Overcoming Hierarchy: A Theory Illustrated

The linocut print reproduced here portrays what we have elsewhere called the capitalist “hierarchy of labor power,” a hierarchy of the world’s population made by and for the 1% for the perpetuation of the power of capital (Brownhill and Turner 2018; Brownhill 2022; Turner 2022). Because capitalists are motivated by the imperative to increase their wealth and control over human and natural capital or else be swallowed up by the competition or be driven out of business, as a class they do not see anything in the universe as off-limits to their acquisition. Capitalism’s relations of exploitation have been created on a global scale through enclosures, witch hunts, conquest, slavery, colonialism, and corporate globalization—with the perpetuation of gendered and racialized intergenerational inequalities, maintained by the imposition of commodified mainstream cultures that reinforce and normalize the violent perpetuation of capitalists’ power. The capitalists’ need for control over Nature brings humanity perpetually to warfare and its horrors (Adler 2022). The print, Overcoming Hierarchy, shows united peoples turning to march out of capitalism’s exploitative relations and into harmony with humanity and Nature. An old monocled white man perches with cane in hand and extractive tools over his shoulder, atop the hierarchical world he rules. The hierarchy is held in place by a capstone of privilege, a “male deal” of legal and cultural biases giving white men historically-rooted, culturally-specific power over all men of color (in general whose land and/or labor the capitalists want) and over all women (who in general produce all the labor that capitalists need). For capitalists, labor is themost strategic commodity; we are human capital stock. Capitalists want control over labor not only at work but in society at large, and, as Roe v. Wade’s reversal shows, in control over the conditions of labor power production, starting in the womb. For centuries, capitalist male deals have cemented the acquiescence of somemen to their own dispossession and exploitation in return for elements of control over Nature and people ‘below them’ on the hierarchy (Brownhill 2009; Turner 1994; Turner 2022). At the same time, the work of controlling labor, including women’s fertility, is never done without the rank complicity of some (especially white) women (e.g., Farris 2017). These are classist, racist, sexist aspects of divide and rule.