As resistance to fascism grows, and it is growing—how could it not—activists will face many choices. One that has often been quite contentious will re-arise. How should we decide whether to be mainly class-oriented or mainly identity-oriented? This is not a topic for a tweet or a snippet. More attention is needed. So, my apologies that this article may look to some so, so long. It really isn’t. I worry, instead, that it isn’t long enough. You decide.

Suppose we want to understand (and impact) a particular domain. It could be how the ocean moves, a pandemic, or how climate changes. Perhaps it is how a band of juvenile delinquents with immense wallets take over the innards of a major government. Whatever. We should come at our chosen domain with a set of concepts that have a highly credible lineage and are well suited to our task and to ourselves as well.

We want to address the weather, human biology, or galaxies. We will have to think about different things in each case and therefore use different concepts for each concern. Physics concepts won’t help us understand why we feel laggard in the morning, but health concepts that clarify why we feel laggard won’t help us understand global warming much less galaxy formation. The incredibly obvious point is that we will need an appropriate toolbox of concepts able to help with whatever we may want to accomplish. And we will need them to be useable by us in our situations—and not, for example, so obscure or so heavy that we can’t even find or lift them.

In fact, we want to understand society in order to change it. So we ask what concepts and what general understanding should we bring to our task. We of course shouldn’t look at society and examine it with electrons and protons, or circulatory systems and kidneys, or gravity or even all of that in mind. But what should we assemble in our minds to aid our task?

To address society, to change society, we might think that having forefront in mind economy and classes is key, so we might mainly look at how the society’s economy divides people into contending classes. We might examine how those classes see themselves and their circumstances because we believe that how classes act is central to societal change. We might even think we should understand pretty much everything about society by considering each thing’s effects on class relations and vice versa. We look at families, the state, education, health care, or what have you. Since our goal is to change society we may feel we should look at how those things affect the likelihood of a working class rising up to make change. This will be a consistent, sensible approach if our initial assertions about the centrality, and even sole centrality of economy and economic classes are correct. But are they?

Consider that we might have instead started with gender. We could have asserted that what creates profound social change is that a gender rises up and transforms social relations and institutions. And that can happen, we might have asserted, if consciousness, militance, and organization on the part of women and also some male supporters increases sufficiently. We might then call our perspective feminism or perhaps radical feminism. That approach, too, will make sense if our initial assertion is true that gender is at the heart of social dynamics so that we should understand economy, race, government and everything else insofar as they impact male and female and, nowadays, other gender designations as well.

But we might have instead asserted, wait a minute, both sets of assumptions make sense, so let’s prioritize in our societal thinking both class and gender. Let’s take both those focuses as central, not one or the other. And in fact, a half century ago, socialist feminism emerged with just that inclination. Attentive to class, it was also attentive to gender. It didn’t prioritize one above the other.

But then, of course, it struck others that it is also possible to assert that race or cultural/community designations are central, and to in turn choose to prioritize race, or race and gender, or race and class, or even all three. For that matter, we might have put power first, so we might instead prioritize power and class, power and race, power and gender, or even all four.

How do we sensibly choose among various possible approaches? What assessments should inform a choice of one approach rather than another? Presumably it will be a belief in a particular set of underlying assertions and not some other possible underlying assertions.

For example, one assertion says the economy is optimally important. Not just production and consumption but also all else depends on the existence and operations of the economy. The economy provides that with which we do things. Our role in the economy profoundly affects our circumstances and views. Our economic roles can divide us into classes where one class has one set of interests and another class has a different set of opposed interests. If we believe that holds for a society, or even that it must hold for every society, that belief will tend to push us toward a class-centered approach to understanding society in order to change it.

But what if our underlying assertion instead emphasizes gender and kinship. In that case, we might start from the observation that relations between men and women generate the next generation, bring up children, and socialize the population, which results all else depend on. Relations of nurturance, procreation, and socialization profoundly impact people and can divide us into constituencies with different interests and inclinations. Kinship can cause some to dominate others. We should elevate kinship concepts.

But then what about the way people identify themselves culturally? How about if that’s also ubiquitously present and profoundly influential? What if the ways people form cultural communities inexorably affect people’s views, behaviors, and interrelations differently for different races, ethnic groups, and religions? We should elevate cultural/community concepts. Or, by the same token, what if the way we implement overarching programs, legislate stability and coherence, and deal with disputes profoundly affects and demarcates people, in turn impacting all else. Elevate concepts of polity and power.

Even as we approach this problem of how to effectively understand society without using piles and piles of blisteringly academic books and obscure schooling, we may see that four parts of society each profoundly impact life possibilities. For example, the economy produces, distributes, and consumes. We can’t do without it. It powerfully impacts who we are, what we want, and what we can do, including creating opposed constituencies. But the polity decides, adjudicates, and legislates. It too affects our life options. Culture, or community relations creates and sustains religion, ethnicity, and racial designations including language, communication, and celebration. It can lead to conflicts and or to solidarity among different constituencies. And finally, we clearly can’t do without kinship. The relations of procreation, nurturance, and socialization make us and at times unmake us.

Following these simple assertions, perhaps we should not assert that one or another singularly-focused option is more important than the rest so that we should understand the rest in terms of that one. Perhaps instead we should understand each of society’s defining domains in itself, in its impacts, but also in context of impacts from the other three. Perhaps we should recognize they are all critical and all entwined.

Entwined? Why entwined? Well, any society will certainly have an economy that will produce stuff we use in homes, at work, at play and in all sides of life. What happens in society’s economy will impact people. Then people will go from the economy into families. They will go from the economy into communities, into government, into all sides of life, and in that way dynamics born in the economy will tend to spread. The economy will exude a force field of influences throughout the whole of society. Are we back to prioritizing just economy? No, because, thinking similarly, we can see that the same is true for kinship. When men and women, gay, straight, and trans people take themselves from families into the workplace, communities, places of worship, and schools they bring the effects they have had imposed on them from kinship relations. The other realms then start to display divisions, behavior patterns, and consciousnesses born of kinship. So socialist feminism? No, because the same holds for all the key domains. Each radiates defining influences into the rest, just as each is radiated into from the rest.

So we return to where we started. We want to change society. What do we need to address? Should we choose a class-centered or an identity-centered approach? Well, can we deny that feminists are right that we need to centrally address kinship? Can we deny that Marxists are right that we need to centrally address class? Can we deny that anti-racists and nationalists are right that we need to address culture and community? Can we deny that anarchists are right that we need to address power and the polity? Isn’t it obvious? Weighing each carefully, no, we can’t deny any of that.

But if they are all right about the importance, significance, and centrality of what they feature aren’t they each also wrong if they argue that the rest is subordinate to what they feature? If so, might we then abide the correct insights but also fix the wrong aspects by all of us understanding that we have to pay attention to class, race, gender and power, and not to just one or another. We have to see their mutual, intertwined, intersectional effects. We have to see how they bend each other. How they cause each other to accommodate. We have to see how the family accommodates to class relations, to race relations, and to power relations and vice versa. How the workplace and economy accommodate to the other three, as well, and so on. To seek fundamental change, wouldn’t we be wise to address each of these four domains in their own right and also their mutual relations?

It is certainly a plausible thought. But is it a valid thought? Why not intelligently highlight only one of the four? Why overcomplicate? The argument for highlighting just class, for example, is that if we all do so, then we will all together pay prime attention to class and since class is indeed really important, that approach will help us discern many true things about society and about the levers of change we have to address to affect society, the constituencies we must relate to, the oppressions we must overcome, the changes we must conceive and enact. So with all that to gain, what is the argument against choosing a mainly class focus?

It is simply that while to highlight class is critically important, to dismiss, disregard, or even just relegate kinship and gender, governance and power, and race and ethnicity, to a lower level of attention across all of society will impede changing society, impede successfully addressing essential constituencies, impede insightfully combating fundamental oppressions, and impede conceiving and enacting necessary changes. Such relegation will cause us to give too little attention—in our whole movement—to certain focuses even as we unduly excessively focus on only one area, in this case class.

I hope it is evident that the same exact arguments apply to prioritizing only gender and paying attention to overwhelmingly gender concepts and kinship. The argument for doing so is that kinship and gender are indeed critically important. If we ignore this, we’re ignoring something that is profound and that impacts people mightily and that also impacts people’s inclinations and dispositions regarding social change. However the argument against over-centralizing kinship is if we pay attention just to kinship, if we put it on a pedestal above everything else, then we will insufficiently attend to other domains and fail to effectively address other constituencies. And by the same reasoning, the same applies to over-prioritizing race. To do so attends to something fundamentally important but will under-attend to things equally important. More, if we take just another small step, we can see that the toolkit of concepts we should bring to our activist efforts is not solely an abstract choice. For each of us as individuals, it often reflects and even mainly derives from our own circumstances and histories.

So, for example, you could imagine paying attention to race and class, not explicitly necessarily, but your background and your history is such that that’s the way you’re oriented. Your personal history primarily points you at race and class. You see it more clearly, more deeply, than you see other social relations. You talk about racialized capitalism and maybe you talk about prison and police abolition, say, and when you do so, somehow maybe gender disappears, maybe even the state disappears and all that remains is race and class, or maybe even only just race remains forefront. And even in that last case, it’s not that to focus on race is wrong. It’s right to do so. Race is profoundly important and focusing on race does reveal critically important truths that bear on changing society. But taken exclusively a race-centered approach has the problem of obscuring and diminishing attention to other important factors, as does even a race plus economy centered approach. Similarly your personal history may cause you to naturally emphasize gender and to see and feel kinship issues intensely, everywhere, always, but to overlook or only weakly see and feel class, race, or power issues. The same logic reveals analogous benefits and debits. Our toolset and also our personal experiences impact our ability to understand society to change it. Indeed, the point of the toolset is in some serious degree to augment and even ward off possible lacks that might stem from our experiences.

So what if we perhaps consider adopting a fourfold approach that emphasizes that the dynamics of each of these areas has to accommodate to the rest. You can’t have the family producing the next generation of owners, workers, and coordinators in your society, or other actors in other societies, in such a way that they won’t fit the economy. You have to have procreation, nurturance, socialization, and education that prepares people to fit the economy or they’re going to rebel against it. So in a society that’s relatively stable, an accommodation will occur. Likewise men and women will act in the economy and will need to come out of that each day such that when they go into the family, into nurturance and socialization, they don’t have attitudes, beliefs, interests, and expectations that contradict those of sexism and kinship and misogyny. Otherwise, there will be conflict. So the workplace starts to accommodate itself to the requirements of the family and also vice versa. And similarly for racial relations and religious communities and for fort government. They two must accommodate and be accommodated to.

The point is, though put very succinctly, the four spheres of life, with their four fields of influence, each contour and mold not just the population that engages within them, but also each other, at least when they are stably entwined. More, each may tend to not only accommodate to but also reproduce the defining features of the rest. Each may become a source not only of its own characteristics and hierarchies, but of characteristics and hierarchies born elsewhere. Workplaces reproduce racism. The polity reproduces sexism. And so on…

I would like to suggest that once we escape trying to find and defend some single lynchpin aspect of society to alone highlight, the above observations seem so obvious that they should be self-evident to everybody. That is, it can become the case that institutions central to one area of life, let’s say the family, or churches, or courts, or markets, can be so immersed in the field of force of other areas of life that they come to co-reproduce the defining features of those other phenomena. So class relations and race relations get reproduced inside the dynamics of the family, and likewise sexism and racism get reproduced inside the dynamics of a corporation. So we have four sides of life that each have their own intrinsic logic but that also each have imposed on them the needs and implications of the other aspects of society. It’s not the case that economics per se has to produce racial differences or gender differences. We can imagine an economy that’s race and gender-blind. All we have to do is imagine a society in which there’s no races and no genders. There is just one kind of person around culture and gender. The economy would still be an economy, it could be a capitalist one, a socialist one, a feudal one or whatever. It just wouldn’t have been impacted by those other dynamics. But, in some societies, in human societies, it is.

I want to suggest that there is nothing rocket science-y about any of this. It’s all straightforward. What makes it difficult to keep in mind and not forget, or resist, is only our tendencies to defend what we have in the past celebrated as alone determinative. Or what experience makes feel preponderantly determinative. So does this suggest we should just add feminism’s gender perspective, Marxism’s class perspective, anarchism’s power perspective, and anti-racism’s cultural community perspective? Should we just include the concepts of each of these perspective in our toolbox and then use that toolbox instead of just using Marxism, or just feminism, or just anarchism, or just what we might call intercommunalism, or even some twofold combination?

Well, no, I think not. I think there’s a problem when we do that. And the problem I have in mind would persist even after we remove from each perspective assertions about it alone being more central than all else. And even after we add to our toolbox concepts to focus us on mutual effects. The problem I think is that in that case we would be taking three perspectives that are good once we remove their claims of domineering priority. Three perspectives that have been developed over time and that embody a lot of wisdom in their concepts that we need to have in order to think about our societies and their components, whether it be the prison system, the school system, hospitals, or larger features. But the fourth perspective we would be including, Marxism, I think that has a problem, and while I don’t want to spend too long on this now, I’ll at least mention it, as what we’re trying to do is get at the question: class and or identity, which approach do we choose?

The problem with Marxism is that while its concepts highlight class which is totally warranted and necessary, Marxism ironically also has a serious flaw regarding class. We do have to pay attention, for example, in my society, in the United States, to the capitalist class that owns the means of production and also to talk about the people who work in the capitalist workplaces and who produce the stuff that we need. But if our concepts assert that that all the people who work, all employees of owners, are workers, then we have only two main classes that we can key in on, the owning capitalist class and the working class. What if the group of all employees of owners aren’t just one class? What if they are two classes? What if employees as a whole are partly workers, meaning people who work for the owners and are denied by their position in the economy much control over their own lives because they are relegated to taking orders and carrying out agendas set by others, and so on. And another group, who I want to call the coordinator class, by virtue of their position in the economy have a kind of monopoly over empowering tasks. They set schedules, create agendas, figure out policies, and give orders. In that respect they differ from other employees, called workers. What if this subset of employees manage, engineer, lawyer, doctor, design, and decide things? They do not own, but nor are they entirely subordinate. They have considerable impact on what goes on in the economy and they use their power to give themselves more income and more status.

So now, coming at all this, everything above, from scratch, which we did, we can see a possible perspective emerging. To understand society to change it we may want to combine a modified approach to class that includes three main classes, the owning class, the working class and, in between, what I call the coordinator class (which the Ehrenreichs called it the professional managerial class which for reasons that I don’t want to bother with now, I don’t think is a perfect name) so whatever we call them, three classes. And we may want to combine that with feminism, including issues of sexuality, procreation, nurturance, and socialization plus the social relations of courtship and all the rest of it. And we want to further combine both those with attention to cultural community, celebration, identity, and language, and to the way that communities including races, religions, and nationalities, form. And we may want to combing all that with attention to polity including adjudication, execution of collective functions, and legislation.

If one were to go that route, a question would surfaces. Would it mean we all should always pay equal attention to everything? Would it mean we all have to simultaneously address all this stuff, all the time, all equally? No, it wouldn’t mean that. But why not, after all, it seems to follow, doesn’t it?

Well, we each come at society from different places in it. We each have different agendas. We feel the circumstances of life differently depending on on our position vis-a-vis kinship, culture, economy, and polity. In other words, depending on, if you will, our identity and the daily circumstances we encounter.

Our priorities depend on those various impacts and so we may mainly focus on one aspect. We may focus on talking about, say, the economy and work, or about families, sex, and education, or about race and the criminal justice system, and so on. We may personally tend to focus on one thing and prioritize only some factors. In that case, what problem does our having also adopted the broader approach help us deal with? It doesn’t prevent us from talking mainly about the economy and talking overwhelmingly about class when we do, or from talking mainly about kinship and overwhelmingly about gender when we do, but it does stop us from acting as though the economy is all class, no gender, no race, no political power—or as though kinship is all gender, no race, no class, no power. It stops us from asserting that we’re doing everything when we are keying on one thing. And while individually we can and often have to focus less than everything–collectively, we do need to focus everything.

As a whole our movements need to encompass it all. As individuals, not so much, but even as individuals we do have to avoid acting as though, and beginning to think as though, we are dealing with all that’s important when we are dealing with only a part of what’s important. So, for example, I put forth participatory economics as an economic vision. When doing so I don’t equally address issues of, say, sex or child rearing or religion and so on, all kinds of things that I barely address. That’s okay, unless I assert that an economic vision is the only vision we need, or what other domains have nothing to do with economy. To say class is the only thing we need to talk about, or relations to class, that’s not okay. And we need to be aware at all times if we’re doing something partial.

In this view, there’s no reason to create some kind of hierarchy, as if everything has to be understood in terms of one thing. But, even supposing a four fold approach is theoretically sensible, does any of this really matter outside academic treatises? Yes, I think it does, for the reason I just said. A more encompassing multi-focus approach to society will help create a mindset which removes the tendency of different orientations to conflict with one another. No one needs to feel that to pay attention to class, means we will ignore race or gender, or to pay attention to race or gender, means we will ignore power and authority. A multi-focus approach can remove concern that a given individual feels one or another focus more in their life, and is more attuned to one or another aspect of society because of their experiences. That is okay. And it can remove a tendency for that person to feel that others are somehow in competition with them, somehow trying to draw their attention away from what they naturally attend most to. It generate the possibility of a more complete understanding instead of understanding only a part. And the practical climax, it can generate the possibility of greater solidarity.

What about the approach mattering to individuals not just the whole left? We can see how it matters to the collective, to movements—to a movement of movements which needs to address all the key aspects of society that fundamentally impact social change and create constituencies relevant to social change. It helps a movement of movements see these orientations as not having to compete with each other. Each viewing angle becomes primary. Each considers that rest also primary. Okay, but how does this approach aid individuals?

Here, I think it’s perhaps a little less obvious. I don’t think an individual has to simultaneously become equally expert in everything or equally attentive to everything. It’s just not necessary and it’s also not human. But when your personal background and training and what you endure in daily life orient you in one direction, a multi focus approach can strengthen your inclination to respect and pay attention to the other directions. It can generate the possibility of mutual respect instead of thinking that some other approach has one banner and it wants us all to get behind that one banner though you know that if we all get behind that one banner, your priorities will disappear. So then you think you should downplay or ignore that banner. That implication goes away once we all understand that the movement of movements banner has to indicate a collection of other banners, a collection of multiple focuses.

So, finally, what about our initial issue, should we choose class politics or identity politics? Class politics will, in practice, tend to give only secondary attention to race, gender, and power. Identity politics will, in practice, tend to give only secondary attention to class. About class I’m suggesting is that it is of course important that we pay attention to it. It has fundamental importance. In fact, however, nowadays, among many leftists it seems that class isn’t paid enough attention. But I also want to make clear that I think class, this thing we need to attend, is more than just owners on the one hand, and workers on the other hand. There’s also this other class between labor and capital, called in my parlance the coordinator class.

But next, what about paying attention to identity? Well, about identity politics, insofar as this is a possible choice, I wonder why isn’t class also an identity? If we say we’re paying attention to identities, what does that mean? I can only assume it means we’re paying attention to how people identify themselves, and even more so to how society demarcates people into important constituencies that inform our identities. But in that case people sometimes identify themselves by class, sometimes by gender and their sexuality, or by their religion or race, and they may identify themselves by their position in the polity as order givers or order takers or office-holders or not. These are different ways people understand themselves and also, different ways society’s roles and circumstances demarcate us into different often overlapping, intersecting constituencies.

It seems to me that to seek and win social change what’s important about identities is when “identity” indicates a significant position in the dynamics of society and, in particular, in how people go about trying to change or maintain society. I get why, at a point in time, some would feel a Marxist approach gives too little and too secondary attention to race, gender, and power, and I also get why, at a particular point in time, people might feel that a radical feminist approach gives too little attention to class and race and power, and so on, around the cycle. But considering the choice between class and or identity, I don’t understand why people’s solution for the left is ever to pick one (or maybe two or even three, leaving one out) and exaggerate it (or those) at the expense of the rest. After all, wouldn’t for us to do that be what we are afraid others would do. Women are often afraid that a class perspective will squeeze them out of central attention, and justifiably so. But then why would they want to squeeze out of centralized attention class, race, or power? And so on through the various permutations. These feelings and observations lead me to think that the class/identity conflict is real and is also false.

It’s real at the level that we need shared concepts suited to the tasks we undertake. It’s false at the level of asserting that personally paying serious attention to any one sphere of life requires that we diminish our attention to the rest. That is generally the case for an individual, yes. If you’re going to start to study and pursue and be an activist around, say, sexual issues or race issues or class issues, or governance you will do attend less to issues other than of what has become your focus. That’s true. Time decrees it. But so what? As a whole, a movement we are in can collectively pay serious attention to multiple focuses without prioritizing one.

Let me suggest another aspect of this matter. There’s often a tendency, or there can be a tendency in how we look at the world that causes us to think in terms of individuals and their feelings to the exclusion of collectives and their circumstances. Or, vice versa, we might pay attention to constituencies and their circumstances and ignore or downplay individuals and their feelings. It’s a bit like what we described with respect to the different priorities. It should not be either or. It should be both and. To the extent we find this asymmetry, often the class politics orientation tends to or is seen as if it underplays individuals and their feelings, while the identity politics approach tends to or is seen as if it underplays collectives and their circumstances.

In fact, we won’t have as good an understanding of society in order to change it if we downplay the feelings of individuals, the thoughts in individuals’ minds, and the motivations that individuals have, but we’re also going to severely hurt our prospects if we pay attention to individuals but do not pay attention to collective dynamics of whole constituencies. It is a false choice. We ought to be secure enough and flexible enough to focus on both individuals and collectives. We ought to not be so defensive that we feel we have to have everyone elevate our own personal current contextual priority, whether it’s individual over collective or vice versa, or whether it’s one area of oppression over another or vice versa.

To deal with the unfolding threat of fascism we will need as much collective unity, as much multi-issue focus, as much multi-tactic diversity as we can sensibly generate and we’re going to have to not see others who are engaged in battling Trump to change society differently than we battle as enemies or competitors instead of as allies. We’re going to have to get even to the point of being able to realize that a lot of Trump supporters are as mad at, as angered by, and as upset with the state of current reality as many leftists, and even more so than some leftists, so they too are potential advocates of worthy change. I am suggesting that we should consider that perhaps the encompassing approach suggested here can help with all these needs.

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