The relationship between material conditions and ideological formations has long been contested in social theory. Idealist traditions, from Hegel through contemporary cultural studies, tend to privilege ideas, discourses, and symbolic systems as relatively autonomous forces shaping social reality. Conversely, vulgar materialism reduces ideology to mere epiphenomena, mechanical reflections of economic base with no causal efficacy.Instead, Here it’s advanced a sophisticated materialist position that avoids both extremes, arguing that socioeconomic structures establish the boundaries of ideological possibility while allowing for contingency, agency, and reciprocal causation within those constraints. The core proposition is straightforward yet profound in its implications: socioeconomic structures, defined as the organization of production, distribution of productive assets, technological capacity, and relations between classes, establish the parameters within which ideological formations can emerge and gain adherents. This is not mechanical determinism but rather structural selectivity. Economic arrangements create certain problems that require solutions, certain opportunities that enable strategies, and certain contradictions that generate conflicts. Ideologies emerge as collective responses to these material realities, offering frameworks for understanding situations and prescriptions for action that make sense given the actual circumstances people face. Consider the fundamental insight that motivates this entire analysis: social actors develop ideological commitments not primarily through intellectual conversion—reading texts, being persuaded by arguments, adopting philosophical positions—but through pragmatic assessment of survival strategies and advancement opportunities available within existing material constraints. A Russian peasant in 1917 adopted collectivist politics not because Marxist theory was intellectually superior to liberal individualism, but because collectivization offered a viable path to securing land and surviving in a context where capital was scarce, concentrated in aristocratic and state hands, and inaccessible through individual accumulation. An American colonial settler embraced individualist ideology not because of philosophical conviction about natural rights, but because land was available, capital could be accumulated individually, and collective strategies solved no problem the settler actually faced. The ideology in each case rationalized and organised a material strategy that made practical sense given actual economic opportunities and constraints. This approach implies that economic structures exercise what we might call structural selectivity over ideological formations. Certain material conditions select for ideologies that either rationalise existing power relations for those who benefit from them, articulate feasible transformation strategies for subordinate groups seeking to improve their position, or become obsolete when material conditions change and the problems they addressed disappear or transform. Feudal ideology emphasising hierarchy, divine order, and mutual obligation made sense in a context of fixed land relations, localised production, and minimal commodity exchange. It became increasingly untenable as commercial relations expanded, land became a commodity, labour became mobile, and production for exchange displaced production for use. The ideology didn’t fail because better arguments appeared, but because the material world it described andorganisedd was being transformed by capitalist development. Yet once ideologies become institutionalised—embedded in state structures, educational systems, religious organisations, legal frameworks, and cultural practices—they develop autonomous momentum through what we might call temporal lag and path dependency. Institutions create interests in their own perpetuation. Bureaucracies reproduce themselves. Educational systems train each generation in inherited frameworks. Cultural practices become habitual, taken for granted, seemingly natural. This creates a lag between material change and ideological adaptation. Societies can continue operating with ideological frameworks whose material basis has eroded, generating growing contradictions until some crisis forces adaptation. The Catholic Church maintained ideological hegemony in Europe for centuries after commercial capitalism had begun undermining feudal relations, until the Protestant Reformation finally articulated an ideology better fitted to emerging capitalist social relations. Similarly, neoliberal ideology persists today despite the 2008 financial crisis revealing its failures, because the institutional apparatus supporting it—think tanks, economics departments, international financial institutions, media ownership, political party structures—continues reproducing it even as material conditions increasingly contradict its premises. This theoretical framework enables us to analyse each historical period through a consistent methodology that examines conjunctural specificity while identifying general patterns. For each major transformation, we investigate first the material infrastructure: what technologies existed, how capital was distributed, what resources were available, and how production was organised. Second, we analyse class structure: what social groups existed, how they related to means of production, and what organisational capacity they possessed. Third, we identify specific economic crises or opportunities that created pressure for ideological innovation. Fourth, we examine what ideologies actually emerged, who adopted them, and why these particular ideological forms rather than others. Fifth, we trace how successful ideologies became institutionally crystallised in organisations and state structures. Finally, we consider material feedback: how ideology, once implemented, subsequently altered material conditions in ways that shaped future ideological possibilities. This dialectical understanding recognises that while material conditions constrain and shape ideology, ideology is not simply a passive reflection. Ideas matter. They coordinate collective action, legitimate or challenge power relations, shape which material possibilities actors pursue, and become embedded in institutions that then structure economic activity. Property rights, after all, are ideological-legal constructs that fundamentally shape who can access capital and on what terms. Educational credentials are cultural-institutional forms that determine class position. Monetary systems rest on collective belief in value. Corporate forms, contracts, and markets are all social constructions that, once established, channel economic behaviour in particular directions. The relationship is genuinely dialectical: material base shapes ideological superstructure, which reconstitutes material base, in an ongoing historical process without final resolution.
Late Feudalism and the Emergence of Mercantile Capitalism
The transformation from feudalism to capitalism represents perhaps the most thoroughgoing restructuring of material life in human history, and correspondingly produced ideological innovations of world-historical significance. To understand how new ideologies emerged from changing material conditions, we must first grasp the economic structure of late feudalism and the specific contradictions that made it increasingly unstable. Late medieval Europe was organised around land-based production with fixed hierarchical relations. The vast majority of the population were peasants producing primarily for subsistence within local manorial economies. Lords extracted surplus through various forms of feudal rent and labor servicelabourile guild monopolies controlled urban craft production. Commodity circulation was limited, with most production aimed at use rather than exchange. Capital accumulation was severely constrained by multiple factors: feudal extraction diverted surplus from productive investment, guild regulations prevented innovation and competition, the Church condemned usury and luxury, and particularistic legal systems made long-distance trade difficult and risky. Technological stagnation in agriculture meant productivity gains were minimal, and population pressure against fixed land supply created recurring subsistence crises. This system entered a profound crisis in the fourteenth century. The Black Death, arriving in 1347 and recurring in waves thereafter, reduced the European population by perhaps thirty to fifty per cent within a few years. The demographic catastrophe fundamentally altered the balance of power between lords and peasants. With labour suddenly scarce, peasants found their bargaining power had dramatically increased. They could demand higher wages, secure tenure, reduced feudal obligations, or simply migrate to towns or regions offering better terms. Lords, meanwhile, faced declining revenues from fixed rents in an increasingly inflationary context as precious metals from expanded mining and later New World conquests increased the money supply. Some attempted to reimpose labour services and re-enserfment, particularly in Eastern Europe, where they succeeded in what historians call the Second Serfdom. Others converted to commercial agriculture, enclosing common lands and producing for expanding urban markets. Simultaneously, new material possibilities were emerging that would eventually burst the bounds of feudal organisation entirely. Long-distance trade networks expanded dramatically with the growth of the Hanseatic League, connecting Northern Europe, Italian city-states dominating Mediterranean commerce, and eventually Atlantic trade, opening entirely new circuits of exchange. The monetisation of the economy created liquid capital that could be accumulated, moved, and invested in ways impossible when wealth consisted primarily of land and feudal claims. Enclosure movements, particularly vigorous in England, transformed land itself into a commodity that could be bought and sold, destroying the feudal conception of land as embedded in hierarchical relations of obligation. Gunpowder technology undermined the feudal military monopoly that had rested on armoured cavalry, making possible both royal centralisation and eventual bourgeois revolution. These material transformations created new class formations with distinct interests that could not be adequately expressed within feudal ideology. The peasantry, facing both new opportunities and new threats, sought secure land tenure and reduced feudal obligations. In regions where labour scarcity was most acute after the plague, they successfully won wage increases and mobility rights. Geographic mobility became possible as urban centres grew and new lands became available. The feudal nobility split between conservative factions attempting to maintain traditional extraction and progressive factions converting to commercial agriculture and trade. An entirely new merchant class accumulated capital through trade arbitrage, but found themselves constrained at every turn by guild monopolies, feudal tolls and customs barriers, and particularistic legal regimes that made commercial activity precarious. They needed uniform law, secure property rights, and the elimination of internal barriers to trade. Urban artisans found guild protections increasingly inadequate as merchant capital penetrated production through the putting-out system, creating proto-proletarian consciousness among workers who no longer controlled their own production process. It is against this background of material transformation and class realignment that we must understand the Protestant Reformation. The Reformation did not emerge from purely theological discovery or spiritual revelation, but from structural contradictions in late feudal society that made new religious ideologies both necessary and possible for specific social groups. The northern European commercial classes faced Church extraction through indulgences, tithes, and various fees that diverted capital from accumulation. Printing technology, developed after 1450, reduced the Church’s information monopoly and enabled ideological competition in ways previously impossible when books were rare, manuscript copies controlled by clerical institutions. Territorial princes saw the vast wealth accumulated by the Church as a tempting target for seizure to fund their state-building projects and wars. The ideological content of Protestantism mapped precisely onto these material interests. The doctrine of justification by faith removed the Church as a necessary intermediary for salvation, disintermediating the relationship between believer and God just as emerging market relations were disintermediating feudal exchange. The Protestant work ethic, as Max Weber famously argued, sanctified profit-seeking and capital accumulation as signs of divine favour rather than sinful avarice, providing religious legitimation for behaviour that Catholic doctrine condemned. The priesthood of all believers articulated an egalitarian ideology useful for merchant classes challenging aristocratic privilege based on birth. The translation of the Bible into vernacular languages and the emphasis on individual interpretation broke the clerical monopoly on scriptural meaning, analogous to breaking guild monopolies on craft knowledge. The geographic pattern of Reformation success reveals its material basis with striking clarity. Protestantism thrived in commercially advanced regions where merchant classes were numerous and powerful: the Netherlands, Northern Germany, England, Scotland, Scandinavia, and the Swiss cities. It failed or was suppressed in the agrarian periphery, where feudal lords remained dominant and their alliance with the Catholic Church served their interests in maintaining hierarchical authority: Spain, Southern Italy, Poland, rural France. This was not because people in commercial regions were more intelligent or spiritually advanced, but because Protestant ideology offered material and organisational advantages to groups with actual power in those contexts. Dutch and English merchants found in Calvinism a religious justification for commercial activity and a basis for political organisation against Catholic monarchs and feudal restrictions. Spanish and Polish landlords found in Counter-Reformation Catholicism a legitimation of hierarchy and authority useful for controlling peasant populations. The peasant revolts that punctuated this period, including the massive German Peasants’ War of 1524-1525, Kett’s Rebellion in England in 1549, and numerous smaller uprisings, emerged from the material pressures of enclosure movements and feudal restoration attempts. The egalitarian religious ideologies that often accompanied these revolts—Anabaptism, the Diggers, the Levellers—expressed the desperate situation of peasants facing expropriation without alternative employment. Yet these movements characteristically took millenarian forms, expecting divine intervention or apocalyptic transformation rather than building institutional alternatives. This reflected the material impossibility of their situation: peasants lacked the organisational capacity and capital to build a viable alternative social order, even though the existing order was becoming intolerable. Millennial waiting made sense when transformation seemed necessary but materially impossible. This contrasts sharply with later socialist movements that could draw on the organisational infrastructure of industrial production and articulate concrete alternatives based on socialising already-centralized means of production. The emergence of absolutist ideology represents another material adaptation to changing conditions. Territorial princes consolidated power by monopolising military force through gunpowder armies, creating tax bureaucracies to fund permanent military establishments, and breaking local feudal autonomy. The ideology of divine right sacralized this centralised authority, while mercantilist economic doctrine provided a rationale for state direction of the economy to accumulate bullion and build state power. The concept of raison d’état offered a secular justification for state action unconstrained by traditional moral or religious limits. Absolutism emerged strongest precisely where merchant classes were too weak to establish republican forms—as in France, Spain, and Prussia—but strong enough to fund centralised states through taxation. It represented a compromise formation, neither fully feudal nor fully capitalist, that managed the transition through state power. Certain ideologies could not yet emerge because their material preconditions did not exist. Liberal individualism made no sense when capital was still scarce and concentrated, production was organised corporately through guilds and estates, and no secure property rights or uniform legal system enabled individual market participation. Socialism was impossible when no proletariat existed, production remained artisanal or small-scale agricultural, and subsistence crises were Malthusian—too many people relative to fixed land—rather than distributional problems amenable to collective appropriation. The ideological universe was constrained by the material world in which people actually lived and the real problems they actually faced.
Commercial Capitalism and the Age of Liberal Revolution
The period from roughly 1600 to 1800 witnessed the maturation of commercial capitalism and the ideological revolutions that legitimised and organised it. Material transformations created new possibilities and problems that feudal and absolutist ideologies could not adequately address, generating liberal, republican, and radical democratic ideologies that articulated the interests of emerging bourgeois and popular classes. The economic structure underwent a fundamental transformation as world trade expanded through the Atlantic triangular trade connecting Europe, Africa, and the Americas, and through Asian trade networks dominated by European joint-stock companies. Primitive accumulation—the process by which capital was initially gathered through violence, theft, and coercion rather than market exchange—proceeded through multiple mechanisms simultaneously. In England, the enclosure of common lands forcibly separated peasants from their means of subsistence, creating both landless proletarians who had to sell their labour and concentrated landholdings that could be farmed commercially. Colonial conquest seized land and resources globally, while the Atlantic slave trade and plantation slavery generated immense wealth extracted from enslaved African labour. Proto-industrialisation through the putting-out system began organising rural manufacturing under merchant capital without yet concentrating production in factories. Agricultural improvements, particularly in England and the Netherlands, increased productivity substantially through crop rotation, selective breeding, new crops from the Americas, and drainage of wetlands. This agricultural revolution created the surplus population that would staff emerging industries, the food surplus that would feed growing cities, and the wealth that would finance industrial investment. The general result was a massive expansion in capital availability, though still concentrated in merchant hands and increasingly in improving landlords who farmed commercially. The class structure was being fundamentally remade. A genuine bourgeoisie emerged as an economically dominant but politically subordinate class. These merchants, manufacturers, financiers, and commercial farmers controlled growing wealth and directed increasing amounts of productive activity, yet remained excluded from political power monopolised by hereditary aristocracies. The aristocracy itself was transforming, increasingly dependent on state offices and intermarriage with bourgeois wealth rather than feudal extraction. Artisans faced displacement by merchant-organised production, their skills being fragmented and subordinated to capitalist control through the putting-out system. An incipient proletariat appeared in textile manufacturing and other early industries, no longer controlling their means of production but working for wages. Classical liberalism emerged precisely where capital was becoming available to broader strata, but state-enforced monopolies and feudal restrictions blocked its accumulation and deployment. John Locke, writing in the aftermath of England’s Glorious Revolution of 1689, when a merchant and gentry alliance displaced royal absolutism, articulated a theory of natural rights centred on property. His famous doctrine that mixing labour with nature creates property rights provided ideological justification for both enclosures—where improving landlords claimed previously common lands—and colonial appropriation—where European settlers claimed Indigenous lands by virtue of “improving” them through agriculture. The social contract theory legitimised revolution when rulers violated property rights, providing a framework for challenging royal authority in the name of property-owning subjects. Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, published in 1776, articulated the mature ideology of commercial capitalism emerging from the Scottish Enlightenment’s analysis of a commercialising but not yet industrial economy. Smith’s arguments for removing guild restrictions, free trade against mercantilist state direction, and market coordination through the invisible hand expressed precisely the interests of the merchant class. They wanted freedom from feudal and mercantilist restrictions without challenging property rights or capitalist relations of production. The ideology of natural rights emerged as the bourgeoisie needed universal principles to oppose aristocratic privilege, yet principles that centered on centred and contract rather than substantive equality. The minimal state doctrine reflected merchant interests in ending feudal extraction while maintaining state enforcement of property and contracts. The structural selectivity of liberal ideology becomes clear when we examine who found it appealing. Commercial classes with capital to invest, improving landlords engaged in market-oriented agriculture, and professional classes selling services in expanding markets all had material interests aligned with liberalism. The aristocracy, dependent on state privileges, peasants being expropriated who needed protection rather than market exposure, and the urban poor, without capital, for whom markets meant starvation risk, had no such interests. Liberal ideology appealed to those for whom capital accumulation through market activity was a viable strategy, while those without access to capital or facing dispossession found nothing appealing in an ideology celebrating market freedom. Radical republicanism emerged in contexts where commercial development had created educated middle strata but oligarchic political structures excluded them from power. The English Civil War of the 1640s saw Levellers articulating democratic demands as artisans and small proprietors challenged both royalist and aristocratic republican factions. They demanded suffrage extension to property holders, anticipating later democratic movements. The Diggers, representing landless labourers, advocated a return to common land, but remained marginal precisely because most English were becoming wage labourers rather than seeking a return to peasant agriculture. Their ideology addressed a vanishing material situation rather than the emerging reality of industrial capitalism. The American Revolution crystallised a colonial settler ideology that combined liberal and republican elements in a unique configuration shaped by specific material conditions. The colonial population had distributed access to land through ongoing Indigenous dispossession, creating a society of relatively independent farmers and townspeople. Revolutionary ideology emphasised republican virtue, possible because land ownership was widespread enough to create a substantial body of independent property holders. Popular sovereignty made sense where property ownership was broadly distributed rather than concentrated in aristocratic hands. Anti-mercantilism expressed colonial frustration with British restrictions on manufacturing and trade that blocked capital accumulation and economic development. The Revolution succeeded because material conditions enabled a cross-class alliance of planters, merchants, farmers, and artisans against British rule, unified by their common interest in economic independence and territorial expansion westward. The question of why the American Revolution was not socialist reveals the material determinants of ideology with particular clarity. Material conditions made individual accumulation feasible in ways that rendered socialist ideology irrelevant to most colonists’ actual situations. The land frontier continuously absorbed surplus population, preventing the emergence of a landless proletarian majority. The colonial economy integrated into Atlantic trade as commodity exporters—tobacco, cotton, grain, timber—making market relations the basis of prosperity. Most critically, the slave labour system gave white settlers cross-class racial solidarity. Poor whites might have precarious economic positions, but shared with wealthy whites a racial status that provided both psychological compensation and material benefits through access to certain occupations and legal privileges. Socialism requires working-class solidarity across racial and ethnic lines, but American slavery and its aftermath created precisely the racial division that would perpetually undermine such solidarity. The French Revolution represents the most complex and revealing case of ideological formation in this period precisely because France combined contradictory material conditions that generated rapid ideological shifts as different class coalitions temporarily gained power. France simultaneously experienced advanced commercial development, severe fiscal crisis from war debts and colonial ventures, a rigid estate system blocking bourgeois political power despite their growing economic weight, a large landless or land-poor peasantry facing subsistence crises, and concentrated urban artisan and labour classes in Paris. This combustible mixture produced a revolution that cycled through multiple ideological phases as material conditions and class coalitions shifted. The initial phase of liberal constitutionalism from 1789 to 1791 expressed the interests of the wealthy bourgeoisie and liberal nobility who wanted a constitutional monarchy, property franchise, and careers open to talent rather than birth. Their demand was fundamentally for ending feudal privileges that blocked capital accumulation and channelling political power to property owners. The radical republican phase from 1792 to 1793 saw power shift to the petit bourgeoisie—small proprietors and artisans—and middling peasants who feared both aristocratic restoration and proletarianization. Jacobin ideology combined universal male suffrage with price controls, small property distribution, and civic virtue, attempting to build a republic of independent small producers. The sans-culotte radicalism of 1793-1794 represented the poorest urban workers and unemployed facing food scarcity, unemployment, and war mobilisation. Their demands for price controls, requisitions, redistribution, and direct democracy expressed desperate material conditions where survival required dramatic state intervention and wealth redistribution. Finally, the Thermidorian Reaction and Directory period from 1794 onward saw property owners and the bourgeoisie reassert control once economic conditions stabilised and military success removed the immediate crisis pressure, returning to a republic of talent and property. This rapid cycling through ideological positions was not capricious but reflected changing material conditions and the victories or defeats of different class coalitions. No single ideology could dominate because France’s social structure was genuinely transitional, neither fully feudal nor fully capitalist, containing within it peasant majorities seeking land, artisans defending craft independence, merchants seeking market freedom, workers facing proletarianization, and aristocrats fighting to preserve privilege. Each group’s ideology made sense given their material position, and political power shifted as military, economic, and organisational circumstances changed. The emergence of the first genuinely socialist or communist ideas in this period, with Babeuf’s Conspiracy of Equals in 1796, proves instructive precisely because it was premature and failed. Material preconditions for communism did not yet exist despite the appearance of a revolutionary situation. Concentrations of propertyless workers existed in Paris and other cities, and the revolutionary context made radical transformation seem possible. Yet there was no industrial proletariat, no organisational infrastructure beyond conspiratorial networks, and no viable economic model for coordinating a complex economy without markets. Babouvist communism failed because the peasant majority violently opposed property abolition, no administrative capacity existed for a planned economy, and artisan production remained dominant—communism made no material sense for small producers who owned their own tools and worked independently. Socialist ideology had emerged before its time, articulating an aspiration without a material basis. It would have to wait for industrial capitalism to create the conditions—concentrated proletariat, socialised production, organisational infrastructure—that would make it viable.
Industrial Capitalism and the Workers’ Movement
The industrial revolution transformed not just production but the entire structure of social relations, creating new classes with new interests requiring new ideologies to articulate and organise them. The period from roughly 1800 to 1914 witnessed the emergence of the industrial working class and the ideological formations—socialism, anarchism, social democracy—that expressed their interests and aspirations while reflecting the specific material conditions and organisational capacities available to workers in different contexts. The economic transformation was staggering in scope and speed. The factory system concentrated hundreds or thousands of workers in single production sites, replacing dispersed artisanal production. Steam power and mechanisation increased productivity while reducing skill requirements and worker autonomy. Railways and telegraph created national and international markets, while steamships bound the world economy together. Joint-stock corporations concentrated capital in amounts beyond any individual fortune. Boom-bust business cycles became characteristic of the new economy, creating recurring unemployment and insecurity. By the mid-nineteenth century in Britain and somewhat later elsewhere, industrial production had decisively displaced agriculture as the dominant sector, and wage labour become the characteristic form of work. The class structure was being fundamentally remade. The industrial bourgeoisie displaced merchants as the dominant fraction of the capitalist class, controlling the commanding heights of the economy through ownership of factories, mines, railways, and banks. Most significantly, an industrial proletariat emerged as the majority class in advanced economies—England by mid-century, Germany by the 1870s, the United States by the 1890s. Unlike peasants or artisans, industrial workers owned nothing but their labour, worked collectively in large enterprises, and were subject to market discipline and industrial time-work discipline. The artisanate was progressively prproletarianisedr marginalised as craft production gave way to mechanized manufacturing. The peasantry began massive rural-to-urban migration, though it remained substantial in many countries through the entire period. For the working class, capital availability had fundamentally changed character. Unlike in earlier periods when a peasant might hope to secure land or an artisan to establish an independent workshop, industrial workers faced a world where capital was concentrated in bourgeois hands and no realistic individual accumulation path existed. Wages purchased subsistence, rarely more. Credit systems were inaccessible to workers. The land frontier was closing in Europe, and even in settler colonies like the United States, the era of free homesteading was ending by century’s end. Individual strategies of advancement were blocked. Collective strategies became materially rational in a way they had not been for earlier subordinate classes. Scientific socialism and Marxism became viable ideological forces only when these material preconditions had matured. Marx’s analysis, developed through the 1840s to 1860s and published definitively in Capital in 1867, explicitly adopted a materialist method. His argument was that capitalism itself creates its own gravediggers through the concentration of capital, producing a corresponding concentration of workers, the socialization of production contradicting private appropriation, and crisis tendencies requiring systemic transformation. Before industrialization, this analysis made no sense because production was dispersed, workers were not concentrated, and no organizational basis existed for collective appropriation. The factory system changed everything. Hundreds of workers laboring together in coordinated production processes could recognize their collective power. Industrial discipline created habits of organization and coordination. Urban concentration enabled communication and political organization. Cyclical crises and unemployment demonstrated capitalism’s instability and created periods of radicalization. The geographic pattern of Marxist movement strength reveals its material determinants with great precision. Strong Marxist movements emerged in contexts of large-scale industrial concentration, such as German heavy industry with its massive steel plants and coal mines, or the huge Russian factories in Petrograd and Moscow, where thousands of workers laboured side by side. Repressive political systems that blocked reformist paths, as in Tsarist Russia, Wilhelmine Germany, and Austria-Hungary, made revolutionary socialism appealing because incremental improvement seemed impossible within existing institutions. Recent rural-to-urban migration often created workers who retained peasant communal memory and could imagine collective property relations translated to industrial contexts. Conversely, Marxist movements remained weak where small-scale production persisted, as in France and Italy, where anarchism found more adherents among artisans and small producers. They also remained weak where liberal political systems allowed reformist labor movements to win incremental gains through electoral and union activity, as in Britain and the United States. Anarchism’s material genesis lay in social groups and production contexts quite different from those that generated Marxism. Anarchist ideology emerged strongest among artisans facing proletarianization but still retaining craft identity and autonomy, agricultural laborers in regions of large estates such as Southern Spain, Italy, and Ukraine, and decentralized industrial workers such as Swiss watchmakers or French silk weavers who worked in small workshops. The ideological content is mapped directly onto this material base. Anti-statism reflected the small producers’ experience of the state as an external threat rather than a potential instrument, since small producers had no possibility of capturing state power. Federalism matched the reality of decentralised production where coordination occurred through horizontal networks rather than hierarchical command. Direct action made sense where workers lacked political representation and had to rely on their own efforts. Mutual aid reflected face-to-face community relations in villages and neighbourhoods rather than the abstract solidarity of large industrial plants. Anarchism declined as a significant force precisely because the material conditions that sustained it were being superseded. Centralized large-scale industry became dominant, rendering obsolete the artisanal ideal of autonomous production. The organizational requirements of coordinated action in mass industry favoured centralised unions and parties that anarchists rejected. Modern state capacity expanded enormously, making anarchist tactics of propaganda by deed and local insurrection ineffective against well-organized police and military forces. Workers gradually gained political representation through suffrage extension, reducing the appeal of anti-political stances. The comparison is instructive: anarchism thrived among workers who retained artisanal consciousness and worked in contexts where autonomy remained partially viable, while Marxism succeeded among workers who had fully internalized industrial discipline and worked in contexts where collective organization was necessary for any effective action. Social democracy and reformist socialism represented a third ideological response to industrial capitalism, one that reflected yet different material conditions than revolutionary socialism or anarchism. Reformism became viable where parliamentary systems gave the working class electoral access, economic growth created room for wage increases without necessarily reducing profits, colonial exploitation provided surplus that could be redistributed to metropolitan workers, and strong trade unions won incremental improvements. The German Social Democratic Party provides the paradigmatic case. It became the largest socialist party in the world by the early twentieth century, combining formally Marxist revolutionary rhetoric with practice that was entirely reformist. This reflected material realities: German workers were benefiting from rapid industrial growth through rising wages and improved conditions, Bismarck’s welfare state provided insurance against sickness, accidents, and old age, and electoral success gave workers real political influence. By 1912 ,the SPD was the largest party in the Reichstag. Revolutionary ideology seemed less urgent when conditions were improving and power could be won through elections. Eduard Bernstein’s revisionist challenge to orthodox Marxism, published in 1899, explicitly recognized these changed material conditions. He observed that working-class living standards were improving rather than deteriorating as Marx had predicted, that the middle classes were expanding rather than disappearing through proletarianization, and that democracy enabled peaceful transition to socialism without violent revolution. The orthodox Marxist response from Kautsky, Luxemburg, and others defended revolutionary theory, yet in practice ,the SPD operated as a reformist party seeking incremental gains. Material incentives overrode ideological commitment. Workers who were gaining from the existing system, however slowly, had material reasons to prefer reform to the risks of revolution. Christian socialism and social Catholicism emerged from the Catholic Church’s recognition that it was losing the working class to secular socialism and needed to articulate an alternative that addressed workers’ material grievances while preserving Church authority and capitalist property relations. Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum established the framework: class collaboration against class struggle, recognition of limited property rights with social obligations, just wages enabling family subsistence, and the right of workers to organize in Christian unions. This offered workers material concessions—welfare provisions, union rights, social legislation—while preserving private property, social hierarchy, and Church influence. The ideology found its strongest support in Catholic regions with substantial peasant and artisan populations, such as Bavaria, the Veneto, and Ireland, and in paternalistic industrial settings where employers provided housing, schools, and social services. It remained weak in Protestant areas with individualist culture and in large-scale industrial centres where radical secular unions were strong. The pattern reveals ideological selectivity: Christian socialism appealed where it could deliver real material improvements to workers whose religious identity and communal structures remained strong, but could not compete where secular class consciousness had crystallized and militant organization won greater concessions. Syndicalism emerged in yet another distinct material context, primarily in countries where trade unions were strong but parliamentary systems were weak or corrupt. In France, Spain, and the United States, before World War I, workers had built substantial union organizations but found electoral politics controlled by bourgeois parties, unresponsive to working-class demands, or outright corrupt. Syndicalist ideology reflected this situation: the general strike would be the revolutionary weapon, direct worker control of production would replace both capitalist exploitation and state bureaucracy, and industrial unions organized by industry rather than craft would coordinate economic activity. The stance was explicitly anti-political since parliament seemed a dead end. Yet syndicalism ultimately failed because coordinating a complex modern economy requires a state-like apparatus, whether called a state or not, general strikes succeeded tactically in winning specific demands but could not seize and hold political power against organized state resistance, and workers discovered they needed state protection through welfare legislation, safety regulation, and labor law enforcement. The ideology expressed a genuine working-class militancy and organizational capacity, but could not overcome the material reality that modern economies require coordinated planning that markets alone cannot provide and that only state-like institutions can deliver. The question of why socialism did not emerge as a major force in the United States despite advanced industrial development has preoccupied scholars since Werner Sombart posed it explicitly in 1906. The materialist answer lies in multiple factors that made socialist ideology less appealing to American workers than to their European counterparts. The frontier and land availability provided a safety valve until the 1890s, allowing discontented workers and poor farmers to seek individual solutions through westward migration. American workers received substantially higher wages than European workers due to labor scarcity in an expanding economy, and mass production techniques pioneered by Ford and others enabled working-class consumption of manufactured goods—the five-dollar day introduced by Ford in 1914 was explicitly designed to create worker-consumers. Most critically, racial and ethnic segmentation divided the working class in ways that prevented solidarity. Slavery and its aftermath created white cross-class solidarity as even poor whites shared privileges denied to Black Americans. Successive waves of immigration brought Irish, Italians, Eastern Europeans, and Asians who competed for jobs and were played off against each other by employers who deliberately used ethnic tensions to prevent a unified labor organization. The American political system also shaped possibilities. Early white male suffrage by the 1830s preempted later demands for voting rights as a class issue—workers already had the vote before socialist parties formed. The two-party system absorbed dissent into established parties rather than allowing independent working-class political organization.Decentralised federalism made national labor politics difficult to coordinate. Corporate welfare capitalism saw large companies like General Electric and US Steel provide pensions, housing, medical care, and other benefits directly to workers, creating company loyalty and preempting independent unions. The ideological result was a distinctive American combination of individualism expressed in self-made man mythology, consumerism with the American Dream defined as homeownership and automobiles, racial capitalism where whiteness itself functioned as a form of property and status, and business unionism where the American Federation of Labor focused on wages and hours for skilled workers rather than system transformation. This was not false consciousness but rational adaptation to material conditions that made socialist strategies less viable than in Europe. For white American workers, individual and racial strategies of advancement had worked materially well enough that collective class-based strategies seemed unnecessary or risky.
Interwar Crisis: Fascism, Communism, and the Collapse of Liberal Order
The period between the two world wars witnessed material catastrophe on a scale that shattered existing social orders and generated ideological innovations of terrifying power and consequence. The First World War destroyed productive capacity across Europe, killed millions of young workers and peasants, disrupted trade networks that had been building for centuries, and delegitimized the ruling classes who had led their societies into the slaughter. The post-war settlements created resentment and instability rather than resolution. Then came economic brethe akdown of unprecedented severity. Hyperinflation in Germany, Austria, and Hungary in the early 1920s literally annihilated middle-class savings accumulated over lifetimes, destroying the material basis of middle-class identity and security. The Great Depression beginning in 1929 ,created unemployment reaching twenty-five percent in major economies, cascading bank failures that wiped out deposits and credit, and a collapse of international trade by two-thirds as countries desperately tried to protect domestic industries through tariffs and competitive devaluations. The class dislocations produced by these material catastrophes were profound and destabilizing. Returning soldiers had been promised homes fit for heroes but faced un,employment and a world that had no place for them. The middle classes saw their savings, status, and security evaporate through inflation and depression. The petit bourgeoisie—small shopkeepers, independent craftsmen, small farmers—found themselves squeezed between organized labor with its unions demanding higher wages and prices, and large capital with its economies of scale and access to credit. Industrial workers experienced mass unemployment, union defeats as employers used the crisis to roll back previous gains, and the very real threat of starvation. The geopolitical order established at Versailles created revisionist powers, particularly Germany, whose territorial losses and reparations burdens generated intense resentment. Colonial independence movements began challenging European imperialism, though most would not succeed until after the Second World War. The global capitalist system that had seemed invincible in 1914 was fragmenting into antagonistic national economies, ideological blocs, and competing models of development. Bolshevism and Leninism emerged from the specific material conditions of revolutionary Russia, and understanding why revolution sthe ucceeded in economically backward Russia rather than advanced Germany requires careful attention to structural factors. The Tsarist state had collapsed under the strain of military defeat, its authority evaporating as armies disintegrated and the administrative apparatus ceased to function. The peasantry, constituting over eighty percent centhe population, faced desperate land hunger with the bulk of agricultural land still controlled by nobles and the state. Industrial workers were concentrated in massive factories in Petrograd and Moscow, creating dense networks of communication and organization despite their small numbers relative to the population. The Russian bourgeoisie was weak and dependent on the state rather than autonomous, lacking the independent power that bourgeoisies had developed in Western Europe through centuries of commercial capitalism. Most critically, organizational capacity existed through the Bolshevik party and the soviets, workers’ and soldiers’ councils that provided alternative structures of power when the old state collapsed. Lenin’s theoretical innovations adapted Marxism to these conditions in ways that would prove historically consequential. The concept of the revolutionary vanguard party substituted for mature working-class consciousness that Marx had assumed would develop naturally through capitalist development. Where workers remained politically backward, a disciplined party of professional revolutionaries could lead them. The peasant-worker alliance represented a fundamental revision of Marx’s expectation that revolution would occur in advanced industrial societies with proletarian majorities. Lenin recognized that in agrarian Russia, revolution required mobilizing the peasantry through the promise of land redistribution. His theory of imperialism explained how revolution might occur in the periphery rather than the core of the capitalist system, as imperialist extraction created particularly acute contradictions in colonized and semi-colonized regions. Democratic centralism provided an organizational form suited to conditions of repression where open democracy was impossible and where rapid decision-making was required for survival. The question of why Leninism rather than social democracy reveals the material impossibility of reformism in the Russian context. There was no parliamentary democracy through which workers could gradually win power and reforms. There was no colonial surplus available for redistribution to buy off the working class with improved living standards. Capital was fleeing abroad to safer havens rather than investing domestically. The new state was immediately encircled by hostile powers intervening in the civil war. The moderate socialist parties that attempted reformist strategies—the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries—were swept aside because the material situation demanded radical transformation, not gradual improvement. When survival itself is at stake and existing institutions are collapsing, revolutionary ideology makes material sense. The post-revolutionary dynamics further reveal how material conditions constrain even revolutionary governments. War Communism from 1918 to 1921, with its total state control of the economy, grain requisitioning, and suppression of markets, was not an ideological preference but material necessity during civil war when the survival of the regime required total mobilization. The New Economic Policy, beginning in 1921, represented a partial restoration of market relations in recognition that the economic complexity of even a relatively backward economy exceeded the planning capacity of the new state. Peasants needed incentives to produce surplus, urban areas needed consumer goods, and the administrative apparatus could not coordinate everything centrally. Collectivization, beginning in 1928, represented Stalin’s forced industrialization drive that required extracting surplus from the peasantry to finance industrial investment, a process of primitive socialist accumulation analogous to capitalism’s earlier primitive accumulation but accomplished through state coercion rather than market forces. This was a Stalinist revision of Leninist principles, driven by the material imperative of industrial development in a hostile international environment. Fascism emerged from material conditions quite different from those that produced communism, and its class base and ideological content reflected those differences. Fascist movements developed primarily in countries experiencing rapid but incomplete industrialization that created vast social dislocations, traumatic status loss through military defeat or mutilated victory, threatened middle classes facing proletarianization through inflation and depression, strong but recently defeated socialist movements that terrified property owners, and weak liberal institutions that could not manage the crisis. Italy and Germany fit this pattern precisely, as did Spain, Portugal, and various Eastern European countries that developed fascist or fascist-aligned regimes. The class base of fascism is crucial to understanding its ideological content and political trajectory. Primary support came from the lower middle classes—small proprietors facing bankruptcy, white-collar workers facing unemployment, independent farmers threatened by agricultural crisis and farm foreclosures. These groups faced very real threats of proletarianization, of falling from petit bourgeois independence into working-class status. Displaced elites, particularly military officers and aristocrats who had lost status and income, found in fascism a vehicle for restoration. The lumpenproletariat—the unemployed, veterans unable to reintegrate into civilian life, and marginal elements—provided the shock troops for street violence. Large capital initially opposed or was ambivalent toward fascist movements, but provided crucial financial backing once fascists had demonstrated their effectiveness at destroying labor organizations and communist parties. The ideological content of fascism mapped precisely onto these material interests and anxieties. Corporatism promised class collaboration under state direction, appealing to the petit bourgeoisie who were threatened by both large capital and organized labor and sought protection from both. Nationalism and racism provided cross-class solidarity against external enemies and internal scapegoats, channelling clchannellingment away from the property system toward foreigners, Jews, communists, and other defined enemies. Militarism offered employment for veterans and the unemployed while promising restoration of national status. Anti-liberalism rejected the market chaos and parliamentary weakness that had failed to prevent economic catastrophe. Anti-socialism preserved private property while promising social security through the corporatist state rather than class struggle. The question of why fascism rather than other possible responses to the crisis reveals structural selectivity with particular clarity. Communism was not viable for the middle classes because they had property to lose and feared proletarianization rather than seeking it. Peasants wanted individual land ownership, not collectivization. National humiliation and xenophobia produced nationalist responses rather than proletarian internationalism. Liberalism had failed catastrophically as market capitalism collapsed in the depression and parliamentary systems proved unable to manage the crisis. Traditional conservatism was inadequate because the old elites were discredited by war defeat, and the agrarian economy was no longer viable. Fascism provided what seemed like the only option: a mass mobilization that could compete with socialism’s appeal, a strong state that could manage the crisis, and preservation of property relations that the middle classes and capital required. The material function of fascism becomes clear when we examine what it actually did in power. It destroyed labor organizations through violence and legal suppression, ensuring that capital would not face effective working-class resistance. It provided employment through massive rearmament and infrastructure projects, absorbing unemployment that threatened social stability. It channelled resentment toward scapegoats rather than toward the property system, preserving capitalist relations while claiming to transcend them. It stabilized capitalism through extensive state intervention in the economy, cartelization, and coordination of production. Fascism represented capitalism’s crisis response when liberalism had failed, neither revolutionary in transforming property relations nor traditionally conservative in rejecting modernization, but rather a modernizing dictatorship that preserved the essentials of capitalist property while mobilizing mass support through nationalism and social promises. The New Deal in the United States and social democratic responses in Scandinavia represented alternative paths that avoided both fascism and communism. In countries where democratic institutions survived the depression, where civil society remained robust through unions, churches, and civic organizations, where reformist elite factions proved willing to compromise with labor and popular demands, and where state capacity existed for economic intervention, a social democratic compromise became possible. The New Deal emerged from the material threat that the depression posed to system legitimacy. Labor militancy was rising with general strikes in 1934 in San Francisco, Minneapolis, and Toledo signalling that workers would not indefinitely accept mass unemployment and starvation. Yet no socialist movement existed with the organisational capacity to seize power, and the federal state retained both capacity and legitimacy. The ideological innovations of the New Deal reflected pragmatic responses to material crisis rather than theoretical conviction. Keynesian demand management recognized that mass purchasing power was necessary to absorb industrial production. Social Security, unemployment insurance, and welfare programs provided basic security that prevented desperation from turning revolutionary. The Wagner Act guaranteed union rights, recognizing that institutionalized labor relations were preferable to the violent conflicts of the early 1930s. Agricultural supports addressed the rural crisis that was threatening food supply and rural social stability. This represented not ideological conversion but pragmatic stabilization recognizing that capitalism required mass consumption, social security, and labor peace to survive. The class compromise embedded in the New Deal is revealing. Labor won recognized unions, wage increases, and welfare provisions. Capital preserved private ownership and indeed saw profits subsidized through government contracts, cartels that were tolerated or encouraged, and infrastructure investment. The middle class benefited from mortgage programs, pensions, and professional employment in the expanding public sector. Yet the compromise systematically excluded Black Americans through provisions that exempted agricultural and domestic workers, through local administration of welfare programs that enabled discrimination, and through housing policies that created segregated suburbs. The New Deal was a white working-class compromise that preserved racial hierarchy even as it ameliorated class conflict. Scandinavian social democracy developed under somewhat different conditions but followed similar logic. Small, ethnically homogeneous populations enabled a sense of national solidarity across class lines. Strong labor organizations had the power to extract concessions. Weak feudal legacies meant that aristocratic resistance to democratization was minimal. Open economies dependent on exports required competitiveness and labor peace. The resulting model combined universalist welfare states providing security from cradle to grave, tripartite bargaining between labor, capital, and the state to coordinate wage levels and economic policy, active labor market policies to facilitate structural change, and redistributive taxation to fund social programs. This was viable precisely because the small scale enabled coordination, export orientation created shared interests in productivity and competitiveness, homogeneity reduced ethnic conflict that divided workers elsewhere, and strong civil society mediated conflicts before they became explosive. Anti-colonial nationalism emerged as a major force during this period as colonialism’s contradictions intensified. Western education had created indigenous elites who absorbed liberal and socialist ideas and recognized the hypocrisy of European rule. Capitalist penetration was destroying traditional economies without providing development, creating immiseration and dislocation. The World Wars demonstrated European vulnerability as the colonizers slaughtered each other and their empires required colonial troops to fight their wars. The Atlantic Charter’s promise of self-determination, though intended only for Europe, provided ideological ammunition for colonial independence movements. The ideological variations within anti-colonial nationalism reflected material conditions and class structures in different colonies. Liberal nationalism, as exemplified by the Indian National Congress, emerged where indigenous bourgeoisies, professionals, and landlords existed who wanted control of the state apparatus, tariffs for industrial development, and Indianization of administration but had no interest in social revolution. Their strategy was negotiated independence that would preserve property relations and simply transfer power from British to Indian elites. Peasant nationalism, as in China under Communist Party leadership, developed where extreme landlord exploitation, warlordism, and foreign invasion created revolutionary conditions among poor peasants who had nothing to lose. Land reform and guerrilla warfare based in the countryside characterized this path. Pan-Arabism emerged in regions where colonial boundaries were artificial, where oil wealth was being extracted by foreign companies, and where Zionist settlement was displacing Palestinians with European support. The ideology emphasized Arab unity against imperialism but contained profound class ambiguities, including monarchs, military officers, and socialists in unstable coalitions. The critical pattern across all these anti-colonial movements is that their ideological content reflected domestic class structure more than abstract anti-colonial principles. Where indigenous bourgeoisies existed, nationalism took liberal forms. Where peasant masses faced extreme exploitation, nationalism took revolutionary forms. The ideology emerged from material conditions and class configurations within each colony, not from a universal anti-colonial program.
The Digital and Post-Industrial Age
The close of the twentieth century marked a profound turning point in the organization of production. Industrial capitalism, once anchored in factories, material goods, and mass labor, began to dissolve into a new order defined by information, finance, and technology. The transition from the industrial to the digital economy represents not only a change in tools but a transformation of the entire social metabolism of capitalism. Whereas industrial capitalism extracted value from human labor applied to physical materials, the digital economy extracts value from information flows, data, and connectivity. The new means of production are no longer looms and assembly lines but networks, algorithms, and databases. The commodity form itself has changed: user behaviour, attention, and personal data have become the raw materials of profit. In this sense, the modern subject has been transformed from worker to data-producer, often without awareness or compensation.
New Class Structures
This shift has produced a novel class stratification. At the top stand the techno-financial elitesowners of digital infrastructure, intellectual property, and algorithmic systems. These actors control the informational platforms that organize communication, consumption, and even political discourse. Below them lies a vast, precarious labor force, fragmented and flexible: gig workers, freelancers, and the invisible digital proletariat maintaining the world’s servers, logistics, and content moderation. Automation and artificial intelligence promise efficiency but also erode traditional employment, rendering large segments of labor redundant. The social contract of industrial capitalism—stable wages in exchange for productivity—has been replaced by insecurity and constant competition. Economic power is now coupled with an unprecedented informational power, as those who own data can predict, manipulate, and shape human behaviour. The writer Shoshana Zuboff aptly describes this as surveillance capitalism: a regime where human experience itself is mined as a resource.
The Crisis of Neoliberal Ideology
Neoliberalism, the dominant ideology of late twentieth-century capitalism, justified this transformation under the banners of freedom, innovation, and efficiency. It portrayed markets as self-regulating and technology as inherently emancipatory. Yet as digital monopolies grew and inequality deepened, the ideological narrative began to collapse. The promises of universal prosperity and open competition gave way to monopolistic concentration and systemic instability. Ecological degradation further exposes the contradictions of neoliberal thought. The pursuit of infinite growth in a finite world now collides with climate limits and resource exhaustion. The digital economy, despite its immaterial appearance, depends on immense material infrastructures—data centers, rare minerals, and global supply chains—that intensify environmental stress. Thus, the ideology that once celebrated deregulation and expansion now faces a moral and ecological impasse.
As in previous historical periods, new ideologies are crystallizing from the tensions of the economic base. Four broad currents can be observed: Populism – a reaction against globalization and digital elites. It channels social anger through nationalist or identity narratives, seeking to restore sovereignty against perceived global control. Eco-Socialism and Green Communitarianism – movements that reinterpret collective ownership and sustainability, proposing a reconciliation between technology and ecological balance. Techno-Authoritarianism – regimes, both corporate and political, that integrate surveillance and algorithmic governance as tools of order and efficiency, sacrificing freedom for predictability. Post-Capitalist Humanism – an emerging intellectual current that seeks to redefine value beyond profit, envisioning a world where automation liberates rather than replaces human creativity. These ideological experiments reveal a world searching for new foundations. Just as the industrial age gave birth to socialism and liberal democracy, the digital age will produce its own philosophical offspring. Whether these will lead to emancipation or control depends on how societies manage the ownership and ethics of data, technology, and planetary resources.
The central question of the twenty-first century is therefore not merely technological but civilizational: can humanity construct an economy that uses digital power without succumbing to domination by it? The answer will determine the ideology of the coming era. If information remains privatized, techno-authoritarianism may prevail. If it becomes a common good, a new form of democratic socialism—grounded in cooperation, transparency, and ecological awareness—may emerge. In either case, the historical principle remains: ideology follows economy. As the digital revolution reshapes labor, property, and consciousness, it is forging the intellectual landscape of a new world. The material base of the digital age—its data flows, global networks, and automated intelligence—will inevitably generate new ways of thinking about freedom, justice, and the human condition. Once again, history reminds us that to understand the ideas of our time, we must first understand the economy that gives them life.
Read More
E.P. Thompson
- The Making of the English Working Class (1963) – Groundbreaking social history examining how industrial capitalism created working-class consciousness
Eric Hobsbawm
- The Age of Revolution: 1789-1848 – Economic and social transformations of the revolutionary period
- The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914-1991 – Analysis of twentieth-century ideological conflicts
Immanuel Wallerstein
- World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction – Framework for understanding global capitalism and core-periphery relations
- Historical Capitalism with Capitalist Civilization – Examining capitalism as historical system
Neoliberalism and Contemporary Capitalism
David Harvey
- A Brief History of Neoliberalism (2005) – Essential analysis of neoliberalism’s rise and class dimensions
- The Condition of Postmodernity (1989) – Examining economic restructuring and cultural change
- Rebel Cities (2012) – Urban space, capitalism, and resistance
Nancy Fraser
- “From Progressive Neoliberalism to Trump—and Beyond” – Analysis of how neoliberalism co-opted progressive movements
- “Contradictions of Capital and Care” – Social reproduction and capitalism’s crisis
Wolfgang Streeck
- How Will Capitalism End? (2016) – Analysis of contemporary capitalism’s terminal crises
Platform Capitalism and Digital Economy
Shoshana Zuboff
- The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019) – Definitive analysis of data extraction and behavioral modification
- “Big Other: Surveillance Capitalism and the Prospects of an Information Civilization” – Journal article overview
Nick Srnicek
- Platform Capitalism (2017) – Concise analysis of platform business models and their implications
- “The Challenges of Platform Capitalism” – Accessible introduction
Evgeny Morozov
- “Digital Socialism? The Calculation Debate in the Age of Big Data” – Exploring possibilities for democratic planning with digital technology
Jathan Sadowski
- “When data is capital: Datafication, accumulation, and extraction” – Analysis of data as new form of capital
Precarity and Contemporary Class Structure
Guy Standing
- The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class (2011) – Defining the emerging precarious class
- Basic Income: And How We Can Make It Happen (2017) – Policy responses to precarity
Kathi Weeks
- The Problem with Work (2011) – Feminist critique of work society and wage labor
Sarah Jaffe
- Work Won’t Love You Back (2021) – How the ideology of passionate work enables exploitation
Financialization
Costas Lapavitsas
- Profiting Without Producing (2013) – How finance transformed capitalism
- “Financialization and capitalist accumulation” – Theoretical framework
Cédric Durand
- Fictitious Capital (2017) – How finance is appropriating the future
Climate, Ecology, and Capitalism
Jason W. Moore
- Capitalism in the Web of Life (2015) – Capitalism as world-ecology
- “The Capitalocene” – Naming the system producing ecological crisis
Andreas Malm
- Fossil Capital (2016) – How steam power shaped capitalism
- How to Blow Up a Pipeline (2021) – Climate crisis and political strategy
Kate Aronoff, Alyssa Battistoni, Daniel Aldana Cohen, Thea Riofrancos
- A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal (2019) – Political economy of climate transition
Ideology and Hegemony
Stuart Hall
- “The Problem of Ideology: Marxism without Guarantees” – Sophisticated analysis of how ideology operates
- Policing the Crisis (1978) – Hegemony, moral panics, and crisis
Slavoj Žižek
- The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989) – Psychoanalytic approach to ideology
- “How to Read Lacan” – Ideology and the unconscious
Mark Fisher
- Capitalist Realism (2009) – Why there seems to be no alternative to capitalism
- “Good For Nothing” – Post-Fordism and mental health
Populism and Contemporary Politics
Chantal Mouffe
- For a Left Populism (2018) – Strategy for progressive populist politics
- “The ‘End of Politics’ and the Challenge of Right-wing Populism” – Analysis of populist moment
Jan-Werner Müller
- What Is Populism? (2016) – Definitional and analytical framework
Thomas Frank
- Listen, Liberal (2016) – How Democrats abandoned working class
- The People, No (2020) – History of populism in America
Identity Politics and Class
Asad Haider
- Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump (2018) – Critique of identity politics from left perspective
Barbara J. Fields and Karen E. Fields
- Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life (2012) – How racial ideology obscures class relations
Adolph Reed Jr.
- “Marx, Race, and Neoliberalism” – Class analysis and racial capitalism
- “The Limits of Anti-Racism” – Critique of anti-racist politics divorced from class
Nancy Fraser and Rahel Jaeggi
- Capitalism: A Conversation in Critical Theory (2018) – Dialogue on capitalism’s multiple contradictions
Historical Studies
Barrington Moore Jr.
- Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (1966) – Class structure and paths to modernity
Perry Anderson
- Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism (1974) – Materialist analysis of European transitions
- Lineages of the Absolutist State (1974) – State formation and class relations
Ellen Meiksins Wood
- The Origin of Capitalism (1999) – Agrarian capitalism and transition debate
- Democracy Against Capitalism (1995) – Separating economic and political spheres