/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.