okay so let's move to power over um this is a more kind of hierarchical dynamic the power possessed by some wielded over others it necessarily implies that power is going to be unequally distributed so how do we respond to unequal distributions of power as I argued in the last one power two is kind of unequally distributed as well but but we tend to see this more explicitly right and so these can be disparities in resources and influence and knowledge again knowledge not being just the absence of knowledge but the active production of one form of
knowledge that excludes others right and so this is the way it becomes embedded in our structures and institutions um this is classic elite theory of politics right is that the iron law of oligarchy it's Michelle's is that no matter how big the group there is always going to be a small group of insiders who are actually running things right that it always functions this way um so this elite theory has you know two groups in society why only two red I guess because the West legs binary simplifications between haves and haves-nots which I I don't
know that I mean we'll get into this next one but by power but sure let's go with this right let's go with this and so Elites occupy powerful positions and key institutions such as military religion economy politics and culture um and then the the question is is this kind of inevitable in structures of Institutions and Authority right um during the Occupy protests they were trying to be radically um um Democratic and so you do things like twinkles and downs for agreeing and disagreeing and you try to have everyone participate in the process in order to
do that but then the question becomes like I don't I don't know it goes back to questions like leadership right like do we need leadership how does leadership happen and then is there always going to be a set of a group of people who um produce this and so um this is one that I keep running into which I think is interesting because Larry Summers I think I've got a clip of him with Jon Stewart in a minute and this is him he this is a speech he gives to like people of influence and power
so uh Giannis I can always mess up his name he was the Greek Finance Minister during the um uh financial crisis in Greece um and and he said that that Summers came and gave him this speech and Elizabeth Warren um who doesn't get along with Summers was given this speech as well she says this in her book um a fighting chance and she says Larry's tone was uh was in the friendly advice category he he teed it up this way I had a choice I could be an Insider I could be an outsider Outsiders can
say whatever they want but the people on the inside don't listen to them insiders however get lots of access and a chance to push their ideas to people powerful people listen to what they say but insiders also understand one unbreakable rule they don't criticize other Insiders which is gross it's just gross it's gross because this is how bad stuff happens this is how you get bad cultures of leadership bad environments bad places this is not because you know there's you have to have the free expression of ideas this reproduces dominance and reflects those values and
so I just grabbed this one I mean I could have grabbed any um this is just Jon Stewart talking with Larry Summers about these types of things so we'll see what happens here um we'll see if these Insider Outsider opinions come through or I think it does a bit I mean let's be fair yeah on Apple TV correct and I think Apple TV is worth about five times as much as Exxon I think Apple's price since the stimulus began Apple's value has gone up by about 1.2 trillion uh dollars right that's four so he's making
the argument Summers is making the argument against Stuart as him being an Insider or a part of an elite group because apple is one of the richest companies on the planet we're thousands you just made my point for me do you feel that apple is somehow gouging or doing something wrong yes of course and Exxon is and mobilism let's talk about Apple do you do you think okay should just sell phones for less and not have enough phones what would you have apple what would you have apple do you're saying to me John Market forces
are Market forces and if demand goes up are you suggesting young man that Apple should charge less than they could charge let me flip that on you when there's a tightness in the labor market what you're saying is the workers shouldn't do the same that the workers just following the same capitalistic principles that allow Apple to charge more for their phones shouldn't charge more because wage inflation is driving inflation that's not at all what I'm saying that's exactly what you're saying actually it isn't every worker should get as high a wage as they can it
would be a terrible idea is going to intervene the FED is going to intervene to make that not possible no and so this is the problem of societies is that the question is we don't get any to get into it but the idea here is that if the government has a key role and a key decision to make in this case they're referencing interest rates but it really doesn't matter but it has to make a decision about whether it's going to help insiders or Outsiders and Summers as an Insider says insiders don't listen to Outsiders
and insiders don't criticize each other and therefore the Insiders are going to make decisions that benefit insiders Apple investors all the rest of it that make a trillion dollars during covet um what Stewart's trying to get at is the idea well maybe government should be in the interest of The Outsiders not the Insiders and so the question becomes when we're talking politics and when we're back to this Machiavellian stuff does the Machiavellian principle fight against the liberal Democratic principle right of the idea that no we should do what benefits everybody to make everybody in that
who votes benefit from the voting or should the voting only reflect the interests and power of those Elites who run the show and so it becomes this this problem and this is how we end up immediately here with power over um you can do it as an elite theory but more easily you can do it as a Marxist theory right so which is the the classes now power unequally distributed between different classes kind of misses the point because absolutely it is about distribution but remember back to the discussion from from Lenin the idea that Lenin
was arguing is it's not that the distribution of resources are um unequal it's that they are utilized in conflictual ways so the distribution resource is weaponized against one another and so if the elites are weaponizing against the masses the masses should weaponize against the elites conflict not just unequal distribution resources but conflict that comes from that unequal distribution of resources and so this class conflict is bound up in the rise of capitalism and the exploitation of the proletariat by the bourgeoisie we don't have to get into that but what the idea here is that as
a political analysis then what these Frameworks are doing is they're saying that class struggle the struggle between these two groups the attacks on one another explains historical uh oppression and resistance it can actually explain history so the history the fight between these two is what actually explains history everybody else is is telling you either the history of the elite rulers so back to the who won the empire here or it's telling the the marginalized oppression of those people as a mechanism to make those people rise up and overthrow the system and so I've been dealing
with this lately thinking about based system where a state restricts compensation to those who create value for private owners where there are businesses that compete in that system with a regulated system that pays for employment and so this could sound like a lot of things this could have Plantation overtones and all the rest of it I'm in this case just using what's happening to media and in particular tick tock Tick Tock in the Canadian State we don't have a creators fund so in the Canadian system we have States making decisions because of all sorts of
things about how people would get renumerated and how that remuneration would happen that that renumeration can't or doesn't happen in Canada it could be that a corporate decision because of the legal regulatory environment or because the state hasn't passed a law they're saying that if you're a tick tock Creator you should be compensated for your creation but that this platform is now sucking all of the advertising Revenue away from traditional forms of media TV social media all the rest of that and is now competing directly with those forms of media where you have to pay
pay people to write TV produce TV where they had realistic sources of income for jobs and now you have the free creation of this thing that this company is making billions of dollars of advertising on and not renumerating anyone for that work and so this weird system is one where I mean this is this I could better capture this than a meme right um that the idea of what Technology Innovation is is often exploiting the lack of State regulation or forcing cab companies to compete directly with Uber so you have a heavily regulated sector that
has to compete with a sector that uses the internet to pay whatever it can or whatever it wants or irregular work versus regular work right yeah I'd bonus app and so you've got hotel chains competing with Airbnb but you see over time how the initial subsidy of these by you know Innovation Tech startup venture capitalist funds in the case of uber um wasting not wasting um spending billions of dollars per year without making a profit is them competing directly with an industry that has been heavily regulated in order to make it fair and and redistributive
in all sorts of ways um the benefits society and all the rest of that and how we've come up with those systems um and then we've got things like I've got a paper on cryptocurrency at crypto Bros I'm not targeting you but now we're kind of safe to do so because the FDX in the crash um that this idea or the plagiarism machine which is what we're in now where um Chachi PT AI bards all the rest of that are fundamentally undermining the ability of Education as it traditionally stands that's fine I mean you you
have to to accommodate these changes but the idea then of of these systems competing with systems that have to renumerate is very weird and so this class analysis then gets framed by the textbook in a way that I'm not comfortable with so we could be sympathetic to the class analysis but I'm critical of it as well um because it what it does is it does the technique of elite Elites which is say hey you workers why are you not thinking enough about racism or about sexism or about misogyny and all the rest of it so
you have to pick one over the other and so the weird part of this is is do we think that we could avoid the discussion of capitalism entirely like that somehow capitalism doesn't intersect with feminist questions or questions of race or racial capitalism and all of these other questions and so the the textbook gave me these slides to ask you as a class do we think class conflict is more important than other forms of conflict in contemporary Society or other forms of Oppression sexism colonialism heteronormativity racism more significant I'm not going to ask you that
question because it's pitting people against each other it's fundamentally wrong to frame it in those terms I think there's absolutely the value in asking all of those questions and we don't need to prioritize one over the other but framing it in that way is a form of elite divide and conquer rule right that we don't need to build a single consensus that we can dissenses we can challenge those questions and the way that we do that would be pretty simple did I just add these in right so I mean there is no class that is
not raised there is no class that is not sexualized that is doesn't deal with gender Dynamic it it's all bound up in the same stuff right so we can talk about feminist forms of social reproduction the way that homemaking Child reorgan Care work often involves no remuneration and there have been lots of proposals in Canada in the in the 70s and with Ubi and all the rest of it that like if you're staying home to socially reproduce the Next Generation or the last generation taking care of elderly parents or you're taking care of the kids
for the future you should be renumerated because Society benefits the labor market benefits from that work you're doing that you're not getting renumerated for so it's both class and feminist questions and there's lots of feminist political economy dealing with ideas of social reproduction how does reproduction happen how do societies reproduce and who gets remunerated for that reproduction how do they do so we know how much to charge for social reproduction you just put your kids in daycare that's the cost and when you do it at home you don't get paid for it which is weird
right because we know how much it costs and so this is why we get things like efforts to make Universal Child Care something that everybody can afford right a conscious State decision to do that we can do this in the colonial dispossession the elimination of languages culture and and being as ways of improvement as the idea that we have to develop areas that aren't properly developed as if those that development doesn't result in unequal Elites making money off the extinguishment of these other ways of being right we could do legacies of slavery transatlantic slave trade
and these Plantation structures and ownership we only have to look at that only recently revising the NWA NCAA in the U.S about the idea of these media companies making billions of dollars off of the working laboring often injuring bodies of young individuals that are raced in specific ways that don't get remunerated right so now we have name image like this like in 2020 we're now finally starting to pay people for something that another group is making billions of dollars off of right so these structures are built in and then the idea of normalcy of bodies
so talking about ableism and ability and and um how we construct what is um you know phenotypical characteristics birthplace no religious identities presenting the ways in which we present gender as things that we normalize or allow access to or not so in the case of Florida all of the gender affirmative care being wiped out is a way of using the state to reflect power and interest which also wipes out all that section of the economy and so those can be class and interest-based as well there's we can do these as supplemental we don't have to
do them as oppositional so it's it's a weird move to make it oppositional which goes back to I I think the original the original framing here of reflecting this elite theory so elite theory and this is the kind of you know police that loves The Meta this framing is an elite theory of class analysis which is isn't fair and there's lots of ways that we can look at the intersections here I just grabbed a bunch of books right the ways in which we can do all these analysis is in real time with the I pulled
these these are all within the last I think three or four years 2019 on all about how the ways in which structures that we've built that are new and Innovative just reproduce very old problems and ideas right um this one invisible women just dealing with the idea of the ways in which like things like we didn't for the longest time you know test whether drugs had differential impacts on bodies of of presenting as women or or um Crash Test Dummies being different sizes different heights in different ways stuff like that it's just it's wild um
this results in direct women's deaths we quantify this it's various Quantified the ways in which um you know racism in our data sets reproduces hierarchies and normalcies the ways in which design frames these things the ways in which some way of being or thinking or some way of expressing yourself gets challenged in all these different forms and so thinking about this in this really the textbook does these really abstract terms we can think about how these class struggle those are presented all the times and just this is just me doing it like these are just
memes this is I'm 14 and this is deeper this is you know late stage capitalism on Reddit these are just memes that Express how the ways in which you know um the class Warfare is Being Framed in in very specific ways the idea that you know Millennials are killing chains like Buffalo Wild Wings and Applebee's and then boomers are killing the planet so this is setting off these groups against each other this Aegis kind of class Warfare or the ways in which you know um donations or helping is framed as beneficial even though it's reflecting
very specific interests or the ways in which climate change is framed as individual choices versus the idea that there's it's a very Elites making a lot of the decisions about global greenhouse gases or the idea that we could expose these Elites and literally nothing happens as a consequence we can have all of these campaigns by people who have the resources um who claim that if they're given um Frameworks for feeding the world's poor they will do it and then given those Frameworks just simply say well everybody else should do it right so the the celebrity
appeals these ideas of the um systems by which wealth is created off of the life experience of some bodies and yet our political systems are concerned with other issues the ways in which the extremism of some of these claims in one context is perfectly normal in others right that the ideas that we can just look at the numbers in terms of questions like CEO compensation and say well our political structures representing everyone or Elites the the group of Elites or we can make Democratic decisions to make sure that people become Elites or that we can
have things that are holdovers from previous eras that are something now literally somebody gotten a Twitter fight about this about the idea well you don't need libraries because you've got Amazon um or that um somehow that there we should be fighting about who is represented when the concept of linear time means that younger people by definition should be I mean we know that the systems of representation are dramatically skewed towards different groups or the ways in which we valorized the accomplishments of some but not the others or the ways in which we framed the idea
of having to shut down prisons as being a lack of of of the the success of the system versus the something we should aspire to or the idea that we have a different set of rules right like any punishment that is a fine is only a cost of doing business if it involves the loss of Liberty it's fair but if it doesn't involve the loss of Liberty then it's just the cost of doing business and so when we think about these things and we think about the differential impacts we also have to think about the
resources that each group has in order to weather those impacts and and how those questions are framed and how we get to talk about and this is what power is all about how we get to talk about and blame what the problems are for these issues and so that's what we'll deal with specifically how these come about in in the next section
