Why Competing Solidarities Tend to Win

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 a ruling class. 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 because other forms of belonging addressed more of what workers actually needed.

The standard explanations - false consciousness, ideological hegemony, the labor aristocracy - each identify something real but share a tendency to treat the phenomenon as a deviation from the true class interest. The competing interests are not false. They are real, immediate, and often more tangible than the abstract promise of class-wide emancipation. 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. Moreover, 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 bound to it by material and social advantages that a purely economic analysis of exploitation cannot capture. That this is how class rule perpetuates itself should be obvious. The question is why the Marxist tradition has not taken it more seriously.

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. 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 material forms of social organization that compete with class solidarity for the actual organization of people's 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. The argument, in brief: competing solidarities address more of what people need than class solidarity as typically constructed does, and they offer more collective control over the forms of social life — because classed societies appropriate and rigidify the dimensions of social existence, locking them into separate institutional domains under class-structured control, removing collective governance over how those dimensions are organized and creating gaps that these solidarities fill.

This essay works with a broader definition of class relations than the Marxist tradition typically employs. A companion essay develops the argument in detail, but the core is straightforward: class relations are those in which a dominant party gets others to do work for them on an ongoing basis without having to meaningfully reciprocate, backed by institutional power the subordinate party cannot easily escape.^[1] This is older and broader than wage exploitation, and it does not operate in a single mode. Tributary, slave-holding, and feudal societies all enabled exploitation and all produced competing solidarities: religion, tribe, guild, city, caste. And just as the capitalist mode grew within a feudal context, non-capitalist modes of exploitation do not simply precede capitalism in a neat sequence; they persist within it and arguably thrive. Patriarchal household authority, credential-based gatekeeping, racialized forced labor, debt servitude — these are not remnants of earlier stages but active forms of class rule operating alongside and through surplus extraction and wage exploitation. 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 will miss both the depth of the problem and the non-commodified modes of exploitation that capitalism relies on but did not invent.

The usual diagnosis - and where it falls short

The Marxist tradition offers three main explanations for the persistence of competing solidarities. None is without merit, 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 Vedic varna ideology 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.

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 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 classed 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. And his answer to the question of how to move beyond the corporative moment is more serious than is often recognized: for Gramsci, every relationship of hegemony is necessarily a pedagogical relationship, and the party's task is not to deliver correct ideas from outside but to develop, through organic intellectuals emerging from within the class, a new common sense that transforms how workers understand their own experience. This comes closer than any other classical account to recognizing that the transition requires a form of life - that the party must be a space where workers develop new capacities, not merely receive new information. But even this answer operates at the level of how workers come to understand their position, not at the level of what material and social conditions make the corporative moment more attractive than class solidarity in the first place. His framework tells us that the transition is difficult and sketches a pedagogy for attempting it; it does not tell us why the corporative moment keeps winning the competition even when the pedagogical work is done well. 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 narrowly economic 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 the species actually requires for social functioning, and what that implies for the conditions under which durable solidarity can exist.

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

The Marxist tradition genuinely has very little to say about motivation, attachment, meaning-making, or the pull of belonging, and the instinct to fill the gap by importing a psychology already takes a wrong step. 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 classed societies have institutionally separated these domains. The market claims subsistence; the state claims protection; the church or its secular equivalents claim meaning; the family claims affection; the academy neatly mirrors the arrangement by studying each in a different department. Over time, the institutional boundaries come to be experienced as ontological — as reflecting real divisions in the nature of things — and certain questions stop being asked altogether: why subsistence should be separated from participation, why protection should be detached from reciprocity, why care should be isolated from production. This division of intellectual labor is a historical and ideological product, not a discovery about how human life works.

The consequence for the problem at hand is direct. If a Marxist asks why nationalism outcompetes class solidarity, and reaches for a "psychology of belonging" to explain the pull of national identity, the analysis has already reproduced the separation it claims to oppose — treating belonging as one thing and material interest as another, when the whole point is that classed societies made them separate. The same applies to importing behavioral economics to explain why workers act against their "rational" class interest, or turning to affect theory to account for the emotional pull of reactionary movements. In each case, the borrowed framework studies one institutionally separated dimension and treats that separation as its starting point rather than as part of the problem. What is needed is not a supplement from another discipline but a materialist analysis that asks why these dimensions were separated in the first place — and what kind of social existence they were separated from. That means asking: 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 animals are humans? 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 its implications for the problem of solidarity are direct. What distinguishes Homo sapiens from most other apes is a capacity for coalitionary egalitarianism - the collective enforcement against dominance hierarchies that Boehm calls "assertive egalitarianism." Under conditions of egalitarian governance, social practices organically address multiple dimensions of need simultaneously: not because humans need some mystical wholeness, but because the evolved capacities for cooperation, empathy, and social coordination developed within collectively governed practices that were not institutionally separated.

The bourgeois disciplines document aspects of this — attachment theory, social psychology, the sociology of belonging all have relevant findings. But there is a reason this essay draws primarily on four research programs: the Radical Anthropology Group (Chris Knight, Camilla Power, Ian Watts), Christopher Boehm, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, and Jerome Lewis. The bourgeois disciplines typically separate dimensions of social life for analytical purposes and rarely integrate them back; worse, their practitioners tend to treat the separation as reflecting reality rather than the institutions that produced their disciplines. These four programs study human sociality without cutting it into pieces first, and their combined picture 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 how Homo sapiens functions as a social species. The Radical Anthropology Group argues that becoming human was itself the product of a social revolution: the transition from primate dominance hierarchy to assertive egalitarianism, through coalitions (initially female-led) that imposed new social contracts on the group (Knight, Blood Relations, 1991). What matters is that this coalitionary egalitarianism produced a form of social life in which ritual, kinship, shared care, symbolic communication and collective identity were all involved simultaneously, as aspects of the same collectively governed 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 collective governance operated.

Nor was the resulting egalitarianism a passive default. Boehm's concept of "reverse dominance hierarchies" (Hierarchy in the Forest, 1999) shows that hunter-gatherer societies maintain egalitarianism through constant coalition-formation against would-be dominants - ridicule, ostracism and, in extreme cases, lethal sanction. This coalitionary enforcement was not merely behavioral but constituted a selection pressure that shaped the species phenotypically over evolutionary time - selecting for prosociality and reduced reactive aggression while maintaining the capacity for proactive, coalitionary aggression. Unlike the domestication of other species, which was imposed externally by human breeders, human self-domestication was the product of coalitionary action from within the group.

The active maintenance of egalitarianism requires capacities that involve identity, participation, recognition and solidarity, not merely material calculation. When those capacities are undermined - as they are when classed societies reorganize social life around institutional separation and enforced compliance - egalitarianism erodes. Hrdy (Mothers and Others, 2009) locates a complementary biological mechanism: humans are "cooperative breeders," a species in which the raising of offspring is shared between parents and alloparents.^[3] 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 community self-governance 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 convergent point across these research programs is that the integration visible in egalitarian social life is a consequence of collective governance, not a separate feature. Remove the governance and the integration either dissolves or is replaced by imposed forms that serve whoever captures control.

This is not as foreign to the Marxist tradition as it may initially appear. In the 1844 Manuscripts, Marx argued that humans are Gattungswesen - species-beings - whose distinctive character lies in their capacity for universal, creative, self-determining social activity, and that alienated labor fragments this species-character along multiple dimensions simultaneously: from the product, from the activity itself, from other humans, and from the species as such. That fourfold account already implies that what exploitation breaks is not merely an economic relation but an integrated form of social existence. The anthropological evidence gives empirical content to what Marx formulated philosophically - and suggests that the tradition's subsequent narrowing of focus to the critique of political economy came at the cost of the broader insight.^[4]

A clarification is needed here, because the egalitarian governance 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 — including through reorganization — without the affected population losing collective control over the process. The evidence suggests that it often did - and that what classed 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 classless and class-restructured social life is not about whether dimensions of social existence ever come apart — material conditions alone can produce that. It is about whether the people affected retain collective control over how the reorganization proceeds, or whether the separation is locked into institutional structures that serve a ruling class and that the affected population cannot renegotiate from below. Class rule also hardens in-group/out-group boundaries that in the pre-class pattern were fluid, context-dependent, and subject to coalitionary renegotiation: it provides rigid institutional categories — race, caste, citizenship, credential — where the species-typical pattern had negotiable ones, and it narrows the scope of empathic response to those classified as deserving while directing exclusionary impulses toward those classified as undeserving. The forcible removal of collective control and the rigidification of social boundaries are two aspects of the same process: both are features of class-restructured human life.

Nor does the evidence imply that all pre-class societies were identically egalitarian. The ethnographic and archaeological record shows substantial variation - seasonal hierarchy, regional differences, divergent forms of gender relations. That variation had material causes: technological, geographic, demographic and ecological conditions shaped which forms of social organization could take hold, and institutionalized hierarchy became dominant only where specific material preconditions - storable surplus, record-keeping, debt systems, military capacity - converged.^[5] What remains constant through this variation is the point that matters for the present argument: human social reproduction depends on multiple dimensions - subsistence, care, identity, participation, recognition - characteristically addressed within the same practices rather than separated across institutions. That is a characteristic of the species, not of any specific organizational form.

One important qualification is needed. Under conditions of extreme deprivation - famine, acute physical threat - the integrated character of social reproduction breaks down, and subsistence acquires 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 classed 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 dependence on collectively maintained social structures is not limited to our species. Elephant populations whose social organization has 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 older matriarchs and bulls display what researchers have described as a breakdown of social regulation, with effects persisting for decades after the original disruption.^[6] The parallel is structural: elephants, like humans, are a social species whose behavioral regulation depends on collectively maintained social order — in their case, matriarchal governance. Destroy that governance from outside, and the result is not merely the loss of specific "services" that can be individually substituted; it is pathology across the full range of social behavior. The same logic applies to domesticated animals confined in conditions that prevent normal social organization — crowded together in groups they did not form, denied the social structures their species depends on, subjected to imposed arrangements that serve production rather than their own functioning. This point — that the forced destruction or prevention of collectively governed social life produces systematic damage in social species generally — will prove important when we turn to the question of whose social existence classed societies restructure.

What classed societies do to the reproductive fabric

Class domination restructures the social fabric — but it does not restructure it from scratch. Material conditions independent of class logic — sedentarization, population growth, ecological change, the logistics of feeding dense settlements — can reorganize social practices on their own: separating activities that were previously embedded in the same relations, creating new functional specializations, altering who does what with whom. What class domination adds is the forcible locking of that reorganization into institutional structures that serve class reproduction, and the removal of collective control over how the reorganization proceeds. Through various forms of institutionalized violence — extraction, enclosure, debt, forced labor, military coercion — it captures reorganizations already underway, deepens them, and prevents the affected population from renegotiating the result. The people whose practices are restructured experience this as loss — and the damage it produces is measurable wherever it occurs.

The mechanism is consistent in its logic, if enormously varied in its historical forms. To maintain class rule — to get others to do work for them on an ongoing basis without having to meaningfully reciprocate — 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 and from the collective control of the people doing the reproducing.

The earliest documented classed societies illustrate the process. In Bronze Age Mesopotamia, urbanization, irrigation management, and the logistics of feeding concentrated populations were already reorganizing social practices before anything we would recognize as class domination had consolidated. Population density required new forms of coordination; fixed infrastructure made fission — the egalitarian mechanism for resolving irreconcilable disputes — incredibly costly; population growth compounded the problem; periodic flooding and crop failure produced hunger that encouraged raiding, which in turn rewarded military organization; storable grain surpluses created resources worth controlling. What class dynamics did was capture this reorganization and lock it in. Production became something done for others rather than with them; distribution became something administered by temple and palace institutions rather than negotiated through kinship; ritual became specialized under a priestly class; protection became the province of armed retainers. The archaeological and textual record — debt tablets, ration lists, temple labor accounts — documents not a single rupture but a gradual process in which activities that had been reorganizing for material reasons were assigned to separate institutional domains under centralized control, and the affected populations lost the capacity to renegotiate the arrangement.^[7]

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. 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 the restructuring means.

The restructuring of that fabric was not only a loss. It also produced capacities that did not and probably could not exist within small-scale integrated social life. The separation of knowledge production from immediate practical context made possible sustained inquiry, literacy, science, and specialized intellectual work - including, for that matter, the kind of theoretical analysis this essay attempts. The abstraction from concrete local relations that classed societies impose is also what makes it easier to conceive of solidarity with strangers - to recognize shared interests with people one has never met, across distances that face-to-face communities cannot span. And small-scale collective governance has its own costs: the tighter the weave of social life, the less room there is for those who do not fit the pattern. Small-scale egalitarian societies can accommodate some diversity - the ethnographic record shows this - but their tolerance has limits set by the very closeness of collective life that makes them work. The restructuring, for all its costs, also opened space for forms of individuation, dissent, and social experimentation that tightly integrated communities tend to constrain.

There is a further complication. When one classed order supersedes another, the dissolution of the old order's specific forms of domination is often experienced as genuine liberation — serfs freed from feudal bonds, subjects from absolutist restrictions, colonized peoples from imperial control — even though the new order imposes its own restructuring. Each historical transition has been partly experienced as emancipation from the last, and with reason: real constraints were lifted, real possibilities opened. There is no single lost fabric to which return is possible. Seeking return is the Romantic and ultimately corporatist move, and it is a dead end. You cannot undo the division of labor, de-invent literacy, or return to face-to-face scale — nor should you want to.

But these achievements are, in their current form, class-structured. Public sanitation, clean water, and modern medicine dramatically reduced mortality — but access to them is stratified by class, nationality, and geography. Literacy opened the possibility of self-education and political organization — but the institutions that teach it also sort people into credential hierarchies that reproduce class positions. Science exists but is gatekept by credentials and funding structures that serve class reproduction. Universalist ethics exist but are selectively applied — extended to citizens but not to migrants, to the credentialed but not to the imprisoned, to humans but not to the nonhuman animals discussed above. Coordination at scale exists but serves accumulation. The capacities are real; their current institutional form ensures they are rationed and kept artificially scarce. The goal is to build social forms that incorporate what the restructuring made possible while overcoming its class-structured character.

The institutional normalization is reinforced by narrative. Every class society produces stories that make the separation of domains appear natural or divinely ordained. The pattern is visible from the earliest documented cases — Mesopotamian creation myths in which humans were created to perform labor for the gods, the opening books of the Torah in which expulsion from a garden of effortless abundance leads within a few generations to God favoring the pastoralist Abel over the farmer Cain, naturalizing both the herding economy on which early Israelite class stratification depended and the domestication of animals on which it rested — through to modern meritocratic ideology, and its logic is consistent: each sphere of life has its proper ruler, and the laborer simply works. 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, captures the spirit precisely. These narrative traditions do not merely reflect the restructuring; 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 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 the thoroughness with which this logic is embedded in institutions, from schooling to the welfare system, but the structure is old. The normalization is backed, in every period, by institutional violence - from tributary extraction and temple corvée through feudal obligation to modern policing, incarceration, credential gatekeeping, and welfare conditionality.

But the normalization also exploits biological capacities that have their own independent basis. The readiness to sort people into hierarchies of deserving and undeserving is not only institutionally trained; it grafts onto the primate dominance tendencies that coalitionary egalitarianism suppresses but does not eliminate, and onto the parochial tendency that couples in-group bonding with out-group exclusion. Meritocratic categories do not create these tendencies — but they provide them with targets, scope, and institutional permanence. Class societies determine where the parochial boundary falls, who counts as a legitimate object of concern, and what categories organize the sorting. The biological tendencies provide the raw material; class-structured institutions industrialize it.^[8]

The result is that the class-structured organization of social life comes to appear natural — as though the institutional arrangement were a reflection of how needs work rather than a product of who governs their fulfillment. Maslow's pyramid, as discussed above, is a case in point: it reflects not the structure of human needs but the conditions of deprivation that class societies produce, and it feels intuitive precisely because those conditions are so pervasive.

The pattern described above is general to classed societies. What distinguishes capitalism is what it produces afterward: an unprecedentedly flexible system of re-integrations bound to class reproduction. Consumer goods substitute for participation, social media for community, personal branding for identity. These provide real forms of connection and recognition. But they are partial and conditional, addressing isolated dimensions of need within institutional structures that serve accumulation.

Earlier classed societies were more rigid in this regard. To take the European case, which is the best documented for these purposes: feudalism's competing solidarities - the Church, estate identity, local lordship - were inherited or adapted rather than dynamically generated, and they were brittle. The Black Death of the mid-14th century illustrates the point. A material catastrophe that killed a third or more of Europe's population thereby 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. The feudal order had no mechanism for generating new competing solidarities to replace the ones the plague had discredited. Modern class societies are far more resilient in this respect — not because they are better governed but because they sustain a much wider range of sources of meaning and identity (consumer culture, professional identity, national belonging, lifestyle communities, digital subcultures), none of which need threaten class rule to function as competing solidarities. The capacity to generate new forms of belonging as old ones erode is one of capitalism's most distinctive features.

The nation-state is the most powerful competing solidarity, and it is important to be precise about why. It 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). But 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; selective in ways that reproduce class domination. And appealing because life under class rule is materially precarious, and classed societies offer little else that addresses that precarity as comprehensively.

The same logic operates at every level of scale - and each competing solidarity enforces as well as attracts. Sectoral organizations enforce 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 comply - and the enforcement works because it is inseparable from the real protections that belonging provides.

Max-Neef's framework as a diagnostic instrument

Human social reproduction was, for most of human history, relatively egalitarian, with social practices that were collectively governed. Classed societies remove that collective governance, locking whatever separations material conditions produce into institutional structures the affected population cannot renegotiate. 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).^[9] 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. For most of human history, the practices addressing these dimensions were under collective control and subject to renegotiation, free from the institutional separations that classed societies impose.

The analytical power of this separation, however, is considerable. 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 more radical than it may appear.

Classed societies do not only restructure the fabric of social reproduction; they also teach people to accept that some people's needs matter less than others'. The meritocratic reasoning that normalizes the restructuring 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. We also learn not to draw attention to needs at all: to articulate a need is to expose a vulnerability, and classed societies punish vulnerability. The result is a double suppression - needs are both hierarchically ranked and driven from acceptable discourse. Max-Neef's framework, by insisting that needs are 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.

The framework becomes sharper still through a second distinction: between needs and satisfiers. Needs, in Max-Neef's framework, are few and broadly universal; satisfiers - the concrete means by which needs are met - are historically and culturally variable, and they vary enormously in scope. A community feast and a supermarket both address subsistence, but the feast simultaneously provides participation, identity and affection while the supermarket addresses subsistence alone. The institutional separation described above — market, state, church, family, each primarily organized around a limited range of dimensions under class-structured control — is, in these terms, the systematic replacement of collectively governed satisfiers by imposed ones that serve class reproduction. This distinction allows us to ask not "what needs do workers have?" but "what satisfiers are produced for those needs, by whom, in which institutional domain, and with what effect on the other dimensions?"

Return to the competing solidarities described above, and the pattern becomes analytically precise. The nation-state addresses subsistence (welfare, public services), protection (law, military), and identity (citizenship, cultural belonging) — but offers little genuine participation (elections are periodic and bounded), almost no affection (the state does not care for you), and constrains creation and freedom to forms compatible with accumulation. Religious communities are strong where the state is weak: affection, identity, understanding, and a sense of meaning that connects daily life to something larger — but they typically enforce conformity in ways that curtail freedom, and their material provision is conditional on membership. Sectoral organizations address subsistence (wages, job security) and a bounded form of participation and identity — but only for those inside the sector, and at the cost of solidarity with those outside it. Each competing solidarity covers a different cluster of dimensions; none covers all of them; and the gaps left by each are precisely where the others gain their foothold.

Nazism represents the limit case: the Nazi state attempted to cover nearly the full range — subsistence through corporatist economics, protection through the security apparatus, identity through racial belonging, affection and belonging through the Volksgemeinschaft, participation through mass mobilization, creation through state-directed cultural production. Italian fascism was less dimensionally comprehensive, outsourcing meaning and affection largely to the Catholic Church. The Hindutva movement in India illustrates a contemporary variant: the RSS and its affiliated organizations (Sangh Parivar) have built a distributed ecosystem of schools, welfare programs, cultural organizations, and neighborhood committees that addresses understanding, subsistence, identity, participation, and belonging without relying on a party-state — a movement-level competing solidarity of extraordinary dimensional breadth. The ecosystem's coherence is maintained not through ideological uniformity (the affiliates disagree on major policy questions) but through the pracharak system: approximately 6,000 full-time cadres, trained through a three-year program, who occupy top management positions across all affiliates — from the BJP to the trade union to the student organization to the schools. The governance is hierarchical: pracharaks are appointed, not elected; the movement offers multidimensional need-fulfillment under centralized control rather than collective governance. Its exclusionary boundaries are maintained through communal violence and the systematic othering of Muslims and other minorities rather than through state terror alone.^[10]

What these cases share is the structural logic identified above: class-structured categories provide the parochial tendency with rigid targets, and the broader the dimensional coverage a competing solidarity achieves, the more coercive the boundary between inside and outside must become — because stronger bonds produce stronger exclusion, and the institutional categories ensure that exclusion falls on those the system designates as undeserving. All nationalism implies exclusion and antagonism; these are cases where the exclusion is pushed toward its extreme. The question class solidarity faces is whether it can address a broader range of dimensions than any of these — and under whose governance.^[11]

The asymmetry this reveals is persistent. Exploitation is itself multidimensional - to be exploited is to have one's participation curtailed, one's autonomy denied, one's subsistence made dependent, one's identity shaped by others' interests. But the dominant theoretical traditions within Marxism have tended to frame the struggle along its economic axis - wages, ownership, working conditions - while treating the other dimensions as secondary concerns or distractions. (The practice of the Second International was often broader than its theory — the SPD and Austrian Social Democrats built extensive parallel social worlds addressing education, culture, leisure, and mutual aid alongside material provision. But the theoretical framework understood these as means of developing class consciousness, not as addressing multidimensional needs in their own right. The practice was ahead of the theory — and when the organizations collapsed or were captured, no theoretical account existed of what had made them work.) This narrowing is itself a reproduction of the separation the tradition claims to oppose: it accepts the separation of "economics" from "culture" and "identity" that classed societies impose, and then tries to build solidarity on one side of the divide. The result is a movement that asks workers to organize around a narrow set of shared interests — wages, workplace safety, shorter hours, protection from arbitrary dismissal — that are real but far from universal even among workers, and that leave the other dimensions of their social existence to be filled by whatever is on offer. In practice, that means nationalism, religion, and sectoral belonging.

Marx himself identified this danger in the 1844 Manuscripts, in his critique of "crude communism" - the communism that merely universalizes private property rather than overcoming the reduction of human life to having. Such a communism, Marx wrote, is "the abstract negation of the entire world of culture and civilization" - a revolution that changes the distribution of goods without addressing the impoverishment of human existence that the system of private property produces. A class politics organized exclusively around wages and ownership risks being the strategic expression of exactly this narrowing.^[12]

Max-Neef's framework, then, provides a diagnostic vocabulary that Marx's early work anticipated but never operationalized. But it has two weaknesses that the present argument must address. First, it lacks a power analysis: it can describe what the nation-state provides and where it falls short, but cannot explain why the nation-state is structured the way it is. Second, Max-Neef asserts that needs are universal, but in his own work this reads as a philosophical commitment rather than a demonstrated finding - which is why this essay has grounded it in evolutionary biology and anthropology rather than taking it on faith.

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

The absence of a power analysis is especially visible when we consider satisfiers that claim to fulfill a need but actually impair it - 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 better alternatives are in principle available, if only we designed better policies. The examples he gives of constructive 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 destructive satisfiers are not policy failures but structural necessities of class reproduction?

That is what Marxists argue about the relation between capital, labor and nature. The subordination of people and the exploitation of 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 represents the clearest expression of this logic, the point at which the denial of need-universality becomes explicit doctrine rather than tacit practice.^[13] 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.

The biological and anthropological evidence developed above converts Max-Neef's assertion of universality into an empirically grounded claim. These are dimensions of social-reproductive functioning rooted in what we know about the species: its cooperative breeding, its dependence on collectively maintained social structures, its shared evolutionary heritage with other social animals. The meritocratic sorting of people into more and less deserving denies this species-level reality by treating some people's needs as less real than others'.^[14] What is hardwired is the dependence on collectively maintained social structures, which is characteristic of social species generally, as the elephant research established. The denial of need-universality that legitimizes class hierarchies is applied most systematically to domesticated animals, whose entire social existence is restructured by class-mediated production relations.^[15] What is distinctive about humans is the capacity to constantly invent new forms of classed exploitation, drawing most of the planet's life into their orbit.

Synthesis: building integrative forms of collective life

If the analysis developed above is correct - if competing solidarities succeed because they offer real, if partial, protection and belonging in a world defined by enforced scarcity and material danger - then a revolutionary movement that addresses fewer of those dimensions than its competitors will predictably lose the competition. The revolutionary task is therefore not only the abolition of class, but the construction of forms of collective life that address the full range of what classed societies have separated. This is not a "soft" supplement to the "hard" economic struggle. It is the core of what emancipation means.

But - as argued above - this cannot mean return. The task is to build forms of collective life that are collectively governed and capable of sustaining solidarity across difference, critical inquiry, and coordination at scale.^[16] That is harder than either nostalgic restoration or technocratic reform, and it is the only task that takes both the anthropological evidence and the historical situation seriously. The goal is not integration for its own sake - class societies produce their own imposed integrations. It is the restoration of collective governance over how social reproduction is organized, at scales and under conditions that small-scale egalitarian societies could not achieve - which requires, as the anthropological evidence shows, that the dimensions of social existence not be held apart and parceled out under class-structured control.

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. 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 separation 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 separation - 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.) Building integrative forms of collective life 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. It also means confronting the double suppression discussed above: the training that teaches people both that some needs matter less than others and that articulating needs at all is a sign of weakness. If classed societies punish vulnerability, then a movement that wants people to organize around their actual needs must first create conditions in which those needs can be voiced without penalty. This is not a therapeutic add-on; it is a structural precondition for the kind of organizing the analysis demands.

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 addressed subsistence, understanding, participation, identity and creation simultaneously within a single institutional form, governed by the participants themselves. Their destruction by both Francoist repression and Stalinist centralization was part of what made the anarchist movement's defeat irreversible.^[17]

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 reproduction of patriarchal norms that undermined the collective governance the programs depended on, and the progressive reduction of multidimensional community-building to a vehicle for party power.^[18]

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 and a re-expropriation: culture was reduced to propaganda, education to technical training, participation to obedience, solidarity to an administered affect, and control over all of them transferred from participants to the party-state.^[19]

The form of organization matters as much as its content, and 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 separation rather than challenging it. A movement that integrates these dimensions under participant control - 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 a point of central structural vulnerability: 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. The anthropological evidence extends the scope of that claim further than the feminist tradition has typically drawn it. The issue is not only that care work is undervalued and exploited, but that the entire fabric of human social existence has been reorganized by class logic into separate institutional domains that address real needs in class-structured and partial ways. Any revolutionary strategy that does not address that reorganization will generate competing solidarities as predictably as scarcity generates hoarding. The question is not whether the working class "can" be united - it is whether the movement offers a form of life that is appealing enough to outcompete the class-structured integrations on offer. That is a materialist question, not a motivational one: the conditions of reproduction shape the possibilities of solidarity.

Conclusion

The persistence of competing solidarities is not evidence that the working class "cannot be united." It is evidence that classed societies reorganize the 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 coalitionary egalitarianism, which produces integrated practices addressing multiple needs simultaneously as a consequence of collective governance; that classed societies remove collective governance over how social reproduction is organized, locking whatever separations material conditions produce into institutional domains 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 in large part because they offer broader composites of need-fulfillment and some measure of community control over the forms themselves. 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.