Starhawk’s Webs of Power
Nathan Matthews
Fifty thousand people marched in the streets of Seattle in November of 1999. In the following two years, nearly a dozen large protests, each drawing many thousands of people, would take place in the United States, Canada and Western Europe. Although these protests targeted multiple institutions—the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization, the World Economic Forum, the Democratic and Republican Parties—they had much in common. They were organized by many of the same people, used similar tactics, and raised similar objections. Logistically, these massive events were coordinated without overarching leadership by any individual or small organization. Texts such as Smart Mobs and Netwars explore tactical aspects of these protests, looking to explain the various successes and losses. However, these books give the impression that decentralized tactics were chosen only because they would be effective. They miss the relationships between these tactics and the goals of the protestors, a group whose means were certainly related to their ends. However, isolating and unifying goals for these protests, each of which was attended by a broad and loose coalition of groups, and which targeted eight diverse institutions, is a difficult task.
In Webs of Power, Starhawk offers a participant’s perspective of these events. She attended the majority of them, missing only the Democratic and Republican National Conventions in the summer of 2000 (this absence is remarkable only in that omitting these protests facilitates Starhawk’s claim that the protests are unified in their commitment to global justice/anti-globalization, as the other protests targeted global economic institutions rather than political parties). The first half of Webs of Power consists of articles she wrote during this period, either during protests themselves or on her way to and from them. The intended audience of these missives is other protestors, or at least sympathizers. The letters have varying purposes. Starhawk’s from Genoa is an eyewitness report of police violence. The introductory “How We Really Shut Down the WTO” was written to correct media misrepresentation of the Seattle WTO protest. “Hermana Cristina’s Well”, almost a parable, explores the critique of globalization, and begins to articulate possible alternatives. All of these letters were sent out on activist email lists, published on Independent Media Center websites, etc. The second half of the book is more thoughtful, a collection of essays written for the book (and after 9-11), are more measured, more carefully constructed, and better integrated. In contrast to the chapters in the first half, which were overlapping, disparate status reports, the chapters of the second half each explore particular memes, values and buzzwords within the movement: direct democracy, nonviolence, environmentalism, diversity, and ultimately goals.
Throughout Webs of Power, Starhawk writes from within the movement and too the movement. She is quick to disclose her beliefs, values and biases; by page 7, she has identified herself a Pagan, feminist, Witch and anarchist. She admits that this “is possibly a way to alarm great segments of the general public, but at least it keeps me from sinking into a boring and respectable middle age.” Starhawk also begins with a commitment to the tactic of direct action--such as barricading buildings. Despite these radical commitments, Starhawk is able to maintain a tone that is neither authoritative nor confrontational. Playing her own role of the (hopefully) influential elder, she generally offers thoughts as solutions she has found, presenting the way that she approaches certain problems. She depends on her audience already agreeing that the problems are there, and then presents her views as a possibility for them to consider. The keys to Starhawk’s views are her understanding of power and webs, or networks. Although her ideas are not scientifically complete concepts (nor are they presented as such), they are tools she uses to analyze the numerous themes in facing the movement. These views have been themes in Starhawk’s previous writing as well, but they are more explicitly and completely explored in Webs of Power. They are also of particular interest to students of systems science.
1
There are points at which Starhawk is inflexible. “Something is wrong with a system in which ten-year-olds in India work sixty-hour weeks making carpets and corporate executives make millions. It’s not justifiable under any theory of economic growth or comparative advantage, it’s just wrong.” The visceral opposition to such a system expresses itself in two types of argument: it might offend a fundamental right to a basic standard of living, or it could target the inequality between the rich and poor, using resource use, leisure, self determination, or some other domain for comparison. With a basic optimism about human nature, Starhawk picks self-determination as the key to justice. The Indian child is powerless in an intuitive sense. Starhawk, with a basic faith in human nature, believes that if people are given power over their own lives, the rest of the problems will be easy (relatively) to sort out.
An anarchist seeking to crush the process of economic globalization and, ultimately, capitalism, using the rhetoric of freedom and self-empowerment, may seem absurd to conservatives and libertarian party members. Starhawk identifies two types of power: power over, and power as ability. The distinction is imperfect, but power over is the “entitlement and ability of some groups to control others, extract their labor or resources, and impose sanctions or punishment.” Power over is a kind of hard power--the ability to get people to do things they do not want to do. I can control another because of a threat emanating from myself--do what I want because otherwise I will beat, imprison or torture you, etc. Starhawk extends the category to include exploitation based on economic necessity. If you are poor and starving or in need of medical care, for example, I can get you to do what I want by paying you. Interdependent modern economies, without the potential for self-sufficiency, can be a source of power-over if the resources within them are distributed inequitably.
Starhawk defines power-as-ability equally broadly. “Power-among could also be called “influence,” “prestige,” or “moral authority.”” (170) “Power-over, or domination, is the power we’re all familiar with, the power of a small group to control the resources or to limit the choices of others. Ultimately, it stems from violence and force and is generally backed by the police and military power of the state.” (7) “We each have a different kind of power: the power that comes from within; our ability to dare, to do, and to dream; our creativity. Power from within is unlimited. If I have the power to write, it doesn’t diminish your power: in fact, my writing might inspire you or illuminate your thinking.” (7-8).
There is no obvious justification for power-over. Self-interest has dominated the use of power-over, and will probably always do so. Nevertheless, even if power-over could be motivated by something other than self-interest, Starhawk would not approve of it.
2
The other element guiding Starhawk’s worldview is her idea of webs. Starhawk uses at least two senses of the word web, the more general of which is a synonym for network. Like Frijof Capra and other deep ecologists, Starhawk believes that everything in the world is influenced by its context, or the web it is situated in. Refreshingly, she makes none of Capra’s claims about the inability of reductive science to appreciate this fact, or the pressing need for a scientific revolution and utterly new paradigm. Context matters, everything is affected by things around it, and webs are a tool for understanding this. No more.
The influence of context on anything, represented as a node in a network, will spread beyond its immediate neighbors. In a sense, butterflies not only can start storms half a world away, but they often do. Economic decisions in one part of the world can similarly influence the conditions of others continents away, but unlike the butterflies, these paths of influence are comprehensible and predictable. And while Starhawk does not make Capra-esque claims about scientific understanding of these links, she does observe that most people, in practice, do not follow them.
Webs not only wrap the globe, they connect to each other. ‘Economic’ decisions in California affect the economics of California, Guatemala, and elsewhere, but they also affect the environment, politics, and everything else, crossing the partitions make for academic study. This is another point that isn’t new—economists acknowledge the plethora of externalities slipping through the cracks. Starhawk reiterates that these unacknowledged connections are nontrivial—the interconnectedness of webs reveals not only that humanity is depended on the environment, but also that we are a part of it. Starhawk argues that growing up in industrialized society never teaches us to see the strands of these webs, which is why we so commonly ignore them. However, her faith in humanity is that if everyday people can live their lives in ways that teach them to see these webs, by observing nature in less regulated forms, they will incorporate this vision into their lives, and act responsibly.
It may seem that, combining these two ideas, Starhawk has argued that the way to understand anything is to take it and draw lines connected it to every other thing in the world. Starhawk might agree that a path of influence can be found between any two things. But she does not claim that any time there is such a path between two nodes, the relation between them is strong. Instead, she claims that as an empirical fact many of these paths, including many of those spanning many links or crossing domains, are significant. We do not know that an event far away will influence something, but we should not be surprised if it does.
Starhawk’s final point about networks is that topology matters. To understand something’s place in the web, we need to know not only what other elements it is connected to, but also the character of the path forming the connection. Macroscopically, to predict the behavior of the nodes in a network, we need to know something about the whole network’s topology. Starhawk distinguishes between two kinds of networks—trees and webs. Tree networks, such as trees in nature, have a branching pattern. Leaves are directly linked only to twigs, twigs to branches, and branches to the trunk. ‘Web’ takes on a narrow meaning when contrasted with trees. A web is a network where no set of nodes has a monopoly on communication. In a web, the ‘leaves’ sometimes have direct links to each other. A web is distinguished from a tree because it contains cycles, and thus multiple paths between nodes.[1]
Like Starhawk’s other points about networks, the claim that topology matters is prima facie reasonable. However, after quickly defining branching networks, she sprints to the normative judgment that human society should be organized as webs instead of trees. She avoids making the most general statement possible—“webs are better than trees.” Treelike networks in nature—actual trees, rivers, etc—are fine and efficient methods of collecting and distributing resources. Starhawk contrasts ‘natural’ trees from human ones by arguing that only the former are sustainable. For example a redwood tree is sustainable because “the energy collected by the leaves is balanced by the water and nutrients collected by the roots. The trunk, the place of concentration, is merely a conduit that serves this balance.” (170). In human societies, the links in trees lack this balance.
In human societies, branching patters [trees] are often used to collect wealth, resources, and labor from one group and to disperse them to another group. Barely enough is given back to insure survival. The value produced by labor is collected from the workers, the leaves of the corporate tree; then concentrated into the hands of various levels of management, and eventually dispersed to owners and shareholders. (170)
It is unclear whether Starhawk argues that the important distinction between human and natural trees is sustainability, but it would be a mistake to do so. Her claim that a system of resource distribution is sustainable only if the flows in either direction are equal is flawed. Labeling the exchange of resources in a tree as equal is either arbitrary or circular. Further, many trees with unquestionably unequal resource flows—those with tumors—are just as long-lived as their tumor free neighbors. Thus, her claim that sustainability requires equality is false (or empty). As this claim supported her argument that human organizations are unsustainable, that argument also fails, and it’s unclear whether treelike human organizations are, in fact, sustainable.
Equality, rather than sustainability, should be the focus of Starhawk’s argument. What bothers her about the stereotypical corporate structure, with a wealthy CEO at the top and poor exploited laborers at the bottom, is not that the corporation is ‘unsustainable’, but that the CEO lives an empowered life and is fantastically wealthy while the laborers have no control over their lives and live in poverty. Unfortunately, Starhawk doesn’t explain how she thinks trees produce this kind of inequality. The problem seems to lie in the imbalanced links between people. Of course, determining whether exchanges between people are ‘balanced’ is a complex task, because in many exchanges different parties will value the goods exchanged differently. Nonetheless, we can imagine a corporation in which all employees are highly paid, jobs are structured to maintain employee satisfaction, etc. Would there be a problem with such a treelike organization?
The problem with trees is that they lend themselves to imbalance between nodes. A node’s parent has a monopoly on interaction between that node and anything other than the node’s descendants (all paths lead through the parent). If a node depends on interaction with any node other than its descendants, the parent can exploit this monopoly to gain power-over its child.[2] The parent is free to renegotiate the terms of the parent-child interaction to its own advantage. This problem arises in trees that haven’t been stratified into parents and children (i.e., if no one of the other nodes linked to by a node has been identified as a parent, and the tree has no single root). The sole criterion for a tree is a lack of cycles, and thus there is only one path between any two nodes. Any time A depends on interaction with C, any intermediary node B on the path from A to C will have power over A. If the network branches greatly, B will link A to many distant Cs, potentially having greater power over A, Thus, if any system of nodes depending on interaction has a treelike topology, that topology will grant power-over to some nodes, creating inequality.[3]
Power-over, when it exists, doesn’t have to be exercised. Trees can distribute resources equitably. However, because of the strong potential for trees to produce inequality, Starhawk believes human organizations should be structured as webs. Webs, with redundant pathways between nodes, dampen the potential for exploitation found in trees.
3
Starhawk’s complaint against globalization and views on environmental responsibility can quickly be summarized by use of her conceptual frame. She believes that capitalistic global integration is drawing the world into one large treelike economy. The increasing specialization that comes along with globalization, especially the emphasis on the production of crops and goods for export in developing nations, increases everyone’s dependence on interaction with distant parts of the trees. Interdependence grants incredible power to those higher in the tree, and they are using this power to exploit most of the world. Starhawk’s complaint is against a particular global economy—not necessarily against global trade (however, her environmental beliefs provide an unrelated objection to extensive global trade).
Bioregionalism, an environmental philosophy arguing for dividing human society along the boundaries of ecologically significant units, is important because we need to appreciate our natural environment. The entire world is too complex to understand at once, but ecological boundaries provide the most natural place for division in the web—we should structure our society such that it can also be divided along these lines. Citizens of bioregions will then be able to form better understandings of their chunks of the web, and the knowledge will cause them to act in environmentally responsible ways.
Human society organized as webs, with decentralized decision making, avoid the problems of power-over and exploitation Starhawk opposes in the first place. Organization the movement for social change is not only the right thing to do, but it allows activists to begin testing other ways of organizing, and demonstrate their success.
Although Starhawk talks about all these ideas in Webs of Power, she doesn’t always start talking about them at the beginning—nor does she successfully take them all to the conclusion. A familiarity with the events and idea she describes, as well as her earlier work, will greatly help understanding her conclusions. Nonetheless, her conclusions aren’t the gems of Webs of Power. Even though her concepts of different kinds of power, and different network topologies, aren’t quite polished or complete, they have promise. Starhawk provides another kind of hope.
[1]
If links are bi-directional, and there is more than one path from A to B, then
there is necessarily a cycle consisting of a subset of the two paths from A to
B.