Playing with the Devil's own toys: a commentary on the relationship between the state and the military industrial complex (a concept that appears repeatedly in this text)_. New York: State University of New York Press, 1992. _Power in the American Constitution_. New York: New York University Press, 1984. Robin, Corey. "No Alternative to War: The Military Industrial-Media-Academic-NGO Complex." In _Wages of War_. Boston: South End Press, 1989. Staloff, Darren. _The Fear of Freedom: Recognizing and Taking Risks in a Sensible and Enduring Democracy_. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996. State of the Union Address 1997. . Stern, Fritz, and Hans Joas. _The Western Heritage_. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Zinn, Howard. _The People's History of the United States_. New York: HarperCollins, 1990. 2. **In this chapter, you will learn about** **...** What I am trying to do is "reconstruct" an understanding of the relationship of power in the contemporary world. I suggest that there are three areas of power in our society—political, economic, and ideological. We can think of power in society as having two facets, one positive and one negative. The positive side of power is what people in a society would identify with terms like "strength" or "freedom," and it is usually what we are talking about when we talk about the good side of power. The negative side of power is what I call "exploitation" or "oppression," and it is usually what we are talking about when we talk about the bad side of power. I want to emphasize that people can be oppressed, in a very concrete way, without their own actions necessarily contributing to it. Let us say, for instance, that the police are beating up the homeless and the homeless are not fighting back. This does not mean that the homeless are not oppressed. It simply means that the police are enforcing the terms of existence of the homeless, that their power is exercised in a systematic way on behalf of the system of private property in land and other resources, the property owners. I think that most of us can think of times when our actions were oppressed and we were helpless. I think we can probably think of times when others oppressed us, and we were helpless. When I say "or" in my title, I am referring to the different kinds of oppression that people face: what society oppresses them, and what they oppress themselves. I would like to stress, however, that, when we use the term "people," we are referring to everyone who is living in capitalist society. For example, many people in the military in the United States are not oppressed in the sense that they were not forced to join the army. What I mean when I say "people" is not referring just to the top 1 percent of the top 1 percent who take advantage of the labor of the rest of us. It is referring to everyone living in a capitalist society. By "exploitation" I do not mean a moral judgment on the part of the person who is using this power—we can talk about a person who is a robber or a murderer or a rapist. I mean that exploitation results from the interaction between the power of society and the weakness of individuals. We must recognize that all people have weaknesses. In the sense that we are able to exploit another person, everyone is vulnerable. There is a great difference between a society and an individual. Power is exercised and used within a society. It takes place as part of the collective process, not as the individual action of an individual person. A society, however, is made up of people. People can organize for a better system—one that allows more people to exercise power in the direction of their own needs and interests. There is nothing wrong with the collective action of groups in a society for the purpose of achieving goals that are in the interests of people as a whole, whether those goals are to be achieved through the democratic process or through direct struggle against some social power that is trying to prevent this collective action from occurring. In order to get some sense of what I mean by the positive side of power, let me talk about democracy for a little bit. Democracy, as I understand it, is the most perfect collective form of power. It means that, within a society of people, people, because they are not coerced or forced into doing something, make decisions about how they want to live. I'm talking about decision making about politics and economics. So the way I want to talk about this will not sound very abstract—although it is, in a sense. Let's say that we are trying to think about a society where the decisions are made by the people, but not in any particular democracy. Let's say there are a lot of people in the society who do not have much to say. And these are people who basically agree with the status quo. They are not out to change things. But in a particular society, they are not able to make any decisions. So it seems that they don't have any power in that society. They are oppressed. But, what I am trying to stress is that they do not have a part in that society. Let's look at what we might think of as a different kind of situation. If we look at the United States, there are a lot of oppressed people. The working class is oppressed, and has been for a long time—a lot of them are oppressed. Some of them work for the military, and they don't get enough of a share of the wealth that the rest of the people produce in this society. But many of them don't get enough. But, at the same time, they have power. They have power in the way they organize politically and economically. In other words, they have a powerful impact on how society functions in the way that people would want it to function. So when we talk about the power of democracy, we mean more than just a vote at election time. We mean the way people organize politically, and how the political process works. We also mean how the economic system works. We have a democracy for poor people in this country, and a democracy for workers. And these are two different systems of democracy. Even though some individuals, the ones in positions of political and economic power, are able to decide things for the majority of people in society, they are forced to answer to some extent to the decisions made by the majority of people. In a sense, we all are democrats. So, we don't have a system of political and economic power that is completely oppressive and totally undemocratic. We have a form of government that's very democratic, but where all of the decisions in a particular society are made by all the people, and then the people in power are more in the business of running things, making and carrying out decisions, but not necessarily making all the decisions. That is how I would like to think about democracy. That's why I think it is significant to talk about democracy, even though I am using the term in a very narrow way. To look at power in another way, let's talk about a country where everyone is rich. Or let's say there is a country where many people are poor and many people are not rich. I think of that as an oppressive system. That is a system of exploitation of the poor by the rich. How does this come about? The way it comes about is that some people get hold of the resources. For example, some people get hold of land and other resources, like oil, and the rest of the people in society must make use of those resources for their survival. That means that they are dependent on these people who have gotten hold of the resources. Let's think about another example. Let's say there are only two kinds of people, or three, in a particular society. You have poor people, working people, and people who own all of the property. And if we look at this society, what will happen is that the poor people are going to be more dependent on the rich. The poor will be forced to work in the workplaces where the rich work, for example. The conditions of life in society will be made to be worse for the poor. And the rich will just be living off the labor of the poor, that's all. What I am trying to get at here is the way power is used to turn one person against another, and to make people more dependent on each other. And when I say