Ok, I’m going to try lay this out as clearly as I can, because I think you’re mixing up what materialism and idealism actually mean (even if we haven’t used their names to this point it is the core of the argument). The main tool of my analysis is materialism. Put simply: the way people organise production, how they meet their needs, who owns what, who has to sell their labour, this is the foundation. Ideas, culture, politics, they arise from and reflect that material base. They aren’t illusions, but they don’t float free. People think and act, but they do so within conditions they didn’t choose. Ideas matter. People can be persuaded, misled, organised, educated. But those ideas only take hold because they connect to real conditions. You can’t sustain a set of ideas that are completely out of step with how people actually live. And you can’t just will a new society into existence because it sounds good. Ideas move things along, but they don’t set the underlying terrain. What you’re arguing with is idealism. In short, idealism puts ideas first. It treats consciousness, values, or narratives as the engine of history, as if reality bends to what people believe rather than belief being shaped by reality. When you say the mode of production is a “choice,” or that solidarity is basically a matter of interpretation, you’re putting ideas in the driver’s seat. That treats history like a competition between narratives, where whichever idea wins out determines reality. But that’s not how it works. People don’t get to pick a mode of production the way they pick a belief. Capitalism didn’t arise because it was persuasive. It arose because older systems stopped functioning under pressure and new relations became necessary to keep production going. The same logic applies to any transition out of it. There’s a reason certain ideas appear at certain times and not others, and it’s not just because someone made a good argument. None of this means people are robots or that they can’t act against their interests. Obviously they can. Propaganda exists, divisions exist, fear exists. But even that happens within limits. If ideas were truly primary, you wouldn’t need to look at anything outside discourse to explain social change, and that clearly doesn’t hold up. On your last point, you’re also treating “authority” as if it automatically creates a class, and that’s just not how class works. Class isn’t about who gives orders day to day. It’s about relationship to the means of production. Who owns them as property, who controls them in a way that lets them extract surplus, who can pass that control on. Administrators, officials, organisers, these are roles within a system. In a system where production isn’t privately owned as capital, people in those roles don’t become a separate class just because they have authority. They don’t own the factories, land, or infrastructure as something they can sell or accumulate. Their position depends on the broader structure, not the other way around. If that changes, if people in those positions start turning control into private, inheritable ownership, then you’re dealing with a class shift. But that has to be shown in actual material terms. You don’t get there just by pointing at hierarchy and calling it a class.