Society must be defended

Is power always secondary to the economy? Are its finality and function always determined by the economy? Is power's rason d'être and purpose essentially to serve the economy? Is it designed to establish, solidify, perpetuate, and reproduce relations that are characteristics of the economy and essential to its working?

Second question: is power something that can be possessed and acquired, that can be surrendered through a contract or by force, that can be alienated or recuperated, that circulates and fertilizes one region but avoids others? Or if we wish to anlyze it, do we have to operate - on the contrary - with different instruments, even if power relations are deeply involved in and with economics relations always constitue a sort of network or loop?

In the case of classic juridical theory, power is the concrete power that any individual can hold, and which he can surrender, either as a whole or in part, so as to constitute a power or a political sovereignty.

Power is not something that is given, exchanged, or taken back, that it is something that is exercised and that it exists only in action. We also have the other assertion that power is not primarily the perpetuation and renewal of economic relations, but that it is primarily, in itself, a relationship of force.

Power is essentially that which represses. Power is that which represses nature, a class, or individuals.

To study power by looking, as it were, at its external face, at the point where it relates directly and immediately to what we might, very provisionally, call its object, its target, its field of application, or, in other words, the places where it implants itself and produces its real effects. So the question is not: Why do some people want to be dominant? What do they want? What is their overall strategy?