Okay, so let's move to power over. This is a more kind of hierarchical dynamic, the power possessed by some wielded over others. It necessarily implies that power is going to be unequally distributed.
So how do we respond to unequal distributions of power? As I argued in the last one, power two is kind of unequally distributed as well, but we tend to see this more explicitly, right? And so these can be disparities in resources and influence and knowledge.
Again, knowledge not being just the absence of knowledge, but the active production of one form of knowledge that excludes others. And so this is the way it becomes embedded in our structures and institutions. This is classic elite theory of politics, right?
Is that the iron law of oligarchy, it's Michel's, is that no matter how big the group, there is always going to be a small group of insiders who are actually running things. right? That it always functions this way.
So this elite theory has, you know, two groups in society, why only two? I guess because the West likes binary simplifications, between haves and haves nots, which I don't know that, I mean, we'll get into this next one, but by power, but sure, let's go with this, right? Let's go with this. And so elites occupy powerful positions in key institutions, such as military, religion, economy, politics, and culture.
And then the question is, is this kind of inevitable in structures of institutions and authority, right? During the Occupy protests, they were trying to be radically democratic. And so you do things like twinkles and downs for agreeing and disagreeing. And you try to have everyone participate in the process in order to do that. But then the question becomes like, I don't.
I don't know. It goes back to questions like leadership, right? Like, do we need leadership? How does leadership happen?
And then there's always going to be a set of a group of people who produce this. And so this is one that I keep running into, which I think is interesting, because Larry Summers, I think I've got a clip of him with Jon Stewart in a minute. And this is him. This is a speech he gives to like people of influence and power. So Giannis Varoufakis, I can always mess up his name.
He was the Greek finance minister during the time. a financial crisis in Greece. And he said that Summers came and gave him this speech.
And Elizabeth Warren, who doesn't get along with Summers, was given this speech as well. She says this in her book, A Fighting Chance. And she says, Larry's tone was in the friendly advice category. He teed it up this way. I had a choice.
I could be an insider. I could be an outsider. Outsiders can say whatever they want, but the people on the inside don't listen to them. Insiders, however, get lots of access and a chance to push their ideas to people, powerful people listen to what they say. But insiders also understand one unbreakable rule.
They don't criticize other insiders, which is gross. It's just gross. It's gross because this is how bad stuff happens.
This is how you get bad cultures of leadership, bad environments, bad places. This is not because, you know, there's. you have to have the free expression of ideas. This reproduces dominance and reflects those values.
And so I just grabbed this one. I mean, I could have grabbed any. This is just John Stewart talking with Larry Summers about these types of things.
So we'll see what happens here. We'll see if these insider outsider opinions come through. I think it does a bit, right?
I mean, let's be fair. Isn't this show going to be on Apple TV? Correct. And I think Apple TV is worth about five times as much as Exxon.
I think Apple's price, since the stimulus began, Apple's value has... gone up by about 1.2 trillion dollars. So he's making the argument, Summers is making the argument against Stewart as him being an insider or part of an elite group because Apple is one of the richest companies on the planet. $4,000 for every American, just an increase in the value of Apple. You just made my point for me.
Do you feel that Apple is somehow gouging or doing something wrong? Yes, of course. And Exxon is, and Mobil is. Let's talk about Apple.
Do you think Apple should just sell phones for less and not have enough phones? What would you... What would you have Apple do? You're saying to me, John, market forces are market forces.
And if demand goes up, are you suggesting, young man, that Apple should charge less than they could charge? Let me flip that on you. When there's a tightness in the labor market, what you're saying is the workers shouldn't do the same.
That the workers just following the same capitalistic principles that allow Apple to charge more for their phones shouldn't charge more because wage inflation is driving inflation. That's not at all what I'm saying, John. That's exactly what you're saying.
Every worker should get as high a wage as they can. It would be a terrible idea. But the Fed is going to intervene. The Fed is going to intervene to make that money.
not possible. And so this is the problem of societies is that the question is, we don't need to get into it. But the idea here is that if the government has a key role and a key decision to make, and in this case, they're referencing interest rates, but it really doesn't matter, that it has to make a decision about whether it's going to help insiders or outsiders.
And Summers as an insider says, insiders don't listen to outsiders, insiders don't criticize each other. And therefore, the insiders are going to make decisions that benefit benefit insiders, Apple investors, all the rest of it that make a trillion dollars during COVID. What Stuart's trying to get at is the idea, well, maybe government should be in the interest of the outsiders, not the insiders. And so the question becomes, when we're talking politics, and when we're back to this Machiavellian stuff, does the Machiavellian principle... Fight against the liberal democratic principle, right, of the idea that, no, we should do what benefits everybody to make everybody in that who votes benefit from the voting.
Or should the voting only reflect the interests and power of those. elites who run the show. And so it becomes this problem.
And this is how we end up immediately here with power over. You can do it as an elite theory, but more easily you can do it as a Marxist theory, right? So which is the classes. Now, power unequally distributed between different classes. kind of misses the point because absolutely it is about distribution.
But remember back to the discussion from Lenin, the idea that Lenin was arguing, it's not that the distribution of resources are... unequal, it's that they are utilized in conflictual ways. So the distribution of resources weaponized against one another. And so if the elites are weaponizing against the masses, the masses should weaponize against the elites. Conflict.
Not just unequal distribution of resources, but conflict that comes from that unequal distribution of resources. And so this class conflict is bound up in the rise of capitalism. and the exploitation of the proletariat by the bourgeoisie. We don't have to get into that. But what the idea here is that as a political analysis, then what these frameworks are doing is they're saying that class struggle, the struggle between these two groups, the attacks on one another, explains historical oppression and resistance.
It can actually explain history. So the history, the fight between these two. is what actually explains history. Everybody else is telling you either the history of the elite rulers, so back to who won the empire, or it's telling the marginalized oppression of those people as a mechanism to make those people rise up and overthrow the system. And so I've been dealing with this lately, thinking about a system where a state restricts compensation to those who create value for private owners.
where there are businesses that compete in that system with a regulated system that pays for employment. And so this could sound like a lot of things. This could have plantation overtones and all the rest of it.
I'm in this case just using what's happening to media and in particular, TikTok. TikTok in the Canadian state, we don't have a creator's fund. So in the Canadian system, we have states making decisions. Because of all sorts of things about how people would get remunerated and how that remuneration would happen. That that remuneration can't or doesn't happen in Canada.
It could be a corporate decision because of the legal regulatory environment. Or because the state hasn't passed a law saying that if you're a TikTok creator, you should be compensated for your creation. But that this platform. Is now sucking all of the advertising revenue away from traditional forms of media, TV, social media, all the rest of that, and is now competing directly with those forms of media where you have to pay people to write TV, produce TV, where they had.
realistic sources of income for jobs. And now you have the free creation of this thing that this company is making billions of dollars of advertising on and not remunerating anyone for that work. And so this weird system is one where, I mean, I could better capture this than a meme, right? That the idea of what technology innovation is, is often exploiting the lack of state regulation or forcing.
cab companies to compete directly with Uber. So you have a heavily regulated sector that has to compete with a sector that uses the internet to pay whatever it can or whatever it wants, or irregular work versus regular work, right? Bonus app.
And so you've got hotel chains competing with Airbnb. But you see over time how the initial subsidy of these by innovation tech startup Venture capitalist funds, in the case of Uber, spending billions of dollars per year without making a profit is them competing directly with an industry that has been heavily regulated in order to make it fair and redistributive in all sorts of ways. The benefits, society and all the rest of that and how we've come up with those systems. And then we've got things like, I've got a paper on cryptocurrency at Crypto Bros. I'm not targeting you, but now we're kind of safe to do so because the...
FTX in the crash. That this idea or the plagiarism machine, which is what we're in now, where chat GPT, AI, Bards, all the rest of that are fundamentally undermining the ability of education as it traditionally stands. That's fine.
I mean, you have to accommodate these changes. But the idea then of these systems competing with systems that have to remunerate is very weird. And so this Class analysis then gets framed by the textbook in a way that I'm not comfortable with. So we can be sympathetic to the class analysis, but I'm critical of it as well.
Because what it does is it does the technique of elites, which is say, hey, you workers, you're not thinking enough about racism or about sexism or about misogyny and all the rest of it. So you have to pick one over the other. And so the weird part of this is, Do we think that we could avoid the discussion of capitalism entirely?
Like that somehow capitalism doesn't intersect with feminist questions or questions of race or racial capitalism? All of these other questions. And so the textbook gave me these slides to ask you as a class, do we think class conflict is more important than other forms of conflict in contemporary society? Or other forms?
of oppression, sexism, colonialism, heteronormativity, racism more significant? I'm not going to ask you that question because it's pitting people against each other. It's fundamentally wrong to frame it in those terms. I think there's absolutely the value in asking all of those questions and we don't need to prioritize one over the other, but framing it in that way is a form of elite divide and conquer rule, right?
That we... don't need to build a single consensus that we can dissensus, we can challenge those questions. And the way that we would do that would be pretty simple.
I just added these in, right? So, I mean, surely there is no class that is not raced. There is no class that is not sexualized that doesn't deal with gender dynamic. It's all bound up in the same stuff, right?
So we can talk about feminist forms of social reproduction, the way that homemaking, child rearing care work often involves no remuneration. And there have been lots of proposals. in Canada in the 70s and with UBI and all the rest of it, that like if you're staying home to socially reproduce the next generation or the last generation, you're taking care of elderly parents or you're taking care of the kids for the future, you should be remunerated because society benefits. The labor market benefits from that work you're doing that you're not getting remunerated for.
So it's both class and feminist questions. And there's lots of feminist political economy dealing with ideas of social reproduction. How does reproduction happen? How do societies reproduce and who gets remunerated for that reproduction?
How do they do so? We know how much to charge for social reproduction. You just put your kids in daycare.
That's the cost. And when you do it at home, you don't get paid for it, which is weird, right? Because we know how much it costs.
And so this is why we get things like efforts to make universal childcare something that everybody can afford, right? A conscious state decision to do that. We can do this in D...
colonial dispossession, the elimination of languages, culture, and being as ways of improvement, as the idea that we have to develop areas that aren't properly developed, as if that development doesn't result in unequal elites making money off the extinguishment of these other ways of being, right? We can do legacies of slavery, transatlantic slave trade, and these plantation structures and ownership. We only have to look at that only recently revising the end.
NCAA in the US about the idea of these media companies making billions of dollars off of the working, laboring, often injuring bodies of young individuals that are raced in specific ways that don't get remunerated, right? So now we have name image likeness, like in 2020, we're now finally starting to pay people for something that Another group is making billions of dollars off of, right? So these structures are built in. And then the idea of normalcy of bodies, so talking about ableism and ability and how we construct what is, you know, phenotypical characteristics, birthplace, ethno-religious identities, presenting the ways in which we present gender as things that we normalize or allow access to or not.
So in the case of Florida, all of the gender affirming care being wiped out is a way of using the state to reflect power and interest, which also... wipes out all that section of the economy. And so those can be class and interest based as well.
There's, we can do these as supplemental, we don't have to do them as oppositional. So it's, it's a weird move to make it oppositional, which goes back to, I think, the original, the original framing here of reflecting this elite theory. So elite theory, and this is the kind of, you know, Pauli said loves the meta. This framing is an elite theory of philosophy.
class analysis, which isn't fair. And there's lots of ways that we can look at the intersections here. I just grabbed a bunch of books, right?
The ways in which we can do all these analysis in real time with the, I pulled these, these are all within the last, I think, three or four years, 2019 on, all about how the ways in which structures that we've built that are new and innovative, just reproduce very old problems and ideas, right? This one, Invisible Women, just dealing with the idea of the ways in which like, things like we didn't for the longest time, you know, test whether drugs had differential impacts on bodies of presenting as women or crash test dummies being different sizes, different heights and different weights, stuff like that. It's wild. This results in direct women's deaths. We quantify this.
It's very quantified. The ways in which racism in our data sets reproduces hierarchies and normalcies, the ways in which design frames these things, the ways in which some way of being or thinking. or some way of expressing yourself gets challenged in all these different forms. And so thinking about this in this really, the textbook does these really abstract terms, we can think about how these class struggles are presented all the time. This is just me doing it.
These are just memes. This is I'm 14 and this is deeper. This is, you know, late stage capitalism on Reddit.
These are just memes that express how the ways in which, you know, the class warfare is being framed in very specific ways. The idea that You know, millennials are killing genes like buffalo, wild wings and apple bees, and then boomers are killing the planet. So this is setting off these groups against each other, this ageist kind of class warfare. Or the ways in which, you know, donations or helping is framed as beneficial, even though it's reflecting very specific interests.
Or the ways in which climate change is framed as individual choices versus the idea that it's a very elites making a lot of the decisions about. global greenhouse gases, or the idea that we could expose these elites and literally nothing happens as a consequence. We can have all of these campaigns by people who have the resources, who claim that if they're given frameworks for feeding the world's poor, they will do it.
And then given those frameworks, just simply say, well, everybody else should do it, right? So the celebrity appeals. These ideas of The systems by which wealth is created off of the life experience of some bodies, and yet our political systems are concerned with other issues.
The ways in which the extremism of some of these claims, in one context, is perfectly normal in others, right? That the ideas that we can just look at the numbers in terms of questions like CEO compensation. and say, well, are our political structures representing everyone or elites, the group of elites?
Or we can make democratic decisions to make sure that people become elites, or that we can have things that are holdovers from previous eras that are something now, literally, somebody got in a Twitter fight about this, about the idea, well, you don't need libraries because you've got Amazon. Or that somehow that we should be fighting about who is represented when the concept of linear time means that younger people by definition should be. I mean, we know that the systems of representation are dramatically skewed towards different groups.
Or the ways in which we valorize the accomplishments of some but not the others. Or the ways in which we frame the idea of... having to shut down prisons as being a lack of the success of the system versus something we should aspire to, or the idea that we have a different set of rules, right? Like, any punishment that is a fine is only a cost of doing business.
If it involves the loss of liberty, it's fair. But if it doesn't involve the loss of liberty, then it's just a cost of doing business. And so when we think about these things, and we think about the differential impacts, we also have to think about the resources that each group has in order to weather those impacts and how those questions are framed, and how we get to talk about, and this is what power is all about, how we get to talk about and blame what the problems are for these issues.
And so that's what we'll deal with, specifically how these come about in the next section.