The structuralist critique of personal power is counter-productive to social change, for it assumes that the individual is shaped by the social structure, while taking no account of the fact that each human on Earth powerfully creates and recreates that structure, through their everyday actions and long term plans.

By labelling the individual as a victim of the social structure, sociologists and activists alike remove the individual’s responsibility for the social and environmental problems we are experiencing. It is not we, but the ‘system’ that is the source of all our problems. More importantly, we disempower ourselves by creating ourselves as the object of others’ actions, rather than the subject of our own. A victim is ‘a sufferer from any destructive, injurious or adverse action or agency,’ he suffers this maltreatment and does not react against it, the first step toward removing himself from the situation entirely.
In reality we are only the victims of our own destructive and injurious behaviour and to react against the consequences of this with a self righteous, abstract critique of the oppressive system is to deny the very thing that we ourselves have created.

As soon as we admit that we ourselves have created the reality in which we now find ourselves entrapped, we can begin to discover ways in which to undermine and escape these structures, and indeed begin to build new and productive social ecologies and knowledge systems. For if we are the architects of our own reality, do we not hold the blue prints, with all the faults, fissures and cracks printed clearly upon them?

Take consumerism as an example. These days it is very difficult to eat without also partaking in a delectable concoction of pesticides, herbicides, hormones, antibiotics, preservatives, additives and other chemicals. What was once our sustenance has become carcinogenic and devoid of goodness and nourishment. Genetic engineering is producing food plant species that can withstand vastly higher rates of pesticide application, rates hundreds of times those of the previous generation.
The consequences of poisoning the Earth and our children may not be apparent for many years, but there is no doubt that there will be consequences. Already the relatively ‘controlled’ application of chemical fertilisers and pesticides in the 70’s and 80’s has created massive problems of salinity, weed infestation, blue green algae and soil sterilisation that are virtually irreversible. And as the majority of Australians live along the coastal areas of the continent, most of these problems go unnoticed by the very people who could do some thing about them: consumers.

Consumer power is a relatively new concept. For many years alternative culture has been based on the left wing concepts of powerlessness and victimisation, a belief that ownership of the means of production is the only source of social power. Now we are beginning to recognise that producers are only producers because we buy their products; it is the basic tenet of a supply and demand economy. The role of the consumer is so integral in fact, that corporations are willing to spend million upon millions of dollars on coercive and manipulative advertising campaigns to ensure that you buy their products.

If the individual wishes to manipulate the social structure, he must withdraw entirely from those practices that render him powerless within that system, a victim of the manipulative actions of others and of his own inability to act independently. By doing so, he is able to create a new culture of empowerment within the old ‘system’.