Social democrats tend not to call the US authoritarian (I have yet to see it). Theyâre too busy negotiating their cut of imperial plunder, welfare states built on extracted surplus and âhuman rightsâ rhetoric that conveniently ignores sanctions and coups. If âthe center defines the standard,â then the standard isnât about coercion; itâs about loyalty to capital (as I already pointed out). The label only sticks to those who break ranks (refuse to bend the knee to the EuroAmerikan hegemony).
On mode of production as âchoiceâ: this is idealism, pure and simple. Putting the cart before the horse. Ideas donât shape the material base; the material base shapes ideas. Capitalism didnât arrive because someone imagined it. Feudal relations broke because they could no longer contain the productive forces, guilds choked industry, serfdom blocked labor, divine right couldnât manage global accumulation. Socialism isnât a fairy tale we opt into. It becomes necessary when capitalâs own contradictions (overproduction, immiseration, ecological rupture) can no longer be managed within private ownership. And solidarity isnât moral selection or simply who we like or donât like. Itâs determined by objective interests. The Chinese revolution for example united workers, peasants, and the national bourgeoisie not because of abstract ideals, but because all three had material stakes in smashing imperialist and feudal domination.
On the vanguard: have you read Lenin? Mao? The entire point is that it is NOT neutral. The vanguard is explicitly the organized, conscious detachment of the proletariat, an instrument of class rule, just like the bourgeois state, but inverted. The difference isnât the existence of authority; itâs which class wields it, for what end, and whether its practice is tied to mass line feedback. To conflate proletarian dictatorship with bourgeois state power is to erase the question of class content.
Authority isnât a substance that âfesters.â Itâs a relation, grounded in who controls production, who allocates surplus, who defends or transforms property forms. You canât analyze it like a moral contaminant. You have to trace it to its material base. When authority serves to socialize wealth, decommodify life, and break imperial chains, it isnât reproducing domination, itâs creating the conditions where coercion itself becomes obsolete.
If material conditions are all that shapes ideas, why are you speaking ideas at me? Either you are incorrect or you are wasting your time, and I donât think youâre wasting your time.
In a world where ideas donât matter, either of us working against our class interests through ignorance is incoherent. If we can be deceived to act against our class interests to change material conditions to serve the rich, then ideas can change material conditions.
People can interpret their interests different ways. People can ally themselves with specific groups but not others. People can have different levels of risk aversion. People can be affected by propaganda and charisma. Ideas skew praxis skews the development of material conditions.
Neglect this at your own peril. Use it to make fairy tales come true.
To conflate proletarian dictatorship with bourgeois state power is to erase the question of class content.
What class attributes do the authorities in the vanguard have in common with the proletariat?
Ok, Iâm going to try lay this out as clearly as I can, because I think youâre mixing up what materialism and idealism actually mean (even if we havenât used their names to this point it is the core of the argument).
The main tool of my analysis is materialism. Put simply: the way people organise production, how they meet their needs, who owns what, who has to sell their labour, this is the foundation. Ideas, culture, politics, they arise from and reflect that material base. They arenât illusions, but they donât float free. People think and act, but they do so within conditions they didnât choose.
Ideas matter. People can be persuaded, misled, organised, educated. But those ideas only take hold because they connect to real conditions. You canât sustain a set of ideas that are completely out of step with how people actually live. And you canât just will a new society into existence because it sounds good. Ideas move things along, but they donât set the underlying terrain.
What youâre arguing with is idealism. In short, idealism puts ideas first. It treats consciousness, values, or narratives as the engine of history, as if reality bends to what people believe rather than belief being shaped by reality. When you say the mode of production is a âchoice,â or that solidarity is basically a matter of interpretation, youâre putting ideas in the driverâs seat. That treats history like a competition between narratives, where whichever idea wins out determines reality.
But thatâs not how it works. People donât get to pick a mode of production the way they pick a belief. Capitalism didnât arise because it was persuasive. It arose because older systems stopped functioning under pressure and new relations became necessary to keep production going. The same logic applies to any transition out of it. Thereâs a reason certain ideas appear at certain times and not others, and itâs not just because someone made a good argument.
None of this means people are robots or that they canât act against their interests. Obviously they can. Propaganda exists, divisions exist, fear exists. But even that happens within limits. If ideas were truly primary, you wouldnât need to look at anything outside discourse to explain social change, and that clearly doesnât hold up.
On your last point, youâre also treating âauthorityâ as if it automatically creates a class, and thatâs just not how class works. Class isnât about who gives orders day to day. Itâs about relationship to the means of production. Who owns them as property, who controls them in a way that lets them extract surplus, who can pass that control on.
Administrators, officials, organisers, these are roles within a system. In a system where production isnât privately owned as capital, people in those roles donât become a separate class just because they have authority. They donât own the factories, land, or infrastructure as something they can sell or accumulate. Their position depends on the broader structure, not the other way around.
If that changes, if people in those positions start turning control into private, inheritable ownership, then youâre dealing with a class shift. But that has to be shown in actual material terms. You donât get there just by pointing at hierarchy and calling it a class.
So you made a straw man of what I was saying. There are degrees of freedom in how material relations are shaped which can be chosen between by a revolutionary movement.
Administrators, officials, organisers, these are roles within a system. In a system where production isnât privately owned as capital, people in those roles donât become a separate class just because they have authority.
Feudalism did not primarily maintain its classes through ownership either. Like a feudal lord, an administrator primarily maintains their position by social maneuvers towards their near-peers. Justifying bad metrics as unavoidable while claiming responsibility for windfalls, shaping their domain to play better within these social dynamics, and sabotaging rivals who donât fit in their narrative.
Unlike feudal lords, administrators donât own a personal demesne, but for the most powerful feudal lords that demesne was miniscule compared to their power base that came from vassalage. A feudal lord conquering a rival kingdom would distribute it to loyal vassals like an administrator cannibalizing a rival ministry would distribute it to loyal managers.
In this game, administrators want to increase authority over their domain of responsibility to better weaponize it. Modes of production are turned towards political usefulness for the administrator rather than towards the benefit of workers, alienating workers in the process.
Simply put, authority becomes a form of control over the means of production which shapes an administratorâs class incentives differently from workers. It isnât ownership but it doesnât need to be.
And yes, administrator roles do tend to be leveraged into nepotistic inheritance of authority, with family being appointed to higher roles in exchange for favors.
No straw man. You said mode of production is a âchoiceâ and solidarity comes down to âinterpretation.â Thatâs putting ideas in the driverâs seat. If you want to soften that now, fine. But donât rewrite what you said and call it misreading. Degrees of freedom exist, but they exist inside hard limits. Movements donât invent new material conditions by thinking hard enough, they work through contradictions they actually inherit.
On feudalism, youâre stripping out the core of what made it feudal. Lords didnât just maneuver socially. Their power rested on land, and on peasants being tied to that land. Thatâs how surplus was extracted. Vassalage was a political expression of that underlying relation, not a substitute for it. If you take away control over land and surplus, youâre not describing feudalism anymore, youâre just using the aesthetic of it.
With administrators youâre doing the same thing, collapsing authority into ownership. Theyâre not the same. Authority that canât be turned into private property, sold off, or passed down as a right is conditional. A feudal lord could hand land to his heir. An administrator canât hand a factory to their kid. If they start acting like they can, thatâs not proof that authority magically equals a class. Itâs a sign something in the system is breaking down, and the question becomes why, materially.
Youâre right that bureaucrats can game systems, build networks, sideline rivals. None of that is controversial. But describing behaviour isnât the same as identifying a class. You keep jumping from âthey consolidate influenceâ to âtherefore they are a class,â without showing the property relation that would actually make that true.
Even the well documented idea of a ânew bourgeoisieâ emerging isnât a blank cheque for your argument. Itâs a warning about a process, not a claim that any layer with authority already is one. Thereâs a difference between a contradiction that has to be managed and a fully formed class that reproduces itself through ownership. If every exercise of coordination produced a new ruling class, then no collective project would ever be possible and we should all just give up and kill ourselves now.
On nepotism, same issue. Favouritism exists in almost every system ever. That alone doesnât define a class. For it to do that, those positions have to become something like property, stable, transferable, independently reproducible. If that happens, then yes, youâre looking at a real shift. If not, youâre still dealing with a deviation inside a different structure.
Youâre not wrong to be wary of authority. Nobody serious ignores that problem. But right now youâre treating suspicion as if itâs analysis, and it isnât. Analysis asks what the underlying relations are, who actually controls production, how surplus is allocated, whether positions can turn into property. Without that, youâre just pointing at hierarchy and filling in the rest by analogy and vibes.
Ownership is a social construct like any other. Limiting your intepretation of class to ones defined by ownership makes the analysis pointlessly inapplicable when looking at societies where ownership plays less of a role. Feudal society didnât just have lords and serfs, it also had peasants and free cities and church land that donât fit the âfeudalism is defined by owning the land and the serfs on itâ schema. Theocracy, bureaucracy, caste systems, white supremacy, patriarchy, and anarchy all benefit from a class-based lens.
Marx focused on ownership as the primary class divide because thatâs how capitalism works (especially in the 19th century before social liberalism muddied the waters through pension funds, unemployment benefits, small business loans, etc.), but any conflict of interests between groups of people seeking to achieve economic prosperity will do. For example, migrant workers are actively imported under liberalism to divide the working class, which was so succesful not just because of racism but because of genuinely different economic incentives between those with citizenship privileges and those who are floundering in a hostile legal system but for who what little they get is more than they could have gotten back in the imperial periphery. In essence, citizenship becomes the division between two distinct working classes.
And here we see how solidarity is a matter of interpretation. Right-wing citizen workers attempt solidarity with capitalists by invoking their shared citizenship while left-wing citizen workers attempt solidarity with the migrants by invoking their shared worker status. These are different strategies that are both within range of what the material conditions make plausible. One hopes to reinforce imperial oppression, creating the material conditions that can be leveraged into greater citizenship privileges as traitors to the international working class; the other hopes to leverage the power of a united labor front grants either to demand more privileges at the negotiating table (socialist reformers) or to have a revolution whose reorganisation leaves them better off than before.
I wish I could say for certain that being traitors to the international working class is a foolishly bad bet. But it worked okay for western workers in the past century. I truly canât say if a median income middle aged white male American would expect less prosperity under Trump than in the conflicting mess that would be an American leftist revolution.
Those in power have similar choices between mutually contradictory strategies, reshaping material conditions in different uncertain ways. In 2015-2024, the USAmerican capital class was divided between going full hog dictatorial fascism and trying to reform through the slow decline of their empire. Neither is objectively better for the US capital class; they both have different risk profiles, and fascism is a big enough swing that it canât be hedged against very well. If the US collapses, billionaires may well end up being hunted down and killed, which is worse for them than becoming multi-millionaires in a world where China is the dominant nation.
âOwnership is a social construct like any other. Limiting your interpretation of class to ones defined by ownership makes the analysis pointlessly inapplicableâŠâ
Waving away ownership because itâs a âsocial constructâ is a dodge. Money is a social construct. Borders are a social construct. Wage labour is a social construct. That doesnât make them less real. It means they are historically produced relations with force behind them, backed by law, coercion, and everyday practice. Saying âitâs just a constructâ doesnât dissolve its material power. It just sounds radical while avoiding the actual analysis.
âFeudal society didnât just have lords and serfs, it also had peasants and free cities and church land that donât fit the âfeudalism is defined by owning the land and the serfs on itâ schema.â
This is just wrong. Land was the dominant means of production in feudal society. Control over land structured the relation between kings, nobles, and peasants. Surplus was extracted through that control and the labour bound to it. The church owned land. Free cities operated within and around that land-based order. Their existence doesnât negate the core relation. Complexity at the edges doesnât erase the structure.
âTheocracy, bureaucracy, caste systems, white supremacy, patriarchy, and anarchy all benefit from a class-based lens.â
Youâre mixing levels of analysis. Patriarchy, white supremacy, caste, these are real, oppressive social relations. They shape labour, reproduction, access to resources, and state power. But they are not classes in themselves. They intersect with class. They are used to divide, organise, and reproduce class relations. Analysing them alongside class is necessary. Collapsing them into class blurs what each actually does. A concept that covers everything ends up explaining nothing.
âMarx focused on ownership as the primary class divide because thatâs how capitalism works⊠but any conflict of interests between groups of people seeking to achieve economic prosperity will do.â
No. If any conflict of interests counts as class, then the term loses all precision. Tenants and landlords, yes. But also senior and junior staff, rival departments, urban and rural voters. Once every patterned antagonism becomes âclass,â you canât distinguish primary contradictions from secondary ones. You canât explain why some conflicts reproduce across generations while others shift or disappear. Class has explanatory force because itâs tied to production and surplus, not just any difference in incentives. Are green energy execs and fossil fuel execs different classes? Obviously not.
âFor example, migrant workers are actively imported under liberalism to divide the working class⊠citizenship becomes the division between two distinct working classes.â
Migrant and citizen workers can have different immediate incentives. Legal status, deportability, access to welfare, all of that matters. But both still sell their labour power. Both are still exploited by capital. The asymmetry exists but itâs a division within a single class, actively produced because it weakens collective power. Thatâs why it works. Not because it creates two classes, but because it fractures one.
âAnd here we see how solidarity is a matter of interpretation.â
There is no solidarity between worker and owner. Thatâs not a matter of interpretation, itâs a material relation. One sells labour power. The other extracts surplus. Appeals to shared citizenship, nation, or race are ideological tools to obscure that antagonism, not resolve it.
Right-wing workers aligning with capital arenât exercising some free interpretive choice in a vacuum. Theyâre being pulled into a politics that reflects their uneven position within imperialism, short-term advantage in exchange for long-term subordination. That isnât solidarity. Itâs a cross-class âallianceâ, and those always break when it matters.
When profits fall, when crisis hits, the âshared citizenshipâ story disappears overnight. Layoffs, wage cuts, austerity, the ownerâs loyalty to the nation ends exactly where accumulation begins. Thatâs the reality underneath the rhetoric.
This isnât about blaming workers. Itâs about explaining why this politics has traction. Imperialism redistributes enough surplus to sections of the core workforce to distort consciousness. Thatâs real, but itâs unstable and conditional. The moment that flow tightens, the underlying antagonism reasserts itself.
So no, solidarity isnât a matter of interpretation. Itâs grounded in position. People can misread their interests, sure. They can be won to chauvinism or reformism. But those interpretations only stick because of material conditions, and they only last as long as those conditions hold. Real solidarity has to be built on shared relation to production and shared interest in ending exploitation. Anything else is temporary alignment at best.
âThose in power have similar choices between mutually contradictory strategies⊠Neither is objectively better for the US capital classâŠâ
Factions within capital do choose strategies. But they donât choose freely. They respond to crisis tendencies, falling profitability, geopolitical pressure, labour unrest. Finance, tech, energy, they have overlapping but not identical interests. That doesnât mean thereâs no structure. It means class rule is contested internally.
Those strategies arenât proof that ideas escape material limits. Theyâre proof that ruling classes adapt under pressure.
The deeper issue here is analytical. You want a framework flexible enough to absorb every pattern you see. That feels sophisticated because it acknowledges complexity. But it quietly drops the hard part, distinguishing structure from expression, primary from secondary contradictions, class from layer.
Once âclassâ means any durable conflict of interest, everything becomes class. Every hierarchy, every incentive split. At that point youâre not explaining anything, youâre just renaming it.
Youâre using âclassâ as a catch-all. Iâm using it in the stricter sense that actually lets you explain things, relation to production, control of surplus, reproduction of power. Thatâs what gives the concept teeth.
And the political implication of your position is pretty dark, whether you mean it or not. If every exercise of authority or unevenness in incentives is already the seed of a new ruling class, then organised transformation becomes impossible by definition. Any revolution complex enough to survive would already contain the embryo of its own betrayal and again we should just give up and kill ourselves now.
Social democrats tend not to call the US authoritarian (I have yet to see it). Theyâre too busy negotiating their cut of imperial plunder, welfare states built on extracted surplus and âhuman rightsâ rhetoric that conveniently ignores sanctions and coups. If âthe center defines the standard,â then the standard isnât about coercion; itâs about loyalty to capital (as I already pointed out). The label only sticks to those who break ranks (refuse to bend the knee to the EuroAmerikan hegemony).
On mode of production as âchoiceâ: this is idealism, pure and simple. Putting the cart before the horse. Ideas donât shape the material base; the material base shapes ideas. Capitalism didnât arrive because someone imagined it. Feudal relations broke because they could no longer contain the productive forces, guilds choked industry, serfdom blocked labor, divine right couldnât manage global accumulation. Socialism isnât a fairy tale we opt into. It becomes necessary when capitalâs own contradictions (overproduction, immiseration, ecological rupture) can no longer be managed within private ownership. And solidarity isnât moral selection or simply who we like or donât like. Itâs determined by objective interests. The Chinese revolution for example united workers, peasants, and the national bourgeoisie not because of abstract ideals, but because all three had material stakes in smashing imperialist and feudal domination.
On the vanguard: have you read Lenin? Mao? The entire point is that it is NOT neutral. The vanguard is explicitly the organized, conscious detachment of the proletariat, an instrument of class rule, just like the bourgeois state, but inverted. The difference isnât the existence of authority; itâs which class wields it, for what end, and whether its practice is tied to mass line feedback. To conflate proletarian dictatorship with bourgeois state power is to erase the question of class content.
Authority isnât a substance that âfesters.â Itâs a relation, grounded in who controls production, who allocates surplus, who defends or transforms property forms. You canât analyze it like a moral contaminant. You have to trace it to its material base. When authority serves to socialize wealth, decommodify life, and break imperial chains, it isnât reproducing domination, itâs creating the conditions where coercion itself becomes obsolete.
If material conditions are all that shapes ideas, why are you speaking ideas at me? Either you are incorrect or you are wasting your time, and I donât think youâre wasting your time.
In a world where ideas donât matter, either of us working against our class interests through ignorance is incoherent. If we can be deceived to act against our class interests to change material conditions to serve the rich, then ideas can change material conditions.
People can interpret their interests different ways. People can ally themselves with specific groups but not others. People can have different levels of risk aversion. People can be affected by propaganda and charisma. Ideas skew praxis skews the development of material conditions.
Neglect this at your own peril. Use it to make fairy tales come true.
What class attributes do the authorities in the vanguard have in common with the proletariat?
Ok, Iâm going to try lay this out as clearly as I can, because I think youâre mixing up what materialism and idealism actually mean (even if we havenât used their names to this point it is the core of the argument).
The main tool of my analysis is materialism. Put simply: the way people organise production, how they meet their needs, who owns what, who has to sell their labour, this is the foundation. Ideas, culture, politics, they arise from and reflect that material base. They arenât illusions, but they donât float free. People think and act, but they do so within conditions they didnât choose.
Ideas matter. People can be persuaded, misled, organised, educated. But those ideas only take hold because they connect to real conditions. You canât sustain a set of ideas that are completely out of step with how people actually live. And you canât just will a new society into existence because it sounds good. Ideas move things along, but they donât set the underlying terrain.
What youâre arguing with is idealism. In short, idealism puts ideas first. It treats consciousness, values, or narratives as the engine of history, as if reality bends to what people believe rather than belief being shaped by reality. When you say the mode of production is a âchoice,â or that solidarity is basically a matter of interpretation, youâre putting ideas in the driverâs seat. That treats history like a competition between narratives, where whichever idea wins out determines reality.
But thatâs not how it works. People donât get to pick a mode of production the way they pick a belief. Capitalism didnât arise because it was persuasive. It arose because older systems stopped functioning under pressure and new relations became necessary to keep production going. The same logic applies to any transition out of it. Thereâs a reason certain ideas appear at certain times and not others, and itâs not just because someone made a good argument.
None of this means people are robots or that they canât act against their interests. Obviously they can. Propaganda exists, divisions exist, fear exists. But even that happens within limits. If ideas were truly primary, you wouldnât need to look at anything outside discourse to explain social change, and that clearly doesnât hold up.
On your last point, youâre also treating âauthorityâ as if it automatically creates a class, and thatâs just not how class works. Class isnât about who gives orders day to day. Itâs about relationship to the means of production. Who owns them as property, who controls them in a way that lets them extract surplus, who can pass that control on.
Administrators, officials, organisers, these are roles within a system. In a system where production isnât privately owned as capital, people in those roles donât become a separate class just because they have authority. They donât own the factories, land, or infrastructure as something they can sell or accumulate. Their position depends on the broader structure, not the other way around.
If that changes, if people in those positions start turning control into private, inheritable ownership, then youâre dealing with a class shift. But that has to be shown in actual material terms. You donât get there just by pointing at hierarchy and calling it a class.
So you made a straw man of what I was saying. There are degrees of freedom in how material relations are shaped which can be chosen between by a revolutionary movement.
Feudalism did not primarily maintain its classes through ownership either. Like a feudal lord, an administrator primarily maintains their position by social maneuvers towards their near-peers. Justifying bad metrics as unavoidable while claiming responsibility for windfalls, shaping their domain to play better within these social dynamics, and sabotaging rivals who donât fit in their narrative.
Unlike feudal lords, administrators donât own a personal demesne, but for the most powerful feudal lords that demesne was miniscule compared to their power base that came from vassalage. A feudal lord conquering a rival kingdom would distribute it to loyal vassals like an administrator cannibalizing a rival ministry would distribute it to loyal managers.
In this game, administrators want to increase authority over their domain of responsibility to better weaponize it. Modes of production are turned towards political usefulness for the administrator rather than towards the benefit of workers, alienating workers in the process.
Simply put, authority becomes a form of control over the means of production which shapes an administratorâs class incentives differently from workers. It isnât ownership but it doesnât need to be.
And yes, administrator roles do tend to be leveraged into nepotistic inheritance of authority, with family being appointed to higher roles in exchange for favors.
No straw man. You said mode of production is a âchoiceâ and solidarity comes down to âinterpretation.â Thatâs putting ideas in the driverâs seat. If you want to soften that now, fine. But donât rewrite what you said and call it misreading. Degrees of freedom exist, but they exist inside hard limits. Movements donât invent new material conditions by thinking hard enough, they work through contradictions they actually inherit.
On feudalism, youâre stripping out the core of what made it feudal. Lords didnât just maneuver socially. Their power rested on land, and on peasants being tied to that land. Thatâs how surplus was extracted. Vassalage was a political expression of that underlying relation, not a substitute for it. If you take away control over land and surplus, youâre not describing feudalism anymore, youâre just using the aesthetic of it.
With administrators youâre doing the same thing, collapsing authority into ownership. Theyâre not the same. Authority that canât be turned into private property, sold off, or passed down as a right is conditional. A feudal lord could hand land to his heir. An administrator canât hand a factory to their kid. If they start acting like they can, thatâs not proof that authority magically equals a class. Itâs a sign something in the system is breaking down, and the question becomes why, materially.
Youâre right that bureaucrats can game systems, build networks, sideline rivals. None of that is controversial. But describing behaviour isnât the same as identifying a class. You keep jumping from âthey consolidate influenceâ to âtherefore they are a class,â without showing the property relation that would actually make that true.
Even the well documented idea of a ânew bourgeoisieâ emerging isnât a blank cheque for your argument. Itâs a warning about a process, not a claim that any layer with authority already is one. Thereâs a difference between a contradiction that has to be managed and a fully formed class that reproduces itself through ownership. If every exercise of coordination produced a new ruling class, then no collective project would ever be possible and we should all just give up and kill ourselves now.
On nepotism, same issue. Favouritism exists in almost every system ever. That alone doesnât define a class. For it to do that, those positions have to become something like property, stable, transferable, independently reproducible. If that happens, then yes, youâre looking at a real shift. If not, youâre still dealing with a deviation inside a different structure.
Youâre not wrong to be wary of authority. Nobody serious ignores that problem. But right now youâre treating suspicion as if itâs analysis, and it isnât. Analysis asks what the underlying relations are, who actually controls production, how surplus is allocated, whether positions can turn into property. Without that, youâre just pointing at hierarchy and filling in the rest by analogy and vibes.
Ownership is a social construct like any other. Limiting your intepretation of class to ones defined by ownership makes the analysis pointlessly inapplicable when looking at societies where ownership plays less of a role. Feudal society didnât just have lords and serfs, it also had peasants and free cities and church land that donât fit the âfeudalism is defined by owning the land and the serfs on itâ schema. Theocracy, bureaucracy, caste systems, white supremacy, patriarchy, and anarchy all benefit from a class-based lens.
Marx focused on ownership as the primary class divide because thatâs how capitalism works (especially in the 19th century before social liberalism muddied the waters through pension funds, unemployment benefits, small business loans, etc.), but any conflict of interests between groups of people seeking to achieve economic prosperity will do. For example, migrant workers are actively imported under liberalism to divide the working class, which was so succesful not just because of racism but because of genuinely different economic incentives between those with citizenship privileges and those who are floundering in a hostile legal system but for who what little they get is more than they could have gotten back in the imperial periphery. In essence, citizenship becomes the division between two distinct working classes.
And here we see how solidarity is a matter of interpretation. Right-wing citizen workers attempt solidarity with capitalists by invoking their shared citizenship while left-wing citizen workers attempt solidarity with the migrants by invoking their shared worker status. These are different strategies that are both within range of what the material conditions make plausible. One hopes to reinforce imperial oppression, creating the material conditions that can be leveraged into greater citizenship privileges as traitors to the international working class; the other hopes to leverage the power of a united labor front grants either to demand more privileges at the negotiating table (socialist reformers) or to have a revolution whose reorganisation leaves them better off than before.
I wish I could say for certain that being traitors to the international working class is a foolishly bad bet. But it worked okay for western workers in the past century. I truly canât say if a median income middle aged white male American would expect less prosperity under Trump than in the conflicting mess that would be an American leftist revolution.
Those in power have similar choices between mutually contradictory strategies, reshaping material conditions in different uncertain ways. In 2015-2024, the USAmerican capital class was divided between going full hog dictatorial fascism and trying to reform through the slow decline of their empire. Neither is objectively better for the US capital class; they both have different risk profiles, and fascism is a big enough swing that it canât be hedged against very well. If the US collapses, billionaires may well end up being hunted down and killed, which is worse for them than becoming multi-millionaires in a world where China is the dominant nation.
Waving away ownership because itâs a âsocial constructâ is a dodge. Money is a social construct. Borders are a social construct. Wage labour is a social construct. That doesnât make them less real. It means they are historically produced relations with force behind them, backed by law, coercion, and everyday practice. Saying âitâs just a constructâ doesnât dissolve its material power. It just sounds radical while avoiding the actual analysis.
This is just wrong. Land was the dominant means of production in feudal society. Control over land structured the relation between kings, nobles, and peasants. Surplus was extracted through that control and the labour bound to it. The church owned land. Free cities operated within and around that land-based order. Their existence doesnât negate the core relation. Complexity at the edges doesnât erase the structure.
Youâre mixing levels of analysis. Patriarchy, white supremacy, caste, these are real, oppressive social relations. They shape labour, reproduction, access to resources, and state power. But they are not classes in themselves. They intersect with class. They are used to divide, organise, and reproduce class relations. Analysing them alongside class is necessary. Collapsing them into class blurs what each actually does. A concept that covers everything ends up explaining nothing.
No. If any conflict of interests counts as class, then the term loses all precision. Tenants and landlords, yes. But also senior and junior staff, rival departments, urban and rural voters. Once every patterned antagonism becomes âclass,â you canât distinguish primary contradictions from secondary ones. You canât explain why some conflicts reproduce across generations while others shift or disappear. Class has explanatory force because itâs tied to production and surplus, not just any difference in incentives. Are green energy execs and fossil fuel execs different classes? Obviously not.
Migrant and citizen workers can have different immediate incentives. Legal status, deportability, access to welfare, all of that matters. But both still sell their labour power. Both are still exploited by capital. The asymmetry exists but itâs a division within a single class, actively produced because it weakens collective power. Thatâs why it works. Not because it creates two classes, but because it fractures one.
There is no solidarity between worker and owner. Thatâs not a matter of interpretation, itâs a material relation. One sells labour power. The other extracts surplus. Appeals to shared citizenship, nation, or race are ideological tools to obscure that antagonism, not resolve it.
Right-wing workers aligning with capital arenât exercising some free interpretive choice in a vacuum. Theyâre being pulled into a politics that reflects their uneven position within imperialism, short-term advantage in exchange for long-term subordination. That isnât solidarity. Itâs a cross-class âallianceâ, and those always break when it matters.
When profits fall, when crisis hits, the âshared citizenshipâ story disappears overnight. Layoffs, wage cuts, austerity, the ownerâs loyalty to the nation ends exactly where accumulation begins. Thatâs the reality underneath the rhetoric.
This isnât about blaming workers. Itâs about explaining why this politics has traction. Imperialism redistributes enough surplus to sections of the core workforce to distort consciousness. Thatâs real, but itâs unstable and conditional. The moment that flow tightens, the underlying antagonism reasserts itself.
So no, solidarity isnât a matter of interpretation. Itâs grounded in position. People can misread their interests, sure. They can be won to chauvinism or reformism. But those interpretations only stick because of material conditions, and they only last as long as those conditions hold. Real solidarity has to be built on shared relation to production and shared interest in ending exploitation. Anything else is temporary alignment at best.
Factions within capital do choose strategies. But they donât choose freely. They respond to crisis tendencies, falling profitability, geopolitical pressure, labour unrest. Finance, tech, energy, they have overlapping but not identical interests. That doesnât mean thereâs no structure. It means class rule is contested internally.
Those strategies arenât proof that ideas escape material limits. Theyâre proof that ruling classes adapt under pressure.
The deeper issue here is analytical. You want a framework flexible enough to absorb every pattern you see. That feels sophisticated because it acknowledges complexity. But it quietly drops the hard part, distinguishing structure from expression, primary from secondary contradictions, class from layer.
Once âclassâ means any durable conflict of interest, everything becomes class. Every hierarchy, every incentive split. At that point youâre not explaining anything, youâre just renaming it.
Youâre using âclassâ as a catch-all. Iâm using it in the stricter sense that actually lets you explain things, relation to production, control of surplus, reproduction of power. Thatâs what gives the concept teeth.
And the political implication of your position is pretty dark, whether you mean it or not. If every exercise of authority or unevenness in incentives is already the seed of a new ruling class, then organised transformation becomes impossible by definition. Any revolution complex enough to survive would already contain the embryo of its own betrayal and again we should just give up and kill ourselves now.
I love your writing comrade, and excellent points
Thank you đ«Ą