BookQuestChin 
Hierarchies of domination are often used interchangeably. When it becomes untenable for those with Power Over others to dominate a marginalized community in one way, that community will face a new form of domination, while those with Power Over them will signal and celebrate the freedom and release of the oppressed from the untenable hierarchy, and depict the new hierarchy as a form of freedom.
As Power To is subsumed and transformed into Power Over, it must have a Dominator, and it must have the Dominated. And while we ourselves are often the target of our own transformed power, far more often, the biggest burden is placed on the shoulders of marginalized communities.
Class, when viewed through the lens of power, instead of as a relation to production, is a kyriarchal power relation.
The person working at Goldman Sachs as a mid level employee earning a 7 figure salary annually, has more power than the small business owner clearing 10K profit annually.
When someone wishes to mobilize people to do their bidding, under capitalism, this means treating people's labour like a commodity for sale. The 10k small capitalist can get a few people to do some things, while the Goldman Sachs employee can get a much larger group of people to do things.
This is Power Over people.
If we were to treat class as a relation to means of production. The Goldman sach employee would be working class, while the Small Business owner would qualify as petite bourgeoisie. Clearly, relation to Means of Production is not a good lens for viewing class.
And I say it is Kyriarchal, because that Goldman Sachs worker might be a Black Trans Woman facing other forms of oppression, while one of their coworkers is a White male earning the same salary. Both of them might have the same capacity for exerting their will, but they do not have an equal confidence in the obedience of those they seek to mobilize to enact their will.
Class should be viewed through this complex lens of Power relations that include matrices of intersectional domination.
Statecraft is the opaque organization of the different elements of a complex body or activity such that elements that would allow for self-governance are disabled, while elements that enforce domination and control, are enabled.
In this perspective, Capital is an enabled element of Statecraft, just like enforced bureaucracy, and legally codified social divisions are.
Rebellion is enabling the disabled elements within a state and thus empowering people to self-govern and resist the domination of the state. The state doesn't want you going on strike, and so makes strike actions and protests illegal, and the only way to fight this, is to coordinate strike actions and protests in spite of the state's attempts to disable these elements of self-governing.
Dismantling the state must begin by turning opacity to full transparency, thus revealing the disabled part of the system.
In the same vein, anarchism is the transparent and participatory organization of the different elements of a complex body or activity so as to enable them to work together effectively as self-governing.
Heterogeneity of ability, within specified bounds, is desirable. We want people to be capable of different things, and to varying degrees, because it facilitates a broader interconnectivity required for co-operation, and undermines the potential for hierarchies of domination.
The myth that the division of labour is specifically necessary for society to function, is exactly that... a myth. While it is partially beneficial to have groups divided up when into different specializations in the completion of a task, that division is not always concrete, and most subtasks do not require a high degree of specialization.
It is also relatively obvious to anyone who has worked with others on a task, that it is a good thing to have multiple people be able to work on a specific subtask, because redundancies are how we prevent task failure.
it's also extremely unlikely that those around you are absolutely incapable of doing more than one specialized task. Almost everyone has multiple skill sets that can contribute to different tasks in different ways.
The effects of social movements are not limited to the actions of those performing direct action on behalf of the social movement, and the agents against whom those direct actions are taken. Unpredictable social effects will result, regardless of the intent of the direct action.
People observing will take actions, influenced by the actions of the social movement, that have knock-on effects. Power dynamics will shift, resource flows will adjust, and social sentiments will have explicit and implicit impacts
The more aware we are of these unintended effects, the better our planning to deal with them can be.
Models and frameworks for assessing reality must reduce complexity in order to be useful. So there is a fine balance that must be struck between simplification and accuracy in order for the model or framework to not leave out so much detail that it becomes useless.
The question to ask yourself is: "what is being left out of the model?"
As an example: If we are modeling the social power of a group of individuals, and we are looking at their economic standing, educational backgrounds, and social interconnectedness, but we are leaving out their cultural background and historic access to resources, then our model is going to provide skewed results that give us a terrible depiction of some individuals within the group. This kind of modeling has often resulted in things like racism.
So being aware of what is excluded is often even more important than what is included.
Labeling concepts and modes of power is important because it helps us to classify it in understandable ways, but we must not think that power labels itself similarly.
Hypothesis:
Proximity to Law is the biggest predictor of Domination.
Through this lens, it is not the practitioners of Law that have Power Over society, but those who shape it, and those who influence the people that shape it.
Counterintuitively, the most power is not held by those with direct access to the creation and re-shaping of law, but rather by those with influence over the law-makers.
We can theoretically measure this by assigning a kind of heat index to legislation and regulation and policy. The hotter a specific legal structure is, the more important indirect contact is for attaining power through that legal structure. Those having direct access easily get burned (sacrificed like a scapegoat) in order to spare the influential entity from the heat. For the colder legal structures, influencers are far more likely to attempt more direct access in shaping the legal structures.
This is an avenue of inquiry that I don't know how to pursue yet, but I am very interested in seeing how to investigate the hypothesis and comparing it to real-world data to see if it has any merit.
Any suggestions on where to begin would be greatly appreciated.
Protecting someone's ability to defend themselves is empowerment.
Negating their ability to defend themselves, is disempowerment.
When we coordinate our power with others who are empowered the same way we are, that is building community.
When power is coordinated to deprive people of their power, and to give it to others, such that the others then get wield people's power over them, that's hierarchy.
We see this manifest as patriarchy, as racism, as homophobia, as transphobia, as xenophobia, as statism, as ultra nationalism, and as capitalism.
And when we see people that have been disempowered and marginalized when we have not, a failure to provide them with power through a horizontal community, is no different than maintaining their disempowerment. If they have no power, we must defend them, as a community.
Coordinate power horizontally, build community, and prevent the disempowerment of the community by hierarchies of domination.