September 19, 2023

Designing an Investigation of Power: Series Introduction

17 minutes

Convergence is happy to announce the launch of our new podcast, Hegemonicon. In this first episode, host William Lawrence introduces himself with his story of working to build a youth-led climate movement as co-founder of the Sunrise Movement and the Green New Deal it brought to the political forefront. Upon reminiscing the perceived successes and failures of that movement and the wilderness the past decade-plus has led Left organizers into, he lays out the foundation for the Hegemonicon’s exploration of power and how the show will go about investigating it through a series of interviews with organizers, activists, theorists, and more, in three parts:

Part 1 - The Conjuncture and the Longue Durée

Conjunctural analysis is a power-map of the present moment, the near past, and into the near future—of the system, in motion, as it is playing out through actual lives and events. It is a necessary skill for the organizer, the campaigner, anybody looking to do politics in the here and now.

The Longue Durée, a phrase from French meaning long duration, is the vast historical trajectory of which we are only a small part, spanning many hundreds of years and heading forward into future centuries. The longue durée reveals trends, historical limitations as well as possible opportunities, that an exclusive focus on the conjuncture does not.

Part 2 - Optionality

A lens that analyzes the presence or absence of choices (options) within a given set of circumstances, and how we act in ways that either expand or constrain our options over time. Our present options are the result of our past investments, or bets that we made. Our present bets and investments are designed to give us options in the future. There are multiple possible futures on which we are all betting, but none of us can know which future will actually come to pass. We ought to ask ourselves which kinds of bets we are placing, and why.

Part 3 - Power

There are five aspects of power that will be explored on the show: force, finance, production, ideology, and law. We will call these the sinews of power, because they tend to intertwine and be mutually reinforcing. If you only control one of them, you don’t really control the full mechanism of power, and you will be exposed to risks via the other sinews. Whoever has the most command of the sinews of power, has the strongest grasp on the future. This gets us to the factor called hegemony, which is when a social force is able to assume a leadership position over society, backed by a multi-faceted command of power through the five sinews.

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