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The fading of the Old Left, along with its fixation with Marxism and class struggle, soon gave rise to a “New Left” in Europe and America. Among other factors, this transition has been defined by the growing predominance of identity politics over class struggle. Identity politics follows from the presumed usefulness of coming together around various shared identities – say, being black, a woman, gay, transgender, or disabled – as a means for understanding and resisting oppression. This eagerness to treat all liberation struggles as ends in themselves did away with the primacy of class; rather, efforts were split more evenly between different minority groups, adding depth to previously neglected concerns.

At first, this trend offered a fair degree of revolutionary potential. The Black Panther Party, for example, recognized that black power was inseparable from achieving community autonomy in fully tangible ways, as was manifest in a range of activity that included everything from armed self-defense to food distribution, drug rehabilitation, and elderly care. Also in the US, the Combahee River Collective – who introduced the modern usage of the term “identity politics” in 1977 – saw their own liberation as queer black women merely as a single component of a much larger struggle against all oppressions, class included. Even Martin Luther King, currently a favorite among pacifist reformers, emphasized not long before his death that anti-racism was meaningless when separated from a broader opposition to capitalism.

As time passed, however, identity politics drifted irretrievably from its antagonistic origins, eventually coming to be associated with the separation of issues of identity from class struggle altogether. Broadly insensitive to the material features of liberation, the term nowadays suggests political engagement that’s heavily focused around moralistic displays and the policing of language – something that, quite inadvertently, can easily end up excluding the rest of the population, especially those lacking an academic grounding. Any larger political strategies, meanwhile, are typically focused not on dissolving the institutions of politics, business, and law enforcement, but instead on making them more accommodating to marginalized groups, thereby conceding the overall legitimacy of class-divided society. It’s no coincidence that this reformist, essentially liberal approach to social transformation only took off in tandem with that unspoken assumption, cemented since the ‘80s, regarding our chances of a revolution actually happening any more. In short, identity politics has been contained within a fundamental position of compromise with power, taking it for granted the state and capital are here to stay.

Perhaps the central problem with identity politics today is that, having had the good sense to abandon Marxian analysis, it loses the ability to account for what’s common to the plethora of social problems we face. If oppressive relations cannot be reduced to class, then what’s the underlying structure that binds them all together? The only alternative is to treat different oppressions as disconnected and remote – problems that can, in their various forms, be overcome without challenging the system as a whole. Identity politics thus lacks the conceptual bridge needed to draw different social movements into a holistic revolutionary struggle. Particularly in its most vulgar forms, liberation struggles are treated as isolated or even competitive concerns, inviting the reproduction of oppressive relations among those supposed to be fighting them.

Having said that, an explicit response to these limitations was offered by intersectionality, which began gaining traction in the ‘80s. The point of this theory is to demonstrate how different axes of domination overlap, compounding the disadvantages received by those exposed to more than one oppressive identity. By focusing only on gender, for example, feminist movements tend to prioritize the experiences of their most privileged participants – typically white, wealthy women. In order to undermine patriarchy effectively, therefore, feminism must embrace a much larger spectrum of concern, inviting the narratives of marginalized women to the forefront. A key virtue of intersectionality has thus been its emphasis on the interconnected nature of power, predicating the effectiveness of different liberation struggles on their ability to support one another. Unlike with Marxian class analysis, moreover, it does so without positing that any single axis of domination is somehow primary, which offers a vital contribution for going forward.

Despite its utility for revolutionaries, however, intersectionality has generally failed to avoid co-optation by neoliberal capitalism. Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, with its numerous references to the likes of the “combined effects of intersecting issues that impact communities of color,” is but one example. Or else look at its seamless application by the mega-corporations nowadays, to the extent that Sony Pictures even has its own Director of Intersectional Marketing, a role designed to ensure that “marketing campaigns achieve maximum outreach to targeted multicultural and LGBT demographics.” How has a seemingly radical theory been diverted towards blatant reactionary ends? A first problem with intersectionality, as with identity politics more generally, is its abandonment of classical revolutionary concerns. At best, class is discussed merely in terms of “classism,” namely, an individual prejudice that can be undone simply by changing opinions, rather than abolishing class-divided society overall. Meanwhile, the state – a concrete institution, not an identity category such as race, gender, or class – is typically ignored altogether, inevitably resulting in toothless political programs.

Moreover, this distinct lack of material analysis leads to a second problem, apparently the inherent defect of any take on identity politics: the inability to locate a common thread to the constitution of oppression as such. By setting out ever more subcategories of oppressed identities – not just being a black woman, for instance, but also a black trans-woman, a black disabled trans-woman, and so on – the consequence is an endless process of compartmentalization. This emphasis on complexity could easily be a source of strength, opening up multiple fronts of diffuse engagement, inviting greater numbers to participate without having to assume a secondary role. Yet by focusing only on particularities, any notion of a common enemy against which to generalize revolt soon vanishes. Only when combined with a broader, concretely revolutionary vocabulary can intersectionality be used to promote diversity rather than fragmentation, undermining power as a totality.

Of course, none of the failures of identity politics should detract from the gains hard-won over the years. Even if transphobia continues to lag behind, overt racism, sexism, and homophobia are rarely tolerated by mainstream politics in much of the Global North – something unthinkable just a few decades ago. The uncomfortable fact, however, is that capitalism has been quite happy to adapt to these changes, taking on this or that superficial tarnish, yet remaining wholly the same in terms of its core operations. Women have flowed into the workforce, just as the nuclear family continues to disintegrate; nonetheless, human existence remains dominated by wage labor, property relations, and value accumulation. Amid all the profound historical shifts, the misery of employment remains constant: workers in Amazon’s warehouses – as contemporary a workplace as you could imagine – are subject to intense surveillance and control, with many too fearful of their productivity quotas to even use the bathroom. No joke: only recently, various companies have begun microchipping their workers to keep track of them better. The opportunity to vote for a black or female head of state, or for queers to marry or join the military, poses little threat to the operation of business as usual. If anything, it only strengthens the liberal paradigm, allowing people to convince themselves – despite the gap between rich and poor growing consistently worldwide, as well as each new day dragging us closer to the brink of ecological meltdown – that somehow things are actually getting better. Decades of alleged ideological progress, only to be met with the turning of a circle: the basic features of authoritarian society, at least as strong as they were a century ago.

Such is the impasse we’re faced with. Taken by itself, class struggle fails to account for the complexity of oppression, attempting to subsume each of its forms into the monolithic category of economic exploitation. Identity politics, on the other hand, breaks out of this formula, yet only by abandoning any semblance of a revolutionary perspective. Rather than collaborating to produce a tangible threat to the existent, therefore, all that class struggle and identity politics did was swap their problems. Both trends offer their own vital insights, but neither charts the possibility of new worlds altogether – not even close.

The prism of social hierarchy

Amid these broad historical shifts, the last decades of struggle have also seen a critique of social hierarchy becoming increasingly influential, particularly within anarchist circles. Writers like Murray Bookchin described hierarchies as including any social relation that allows one individual or group to wield power over another. In his words:

By hierarchy, I mean the cultural, traditional and psychological systems of obedience and command, not merely the economic and political systems to which the terms class and State most appropriately refer. Accordingly, hierarchy and domination could easily continue to exist in a “classless” or “Stateless” society. (The Ecology of Freedom, 1982)

What Bookchin offers here is a lens for understanding society that explicitly exceeds Marxist and anarchist orthodoxies, especially the class reductionism. This isn’t a matter of doing away with the struggle against the state and capital, given that both institutions are as hierarchical as any. Rather, the point is to recognize that additional hierarchies – those based, for example, on relations of race, gender, sexuality, age, ability, and species – cannot be entirely contained within the narrow categories either of economic exploitation or political coercion. Various hierarchies existed before the advent of both class and the state, be it the hierarchy of men over women, the old over the young, or humans over other animals. And they will continue to exist in the future, too, even within ostensibly radical circles, unless we make a concerted effort to undermine them in the now. What we need is a broader focus for our resistance, one that includes a deep concern for the old targets without being limited by them. A social critique based on hierarchy offers this distinctly horizontal outlook, combining an appreciation of the holism of domination with the refusal to single out any one of its axes as primary.

This is no call to do away with class analysis altogether. The broad, materially focused analyzes of theorists like Marx remain useful for explaining how economic factors motivated much of the development of oppressive relations. Nor can we forget that, were it not for the invention of the state, the normalization of these relations to such a staggering extent would have been impossible. But we need to appreciate these insights without going overboard, mistakenly taking either class or the state to be the crux of social domination. Treating any single form of oppression as primary (almost always the one we just happen to feel closest to) is all too often a cheap excuse for sidelining the others. And this problem isn’t somehow abstract or peripheral, either, but denotes one of the main reasons many resistance movements seem incapable of relating to broader sections of society nowadays. Only by granting equal consideration to all oppressions can the struggle begin to maximize its inclusivity, accommodating those people – in fact, the vast majority of people – whose experiences and wellbeing have already been marginalized everywhere else.

Unlike identity politics, however, what keeps the critique of hierarchy from trailing off into reformism is that it nonetheless locates all oppressions within a single power structure. Only this time it’s hierarchy, not class, that frames the discussion as such. You can explain patriarchy, for example, not only as a specific form of oppression, but also as something that arises from a set of relations that includes gender whilst vastly exceeding it. Because there’s something inherent in patriarchy that permeates all other instances of oppression, and that thing is its core structure – specifically, its hierarchical structure. Patriarchy can be summarized simply as gender hierarchy; white supremacy, meanwhile, is a specific kind of racial hierarchy; the state is the hierarchy of government over the general population; capitalism is the hierarchy of the ruling class over the working class; and so on. It’s impossible to imagine an instance of oppression that isn’t grounded in exactly this kind of setup, namely, an institution that grants one section of society arbitrary control over another. Which is to say that all oppressions, no matter how diverse, presuppose the very same asymmetrical power relations, each of them subordinating the needs of one group to the whims of another. Everything from homelessness, to pollution, to transgender suicides can thus be revealed not as isolated issues, but instead as flowing from a common source. What we’re dealing with, basically, is a single problem: social hierarchy is a hydra with many heads, but only one body.

Some might approach this description with caution, as if it were just another attempt to reduce all oppressions to one. But the critique of hierarchy isn’t reductionist in the Marxian sense: rather than singling out any one form of oppression as more fundamental than the others, it merely emphasizes the structure they all assume. This kind of bigger-picture thinking hardly means failing to realize what’s unique to every liberation struggle, as if to subsume them into some amorphous whole; the point is only to emphasize particularities without getting bogged down in them. That means combining an intimate knowledge of different oppressions with a broader understanding of those features they all hold in common, including the very real pain, exclusion, and destruction of potential each entails. In other words, every form of oppression, aside from being a problem in itself, must also serve as a gateway for entering the clash with social hierarchy as a whole.

It can be easy to feel overwhelmed by the sheer breadth of issues we’re facing – that is, if we’re going to approach them one by one. But this isn’t the only option open to us. Framing the discussion in terms of hierarchy (already common sense for many) offers that broad, revolutionary perspective we’ve lost sight of, locating all oppressions within a single power structure. Yet it does so in a way that refuses to prioritize any particular aspects of that structure, thereby balancing the key virtues of class struggle and identity politics.

Revolutionary struggle in the 21^st century calls out to a new horizon. It’s time to strive beyond mere economic destinations such as socialism or communism, just as the absence of formal political institutions like the state will never be enough. Rather, what matters here is bringing about anarchy – the absence of mastery of any kind – in the fullest sense of the word. The anarchist project must thereby be distinguished from the antiquated goals of Marxists, as well as the Left more generally: the point is to dismantle oppression in all possible forms, and it means taking the maxim seriously, too, instead of cashing it out as just another empty slogan. Be wary, comrades. Who knows what adventures could result from such an audacious proposal?