to make it easier for these corporate resource-hunters to speed up the displacement of local people from the native lands and resulting into millions of refugees (Mander, Tauli-Corpuz eds, 2006). This disgraceful situation, by its turn, is also giving birth to certain kind of terrorism in those lands that seek vengeance to as a payback to the wealthy and affluent societies that they equate with those multi-national companies. It has been observed that prolonged poverty and domination trigger despair leading to insurgency and terrorism. Such situations deprive people of their own rights and possibilities turning nations into terrorist enrolling places. Governments in underdeveloped countries every now and then manifest their politically and economically closed attitudes provoking misery amongst its people who gradually increase in number only to become easy recruits to the terrorist cause (Mander, Tauli-Corpuz eds, 2006). The experience of Afghanistan points toward the fact that isolated areas of poorer countries are the most fruitful regions of terrorist fervor. Countries become susceptible to terrorist rebellion when the rates of unemployment soar, mostly among males aged 15 to 35 as has been verified frequently with feeble and weakening states. Mercenaries are recruited from the ranks of agitated, unemployed youths simply seduced into crimes holding up terrorism. The menace of terrorism increases when government institutions and the services have only a weak presence also breeding in a country where the people have a corrupted government. Finally, education is one of the strongest weapons against terrorism and the battle against fanatical Islami militants can be won over provided programs can be planned for the Muslim world to counteract the challenge posed by radical Islam. Such schools that teach fundamentalism and terrorism are rampant in countries like Afghanistan and Pakistan, where the public education system is scrawny (Natsios, 2004). Thus, through the history of mankind, it has been seen that where there is power, resistance follows. Power and resistance have occurred in sequence or simultaneously in the economic, political and social spheres. Whether it is imperial power – like the British rule in India or the French rule in Vietnam – or aggressive post-colonial power – the United States in Vietnam or Afghanistan, resistance movements have grown to fight the power. State powers like autocracies or communism have been defeated through resistance movements, often forming new power equations. Nationalist movements have been the natural result in order to resist power. Similarly, resistance to power has been evident in racial movements like those of the African Americans against white domination. In the modern times, however, power has taken various subdued form, for example through the exertion of power denying gender justice or equality for all humans. However, even here resistance has found its way through feminist movements or through terrorist organizations fighting political and economic injustice. Works Cited Coser, Lewis A.  (1977)  Masters of Sociological Thought: Ideas in Historical and Social Context, second edition.  New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Foucault, Michel (1978). The History of Sexuality, translated by R. Hurley, Penguin Books, 1978 Hallam, Jennifer. Slavery and the Making of America, Historical overview. http://www.pbs.org/wnet/slavery/experience/family/history.html Mander, Jerry, Tauli-Corpu, Victoria, eds (2006) Paradigm Wars: Indigenous Peoples' Resistance to Globalization, Sierra Club Books; 1 edition Natsios, Andrew (2004) Fighting Terror with Aid: Underlying Conditions that Foster Terrorism, Europe, Vol. 26 (3) - Fall, retrieved from Harvard International Review, http://hir.harvard.edu/articles/1271/ Rabinow, P ed. (1984) Foucault Reader, NY: Pantheon Tucker, Spencer C. (1999) Vietnam, UCL Press. London. Winthrop, Jordan (1974) The White Man’s Burden: Historical Origins of Racism in the United States, Oxford University Press United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD) (2000). Gender Justice, Development and Rights: Substantiating Rights in a Disabling Environment, 3 June. Retrieved from http://www.pogar.org/publications/other/unrisd/gender.pdf Read More