I’m reading The Ecology of Freedom by Murray Bookchin at the moment, after reading Listen, Marxist! and Post-Scarcity Anarchism recently. The texts are rooted in Bookchin’s anarchist views that he espoused throughout the sixties, seventies and eighties. So far, I have taken from his writings that thinking about social hierarchy is important to understanding the nature of the modern Western class struggle, and how it protects Westminster and American-style democracy from proletarian interests.

In the introduction of The Ecology of Freedom — which I am only up to page 26 on — Bookchin explains the way in which human societies evolved. It appears that hierarchies were instituted as humans changed the way in which they related to their means of survival, and that earlier hierarchies did not contain the oft-thought patriarchal supremacy over the rest of the clan — in fact, they appeared to be codependent with the collective efforts of different groups within the society. For example, Bookchin notes that despite the concept of elders (a gerontocracy, as he calls it) being the earliest “seeds” of social hierarchy, they exerted little real influence and appeared to be a development along the way of human history.

The evolution of hierarchy can be traced through the civilisation of humans. The chiefs and warrior classes are hierarchical constructs, monarchies and the aristocrats are as well, the caste system in India is an enduring example. Today, in Australia, our social hierarchy is complex and non-linear, which can make it hard to understand — however, we need to understand how it reinforces the interests of the capitalist class.

The parliament is an institution which rules through popular support. It is assembled with popularly elected representatives — they are gathered in a chamber, and they legislate the laws of the land. Those laws are influenced by the members, their advisers, and the relationship between the member, their electors and people and businesses who can affect their material interests.

Those people who can affect their material interests are fairly broad. Donations play a part. as well as lobbyists who interact directly with the political class. Party officials who control preselection, branch members, other members with shared material interests all have powerful influences upon members. Media coverage, which all of the aforementioned groups interact with, affects electability. When the full range of relationships are examined, one can see that hierarchy is not linear, but it does exist, and it does stratify people according to their place in the social order.

With the capitalist class exerting influence through the political class in the form of advice, lobbying, material power and media influence, and upon the working class through the parliament, the media and economic power, class struggle is tilted in their favour. Only a mass of the population rising up and destroying or seizing that power can free the working class from the hierarchical yoke.

Despite the alienation from work and life experienced by a large swathe of Australians, class consciousness remains dampened. I hypothesise that the rise of social mobility and the adherence to our social order, in tandem with the economic tendency of specialisation in our massive, intensely productive nation serves to mollify the revolutionary tendency of the working class, along with the ideas of technocrats reinforcing the notions of individualism and a just world that ensures the stability of the hierarchy, and the oppressive nature of our relationship to the means of production as realised in our bourgeois democracy.

Workers who are elected to parliament tend to lose their class identity, once they become politicians and assume their new place in the political hierarchy. We’ve seen time and time again, Labor MPs and leaders change from passionate union officials and activists into pro-business technocrats, trying to minimise the unfairness workers and the precariat face every day instead of acting in their interests. Tradespeople who free themselves from wage labour have become mini-capitalists, their interests aligned with the capitalist class that continue to exploit them anyway. The Hawke-Keating years destroyed the Builders Labourers Federation, and the last radical union with political influence, to serve the interests of developers and Labor politicians.

We can see then, that while people in modern society can move more easily than ever between the capitalist class, political and technocratic class, the media and the working class, the hierarchy of Australian society preserves the supremacy of the capitalist class above the rest. A person’s lot may change, however the unequal and exploitative nature of capitalist society remains.

Class reinforces hierarchy, and the hierarchy reinforces class. Liberal societies with high levels of development and social mobility are not immune.

What hierarchy also does, which our social hierarchy demonstrates, is that it can act as a mollifying or destabilising force within and against resistance. Hearing about the interactions between the students and workers who participated in the Chinese uprisings in 1989 before the Tiananmen Square massacre. Despite the spontaneous swelling of revolutionary fervour in the Beijing Workers’ Autonomous Federation, the deferral of the union to student hunger strikers, and the inability to convince the students of the need for active resistance against advancing PLA troops put the movement at a disadvantage. What was put as the “moral superiority” of student demonstrators doomed those in Tiananmen Square.

Revolutionary movements need to adapt to the material conditions that they face and act accordingly. Hierarchies that slow down decision making and promote deference to narrow ideas which are disconnected from the revolutionary moment can imperil the movement. Those hierarchies have also tended to carry over to the transitional periods following successful revolutions, where those parties have seized power and attempted to use it for their own ends, good or bad. These hierarchies merely create a new class stratification — cutting out the capitalist class on its own cannot destroy that.

There is a more complex hierarchy at play in modern Australia, that stratifies people by gender and race, which also feeds into the political hierarchy. That requires more thinking about for me.

The main thrust of my thoughts are this — we cannot merely conduct ourselves in the classical Marxist kind of class struggle. We must reflect on how they interact with our hierarchies, where we can break down the social power of those hierarchies and change the perception of their necessity, so as to tear away the shields protecting the primacy of the capitalist class — the bourgeoisie. Hierarchies are not natural and good, like Dr Lobster says; they are social constructs that developed as human’s relationship with the means of survival changed. Social constructs can be broken.