When agriculture can sustain a population with a majority in non-agricultural pursuits, social stratums start to appear. Jared Diamond, in his book "Guns, Germs, and Steel" has argued that civilisations, as we know the term, have this starting point in common. From a Marxist perspective, this does not seem to develop a solidarity but instead fosters the growth of class divisions. Think of the structure of feudal society: whether feudal Japan or medieval Europe, a land-owning aristocracy eventually rules over a subservient peasantry and lives off their taxes. It becomes justified with an appeal to some sort of "divine right of kings" and creates an ideology where inequality is accepted as a social fact, a state of normalcy, an inalterable state of affairs. At least until the revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries.
The most extreme example could be the Indian caste systems - the lowest rung of society is called the pariah, or untouchable - a stigmatised and ostracised social stratum whose members gain that status by birth. Indeed, the concept of hereditary classes isn't isolated to the pariah. The prince and peasant are born into their classes, where they usually stay in the absence of political conspiracies or revolutions. Need an example? Puyi is the last emperor of China's Qing dynasty. The communist revolution of 1949 abolished the monarchy for good and established a political monopoly around the CCP. Whatever political status Puyi had as emperor was a thing of the past. With all the inequality and the revolutions that eventually displaced them after centuries, it's hard to say that any kind of 'solidarity' existed.
In our time, class is no longer divine; it is economic. Class mobility seems to be framed around the concept of meritocracy and equal opportunity. How equal society is and how meritocracy is socially defined and recognised is outside the scope of this article. Class mobility does, however, retain the same polarising tendencies as feudal class societies. It's contemporary form merely incorporates a few newer features.
Taking the Occupy Wall Street movement as a starting point, it seems that class conflict consists of certain perceptions. These revolve around the phrase "corporate greed", and the income inequalities in a capitalist system managed by these giants. Unlike previous class divisions, the capitalist state probably won't experience the same sort of mass systemic upheavals of revolutions past. Most of those revolutions contained 2 elements: (a) widespread deprivation and (2) a blueprint of a new social structure. "No taxation without representation" in the USA, "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity" in France, and "Peace, Land, Bread" in the Soviet Union. These are some of the basic tenets of a social vision to replace the monarchical social structure. The French and American revolutions established 'republics' based on a parliamentary model (or at least tried to), while the Soviet Union centralised state affairs with the Communist Party - effectively a one-party monopoly.
Sure, we are unhappy with today's economic uncertainty. Ulrich Beck in "Risk Society" has noted that increases in wealth tend to be accompanied by increases in risk. Looking at the 20th and early 21st century, it's no surprise. Global economic patterns have revealed an alarming number of sudden downturns from the Great Depression of the '20s, Asian Financial Crisis of the '90s and, of course, our current GFC and Eurozone crisis. It is easy to see why class divisions are exacerbated in these situations. Take the GFC - the US government approved a bailout package for banks that essentially engaged in bad loan practices and got saddled with too many non-performing loans that effectively 'bankrupted' them (google sub-prime mortgage crisis). That pretty much took down the US economy and left a number of people homeless - but the latter did not get a bailout package. Nor did anyone else outside the top level of banks.
But even at a micro-social level, the notion of 'solidarity' seems to be a myth. Forget corporate rich big wigs vs 'poor(er)' employees, things like school and university admission and labour employment are competitive in nature. It is hard to think of 'solidarity' when the realisation of material aspiration and its accompanying status is fundamentally competitive in nature. The sweatshop prole in Naomi Klein's famous books may gripe about employment conditions but they too aspire towards the upper-middle class lifestyles of their bosses and the media. We may not go all the way towards "I wanna be a billionaire so fricking bad", but material aspirations are only realised through the competitive mechanisms of the exam, workplace, and market. This is the new ideology: that free competition produces "individual pursuit for the common good" - as per Adam Smith. That may be true, but at what cost?
So, to put it simply, organic solidarity in a state of normalcy is a myth. Class conflict - for lack of a better non-Marxist phrase - is the reality. The contemporary form of class conflict is both inter-class and intra-class. It is inter-class because of varying wealth and lifestyle inequalities, as it has always been throughout civilisations, in a world of scarce resources to realise and sustain everyone's aspirations. But today, class mobility is possible and we aren't necessarily confined to our class of birth. Instead, we may aspire and work towards class ascension or, conversely, descend the social ladder if we fall out of sync with the mechanisms of the exam, workforce, and market environment.
Today's class conflict is also intra-class because members of the same class compete to stay in the same class. Whether it's against domestic labour competition, competition from immigrants/other countries' markets, or younger, better-educated workers, one's class status is in jeopardy if one's labour becomes sub-par, and an employer or patron capital owner decides a replacement is in order. If one can't find a commensurate job, one falls on the socio-economic ladder. If one can't find any job, one becomes 'unemployed' - the modern pariah. A joke I saw on YouTube puts it well:
"The upper class gets all the money and does none of the work,
the middle class does all the work and doesn't get much of the money,
and the lower class is just there to scare the shit out of the middle class."
In such a society, do you really think unequal economic interdependence can produce "organic solidarity" or any kind of pan-social solidarity?
On a side note, racial issues often have an economic basis. I haven't read too much into this yet but I understand that affirmative action in admitting non-white students into American universities is the norm. Also, Malaysia's New Economic Policy was also crafted to address the conflation of economic class and race, particularly between the purported 'rich Chinese and poor Malays' which created a Moral Panic in the '60s and '70s.
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