Moral Imperialism vs. Class Solidarity

Individualism and imperialism define ruling class morality. Solidarity is the left’s only answer.

Cover: New IWW seal for 2026, via https://seqldiww.org/iww-brisbane-2018-2020-my-personal-perception-of-events/

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Grace Blakeley ||In his masterful history of capitalism, Sven Beckert identifies a curious feature of the early capitalist class: many of its members were animated not only by the pursuit of profit, but by a sense of moral mission.

Inspired by the attitudes of Christian missionaries towards colonial subjects, capitalist reformers set up “civilising missions” across England’s cities. The founder of the Salvation Army, for example, explicitly compared what he called “Darkest England” with “Darkest Africa”, writing that “the foul and fetid breath of our slums is almost as poisonous as that of the African swamp.”

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Reformers within the bourgeoisie saw themselves as a moral vanguard, attempting to force the emerging capitalist order into alignment with their liberal and Christian values, and spreading their moral code to a savage working class. Their politics was cast in the language of sobriety, self-improvement, and individual responsibility.

The poor were not to be liberated but reformed; educated out of their brutishness and tranmsformed into good, Christian subjects. And participation in these reform movements would allow members of the ruling class to signal their moral rectitude to others.

The Working Class ‘Other’

The moral imperialism of the early capitalists was facilitated by the increasing separation of the capitalist class from labour. Workers were segregated from bosses in the factory, in the city, in politics, and throughout most social institutions. Capital could approach labour as a project to be controlled and reformed because, as Beckert puts it, “workers had suddenly become strangers” to capital.

The working class was not, of course, a stranger to itself. Workers saw that they were being exploited and oppressed by the potent alliance between capital and the state that has always characterised capitalist social relations. And they struggled against this exploitation and oppression because doing so was a question survival – for themselves and their communities.

Leaders of the working class found ways to articulate their struggle in moral terms, throwing into sharp relief the hypocrisy of the liberal, Christian ideology of the bourgeoisie. But where the morality of the ruling class was based on individualism and imperialism, that of workers was rooted in collective struggle – a struggle fought by a class, for a class, through dense networks of mutual solidarity. The trade union, the cooperative, the friendly society – these were not expressions of abstract moral principle but of lived interdependence. Workers organised not because they had arrived at the correct ethical position, but because they needed each other.

In this sense, the morality of working-class resistance was distinct from the individualistic and imperialistic morality of capital. The latter was a universalistic moral framework to be imposed on others, both as a means of control and to signal one’s own moral rectitude. The former emerged out of a struggle for survival, based on workers’ recognition of their interdependence, rooted in solidarity.

Ultimately, as Beckert notes, capital’s moralising mission failed. “The capital owner’s power on the shop floor”, Beckert writes, “did not translate to effective control of the inner lives and culture of workers.” But as capitalism developed, the ruling class figured out much more effective ways to use moral imperialism as a means of control.

The Neoliberal Soul

Over the course of the late twentieth century, the sharp lines between capital and labour that had structured political life were blurred by a political class seeking to undermine working class solidarity. Their project – neoliberalism – was one of the most successful political revolutions of our time. Its effects were not simply economic and political, but social and psychological.

When the neoliberals took power in the 1980s, trade unions were broken up and workers were encouraged to see themselves as ‘mini-capitalists’ whose interests were tied to those of business and financial elites. In the UK, the mass sell-off of council housing turned workers into homeowners, which meant their prosperity was tied to the health of property market – and therefore financial markets. Similar effects were produced by the privatisation of pensions and the ‘opening up’ of financial markets to retail investors.

These material shifts produced a corresponding transformation in consciousness. As networks of collective solidarity were dismantled – unions broken, mass political movements dispersed, community infrastructure destroyed – they were replaced by a new subjectivity rooted in individualism. Thatcher was explicit about her aims when she said, “the method is economics, the object is to change the soul.”

Where workers had once defined themselves in relation to their class, they were now encouraged to define themselves as autonomous economic units, competing with other economic units in free markets. And where they had once oriented themselves toward their neighbours through bonds of mutual obligation, they instead began to see those neighbours as competitors.

In this way, neoliberalism scattered and dispersed a once tightly organised working class. The “middle classes” were encouraged to see their interests as aligned with those of capital. And the new working classes were subject to increased rates of exploitation, precaritization, and outright repression to make it even harder for them to fight back.

The Democratization of Moral Imperialism

The rise of individualism – closely tied with neoliberalism – has also had a profound impact on the left. The first and most obvious consequence was the destruction of the collective institutions that once underpinned left politics – from labour unions, to social clubs, to mass political parties.

But individualism has also dramatically affected the way we relate to one another within the movements that remain. Moral imperialism – once the preserve of the bourgeois reformer – has become democratised. Just as asset ownership has spread unevenly across society, so too has this mode of relating to morality: as an individual assertion of values to be projected onto others, rather than a collective project based on solidarity.

Like the early capitalist reformers, we increasingly understand our political participation as a way of signalling our personal moral rectitude to others. We think of ourselves as consumers – not just of goods, but of political identities – expressing who we are through what we buy and the language we use. Politics becomes a performance of individual ethics, rather than a process of coalition building and consciousness raising.

There is something seductive about this mode of politics. Moral conviction is real, and it matters. The desire to live consistently with one’s values is not trivial. But liberal individualism turns this desire into a trap. When politics is understood primarily as an expression of individual morality, collective action becomes extraordinarily difficult – because a person’s moral development is idiosyncratic and deeply shaped by their individual life circumstances.

We arrive at our moral positions through different paths, shaped by our histories and our communities. So, where solidarity supported the formation of broad-based political coalitions, individualistic moral politics tends toward fragmentation. Different understandings of what it means to act rightly become barriers to organising, rather than the basis for it. Each faction tends its own ethical garden, suspicious of those whose moral vocabulary differs from its own.

From Solidarity to Individualism

The analogy with asset ownership is instructive. The worker who owns her home does not feel the need to join a union. Her material interests have been partially decoupled from those of her fellow workers and partially aligned with those of the property owning class. She may well vote for the party that promises to protect the value of her house, even as that same party pursues policies that erode the value of her labour. Her political choices are not irrational; they follow from her understanding of her material interests. But her understanding of her material interests is no longer shaped by class solidarity.

Something similar happens when we accept the liberal idea that morality is individual, and politics is a struggle between competing moral frameworks. The person who sees their politics primarily as an expression of their personal ethical framework does not feel the pull of broad-based coalitions. The compromises that solidarity requires – the willingness to work alongside people whose values are not identical to your own, toward shared goals that are not perfectly aligned with your own convictions – come to feel like a corruption rather than a necessity. Movements become balkanised into hermetically sealed units, each defending its own understanding of the good, and suspicious of all the others.

This balkanisation is not a failure of individual political actors. It is the predictable outcome of a social transformation that pushed us to trust each other less and focus more on ourselves instead; that replaced solidarity with individualism.

The Politics of Solidarity

None of this is to say that morality has no place in politics. It is indispensable. Many people are driven into politics out of a sense of injustice, and this moral conviction often helps them to keep fighting when they might otherwise give up.

But one’s personal morality is no substitute for shared solidarity. Solidarity is the recognition of our interdependence. It is the understanding that our fates are bound together; that the conditions of my life are shaped by the conditions of yours. Solidarity is what makes us realise that we have to work together to fight a system that is exploiting and oppressing us all – rather than trying to dissociate ourselves from the evils this system causes.

Recovering that capacity to build powerful political movements, in conditions shaped by decades of deliberate fragmentation, is the central challenge of our time. This challenge cannot be overcome by prioritising individual moral rectitude – or by forcing others to adopt our particular version of the good. It will require, as it always has, the unglamorous work of finding one another across our differences, recognising our common interests, and acting together in pursuit of them.