Michael Mann on power

Dan Little reviews Michael Mann on power.

Little describes Mann's model as follows:

One of the generalizing frameworks that he uses throughout all four volumes is what he refers to as the "IEMP model" of social power: ideological, economic, military, and political. He believes that these aspects of social reality are largely independent sets of institutions and processes, and they create different though complementary sources of power for individuals and groups within a given state of society. Here is the thumbnail he offers for each of these four high-level features of social power in Volume 3:

Ideological Power derives from the human need to find ultimate meaning in life, to share norms and values, and to participate in aesthetic and ritual practices with others. (V3, 6)

Economic Power derives from the human need to extract, transform, distribute, and consume the products of nature. Economic relations are powerful because they combine the intensive mobilization of labor with very extensive circuites of capital, trade, and production chains, providing a combination of intensive and extensive power and normally also of authoritative and diffused power. (V3, 8)

Military Power. Since writing my previous volumes, I have tightened up the definition of military power to "the social organization of concentrated and lethal violence." (V3, 10)

Political Power is the centralized and territorial regulation of social life. The basic function of government is the provision of order over this realm. (V3, 12)

In Marxist terms, economic power would refer to the control of the means of production. The state would encompass both military and political power. While the superstructure would include both the state and institutions of ideological power such as organised relgion, educational institutions, and the mass media.

The superstructure acts to protect the economic power of the ruling class. The material basis for these manisfestations of power is in the control of the means of production.

It is the division of society in classes that drives history. Mann is working at the edges, not at the centre which is class warfare.