Why Competing Solidarities Tend To Win: Disintegration, Human Needs, and the Limits of Class Unity

The Marxist tradition has an unresolved problem. Workers share an objective interest in the abolition of class domination - in ending the system that subordinates their lives to the interests of one or more ruling classes. Yet that shared position rarely produces durable unity. Instead, workers persistently identify with their sector, their nation, their ethnic group, their religious community. The history of class struggle is littered with moments where solidarity built along class lines was defeated - not primarily by repression, though repression plays its part, but by the sheer gravitational pull of other forms of belonging.

The most common Marxist explanations for this - false consciousness, ideological hegemony, the labor aristocracy - each identify something real. What they share is a tendency to treat the phenomenon as a deviation from the true class interest, to be explained by some combination of ideological manipulation, material bribery and insufficient consciousness development. The question they leave insufficiently answered is why these competing identifications are so persistent and so attractive - why they are structurally robust rather than merely contingent.

There is an answer that is both easy and difficult: because these competing identifications also serve material interests - or, more precisely, address material needs that class solidarity as typically constructed does not. The steelworker who identifies with her sector does so partly because the sector provides her livelihood, her bargaining position, her concrete daily social world. The worker who identifies nationally does so partly because the nation-state provides real protections, real infrastructure, real welfare - and because national economic policy materially affects her prospects. This is the easy part: material interests are involved. The difficult part is that this observation, rather than resolving the problem, deepens it. If competing solidarities serve material interests too, then the classical Marxist move - appealing to the "true" material interest in class unity against the "false" interest in sectoral or national identification - loses substantial force. The competing interests are not false. They are real, immediate, and often more tangible than the abstract promise of class-wide emancipation and unity with people you largely don't know and may have your reservations about. Moreover, this extends beyond the institutional level: individual workers personally derive use values from class relations - from credential-based status, from the capacity to direct others' labor in the workplace or the household, from access to social spaces that exclude those deemed inferior. Workers are not merely deceived into supporting class rule; they are, in specific and identifiable ways, bound to it by material and social advantages that a purely economic analysis of exploitation cannot capture. The question then becomes: why does the organization of material life in class societies produce these competing material interests - and these unmet needs - in the first place, and what would it take to overcome them?

This essay argues that the persistence of what I will call competing solidarities - nationalism, sectoralism, religious communalism, tribal and ethnic identification, and related forms of belonging - points to a structural gap in Marxist theory. These are not purely "ideological" or "superstructural" phenomena that float above a material base of class relations. Each embodies a specific vision of economic development and social reproduction: nationalism organizes production, trade and welfare along territorial lines; sectoralism organizes bargaining power and labor markets along craft or industry lines; religious and ethnic communities often maintain their own networks of mutual aid, education and care. They are, in other words, material forms of social organization that compete with class solidarity not merely for people's hearts and minds but for the actual organization of their economic and reproductive lives. The gap in Marxist theory is not that it "ignores culture" or "reduces everything to economics." It is that the tradition has insufficiently theorized the multidimensionality of social reproduction, and has as a result underestimated the material basis of competing solidarities. The shortcoming is biological and anthropological: the tradition has failed to modernize its knowledge of what kind of beings humans actually are.

Two delimitations are needed from the outset. First, this is not a liberal critique that pits "identity" against "class." The question is why class societies structurally succeed in producing forms of solidarity that cross-cut class interest, and why Marxist theory has insufficient purchase on that process. Second - and this is a point on which a great deal of confusion persists - the problem is older than capitalism. Feudal, tributary and slave-holding societies equally produced competing solidarities: religion, tribe, guild, city, caste. Class logic - the extraction of surplus by a ruling class and the organization of production and reproduction in service of that extraction - is older and broader than capitalism. Capitalism is the most flexible and adaptive form in which class logic has operated to date, but it is a form, not the logic itself. An analysis that frames the problem as exclusively capitalist misses both the depth of the problem and the specificity of the capitalist variant.

To work toward an answer, this essay draws on an unlikely combination of sources: the Chilean economist Manfred Max-Neef's taxonomy of fundamental human needs, recent work in evolutionary anthropology and biology, and the Marxist theory of social reproduction. It moves from the biological-anthropological foundations of human sociality, through the mechanism by which class societies disintegrate the integrated fabric of human social life, to Max-Neef's framework as a diagnostic instrument - and draws out the strategic implications.

This essay should be read in conjunction with a companion piece that develops the political-strategic side of the argument in greater detail.^[1]

The usual diagnosis - and where it falls short

The Marxist tradition offers three main explanations for the persistence of competing solidarities. Each identifies something real, but none explains why the phenomenon is so structurally robust.

The first is the theory of false consciousness, most associated with Lukács. Workers internalize the worldview of the ruling class; nationalism, sectoralism and similar forms of identification are manifestations of that internalization. In its crude form, the difficulty is straightforward: if the content of hegemonic ideology were arbitrary - simply whatever the ruling class happened to promote - then one would expect competing solidarities to vary randomly in their effectiveness. They do not. Nationalisms - which have themselves changed substantially over time, from romantic ethnic nationalism through liberal civic nationalism to contemporary authoritarian variants - have proven extraordinarily resilient across wildly different economic and political contexts, from 19th-century European industrialization to 21st-century deindustrialization, from colonial independence movements to settler-colonial states. Religious narratives that legitimize domination as divinely ordained have shown comparable persistence, from Mesopotamian creation myths to contemporary political theology. This consistency suggests that these forms of solidarity are tapping into something more fundamental than the specific ideological content of any given ruling class project. Gramsci's theory of hegemony is subtler - it recognizes that ruling-class ideology must connect with real material experience to be effective, and his analysis of the "corporative moment" will be examined in more detail below.

The second is Lenin's theory of the labor aristocracy: super-profits extracted through imperialism are partially channelled to a privileged stratum of the working class in the imperial core, materially binding them to the fortunes of their own ruling class. This correctly identifies a real mechanism. The strongest version of the argument goes further: the material privilege does not merely coexist with national identification but is organized and delivered through national institutions - welfare states, citizenship-based rights, national labor markets, tariff protections - so that national belonging becomes the institutional form in which workers experience their advantage. On this reading, workers in the imperial core identify nationally not despite their class interests but because the nation-state is the vehicle through which those interests are concretely served. But even this stronger version does not fully resolve the puzzle. Workers in countries without significant imperial privilege also identify nationally; workers in industries without particular material advantages also identify sectorally. The material incentive reinforces the identification, and in some cases may be sufficient to sustain it - but the pattern's universality suggests something more is at work than the distribution of super-profits.^[2]

The third and most productive starting point is Gramsci's analysis of the three moments of consciousness, developed in the Prison Notebooks. Gramsci argues that political consciousness develops through distinct moments, and the analysis is worth setting out in some detail because it gets closer to the problem than any other framework in the classical tradition.

In the first - what Gramsci calls the "economic-corporative" moment - people identify with the immediate group that shares their specific economic position: their trade, their sector, their profession. A steelworker feels solidarity with other steelworkers; a teacher with other teachers; a dockworker with other dockworkers. The solidarity is real and can be intense, but it is bounded by the group's particular position in the division of labor. And it is not just economic calculation. The steelworker who identifies with her trade is also embedded in a web of social relations that the workplace provides: shared routines, shared risks, shared knowledge, a sense of who "we" are and what "we" do. The trade or sector becomes a source of identity, recognition and belonging - not only a unit of bargaining power.

In the second - the moment of class solidarity proper - this narrow identification broadens. The steelworker comes to see herself not only as a steelworker but as a worker, someone whose interests are shared with the teacher, the dockworker, the cleaner, by virtue of their common position as people who sell their labor to survive. This requires an act of abstraction: seeing past the differences in concrete working life to the common structural position underneath. In the third - the "hegemonic" moment - the class develops the capacity to present its interests as the interests of society as a whole, offering moral and intellectual leadership that transcends its own economic position - not merely demanding a better deal but proposing a different way of organizing social life altogether.

The power of this framework is that Gramsci, unlike Lukács or Lenin, recognizes that the corporative moment has its own logic and its own pull - that sectoral identification is not simply a failure of understanding but a real force with real social content. In effect, what he describes with the "economic-corporative moment" is the most self-conscious and institutionalized variant of what this essay calls competing solidarities: the organization of belonging along non-class lines, and the embedding of those groups within a larger framework that substitutes for class solidarity. Italian fascism made this into an explicit state program - the corporazioni that organized workers and employers by sector into state-supervised bodies, offering protection, identity and participation as a package tied to the sector rather than the class. But the pattern is far broader: feudal guilds, religious communities, tribal affiliations and nationalisms all function on the same structural logic, offering solidarity within a bounded group at the expense of solidarity across groups. The fascist variant simply made explicit what other class societies achieve by more diffuse means.

Yet even Gramsci does not systematically work out why the corporative moment is so persistent. He roots it in the division of labor, in the structure of production, in civil society institutions and forms of common sense - so the grounding is not merely ideological. But his framework treats the corporative moment primarily as something to be superseded through the political work of building hegemony, and does not fully theorize why it remains affectively and socially more stable than class solidarity. His framework tells us that the transition is difficult; it does not tell us why. It does not ask: what is it about sectoral or national belonging that makes it so reliably attractive - what does the corporative moment provide, not only in material terms but as a form of social life, that class solidarity as typically constructed does not?

The common limitation across these explanations is this: they treat competing solidarities primarily as deviations from the true class interest - as something to be explained by ideological manipulation, material bribery, or insufficient consciousness development. Feminist social reproduction theory, from Vogel through Federici and Bhattacharya, has gone further than any other current in the tradition by insisting that the reproduction of labor-power involves the full range of care, socialization and embodied maintenance that keeps human beings functioning - and that the tradition's neglect of this domain has strategic as well as theoretical consequences. But even this body of work has not fully pursued the question to its biological and anthropological foundations: it has not asked what we know about what kind of beings humans are as a species, and what that implies for the conditions under which durable solidarity can exist. That is the question this essay takes up.

The common escape route - and why it is a dead end

Having identified the gap, the question is how to fill it. And here the left tends to reach for what seems like the obvious move: if Marxism's analysis of material conditions is strong but its account of motivation and identification is weak, then surely what is needed is a psychology - an account of why people want what they want, identify as they do, sacrifice or defect when they do.

The appeal is real. The Marxist tradition genuinely has very little to say about motivation, attachment, meaning-making, or the pull of belonging, beyond the general claim that consciousness is shaped by material conditions. Something is clearly missing. But the instinct to fill the gap by reaching for "psychology" already takes a wrong step, and it is worth being precise about why, because the mistake points directly toward what is actually needed.

The problem is not that psychology has nothing useful to say. It is that treating "the mind" or "motivation" as a separate domain to be studied by a separate discipline, and then imported into Marxism as a supplement, accepts a division that is itself part of the problem. We have separate academic disciplines studying "the economy," "the mind," "society" and "morality" not because reality is actually structured that way, but because class societies have institutionally separated these domains. The market handles subsistence; the state handles protection; the church or its secular equivalents handle meaning; the family handles affection; the academy neatly mirrors the arrangement by studying each in a different department. This division of intellectual labor is a historical and ideological product, not a discovery about how human life works.

This matters directly for the problem at hand. If the question is why nationalism outcompetes class solidarity, and the answer is sought by importing a "psychology of belonging" to explain the pull of national identity, then the analysis has already conceded the terms of the problem. It assumes that "belonging" is a separate thing from "material interest" - that we need one theory for why people want bread and another for why they wave flags. But what if the separation of material interest from identity, belonging, recognition and participation is not a feature of human life as such but a product of the very class societies whose effects we are trying to explain? Then the problem is not that Marxism lacks a psychological supplement. The problem is that it has not yet fully grasped what class societies do to the integrated fabric of human social existence - and importing fragments from other disciplines, each of which studies one isolated piece of that fabric, cannot get at the root.

The Frankfurt School illustrates both the promise and the limitation of this approach. Fromm and Adorno drew on psychoanalysis to explain authoritarianism and the appeal of fascism, producing important work on how class societies deform personality and desire. But psychoanalysis arrived as a pre-built framework from a different disciplinary tradition, and the graft shows: the resulting theory could explain individual psychological mechanisms of submission, but it could not explain why certain forms of collective life - nationalism, religious community, sectoral belonging - are so much more effective at sustaining solidarity than the class organizations that should, on Marxist premises, have the structural advantage. Feminist social reproduction theory came closer, as noted above - but it, too, sought to supplement Marxism from within the existing disciplinary landscape rather than pushing the materialist analysis to its biological foundations.

What is actually needed is not the importation of another discipline but a deepening of the materialist analysis itself - an extension that asks: what kind of animal is Homo sapiens? What are the conditions under which this species reproduces itself socially? And what happens when those conditions are disrupted? These are empirical questions, answerable with evidence from evolutionary biology and anthropology, and the answers have direct implications for the problem of solidarity.

What kind of being is the human? The biological-anthropological foundation

If the Marxist tradition has under-theorized social reproduction, the obvious next question is: what should it know? Specifically: what do evolutionary biology and anthropology tell us about the conditions under which human beings function as social creatures - and what does that imply for the problem of solidarity?

The answer that has emerged over the last three decades of research, across multiple disciplines and research programs, is convergent and striking. It amounts to this: Homo sapiens is a species whose social functioning depends on an integrated fabric of group life - material provision, shared identity, mutual care, all woven together - rather than on any one of these in isolation. When social life is organized in ways that sustain that integration, human beings are capable of extraordinary cooperation. When it is reorganized so that material life is separated from ritual, care from recognition, identity from participation - as class societies do - each isolated domain functions poorly on its own, and people seek forms of belonging that approximate the lost integration, however partially. That, in a sentence, is why competing solidarities are so persistent: they are responses to a real disintegration, not mere ideological mystifications.

The evidence for this claim comes from four converging bodies of work - the Radical Anthropology Group (Chris Knight, Camilla Power, Ian Watts), Christopher Boehm, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy and Jerome Lewis - whose combined picture, though assembled from different disciplinary angles, is remarkably consistent.

The starting point is that solidarity is not a property you can add to an already-existing being; it is constitutive of what it means to be human. The Radical Anthropology Group argues that becoming human was itself the product of a social revolution: the transition from primate dominance hierarchy to what Boehm calls "assertive egalitarianism," through coalitions (initially female-led) that imposed new social contracts on the group (Knight, Blood Relations, 1991). What matters is that this solidarity was from the start integrated: ritual, kinship, shared care, symbolic communication and collective identity were all involved simultaneously, as aspects of the same practices. It was never only a matter of material production - but the material-reproductive base (who cares, who feeds, who shares) formed the site on which that integration took place.

Nor was the resulting egalitarianism a passive default. Boehm's concept of "reverse dominance hierarchies" (Hierarchy in the Forest, 1999; Moral Origins, 2012) shows that hunter-gatherer societies maintain egalitarianism through constant coalition-formation against would-be dominants - ridicule, ostracism and, in extreme cases, lethal sanction. This active suppression requires capacities that involve identity, participation, recognition and solidarity, not merely material calculation. When those capacities are undermined - as they are when class societies reorganize social life around institutional separation and enforced compliance - egalitarianism erodes. Hrdy (Mothers and Others, 2009; Father Time, 2024) locates the biological mechanism underlying this: humans are "cooperative breeders," a species in which the raising of offspring is shared between parents and alloparents. Our capacity for empathy, perspective-taking and intersubjectivity evolved as a consequence of this arrangement - infants who could solicit care from multiple caregivers survived; those who could not, did not. The human need for trust, affection, reciprocity and social embeddedness is grounded in our reproductive system as a species. When shared care collapses - as it does in the isolated nuclear family structures characteristic of modern capitalism - measurable pathologies result.

What this integration looks like in practice is visible in Lewis's long-term ethnographic work with the Mbendjele BaYaka: shared care, polyphonic music as a mode of self-governance, ritual practices that address identity, participation and affection simultaneously. What Lewis's work makes particularly clear is that intuitively distinguishable dimensions of social life - identity, participation, subsistence, affection - do not appear as separate categories in lived practice. Food-sharing is ritual is identity is participation. What we separate analytically is integrated in the same activities. (A formal vocabulary for making these distinctions precise will be introduced below; for now, the ordinary-language terms suffice.)

The convergence yields a single picture: human beings are creatures whose functioning as social beings depends on an integrated fabric of social relations - shared care, ritual, recognition, trust, symbolic communication, collective identity, material production and distribution. This describes an integrated whole normally maintained by the same practices, and should be read that way rather than as a list of separate "needs." The material-reproductive base - who produces, who cares, who feeds, who shares - is the site around which the integration crystallizes, though it is not hierarchically "more important" than the other dimensions.

A clarification is needed here, because the integration thesis is easy to overstate. It should not be read as a claim that pre-class societies achieved some perfect harmony in which every member's needs were seamlessly met. That would be a romanticization. In any human society - if only because the young experiment with new social forms, individuals have different temperaments and capacities, and material conditions shift - there will be mismatches and slippage between what is on offer and what is sought or desired. What matters is not the absence of friction but the room for diversity, experimentation and renegotiation within the social form. The ethnographic evidence from egalitarian societies suggests that this room was substantial: Boehm's reverse dominance hierarchies involve constant political negotiation, Lewis's accounts of Mbendjele life are full of disputes and their resolution, and the very mechanisms of egalitarian maintenance - ridicule, gossip, fission - presuppose disagreement. The question, then, is not whether pre-class societies were free of tension but whether the form of social organization allowed tensions to be addressed without breaking the integration itself. The evidence suggests that it often did - and that what class societies break is precisely that capacity for internal renegotiation, by removing social reproduction from the control of the people doing the reproducing.

The point, then, is this: the distinction between integrated and disintegrated social life is not about the absence or presence of friction. It is about whether the dimensions of social existence are addressed within the same practices and subject to collective renegotiation, or split across separate institutional domains governed by different logics and different forms of control. The separation is not a feature of human life as such; it is a feature of disintegrated human life.

This does not mean that all pre-class societies were identically egalitarian. The ethnographic and archaeological record shows variation - seasonal hierarchy, regional differences, divergent forms of gender relations. Graeber and Wengrow (The Dawn of Everything, 2021) have emphasized this variation, though their conclusion - that humans consciously "chose" hierarchy - is an immaterialist step unsupported by the empirical evidence (see Daniel Bitton's multipart critique on the youtube What is Politics as well as Knight, "Wrong About (Almost) Everything," FocaalBlog, 22 December 2021). The variation has material causes: technological, geographic, demographic and ecological conditions determined which forms of social organization could take hold. Institutionalized hierarchy required specific material preconditions - agriculture and storage capacity (energy surplus), writing and record-keeping (bureaucracy), credit and taxation systems (debt servitude), logistics and military technology - and only became dominant when these conditions converged.^[3] What remains constant through all this variation is that the multidimensionality of social reproduction - the fact that humans depend for their functioning on more than material provision alone - is a characteristic of the species, not of any specific organizational form.

One important qualification is needed. There is evidence that under conditions of extreme deprivation - famine, acute physical threat - the integrated character of social reproduction can break down, and that subsistence does acquire a kind of emergency priority. This is the grain of truth in Abraham Maslow's well-known hierarchy of needs, which places physiological survival at the base and "self-actualization" at the apex. But Maslow's model describes not the normal human condition but a pathological limit case - the condition of a social being under extreme duress. That matters because class societies systematically produce this limit condition for portions of the population, making it appear as though needs are "naturally" hierarchical - when in fact the hierarchy is itself a product of the deprivation caused by class domination.

The consequences of social disintegration are not limited to our own species. Research on African elephants - another long-lived, socially complex species with extended parental care and multi-generational social learning - provides a striking parallel. Elephant populations whose social structures have been destroyed by culling and poaching show dramatically elevated aggression, including the killing of rhinoceroses and other species - behavior essentially unknown in intact populations. Young males who grew up without the guidance of older matriarchs and bulls display what researchers have described as a breakdown of normal social regulation, with effects persisting for decades after the original disruption.^[4] The parallel is instructive: in elephants as in humans, the destruction of the integrated social fabric does not merely remove a set of "services" that can be individually substituted. It produces pathologies that affect the full range of social behavior, precisely because the fabric was integrated to begin with.

We now have the anthropological foundation in place. Human beings are creatures whose social reproduction is normally integrated - multidimensional and addressed by the same practices. The question that follows is: what happens when that integration is reorganized along class lines?

The disintegration: what class societies do to the reproductive fabric

If the integrated character of social reproduction is the normal human pattern, the central question becomes: what does class logic do to that fabric? The answer: class domination disintegrates it. Through various forms of institutionalized violence - extraction, enclosure, debt, forced labor, military coercion - it breaks the integrated whole into separate institutional domains, each addressing some dimensions of need but structured by class logic rather than by the integration they replace.

The mechanism is straightforward in its logic, if enormously varied in its historical forms. To extract surplus, ruling classes must gain control over the material-reproductive base - over who produces what, who receives what, who cares for whom. That control requires reconfiguring production and distribution and the social relations in which they were previously embedded: kinship, ritual, reciprocity. This uncoupling is what Marx describes as the separation of the producer from the means of production, but it is broader than that: it is the separation of social reproduction from its integrated basis.

The process is visible in the earliest documented class societies we know of. In Bronze Age Mesopotamia, once the material preconditions discussed above converged, the integrated fabric of social life - in which production, distribution, care, ritual and governance had been aspects of the same communal practices - was progressively broken apart. Production became something done for others rather than with them; distribution became something administered by institutions rather than embedded in kinship; ritual became specialized under a priestly class; protection became the province of armed retainers serving the palace.

The consequences unfold across multiple domains. The market (or the tributary system, or the slave relation) becomes the domain of subsistence - addressing material need but severed from the affection, identity and participation that previously accompanied production. The state becomes the domain of protection - real but detached from reciprocity and direct participation. Religion (or nationalism, or consumer culture) becomes the domain of identity and meaning - providing genuine forms of belonging but decoupled from material production. The family becomes the domain of affection - offering real care but isolated from the broader community and burdened with reproductive tasks that were previously carried collectively. Each domain addresses something real; none is purely illusory. But each is embedded in institutional structures that serve class reproduction, and the separation itself - the fact that these dimensions are addressed by different institutions under different forms of control - is the core of what disintegration means.

The disintegration is then normalized through narrative. The mythological and religious traditions that accompanied the rise of class societies consistently worked to make domination, violence and hierarchy appear natural or divinely ordained. From the Mesopotamian creation myths - in which humans were created to perform labor for the gods - through the Greek and Roman pantheons - in which capricious divine violence models and legitimates human hierarchy - to the great monotheistic traditions, ruling classes and their supporters produced or promoted stories that naturalised the separation of domains: the divine orders one sphere, the king another, the priest a third, and the laborer simply works and is expected to know their place - as in the Delphic maxim gnōthi seauton ("know thyself"), which in its original context meant not the modern injunction to introspection but the warning not to overstep one's station. These narrative traditions do not merely reflect the disintegration; they actively produce consent for it, by presenting the separated, hierarchical organization of social life as the proper order of things.

The underlying logic is meritocratic in the broad sense: each class society produces criteria by which people are sorted into those who deserve more and those who deserve less, and treats that sorting as evidence that the social order is justified. The specific markers of merit shift - divine favor, noble blood, martial prowess, bureaucratic competence, educational credentials - but the reasoning is constant: those at the top belong there because they possess the relevant quality, and those at the bottom lack it. Modern societies are distinctive mainly in their emphasis on bureaucratic and credentialed competence as the sorting criterion, and in the thoroughness with which this logic is embedded in institutions - from schooling to the workplace to the welfare system - but earlier class societies were no less meritocratic in structure: the priest merited his position by divine calling, the knight by martial virtue, the guild master by craft mastery. The normalization is backed, in every period, by institutional violence whose forms change while its function does not - from tributary extraction and temple corvée through feudal obligation and guild exclusion to modern policing and incarceration, as well as the softer but no less effective violence of credential gatekeeping, welfare conditionality and bureaucratic exclusion.

This disintegration produces a characteristic illusion - and here the pathological limit case discussed earlier connects to a broader mechanism. Under extreme deprivation, needs appear hierarchical because they are: subsistence really does acquire emergency priority for a social being under acute duress. But the institutional separation of domains produces the same illusion under normal conditions: in a class society, needs appear to be separate and hierarchical because the institutions that address them are organized in separate, hierarchical domains. Maslow's pyramid reflects both mechanisms at once, which is why it feels so intuitively right. The taxonomy looks natural because the disintegration that produced it has become invisible.

All class societies disintegrate the reproductive fabric. What distinguishes capitalism is what it produces after the disintegration: an unprecedentedly flexible system of partial re-integrations bound to class reproduction. The market continually generates new ways of addressing what has been lost - consumer goods as substitutes for participation, social media for community, personal branding for identity. These provide real, if impoverished, forms of connection and recognition. They are partial and conditional: they address isolated dimensions of need within institutional structures that serve accumulation, and they cannot restore the integration they replace.

Earlier class societies were more rigid in this regard. The feudal order produced religion and estate identity as its primary competing solidarities, but these were brittle precisely because they depended on material conditions the feudal system could not reliably control. The Black Death of the mid-14th century illustrates the point with devastating clarity: a material catastrophe - the loss of a third or more of Europe's population - simultaneously destroyed the economic base of serfdom (by creating a labor shortage that shifted bargaining power to surviving peasants) and exposed the bankruptcy of the Church's claim to provide meaning and protection (God, it turned out, did not spare the faithful). The feudal system's competing solidarities - religious community, estate identity, local lordship - could not survive a material disruption of that magnitude, because they lacked the flexibility to regenerate in new forms. Capitalism, by contrast, produces competing solidarities with an industrial dynamism that earlier systems could not match.

The nation-state is the most powerful of these, and it is important to be precise about why. The temptation to dismiss nationalism as "false consciousness" or "mere ideology" has led the left to underestimate it repeatedly. The nation-state provides real protections (law, welfare, infrastructure), real participation (elections, civic institutions, military service), real recognition (citizenship, cultural belonging), and real material provision (tariffs, industrial policy, public services). It makes laws, wages wars, sets trade policy, redistributes income. What makes it a competing solidarity rather than a genuine re-integration is that all of this is structured by class logic: the protections serve property relations, the participation is bounded by the interests of capital, the redistribution is calibrated to maintain the labor force without threatening accumulation, and the identity is defined to cut across class lines - binding worker and employer together as nationals against the foreign worker who shares the class position but not the passport. Real enough to command loyalty, incomplete enough to reproduce class domination.

This reframes the problem of competing solidarities. Nationalism succeeds not because it addresses the "identity need" better than class solidarity does, but because it offers a partial but real re-integration across multiple dimensions of social life, bound together in a single institutional package. That this package is structured to reproduce class relations does not diminish its pull. It pulls because the need for integration is real, because the nation-state addresses it with real material and institutional resources, and because class societies offer little else that addresses it as comprehensively.

Sectoralism functions analogously at the meso-level. The trade union or professional association becomes a bounded community that offers real protection, identity and participation, but remains tied to the sectoral logic that cross-cuts broader class solidarity. Gramsci recognized this with his "economic-corporative moment," but - as argued above - did not fully theorize why it remains so affectively and socially stable. What the disintegration thesis suggests is that the corporative moment is not a deficiency of consciousness but a predictable response to a real structural condition: in a world where the integrated fabric has been broken, people gravitate toward whatever offers the closest approximation of integration, even if that approximation is partial and bound to a non-class unit.

There is a further dimension. Each competing solidarity is not only an attractive alternative to class solidarity but a form of organized compliance in its own right, backed by its own institutional violence. The nation-state compels through conscription, border control, citizenship law and the conditional withdrawal of welfare. Sectoralism enforces through closed shops, credential requirements and apprenticeship barriers. Religious communities enforce through excommunication, shunning and marriage rules. Ethnic solidarities police membership through codes of loyalty, shame and ostracism. To belong is also to submit - and the enforcement works because it is inseparable from the real protections and recognitions that belonging provides. This is what makes competing solidarities so difficult to dislodge.

Max-Neef's framework as a diagnostic instrument

Human social reproduction is normally integrated; class societies break that integration. What we lack so far is a vocabulary precise enough to analyze the consequences - to say which dimensions of social life are being addressed by which institutional structures, and where the gaps are that competing solidarities exploit. For this, a diagnostic instrument developed outside the Marxist tradition turns out to be unexpectedly useful.

Manfred Max-Neef, a Chilean economist working with Antonio Elizalde and Martín Hopenhayn, developed a framework of fundamental human needs in Human Scale Development (New York: Apex Press, 1991).^[5] He identifies nine axiological dimensions of need: subsistence, protection, affection, understanding, participation, idleness (or leisure), creation, identity and freedom. In explicit contrast to Maslow's hierarchy, he presents these as non-hierarchical: no need is inherently more important than any other, and the frustration of any single need produces pathologies regardless of whether other needs are met.

On the basis of the anthropological analysis developed above, we can be more precise about what "non-hierarchical" means here. The point is not that needs are "equal" in some flat sense - as though identity and subsistence were interchangeable. The point is that in normal human functioning, these dimensions are addressed by the same practices, within the same social relations, rather than being split across separate institutional domains. Splitting them into nine discrete categories is a legitimate analytical move - analysis necessarily separates what is integrated in practice - but it should not be mistaken for a description of how need-fulfillment works when social reproduction has not been institutionally fragmented.

The separation is legitimate because it corresponds to something real in human experience. That practices are normally integrated wholes does not mean that the dimensions they address are invisible to the people involved. Humans - like other social animals - are capable of registering when a particular dimension of their social existence is not being adequately met, even when the overall practice is functioning well enough that they choose to continue participating. A hunter who joins a collective hunt that provides food but from which she feels excluded in the planning can notice the deficit without the practice ceasing to be an integrated one. The capacity to flag unmet needs, to signal distress along specific dimensions, is itself part of the evolved social toolkit - it is what makes negotiation, adjustment and repair possible within integrated practices. What class societies do is not create the perceptual capacity to distinguish dimensions (that capacity is always there) but institutionalize the separation, so that different dimensions are addressed by different institutions under different forms of control, and the normal process of internal negotiation is replaced by dependence on structures the participants do not govern. Max-Neef's nine categories, then, are not impositions on human experience but formalizations of distinctions people have always been able to draw - distinctions that class societies exploit by assigning each to a separate institutional domain.

The analytical power of this separation, however, is considerable. Consider first what it reveals about needs themselves, before we turn to solidarities. If we take Max-Neef's framework seriously, then every human being - regardless of their position in the division of labor, their credentials, their nationality, their perceived "merit" - has these nine dimensions of need, and the frustration of any one of them produces pathologies. This is a more radical claim than it may appear, though Max-Neef himself does not draw out its full implications. What follows is our extension, not his.

Class societies do not only disintegrate the fabric of social reproduction; they also, as discussed above, teach people to accept that some people's needs matter less than others'. The meritocratic reasoning that normalizes the disintegration is, among other things, a systematic training in the denial of need-universality. We learn, through institutions from schooling to the workplace, to sort people into categories of more and less deserving, and to accept that the needs of the "undeserving" - the uncredentialed, the unemployed, the undocumented, the imprisoned - can be neglected without moral cost. Max-Neef's framework, by insisting that needs are finite, universal and non-hierarchical, cuts against this logic at the root. It does not tell us that everyone's needs are being met; it tells us that everyone's needs exist, with equal standing, whether or not the social order acknowledges them.

This has direct implications for how we analyze solidarities. If we take the framework seriously, then every form of solidarity - not only nationalism, religion and sectoralism, but also class solidarity itself - can be analyzed as a composite that addresses some dimensions of need while leaving others unaddressed or actively frustrated. Class solidarity is not the "true" position from which other solidarities deviate; it is itself a satisfier, a specific way of organizing belonging, identity, protection and material provision. The question is not whether class solidarity is real and the alternatives are false, but what each composite offers, what it neglects, and what structural conditions determine how comprehensive it can be. This reframing is what makes Max-Neef's taxonomy genuinely dangerous for comfortable Marxist assumptions: it places class solidarity on the same analytical plane as its competitors and asks why, in that competition, it so often loses.

The framework becomes sharper still through a second distinction: between needs and satisfiers. Needs, in Max-Neef's framework, are few, finite and broadly universal; satisfiers - the concrete means by which needs are met - are historically and culturally variable. A community feast and a supermarket both address subsistence, but they do so in radically different ways, embedded in radically different social relations, with radically different consequences for other dimensions of need. This distinction allows us to ask not "what needs do workers have?" - a question that leads nowhere productive - but "what satisfiers are produced for those needs, by whom, in which institutional domain, and with what effect on integration?"

Max-Neef further distinguishes types of satisfiers, and this is where the vocabulary connects directly to the disintegration thesis. Synergistic satisfiers fulfill multiple needs simultaneously - the community feast that addresses subsistence, participation, identity and affection in a single practice. Singular satisfiers address only one need. Pseudo-satisfiers create the illusion of fulfillment. Inhibiting satisfiers over-fulfill one need at the expense of others. And violators or destroyers claim to fulfill a need but actually impair it and others. The disintegration of the reproductive fabric by class societies can now be described precisely: it is the systematic replacement of synergistic satisfiers by singular, inhibiting and pseudo-satisfiers. What was once food-sharing-as-ritual-as-identity-as-participation becomes the market for subsistence plus the church for meaning plus the state for protection plus the family for affection - each addressing one dimension in isolation, and each embedded in institutional structures that serve class reproduction.

Applied to the problem of competing solidarities, this vocabulary makes the asymmetry visible. Class solidarity, as it is typically constructed in the Marxist tradition - centred on the shared political-economic interest in ending exploitation, but in practice often narrowed to its economic dimension - functions as a singular satisfier. It addresses subsistence and, at best, protection, but offers relatively little in the way of identity, affection, participation, creation or understanding. It asks workers to organize on the basis of what they share materially, while leaving the other dimensions of their social existence to be filled by whatever is on offer - which, in a class society, means the competing solidarities produced by the disintegration. The competition is not between truth and illusion but between a narrow composite and broader ones.

Nationalism is more complex. In Max-Neef's vocabulary, the nation-state operates as a mixed satisfier: genuinely synergistic along some dimensions (the welfare state really does address subsistence and protection together), but inhibiting along others (the national identity it provides is structured to prevent class consciousness, and the participation it offers is bounded by the interests of capital). The difficulty for Max-Neef's framework is that it can describe this mix but cannot explain why the nation-state is structured this way - why the synergistic elements are always partial, always conditional on accepting the class-structured whole. For that, we need a power analysis the framework does not contain.

The framework's diagnostic power, however, comes with two significant issues: a structural limitation and a weakness in grounding. The first - the absence of a power analysis - is already visible in the difficulty just noted. The second - the insufficiency of Max-Neef's own support for his transhistorical claim - is one this essay's argument has sought to repair. Both require examination.

What Max-Neef misses - and what the materialist analysis must add

The structural limitation is the absence of a power analysis. Max-Neef's framework can describe what nationalism provides and where it falls short, but it cannot explain why the nation-state's integration is structured the way it is - why its synergistic elements are always partial, always conditional on accepting class-structured terms. For that, you need an analysis of class interests and of the material structures that maintain and exploit the disintegration. The limitation is especially visible in Max-Neef's own category of violators or destroyers - satisfiers that claim to fulfill a need but actually impair it and others. Arms races that promise protection while producing insecurity, censorship that promises social cohesion while destroying understanding, forced labor that produces subsistence while destroying participation and freedom: Max-Neef can name these, and his framework can identify what they destroy. But it cannot explain why they are systematically produced and reproduced. His implicit assumption is that the existence of synergistic satisfiers - satisfiers that fulfill multiple needs simultaneously without harming anyone - means that the destructive variants are in principle avoidable, if only we designed better policies. The examples he gives of synergistic satisfiers (breastfeeding, preventive health care, popular education, democratic community organizations) are all non-antagonistic. What is absent is the question: what if the fulfillment of one group's needs is structurally dependent on the frustration of another group's needs? What if violators and destroyers are not policy failures but structural necessities of class reproduction?

That is what Marxists argue about the relation between capital, labor and nature. The extraction of surplus from labor and the extraction of resources from nature operate by the same logic - and are ideologically reinforced by the same move: the exploiting and priestly classes have consistently argued that the propertyless, the enslaved and the colonized are simply part of nature, beasts to be managed rather than persons whose needs count. The treatment of non-human animals themselves - whose social and emotional needs are demonstrable, as the elephant research discussed above illustrates - represents the outermost extension of this logic, the point at which the denial of need-universality becomes explicit doctrine. Max-Neef's framework is not equipped to address any of this - not because it explicitly rejects it, but because it lacks the analytical machinery. For that, you need an analysis of production relations and power structures that the framework does not provide.

This limitation is not specific to capitalism. Institutionalized hierarchy, as noted above, required specific material preconditions - agricultural surplus, bureaucracy, credit and taxation systems, military technology - and the ruling classes that commanded these technologies actively produced narratives and structures that normalized the disintegration. Mesopotamian debt servitude, one of the earliest and best-documented forms of class extraction, illustrates the point: Assyriologists have identified some thirty debt cancellation proclamations in the Bronze Age Near East (ca. 2400–1400 BCE), suggesting that ruling elites understood that unchecked debt accumulation would destroy the peasant base on which their own extraction depended. When such cancellations ceased, economic polarization and social collapse followed. Capitalism adds to this the dynamic of capital accumulation, which continually generates new pseudo-satisfiers and new forms of disintegration at an accelerating pace.

The weakness in grounding - that the framework's transhistorical claim is insufficiently supported - is one that the argument of this essay has already addressed. Max-Neef asserts that needs are universal and transhistorical, but in his own work this reads as a philosophical commitment rather than a demonstrated finding. The biological and anthropological evidence developed above converts that assertion into an empirically grounded claim: these are not abstract categories but dimensions of social-reproductive functioning rooted in what we know about the species - its cooperative breeding, its dependence on integrated social relations, its shared evolutionary heritage with other social animals whose needs are equally demonstrable. The meritocratic sorting of people into more and less deserving - discussed in the sections above - is, from this vantage point, not just morally objectionable but empirically wrong: it denies a species-level reality. The grounding also clarifies what "transhistorical" means and does not mean. It does not mean that nine fixed categories have existed unchanged since the Pleistocene. It means that Homo sapiens is a species whose social functioning depends on an integrated range of requirements, that the specific configuration of those requirements is always materially and historically mediated, and that the institutional separation of these dimensions into distinct domains is a product of class societies, not of the species. With this grounding in place, the framework's remaining limitation is the one already identified: the absence of a power analysis capable of explaining why synergistic satisfiers are systematically replaced by singular and destructive ones.

Max-Neef's own political practice illustrates this tension. An economist who worked for the FAO, ILO and the Pan-American Union, affiliated with the Club of Rome and the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation, he ran as an independent green presidential candidate in Chile in 1993 (receiving 5.55% of the vote). His political orientation was toward localism, participatory micro-democracy and green economics - a program that, from a Marxist perspective, avoids the questions of state power and property relations. He was no conservative - his critique of the Chicago Boys and of growth obsession was sharp and sincere - but his framework's lack of a power analysis is reflected directly in a political practice that addresses the symptoms of disintegration at the local level without confronting the class logic that produces it. The diagnostic instrument is stronger than the politics of the diagnostician.

Synthesis: re-integration as a revolutionary task

If the analysis developed above is correct - if competing solidarities succeed because they offer real, if partial, re-integrations in a world that has been genuinely disintegrated - then a revolutionary movement that addresses only the material-economic interest offers a further impoverishment of an already impoverished supply, and predictably loses the competition. The revolutionary task is therefore not only the abolition of class, but the re-integration of social reproduction. This is not a "soft" supplement to the "hard" economic struggle. It is the core of what emancipation means.

What does this imply for strategy? Not the addition of "cultural work" alongside trade union work, but a form of organization that undermines the separation between those domains itself. The disintegration is the problem; re-integration is the strategic task. And this task operates at every level. At the institutional level, it means building organizations that address multiple dimensions of social reproduction integrally rather than outsourcing them to separate structures. But the disintegration does not only operate through macro-level institutional structures. It is maintained, daily, by the micro-level dynamics through which workers exercise power over one another: the manager who claims subordinates' work, the credential-holder who derives authority from artificial scarcity, the father who commands the household, the gatekeeper who polices access to social spaces. These are not incidental features of class society; they are the interpersonal face of the same disintegration - individual workers deriving concrete use values from class relations, and thereby becoming bound to class rule in ways that a purely economic analysis of exploitation cannot capture. (The companion piece develops this argument in greater detail.) Re-integration means confronting these dynamics too - not as secondary "cultural" issues to be addressed after the revolution, but as concrete forms of class rule that must be challenged in the present, within and through the organizations we build.

Historical examples of movements that achieved this, however partially and temporarily, are instructive - not as models to copy but as evidence that the principle is not merely theoretical.

The Spanish anarchist ateneos of the late 19th and early 20th century were perhaps the most deliberate experiment in re-integration. These were spaces - typically in working-class neighborhoods - where the separation between "education," "culture," "politics" and "material aid" that the bourgeois institutional landscape enforces was deliberately refused. A worker who came for a reading class encountered political analysis; someone who came for a political meeting participated in collective cultural production; the person who needed material support was drawn into the intellectual and social life of the group. At their best, the ateneos functioned as synergistic satisfiers: a single institutional form addressing subsistence, understanding, participation, identity and creation simultaneously. Their destruction by both Francoist repression and Stalinist centralization was part of what made the anarchist movement's defeat irreversible.^[6]

The Black Panther Party's survival programs in the United States during the late 1960s and 1970s represent a parallel experiment in a very different context. The Panthers' Free Breakfast for Children, free health clinics, community defense and newspaper are often remembered as charitable initiatives, but that framing misses the point. The point was to build an alternative infrastructure of social reproduction that addressed material needs, identity, participation and political consciousness as an integrated whole, outside the control of the state and capital. The FBI understood this better than many on the left: J. Edgar Hoover called the breakfast program the Panthers' greatest threat because it built a form of community life that competed with the state's own integrative apparatus on terms the state could not control. The Panthers' eventual decline owed much to state repression, but also to internal instrumentalization - the subordination of the survival programs to party discipline, the narrowing of political education to doctrinal instruction, the erosion of the integrative character that had been the source of the movement's strength.^[7]

Elements of early Soviet cultural politics before the Stalinist consolidation represent a third, more ambiguous case. The Proletkult movement, the workers' clubs, the literacy campaigns, the explosion of artistic experimentation in the 1920s - all of these were attempts to build a new form of social life in which production, education, culture and political participation were not separated into distinct institutional domains. The ambition was explicitly integrative: the worker was not merely a producer but a creator, a learner, a political subject, a cultural participant. That this experiment was crushed - first by the instrumentalization of culture under "socialist realism," then by the subordination of all social life to the demands of forced industrialization - does not invalidate the principle. It confirms the difficulty. The Stalinist regression was, among other things, a re-disintegration: culture was reduced to propaganda, education to technical training, participation to obedience, and solidarity to an administered affect.^[8]

The lesson is not "do more of everything." It is that the form of organization matters as much as its content - and that in each of these cases, decline followed from regression toward singular or instrumental approaches. A party that organizes around economic demands but outsources identity to the nation, meaning to religion, and affection to the private family is reproducing the disintegration rather than challenging it. A movement that integrates these dimensions - not by adding them as separate programs, but by building forms of collective life in which they are addressed together - is attacking class society at the point where it is most structurally vulnerable: its dependence on keeping the dimensions of social reproduction institutionally separated and under class-structured control.

For the Marxist tradition specifically, this implies a reorientation. The theory of social reproduction, as developed by feminist Marxists from Vogel through Bhattacharya, has already opened the door by insisting that the reproduction of labor-power cannot be reduced to an economic process. What the anthropological evidence adds is that the scope of that claim is even broader than the feminist tradition has typically drawn it: not just that care work is undervalued and exploited, but that the entire integrated fabric of human social existence has been systematically reorganized by class logic into separate institutional domains that address real needs in class-structured and partial ways, and that any revolutionary strategy that does not address that disintegration will produce competing solidarities as predictably as a river produces tributaries. The question is not whether the working class "can" be united - it is whether the movement offers a form of life that is integrative enough to outcompete the partial, class-structured integrations on offer. That is a materialist question, not a motivational one.

The point is straightforwardly materialist. The Marxist tradition has always insisted that the conditions of production shape the possibilities of consciousness. The biological-anthropological evidence extends this: the conditions of reproduction - in the full, integrated sense - shape the possibilities of solidarity. A movement that ignores this will continue to be surprised by the persistence of competing solidarities. A movement that grasps it has a chance of building something durable.

Conclusion

The persistence of competing solidarities is not evidence that the working class "cannot be united." It is evidence that class societies reorganize the integrated reproductive fabric on which durable solidarity depends - and that the Marxist tradition has insufficiently modernized both its understanding of social reproduction and its knowledge of the species it claims to want to emancipate.

The three claims developed here - that human social functioning depends on an integrated fabric of requirements normally addressed by the same practices; that class societies break that integration by assigning each dimension to a separate institutional domain under class-structured control; and that Max-Neef's needs framework, when biologically grounded and supplemented with a power analysis, provides the diagnostic vocabulary for mapping the consequences - converge on a single strategic conclusion. Competing solidarities outcompete class solidarity because they offer broader composites of need-fulfillment. They are material forms of social organization, backed by real institutional resources and real enforcement, and they will not be dislodged by appeals to the "true" class interest. The revolutionary task is to build forms of collective life whose integration is comprehensive enough to outcompete them - forms in which subsistence, identity, participation, creation and care are addressed together, under the control of the people doing the reproducing. A materialism serious about the kind of beings it seeks to organize would expect nothing less from a species whose solidarity, when it works, has never been only about bread.