Everything small is beautiful these days. NGOs, busy with micro finance and micro politics for the poor, are small, beautiful -- and powerless. Meanwhile, the beast of markets and States can continue to dominate macro economics and politics. This neat division into micro and macro sustains the unjust power relationships that perpetuate impoverishment, inequality and injustice, says John Samuel

Small may seem beautiful. But is this beauty enough to take on the beast? These days there is a great deal of talk about micro-this and micro-that -- as if it were the most desirable thing. But can micro beauty challenge and change the macro beast of market and State? At the core of this is the question is power: what kinds and modes of power relationships shape social and economic policies? How differently does power operate in its micro and macro dimensions? How is power derived and sustained? Our predicament is that power can create the delusion of ‘empowerment’ and the subjugation of the ‘empowered’ at the same time.

Why is it that in spite of all the magic of micro credit and the perceived ‘empowerment’, the poor and marginalised fail to influence the macro politics of Bangladesh or for that matter any country? Why is the celebrated hero of micro credit ending up a zero in the macro party politics of Bangladesh? Why is it that in spite of a long history of ‘civil society’ initiatives and grassroots ‘empowerment’ by organisations like SEWA and many Gandhian organisations in the state of Gujarat in India, thousands of people were massacred in broad daylight, with the complicity of the State? Why does most of ‘civil society’ fail to respond to the uncivil behaviour of organised political forces and State power? Why is it that the so-called ‘social capital’ in southern Italy failed to counter the rise of fascism? This is where we need to understand the limitations of micro politics and micro finance.

The crux of the matter is that it is often macro power relationships and macro economics that call the shots, while micro politics can perpetuate a false sense of power. Micro politics and micro finance may offer a sense of power. But such power is no more than a delusion when it is subservient to unjust power relationships that perpetuate injustice, inequality and impoverishment. Often micro power and micro politics are simply bulldozed or consistently subverted by the macro power of the State and market -- the beasts of macro politics and economics -- deriving their power from a coercive army, a media that manufactures consent, and markets that masquerade as the messiah.

These days we hear a lot about micro finance, micro enterprises, local governance and empowerment at the grassroots level. The new stress on the rights-based approach to development, civil society action, civic virtues, community-based mobilisations and grassroots empowerment all seem to stress largely on micro and very little on macro. Micro is for the poor and excluded and macro is for the rich and powerful. Micro finance and micro politics can be subcontracted to NGOs while macro politics and macro economics will be controlled by organised corporate and market power along with the political elite. This is where the delusions of power and the delusions of development begin.

What is the problem? The problem is that while the so-called NGOs or Civil Society Institutions are busy ‘empowering’ the grassroots, establishing micro finance, strengthening local governance or ‘delivering development’, the organised macro economic and political powers continue to play their power games of macro finance, macro economics and national, international and global governance. They capture markets, natural resources or countries through laws, advertising campaigns, finance capital markets or bombs as and when they like! While every good soul seems to be focusing on the grassroots and local development or empowerment, the rich and powerful seem to be busy capturing markets, consumers and governments.

The logic of this neat division of politics and finance into micro and macro often helps to sustain and strengthen hegemonic and unjust power relationships that perpetuate impoverishment, inequality and injustice. While civil society organisations can claim the ethical or political high ground, they simply fail to influence anything about the war in Iraq or the policies of the World Bank or IMF or for that matter the nature and character of a coercive State, whether in Ethiopia or Zimbabwe or the USA.

So micro finance looks good as long as you ignore the macro finance which drives it. So we can celebrate Grameen and forget about Citibank or American Express or finance capital markets. Micro enterprises look good as long as you ignore macro economics; local governance is a favoured option as long as national and global governance continues unchallenged as the terrain of the political and technocratic elite. While influencing micro power relations and micro politics is a worthwhile effort, it is also a means of creating and sustaining delusions of power when macro politics and macro economics are left to control and manipulate power in business corporations, rich countries and their institutions.

The fact of the matter is that in spite of years of community mobilisation and grassroots empowerment and local governance in many of the countries of Asia (Thailand, Myanmar, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and to some extend Nepal), macro politics is often shaped by a mix of larger political forces and interest groups along with the coercive power of the army. Most of the countries in Africa and Latin America also show the same pattern. In the so-called democracies of Europe and America too the situation is more or less the same. In spite of all efforts, it is State power that decided to launch a preemptive and disastrous war in Iraq.

This is not to argue that micro politics or micro power is not important. On the contrary, micro power and micro politics are very crucial for individual empowerment and women’s empowerment at the level of family, community and local power relations. Indeed, transforming micro politics and the injustice that is embedded in gender relations and challenging feudal power structures and historical marginalisation require change in unjust and unequal relationships within the family and communities. However, the problem is that larger power structures, political forces and corporate interests are so organised in terms of their interests, networks and control over the institutions and interests of the military, market and media. The institutionalised power of macro politics can make the power of micro politics redundant in the larger power play. One of the key reasons for this is that micro politics is most of the time dispersed, disorganised and disoriented in the larger context of the political economy of power and institutions. Hence, micro politics do not translate into collective power that can challenge and change macro power and the institutions that control and reproduce such macro power and macro economies. The key reason for this is the hegemonic power paradigm that influences and shapes power relations.

At any given point of time there is a hegemonic power paradigm that operates through the political economy of institutions, interests, knowledge, technology and State. Even morality and moral tools like human rights are often defined by the political economy of the hegemonic power paradigm. Hence a moral tool like human rights is often misused in the most immoral way by those who control the power paradigm. This paradigm is still controlled by the power of military, media and markets and sustained by the State and its various institutions at the national and international level. While such a power paradigm gives incremental space to civil society or civil society organisations or social movements or NGOs (in the name of human rights or democracy) to influence public policies, this ‘invited’ or ‘designed’ space is largely within the hegemonic power paradigm. That is why such efforts have to depend largely on the goodwill of the media or institutions of the State in spite of and irrespective of their moral and political claims on behalf of the poor or citizens. In fact, one can argue that even such ‘invited spaces’ are little more than accommodative arrangements to create delusions of power for civil society.

Even international campaigns initiated by civil society or INGOs to challenge the politics of the State and market largely depend on the highly corporatised media for attention and legitimacy. Often anything that happens in cities such as Washington, New York, London or Brussels qualifies an action as ‘global’. Anything that appeared on BBC or CNN is ‘global’. Any book that is published in London or New York or reviewed in Time or Newsweek or Economist is supposed to have ‘global’ influence. Any theory or knowledge that is manufactured or processed in the Northern universities or think-tanks is supposed to have ‘global significance’. By the same token cities of the South, knowledge from the South and the media in the South are still ‘local’ or ‘national’. This too creates a false sense of power based on the location and delusions of power. Little wonder then that even civil society or NGO campaigns are vulgarised into cheap media stunts, high-profile seminars and communication circuses in the Northern cities (privileged by the hegemonic power paradigm), based more on brand- building and less on mobilising or transforming political power or power relationships at the micro or macro level.

We must understand the character and nature of the hegemonic power paradigm and challenge and change the very paradigm of the 3 Ms (Military, Media and Market) to reclaim the State as well as governance for the people and the billions of poor and excluded both in rich and poor countries. This requires a much more nuanced understanding about the uses and abuses of power and a political strategy based on a long-term approach to the power paradigm as well as social transformation.

Power is a contested concept, as much as it is about contestations. Power is also a very slippery notion, with multiple manifestations, processes and histories. The notions of ‘Power over’, ‘Power to’, ‘Power within’ and ‘Power with’ often capture different dimensions and modes through which power operates, transforms and manifests itself. Power can have both positive and negative connotations. Power can be visible or hidden. It can have symbolic as well as institutional dimensions. Power is often negotiated through and by different social, political, economic and institutional dimensions as well as through cultural, historical and technological modes. The questions are how power is derived, how it is used, how it is manifested and how it is reproduced or regenerated. The ‘how’ aspect of power is often more important than the ‘what’ and ‘why’ aspects.

Power can manifest itself in terms of aesthetics, coercion, consensus, control or networks. The power to create can in many ways signify the primordial notion of power and often the very basis of the omnipotence of the notion of God is derived from the ‘power to create’. Later on, religions as formal institutions transformed this ‘creative power’ to the ‘power to control’. Power can be termed the process, instruments and ability to create, communicate, choose, decide, influence, convene, sustain, control and destroy. Power has an individual as well as institutional dimension. The personal is indeed political. However, it is the institutions of family, religion, State and market that often define, sustain and reproduce power relationships. Often such institutions legitimise the ‘control’ and ‘coercive’ aspect through ‘power over’. Patriarchy is the most manifested form of power as control. Power is often derived from and through guns as well as gender; books as well as battalions; ethics as well as economics; religions as well as rockets; tactics as well as technology; liberty as well as law; love as well as language; crime as well as punishment; people as well as profits; media as well as mediation; war as well as peace; values as well as visions; community as well as creativity; advocacy as well as armies; missionaries as well as markets and democracy as well as desires. In fact, a hegemonic power paradigm operates through the control of all these modes as well as expressions of power. It operates through the control and coordination of the military, law and order, technology and even the political economy of desire (the manufacturing of new desires and demands through advertisements), democracy (by corporate funding of political parties and political elites), human rights and civil society initiatives (either through State patronage of development aid or through corporate funding). Hence the Knowledge of Power is as important as the Power of Knowledge.

The delusions of power through individual empowerment or through the empowerment of the consumer to choose, through the empowerment of local governance or through the ‘invited’ space for civil society, can give a false sense of hope about the whole project of development and human rights. It is far less complicated to address the micro dimension of power. Hence, the hegemonic power paradigm (which is patriarchal in nature) will not have much of a problem initiating affirmative action in favour of women’s political participation and leadership in local self-government. This is the same for other excluded groups. However, there is tremendous resistance to allocation of 30% or 40% of seats in a nation’s parliament for women or excluded sections.

It is the same with NGOs. As long as NGOs are small and beautiful, the hegemonic power paradigms of the State or market will not have any problem supporting micro credit or micro enterprises. The fact of the matter is that most NGOs or Civil Society Organisations derive power from their institutional sources and through communicative action based on moral premises. However, the very institutional and communicative sources are often located on the periphery of the State, market and media. This is true of fundraising as well as of media strategies. Such a sense of power derived through institutions, networks, communicative action, knowledge and technology can be effective to a certain extent at the very grassroots level through community mobilisation or delivery of the service. With the advent of information and communication technology and media-driven campaign strategies, they may also have a visible presence or profile at the global level. But such presence and ‘invited spaces’ do not necessarily mean the power to influence or change. Because of the very character and nature of the institutional premises, located in markets as well as in the periphery of the State, many such initiatives can at best be progressive reformism or token instrumentalism. Hence, unless such Civil Society Organisations think of a new political strategy as well as political theory and praxis of action at all levels of micro and macro power relationships, the chances of transforming the hegemonic power paradigm are few. In fact, after 25 years, many of the present local and ‘global’ initiatives for change may prove redundant. Many of these small and beautiful efforts and institutions may very well be swallowed by the beasts of market and State.

In fact the major challenge for the present hegemonic power paradigm comes from the emergence of postmodern identity politics. The notion of ‘class’ is getting increasingly mixed with ‘identity’. Unprecedented urbanisation, migration, inequality, combined with the new markers of identity based on location, religion and ethnicity can unleash new political forces that can subvert the present state of the hegemonic power paradigm. This can very well be reactionary political forces as distinct from a progressive or transformative political force. The new identity politics has individual, micro and macro dimensions as well as the subversive capacity through new forms of military action and terror tactics. This poses a great challenge to both the beauty and the beast.

At the moment the beauty and the beast seem to have established a complacent and conciliatory relationship based on mutual benefit and the desire for self-preservation. Such a complacent coexistence of the beauty and the beast creates the delusion of power as well as development as the beast is busy bombing the lives and livelihoods of the people. However, the new identity politics and the new hegemonic power paradigms at the global, national and international level may rock the applecart. The beast may change colour and even language. It may shift its primary location from Washington to elsewhere. However, the beauty cannot afford to be complacent with ‘micro’ power. There is indeed a need to create something big as well as beautiful that is relevant at the local, national and international level.

There is a need for a new renaissance and a new flowering of creativity in the form of new poetry, cultural expression and politics to build a new aesthetics of power and empowerment that can be relevant both at the micro and macro level. Small may be beautiful. But all beautiful things do not necessarily need to be small -- particularly when there is a beast that can easily swallow the small beauties of civil society at their convenience for either breakfast or dinner. We need to outgrow the delusions of power and confront the hegemonic power paradigm by creating new sources of power and politics, through broad-based mobilisations, new forms of communicative actions, new forms of local and international alliances, new forms of knowledge creation, distribution and reproduction and new forms of democratisation. We need a new imagination to go beyond the three-year project cycles or five-year thematic strategies of ‘empowerment’ to build a new vision for a new world -- a just and joyful world -- through new actions and through innovative institutional approaches. Delusions of power lead to delusions of development. And such frustrations may lead development actors to go in search of new approaches and strategies for poverty eradication, without being able to challenge and change the hegemonic power paradigms that perpetuate inequality, injustice and consequent impoverishment.

This piece was first published in InfoChange News & Features, June 2007

* John Samuel is a human rights activist and is currently International Director of Actionaid, based in Bangkok.

* Please send comments to or comment online at www.pambazuka.org