The Empowerment Tactic

Empowerment. They're always talking about empowering you, aren't they? They're gonna empower this one and empower that one. They're gonna empower women, empower the poor, empower minorities, empower workers, empower the so called world, empower the global South, empower Africa. They're gonna empower everyone, aren't they?

Don't you know when they say that, all they're doing actually is trying to implant weakness in your mind? They wanna implant a sense of weakness in the minds of whoever they say that they're gonna empower, to make you think that you need someone to empower you in order for you to have any power. You need them to give you power. That's just a psychological tactic for disempowering you, to make you think that the only way you can have any power is by means of their beneficence. Look, the powerful do not empower others.

Power doesn't empower. Power consolidates, and it never does anything but try to increase itself. The powerful are not gonna try to bring you up to their level. Maybe a government will empower you to pay more they'll empower you to support them, to draft you and fight for them, to defend them, that's all. They'll empower you to serve their own power interests.

A corporation will empower you to manufacture or sell or consume their useless goods. They'll empower you to not be self reliant, to not be self sufficient, to not be content. They'll empower you with a sense of inadequacy. No one's gonna try to give up their advantage over you by making you level with them. This idea of the powerful empowering you or empowering those weaker than them is a myth.

It's a tactic for disempowerment. Look, class struggle is like this, decolonization is like this. If you and I are in a race and you have on running shoes and I have on no shoes, are you gonna try to even things out between us by giving me one of your shoes so now we'll both run lopsided? Meanwhile, the other man in the race is on a motorcycle. So now you and I have actually two options, either we can decide to not run-in that race because when you put someone in a race that they're not equipped to be in, then you're just fooling them into thinking that they're competitors in that race when they're actually nothing but spectators.

So either we choose not to run-in that motorcycle race, or the two of us together decide to disable that motorcycle. That's solidarity, and that's the power that we have. And no one can give it to us, we make it ourselves. Don't try to make us fake participants in your competition. You just want us to be the appointed losers in your rigged race.

No. You don't empower us by putting us on the racetrack, on your racetrack. Empower us to follow your rules, the rules that you designed according to your power. The only way that we can empower ourselves is to reject your rules and to reject your race and to reject your competition and call you out for the fraud that you're trying to commit and to start following our own rules.