"'...once a group gets power, it never gives it up freely.'"
-Poul Anderson, "The Big Rain" IN Anderson, The Psychotechnic League (New York, 1981), pp. 201-280 AT p. 249.
Kemel Ataturk is cited as an exception. Hollister says that the state was supposed to whither away in the Soviet Union. But things went badly wrong there. For a text on what is meant by the "withering away of the state," I recommend The State And Revolution by Lenin.
5 comments:
Competition for power is inherent in the nature of human beings.
And power is a positional good, which means that unlike material things it can never be abundant, not even theoretically. Power can be mediated through material things (eg., wealth) but doesn't require that. People in a hunter-gatherer band have little material inequality, but there are very sharp inequalities of social power, mostly dealing with reproduction and status.
Attaturk didn't give up power; he accomplished what he set out to do and then retired, and the structure -- the group -- he established remained in power for generations. The recent coup in Turkey was an attempt by Kemalists to regain power that had been taken away from them.
Mr Stirling,
Thank you, again. I am really digging that, by discussing a pulp sf story, we are addressing the same issues as the political theoreticians. Sf is good for you.
Paul.
Science fiction lets you play out hypotheticals.
Thought experiments. Mind games.
Gentlemen,
If I'm recalling correctly what Paul Johnson wrote in MODERN TIMES, Ataturk came to have only contempt for Islam and strove to make it irrelevant and impotent in Turkey. But, as we are seeing with the rise to power of Muslim extremists led by Erdogan, he failed, ultimately, in that goal. Ataturk forgot that men don't live by bread alone but also by their beliefs and ideas on the ultimate questions. Only if Ataturk had managed to convert most of his Turks to another religion, such as Christianity, could the long term grip of Islam on them be broken. But I don't think Ataturk took religion seriously enough to understand the point I made here.
Sean
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