Nora Ng
PS 311 – Wk 8
John Gaventa’s Power and Powerlessness
John Gaventa in Power and Powerlessness seeks to explain the absence of organized political protest by the miners of Middlesboro, in Central Appalachia’s Clear Fork Valley, who suffered terrible economic exploitation and political neglect. Gaventa is mainly concerned with the miners’ failure to initiate rebellion, though he also provides accounts of the few failed attempts at collective action. These accounts of failed attempts offer a chance to indirectly use the McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly approach to studying contentious politics (as described in Dynamics of Contention) on a case where the stakes are local rather than national.
Gaventa tells the story of the industrial “colonization” of the Cumberland Gap region of Appalachia by the British firm, American Association Ltd. The Company acquired enormous areas of land in order to extract the coal beneath, and developed the city of Middlesboro. In Middlesboro the Company owned and controlled all the land, all the factors of production, and all the facilities on which miners depend (such as houses and the Company store). Social stratification accompanied this concentrated control of economic resources, with the British absentee owners and their agents on top, merchants and professionals in the middle, and the majority of Middlesboro’s population, the laborers and miners, on the bottom. The local elites and government officials were successfully co-opted by the Company, consistently upholding the Company’s interest over those of the miners, and turning a blind eye to flagrant labor abuses. Why, in an ostensible democracy, did the miners not organize themselves to demand their rights? Why the conspicuous inaction?
The political quiescence of the Appalachian miners stem from the overwhelmingly unequal power distribution among them, their employer, and the local elites. According to Gaventa, there are three approaches to studying power. The one-dimensional approach asserts that people recognize their grievances and would directly participate in an open political system to address them. Nonparticipation is attributed to some quality of the oppressed group, such as low socio-economic status, apathy, and alienation. Gaventa faults this “blame the victim” approach for ignoring power relations, specifically power inequality, and how power of the dominant group can affect the political participation of the oppressed. The two- and three-dimensional approaches fill this gap. The two-dimensional approach claims that power, besides working directly on political participants, serves to shape the political process to exclude certain participants and to control the agenda to exclude certain issues. Power also works indirectly, through anticipation of retaliation, and thus prevents issues from being raised at all. Going even further, the three-dimensional approach states that power can shape or determine conceptions of grievance and the possibility of challenge. All three dimensions work together to forge the link between power and powerlessness. The Company’s persistent triumph over the miners in the political arena (first dimension) leads to the quiescence of the miners in anticipation of failure and of the Company’s repressive response (dismissal, eviction, harassment, etc.). The identification of the local elite’s interests with the Company’s kept economic and labor grievances off the agenda. The cumulative impact of miners’ political defeat over time internalized in the miners a sense of powerlessness and an attitude of submission, even an adoption of the values of the Company controllers. The miners’ withdrawal from participation and challenge eventually leads to a “fading of conception of action itself,” to the point where the miners didn’t think to act even when opportunity presented itself. (Power 92).
Attempts to rebel must have been made -- and failed -- before defeat can be internalized. The failure of miner rebellions, particularly the one in 1931-32, offers the opportunity to apply the relational approach to studying contentious politics described by McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly, in a case where the stakes were local, a case that differs from the nation-wide episodes examined in Dynamics of Contention, but for which McAdam et al. are convinced their approach would also work (Dynamics 341). I will deal only with the mobilization aspect of contention, since that was as far as the miners got.
The classic social movement agenda, according to McAdam et al, emphasizes the elements of social change, resulting political opportunities, mobilizing structures (with strength of organization positively correlated with insurgency success), the framing (or interpretation and construction) of opportunity and action, and transgressive forms of action. Based on this classical agenda, McAdam et al. constructs a dynamic mechanism linking these elements and putting them into action. In this dynamic model, no opportunity will spark mobilization unless it is visible to challengers and recognized by challengers as an opportunity. Instead of pre-existing mobilization structures, the dynamic model would focus on “active appropriation of sites” for mobilization. Framing becomes an “interactive construction of disputes” among challengers, opponents, third parties, and the media. Attention would be paid to “innovative collective action,” which entails claims, objects of claims, collective self-representations, and/or means that are “either unprecedented or forbidden within the regime in question”. (Dynamics 43-44, 49) The active appropriation and innovative action components of mobilization sometimes bring forth two additional mechanisms that result in the constitution of new actors and collective identities – certification, the validation of actors and claims by external parties; and category formation, a shift or redefinition of insurgent identity, which in turn redefines interests and the relations among actors in political contention. (Dynamics 316)
Failure of the 1931-1932 miners’ rebellion can be seen as the result of the way some of the above mechanisms worked, or failed to work, in Clear Fork Valley, especially those of framing and certification. The other mechanisms were present: when massive layoffs and cutbacks in 1930 weakened the Company’s control over the miners, the miners had both cause and opportunity to organize for relief and better treatment. In 1931, miners actively organized and joined unions in droves for the first time (active appropriation and innovative action). The miners were militant and determination was strong, enduring dismissals, evictions, and severe harassment to make political claims. The miners’ plight and the strong-arm tactics of the Company and the local government – such as mass arrests, physical violence, and the murder of a young union organizer – attracted outside attention. These conditions ought to have been favorable for the miners’ rebellion, yet by the spring of 1932, the effort petered out. Why?
The effectiveness of “reign of terror” tactics, the strong pro-Company bias of the local government, insufficient union resources all contributed to the failure of the rebellion. The most interesting reasons, however, are the way framing and certification worked in this conflict. Framing and certification are parts of the McAdam et al. mobilization mechanism, but they also fall under Gaventa’s second and third dimensions of power. The key here is the control of communication by local elites. As leaders at the centralized location of the county seat, local elites act as gatekeepers, mediators, and brokers of information for the entire county (Power 105). Their monopolization of communication allowed them to prevent alternative, sympathetic interpretations of the rebellion, to “isolate, contain, and redirect” the conflict (Power 106). By presenting the strikes as ineffective, by minimizing knowledge of the scope of and support for the strikes, by burying news of outside support, local elites kept external validation out of the news and preempted the certification mechanism, which could have stiffened the miners’ resolve and encouraged further organization through the external validation of their claims. By reporting on irrelevant side-events (such as fist-fights, the adultery of a union-sympathizer, communist literature in union headquarters), local elites redirected the issue from the genuine grievances of unemployment and civil rights to controversial but nongermane concepts of patriotism and morality (Power 109).
Elites also managed to frame the conflict in terms that undermined miners’ support for the rebellion. They condemned Communism (an ideology often associated with unionism) as anti-religious, foreign, and un-American, and with some effectiveness appealed to the miners’ patriotism and cultural loyalty. Even outside support for miners was turned to the elite’s advantage. The “invasion” of outside investigators of the rebellion allowed local elites to alter the conception of the conflict from a class struggle to a culture-based division of “mountaineers v. outsiders” (Power 114). Manipulation of information, symbols, and identity by local elites (among other things) hindered the category formation and consolidation of the miners. No solid, enduring class identification or class-consciousness emerged.
Gaventa’s conception of power and its effects explains the development and maintenance of political quiescence of the Appalachian miners, while the McAdam et al. mobilization mechanism is useful for illustrating the actual episode of rebellion. Based on this one limited case, it would appear that the McAdam et al. ‘s dynamic approach to the study of contentious politics can indeed work on a local level.
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