Moment has entered into my head some half-remembered famous anarchist quip about how they will storm the palaces only to find them empty and devoid of power or something but I can’t for the life of me remember the wording or source.
yes the corridors of power are actually just empty corridors, the legislative chamber is a place where people go to talk and when those people leave it’s just an empty building, power is the intangible network of relationships between individuals, that’s what makes it interesting!
that said, occupying a palace is still valuable as a communicative act, even if it doesn’t physically capture the Power Crystals that give Total Control.
Social power is when other people will do what you tell them to.
One source of it is when they just think you’re a neat dude (gender neutral) who has good ideas that they’re better off following than not.
Another source is when they believe you will harm them somehow if they don’t.
And the third source is when they think other people WILL do what you tell them to, and that those other people might harm them if they don’t.
That last one is the one that scales the best.
There’s only so much authority you can convince others to give you purely on merit, and even if you manage to do the cult leader thing and build up a huge amount of people who all think you’re the bee’s knees and they should do EVERYTHING you tell them to, it’s fragile. There’s a reason cult leaders are abusive to their followers, and that’s because without the abuse, it will be all too easy for them to realize that one person does not in fact have the capability to run all of their entire lives better than they can.
And being able to harm people personally and directly does not scale well because at some point people will team up on you and will beat you up right back. This is a fun one in fantasy settings, because there it’s actually possible for it to scale one hell of a lot, but there’s always the problem that if it’s possible for you, it’s possible for someone else too, and if two people of your power level or whatever come to knock your teeth out, that’s where your reach ends.
That last one though? It can even be completely self-sustaining. You don’t even need to actually have there be that one original person who thinks you’re a neat dude or will personally beat you up. Literally the entire group of people you’re holding power over can be aware you only have it because they’re all afraid of others in the group turning on them if they act against it, and so long as they can’t coordinate to make sure enough among them will turn against you to overpower the rest of the group, they’re still stuck. Of course the minute the coordination happens you’re fucked, so modern society is mostly built on a mixture of 1 and 3. 1 provides foundation - there is a group of people out there who think you should hold the power on merit, and everyone else knows that if they disagree they had better do it quietly and turn on anyone who turns on you, or else.
Capitalist power is purely the third one. A worker does what their employer says not because the employer is going to personally beat them up with a steel chair and not because they think the employer is smart and knows what’s best. They do it because they know that if they don’t, the people in the bank won’t transfer money to their account and the people in the stores won’t give them food and the utility people won’t supply their home with power. A tenant follows the rules of their agreement with the landlord, because if they don’t, the landlord can call the police and it will side with them.
Even capitalist societies aren’t built purely on that, though. Parents send their children to school because they do think the teachers are worth listening to. Officials get elected or assigned. Actual immediate personal trust anchors the system here and there, it’s not purely a circle agreement to have each other’s back in supporting whoever is “in charge” (though a large part of it is that, as it always is with governance on a scale beyond where the leader can know everyone individually and personally).
Feudal societies are build on that third one too. The lord and his friends with the weapons might not necessarily think much of one another, but they will have each other’s back and will beat up anyone who disobeys, and that is that. Only very small interpersonal scale can in any way rely on 2 - playground bully (and even that usually blends into 3 immediately), blackmailer, familial physical abuse (and even that will often tie into 3 with power dynamics that make the victim believe other people will take the side of the abuser in a conflict).
I don’t actually have a point, just felt like finally typing all of this out.
(There are other kinds of power than social power, technology can provide a very different and specific category that ties with the power to just, like, immediately do the thing you want to do (the power to microwave a burrito in the middle of the night!), which is about logistics & ability besides no-one else stopping you, but all other kinds of power can flow from social power and not vice versa)