The Spice Must Flow: Power, Politics, and the Struggle for Arrakis
“We've a three-point civilization: the Imperial Household balanced against the Federated Great Houses of the Landsraad, and between them, the Guild with its damnable monopoly on interstellar transport.”
Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam, Dune by Frank Herbert.
Quite early on in Dune, we’re given this encapsulation of the power dynamics at play in the universe. There’s the Imperial Household, headed by the Padishah Emperor, the Great Houses of the Landsraad, the major political body, and the Spacing Guild, the entity that controls all interstellar travel. The Emperor’s power is grounded in status and the strength of his feared Sardaukar army, the Landsraad holds power through the political structures it wields and the treaties and conventions it defends, and the Spacing Guild maintains its power by exerting a monopoly on space travel. Three simple pillars of power.
Except we already know that this is a lie. Even at this early juncture, 20-something pages into the book, we can see, by what’s happening in this chapter alone, that it can’t be true. The character that gives us this overview of the ruling powers of the Dune universe is Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam, a sister of the Bene Gesserit and Turthsayer to the Emperor himself. In this very scene, she is shown to us exerting her own form of power - power over people such as Lady Jessica, a fellow sister of the Bene Gesserit, and power over Paul Atreides whom she commands by way of a skill called the voice, to obey her. Power, then, lies in at least more hands than the three the Reverend Mother outlines to Paul at his home on Caladan. In fact, the web of power in Dune is spun with uncommon complexity.
In political philosophy, we often taxonomise power - power structures, sources of power, forms of power - and Frank Herbert seems to take particular interest in exploring these different kinds of power and, in particular, what happens when they run into one another. Dune dissects the sources of power that individuals or groups might hold, and how these interrelate, challenge one another, and even threaten one another. A simple rundown of some possible sources of power might be:
Resources
Strength
Institutions
Ideology
Charisma
Expertise
In Dune we find examples of all of these sources and, in fact, often find multiple examples being used in very different ways. Both the Harkonnens and the Atreides come to control spice at different points in the novel but use this as a very different source of power from one another. Both Duke Leto Atreides and his son Paul Atreides gain power through their charismatic leadership but, again, the results are markedly different. What makes Dune so interesting, as an exploration of questions of political power, is how complex and nuanced it is. Characters speak of power in incredibly different ways and make use of the power they hold to very different ends. Contrast the young Harkonnen heir Feyd Rautha’s musings on power:
“Feyd-Rautha nodded. Wealth was the thing. CHOAM was the key to wealth, each noble House dipping from the company’s coffers whatever it could under the power of the directorships. Those CHOAM directorships – they were the real evidence of political power in the Imperium, passing with the shifts of voting strength within the Landsraad as it balanced itself against the Emperor and his supporters.”
With those of Princess Irulan discussing her father, the Emperor:
“[The Emperor] seldom appeared in public wearing other than a Sardaukar uniform and a Burseg’s black helmet with the Imperial lion in gold upon its crest. The uniform was an open reminder of where his power lay.”
With these words from Lady Jessica about Paul,
“The men tell strange stories of you, Paul. They say you’ve all the powers of the legend – nothing can be hidden from you, that you see where others cannot see.”
It’s clear the Emperor sees his power as rooted in military strength, Feyd Rautha understands power to be the same as wealth, and that Paul’s power, or perceived power, is as much about the story, the myth of him, as it is his ability to see “where others cannot see”.
Which of these, if any, does Frank Herbert want us to believe is correct? In a way, all of them and none of them. Feyd-Rautha, the Emperor, and Lady Jessica are all right. All of these are power, of a kind, and yet none of them are true power - the kind of power that so many in Dune seem to be seeking. That’s because true power is inevitably an illusion, a chimaera of a thing. It’s a mistake to think otherwise and a disastrous mistake that is made over and again in Dune. Baron Harkonnen's absolute belief that his wealth is his power is also his undoing and the Emperor’s belief that his army is his power preludes his eventual downfall. Instead, power is something that emerges from certain kinds of social relations. In other words, it’s a product of people. If you change the people, and change the relationship, you’ll inevitably change the power. Michel Foucault talks of this when he says,
“Power is relations; power is not a thing, it is a relationship between two individuals… such that one can direct the behaviour of another or determine the behaviour of another.”
Society Must be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France 1975-1976
Foucault tells us three key things in this single statement. That power is grounded in relationships, that it is not a thing that can be sought in itself, and that power amounts to the ability to direct another or determine their behaviour. There is nothing innately good nor bad here, power is, in itself, neutral, it can be used for both evil ends and great ends. What is key is that it emerges from intersubjectivity. Power, then, is about action and interaction.
“[Power] incites, it induces, it seduces, it makes easier or more difficult; in the extreme, it constrains or forbids absolutely.”
Ibid.
We can see all of these uses, and abuses, of power in Dune. We can see power emerging from knowledge and learning in the case of the Bene Gesserit or the Mentats or from ability in the case of the Sardaukar or the Fremen. We see it as a property of wealth for the Harkonnens, or as a property of resource control in the Spacing Guild. We see it as a being allied to physical strength as with the Padishah Emperor or as flowing from charismatic leadership as with Duke Leto and Paul Atreides. In all of these cases, though, it is the relationships that these sources of power make possible or exploit that are the real source of the power. The ability to manipulate, guide, restrict, overwhelm, raise, tear down, or inspire.
It is also precisely because power emerges from interpersonal relationships that it contains the seeds of its own dissolution. If we change or remove the central relationship the power disappears. It is this challenging of forms and sources of power that occupies most of the second half of Dune but Herbert doesn’t want us to think it’s simply a case of taking aim at the system we don’t like and bringing it to its knees so that we can then frolic in some power-free Eden. Whilst we can oppose and even overthrow forms of power we can never step outside of them. Not unless we’re willing to walk out into the desert all alone. Where there are people, there are always power relations. Foucault emphasises this very inescapability of power:
“It seems to me that power is ‘always already there’, that one is never ‘outside’ it…. [But] to say that one can never be ‘outside’ power does not mean that one is trapped and condemned to defeat no matter what…. [Resistances] are all the more real and effective because they are formed right at the point where relations of power are exercised.”
Power/Knowledge: Selected Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977
A little like energy, power cannot be destroyed it can only be changed from one form to another. But our resistance to any power structure, Foucault suggests, is sharpest precisely where relations of power are exercised. Paul sees this, more than any other character in Dune, when he sees that the one lever of power he has access to is the spice production of Arakkis. With the Fremen united behind him, he now exercises total control over the production of spice, the resource that allows the whole great mechanism of the Imperium to function. As Paul understands, it is not just that he now stands between the universe and the spice, but he also has total power because he can destroy it, should he wish.
We begin Dune with that ‘three-pointed’ description of power from the Reverend Mother and, as the book reaches its conclusion, Paul finally seizes all three. The movement of power has come full circle. In the Emperor’s throne room, relocated to Arrakis, Paul confronts the imperial household, the Great Houses, and the Spacing Guild. Knowing that the greatest act of resistance occurs where power relations are exercised, Paul doesn’t just assert his control of spice. That would be playing them at their own game. Instead, he brings them to the startling revelation that, just as he controls spice, he can destroy it.
“Do it!’ Paul barked. ‘The power to destroy a thing is the absolute control over it. You’ve agreed I have that power. We are not here to discuss or to negotiate or to compromise. You will obey my orders or suffer the immediate consequences!”
Here we see that true display of power - not because Paul now possesses or controls a great resource, but because he is willing to destroy it. This move stands entirely outside of the normal movements of power in the Imperium - it is a different game entirely. No more political manoeuvring, no more assassins in the night or clashing armies, no more kanly - the ritualised conflict between Great Houses. Paul has realised that he can’t oppose a system by using its own methods against it but instead needs to move to a radically different approach, something the system cannot swallow, consume, and subsume back into itself. Something that challenges the very functioning of that system.
This rejection of consumption and control reveals to us that Paul’s struggle is, at heart, one of class struggle. Exploited, oppressed, and marginalised, the Fremen are tolerated only in so far as they can be used to further the ends of the capitalists and the ruling elites who really run things. In The Communist Manifesto Marx says that all historical struggle has fundamentally been class struggle,
“Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guildmaster and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, that each time ended, either in the revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.”
The fact this excerpt starts with the word “Freeman” is far from incidental, of course. What Marx clarifies, though, is that there are only two ways these things play out. Either reconstitution of society at large or the common ruin of all. As Paul holds spice hostage and threatens its destruction, he stands at exactly that crossroads. The most important question of all, then, is what comes next? Herbert doesn’t leave us with a great deal of optimism. Paul demands the abdication of the Emperor, that he be given Princess Irulan’s hand in marriage, and in ascending to the highest station in the imperium he seems to realise that the great war he has spent the last four or five hundred pages foreseeing is now to be unleashed.
“No more terrible disaster could befall your people than for them to fall into the hands of a Hero.”