/b/ - Siberia

>Where does the power come from?
This'll blow your mind, but it comes from you.
Everything is technically bottom-up. All the power is inherently built on top of productive economic power and local organization. However, there's an effort to obfuscate this, because if people don't understand that the power of bosses, presidents, etc. comes from their own actions, then they will not possess the inherent intuition that, by withholding labor, they can stop things which they object to. Part of this obfuscation is accomplished simply through the shady business of wage labor, where workers are not expected to know exactly what the difference is between the revenue they generate and the cut of it they get in wages; the worker's contribution is inherently obscured, left to bosses and middle-managers to observe objectively. Another, more obviously deliberate aspect of the obfuscation are the various distractions: the idpol, the propaganda, the narratives pushed which demonize certain types of organization (unionization, nationalization of industry, public services, etc.) while promoting or obscuring the existence of other kinds (incorporation, monopolization, privatization, etc.), etc. The idea which is instilled into workers is that everyone is just naturally supposed to exist in competition; and yet, as this idea is promoted, those with major financial and political power largely seek to do the opposite, and aim to maximize their power to collude with one another without interference while opposing the power of workers, who produce the wealth of those at the top but keep less of that wealth themselves, to do the same. This makes an already uneven dynamic even more skewed in favor of the capitalists, since worker organization is really the only way for the common man to reclaim power which he himself generates.

This society, as it exists, would collapse the moment that people stop getting up every day to recreate it. Those who benefit from this status quo have organized and consolidated power to prevent that, and to prevent the ascendancy of any competing forms of organization, and to subvert them where they emerge so that they do not fully wield the power they have. The job of ordinary people is to organize harder and more militantly, to consolidate any material collective wealth and power that they have, and to build. People are creatures which organize naturally, but there is also a natural tendency of people to want to reap the profits of others' labor, and this includes the tendency to harness power and wealth and organizational structures created by others for selfish ends. At the highest levels of centralized power, this is essentially an addiction, so there is resistance to competition and frequently a lack of perspective about the real world impacts of sucking up all that power without regard for those who generate it. Beneath that, though, there is a long series of offices and bureaucrats whose job it is to channel that power upward from the lowest levels of state organization, and whose job it could also be to channel the will of the demos if doing so was not considered such a threat to the will of the rentier-capitalist class.

I'm going to provide an account that attempts to flip >>157017 on its head.
Power is a mirage. When I use the word "mirage", I am being very specific here on two points, but I'm also missing one. First, it means the thing which looks like it's distorted is actually the product of the distortion. Second, the thing is actually intangible, yet it still has real effects - so long as people believe that it's real and act according to that belief. But the key to power is that belief can function even if someone consciously knows that it's all bullshit, because that belief can be delegated and externalized.
Let's go back to feudal times. Did the peasants actually believe that the king had the right to rule because he was anointed by God? For the most part, no. Did the king himself believe in his divine right to rule? If he did, then he was considered a madman, because God (or at least the kind that anoints kings) obviously doesn't exist. Does the king get his power from his crown, or his scepter, or his throne? Of course not, those are just gaudy ornaments.
But then why even bother with the image of the king, anointed by divine right, wearing his crown and wielding his scepter as he sits on the throne? Why stamp every coin and bill with his face? Why bother with all these priests and popes and prophets? Because power flows from the whole structure of belief and all the fetishes of externalized belief which shape the form of this mirage.
From the perspective of the state, it is true that political power grows out of the barrel of a gun, but someone has to aim that gun (or aim a gun at someone else aiming that gun). They must be granted the authority to aim a gun, and that authority must be felt. It can be felt as a result of all the stories and symbols that must accompany it. Of course real people and real things are involved in the reproduction of that power structure, but simply killing those people and blowing up those things won't get rid of it. It has a life of its own.
The material effect of belief is so powerful that entire societies are sustained by it, and collapse without it. In the introduction to Towards a New Socialism, Paul Cockshott explains that the critical flaw of the socialist mode production in the USSR is that it relied upon Stalin's cult of personality as its mechanism of surplus extraction (which emerged out of a lack of democratic legitimacy). Get rid of that cult of personality, and the mode of production which relies on it will soon wither away - which is precisely what happened. Cockshott is no "critical theorist" or "anti-Stalinist" or "idealist Marxist" of any kind, mind you! This is a truly materialist form of ideology critique, because it recognizes the materiality of belief.

>>157017
This was already at least alluded to in the previous messages and isn't, or at least shouldn't be some new revelation. Hence I suggested robert greene's laws of power since that illustrated the dynamic of a leader or head figure being allowed there by the people beneath them. Since when the aristocracy objects then the king won't be a kind no more, as it frequently has happened throughout history.
But not only that but is also simplistic and incomplete. The criticism to your post can already be found in prior replies here.

>This society, as it exists, would collapse the moment that people stop getting up every day to recreate it.
And that's the issue here. People don't want that to happen. Even the lowest ranked crew member unless driven to suicidal tendencies, won't want to punch a hole into the ship's hull since it will sink with them. Same with a system that's putting them at a disadvantage but still provides more of an advantage than the alternative of letting it collapse. If a strike drives a company to ruin then even their union won't save them being unemployed and unable to pay their mortgage, bills and food.
Now you might respond with something like "but what about UBI"? The problem with such a scheme is that it can easily become dysfunctional and without enough people providing their labor to sustain that system it will collapse and the consequences of that are even worse. It's a real dilemma which you need to recognize.
The solution to that is really not as straight forward as you are stating.

>At the highest levels of centralized power, this is essentially an addiction
This you appear to be right with. It's interesting to look into how our dopaminergic system works with that in mind. And what makes me bring this conversation back that the label of the system doesn't matter. Capitalism, shmapitalism, you will always end up with a societal lid of people who are in the trues biological sense of the word addicted to maximizing their influence and power. And to actually define power, which was at least part of OP's question, it's the pull they can exert by the network of other people that they have a mutually beneficial relationship with.
The bottom of society is rarely to never the source of change and it's the middle class that has the pull, who has the resources and connections to organize and push change upwards. You can see it by the current dominating culture being "post modernist" due to the middle class being it. You see major media productions of hundreds of millions usd faltering because profit is forfeit for the sake of the message. And before you call it lies and me some gamer-gater or whatever, I simply pointed that out as an interesting example of where we're moving currently as a western society.
But I don't think this is helping either, sadly. Granted, and as you pointed out, the idpol is only divisive. But the idea had its organic and well intended origins, albeit ill conceived and ill fated and now is pushing people back into the modernist, dog eat dog mindset, since that's what's actually still working well enough.
Neither can we return to this high trust arrangement again where people could rely on their leaders and bosses to feel at least some sort of responsibility. Or could just dispense with their resources to others in supposed or actual need and being able to rely on things coming around when they go around. Simply due to high population density. And if you can't keep track of the level of reciprocity of people because most of them you won't ever see again once a transaction or exchange is concluded, it becomes a hotbed for psychopaths who will just regard generous people as suckers and quickly amass material wealth to other's detriment. This is also the reason why everything has to have a price tag now. Because it's either heavily authoritarian management and distribution of resources or a market system that's facilitating a low trust mode of trade between individuals. And I don't know about you but I personally am not fond of how the soviet union was running things. Partly because it also seemed to make people even more materialistic in the end and suppressing or even selecting them out for self agency. Really weird how that works but that's so far my observation.
But in short, the whole world isn't and can't be a tribe. The logistics of it simply prohibit that.
The only glimpse of an idea I've got so far to actually improve things is hence to not focus on trust as much as on care. And also realizing that a certain level of reciprocity must be present. You can't just be expected to be giving and permissive to people who just want to behead you. But also the middle class must realize the faults in their egalitarian and over-inclusive idealism (which is what gives idpol its disruptive power) and instead focus on strongly compelling leaders and owners to adopt a sense of responsibility again.
Our society essentially needs to develop a sense of care that's not just this surface level bullshit of virtue signalling and green washing. But how exactly that's meant to be achieved I'm currently as lost as you are.