What is politics?

The academic year has started again, so I'm back to studying. Today I had the first class of a subject on contemporary political theory, and a key theme was the crisis in identity that political theory is experiencing. This is especially in respect to its supposed object, politics.

When the lecturer asked the hall what they thought "politics" meant, he got a wide range of answers. This was meant to illustrate the confusion in understanding of politics, and successfully did so. Some responses included "[the] social institution ... [of] government", "matters of public concern", "disputes ... elevated to the political [state] sphere", "administration of society ... [and] common production", and the "striving for good".

I have problems with all of these definitions, mostly that they're too limited. If politics is the social institution of government or the administration of society, what about the political and ideological struggles in society, like the social movement for suffrage or civil rights? They happened outside of government, but yet affected government, so they must be political. If politics is merely the matters of public concern, what is a dictatorship or kleptocracy that manipulates laws and public resources for private good? Is this not political? If politics involves only the disputes elevated to the political sphere, what about social and economic disputes like union struggles against workplaces and the socialist or anarchist quest for working-class power? Surely this is incredibly political. If politics involves only the striving for good, what about all of the reactionary and self-interested groups and forces that have their fingers in our governments? Do we dismiss them as "non-political" and ignore them in political analysis?

It seems to me that politics is best understood simply as "that which regards power in society". Whenever power is exercised, there politics is happening. Today, power (and violence) has been largely institutionalised in government, which creates the opportunity for formal politics. Naturally, the government becomes a key focus for political thought. But not the only focus. As Marx identified, there are power imbalances in the economy, between the owners and the workers. Therefore, the economy becomes political as well. As feminist thinkers have shown, there are power imbalances in society and even in the home, between men and women. So society and even the personal becomes political. Herbert Marcuse, and others, demonstrated that culture is a type of power, by defining norms that benefit some and marginalise others. So culture becomes political. The post-structuralists realised the power in language – so even language becomes political.

So, a more full definition of politics might be "activities that involve the use of power to influence laws, norms, accepted ways of being, and the distribution of resources". And to the extent that the economy, society, culture, language, and our personal lives involve power, they are political.

One of the problems identified with this idea was that widening the scope of politics, especially into our private lives as the feminists do, extends the reach of the tyrannical public, and erodes privacy and personal freedom. But I don't think this is necessarily so. The recognition that power is everywhere leads to a similar recognition that the scale of politics changes based on where the power is. One size does not fit all – the national governments of today have no reason to legislate regarding what goes on in our private lives. Power imbalances inside the modern corporation can't be solved by the state. If there is a political problem with the corporation, it should be solved at the level of the corporation (for example, the power imbalance could be solved by a workplace democracy). If there is a power imbalance inside the family, it should be solved at the level of the family. To the extent that wider society acknowledges the problem, it can act to help solve power imbalances (as it did in the 1970s, legislating no-fault divorce and bank accounts for women), but this is not an intrusion in our private lives. Believing that the politicisation of issues involves the state coming in to solve it, again, misunderstands what politics is.

I'm sure there are problems with this understanding of politics. But it seems to me that the insights of political economy, cultural theory, social theory, and all other critical theories can't remain in their disciplinary silos. They must be taken up by political theory and used in the quest for a better politics, which necessarily involves a better society, a better economy, and a better culture.