“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. 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.