9.1.4 Power

More contemporary frameworks of social inequalities include an understanding of power. This section dives into the concepts and frameworks used in studying power. To recap, power is the ability to exert control, authority, or influence over others; agency, which comes from power, is the capability to act and make decisions. Power can be conceptualized as both subtle and coercive; in some contexts, it’s obvious who has power and how it’s utilized, but in other contexts, there are power imbalances that are allowed in everyday life. The point of this section is to contemplate why people allow certain power imbalances to exist while challenging others. Often, people allow power imbalances that they benefit from and resist imbalances that they do not benefit from. To better understand this, it is useful to discuss various concepts related to power, including hegemony, the state apparatus, biopolitics, and necropolitics.

Hegemony

Antonio Gramsci, famous for his writings on philosophy, political theory, sociology, linguistics, and history, came up with the concept of hegemony while imprisoned by the Fascist Italian government. A founding member of the Communist Party of Italy, he was arrested by Benito Mussolini’s Fascist regime for provoking class hatred and civil war and was sentenced to 20 years of imprisonment. In The Prison Notebooks, composed of 33 notebooks written during his imprisonment, Gramsci writes about power using the notion of hegemony. Hegemony describes how people with power keep their power through the subtle dissemination of certain values and beliefs. Hegemony relies on the maintenance of a “groups’’ authority and various mechanisms through which those in marginalized groups accept the leadership of another group’s authority. These mechanisms include cultural institutions such as education, religion, family, and common practices of everyday life. When a paradigm is so dominant that no one questions it, it becomes hegemonic. For instance, the idea that the United States is a democracy, even though many Americans are disenfranchised from voting and several presidential candidates have won the popular vote but lost the election, could be considered a hegemonic paradigm.

The State Apparatus

French Marxist philosopher Louis Pierre Althusser is known for his writings about ideologies of exploitation. Asking how those who are exploited continue to remain exploited, Althusser developed the concept of the state apparatus. The state apparatus consists of two intertwined but distinct sets of institutions, the repressive state apparatus and the ideological state apparatus, which function together to maintain state order and control. Repressive state apparatuses include institutions through which the ruling class enforces its control, such as the government, administrators, the army, the police, the courts, and prisons. These institutions are repressive because they function by violence or force. Althusser argues that the state also consists of ideological state apparatuses, which include distinct and specialized institutions such as religious institutions, public and private education systems, legal systems, political parties, communication systems (radio, newspapers, television), family, and culture (literature, arts, and sports). Ideological state apparatuses, although they include different institutions that are dominated by ruling class ideologies, are also sites where the ideologies of exploited classes can grow. Therefore, ideological state apparatuses can be places of class struggle and social change.

Biopolitics

French philosopher Michel Foucault conceptualized power through biopolitics, which refers to the ways populations are divided and categorized as a means of control, often by the state. This categorization and division—in terms of race, religion, or citizenship status, for instance—seeks to further marginalize certain groups and increase the power of the state. Biopolitics can be understood as the use of power to control a population through surveillance, which Foucault refers to as biopower in his book The History of Sexuality ([1978] 1990). An example of biopower in action is government control of immigrants, especially undocumented migrants. In his ethnography Pathogenic Policing: Immigration Enforcement and Health in the US South (2019), medical and legal anthropologist Nolan Kline describes immigrant policing as a form of biopower that attempts to control and govern immigrants through tactics based on fear, making undocumented immigrants fearful as they go about the normal activities of their daily lives, with many afraid to even seek health services when necessary.

Necropolitics

Cameroonian philosopher and political theorist Joseph-Achille Mbembe, known as Achille Mbembe, writes about power through the idea of necropolitics (the power of death). Necropolitics, an extension of Foucault’s biopolitics, explores the government’s power to decide how certain categories of people live and whose deaths are more acceptable. Mbembe describes this as a power to decide “who matters and who does not, who is disposable and who is not” (2003, 27). The power to determine a life’s worth resides within both political systems and the decisions that policy makers are tasked with. It has, quite literally, life-or-death consequences, from who has access to life-saving medical technology to who is most policed and most likely to end up in jail.

The Black Lives Matter social justice movement is a response to an understanding that modern necropolitics in the United States treats Black people as disposable. The Black Lives Matter movement has grown beyond the United States in response to other nations’ state policies that are seen as treating people of color as not worthy of protection or care.