Politics & Power Quote by Iain Banks

Banks is yanking ideology off its pedestal and handing the steering wheel to infrastructure. The provocation in his line is the blunt refusal to treat politics as the prime mover: fascist, communist, free-market - pick your costume. What actually scripts the range of viable social arrangements, he implies, is the technical substrate: energy systems, communication networks, manufacturing capacity, weapons, surveillance, logistics. The state’s creed matters less than what its machines can do.

The sentence works because it sounds like an insult to everyone at once. By flattening rival systems into interchangeable “start out from” positions, Banks suggests ideology is often retrofitted - a story we tell to justify what technology has already made practical or profitable. That’s the subtext: regimes don’t only express values; they manage capabilities. When the capability changes, the moral language tends to follow.

Context matters: Banks wrote fiction (notably the Culture novels) obsessed with post-scarcity and the political consequences of near-miraculous tech. In those books, abundance and advanced AI don’t merely improve life; they rearrange the menu of social choices, making certain coercions harder to sustain and certain freedoms easier to administer. Read against late-20th-century history - mass media, nuclear deterrence, computerization, global supply chains - the quote also carries a cold warning. A “free market” with ubiquitous surveillance tech can behave like a police state with better branding; a “people’s republic” with the same tools can scale control beyond anything older tyrannies could dream of.

Banks isn’t praising determinism so much as puncturing political self-congratulation: your system is only as emancipatory as the machinery underneath it allows.