Social Power

Social power is the basic element in politics, economics, and all other social relationships. Social power is possessed by all individuals and social groups and arises out of their connections to each other.

In Capital, Marx explained social power in a materialistic way. Human labor can impart ‘vital energy’ to nature in creating use-values. Marx said ‘each individual holds social power in his pocket in the form of a thing’ (Marx, 1963, p. 986ff). The specific social character of each producer’s labor can only show itself when producers conduct the act of exchange. And money, a thing acquires social properties and social power. Marx describes this "transcendental" quality of a thing as fetishism. Such fetishism is not merely a delusion, or a sort of "false consciousness." In bourgeois society, money actually does possess the greatest power. However, it only possesses such power due to a specific social relationship which underlies it: atomized commodity owners who can constitute their social relationship to one another only by means of a thing, money. Money only has power because all social actors relate to money as money, that is, as an independent embodiment of Value. But insofar as individuals act as commodity owners exchanging products, they have no other choice but to stand in such a relationship to money. Having said that, fetishism does contain a delusional aspect in that money seems to possess an inherent social power. The fact that this power is the result of an automatically executed social process evades the grasp of everyday cognition. The process vanishes in its own result.