Introduction
Our world is divided between the few who dominate and the many who are dominated. This deep-seated division is the product of the core structures that define our society: capitalism, the state, heteropatriarchy, imperialism, settler colonialism, and white supremacy. Although we will analyze these structures individually, we see each as mutually reinforcing expressions of a broader system of domination. These structures have changed over time, but their fundamental features have remained resilient.
To understand the nature and resilience of these structures, we first have to look at how we understand power. Many anarchists, past and present, see power as synonymous with the state, as equivalent to exploitation and domination, as something that needs to be destroyed. Instead, we understand power as a relationship, shaped by the ongoing struggle between social forces in society, particularly between the dominant and dominated classes.4,5 The balance of power between these conflicting classes varies by time and place depending on which side has the capacity to achieve its goals despite resistance from opposing forces.
We should also clarify how we define “class,” which is key to our understanding of power, and which differs from narrower Marxist conceptions. Like power, we see class as a relationship. In this sense, class is defined in relation to ownership or control not only of the means of production (e.g. machinery, land, housing), which we share with Marxism, but also of the means of coercion (e.g. police, military, prisons) and administration (e.g. governmental bodies that create and administer the laws).6,7 Those who own or control the means of production, coercion, and administration are part of the dominant classes (e.g. capitalists, political officials, military leadership, police, judges, governors), placing them in a structural position to exploit, oppress, and dominate those who do not, who are part of the dominated classes (e.g. waged, unwaged and precarious workers, the unemployed, and the incarcerated).
The dominated classes are not a monolith. While we are united by our lack of ownership or control over the means of production, coercion, and administration, we often experience or understand this shared status in different ways due to a number of factors: from how we are racialized and gendered, to our citizenship status. The dominated classes represent the vast majority of the population in all its diversity, but those of us at the sharpest edges of the system—Black, Indigenous, LGBTQ people, undocumented immigrants, and incarcerated people, etc.—are disproportionately represented in its ranks.
Class is inseparable from other forms of domination. The same structures and relationships that define class, for example, also shape racialized and gendered domination, and vice versa. Race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, among other social categories, are mutually constructed elements that define the system of domination.
This system is deeply embedded. It is reinforced by mainstream culture, internal divisions within the dominated classes, and a complex mix of consent, coercion, and co-optation. But its relative stability depends on the intensity of class struggle and the power that either side is able to wield, keeping in mind: a) power is a fact of life, present in all social relationships and at all levels of society, from the institutional to the interpersonal; b) power is not inherently good or bad, but contingent on how it is mobilized and toward what end; and c) power can be changed, but not eliminated—our task is to shift the balance of power in favor of the dominated classes.
This document is BRRN’s structural analysis. With it, we hope to expose the root causes of the many social, political, economic, and ecological challenges that shape the balance of power and the terrain of class struggle. Understanding how and why the following structures operate is a critical step toward dismantling the system of domination and laying the foundation for a free, socialist society.
Capitalism
From its origins in Western Europe in the eighteenth century, capitalism has spread unevenly around the globe, leaving inequality, poverty, and ecological devastation in its wake.
At its core, capitalism is a social, political, and economic system defined by private ownership or control of the means of production and reproduction (e.g. factories, apartment buildings, and land), waged and unwaged labor, and production and exchange for profit. These factors give shape to a brutal class society—protected and promoted by the state—that benefits the few at the expense of the vast majority of the population and the planet.
In capitalist societies, the bulk of the means of production are owned or controlled by a small fraction of the population—the capitalist class. Through direct control of society’s essential resources and sources of wealth, the capitalist class occupies a structural position that enables it to wield enormous power over our lives, from deciding whether we get hired or fired to how much we pay for rent, food, clothing, and healthcare, not to mention the fact that these things are bought and sold in the first place.
Those who do not own or control the means of production—the working class—make up the vast majority of the population. Lacking ownership or control over the means of production, we are forced to sell our labor, our bodies, our time and our minds in exchange for a wage (or depend on others who do) in order to gain access to the resources we need to survive. By putting our brains and brawn to work for the capitalist class, we create value, we create wealth. Under capitalism, the capitalist class steals and hoards vast shares of this value and leaves the people who create it with little to nothing. We build houses, care for patients, teach, cook food, clean, deliver packages, and more. But the price tag on all these goods and services is well beyond what we are paid in wages. The difference between the value we create and the wages we are paid is how capitalists make their profits—that is, by exploiting our labor. Wages represent a small portion of the value that we create and are often barely enough to cover basic necessities. In this way, capitalism is rooted in a social relationship between the many that must work for a wage—along with the unemployed and those who are too sick or elderly to work—and the few that employ and direct our labor. It is a relationship that is reproduced at every level of society by workers, managers, and bosses, within the workplace and beyond.
Wage labor is a key component of capitalism, but our ability to get up and go to work is made possible by countless hours of mostly unwaged labor. This includes all labor that goes into making and remaking people—childbirth, cooking, cleaning, healthcare, child rearing and elder care, education, and more—also known as reproductive labor, which is overwhelmingly performed by, and expected of, women. Some aspects of reproductive labor have been commodified, converted into services that can be bought and sold, but it remains largely unpaid, undervalued, invisibilized, and subordinated to the process of making profit, which requires reproducing obedient workers and citizens. In capitalist societies, the division of reproductive labor has always been racialized. For instance, Black women, as slaves, provided the domestic labor to run plantation homes, provided similar labor after emancipation, and currently account for a large segment of the home healthcare occupation.
In the process of making and remaking a class that can only survive through selling its labor, capitalism has also locked others out of the workforce altogether. Many people, who are disproportionately Black, non-Black Latine, and Indigenous, are held in near permanent unemployment or swallowed up by the prison system. Alongside the regular economy, a gray economy of marginalized workers exists, where various drugs and other products are bought and sold outside the formal marketplace. This area of the economy is frequently subjected to state scrutiny and violence. Whole towns of the US exist with generations of permanently unemployed workers, discarded by capitalism’s thirst for profit and domination.
The hierarchies of domination in our capitalist society emerged from and were shaped by prior systems of domination. Capitalism emerged as a fundamentally patriarchal institution with a male ruling class because it grew out of the patriarchal systems of domination in feudal Europe. Over the years, the dominant class’s drive for profits have led them to shape and reshape the system of patriarchy. For example, during the antebellum period, when capitalism thrived on the extreme exploitation of chattel slavery, Black women were stereotyped as being tough and immune to pain, in comparison to fragile upper class white women, so plantation owners could force them to labor in the fields as well as in the home. In this way, capitalism depends on systems of oppression to prop up its ruling class, and those systems of oppression need the power of the capitalist ruling class in order to survive.
The driving force behind capitalism is the profit motive. Capitalists invest money to produce goods and services that can then be sold to make more money. This process of capital accumulation lies at the heart of how and why capitalism operates. In their insatiable hunger for profit, capitalists are pitted against one another through the market—the labor market, financial market, and the market for goods and services—where commodities are bought and sold in exchange for money. To gain ground in this ruthless competition, capitalists seek ways to cut the cost of production, which can include replacing workers with machines, relocating production to places where workers can be paid less, bypassing costly safety upgrades at the worksite, and ignoring environmental regulations, among other measures. More money is also made by turning ever more aspects of our lives into commodities that can be bought and sold, from the water we drink to the education system.
The malignant seeds of this process were planted by waves of settler colonialism during which land, labor, and resources were stolen from Indigenous communities for incorporation into the global system of capitalist production. If this process continues unchallenged, it will irreparably devastate the life-sustaining capacity of the biosphere. This means that capitalism is unsustainable by its very nature and will continue to devastate our ecosystem if it is allowed to. Today nearly every corner of the earth has been turned into a node in the global network of investment, extraction, production, and commodity exchange, with widespread pollution, deforestation, record heat waves, and a global mass extinction event as its byproducts. The climate catastrophe that faces us is not caused by supposedly timeless, unchanging characteristics like greed or human nature, and much less so by our individual consumption patterns. Instead, it is caused by a system existentially driven to continuously expand throughout and plunder the Earth. In the pursuit of maximizing short-term profits, capitalism devalues and destroys ecological diversity, long-term planning for survival, and life itself.
Throughout its history, capitalism has coexisted with various types of states—from monarchies to social democracies—but in all its forms, the state’s primary function has been to ensure that the right conditions are in place for capitalism to thrive. The state functions as a general manager of capitalism, passing laws that protect and preserve private property, sending the police or military to break up strikes and mass protests, regulating capital flows, incentivizing some businesses over others, and facilitating the capitalist class’ pursuit of profit.
The capitalists’ efforts to increase control over work and to expand the power of the state has led to the creation of layers of managers and elite professionals in corporations and the institutions of the state. Management is a tool of repression and policing in the workplace, speeding up our work and keeping the interests of the owners as the driving force on the job. Elite professionals who dominate social institutions are the agents of ruling class hegemony. The subordination of the working class to capitalists and bureaucrats denies us control over our lives and subordinates life to the meaningless drive for profit.
Not everyone is conscious of their class position in capitalism. People often have contradictory ideas about themselves, their work, and their class, leading individuals to misunderstand their position within the class system. Dominant class ideas that justify capitalism, like the American myth that almost everyone is middle class or that anyone who works hard enough can be successful, are deeply embedded in society. Workers are sold these myths through school curriculums, social media hashtags, and in countless television shows. Capitalism creates its own ideology, and in the US it has been so successful at eliminating any alternative thinking that many people accept capitalist ideas about class as common sense instead of being aware of their own class position and interests. At the same time, the experience of collective struggle can create ideas that break from dominant-class thinking. Class consciousness does not happen automatically. It develops through struggle and ideological battle.
Imperialism
Imperialism is a system in which the state and dominant classes of some countries use their superior economic and military power to dominate and exploit the people and resources of other countries. The imperialist powers drain wealth from less powerful countries through debt, corporate investment, unequal trade relations, and military intervention.
While colonialism—the direct and total rule of one nation by another—has been eroded by popular struggle over the last century, imperialist domination and exploitation remains. The US, for example, maintains a colonial relationship to Puerto Rico, Guam, Samoa, and the Virgin Islands. For the most part however, instead of direct foreign rule, it is a nation’s own domestic dominant classes who manage imperialist exploitation on behalf of foreign imperialist states and the global economy. While there is an appearance of independence and self-rule, in reality the same relations of power remain.
Imperialism is an inherent feature of global capitalism and competing states. The international capitalist system generates competition between states, which struggle over territory and geopolitical positioning, to jockey for influence and control. Similarly, in the system of global capitalism, members of each country’s capitalist class pressure their home states to secure exclusive or semi-exclusive access to new markets and resources.
Based on their economic and military capacities, countries can be roughly categorized as core, semi-peripheral, or peripheral.8 Within each of these categories exist further stratifications, with particular nation-states occupying either more dominant or more subordinate positions in relation to others in the same category. As well, it is important to note that the positions of and relationships between nation states are incredibly complex and not entirely static.
Core countries are exceedingly wealthy, highly industrialized, and militarily powerful, allowing them to secure access to the cheap labor, raw materials, export markets, and the goods of semi-peripheral and peripheral countries. The United States, Canada, much of Western and Northern Europe, Australia and New Zealand, and Japan, sit at the core of these global systems.
Countries on the periphery lack thoroughly industrialized economies and states with powerful militaries. These peripheral countries are targeted for exploitative access to cheap labor and resources mainly by countries at the core, and to a lesser degree, countries on the semi-periphery. The majority of countries on the African continent, in the Middle East, Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe, and in Central and South America are on the periphery.
Finally, semi-peripheral countries occupy a middle strata between the core and periphery. The semi-peripheral countries possess partially industrialized economies and relatively strong states with military capabilities. While still subject to the imperial domination of core countries, semi-peripheral countries are able to exert their own influence on peripheral countries through smaller-scale investment, access to export markets, and a degree of military power. In some cases, dominant core countries enlist states of the semi-periphery to act on their behalf as regional managers or enforcers. Countries like India, Russia, Iran, Turkey, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, South Africa, and Israel are considered semi-peripheral. While China is still typically understood to be on the semi-periphery, its rapid military and economic growth has allowed for it to project broad influence across the globe. As such, we may consider it an emerging core country.
Each country’s geopolitical position emerged not by happenstance, but by historical processes and circumstances. For example, Western Europe’s colonial domination in, exploitation of, and extraction from Africa and the Americas facilitated the former states’ growth as contemporary economic and political powerhouses at the expense of the latter. These same processes of domination and extraction also gave rise to ideological justifications predicated on the pseudo-science of race. According to this line of reasoning, Africans, Indigenous Peoples of the Americas, those on the Indian subcontinent, and others were not only deserving of the domination and exploitation they endured, but were in fact ‘beneficiaries’ of the ‘civilizing’ project that colonial powers had undertaken. It was in this crucible that modern conceptions of race and white supremacy were formed.
The United States has been the most dominant global imperialist power since World War II. US state functionaries maintain and reproduce empire through hundreds of military bases around the world, military alliances like NATO, financial bodies like the IMF and World Bank, direct military intervention and occupation, the world’s largest military budget, and covert operations to keep the global capitalist system running smoothly. The US also uses soft power to maintain its empire, like internationally distributed Hollywood films and other forms of mass entertainment, development aid, and liberal nonprofit institutions.
The systems of global capitalism and interstate competition benefit core countries, but they do so unevenly. While the working class in core imperialist countries are granted some access to benefits from the wealth extracted via dominated peripheral countries, these benefits pale in comparison to what the real beneficiaries—the capitalist class—reap. Moreover, these interconnected systems, through processes like globalization, also work to destabilize the lives of workers in core countries, as the capitalist class relocates jobs to peripheral and semi-peripheral countries in search of cheaper labor and higher profit margins.
Nationalism is one of the key ideological mechanisms that prevents dominated classes around the world from recognizing their shared position within the structure of global capitalism. Instead of identifying as members of the global dominated classes, we are taught to ignore social contradictions and instead identify with our home nation-state. This is typically achieved through the construction of a national founding myth that is consistently reinforced with symbols, songs, and rituals. Some revolutionary and popular progressive forces in colonized countries have used alternative nationalisms to mobilize the dominated classes against imperialist control. While many of these struggles successfully eliminated direct colonial exploitation, most simply replaced foreign rulers with local rulers who reconstructed their nation-states and, through global market pressure and for direct gain, integrated into the systems of global capitalism and interstate competition.
Some have argued that the world can easily be broken into two blocs: a broadly imperialist camp and a broadly anti-imperialist camp. We reject this notion on the grounds that national interests—directed as they are by a country’s dominant classes—even if they contradict those of dominant imperialist countries, do not automatically constitute an anti-imperialist program. In fact, some semi-peripheral and peripheral countries simultaneously oppose the dominance of core countries while undertaking extreme measures to suppress or eradicate popular movements at home. A genuine anti-imperialism is internationalist at its core and must side with the global dominated classes, not with the states that rule over them.
The State
The modern state as we know it codeveloped with capitalism in Western Europe and has spread unevenly to nearly every part of the world. Since its inception, the state has taken on a range of forms, from liberal democracies to military dictatorships. Regardless of its size or shape, the state is a bureaucratic-military organization made up of all the lawmaking and law enforcing institutions within a given territory—where power is concentrated in the hands of a minority ruling over and above the majority.
All states are marked by the dubious distinction of having a monopoly on violence within their borders and claim the ‘legitimate’ use of force outside of them. Through its police, courts, jails, and prisons, the state maintains social stability at home, protecting and preserving the system of domination in the interest of the dominant classes. To secure its interests abroad—whether that entails access to raw materials or cheap labor for certain segments of the capitalist class or geopolitical positioning—the state has the authority to mobilize the military in addition to other violent means.
The US state, created through the violent displacement and genocide of Indigenous peoples across North America, is a settler-colonial state. This fact has fundamentally shaped the US state’s trajectory from its birth to the present.
But the capacity of the state to exercise violence is, at least in part, dependent on its ability to maintain a sense of legitimacy in the eyes of its subjects. A purely repressive state is unsustainable. The state’s coercive role is therefore complemented and concealed by both consent and co-optation. Through the education system, political parties, mass media and other ideological mechanisms, the state seeks to foster a national consensus in which the exploited and oppressed accept the state, along with the system of domination as a whole, as common sense, as natural. By internalizing the logic of authority, we fuel the reproduction of relations of domination on a daily basis. The legitimacy of the state is also sustained by providing essential services, such as education and healthcare, which are typically a reflection of class struggle, but give the appearance of state benevolence. In this way, the credibility of the state is kept intact by cultivating an image of neutrality in the class struggle. The state is often skilled at absorbing and co-opting challenges to its authority, adopting popular slogans from social movements (e.g. “Si se puede!”, the 1 percent vs the 99 percent, Black Lives Matter), channeling mass discontent into the reformist realm of electoral politics, and hiring movement leaders to “change things from the inside,” among other tactics.
The ability of the state to carry out these and other functions relies on the health of the economy, from which it takes in revenue through taxation. One of the core functions of the state is therefore to develop, protect, and promote the capitalist system. Toward this end, the state uses its police and legal system to protect private property and suppress class conflict, provides tax incentives for corporations, negotiates international trade deals with other states, promotes capitalist ideology through its schools, and so on. Given that capitalists tend to act in ways that prioritize their short-term interests at the expense of workers, other capitalists, the environment, and the economy more broadly, the state intervenes to manage the long-term interest of capitalism as a whole. Today, the state itself is one of the largest actors in the economy. As a pillar of capitalist society, the state is the shield and shepherd of the exploitative relationship between labor and capital, with the capacity for coercion looming in the background, placing it firmly in the camp of the capitalist class at the expense of the majority of the population.
But the state is not simply an instrument of the capitalist class. Although capitalists, particularly through multinational corporations, exert enormous influence over the state relative to other actors, the state retains a degree of autonomy. Political elites, for example, often make decisions in their own interest or occasionally in response to pressures from below that are not always in line with the competing interests of capital.
While the state expresses the interests of those controlling it, that does not mean that the dominant classes are always unified. As various figures and groupings take the reins of the state, they can use it to develop and transform some sectors of the economy over others and use the state as a vehicle to align and compete with other state actors. Struggles within the dominant classes, and the need for perpetual reformist co-optation to contain threats from below, make the state a shifting and contested site of power.
The state also plays a fundamental role in institutionalizing and enforcing systems of domination. Over time, the state has been central to shaping and reshaping social hierarchies, often in response to new conditions and popular movements that render tactics of control obsolete. In terms of white supremacy, this can be seen historically through the constitutional protection of slavery; the role of the US Army, courts, and congress in advancing settler colonialism; and the legalization of Jim Crow. While popular struggles damaged or eliminated many of these pillars of white supremacy, the state developed new forms to maintain racial domination, such as the ongoing militarization of the border, mass incarceration, police brutality, and imperial aggression abroad—all of which disproportionately affect people of color. As for its mutually reinforcing relationship with heteropatriarchy, for much of US history the state systematically denied basic political and economic rights to women, it has both extended and attacked access to abortion, prohibited and granted marriage equality, imposed nonsodomy laws and denied protections to trans workers and students, sided overwhelmingly with rapists in court, while the most powerful state institutions—the military, the police, congress, and the presidency—feature straight white men overwhelmingly at the top of the chain of command.
The state is ultimately an institution of minority class rule reproduced as a social relationship throughout society, where relations of domination thrive in our homes, workplaces, schools, and every other core institution in our lives.
Because it is a pillar of the system of domination, the state is not a neutral instrument that can be wielded for good or bad depending on who is at the helm. There is no hope for a free, socialist society through the capture of the state or through the creation of new states—whether by ballot or bullet—regardless of the insignia or color on the flag.
White Supremacy
White supremacy is a system of racial domination that emerged from the process of rationalizing, institutionalizing, and protecting the extractive and exploitative practices of European colonialism in the 15th and 16th centuries. The concept of “race” itself is a product of this process. It developed both as a mechanism of social control and as part of an effort to “scientifically” categorize people into a social hierarchy, attributing certain essential characteristics, traits, and behaviors to each category based on physical appearance. While these categories continue to shape our social, political, and economic life, they have no basis in biology. In other words, race is a biological fiction. Born out of a colonial context marked by the enslavement of Africans and Indigenous genocide, race and racial categories have evolved over time. But, regardless of time and place, race has been the glue of a cross-class alliance, binding the dominant classes to a segment of the dominated classes through shared identity—particularly a “white” identity—as a way to suppress class conflict.
This cross-class alliance can be traced back to the origins of race and white supremacy in the United States. In the late 1600s, elites in the British colony of Virginia invented and institutionalized the so-called white race in response to real and perceived threats to the settler-colonial order. Fearing the potential power of indentured servants—the majority of the population—uniting with free and enslaved Africans against the ruling minority of wealthy planters, colonial elites initiated a divide-and-conquer strategy. Through a series of laws and other measures, colonial elites created a range of exclusive rights and benefits for poor Europeans that were denied to Africans and Indigenous peoples. Out of this process, the social, political, and economic distinctions between “white” and nonwhite people took form, with continuities and changes over time.
While “white” people were placed in a dominant position, whiteness is not a stable category. Whiteness in particular, and the entire concept of race more generally, is socially constructed rather than based on biology. This means that whether someone gets classified as white is not defined by the quantity of their melanin or some genetic marker, but instead by complex social arrangements. This is made clear by tracing changes in who is included or excluded from these categories over time. For example, the large numbers of Irish immigrants who arrived in the US throughout the nineteenth century were not, at the time, considered white. Nativist Anglo-Americans closely guarded their white identity and the benefits it afforded them via the exploitation and domination of racialized “others.”
Over time, Irish, Italian, and other European immigrant workers were included in the cross-class alliance. Given its social and material benefits, these groups actively sought inclusion in the category of whiteness. For white elites, expanding the definition of whiteness served to head off or destabilize any possibility of multiracial solidarity among workers against the common forces of domination and exploitation that they faced in the fields and factories of a growing capitalist economy.
While the boundaries of whiteness have expanded or contracted depending on historical circumstances, membership in the cross-class alliance has always come with a wide range of benefits. The overall sense of superiority and entitlement among those within the dominant group has been nurtured by the fact that, relative to working-class people of color, those considered “white” have had lower unemployment rates, more wealth, better access to quality healthcare, housing and schools, lower incarceration rates, and safer neighborhoods. Though these benefits are not accessible to all “white” people equally, the elite few have tried to tether the interests of the “white race’s” working-class majority to a racial capitalist project at the expense of class solidarity from below. This can be seen in the past and present—in the defense of slavery, Indigenous genocide, and Jim Crow; in the recurring nativist assaults on immigrants; and in support for US imperialism. Meanwhile, the few at the top of the cross-class alliance, who own and control nearly every major institution in our society, continue to reap the benefits of a divided working class.
The shape of race and white supremacy at home has always been fueled by imperial conquest abroad. Beginning with the colonization of North America to the more recent invasions and occupations of the Middle East, US imperialism has always been rooted in the construction of a foreign “other,” labeling mostly nonwhite peoples and nations as both inferior and a threat to the empire. The consequences of this “othering” can be seen in the boarding schools for Indigenous peoples, the mass internment of Japanese citizens during World War II, and the racial profiling and attacks against Arabs, South Asians, and anyone perceived to be Muslim in the US during the so-called “war on terror.”
The persistence of white supremacy is propped up by both the state and capitalism. Through the labor market, capitalists have disproportionately relegated working-class people of color—particularly Black people—to the lowest paying jobs with the least amount of benefits and security, leaving many chronically underemployed and subject to rampant state violence and incarceration. To prop up racialized class oppression, US politicians and state administrators have constructed the largest and most elaborate carceral system in human history, serving to permanently warehouse more people per capita than any other nation-state. As well, nativist and white supremacist ideology and forces militarize internal and external borders against the specter of immigrants, while simultaneously enabling the economy to thrive on their hyperexploitation.
While white supremacy endures, today’s dominant classes are increasingly diverse. The racial and gender composition of the dominant classes reflect decades of struggle against white supremacy. Despite this representation, the majority of people remain trapped in a highly racialized class system, as evidenced by racial income stratification, prison demographics, and other markers of an ongoing white supremacist reality. These facts should caution us from relying on any reductive analysis that focuses wholly on identity or wholly on class as the locus of domination. Instead, we assert that race, class, and other forms of domination in the United States are intrinsically connected with each other, affecting different groups of people differently depending on time and place.
Heteropatriarchy
Heteropatriachy is a system in which gender and sexuality are shaped by structures, relationships, and ideologies of domination in ways that place men in general, and straight cisgender men in particular, in a position to exploit, oppress, and dominate women and LGBTQ people.
From birth onward, gender socialization occurs in our homes, schools, workplaces, and every other social institution we interact with throughout our lives. These institutions inscribe heteronormative beliefs, values, norms, practices, and expectations around sex and gender. This includes dominant understandings of what it means to be a “man,” “woman,” “straight,” or “gay,” as well as narrow definitions of what is considered “masculine” and “feminine.” These and other categories related to sex, gender, and sexuality are not natural, timeless, objective facts. Both gender and sexuality are socially constructed. They are defined differently depending on time, place, context, and social struggle, and can have life-affirming or life-threatening connotations or consequences depending on the circumstances.
The social structure of heteropatriarchy situates heterosexual cis men in a position of dominance. Under heteropatriarchy, heterosexuality is viewed as the normative sexual orientation, the man-woman-child structure is understood as the standard family form, and male and female are seen as two mutually exclusive, binary, and unchanging genders that are determined at birth by physical “sex” characteristics.
Heteropatriarchy has a symbiotic relationship with other forms of domination. As part of the legacy of slavery and settler colonialism, for example, white men continue to dominate the highest paying occupations in the US, while Black and Indigenous women are overrepresented in low-wage jobs with little if any benefits. The state and capital have played a central role in creating and sustaining this racialized and gendered segregation of the labor market to maintain a cheap source of labor. In relation to the coercive function of the state, Queer and trans people, particularly those of color, are disproportionately policed, arrested, and imprisoned. Meanwhile, imperial ventures, such as the US invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, are often justified by political elites on the grounds of “liberating” women in the service of empire building.
One of the pillars of heteropatriarchy is the gendered division of socially reproductive labor. In capitalist societies, men are more often encouraged to do “productive” manual and intellectual labor. Women, on the other hand, are pushed to serve the needs of social reproduction, the process of making, caring for, and socializing the working class to develop its willingness, capacity, and disposition to continue selling its labor for a wage. Within heterosexual households, women still do the large majority of unwaged housework, usually working a “double shift” where they go to work to generate profit for capitalists and then go home to cook, clean, and take care of children, the elderly, and even their spouses—all of which is needed for workers to be able to go back to work the next day and for the next generation to enter the ranks of the working class. In the workforce, women are often tracked into positions of care and service to others—including teaching, healthcare, and other service occupations, which are overall less valued and less secure than traditionally male occupations. Social reproductive labor is not only essential for facilitating waged labor, but is also a key part of the process of instilling the gender norms and roles that underpin heteropatriarchy.
Heteropatriarchy expresses its clearest and most brutal form through the rampant violence inflicted upon women and LGBTQ people. Gender violence comes in various forms, from intimate partner violence at home, to sexual harassment at work, to femicide in the streets and rape as a weapon of war in combat zones. Gender violence is enabled by hierarchical power relationships. In our workplaces, families, schools, and other social institutions, cis men overwhelmingly occupy the position of boss, landlord, policemen, prison guard, and others with the structural power to prey on those who depend on them for work, housing, safety, and other necessities. Cultural norms, managers of capitalist enterprises, and the state’s alleged justice system protect and perpetuate the cis men who perpetrate this violence, using shame, rejection, disbelief, and other insidious tactics to ignore and silence the victims and survivors of gender violence. In times of crisis or in reaction to advances in feminist struggle, gender violence is often amplified, weaponized by men who fear that their masculinity and dominance is being threatened. However, gender violence is not exclusively carried out by cis men. People of various gender identities use violence and other forms of domination to enforce the norms and roles proscribed by heteropatriarchy. Ultimately, gender violence is an extension of the broader violence inherent to the system of domination.
Heteropatriarchy is also profoundly harmful to men. Throughout their life, men are socialized to suppress their emotions and defer support in order to appear strong—behaviors that contribute to higher rates of depression, drug abuse, violence, and suicide. Boys and men are under constant pressure to uphold narrow notions of manhood and masculinity. Homophobia and misogyny are regularly weaponized to keep boys and men in line. They are told: “man up,” “don’t be a bitch,” “no homo,” or that “men don’t cry.” While these norms and behaviors are either unattainable or undesirable, men who are perceived to be defying them, especially gay and trans men, are often subject to violence. Though heteropatriarchy provides benefits to men by placing them in a dominant position within the social structure, it ultimately prevents them from realizing their full potential as human beings.
The shape of heteropatriarchy is not fixed. The dominant classes today, while still overwhelmingly composed of heterosexual cis men, are increasingly made up of women and queer people. Through the advance of liberal assimilationist politics and identity-based struggles, the hard social borders of heteropatriarchy have become more porous. Some sections of oppressed groups have become members or junior partners of the dominant classes. This fact requires us to deepen our analysis beyond liberal identity politics, while also continuing to recognize the particular social positions that women and queer people occupy.
Although the dominant classes play a crucial role in maintaining the basic structures of heteropatriarchy, they are reproduced and reinforced on a daily basis by all of us who have grown up surrounded by this inescapable, poisonous, and dominant ideology. Thus sexism, transphobia, and homophobia are things that are very much present within working-class organizations and within our own political organizations. They threaten to undermine working-class power if they are not consistently recognized and challenged.
Settler Colonialism
The United States was built on the genocide of Indigenous peoples. Beginning in the late fifteenth century, European royal houses sought to enrich themselves by funding and encouraging traders, soldiers, and missionaries to violently clear the Indigenous populations of what we now know of as the Americas, take and occupy the land, and construct permanent settler societies on Indigenous territories.
This ongoing process of settler colonialism differs from other forms of colonialism, which are predicated primarily on the extraction of raw materials and the exploitation of Indigenous populations in the interest of direct material gain or market expansion. Under classic forms of colonialism, these activities are carried out by an impermanent population circulating between the metropole (the home country) and the colony. In settler colonialism, these functions still play an important role, but are subordinated to the more fundamental project of introducing a permanent population whose aim is to uproot the lifeways of Indigenous peoples so as to replace them with new social, political, juridical, economic, and religious structures. Ultimately, the settler colony aims to supplant existing Indigenous populations through a combination of genocidal elimination and assimilation.
Land theft is necessary for the establishment of a settler-colonial society. Recognizing the moral contradiction present in violently dispossessing people from their land, European and US settlers relied on a number of justifications to reach their intended ends. These included the familiar practice of casting Indigenous peoples as racially or culturally inferior, but also weaponizing the legal-political notion of terra nullius, which viewed “empty” lands as free to those who would put them to “legitimate use.” Settlers carved these lands into discrete parcels to be owned solely by individuals or groups of individuals, thereby introducing a regime of private property.
It was precisely this rapacious drive to acquire ever more territory that sparked the revolt of settler colonists in North America against the British Crown. After securing its independence, the newly sovereign United States acted to remove all previous restrictions on internal territorial expansion. The rapid westward advance that followed the war placed major demands on the fledgling federal government, requiring it to quickly expand its military and policing capabilities. It’s in these dual crucibles—the war of independence and the rapid expansion of territories—that an early version of the modern US settler-colonial state would be forged.
The nineteenth century saw the United States continue to expand its territory through annexations, wars, and transactions with other nation-states. Throughout this period the federal government and vigilante settlers alike sought to liquidate Indigenous populations using a variety of means. Violent incursions into Indigenous territories remained a key method, but new practices also emerged. The dual introductions of the Indian Removal Act and the Indian Appropriations Act resulted in a systematization of forced removal and the creation of the modern reservation system. The latter part of the century also saw a ratcheting up of efforts to fully assimilate Indigenous peoples into settler society by stripping them of their relationships to land, language, spirituality, cultural practices, and one another. Among other measures, this involved the creation of hundreds of private and state-funded “boarding schools” into which Indigenous children were enrolled after having been separated from their families and communities. These schools aimed, according to one of their chief architects, to “kill the Indian…and save the man.” The practices of state-backed coerced assimilation continued well into the twentieth century, during which the federal government produced new and more complex schemes aimed at fully dissolving the identity and culture of Indigenous peoples.
While Indigenous peoples have struggled mightily to retain their lifeways and very existence, from the Powhatan Uprising of 1622 to more recent struggles around the Dakota Access Pipeline, settler-colonial domination continues to this day. In our moment, as in moments of the past, it manifests in ongoing conflicts over Indigenous lands, waterways, treaties, and autonomy; denigration, misrepresentation, and the near absence of Indigenous people in popular media; state attempts to withhold recognition of certain Indigenous tribes and their rights; and the systematic degradation of life for those living in the reservation system through the denial and mismanagement of state resources.
4. Enrique Guerrero-López and Cameron Pádraig, “Tipping the Scales: Popular Power in an Age of Protest and Pandemic,” Black Rose Anarchist Federation / Federación Anarquista Rosa Negra, 2022.
5. Felipe Corrêa, “Creating a Strong People: Discussions on Popular Power”, 2009.
6. Felipe Corrêa, “Anarchism, Power, Class and Social Change”, Anarkismo.net, 2022.
7. Leroy Maisiri, “A Case for Anarchist Class Analysis: Why it Works Better than the Marxist Approach and What it Means for Struggles”, Zabalaza Books, 2019.
8. Gabriel Kuhn, “Oppressor and Oppressed Nations: Sketching a Taxonomy of Imperialism”, Kersplebedeb, 2017.