Abstract: Historical Agency in the Imperial Order

This paper explores the possibility for social change in the imperial order. The warfare state and military industrial complex are based on accumulating distinct sources of power. The accumulation of power to resist this system depends on power accumulation systems. I show how power to demilitarize can be accumulated, the barrier to deploying such power accumulation systems, and how barriers can be overcome.

Theorists like Bourdieu point to distinct kinds of power that represent a complex of capitals or power sources that reproduce and legitimate power relations and support the existing social order. Michael Mann argues that diverse sources of power organize society and are negotiated in the realm of international relations and state power projection across international boundaries. The Bourdieu view, however, has been challenged by other writers like Aronowitz who claim that it is ahistorical and fails to show how different “social formations” or power blocks are organized over time. These social formations constitutes classes, are based on coalitions and political or “class struggles.”

In the face of concentrated militarist power, the essential and usually ignored question is how power can be accumulated. This question of power was essential to the discourse developed by C. Wright Mills, a discourse that Aronowitz charges has been ignored by pluralist theorists on the right and deconstructionist cultural studies and postmodernist academics on the Left.

The key sources of power accumulation discussed include interventions in design (of social movements, technologies, firms); electronic and media networks (that overcome spatial and intellectual atomization); dealienation processes (from various forms of capital, e.g. cooperatives); exchange systems (which transform various forms of capital) and crises (which create topical openings or opportunities).

The key barriers to accumulating power through these processes are based on several factors. These include: a turn towards deconstruction as opposed to reconstruction; intellectual atomization which fragments the ability to address diverse sources of power and how they can be exchanged; filtering systems (such as foundations, social democratic parties, and the established mass media) which block comprehensive and favor ad hoc approaches.

Using historical examples, the paper hypothesizes that such barriers can be overcome by: exploring the intellectual archaelogy of reconstructionism, by developing social innovations that exchange capitals, and by creating a dual power system using ju jitsu extensions of established power, e.g. green corporatism, leveraged media spectacles, and town meeting democratic spaces. I will discuss case studies related to these interventions.

Jonathan Michael Feldman

Historical Agency in the Imperial Order

Stockholm University

Email: JonathanMFeldman@gmail.com