China: Sharing, ‘power-with’ and Web 2.0

Isaac Mao’s comments about Web 2.0 and his concept of sharism (分享主义) reminded me of the concepts of ‘power over’, ‘power under’ and ‘power with’, so I did a little digging and came up with the woman credited with inventing them. It’s a testament to her sharism that they are frequently attributed to others; indeed I believed them to be much more cutting edge than they are. Mary Parker Follett coined the terms in the 1920s in a book about psychology and business administration.

What is the central problem of social relations? It is the question of power… But our task is not to learn where to place power; it is how to develop power. We frequently hear nowadays of ‘transferring power as the panacea for all our ills’ Genuine power can only be grown, it will slip from every arbitrary hand that grasps it; for genuine power is not coercive control, but coactive control. Coercive power is the curse of the universe; coactive power, the enrichment and advancement of every human soul. (Follett, 1924: xii-xiii).

Follett suggests that ‘power-over’ is resorted to because ‘people will not wait for the slower process of education’ (1924: 190). ‘Power-with’, she argues, ‘is what democracy should mean in politics or industry (ibid.: 187).

http://www.infed.org/thinkers/et-foll.htm

Isaac seems to be talking about something similar here:

There are a big gap between privacy and publicity today that many people may not realize. So actually, the knowledge spectrum could be broken to most of us. The gap, however, has big potential to become a valuable space for social creation and sharing. Many people, however, still have no idea how to bridging the gap because they are over-concerned about privacy. It’s not strange because there are still many abuse on Internet that people can’t afford to fight with those bad behaviors with individual power. However, it’s also a paradox. The less you share, the less power you have.

http://www.isaacmao.com/meta/2007/09/sharism-is-not-communism-nor-socialism.html
It seems clear to me that whether your political regime is ‘democratic’ or ‘non-democratic’, if citizens don’t take up the social space in the form of community, sharism, or non-profitable collaboration, there is a hollowing out of power relations, and power-over steps in to regulate every aspect of individual lives. This is just as urgent a truth for those of us living in ‘Western democracies’ as it is for those under ‘repressive regimes’. Margaret Thatcher once said ‘There is no such thing as society.’ She was speaking against a tendency to expect the government to solve people’s problems. But this is a very black-and-white, zero-sum game approach. It hinges on an imagined ‘deficit’ (in Thatcher’s case, the economic concept of scarcity). This ‘deficit’ must be ‘filled’ by individual struggle (power-under), not by the government (power-over). In China, the power-over actions of the government are matched exactly by the undermining actions of individuals (often corrupt officials, but sometimes people who simply don’t yet have the level of refined socialisation that a large and diverse society requires – AFTERTHOUGHT – I don’t include those who DO possess such ethics and sensitivity; they do not undermine the government in a power-under way, in the normal run of events, but  sometimes make it FEEL undermined because they step altogether outside its mode of discourse* on a topic of extreme sensitivity to the government; and of course they are often repressed just the same.

But ethics come from repeated successful use of the social space, and China’s social space, to take a psychotherapeutic view, has suffered plenty of abuse in the recent past. It is a traumatised space, and people are afraid to enter it, quite rightly, because it is still full of demons.

It also makes me understand why it is so problematic for Western media to keep talking from the point of view of ‘human rights’ (人权). This is a top-down generalistic notion coined during the French Revolution (a massive wave of power-under!). Power-under gives rise to power-over and vice versa, in a dualistic oppositional process. Power-with can’t come from it. It must be grown in the spaces between people. Civil rights (which is how I translate 维权), on the other hand, refers to something specific pertaining to a group whose legal rights have been infringed. An awareness of civil rights goes alongside the development of a civil society, Sharism, and ‘power-with’. It is necessary regardless of who your government is.

*I haven’t thought this through carefully yet, but perhaps it’s to do with being a ‘dissident’, and whether you use the same language as the Party. Some dissidents do. The sad thing, of course, is that political language has no substance in China at the moment; it turns people off so thoroughly that almost anything can be said to be outside its normal mode of discourse.