Power and Permanence

Morning Comrades.

A few basic propositions are necessary in order to situate what follows. The present global order, as it is experienced within the advanced capitalist centres and as it is exported, often coercively, usually catastrophically, to the rest of the world, cannot be understood as stable in either ecological, social, or moral terms. From the accelerating breakdown of environmental systems, to the persistence of a self-legitimating “rules-based” international order, to the increasingly exhausted and atomised forms of everyday life under contemporary capitalism, the prevailing organisation of society appears less as a settled equilibrium than as a condition of managed disintegration. The reproduction of this order depends not only upon economic extraction or geopolitical dominance, but upon the internalisation of forms of exhaustion, resignation, and procedural compliance that render alternatives difficult to imagine in practical rather than merely theoretical terms.

It follows that the demand for change is neither novel nor marginal; it is, in a sense, constitutive of the present historical moment. Yet this demand has repeatedly failed to translate into sustained transformation, even as the conditions it responds to have intensified. The gap between the recognition that current arrangements are untenable and the capacity to alter them has widened, producing a political situation in which awareness coexists with apparent paralysis. It is therefore insufficient to rest content with moral denunciation or abstract critique, however accurate such critiques may be. The question that imposes itself, with increasing urgency, is not simply whether change is desirable, but how change might become materially possible under conditions that are structurally resistant to it.

To address this question is to confront, directly and without euphemism, the problem of power. Not power as an abstract philosophical category, but power as it is concretely organised, distributed, and enforced through institutions, legal frameworks, economic dependencies, and coercive capacities that shape the boundaries of functioning action. This includes questions of acquisition and consolidation, but also of limitation, accountability, and eventual relinquishment, insofar as any transformative project must reckon with the risk that the instruments used to alter society may themselves become the foundations of a new form of domination. To speak seriously about change, therefore, is to speak simultaneously about how power is obtained, how it is exercised, and how it is prevented from becoming self-perpetuating beyond the conditions that originally justified it.

From this perspective, the habitual recourse to inherited moral vocabularies, particularly those that present power as inherently corrupting or politically suspect in itself, requires critical scrutiny. Such frameworks, whatever their ethical intentions, often function to obscure rather than clarify the actual structure of contemporary domination, insofar as they risk detaching questions of justice from the material mechanisms through which injustice is sustained. A more sober analysis begins from the recognition that existing forms of power are neither neutral nor absent, but actively operative, and that any serious attempt at transformation must therefore engage with them on their own terms rather than simply opposing them at the level of moral assertion.

What is required, then, is not an abandonment of ethical reflection, but a reordering of priorities in which conceptual clarity regarding power precedes normative evaluation of its uses. Only on the basis of such clarity becomes it possible to pose, in a meaningful way, the question of how a different social order might be constructed, sustained, and protected without reproducing the very forms of domination it seeks to overcome. The following discussion proceeds from this premise, and situates the problem of revolutionary transformation within the broader tension between necessity and constraint, between the acquisition of collective capacity and the enduring risk of its institutional solidification

A persistent difficulty within modern revolutionary theory lies in the attempt to reconcile two claims that appear, at least in their most uncompromising formulations, to be mutually incompatible: on the one hand, the insistence that the transformation of a deeply unequal social order requires the concentration of political power sufficient to dismantle the institutional architecture of capitalism; on the other, the equally forceful warning that any such concentration of power risks reproducing, in altered form, the very relations of domination it seeks to abolish. The classical articulation of this problem is often associated with debates surrounding the so-called “dictatorship of the proletariat” in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Marxist tradition, but its conceptual stakes extend far beyond any single doctrinal lineage, reaching instead into the broader question of whether emancipation can be achieved through instruments historically associated with coercion without those instruments subsequently becoming autonomous centres of domination.

In the writings of Karl Marx, the term “dictatorship of the proletariat” does not denote arbitrary tyranny but rather a transitional phase in which class power is reorganised in favour of the majority in order to suppress the counter-revolutionary capacity of the old ruling classes. Yet even in Marx’s relatively schematic treatment, the concept remains underdetermined in institutional terms, and it is precisely this indeterminacy that later theoretical and political developments attempt to resolve with divergent consequences. In the work of Lenin, the emphasis shifts decisively toward questions of organisation, state capacity, and the strategic necessity of a disciplined revolutionary apparatus capable of withstanding both internal fragmentation and external intervention. “Critics” such as Luxemburg, however, identify within this trajectory an inherent danger: namely, that the means of revolutionary defence may harden into a permanent administrative and coercive structure, thereby substituting one form of minority rule for another, even if conducted in the name of the majority.

The theoretical tension here is not simply empirical but structural. It concerns whether power, once centralised, can be reliably subordinated to the emancipatory ends for which it was initially justified. This question acquires further complexity when considered alongside the sociological insight, associated with Max Weber, that modern political authority tends to stabilise itself through bureaucratic routines, technical expertise, and institutional inertia, thereby rendering reversal or dissolution increasingly difficult even when original revolutionary intentions remain formally intact. From this perspective, the problem of revolution is not exhausted by the seizure of state power; it extends into the far more difficult question of how such power might be prevented from becoming an enduring structure of domination in its own right.

One response to this question has been to reject the premise that revolutionary transformation requires concentrated state power at all, privileging instead decentralised or horizontal models of organisation. Yet such approaches are frequently confronted with the counter-argument that dispersed forms of authority will struggle to defend themselves against more centrally organised forces, particularly in contexts where existing state structures retain coercive superiority. The result is a recurring oscillation within radical political thought between the perceived necessity of centralisation for effectiveness and the equally perceived necessity of decentralisation for emancipation, an oscillation that has never been fully resolved in theory or practice.

It is in this context that the experience of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation in Chiapas is frequently invoked as an attempt to navigate, rather than definitively resolve, this tension. Emerging publicly in 1994, the EZLN combined armed resistance with a sustained effort to construct autonomous forms of governance in indigenous territories, particularly through the development of local councils and regional assemblies structured around principles of participatory decision-making. Over time, this project evolved into a complex institutional ecology in which formal authority is deliberately fragmented, rotated, and made accountable to communal assemblies, most notably through the principle often summarised as “mandar obedeciendo”, to lead by obeying.

What distinguishes the Zapatista model, at least in its self-description and in much of the secondary literature, is not the absence of authority but its continuous subjection to mechanisms of recallability and communal oversight. Positions of coordination rather than command are rotated, and decision-making is embedded in assemblies that are intended to function as the primary locus of political legitimacy. In this sense, authority is not abolished but rendered provisional, situational, and explicitly subordinated to collective deliberation. The aim is less the elimination of power than its systematic deconcentration, coupled with an ongoing effort to prevent its crystallisation into a self-sustaining bureaucratic layer.

However, the significance of this experiment should not be overstated without qualification. Even within the Zapatista territories, questions persist regarding the practical limits of horizontal governance, particularly in contexts requiring rapid coordination or external negotiation. Moreover, the necessity of maintaining a defensive capacity in relation to both state forces and non-state violence introduces an additional layer of complexity, insofar as any sustained form of autonomy must also possess the means to preserve its conditions of possibility. This tension between internal decentralisation and external defence does not disappear through institutional design; rather, it becomes one of the central, enduring problems such systems must manage.

From a theoretical perspective, what the Zapatista experience illuminates is not a final synthesis of the dictatorship-versus-democracy debate but rather a reconfiguration of the problem itself. It suggests that the central issue may not be whether power is exercised, but how its exercise is temporally and institutionally bounded. The distinction, in other words, is between power conceived as a means oriented toward its own dissolution and power conceived as an end that stabilises itself through administrative reproduction. Yet the translation of this distinction into durable institutional form remains profoundly uncertain, and no historical example has yet demonstrated a fully stable resolution.

This brings us back to the earlier theoretical antinomy. If revolutionary transformation requires sufficient concentration of power to dismantle entrenched systems of domination, then the problem of post-revolutionary governance becomes unavoidable: how to prevent the reconstitution of domination within the very structures created to abolish it. Conversely, if the avoidance of domination is pursued through radical decentralisation from the outset, the question of whether such arrangements can withstand sustained external pressure remains unresolved. The difficulty, therefore, is not merely choosing between two models but recognising that each contains within it a distinct form of vulnerability: centralisation risks internal ossification, while decentralisation risks external fragility.

The enduring relevance of both Marxist and post-Marxist debates, as well as experiments such as those of the EZLN, lies in their shared recognition that emancipation cannot be reduced to a single institutional gesture. It is instead a process marked by continuous tension between necessity and risk, between the requirements of collective survival and the imperative to prevent the emergence of new hierarchies. Whether this tension can be resolved, or whether it must simply be perpetually managed, remains one of the central unresolved questions of modern political thought.

Yours, warmly,

V.