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Ideals of justice may do little toward the correction of injustice in real life. The influence of John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice has led some philosophers of race to focus on “nonideal theory” as a way to bring conditions in unjust societies closer to conditions of justice described by ideal theory. However, a more direct approach to injustice may be needed to address unfair public policy and existing conditions for minorities in racist societies. Applicative justice describes the applications of principles of justice that are now “good enough” for whites to nonwhites (based on prior comparisons of how whites and nonwhites are treated). Social information just dribbles in, bit by bit, and we simply get used to it. A single story about a person really hits home at once, but the grinding injustices of daily life are endured. It is easy to ignore them and we do. Judith Shklar, The Faces of Injustice (Shklar 1990, 110) IDEAL theory about justice extends from Plato’s Republic to John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice, including many careers devoted to analyses and criticism about such texts in political philosophy. Rawls offers a picture of the basic institutional structures of a just society, on the premise that in order to correct injustice, we must first know what justice is. According to Rawls, while “partial compliance theory” studies the principles that govern how we are to deal with injustice, full compliance theory, or ideal theory, studies the institutional principles of justice in a stable society where citizens obey the law. Rawls began A Theory of Justice with the claim: “The reason for beginning with ideal theory is that it provides, I believe, the only basis for the systematic grasp of these more pressing problems” (Rawls 1971, 8). Rawls’s ideal theory is too abstract to correct injustice or provide justice for victims of injustice in reality, because it is based on a thought experiment and the assumption of a “well-ordered” society in which there already is compliance with law (Zack 2016, 1–64). What people care about in reality concerning justice is not what ideal justice is or would be, but how immediate injustice can be corrected. Injustice is always specific in concrete events that are recognizable as certain types, for example, theft, murder, or police racial profiling. Injustice can be corrected by punishing those responsible for it in specific cases and instituting social changes that prevent or reduce future occurrences of the same type. Rawlsian nonideal theories of justice, constructed for societies where people do not comply with just laws, rely on ideal theory as a standard for just institutional structures. The main question driving nonideal theory is how to construct a model or picture of justice that will result in the future correction or avoidance of present injustices. John Simmons quotes John Rawls from Law of Peoples, on this matter. Nonideal theory asks how this long-term goal might be achieved, or worked toward, usually in gradual steps. It looks for courses of action that are morally permissible and politically possible as well as likely to be effective [LOP p. 89]. (Simmons 2010, 7) However, injured or indignant parties may not care about the long-term goal of justice that could lead to balance or compensation for their situations. Not only are what P. F. Strawson (1962) called “reactive attitudes,” such as moral indignation, blame, and a desire for deserved punishment, strong in their focus on injustice, but the best theory of justice in the world does not tell us what to do about the injustices we are faced with in the here and now, especially “the more pressing problems” of race-related injustices. Such questions cannot be answered with reference to ideal theory or some application of ideal or nonideal theory to their concrete situations, because the a priori nature of both of these does not provide a fit with specific contingencies—ideal and nonideal theories do not generate practical bridge principles. As theories, they posit ideal entities, but without the apparatus of scientific theories which provides connections to observable entities or events. (Moulines 1985). The correction of injustice or injustice theory requires a philosophical foundation for itself. Models of justice have often been naïvely utopian throughout the history of philosophy, because they are based on an assumption of automatic total compliance, as though the right words or pictures by themselves have the power to transform reality, or as though agreement with those right words or pictures will automatically result in action that will automatically make the world instantiate those words or pictures. When they are not fantastically and ineffectively utopian in this way, such models have been used to justify the already-existing dominance of some groups over others. (A prime example is John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government, written decades before 1688 Glorious Revolution, to express the interests of the new rising class of landed gentry, which were eventually fulfilled by a Protestant king on the throne and a strong representative parliament after that revolution [Laslett 1988].) Models of justice have legitimately served to inspire law in modern societies with government constitutions and national and local law. But, sometimes, as in US founding documents, although universal and absolute justice is proclaimed, subsequent events make it clear that this language was intended to legitimize just treatment for members of selected groups only, that is, white male property owners, at first. As a result of just law and its selective application, over time, there comes to be justice for an expanding group, but still not everyone in society. However, what is written, together with descriptions of real justice for some, can be a powerful lever for obtaining justice for at least some of the excluded. To understand how that works, it is necessary to develop an approach to justice that begins with injustice, in real situations where there is already some degree of justice in a larger whole. The extension of existing practices of justice to members of new groups is applicative justice, a concept with substantial historical and intellectual precedent, although not by that name. In what follows, more will be said about the idea of applicative justice and then its history will be considered. Voting rights and housing rights are examples of candidates for applicative justice in our time. Finally, content in the form of narrative may be motivational for social change. The Idea of Applicative Justice Applicative justice is an approach to justice with the goal of making the unjust treatment of some comparable to those who already receive just treatment. Applicative justice takes a comparative approach, for example, comparing how young black males are treated by police officers in contemporary US society, to how young white males are treated (Jones 2013; Zack 2013, 2015). Applicative justice rests on a pragmatic approach to social ills, which includes the premise, based on Arthur Bentley’s 1908 insights in The Process of Government, that government is much more than the apparatus of state and written laws and court decisions. Government is an extended, dynamic process, an ongoing contention among interest groups in society. This full-bodied, empirical and pragmatic view of government process entails, for example, that we consider as parts of the same political mix/phenomenon/raw material all of the foregoing: the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments, the 1960s Civil Rights Legislation, doctrines of probable cause, the disproportionate incarceration of African Americans, racial profiling, and police homicide with impunity. Thus, Rawls’s insistence that “the rights secured by justice are not subject to political bargaining or to the calculus of social interests” (Rawls 1971, 4), should be understood as “the rights secured by justice should not be subject to political bargaining or to the calculus of social interests.” In reality, “the rights secured by justice” are constantly subject to political bargaining and the living calculus of social interests. One consequence of this empirical perspective is that moral outrage, critiques of white supremacy, or analyses of white privilege, along with other forms of blame, cannot be assumed to have the power to change anything, by themselves. By contrast, changing relationships between police officers and their local communities, or changing the rules of engagement when police stop or attempt to stop suspects, might on this view have some causal power (Ayres and Markovits 2014). It is important to realize that such changes in practice would not be specific applications of a theory of justice, but ways of changing social reality into a different political mix. However, a better theory of justice, even a more racially egalitarian one and even a theory of applicative justice that was widely accepted, would still be no more than a change in what Bentley calls “political content.” Any theory of justice or any set of just laws is compatible with widespread racially unequal and unjust practice. And the converse also holds. Unjust laws or laws with gaps for unjust practice are compatible with just practice. Thus, applicative justice is pragmatic in taking the whole political mix/ phenomenon/raw material as its subject for a specific injustice. Unlike ideal or nonideal justice theory, the applicative justice approach brooks little faith that reality can be changed by a special conceptual space or mode of critical moral discourse that is undertaken apart from reality. Reality cannot be changed by normative pronouncements, by or on behalf of the oppressed, but only by shifts in existing interests of groups of real people. To base hopes for change on normative content alone may paralyze [eliminate] the means for taking action that could result in change, because such content proceeds as though matters of justice were only matters of argument. Those who have opposed social racial justice have understood this well enough, because instead of mainly arguing against new just law over the twentieth century, they have taken action to block progress. Race and Justice Consideration of race and injustice together, within political philosophy, focuses on the need for specific groups to not be treated unjustly. For a group to be treated justly, a large number of its members need to be treated justly. But for a group to be treated unjustly, it is sufficient if a smaller number or lower proportion than required to meet the standard of just treatment be treated unjustly. One reason for this asymmetry is that just treatment is easily normalized within communities, whereas unjust treatment of only a few is disruptive and considered abnormal among other members of the group to which victims belong (although not necessarily by members of groups who are generally treated justly). The unjust treatment of a small number ripples from their friends and relations to other members of the same group, who realize that they are subject to similar unjust treatment from their membership in that group alone. More broadly, if the group treated justly and the group treated unjustly belong to the same larger collective, such as whites and blacks in the United States, then the unjust treatment of even a very small number of that total collective of residents or citizens should be disruptive to the whole collective, given promulgated principles of “justice for all.” But that does not always happen, at least not in ways that result in real change. Apathy and self-absorption of those not treated unjustly is part of the reason, although another significant part is that the group treated justly already knows that the national collective rhetoric of justice is intended to apply primarily to them. It is that kind of disparate treatment, which does not disrupt everyone, even though it should, which calls for a theory of applicative justice, on the abstract level where people call for justice. But applicative justice is not only an abstract theory. Applicative justice requires comparisons of group treatment. If minorities are treated unjustly, a description of that injustice does not require an ideal or nonideal theory or model of justice, but simply a comparison with how the majority is treated. (The term “minorities” refers to those disadvantaged or oppressed, because sometimes minorities are greater in number than “majorities,” e.g., blacks under apartheid in South Africa, American slaves in some Southern states, or black Americans in some twenty-first-century cities.) The principles and mechanics of justice that work well enough for most white Americans need to be applied to nonwhite Americans. For rhetorical purposes, it might be evocative to talk about black lives or black rights, but strictly speaking the subject is a racial framework that is color-blind in an important part of law—constitutional amendments and federal legislation—but not in reality. This gap between written law and social reality can be viewed as hypocrisy, racial bias, or white supremacy, only if one assumes that written law is an accurate description of, or blueprint for, social reality. But a perspective that takes in the whole process of government reveals that the gap and what is permissible within it, are parts of the same whole process. The contrast between blueprints and maps is important to consider. Political philosophers often proceed as though their writings about justice are blueprints, when they should instead begin by constructing maps. Present politics or a political party in power may present obstacles and challenges to applicative justice in any specific case. Those who aim for applicative justice must struggle against such obstacles and challenges, as well as the ignorance, prejudice, and ill will of large parts of voting publics under democratic government, and in addition, media misrepresentations, business interests in a status quo, and lack of understanding of oppression by those who are treated unjustly. For example, the injustice in the disproportionately large number of African Americans in the US criminal justice system has been supported by law-and-order politics, the War on Drugs, belief in racial gender myths (e.g., the larger-than-life black rapist), explicit racism, media sensationalism of crime committed by black men, profits made by for-profit prison corporations, and embrace of self-destructive subcultures by some black men who become incarcerated. At the same time, as an efficient cause or precipitating factor, ongoing racial profiling by police helps feed the system with new suspects, about 90 percent of whom plead guilty in preference to the risks and costs of a trial (Kerby 2013; Rakoff et al. 2014). Intergenerational poverty, unemployment, and undereducation contain people within this system, and the high rates of nonwhites in the prison population are used as official justification for racial profiling (Zack 2015, chap 2). Thus, the complexity of causes and background factors associated with the disproportionate number of African American male prison inmates can be understood through a number of approaches. The normative approach of applicative justice would be to address those causes or factors, distinctly and individually, through specific changes in concrete practice, as well as changes in law, as relevant.

(Laura, Dr. Laura Zanotti is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Virginia Tech, 12/30/13, Center for the Study of Developing Societies, “Governmentality, Ontology, Methodology: Re-thinking Political Agency in the Global World”)

In summary, in non-substantialist frameworks, agency is conceptualized as modest and multifar- ious agonic interactions, localized tactics, hybridized engagement and redescriptions, a series of uncertain and situated responses to ambiguous discourses and practices of power aimed at the con- struction of new openings, possibilities and different distributive processes, the outcomes of which are always to an extent unpredictable. Political agency here is not imagined as a quest for individual authenticity in opposition to a unitary nefarious oppressive Leviathan aimed at the creation of a ‘‘better totality’’ where subjects can float freed of ‘‘oppression,’’ or a multitude made into a unified ‘‘subject’’ will reverse the might of Empire and bring about a condition of immanent social justice. By not reifying power as a script and subject as monads endowed with freedom non-substantialist positions open the way for conceptualizing political agency as an engagement imbricated in praxis. The ethical virtue that is called for is ‘‘pragmatist humility,’’ that is the patience of playing with the cards that are dealt to us, enacting redescriptions and devising tactics for tinkering82 with what exists in specific contexts. Conclusion In this article, I have argued that, notwithstanding their critical stance, scholars who use governmen- tality as a descriptive tool remain rooted in substantialist ontologies that see power and subjects as standing in a relation of externality. They also downplay processes of coconstitution and the impor- tance of indeterminacy and ambiguity as the very space where political agency can thrive. In this way, they drastically limit the possibility for imagining political agency outside the liberal straight- jacket. They represent international liberal biopolitical and governmental power as a homogenous and totalizing formation whose scripts effectively oppress ‘‘subjects,’’ that are in turn imagined as free ‘‘by nature.’’ Transformations of power modalities through multifarious tactics of hybridiza- tion and redescriptions are not considered as options. The complexity of politics is reduced to homo- genizing and/or romanticizing narratives and political engagements are reduced to total heroic rejections or to revolutionary moments.

Counter-power is power in two directions: it is power in that it implies the regulation of people towards its strategies, occasioning its own sub-resistance, and it is power in that it is acting upon the actions of agents outside its own strategy, in attempting to retard or change the behaviour of people perpetrating the strategies of power it opposes. Clearly, counter-power can-not hope to abolish power per se, or even to be implacably opposed to it, since it is itself power! Might it not be possible however to constitute resistance in such a way as to utterly refuse and exclude power, and thus eventually abolish it? Hardly, since to utterly annihilate power would mean nothing less than the destruction of all actions upon actions. It cannot be done by appealing to a higher action upon actions that will keep power in check, since that would of course itself still be power, hence the abnegation of total freedom. The complete disappearance of Foucaultian power relations would seem to require nothing less than the total abolition of sociality: Power relations are rooted deep in the social nexus, not a supplementary structure over and above “society” whose radical effacement one could perhaps dream of. To live in society is, in any event, to live in such a way that some can act on the actions of others. (EW3 343) Hence Foucault’s injunction that “we must stop imagining that we can escape power relations at a stroke, globally, massively, by a kind of radical rupture” (DE2 542), since “there is not then with power relations any one site of the great refusal, no soul of revolt, base of all rebellions, or pure law Resistance 113 of the revolutionary” (VS 126; cf. WK 95–96). Hence, anarchism, qua the project of abolishing government, is a kind of fantasy that belies the real reasons for its existence, which is always in fact the opposition to a real, proximal repression: in the discussion after a 1978 lecture in Paris, Foucault declares, I do not think that the will not to be governed at all is something that could be considered an originary aspiration. I think that, in fact, the will not to be governed is always the will not to be governed like this, in this way, by these people, at this price. As for resolving not to be governed at all, it would seem to me to be some kind of philosophical and theoretical paroxysm of something that would be this will not to be governed relatively speaking. (Foucault 1990, 59; cf. PT 72–73) However, he in fact goes on to make clear that, while he does not endorse a “fundamental anarchism,” that is opposed to government, he does not “absolutely exclude it” either. Such anarchism, though “fundamental,” is merely opposition to “all governmentalisation” (Foucault 1990, 59), not opposition to power per se. Foucault clearly had certain anarchist tendencies; like Nietzsche (Z:1 “The New Idol”), Foucault (2005, 128) has a keen mistrust of “this monstrosity we call the state,” and at times he does indeed seem to endorse a fight against power itself, as in this excerpt from a 1980 interview: We have to rise up against all forms of power—but not just power in the narrow sense of the word, referring to the power of a government or of one social group over another: these are only a few particular in-stances of power. (Foucault 1988, 1) 2 Yet, here Foucault does not mean that we must rise up against power itself, but rather that every form which does occur must be fought against. Anarchists, on the other hand, as Todd May (1994, 65) has put it, assume as an a priori that power itself must be fought against. 3 The difference is that the Foucaultian aim of fighting against specific forms of power isnot to get rid of power forever, but only to modify the network of power relations in such a way as to change the power with which we are at that moment concerned. As May puts it, the problem with the anarchist attitude, and the reason it is an a priori, is that their opposition to power is not based on an assessment of the tactical situation. Total opposition to power does not allow us to pick our battles, but rather condemns all power by way of a norm of the abolition of power relations which is thoroughly unachievable.

The reasoning that leads to this justification of UBI begins from a Negrian analysis of changes that took place during post-Fordism in the relationship between capital and subjectivity. This analysis is based on a particular interpretation of the Marxian idea of “real subsumption”, considered as the primary mode of enhancement of social relations in contemporary capitalism.

While this concept had been described by Marx, in the famous unpublished chapter of Capital, with reference to the socialization of the productive forces and the development of a specific mode of production connected to them, Negri interprets it in the sense of the parasitism and extractivism of capital.

On the other hand, the political instrumentalization of UBI provides some skepticism on the possibilities of implementing a sustainable and comprehensive version of it and some of its emancipatory features. In this sense, UBI needs to face the constant struggle between political parties in democratic nation-states and the difficulty to reach a viable version of UBI. In addition to this, some Marxist scholars have pointed out that UBI is unable to provide an alternative status quobeyond the current capitalist mode of production. Such a reading has also been present in the Foucaldian inquiries on neoliberalism and the role of social policies, in which the later, rather than tackling the causes of inequality and precarity, try to palliate the effects of them resulting in the perpetuation of an unjust society. Indeed, they understand that UBI could be envisioned as a rather conservative and reactionary tool.

Nevertheless, which are the future prospects of a possible implementation of a UBI? An answer that has been briefly sketched in this article has been the possibility of understanding UBI as a human right. Despite the intrinsic difficulties for that foundation from a moral standpoint, the fact is that such a framework could provide a fruitful perspective on how to understand the future of the UBI. Such an understanding is deeply related to the republican view on UBI, a vision that is not only concerned about the negative duties and rights of individuals; but also, in its positive ones related to the political and civic participation. Therefore, UBI can be incorporated inside the democratic form of life described by Rancière that tries to go beyond the neoliberal managerial state, the erosion of the political arena and the extension of the area of politics beyond the limits of the nation-states.

["DESIGNING A BASIC INCOME GUARANTEE: TARGETING, UNIVERSALITY AND OTHER CONSIDERATIONS,” Institute for Economic Justice, October 2021, , Accessed 6/26/23, GDS – PL]

***UBIG – Universal Basic Income Grant

["DESIGNING A BASIC INCOME GUARANTEE: TARGETING, UNIVERSALITY AND OTHER CONSIDERATIONS,” Institute for Economic Justice, October 2021, , Accessed 6/26/23, GDS – PL]

***UBIG – Universal Basic Income Grant

[Mary and Tyler, “Making UBI radical: On the potential for a universal basic income to underwrite transformative and anti-kyriarchal change,” Taylor and Francis Online, March 6th 2023, Accessed via Georgetown Library, GDS – PL]

Conclusion

[Mary and Tyler, “Making UBI radical: On the potential for a universal basic income to underwrite transformative and anti-kyriarchal change,” Taylor and Francis Online, March 6th 2023, Accessed via Georgetown Library, GDS – PL]

A radical position in support of a UBI

[Mary and Tyler, “Making UBI radical: On the potential for a universal basic income to underwrite transformative and anti-kyriarchal change,” Taylor and Francis Online, March 6th 2023, Accessed via Georgetown Library, GDS – PL]

Cash transfers underwriting radical change

In a bio-economic context, instead, the production of added value (wealth) converges ever more with the production and reproduction of social life itself: it thus becomes ever more difficult to keep distinctions among productive, reproductive and unproductive labour. Labour - material, immaterial, cognitive or corporeal - produces and reproduces social life. The progressive in distinction between production and reproduction highlights the incommensurability of time and value. The most clear example is provided by cognitive work, in which the power of science, knowledge, affect ad communication is fundamental for its productivity, but whose source is not definable on individual basis, but only on social basis. It is the result of what Marx names the “general intellect”. According to Marx, at a certain point in capitalistic development (which Marx glimpsed as the future), the powers of labour are infused by the powers of science, communications and language. General intellect is a collective, social intelligence created by accumulated knowledge, techniques and know-how. General intellect is a common good, whose value becomes incommensurable.

Proposition 11:

[Mary and Tyler, “Making UBI radical: On the potential for a universal basic income to underwrite transformative and anti-kyriarchal change,” Taylor and Francis Online, March 6th 2023, Accessed via Georgetown Library, GDS – PL]

Cash transfers and UBI as ‘modest’ (not modern) statecraft

Where there is power, there is resistance, and yet, or rather consequently, this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power. Should we say that we are necessarily “inside” power, that we cannot “escape” it . . . or that . . . power is to be the ruse of history, which always emerges victorious? This is to misunderstand the strictly relational character of power relations. They can only exist via a multiplicity of points of resistance, which play, in power relations, the role of adversary, target, support, or handhold. These points of resistance are present everywhere in the power network. Hence there is with power relations no single locus of great Refusal. . . . Rather there are resistances, which are all special cases: possible, necessary, improbable, spontaneous, savage, solitary, concerted, rampant, violent, irreconcilable, quick to settle, interested, or sacrificial; by definition, they can only exist within the strategic field of power relations. But this does not mean that they are only the backlash or hollow trace of that field, forming, in relation to the basic domination, an under-side that is in the end always passive, doomed to perpetual defeat. Resistances do not depend upon a few heterogeneous principles; but neither are they a lure or promise that is of necessity betrayed. They are the odd term in relations of power; they are inscribed in these relations as an irreducible counterpart. Hence they too are distributed in an irregular fashion: the points, knots, or foci of resistance are spread over time and space at varying densities, at times mobilizing groups or individuals in a definite way, inflaming certain points of the body, certain moments in life, certain types of behaviour. Are there great radical ruptures, or massive binary divisions? Sometimes there are. But more often it is a matter of mobile and transitory points of resistance, introducing into a society cleavages, which shift around, shattering unities and giving rise to regroupings, ploughing through individuals themselves, carving them and re-modelling them, drawing irreducible areas in them, in their bodies and their souls. Just as a network of power relations ultimately forms a thick fabric which traverses apparatuses and institutions, without precisely localising itself in them, so too does the swarming of points of resistance traverse social stratifications and individual unities. And it is doubtless the strategic codification of these points that makes a revolution possible, somewhat similar to the way in which the state relies on the institutional integration of power relationships. (VS 125–27; cf. WK 95–96) It is in this sphere of force relations that we must try to analyze the mechanisms of power. In this way we will escape from the system of Law-and-Sovereign which has captivated political thought for such a long time. And if it is true that Machiavelli was among the few-and this no doubt was the scandal of his "cynicism"-who conceived the power of the Prince in terms of force relationships, perhaps we need to go one step further, do without the persona of the Prince, and decipher power mechanisms on the basis of a strategy that is immanent in force relationships.

Rights for Foucault must thus become the mechanism of refusal of governmental power and, through a process of self-critique in which new forms of being are installed in given emanations of rights, the mechanism for the refusal of set juridical identities through the contestatory repetition and deformation of rights themselves (see Foucault, 1997d: 166).26 It is hopefully clear from the foregoing that Foucault's deployment of rights is neither intended somehow to reinforce existing normative systems nor to make appeals to rights, the recognition of which can easily be accommodated within liberal orthodoxy (which is not of course to assert that some of these claims cannot or do not get politically recup¬erated - see Bailey, 2009). Rather, the deployment of Foucaultian rights as instrument- effects of political struggle is strategic. This is the final element of this second figure of Foucault's theorization of rights. By strategic here I refer to two different aspects of Foucault's approach. First, a strategic deployment of rights is one in which rights are invoked neither as a mechanism of reform nor as a simple appeal to the existing system in and on its own terms, as it were. Rather, borrowing from the critical legal strategy of Emilios Christodoulidis, 'the ''strategic'' imports a specific reflexivity that does not necessarily fall within, but may situate itself incongruently to the spaces, interstices and speaking positions that the system makes available' (Christodoulidis, 2009: 22). Foucault's invocations of rights are strategic in this incongruous sense as they are situated within (the spaces, the available rhetorical tools, and so forth, of) a political formation but are intended to resist and go beyond that formation, to transform it. In locating resistance uneasily within political formations such an understanding of 'strategy' accords both with general Foucaultian insights about the constitutive inextricability of power and resistance, but also with Foucault's more specific comments on what he calls in the first volume of the History of Sexuality the 'rule of double conditioning' (1979: 99-100). This is the second aspect of 'strategy', namely the connection of local tactics of power (and hence resistance) to overall political (again, also, resistant) strategies. In that text Foucault briefly discusses this important connection between tactics and strategy. For Foucault, as Kevin Thompson helpfully explains, 'the tactical and the strategic ... condition one another' and hence resistance can be 'historically situated, local and specific, and politically effective, a challenging of the reign of the strategic as a whole from within this reign itself (2003, 118-119). So, in terms of the argument I am developing here, Foucault's usage of rights is strategic in the (first) sense of being intended to disrupt the system of power in and towards which it is directed and also (in the second sense) of affirming that local interventions and deployments of rights discourse can leverage changes in overall political formations.To take one example, Foucault famously asserted a 'right to suicide' towards the end of his career. In the interview, 'The Risks of Security', for instance, he argued that: 'The idea of bringing individuals and decision centers closer together should imply, at least as a consequence, the recognized right of each individual to kill himself when he wants to under decent conditions' (Foucault, 2000g: 380). He went on immediately to say that:If I won a few billion in the lottery, I would create an institute where people who would liketo die would come spend a weekend, a week, or a month in pleasure, under drugs perhaps, inorder to disappear afterward, as if erased. (2000g: 380)Questioned by the interviewer: 'A right to suicide?' (p. 380, emphasis in original), Foucault simply replied: 'Yes'. Liberal advocacy for the 'right to die', understood either as physician-assisted suicide or euthanasia, is of course well established and has in sev¬eral jurisdictions and at various points in time been legislatively recognized. How, then, does Foucault's mobilization of 'right to die' rhetoric constitute a strategic intervention and how does it seek to position itself incongruently in relation to the institutional spaces of liberalism (or, crucially, of contemporary bio-politics)? In a recent article on this topic, Thomas Tierney neatly illustrates how Foucault diverges from orthodox liberal articulations of the ‘right to die’. In order to do this, Tier- ney reads Foucault’s comments on the ‘right to die’ against the famous intervention of the ‘Dream Team’ (a collection of six eminent liberal/libertarian philosophers, to wit: Ronald Dworkin, Thomas Nagel, Robert Nozick, John Rawls, TM Scanlon and Judith Jarvis Johnson) in their amicus curiae brief in the 1997 US Supreme Court case on assisted suicide, Washington v Glucksberg (see Dworkin et al. 1997). Whereas the latter is ‘concerned with providing to individuals enough control over their deaths so they can avoid a painful and/or degrading demise, while simultaneously maintaining the integrity of juridico-medical authority that is aimed at preserving life’, (Tierney, 2006: 626), Foucault’s deployment of the ‘right to die’ [RTD] is intended to contest the forms of subjectivity produced and required by that very ‘juridico-medical authority’. Under contemporary conditions of bio-politics, that which Tierney calls the ‘juridico-medical order of mod- ernity’, the medically-aware subject is enjoined to police his or her own health such that ‘[r]easonable individuals have been eager participants in this modern project of death deferral’ (Tierney, 2006: 614, 615; see also Thompson, 2004). Under these conditions the standard liberal resort to the dignity of the individual and the autonomous terms under which that individual can exit life do nothing to contest the terms under which that life is bio-politically lived and invested by the institutions of medical power. By contrast, Foucault’s interventions on the ‘right to die’ (read alongside his wider critique of biopolitics) actually entail a ‘fundamental challenge to the juridico-medical complex of modernity’ (Tierney, 2006: 631) by ‘rais[ing] unsettling questions about the very nature of modern subjects’ (Tierney, 2006: 605). The deployment of rights is intended to reflect back, as it were, upon the politicization of life. Foucault’s assertion of a ‘right to die’ is thus intended to problematize the subjective pre-suppositions of medicalized bio-politics (obedience to discourses of death-deferral and medical self-management) by opening up a different perspective upon death in life – that is, the preparation of one’s own death as an aesthetic project (cf. Foucault, 1983: 237). ‘It is quite inconceivable that we not be given the chance’, Foucault writes elsewhere, ‘to prepare ourselves with all the passion, intensity and detail that we wish, including the little extras that we have been dreaming about for such a long time’ (Foucault, 1996: 296–297), that is to make of suicide ‘a fathomless pleasure whose patient and relentless preparation will enlighten all of your life’ (1996: 296). The crux of the difference between the Foucaultian and the liberal articulations of the ‘right to die’ thus resides in life’s preparation for death and, through this late modern melete thanatou, the consequent ‘enlightenment’ in life (read, for Foucault: the disruption of bio-politicized subjectivity). In contrast, ‘by focusing on controlling one’s death [the] liberal perspective does not foster critical reflection upon those convictions by which one lives one’s life, and leaves unchallenged the role of medical authority in shaping those convictions’ (Tierney, 2006: 632). For all its insistence upon the manner of death needing to reflect autonomous decisions concerning the value of life itself (which would seemingly import some critical perspective upon that life), orthodox liberal articulations of the ‘right to die’, like that of the ‘Dream Team’, work to reinforce a bio-political medical apparatus. The liberal narrative reinscribes the death- bound subject of bio-politics in a milieu of suffering (see the pathos-laden conclusion to Dworkin et al., 1997) from which medicine cannot save her and it thus calls upon law and the state to balance the interests of the individual’s dignity against the state’s (bio-political) interest in preserving life. Such an approach leaves unquestioned (indeed, performatively reinforces) the respective roles of law, state and medicine, whereas Foucault’s aesthetic, de-medicalized, anti-statist discourse seeks to subvert or avoid these relations.

A philosophy attending to the acceleration, expansion, irrationalities, interdependencies, and fragilities of late capitalism suggests that we do not know with confidence, in advance of experimental action, just how far or fast changes in the systemic character of neoliberal capitalism can be made. The structures often seem solid and intractable, and indeed such a semblance may turn out to be true. Some may seem solid, infinitely absorptive, and intractable when they’re in fact punctuated by hidden vulnerabilities, soft spots, uncertainties, and potential lines of flight that become appar- ent when they are subjected to experimental action, upheaval, testing, and strain. Indeed no ecology of late capitalism, given the variety of forces to which it is connected by a thousand pulleys, vibrations, impingements, de- pendencies, shocks, and threads, can specify with supreme confidence the solidity or potential flexibility of the structures it seeks to change. The strength of structural theory, at its best, was in identifying, institutional intersections that hold a system together; its conceit, at its worst, was the claim to know in advance how resistant such intersections are to potential change. Without adopting the opposite conceit, it seems important to pursue possible sites of strategic action that might open up room for productive change. Today it seems important to attend to the relation be- tween the need for structural change and identification of multiple sites of potential action. You do not know precisely what you are doing when you participate in such a venture. You combine an experimental temper with the appreciation that living and acting into the future inevitably contain a shifting quotient of uncertainty. The following tentative judgments and sites of action may be pertinent. 1) Neither neoliberal theory, nor socialist productivism, nor deep ecology, nor social democracy in its classic form seems sufficient to the contemporary condition. This is so in part because the powers of market self-regulation are both real and limited in relation to a larger multitude of heterogeneous force fields beyond the human estate with differential powers of self-regulation and metamorphosis. A first task is to challenge neoliberal ideology through critique and by elaborating and publicizing positive alternatives that acknowledge the disparate relations between market processes, other cultural systems, and nonhuman systems. Doing so to render the fragility of things more visible and palpable. Doing so, too, to set the stage for a series of interceded shifts in citizen role performances, social movements, and state action. 2) Those who seek to reshape the ecology of late capitalism might set an interim agenda of radical reform and then recoil back on the initiatives to see how they work. An interim agenda is the best thing to focus on because in a world of becoming the more distant future is too cloudy to engage. We must, for instance, become involved in experimental micropolitics on a variety of fronts, as we participate in role experimentations, social movements, artistic displaces, erotic-political shows, electoral campaigns, and creative interventions on the new media to help recode the ethos that now occupies investment practices, consumption desires, family savings, state priorities, church assemblies, university curricula, and media reporting. It is important to bear in mind how extant ideologies, established role performances, social movements, and commitments to state action intersect. To shift some of our own role performances in the zones of travel, church participation, home energy use, investment, and consumption, for instance, that now implicate us deeply in foreign oil dependence and the huge military expenditures that secure it, could make a minor difference on its own and also lift some of the burdens of institutional implications from us to support participation in more adventurous interpretations, political strategies, demands upon the state, and cross-state citizen actions. 3) Today perhaps the initial target, should be on reconstituting established patterns of consumption by a combination of direct citizen actions in consumption choices, publicity of such actions, the organization of local collectives to modify consumption practices, and social movements to reconstitute the current state- and market-supported infrastructure of consumption. By the infrastructure of consumption I mean publicly supported and subsidized market subsystems such as a national highway system, a system of airports, medical care through private insurance, agribusiness pouring high sugar, salt, and fat content into foods, corporate ownership of the public media, the prominence of corporate 403 accounts over retirement pensions, and so forth that enable some modes of consumption in the zones of travel, education, diet, retirement, medical care, energy use, health, and education and render others much more difficult or expensive to procure.22 To change the infrastructure is also to shift the types of work and investment available. Social movements that work upon the infrastructure and ethos of consumption in tandem can thus make a real difference directly, encourage more people to heighten their critical perspectives, and thereby open more people to a more militant politics if and as the next disruptive event emerges. Perhaps a cross-state citizen goal should construct a pluralist assemblage by moving back and forth between experiments in role performances, the refinement of sensitive modes of perception, revisions in political ideology, and adjustments in political sensibility; doing so to mobilize enough collective energy to launch a general strike simultaneously in several countries in the near future. The aim of such an event would be to reverse the deadly future created by established patterns of climate change by fomenting significant shifts in patterns of consumption, corporate policies, state law, and the priorities of interstate organizations. Again, the dilemma of today is that the fragility of things demands shifting and slowing down intrusions into several aspects of nature as we speed up shifts in identity; role performance, cultural ethos, market regulation, and state policy. 4) The existential forces of hubris (expressed above all in those confident drives to mastery conveyed by military elites, financial economists, financial elites, and CEOs) and of ressentiment (expressed in some sectors of secularism and evangelicalism) now play roles of importance in the shape of consumption practices, investment portfolios, worker routines, managerial demands, and the uneven senses of entitlement that constitute neoliberalism. For that reason activism inside churches, schools, street life, and the media must become increasingly skilled and sensitive. As we proceed, some of us may present the themes of a world of becoming to larger audiences, challenging thereby the complementary notions of a providential world and secular mastery that now infuse too many role performances, market practices, and state priorities in capitalist life. For existential dispositions do infuse the role priorities of late capitalism. Today it is both difficult for people to perform the same roles with the same old innocence and difficult to challenge those performances amid our own implication in them. Drives by evangelists, the media, neoconservatives, and the neoliberal right to draw a veil of innocence across the priorities of contemporary life make the situation much worse. 5) The emergence of a neofascist or mafia-type capitalism slinks as a dangerous possibility on the horizon, partly because of the expansion and intensification of capital, partly because of the real fragility of things, partly because the identity needs of many facing these pressures encourage them to cling more intensely to a neoliberal imaginary as its bankruptcy becomes increasingly apparent, partly because so many in America insist upon retaining the special world entitlements the country achieved after World War II in a world decreasingly favorable to them, partly because of the crisis tendencies inherent in neoliberal capitalism, and partly because so many resist living evidence around and in them that challenges a couple of secular and theistic images of the cosmos now folded into the institutional life of capitalism. Indeed the danger is that those constituencies now most disinclined to give close attention to public issues could oscillate between attraction to the mythic promises of neoliberal automaticity and attraction to a neofascist movement when the next crisis unfolds. It has happened before. I am not saying that neoliberalism is itself a form of fascism, but that the failures and meltdowns it periodically promotes could once again foment fascist or neofascist responses, as happened in several countries after the onset of the Great Depression. 6) The democratic state, while it certainly cannot alone tame capital or re- constitute the ethos and infrastructure of consumption, must play a significant role in reconstituting our lived relations to climate, weather, resource use, ocean currents, bee survival, tectonic instability, glacier flows, species diversity, work, local life, consumption, and investment, as it also responds favorably to the public pressures we must generate to forge a new ethos. A new, new left will thus experimentally enact new intersections be- tween role performance and political activity, outgrow its old disgust with the very idea of the state, and remain alert to the dangers states can pose. It will do- so because, as already suggested, the fragile ecology of late capital requires state interventions of several sorts. A refusal to participate in the state today cedes too much hegemony to neoliberal markets, either explicitly or by implication. Drives to fascism, remember , rose the last time in capitalist states after market meltdown. Most of those movements failed. But a couple became consolidated through a series of resonances (vibrations) back and forth between industrialists, the state, and vigilante groups in neighborhoods, clubs, churches, the police, the media, and pubs. You do not fight the danger of a new kind of neofascism by withdrawing from either micropolitics or state politics. You do so through a multisited politics designed to •infuse a new ethos into the fabric of everyday life. Changes in ethos can in turn open doors to new possibilities of state and interstate action, so that an advance in one domain seeds that in the other. And vice versa. A positive dynamic of mutual amplification might be generated here. Could a series of significant shifts in the routines of state and global capitalism even press the fractured system to a point where it hovers on the edge of capitalism itself? We don’t know. That is one reason it is important to focus on interim goals. Another is that in a world of becoming, replete with periodic and surprising shifts in the course of events, you cannot project far beyond an interim period. Another yet is that activism needs to project concrete, interim possibilities to gain support and propel itself forward. That being said, it does seem unlikely to me, at least, that a positive interim future includes either socialist productivism or the world projected by proponents of deep ecology. 7) To advance such an agenda it is also imperative to negotiate new connections between nontheistic constituencies who care about the future of the Earth and numerous devotees of diverse religious traditions who fold positive spiritualities into their creedal practices. The new, multifaceted movement needed today, if it emerges, will take the shape of a vibrant pluralist assemblage acting at multiple sites within and across states, rather than either a centered movement with a series of fellow travelers attached to it or a mere electoral constellation. Electoral victories are important, but they work best when they touch priorities already embedded in churches, universities, film, music, consumption practices, media reporting, investment priorities, and the like. A related thing to keep in mind is that the capitalist modes of acceleration, expansion, and intensification that heighten the fra- gility of things today also generate pressures to minoritize the world along multiple dimensions at a more rapid pace than heretofore. A new pluralist constellation will build upon the latter developments as it works to reduce the former effects. I am sure that the forgoing comments will appear to some as "optimistic" or "utopian." But optimism and pessimism are both primarily spectatorial views. Neither seems sufficient to the contemporary condition. Indeed pessimism, if you dwell on it long, easily slides into cynicism, and cynicism often plays into the hands of a right wing that applies exclusively to any set of state activities not designed to protect or coddle the corporate estate. That is one reason that "dysfunctional politics" redounds so readily to the advantage of cynics on the right who work to promote it. They want to promote cynicism with respect to the state and innocence with respect to the market. Pure critique as already suggested, does not suffice either. Pure critique too readily carries critics and their followers to the edge of cynicism. It is also true that the above critique concentrates on neoliberal capital- ism, not capitalism writ large. That is because it seems to me that we need to specify the terms of critique as closely as possible and think first of all about interim responses. If we lived under, say, Keynesian capitalism, a somewhat different set of issues would be defined and other strategies identified.25 Capitalism writ large—while it sets a general context that neoliberalism inflects in specific ways—sets too large and generic a target. It can assume multiple forms, as the differences between Swedish and American capitalism suggest; the times demand a set of interim agendas targeting the hegemonic form of today, pursued with heightened militancy at several sites. The point today is not to wait for a revolution that overthrows the whole system. The "system," as we shall see further, is replete with too many loose ends, uneven edges, dicey intersections with nonhuman forces, and uncertain trajectories to make such a wholesale project plausible. Besides, things are too urgent and too many people on the ground are suffering too much now.

4) The existential forces of hubris (expressed above all in those confident drives to mastery conveyed by military elites, financial economists, financial elites, and CEOs) and of ressentiment (expressed in some sectors of secularism and evangelicalism) now play roles of importance in the shape of consumption practices, investment portfolios, worker routines, managerial demands, and the uneven senses of entitlement that constitute neoliberalism. For that reason activism inside churches, schools, street life, and the media must become increasingly skilled and sensitive. As we proceed, some of us may present the themes of a world of becoming to larger audiences, challenging thereby the complementary notions of a providential world and secular mastery that now infuse too many role performances, market practices, and state priorities in capitalist life. For existential dispositions do infuse the role priorities of late capitalism. Today it is both difficult for people to perform the same roles with the same old innocence and difficult to challenge those performances amid our own implication in them. Drives by evangelists, the media, neoconservatives, and the neoliberal right to draw a veil of innocence across the priorities of contemporary life make the situation much worse. 5) The emergence of a neofascist or mafia-type capitalism slinks as a dangerous possibility on the horizon, partly because of the expansion and intensification of capital, partly because of the real fragility of things, partly because the identity needs of many facing these pressures encourage them to cling more intensely to a neoliberal imaginary as its bankruptcy becomes increasingly apparent, partly because so many in America insist upon retaining the special world entitlements the country achieved after World War II in a world decreasingly favorable to them, partly because of the crisis tendencies inherent in neoliberal capitalism, and partly because so many resist living evidence around and in them that challenges a couple of secular and theistic images of the cosmos now folded into the institutional life of capitalism. Indeed the danger is that those constituencies now most disinclined to give close attention to public issues could oscillate between attraction to the mythic promises of neoliberal automaticity and attraction to a neofascist movement when the next crisis unfolds. It has happened before. I am not saying that neoliberalism is itself a form of fascism, but that the failures and meltdowns it periodically promotes could once again foment fascist or neofascist responses, as happened in several countries after the onset of the Great Depression. 6) The democratic state, while it certainly cannot alone tame capital or re- constitute the ethos and infrastructure of consumption, must play a significant role in reconstituting our lived relations to climate, weather, resource use, ocean currents, bee survival, tectonic instability, glacier flows, species diversity, work, local life, consumption, and investment, as it also responds favorably to the public pressures we must generate to forge a new ethos. A new, new left will thus experimentally enact new intersections be- tween role performance and political activity, outgrow its old disgust with the very idea of the state, and remain alert to the dangers states can pose. It will do- so because, as already suggested, the fragile ecology of late capital requires state interventions of several sorts. A refusal to participate in the state today cedes too much hegemony to neoliberal markets, either explicitly or by implication. Drives to fascism, remember , rose the last time in capitalist states after market meltdown. Most of those movements failed. But a couple became consolidated through a series of resonances (vibrations) back and forth between industrialists, the state, and vigilante groups in neighborhoods, clubs, churches, the police, the media, and pubs. You do not fight the danger of a new kind of neofascism by withdrawing from either micropolitics or state politics. You do so through a multisited politics designed to •infuse a new ethos into the fabric of everyday life. Changes in ethos can in turn open doors to new possibilities of state and interstate action, so that an advance in one domain seeds that in the other. And vice versa. A positive dynamic of mutual amplification might be generated here. Could a series of significant shifts in the routines of state and global capitalism even press the fractured system to a point where it hovers on the edge of capitalism itself? We don’t know. That is one reason it is important to focus on interim goals. Another is that in a world of becoming, replete with periodic and surprising shifts in the course of events, you cannot project far beyond an interim period. Another yet is that activism needs to project concrete, interim possibilities to gain support and propel itself forward. That being said, it does seem unlikely to me, at least, that a positive interim future includes either socialist productivism or the world projected by proponents of deep ecology. 7) To advance such an agenda it is also imperative to negotiate new connections between nontheistic constituencies who care about the future of the Earth and numerous devotees of diverse religious traditions who fold positive spiritualities into their creedal practices. The new, multifaceted movement needed today, if it emerges, will take the shape of a vibrant pluralist assemblage acting at multiple sites within and across states, rather than either a centered movement with a series of fellow travelers attached to it or a mere electoral constellation. Electoral victories are important, but they work best when they touch priorities already embedded in churches, universities, film, music, consumption practices, media reporting, investment priorities, and the like. A related thing to keep in mind is that the capitalist modes of acceleration, expansion, and intensification that heighten the fra- gility of things today also generate pressures to minoritize the world along multiple dimensions at a more rapid pace than heretofore. A new pluralist constellation will build upon the latter developments as it works to reduce the former effects. I am sure that the forgoing comments will appear to some as "optimistic" or "utopian." But optimism and pessimism are both primarily spectatorial views. Neither seems sufficient to the contemporary condition. Indeed pessimism, if you dwell on it long, easily slides into cynicism, and cynicism often plays into the hands of a right wing that applies exclusively to any set of state activities not designed to protect or coddle the corporate estate. That is one reason that "dysfunctional politics" redounds so readily to the advantage of cynics on the right who work to promote it. They want to promote cynicism with respect to the state and innocence with respect to the market. Pure critique as already suggested, does not suffice either. Pure critique too readily carries critics and their followers to the edge of cynicism. It is also true that the above critique concentrates on neoliberal capital- ism, not capitalism writ large. That is because it seems to me that we need to specify the terms of critique as closely as possible and think first of all about interim responses. If we lived under, say, Keynesian capitalism, a somewhat different set of issues would be defined and other strategies identified.25 Capitalism writ large—while it sets a general context that neoliberalism inflects in specific ways—sets too large and generic a target. It can assume multiple forms, as the differences between Swedish and American capitalism suggest; the times demand a set of interim agendas targeting the hegemonic form of today, pursued with heightened militancy at several sites. The point today is not to wait for a revolution that overthrows the whole system. The "system," as we shall see further, is replete with too many loose ends, uneven edges, dicey intersections with nonhuman forces, and uncertain trajectories to make such a wholesale project plausible. Besides, things are too urgent and too many people on the ground are suffering too much now.

Understanding power as constructed through patterns of social relations that are reproduced through processes of socialisation provides an agenda for contesting power that concerns changing the way people relate to each other – including changing the meanings they give to these relationships. Robert Chambers uses the language of ‘uppers’ and ‘lowers’ to describe situations in which one person has power another, while stressing that a person may be an ‘upper’ in one context and a ‘lower’ in another. Gaventa in his article on entry points for change starts from the position of looking at the institutional and cultural structures that enable domination. Using the idea of ‘three faces of power’ – visible, hidden and invisible – he suggests that political processes are shaped not just by contests over (visible) interests that take place in observable or public spaces but also by the structures of relations that set the rules of the game (or hidden structures) so that some have more power than others to influence outcomes, as well as by invisible power already discussed. Gaventa then takes Chambers’ idea of context and turns this into concepts of ‘space’ and ‘place’. By ‘space’ he means the ways in which participation or political engagement occurs, for example whether power is contested in formal parliamentary institutions or through autonomous social movements; by ‘place’ he means the arenas of political struggles, from the very local level of the family or community up to national and even global levels. When power is seen as a finite resource, inevitably the history of humanity will be one of contest. If we see contestation as ‘natural’ or inevitable then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. But what if power were understood more like a balloon that can be infinitely expanded? Could we explore power for change by looking for entry points towards achieving harmonious and equitable social relations? Although Gaventa sees power primarily in terms of conflict or contestation, both he and Chambers are interested in the idea of how spaces for participation can expand power so that more people have it, with Chambers being more interested in how this can be achieved without anyone losing out, as we now go on to discuss. 6 Expanding power Not seeing power as a zero-sum game has long been a preoccupation of Chambers who argues that positive change can be more easily achieved through identifying win-win situations (Saxena et al. 1989). In his article in this IDS Bulletin, he comments that by assuming that power is never given up without a fight, those struggling for social justice may be missing important opportunities for engaging with the powerful. An example would be working with decision-makers on the assumption that they are trying their best but are constrained by the inadequacies of their own bureaucratic organisations. Resistance can be reduced by inviting more people to help them seize such opportunities. Understanding power in this way is underpinned by a normative preference for cooperation rather than competition. As such, it has a very long philosophical history. This includes a strand in feminist understandings of the political that emphasises that the value of the common good as achieved through democratic sharing and participation, in contrast to a liberal concept of democracy, as being an arena where competing interests come to some kind of bargain or settlement about the balance of power in society (Mouffe 1997). Conversely, Hunter’s study of the passing of the Prevention of Family Violence Act in South Africa in 1993 reveals the complexity of any particular attempt to change societal power relations, with both the expansion of power through new coalitions of women across political divides and political opportunism by an authoritarian party desperately seeking new voters. Taylor and Boser pursue a similar line of thought when seeking to avoid thinking of power relations in terms of them and us, which can be particularly challenging when those resisting change are acting in an adversarial fashion. Yet, they argue, if one is capable of learning not to internalise the conflict and not to counter aggressive power with a further aggressive reaction, there are real possibilities of achieving greater participation and more equal power relations within organisations such as institutions of higher education. Approaches to learning that aim to transform society would thus be reinforced by the day-to-day practice of the staff, enhancing the possibility that their students in turn might be agents of change in their future careers as development actors. Gaventa’s idea of expanding power, on the other hand, makes no assumptions that someone else does not have to give it up. Rather he suggests strategies for expanding power among those who are currently powerless, for example through building horizontal alliances that link up different spatial entry points for change. However, he stresses that without prior awareness, building such new strategies for expanding power may be captured by prevailing interests. his idea of raising awareness, encouraging critical reflection or discursive consciousness, runs through all the contributions to this IDS Bulletin, to which we finally turn. 7 Transforming power Many people in a subordinate position may question the way the world is ordered but do not organise themselves for strategic resistance because of the fear of the consequences should they fail. They would need to gain support from others to develop new ways of understanding – or frameworks of meaning – about how the world could work. What are the conditions that allow for the mobilisation of such support? Power with is a term that has been coined to refer to the building of common ground among different interests, the development of shared values and strategies and the creation of collective strength through organisation (Rowlands 1997). Power with depends on individuals and groups releasing their power within through a process of self interrogation or consciousness raising. Empowerment frameworks have been developed by activists that draw on these concepts of power and can serve as guides to action, including the likely risks in applying these (Veneklasen and Miller 2002). One such risk is pointed to by Shutt who comments that whether one’s actions from a position of power to support empowerment are interpreted as helpful and creating power to or trying to gain control (power over), is highly subjective and is shaped by the beliefs and values of those one is seeking to help. Chambers, an avowed optimist, argues that through a ‘pedagogy of the powerful’ power over can be used as an empowering opportunity for both themselves and those they are seeking help; ‘with less power goes a better experience of life’. Harris uses a Socratic approach of asking questions, setting off a train of self enquiry leading to changed behaviour. However, she does not necessarily agree with Chambers that men, when ‘uppers’ in a relationship with women, are likely to voluntarily give up power. In both cases however, it is an approach to learning that encourages self scrutiny. Both Pettit’s and Taylor and Boser’s articles focus on the importance of teachers and facilitators themselves reflecting on their power in promoting wider learning for change. Pettit emphasises the benefits of cyclical and experiential methods that can help educators and those they are learning with to understand power not just conceptually and cognitively but through the senses, emotions, creativity, intuition and embodied forms of knowledge as means of accessing and transforming power. On the other hand, Taylor and Boser recognise how emotional stress in situations of adversarial power relations can block attempts to be reflexive. They ask: How do we nurture ourselves and others during such times? What strategies enable us to maintain openness to learning during periods of conflict and stress? And what are the implications for the role of, and necessary skills for, leadership in participatory processes? In an article that includes reflecting on their personal experience of confronting power in their own organisations, the authors conclude that the development of trust and working cooperatively rather than in an adversarial manner, is key to altering power relations. 8 Conclusion: knowing power In the introduction to her article and reflecting on her growing up in Jamaica, Moncrieffe considers the dual role of power to which we referred at the start of this introduction, and in that respect considers Bourdieu’s theme of misrecognition: Power, in practice, can be repressive and even lend itself to violence; conversely, power is crucial for producing healthy changes in social relations, such as would profit those subsisting in conditions of poverty or those subjected to various forms of injustice; repressive power is most potent and durable when people accept and uphold the (mis)perceptions and conditions that underpin their own inequality; therefore, much hinges on the extent to which, in the emerging social contexts, people are adequately challenged to recognise, confront and transform the socially acquired dispositions that allow for repression, both of others and of themselves. How can a team of researchers and teachers – knowledge specialists – contribute to this challenge, bearing in mind Pettit’s discussion of how our own lives are full of contradictions and that we are ourselves often failing to confront our ‘socially acquired dispositions’ that reproduce injustice? One way to confront these dispositions is to address issues of power in our everyday professional practice within our own organisations, as discussed by Taylor and Boser. A further way is for team members to work with those whom Chambers has called ‘lowers’ to support them to reconceptualise their own power positions and work with them to help improve their capacity to develop power within and power with. Yet another could be to take up Chambers’ challenge of working with ‘uppers’ to support them in ceding power or, to express it more felicitously, sharing it. Harris’ work with men in Mali and elsewhere is a case in point. Not all members of the team would necessarily support all of these options. But all understand knowledge as a resource in the power field and, as Gaventa and Cornwall stress in their article, seek to make the production of knowledge more democratic.2 Therefore, a diversity in understanding and approaches within our own team is an expression of the importance we place on there being no single way of understanding the world or of promoting social justice. This reflects a commitment to help others find their own understandings rather than having power (understood in the Foucauldian sense as discipline) interpret the world for them in a way that is disempowering. Thus, the contributions to this IDS Bulletin and the ways in which power is interrogated are very varied, despite a shared commitment to exploring its meaning for social change. In categorising power in the way we have, our intention has not been to offer a comprehensive or exclusive framework for analysing power. Rather, in our presentation of the argument, we have sought to construct a positive spiral between reflection and transformation, concluding that the role of the action researcher/teacher is to explore with others – students, activists, practitioners, policymakers and communicators – as to how power can be harnessed for change and to work alongside them in tracing and learning from the myriad of micro level efforts, successes and failures. Other than in Hunter’s discussion of the state and the scope for legal activism in renegotiating the concepts of public and private domains, missing from this collection of articles is any central analysis of power in terms of the connections between the diffuse operations of power in society and the formal political institutions that reflect, reproduce and potentially contribute to changing power. It is worth noting that the Participation, Power and Social Change team also hosts the Development Research Centre on Citizenship, Participation and Accountability and in its new cycle of work, one of the Centre’s three research themes relates to how new democratic institutions and new patterns of activism open political opportunities for people to express their interests and negotiate in political arenas. A second theme concerns how violence shapes relations between states and their citizens (not just as individuals but also as community and family members). Nevertheless, over and above this work in the Citizenship research programme, the editors believe there remains a challenge for the team as a whole in expanding our own knowledge of power so as not to be constrained by conventional theoretical and disciplinary distinctions. In particular, we might want to go further along the road that Hunter has indicated, exploring how power shapes citizens’ constructions of state institutions and the potential role of these institutions, including development organisations, in harnessing public power as a counterbalance to patriarchal and other forms of oppressive societal power within families and local communities. Thus, we ask our readers both to engage with this work in progress and to encourage us to go further.

This understanding of the democratic and totalitarian potentials of biopolitics at the level of the state needs to be underpinned by a reassessment of how biopolitical discourse operates in society at large, at the "prepolitical" level. I would like to try to offer here the beginnings of a reconceptualization of biopolitical modernity, one that focuses less on the machinations of technocrats and experts, and more on the different ways that biopolitical thinking circulated within German society more broadly. It is striking, then, that the new model of German modernity is even more relentlessly negative than the old Sonderweg model. In that older model, pre- modern elites were constantly triumphing over the democratic opposition. But at least there was an opposition; and in the long run, time was on the side of that opposition, which in fact embodied the historical movement of modernization. In the new model, there is virtually a biopolitical consensus.92 And that consensus is almost always fundamentally a nasty, oppressive thing, one that par- takes in crucial ways of the essential quality of National Socialism. Everywhere biopolitics is intrusive, technocratic, top-down, constraining, limiting. Biopolitics is almost never conceived of - or at least discussed in any detail - as creating possibilities for people, as expanding the range of their choices, as empowering them, or indeed as doing anything positive for them at all. Of course, at the most simple-minded level, it seems to me that an assessment of the potentials of modernity that ignores the ways in which biopolitics has made life tangibly better is somehow deeply flawed. To give just one example, infant mortality in Germany in 1900 was just over 20 percent; or, in other words, one in five children died before reaching the age of one year. By 1913, it was 15 percent; and by 1929 (when average real purchasing power was not significantly higher than in 1913) it was only 9.7 percent.93 The expansion of infant health programs - an enormously ambitious, bureaucratic, medicalizing, and sometimes intrusive, social engineering project - had a great deal to do with that change. It would be bizarre to write a history of biopolitical modernity that ruled out an appreciation for how absolutely wonderful and astonish- ing this achievement - and any number of others like it - really was. There was a reason for the "' Machbarkeitswahn" of the early twentieth century: many marvelous things were in fact becoming machbar. In that sense, it is not really accurate to call it a " Wahn" (delusion, craziness) at all; nor is it accurate to focus only on the "inevitable" frustration of "delusions" of power. Even in the late 1920s, many social engineers could and did look with great satisfaction on the changes they genuinely had the power to accomplish. Concretely, moreover, I am not convinced that power operated in only one direction - from the top down - in social work. Might we not ask whether people actually demanded welfare services, and whether and how social workers and the state struggled to respond to those demands the different dynamics (and histories) of different programs. The removal of children from their families for placement in foster families or reformatories was bitterly hated and stubbornly resisted by working-class families; but mothers brought their children to infant health clinics voluntarily and in numbers, and after 1945 they brought their older children to counseling clinics, as well. In this instance, historians of the German welfare state might profit from the "demand side" models of welfare development that are sometimes more explicitly explored in some of the international literature.95 In fact, even where social workers really were attempting to limit or subvert the autonomy and power of parents, I am not sure that their actions can be characterized only and exclusively as part of a microphysics of oppression. Progressive child welfare advocates in Germany, particularly in the National Center for Child Welfare, waged a campaign in the 1920s to persuade German parents and educators to stop beating children with such ferocity, regularity, and nonchalance. They did so because they feared the unintended physical and psychological effects of beatings, and implicitly because they believed physical violence could compromise the development of the kind of autonomous, self- reliant subjectivity on which a modern state had to rely in its citizenry.96 Or, to give another common example from the period, children removed from their families after being subjected by parents or other relatives to repeated episodes of violence or rape were being manipulated by biopolitical technocrats, and were often abused in new ways in institutions or foster families; but they were also being liberated. Sometimes some forms of the exercise of power in society are in some ways emancipatory; and that is historically significant. Further, of course we must ask whether it is really true that social workers' and social agencies' attempts to manipulate people worked. My own impression is that social policy makers grew increasingly aware, between the 1870s and the 1960s, that their own ends could not be achieved unless they won the cooperation of the targets of policy. And to do that, they had to offer people things that they wanted and needed. Policies that incited resistance were sometimes with glacial slowness, after stubborn and embittered struggles - de-emphasized or even abandoned. Should we really see the history of social welfare policy as a more or less static (because the same thing is always happening) history of the 95 imposition of manipulative policies on populations? I believe a more complex model of the evolution of social policy as a system of social interaction, involv- ing conflicting and converging demands, constant negotiation, struggle, and - above all - mutual learning would be more appropriate. This is a point Abram de Swaan and others have made at some length; but it does not appear to have been built into our theory of modernity very systematically, least of all in German history97 All of these questions, however, still address primarily the activities of tech- nocrats and social managers. We are still asking how bad social engineering is. In fact, this entire discourse seems to be shaped by the fundamental suspicion that trying actively to create a better society is always and necessarily a bad thing - an undemocratic, manipulative, oppressive thing.98 This assumption is rooted in a particular understanding of the micropolitics of expertise and pro- fessionalism. It is frequently argued that modern forms of technical knowledge and licensing create relations of dominance and subordination between experts and their "clients." Thus Paul Weindling, for example, asserted that, "Profes- sionalism, reinforced by official powers, meant that welfare defined new spheres for the exercising of coercion ... The new technocracy of professions and welfare administrators might be seen as erecting antidemocratic and coercive social structures by extending the welfare state." Michael Schwartz, similarly, observed in 1992 that "even in the democratic variant of science there was a tendency to technocratic elitism" and the "scientistic objectification of humanity."99 And Detlev Peukert reminded us that "rationalization as a strategy of experts inher- endy contained [barg systematisch] the danger of the technocratic arrogance of experts, the overwhelming of those affected by the catalog of norms for ratio- nal living derived from the expert knowledge of the professions, but not from the experience of those affected."100 Even more sinister, again, is the tendency of these same experts to exclude, stigmatize, and pathologize those they are not able to "normalize." Zygmunt Bauman has presented the same case with a particular clarity, concluding that since modernity is "about" order, and order always implies its opposite, chaos, "intolerance is . . . the natural inclination of modern practice. Construction of order sets the limits to incorporation and admission. It calls for the denial of rights, and of the grounds, of everything that cannot be assimilated - for the de-legitimation ofthe other."101 At its simplest, this view ofthe politics of expertise and professionalization is certainly plausible. Historically speaking, however, the further conjecture that this "micropolitical" dynamic creates authoritarian, totalitarian, or homicidal potentials at the level of the state does not seem very tenable. Historically, it appears that the greatest advocates of political democracy - in Germany left- liberals and Social Democrats - have been also the greatest advocates of every kind of biopolitical social engineering, from public health and welfare programs through social insurance to city planning and, yes, even eugenics.102 The state they built has intervened in social relations to an (until recently) ever-growing degree; professionalization has run ever more rampant in Western societies; the production of scientistic and technocratic expert knowledge has proceeded at an ever more frenetic pace. And yet, from the perspective of the first years of the millennium, the second half ofthe twentieth century appears to be the great age of democracy in precisely those societies where these processes have been most in evidence. What is more, the interventionist state has steadily expanded both the rights and the resources of virtually every citizen - including those who were stigmatized and persecuted as biologically defective under National Socialism. Perhaps these processes have created an ever more restrictive "iron cage" of rationality in European societies. But if so, it seems clear that there is no necessary correlation between rationalization and authoritarian politics; the opposite seems in fact to be at least equally true. Oddly enough, fundamentally our vision of science and the welfare state sounds rather Hke Hberal and conservative critiques of science and the welfare state any time between the 1880s and the 1950s. Critiques of the iron cage of rationality and of the moral emptiness of instrumental and scientific rationality were commonplaces in the milieu of left-liberal social science, or in the milieu of conservative Christian social teaching, at the very moment when the whole complex of biopolitics was being aggressively constructed. Nor is the idea that Auschwitz was a product ofthe Enlightenment particularly new. Christian critics warned of the murderous potentials of Darwinist thought for decades before 1933, and by the 1950s Auschwitz could be taken by many critics of modernity as merely a confirmation of an analysis they had long championed - as when, 101 for example, in 1954 Hugo Miiller saw in the impersonal rules and procedures of the welfare state a glaring example of a process of dehumanization, deper- sonalization, and alienation that began with Kant's commitment to abstract moral imperatives and culminated in a program of mass murder that sacrificed individual persons in the name of the abstraction "humanity."103 And at root our vision shares something important with that of the conservative Catholic min- isterial official Friedrich Rothe, who remarked before the FRG's Federal Council on Youth Affairs in 1957 that the "dissolution of ethical principles" that underpinned and resulted from the expansion of the welfare state was "unconsciously preparing our delivery into the hands of totalitarian forces."104 This kind of analysis may or may not be partially correct; but it seems to me that we should take care not to allow our theorization of modernity to be overly influenced by the perspective of the German Bildungsbiirgertum, who viewed it with profound and not quite disinterested pessimism. In any case, the focus on the activities and ambitions of the social engineers in the literature on biopolitical modernity has begun to reach the point of diminishing returns. In the current literature, it seems that biopolitics is almost always acting on (or attempting to act on) people; it is almost never something they do. This kind of model is not very realistic. This is not how societies work. The example of the attempt to create a eugenic counseling system in Prussia should be instructive in this respect. Here public health and eugenics experts - technocrats - tried to impart their sense of eugenic crisis and their optimism about the possibility of creating a better "race" to the public; and they success- fully mobilized the resources of the state in support of their vision. And yet, what emerged quite quickly from this effort was in fact a system of public con- traceptive advice - or family planning. It is not so easy to impose technocratic ambitions on the public, particularly in a democratic state; and "on the ground," at the level of interactions with actual persons and social groups, public policy often takes on a life of its own, at least partially independent of the fantasies of technocrats. This is of course a point that Foucault makes with particular clarity. The power of discourse is not the power of manipulative elites, which control it and impose it from above. Manipulative elites always face resistance, often effective, resistance. More important, the power of discourse lies precisely in its ability to set the terms for such struggles, to define what they are about, as much as what 103 their outcomes are. As Foucault put it, power - including the power to manage life - "comes from everywhere."105 Biomedical knowledge was not the property only of technocrats, and it could be used to achieve ends that had little to do with their social-engineering schemes.106 Modern biopolitics is a multifac- eted world of discourse and practice elaborated and put into practice at multiple levels throughout modern societies. And of course it is often no less economistic - no less based on calculations of cost and benefit - at the level of the individual or family than it is in the technocrats' visions of national efficiency. In fact, the literature of the past twenty years has made it abundantly clear that a great deal of "official" biopolitical discourse generated by academics and civil servants was essentially reactive. A vast amount of discussion among eugenics, population policy, and welfare experts focused on the concrete "problem" of the demographic transition of the early twentieth century. It was the use of reproductive knowledge and reproductive technology by millions of Europeans to limit their fertility ? the Geburtenruckgang or decline of births, in German parlance ? that was the center of concern. While much of the historical literature stresses the role of science in shaping technocratic ambition, of course actually a large proportion of the technocrats' discourse was concerned with orchestrating a return to more "natural" and less technologically-enabled reproductive patterns. The problem, particularly for the more influential moderate and pronatalist branch of eugenics, was not only how to apply modern science to humanity, but more importantly how to get humanity to stop applying modern science to itself. Atina Grossmann, in her history of the organized mass popular movement for fertility control in Germany in the 1920s, has given us a good example of what this shift in perspective can reveal. Grossmann stresses the technocratic ambition and relatively conservative intent of many medical sex reformers, the power of the "motherhood-eugenics consensus" to shape and limit acceptable definitions of women's social and sexual roles and aspirations in this period, and the preva- lence of the rhetoric of "social health, medicalization, cost effectiveness, and national welfare." And yet, in the final analysis she describes a powerful reform movement that helped to spread contraceptives and contraceptive knowledge widely among the German population. Popular groups were "increasingly insistent that the working class also had a right to the beneflts of scientific progress" (in the form of contraceptive technologies); and while most of the medical establishment opposed the widespread use of contraceptives, the pop- ular movement garnered critical support from radical sociaHsts within the med- ical profession. As Grossmann remarks, "the German case is instructive precisely because it illustrates the fallacies of setting up rigid categories of 'popular' and 'professional.'"107 In short: is the microphysics of modern power/knowledge always the micro- physics of oppression, exploitation, and manipulation? Are technocratic elites always in charge of the imperatives of discourse ? or do discourses have their own logic, which technocrats can define, escape or direct no more (or less) than can anyone else? Discourse may or may not be a locomotive, driving down a predetermined track and dictating individual decisions and fates by its own internal logic; but even if it is, the technocrats aren't driving it, and in fact their schemes may get flattened just as effectively as the autonomy of the average citizen. Biopolitical policy as a field of state activity was often the product of technocratic "readings" of biopolitical discourse. But it was only one small part of a much broader process by which a large proportion of the German population came to define their needs and aspirations in new ways. We need not exagger- ate the degrees of freedom that process generated to be able to appreciate that in some cases, to some extent, and sometimes willy-nilly, discourse and policy were actually a response to that broader process of redefinition ? in short, to "demand-side" pressures. Uncoupling "technocracy" from "discourse" is not yet enough, however. We should also be alive to the ways in which new social practices, institutions, and knowledge generated new choices ? a limited range of them, constrained by all kinds of discursive and social frameworks, but nonetheless historically new and significant. Modern biopolitics did create, in a real sense, not only new con- straints but also new degrees of freedom ? new levers that increased people's power to move their own worlds, to shape their own lives. Our understanding of modern biopolitics will be more realistic and more fruitful if we reconcep- tualize its development as a complex process in which the implications of those new choices were negotiated out in the social and discursive context. Again, in the early twentieth century many more conservative biopolitical "experts" devoted much of their energy precisely to trying - without any discernable success - to control those new degrees of freedom. For most social liberals and Social Democrats, however, those new choices were a potential source of greater social efficiency and social dynamism. State policy reflected the constant negotiation and tension between these perspectives. Nor should we stop at a reexamination of knowledge and technology. It might make sense, too, to reexamine the process of institution-building, the elaboration of the practices and institutions of biopolitics. No doubt the cre- ation of public and private social welfare institutions created instruments for the study, manipulation, or control of individuals and groups. But it also generated opportunities for self-organization and participation by social groups of all kinds. Grossmann's birth control movement was but one instance of the explo- sive growth of the universe of associational life in the field of biopolitics, which itself was only one small part of a much broader development: the self-creation of a new, urban industrial social order, the creation of a self-government of soci? ety through myriad nongovernmental organizations. In these organizations, cit- izens were acting to shape their own lives in ways that were often fundamentally important as part of lived experience - ofthe "life world." Of course there was nothing inherently democratic about these organizations or their social func- tions ? many were authoritarian in structure, many cultivated a tendentially elitist culture of expertise, and some pursued exclusionary and discriminatory agendas. Nevertheless, they institutionalized pluralism, solicited participation, enforced public debate, and effectively sabotaged simple authoritarian govern- ment. Again, National SociaHst totalitarianism was in part a response precisely to the failure of poHtical, social, and cultural elites to contain and control this proHferation of voices, interests, and influence groups.108 Private organizations, further, were not the only ones that helped to build habits and structures of participation. The German state deliberately recruited citizens and nongovernmental organizations to help it formulate and implement welfare poHcy. It had to, for no state could possibly mobiHze the resources nec? essary for such a gigantic task. And of course often the poHcy initiative came from the other direction ? from private organizations engaged in elaborating biopoHtical discourses of various kinds, and working to mobiHze the authority and resources ofthe state to achieve the ends they defined for themselves. That was an intended consequence of the creation of a democratic republic. As S. N. Eisenstadt wrote in 2000, an important part ofthe project of modernity was "a very strong emphasis on the autonomous participation of members of society in the constitution ofthe social and poHtical order."109 Again, the massive, state- orchestrated mobiHzation of the German population in the Nazi period or in the German Democratic RepubHc (not least in welfare organizations) should remind us that such mobiHzation is not necessarily democratic in nature; this is a point made amply for the Weimar period too by, for example, Peter Fritzsche.110 But obviously, it could be, and in fact, before 1933 and after 1949 in the Federal RepubHc of Germany, very often was We know that eugenics, public health, and welfare all appealed across the polit? ical, religious, and ideological spectrum, and around the world, in the early twentieth century. We know that strategies of biopolitical management that were in important ways fundamentally similar were adopted throughout the European world ? in Sweden, Italy, France, England, the United States, even arguably in the Soviet Union ? in this period, and in the German Empire, the Weimar Republic, Nazi Germany, and the two postwar German states. "The social" as a discursive field is modern, it is not a peculiarity of any national his? tory. National Socialist racial policy was an extreme case of a general phenom? enon. These patterns pose a simple but important question: what was the relationship between biopolitics and regime form? One answer might be to argue ? as Michael Schwartz and Peter Fritzsche have suggested ? that regimes that arise for reasons having little to do with this aspect of modernity "choose" their biopolitics to suit their needs and princi? ples. Victoria de Grazia, for example, has suggested that differing class coalitions determine regime forms, and that regime forms determine the "shape" of biopolitics.111 This is obviously not the approach that has predominated in the literature on Germany, however, which has explored in great depth the positive contribution that modern biopolitics made to the construction of National Socialism. This approach may well exaggerate the importance of biopolitics; but, in purely heuristic terms, it has been extremely fruitful. I want to suggest that it might be equally fruitful to stand it on its head, so to speak. One could easily conclude from this literature that modern biopolitics "fits" primarily authoritarian, totalitarian, technocratic, or otherwise undemocratic regimes, and that democracy has prevailed in Europe in the teeth of the development of technocratic biopolitics. Again, however, the history of twentieth-century Germany, including the five decades after World War II, suggests that this is a fundamentally implausible idea. A more productive conclusion might be that we need to begin to work out the extent and nature of the positive contribu- tion biopolitics has made to the construction also of democratic regimes. Why was Europe's twentieth century, in addition to being the age of biopol- itics and totalitarianism, also the age of biopolitics and democracy- How should we theorize this relationship? I would like to offer five propositions as food for thought. First, again, the concept of the essential legitimacy and social value of indi- vidual needs, and hence the imperative of individual rights as the political mechanism for getting them met, has historically been a cornerstone of some strategies of social management. To borrow a phrase from Dedev Peukert, this does not mean that democracy was the "absolutely inevitable" outcome of the development of biopolitics; but it does mean that it was "one among other pos? sible outcomes ofthe crisis of modern civiHzation."112 Second, I would argue that there is also a causal fit between cultures of exper? tise, or "scientism," and democracy. Of course, "scientism" subverted the real, historical ideological underpinnings of authoritarian poHties in Europe in the nineteenth century. It also in a sense replaced them. Democratic citizens have the freedom to ask "why"; and in a democratic system there is therefore a bias toward pragmatic, "objective" or naturaHzed answers ? since values are often regarded as matters of opinion, with which any citizen has a right to differ. Scientific "fact" is democracy s substitute for revealed truth, expertise its substi- tute for authority. The age of democracy is the age of professionalization, of technocracy; there is a deeper connection between the two, this is not merely a matter of historical coincidence. Third, the vulnerabiHty of expHcitly moral values in democratic societies cre- ates a problem of legitimation. Of course there are moral values that aU demo? cratic societies must in some degree uphold (individual autonomy and freedom, human dignity, fairness, the rule of law), and those values are part of their strength. But as people's states, democratic social and poHtical orders are also implicitly and often expHcitly expected to do something positive and tangible to enhance the weU-being of their citizens. One of those things, of course, is simply to provide a rising standard of living; and the visible and astonishing suc? cess of that project has been crucial to aU Western democracies since 1945. Another is the provision of a rising standard of health; and here again, the democratic welfare state has "delivered the goods" in concrete, measurable, and extraordinary ways. In this sense, it may not be so simpleminded, after all, to insist on considering the fact that modern biopolitics has "worked" phenome- nally well. Fourth, it was precisely the democratizing dynamic of modern societies that made the question of the "quality" of the mass of the population seem - and not only in the eyes of the dominant classes - increasingly important. Again, in the course ofthe nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the expected level of the average citizens active participation in European political, social, cultural, and economic life rose steadily, as did the expected level of her effective influence in all these spheres. This made it a matter of increasing importance whether the average person was more or less educated and informed, more or less moral and self-disciplined, more or less healthy and physically capable, more or less socially competent. And modern social reform ? "biopolitics" defined very broadly ? seemed to offer the possibility of creating the human founda- tion for a society ordered by autonomous participation, rather than by obedi- ence. This too was part of the Machbarkeitswahn of modernity; but this was potentially a democratic " Wahn," not only an authoritarian one. Fifth, historically there has been a clear connection between the concept of political citizenship and the idea of moral autonomy The political "subject" (or citizen ? as opposed to the political subject, who is an object of state action) is also a moral subject. The citizen s capacity for moral reasoning is the legitimat- ing postulate of all democratic politics. The regulation of sexual and reproduc- tive life has long been understood in European societies to be among the most fundamental issues of morality There is, therefore, a connection between polit? ical citizenship on the one hand, and the sexual and reproductive autonomy implied in the individual control that is a central element ofthe modern biopo? litical complex, on the other. The association in the minds of conservatives in the late imperial period between democracy and declining fertility was not a panicky delusion; panicky it certainly was, but it was also a genuine insight into a deeper ideological connection.113 Perhaps it should not be surprising, therefore, that the first great homeland of eugenic legislation was the United States ? the first great homeland of mod? ern democracy. In fact the United States served both as a kind of promised land for racial and eugenic "progressives" in Germany, and as a worst-case scenario of "regression into barbarism" for those opposed to coercive eugenic mea? sures.114 Nor should it be surprising that, apart from Nazi Germany, the other great land of eugenic sterilization in Europe in the 1930s was Scandinavia, where democratic governments heavily influenced by social democratic parties were busily constructing the most ambitious and extensive welfare states in the world.115 The lesson is not that modern democracy is "dangerous" or destructive, much less that it is crypto-fascist ? that, as Jacques Donzelot put it, the 1930s was the age of "social fascism" and our own age that of "social sector fas? cism."116 The relevant message is, rather, that it is time to place the less familiar history of modern democratic biopolitics alongside the more familiar history of modern totalitarian biopolitics. The dream of perfectibility ? Machbarkeits? wahn? is central to modernity. But social engineering, the management of 113. This is an issue addressed in Edward Ross Dickinson, "The Men's Christian Morality Movement in Germany, 1880-1914: Some Reflections on Sex, Politics, and Sexual Politics," Journal of Modern History 75 (2003). 114. Weingart et al., Rasse, 287 (quotation), 363-64; Richter, Katholizismus, 201; Weiss, "The Race Hygiene Movement," 26. 115. See Gunnar Broberg and Nils Roll-Hansen, eds., Eugenics and the Welfare State: Sterilization Policy in Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland (East Lansing, 1996). 116. Philippe Donzelot, The Policing of Families (New York, 1979), 174-75, 187. This content downloaded from 107.77.193.110 on Mon, 20 Jul 2020 18:38:36 UTC All use subject to http 48 BIOPOLITICS, FASCISM, DEMOCRACY society, can be organized in different ways. HistoricaUy, totalitarian biopolitics was a self-destructive failure. Democratic biopolitics has, in contrast, been ? not in any moral sense, but poHtically ? a howHng success. For the historian interested in modernity, that story is no less interesting or important than the story ofthe implosion ofthe Nazi racial state.

The anarchist critique of Marxist organisational forms is unconvincing, then, because it does not acknowledge the diversity of Marxist approaches and it tends towards a theoreticism that sees a linear, causal, and continuous line from theory to practice. Nonetheless, there are significant differences of strategy between anarchism and Marxism: it is just that these are less to do with organisation as such, and are much more broadly to do with differing attitudes toward politics and the state. Although some (though by no means all) anarchists have supported formal political organisations, with rules, membership criteria, and even internal discipline (Schmidt and van der Walt 2009: 247-263), they have traditionally rejected any engagement with the state – whether it be voting, demanding legal rights or protections, forming political parties, or attempting the revolutionary seizure of government – on the basis that such engagement can only end up replicating the oppressive hierarchies that they are fighting: either it will lead to new forms of dictatorship and bureaucracy (such as developed in the Soviet Union); or it will lead to parliamentary reformism and hence merely reinforce existing structures and relations of power. If Marxists support (qualified) engagement with the state and even the formation of political parties, however, it is not because they think that centralised hierarchies are desirable or inevitable, but because they begin from a different understanding of politics. They argue that the anarchist abstention from state politics denies us the most effective means of political action: we disempower ourselves rather than the state when we refuse to engage with it. Making demands on the state does not necessarily entail an endorsement of the state, any more than the demands that are made by employees during a strike are an endorsement of the employer or of the system of wage-labour (Marx 1988). Anarchists themselves have at least implicitly recognised the efficacy of political engagement by occasionally supporting the policies of certain governments and even participating in elections (Engels 1988; Franks 2012: 216). More than this, abstention from state politics is not a genuine option: whether we like it or not, we are all already involved in state politics, because we are all always already submitted to state power, control, and oppression. Anarchists are concerned that participation in conventional politics will lead to parliamentary reformism. But this concern is itself ultimately premised on a tacit acceptance of the liberal-parliamentary understanding of politics: to claim that we can safely repudiate state politics simply by refusing ever to enter a polling booth is to assume that ‘the state’ stops at the door of Parliament. Marxists, in contrast, have argued that the state apparatus includes educational institutions, the media, churches, the family, and so on (e.g. Althusser 1971): simply in going about our daily lives we are all therefore implicated in state politics. Given our necessary involvement within politics, the question is not whether we engage with it, but how we do so; even libertarian Marxists like Holloway argue that engagement with the state is inevitable (Holloway 2005: 40). In contrast, the anarchist recommendation of disengagement from the state risks a politics of withdrawal and isolation. There are two related reasons why under our current conditions in particular the Marxist willingness to engage in state politics is preferable to an anarchist position. The first is the dominance of neoliberalism today. Given the strength of neoliberalism since the crisis that it created, there is a strong case for a certain pragmatism in our response. A danger of the prefigurative politics favoured by anarchists is that it dogmatically dictates an a priori exclusion of certain forms of political action. For Marxists, on the other hand, political strategies must be decided according to particular conditions and within a certain context. In a context in which private companies are increasingly undertaking tasks previously performed by the state, the active defence of state services and institutions can be viewed as a radical position to adopt: defending welfare provision, public pensions, universal healthcare, and free higher education should be seen not as a reformist compromise with the existing order but as safeguarding the gains of class struggle against capitalist processes of accumulation by dispossession. This leads to the second reason for doubting the refusal of state politics as a viable tactic under current conditions, which concerns the specific role of the state under neoliberalism. The anti-state politics of anarchism may have made sense during eras in which the state could plausibly be presented as the main threat to freedom and equality: during the period of nation-building and imperialistic expansion in the mid- to late-19th century, of the rise of fascism in the early-20th century, or even of the development of welfare capitalism after WWII. But it has far less purchase in an era in which neoliberalism, as both the official ideology and a form of everyday common sense, is anti-statist. Put simply, the attack on state power too easily echoes the rhetoric of neoliberalism itself (Taylor 2013: 735). When government actors themselves are explicitly endorsing the retreat of the state, then anarchist attacks on state power have limited efficacy either as a tactical call to arms or as a convincing analysis of our present conjuncture. In practice, of course, it is true that neoliberalism has not dissolved state power. But nor has the relation between state and capital remained the same under neoliberalism, such that our analyses, strategies, or rhetoric need not alter. The nature of this relationship between state and capital will be examined in the next section.

Those of us who consider ourselves “left liberals” have expressed particular alarm about the symbolic and practical dangers posed by leaders such as Donald Trump and his supporters. To name but a few: mass rallies denouncing “the liberal media”; inciting and sometimes enacting violence against critics or protestors; calling for the imprisonment of political adversaries; racist and xenophobic rhetoric invoked to support Muslim bans, border walls, and mass deportations; conspiracy-mongering attacks on career civil servants as agents of “the deep state,” and on journalists as “enem[ies] of the American people”; and orchestrated campaigns of lying and disinformation under the banner of speaking “truth” directly to the people and opposing “fake news.” In many ways, these tactics and actions are all too reminiscent of the “origins of totalitarianism” discussed by Hannah Arendt in her 1951 classic of that title. To note this is not to deny the profound differences between the global crises of 1914–1945 and today. But it is to register profound fear for the future of liberal democracy.

Colleagues further to my left have been critical, sometimes harshly, of this liberal response. They insist that Trump is not quite so dangerous, and that the dangers he does pose are largely expressions of deeper tendencies of neoliberalism that require more fundamental challenge. It thus makes little sense, they argue, for the left to reflexively defend liberal democracy— liberal democracy itself is the problem, and the solution is its transformation. While tactically these arguments track the 2016 debates between supporters of Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, they also run deeper. Some on the left—whether enthusiastic Bernie supporters, or unenthusiastic supporters who nonetheless saw his candidacy as an opening—reviled Clinton for her neoliberalism, and could not bring themselves to vote for her even once she won the Democratic nomination. They argued that the threat posed by Trump was overstated since both parties are oligarchical and capitalist (they are), and thus essentially similar (they are not). This contingent believed that the real danger is not Trumpism but the corruption, hypocrisy, inequality, and violence plaguing liberal democracy itself.