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 didn’t just have lords and serfs, it also had peasants and free cities and church land that don’t fit the “feudalism is defined by owning the land and the serfs on it” 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 that’s 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 can’t 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 can’t 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.
“Ownership is a social construct like any other. Limiting your interpretation of class to ones defined by ownership makes the analysis pointlessly inapplicable…”
Waving away ownership because it’s a “social construct” is a dodge. Money is a social construct. Borders are a social construct. Wage labour is a social construct. That doesn’t make them less real. It means they are historically produced relations with force behind them, backed by law, coercion, and everyday practice. Saying “it’s just a construct” doesn’t dissolve its material power. It just sounds radical while avoiding the actual analysis.
“Feudal society didn’t just have lords and serfs, it also had peasants and free cities and church land that don’t fit the ‘feudalism is defined by owning the land and the serfs on it’ schema.”
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 doesn’t negate the core relation. Complexity at the edges doesn’t erase the structure.
“Theocracy, bureaucracy, caste systems, white supremacy, patriarchy, and anarchy all benefit from a class-based lens.”
You’re 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.
“Marx focused on ownership as the primary class divide because that’s how capitalism works… but any conflict of interests between groups of people seeking to achieve economic prosperity will do.”
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 “class,” you can’t distinguish primary contradictions from secondary ones. You can’t explain why some conflicts reproduce across generations while others shift or disappear. Class has explanatory force because it’s tied to production and surplus, not just any difference in incentives. Are green energy execs and fossil fuel execs different classes? Obviously not.
“For example, migrant workers are actively imported under liberalism to divide the working class… citizenship becomes the division between two distinct working classes.”
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 it’s a division within a single class, actively produced because it weakens collective power. That’s why it works. Not because it creates two classes, but because it fractures one.
“And here we see how solidarity is a matter of interpretation.”
There is no solidarity between worker and owner. That’s not a matter of interpretation, it’s 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 aren’t exercising some free interpretive choice in a vacuum. They’re being pulled into a politics that reflects their uneven position within imperialism, short-term advantage in exchange for long-term subordination. That isn’t solidarity. It’s a cross-class “alliance”, and those always break when it matters.
When profits fall, when crisis hits, the “shared citizenship” story disappears overnight. Layoffs, wage cuts, austerity, the owner’s loyalty to the nation ends exactly where accumulation begins. That’s the reality underneath the rhetoric.
This isn’t about blaming workers. It’s about explaining why this politics has traction. Imperialism redistributes enough surplus to sections of the core workforce to distort consciousness. That’s real, but it’s unstable and conditional. The moment that flow tightens, the underlying antagonism reasserts itself.
So no, solidarity isn’t a matter of interpretation. It’s 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.
“Those in power have similar choices between mutually contradictory strategies… Neither is objectively better for the US capital class…”
Factions within capital do choose strategies. But they don’t choose freely. They respond to crisis tendencies, falling profitability, geopolitical pressure, labour unrest. Finance, tech, energy, they have overlapping but not identical interests. That doesn’t mean there’s no structure. It means class rule is contested internally.
Those strategies aren’t proof that ideas escape material limits. They’re 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 “class” means any durable conflict of interest, everything becomes class. Every hierarchy, every incentive split. At that point you’re not explaining anything, you’re just renaming it.
You’re using “class” as a catch-all. I’m using it in the stricter sense that actually lets you explain things, relation to production, control of surplus, reproduction of power. That’s 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.
Waving away ownership because it’s a “social construct” is a dodge.
I am not waving it away, I am lowering its status to be within the same realm as concerns that are secondary in capitalism. Concerns that may become primary when capital is undone, as in state communism.
You’re using “class” as a catch-all. I’m using it in the stricter sense that actually lets you explain things, relation to production, control of surplus, reproduction of power. That’s what gives the concept teeth.
And all of these can continue to be monopolized by a specific societal subgroup without the use of “ownership”. Any group with authority over these matters that can have solidarity within the authoritative group will serve as a ruling class that gains from exploiting the working class.
So no, solidarity isn’t a matter of interpretation. It’s 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.
The relation to production of different groups change over time. Serfdom, slavery, automation. Worldwide alignment of workers’ interests is temporary and shifting like intranational alignment, which is why it historically hasn’t happened yet.
If the singular working class as a concept had more teeth than nationality I would expect it to, well, take a bigger bite out of history. For French revolutionaries to abolish slavery in their natural solidarity with other workers rather than continuing exploitation because their interests did not in fact align with slaves in the colonies.
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.
No, we should become anarchist. Unevenness is a vulnerability that we build social structures to prevent from turning into authority, and complex social structures with far less authority already exist from sociocracy to decentralized guerilla cells.
As with your narrative of state communism, these systems are imperfect and will develop places of authority and abuse, and we will learn from that and alter the systems to be less authoritative.
But where you expect administrators to make such improvements to their personal and (sub)class’ detriment, anarchy keeps the power to make these changes with the people so the changes are made in the people’s favor.
We are able to be anarchist (or state communist) even within capitalism; the countless seeds of authority we carry with us into the postrevolutionary society will be far easier to wrangle than the full-grown monstrosities of capitalism.
“I am not waving it away, I am lowering its status to be within the same realm as concerns that are secondary in capitalism.”
You can’t just decide ownership matters less after capitalism by fiat. That’s idealism. Ownership isn’t a preference. It’s the material anchor of class power. The point of proletarian state power isn’t to wish authority away. It’s to use authority to socialize production, break imperial chains, and create the conditions where class distinctions become obsolete. You don’t get there by lowering the status of property relations. You get there by transforming them.
“Any group with authority over these matters that can have solidarity within the authoritative group will serve as a ruling class that gains from exploiting the working class.”
This conflates function with class. Yes, bureaucrats can degenerate. That’s a real contradiction. Mao wrote extensively about the risk of a “new bourgeoisie” emerging from within the party. But the solution isn’t to abandon proletarian authority. It’s to deepen mass line, criticism-self-criticism, recall mechanisms. The AES experiences show that proletarian authority can break imperial dependency, socialize surplus, and expand human development. That isn’t authority becoming a class. That’s authority being wielded to transform the conditions that make class possible.
“If the singular working class as a concept had more teeth than nationality I would expect it to, well, take a bigger bite out of history. For French revolutionaries to abolish slavery…”
The French Revolution was a bourgeois revolution. Of course bourgeois revolutionaries didn’t abolish colonial slavery out of “solidarity.” That proves the class character of that revolution, not the impossibility of proletarian internationalism. The Paris Commune, the Bolsheviks, the Chinese revolution, the Vietnamese revolution, the Cuban revolution, these show proletarian internationalism in practice. It’s uneven, contradictory, contested. But it exists. And it exists because imperialism creates a shared enemy, not because workers spontaneously feel nice to each other.
“No, we should become anarchist… complex social structures with far less authority already exist from sociocracy to decentralized guerilla cells.”
“Anarchism”(I’ve read anarchist theory and debated principled anarchists; in practice, when faced with real revolutionary tasks (smashing the bourgeois state, defending against counter-revolution, coordinating production at scale) they end up adopting positions functionally close to MLs, because material conditions demand it. The “authority is inherently tyrannical” line is tyranny of bedtime idealism that collapses on contact with actual struggle.) treats authority as the problem. But authority isn’t the problem. Class power is. You can’t dismantle the bourgeois state with decentralized cells. You can’t break imperial chains with sociocracy. The material task of revolution is to seize state power, socialize production, and defend the revolution against counter-revolution. That requires coordination, discipline, and yes, authority. “Anarchism’s” refusal to confront this is why it has repeatedly failed when faced with real revolutionary situations.
“But where you expect administrators to make such improvements to their personal and (sub)class’ detriment, anarchy keeps the power to make these changes with the people…”
This sounds good but is abstract. Who are “the people”? How do they coordinate at scale? How do they defend against counter-revolution, imperial invasion, economic sabotage? The mass line is a method for tying leadership to the masses through concrete practice. But it requires a vanguard, a party, a state form capable of wielding power. “Anarchism’s” distrust of all authority leaves it unable to answer these questions.
“We are able to be anarchist (or state communist) even within capitalism…”
You can build prefigurative spaces under capitalism. That’s great, but prefiguration isn’t revolution. The bourgeois state won’t be voted away or out-organized by parallel structures. It has to be smashed. And what replaces it has to be capable of holding power, not just avoiding it.
You see authority as inherently dangerous, so you want to minimize it. I see authority as a social relation, so I ask: which class wields it, for what end, and with what mechanisms to prevent ossification? One approach leads to moralism. The other leads to strategy.
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 didn’t just have lords and serfs, it also had peasants and free cities and church land that don’t fit the “feudalism is defined by owning the land and the serfs on it” 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 that’s 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 can’t 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 can’t 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 it’s a “social construct” is a dodge. Money is a social construct. Borders are a social construct. Wage labour is a social construct. That doesn’t make them less real. It means they are historically produced relations with force behind them, backed by law, coercion, and everyday practice. Saying “it’s just a construct” doesn’t 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 doesn’t negate the core relation. Complexity at the edges doesn’t erase the structure.
You’re 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 “class,” you can’t distinguish primary contradictions from secondary ones. You can’t explain why some conflicts reproduce across generations while others shift or disappear. Class has explanatory force because it’s 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 it’s a division within a single class, actively produced because it weakens collective power. That’s why it works. Not because it creates two classes, but because it fractures one.
There is no solidarity between worker and owner. That’s not a matter of interpretation, it’s 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 aren’t exercising some free interpretive choice in a vacuum. They’re being pulled into a politics that reflects their uneven position within imperialism, short-term advantage in exchange for long-term subordination. That isn’t solidarity. It’s a cross-class “alliance”, and those always break when it matters.
When profits fall, when crisis hits, the “shared citizenship” story disappears overnight. Layoffs, wage cuts, austerity, the owner’s loyalty to the nation ends exactly where accumulation begins. That’s the reality underneath the rhetoric.
This isn’t about blaming workers. It’s about explaining why this politics has traction. Imperialism redistributes enough surplus to sections of the core workforce to distort consciousness. That’s real, but it’s unstable and conditional. The moment that flow tightens, the underlying antagonism reasserts itself.
So no, solidarity isn’t a matter of interpretation. It’s 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 don’t choose freely. They respond to crisis tendencies, falling profitability, geopolitical pressure, labour unrest. Finance, tech, energy, they have overlapping but not identical interests. That doesn’t mean there’s no structure. It means class rule is contested internally.
Those strategies aren’t proof that ideas escape material limits. They’re 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 “class” means any durable conflict of interest, everything becomes class. Every hierarchy, every incentive split. At that point you’re not explaining anything, you’re just renaming it.
You’re using “class” as a catch-all. I’m using it in the stricter sense that actually lets you explain things, relation to production, control of surplus, reproduction of power. That’s 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 am not waving it away, I am lowering its status to be within the same realm as concerns that are secondary in capitalism. Concerns that may become primary when capital is undone, as in state communism.
And all of these can continue to be monopolized by a specific societal subgroup without the use of “ownership”. Any group with authority over these matters that can have solidarity within the authoritative group will serve as a ruling class that gains from exploiting the working class.
The relation to production of different groups change over time. Serfdom, slavery, automation. Worldwide alignment of workers’ interests is temporary and shifting like intranational alignment, which is why it historically hasn’t happened yet.
If the singular working class as a concept had more teeth than nationality I would expect it to, well, take a bigger bite out of history. For French revolutionaries to abolish slavery in their natural solidarity with other workers rather than continuing exploitation because their interests did not in fact align with slaves in the colonies.
No, we should become anarchist. Unevenness is a vulnerability that we build social structures to prevent from turning into authority, and complex social structures with far less authority already exist from sociocracy to decentralized guerilla cells.
As with your narrative of state communism, these systems are imperfect and will develop places of authority and abuse, and we will learn from that and alter the systems to be less authoritative.
But where you expect administrators to make such improvements to their personal and (sub)class’ detriment, anarchy keeps the power to make these changes with the people so the changes are made in the people’s favor.
We are able to be anarchist (or state communist) even within capitalism; the countless seeds of authority we carry with us into the postrevolutionary society will be far easier to wrangle than the full-grown monstrosities of capitalism.
You can’t just decide ownership matters less after capitalism by fiat. That’s idealism. Ownership isn’t a preference. It’s the material anchor of class power. The point of proletarian state power isn’t to wish authority away. It’s to use authority to socialize production, break imperial chains, and create the conditions where class distinctions become obsolete. You don’t get there by lowering the status of property relations. You get there by transforming them.
This conflates function with class. Yes, bureaucrats can degenerate. That’s a real contradiction. Mao wrote extensively about the risk of a “new bourgeoisie” emerging from within the party. But the solution isn’t to abandon proletarian authority. It’s to deepen mass line, criticism-self-criticism, recall mechanisms. The AES experiences show that proletarian authority can break imperial dependency, socialize surplus, and expand human development. That isn’t authority becoming a class. That’s authority being wielded to transform the conditions that make class possible.
The French Revolution was a bourgeois revolution. Of course bourgeois revolutionaries didn’t abolish colonial slavery out of “solidarity.” That proves the class character of that revolution, not the impossibility of proletarian internationalism. The Paris Commune, the Bolsheviks, the Chinese revolution, the Vietnamese revolution, the Cuban revolution, these show proletarian internationalism in practice. It’s uneven, contradictory, contested. But it exists. And it exists because imperialism creates a shared enemy, not because workers spontaneously feel nice to each other.
“Anarchism”(I’ve read anarchist theory and debated principled anarchists; in practice, when faced with real revolutionary tasks (smashing the bourgeois state, defending against counter-revolution, coordinating production at scale) they end up adopting positions functionally close to MLs, because material conditions demand it. The “authority is inherently tyrannical” line is tyranny of bedtime idealism that collapses on contact with actual struggle.) treats authority as the problem. But authority isn’t the problem. Class power is. You can’t dismantle the bourgeois state with decentralized cells. You can’t break imperial chains with sociocracy. The material task of revolution is to seize state power, socialize production, and defend the revolution against counter-revolution. That requires coordination, discipline, and yes, authority. “Anarchism’s” refusal to confront this is why it has repeatedly failed when faced with real revolutionary situations.
This sounds good but is abstract. Who are “the people”? How do they coordinate at scale? How do they defend against counter-revolution, imperial invasion, economic sabotage? The mass line is a method for tying leadership to the masses through concrete practice. But it requires a vanguard, a party, a state form capable of wielding power. “Anarchism’s” distrust of all authority leaves it unable to answer these questions.
You can build prefigurative spaces under capitalism. That’s great, but prefiguration isn’t revolution. The bourgeois state won’t be voted away or out-organized by parallel structures. It has to be smashed. And what replaces it has to be capable of holding power, not just avoiding it.
You see authority as inherently dangerous, so you want to minimize it. I see authority as a social relation, so I ask: which class wields it, for what end, and with what mechanisms to prevent ossification? One approach leads to moralism. The other leads to strategy.