Beyond Class: Building Fourth World Solidarity

Introduction

The phrase “working class” has a seductive simplicity. It promises unity. It suggests that if you can just gather everyone who sells their labor for survival, you have assembled history’s decisive force. For generations, organizers have repeated the mantra that class solidarity is the shortest road to liberation.

But what if the road is built on a map that erases entire territories of suffering?

Black and Indigenous peoples in the Americas do not experience “working class” in the same way as white workers. Even when jobs are similar, the outcomes are not. Homelessness rates diverge. Police violence concentrates. Land dispossession lingers. Cultural and spiritual lives bear the scars of deliberate state segregation and colonization. To collapse these histories into a single economic category is not unity. It is distortion.

The challenge before you is strategic, not merely moral. How do you challenge the assumption that economic class alone is sufficient, without fracturing movements into isolated silos? How do you center racial and colonial histories without abandoning economic struggle? The answer lies in reframing solidarity around sovereignty, redesigning leadership structures, and embedding anti colonial analysis into every tactic. True unity is not sameness. It is disciplined alignment across difference.

The Limits of Class-Only Solidarity

Economic exploitation is real. Capitalism extracts surplus value from millions. But the idea that “class” functions identically across racial lines is historically inaccurate and strategically naive.

Class Is Racialized by Design

In settler colonial societies, race was not a side effect of capitalism. It was a tool of its construction. Enslavement of Africans, removal of Indigenous nations, redlining, segregation, and differential policing were not unfortunate deviations from a neutral market. They were foundational mechanisms for creating wealth and consolidating territory.

To say that a Black warehouse worker and a white warehouse worker share the same class position ignores how one may face higher surveillance, greater housing precarity, harsher sentencing, and generational wealth gaps rooted in slavery and segregation. The wage may be identical. The life outcome is not.

Similarly, Indigenous communities often confront extractive projects not merely as workers but as nations defending land. A pipeline is not just a labor issue. It is a sovereignty issue. It threatens treaty rights, sacred sites, and ecological systems that predate the corporation by centuries.

If your movement frames such struggles as only “jobs versus profits,” you flatten a national and spiritual conflict into a paycheck dispute. You may gain rhetorical simplicity. You lose strategic clarity.

The Myth of Automatic Unity

History is littered with moments when class appeals failed to overcome racial divisions. During Reconstruction in the United States, poor white farmers were courted by Black political movements that promised shared economic reform. White supremacist backlash fractured that alliance. Race was weaponized to prevent class solidarity.

More recently, massive mobilizations such as the global anti Iraq War protests in 2003 demonstrated that sheer numbers do not guarantee influence. Millions marched, but the invasion proceeded. Scale alone, detached from structural leverage and deeper narrative transformation, evaporates.

The lesson is stark. Unity is not automatic. It is engineered. If class is treated as the sole axis, racial and colonial grievances resurface as unresolved contradictions. Movements implode not because difference exists, but because difference was denied.

To build durable solidarity, you must confront the racial architecture of class itself. That recognition opens the door to a different organizing horizon.

From Petition to Sovereignty: Reframing the Goal

Most campaigns operate within a reformist frame. They petition the state for higher wages, better benefits, fairer laws. These demands matter. But for communities living in what can be called a Fourth World condition, the deeper issue is sovereignty.

What Is Meant by Fourth World?

Fourth World refers to peoples within nation states who remain colonized internally. They may hold citizenship on paper yet lack full control over land, culture, safety, and political destiny. Black communities shaped by slavery and segregation. Indigenous nations constrained by treaties violated or ignored. These are not merely demographic groups within a working class. They are nations and peoples whose autonomy was systematically dismantled.

If your theory of change is limited to redistributing income, you miss the structural wound. Sovereignty means control over land use, policing, education, cultural reproduction, and economic development. It is not a metaphor. It is institutional power.

Measuring Success Differently

Movements often count heads. How many people attended? How many likes did the post receive? How many workers signed the petition? These metrics flatter the ego but obscure the core question: how much self rule was gained?

Consider Occupy Wall Street. It reframed inequality and altered public discourse, yet it built few durable institutions capable of exercising ongoing authority. The encampments were evicted and the infrastructure dissolved. The story vector was powerful. The sovereignty captured was limited.

Contrast this with struggles that establish enduring structures. The Zapatista communities in Chiapas created autonomous municipalities with their own schools and health systems. Whatever one thinks of their scale or ideology, they shifted from protest to governance.

For Black and Indigenous organizers, sovereignty may mean land trusts, community controlled safety initiatives, language revitalization schools, or legal campaigns to enforce treaty rights. When allied movements adopt sovereignty as a shared metric, solidarity deepens. Economic justice becomes one component of a larger project: the reconstitution of self determination.

This reframing changes how you design actions, allocate budgets, and tell stories. It also requires reengineering leadership.

Centering Leadership Without Tokenism

Centering marginalized voices is now a common slogan. The difficulty lies in making it structural rather than symbolic.

Institutionalizing Frontline Authority

If leadership remains informally concentrated among those with time, resources, or social capital, centering becomes performance. You need rules.

One approach is to reserve formal decision making roles for delegates selected by Black and Indigenous councils or assemblies. These representatives should not merely advise. They should possess real veto or agenda setting power. Authority must be visible and procedural.

Another tactic is sequencing speech. In assemblies and public events, frontline communities open and close. Allies speak in between, in support, not as protagonists. This simple choreography shifts narrative gravity.

Budget is also a political document. Earmark funds for land back campaigns, bail support, cultural programming, and legal defense. Require that each major initiative articulate how it advances land, cultural resurgence, or bodily safety. If it cannot, redesign it.

Integrating Culture as Strategy

Cultural practices are often relegated to opening ceremonies. That is a mistake. Ritual is not decoration. It is a form of power.

The Quebec casseroles during the 2012 student strike transformed neighborhoods into sonic battlegrounds. Pots and pans became instruments of collective identity. The tactic blurred private and public space, mobilizing households without centralized command.

Similarly, Indigenous prayer camps at Standing Rock were not symbolic add ons. Ceremony structured the resistance. The spiritual frame attracted global solidarity and altered the moral terrain of the pipeline debate.

When you integrate Indigenous language, drum circles, land acknowledgments tied to material commitments, and Black liberation theology into the fabric of actions, you are not diversifying optics. You are reshaping the movement’s consciousness. Subjective shifts in identity can precede material shifts in policy.

The danger is appropriation. Culture must be led by those to whom it belongs. Allies participate respectfully, not as choreographers.

Centering leadership, then, is about governance, budget, narrative sequencing, and ritual design. It prepares the movement to act with greater coherence across difference.

Designing Campaigns That Teach Intersection

Solidarity is most durable when it is embodied in action, not merely declared in statements.

Choose Targets That Reveal Overlapping Systems

A campaign against a pipeline financier exposes capitalism and colonial enclosure simultaneously. A rent strike in a historically redlined neighborhood highlights both economic exploitation and racial segregation. A port slowdown targeting arms shipments to police departments links labor power to racialized state violence.

When your targets incarnate both class and colonial dynamics, participants learn intersection through experience. The campaign becomes a classroom without walls.

This approach avoids abstract debates about whether race or class is primary. It demonstrates that systems interlock. The action itself becomes a unifying theory.

Move in Bursts, Not Endless Siege

Movements decay when they repeat predictable tactics. Once authorities understand your script, they co opt or crush it. Innovation is not aesthetic flair. It is survival.

Design campaigns in cycles. Escalate rapidly, then withdraw before repression hardens. Use the lull to reflect, train, and redesign. This temporal rhythm exploits the speed gap between agile networks and slower institutions.

For example, synchronized multi city actions can overwhelm coordination capacities. But if repeated identically month after month, they become manageable. Surprise opens cracks. Routine seals them.

By constantly renewing tactics, you prevent internal stagnation and external neutralization. This is particularly crucial when defending communities already under heavy surveillance and policing.

Embed a Believable Path to Win

Despair corrodes solidarity. If participants cannot envision how actions lead to tangible gains, they reconcile with defeat. For Fourth World communities, this reconciliation can be lethal, reinforcing cycles of marginalization.

Every campaign must articulate a clear chain reaction. How does this action increase leverage? What institutional change follows? How does that change expand sovereignty?

Story, action, timing, and chance interact. You cannot control all variables. But you can design for plausibility. When people believe victory is possible, they risk more. When risk is shared, solidarity thickens.

Designing such campaigns transforms unity from a slogan into a lived practice.

Navigating Tensions Without Fragmentation

A persistent fear haunts class focused organizers: that emphasizing racial and colonial difference will splinter the movement. The opposite is often true.

Naming Difference as Strategic Honesty

When disparities are ignored, resentment festers. Black and Indigenous members may feel instrumentalized, invited to swell numbers but not shape direction. White working class members may feel accused or displaced without clear guidance on their role.

Honest conversation about history clarifies responsibility. It distinguishes between individual guilt and structural advantage. It invites accomplices to leverage privilege intentionally.

For example, white allies can commit to material transfers such as contributing a percentage of income to land return funds or prioritizing legal risk in actions where racialized participants face harsher sentencing. These are not charity gestures. They are strategic reallocations of risk and resource.

Building a Shared Myth of the Future

Movements thrive on myth, not in the sense of falsehood, but of shared narrative. If the only story offered is redistribution within the existing state, those who experience that state as an occupying force will not feel fully represented.

Craft a future vision that includes autonomous zones of governance, community controlled safety, ecological restoration, and economic democracy. Show how wage gains, debt relief, and workplace power fit into that broader transformation.

When economic justice is nested inside a sovereignty project, rather than positioned as the whole, unity expands.

The choice is not race or class. It is whether you are willing to reimagine the architecture of solidarity.

Putting Theory Into Practice

Here are concrete steps you can implement immediately:

• Adopt a sovereignty diagnostic. Require every major campaign to answer: How does this advance land control, cultural resurgence, or bodily safety for Black and Indigenous communities? If it does not, revise.

• Formalize frontline authority. Create designated leadership seats selected by Black and Indigenous assemblies with real decision making power, including agenda setting and veto rights.

• Align targets with intersectional systems. Prioritize campaigns against institutions that embody both capitalist extraction and racial or colonial control, such as pipeline financiers, private prison contractors, or urban redevelopment boards.

• Reallocate risk and resources. Develop policies where allies with greater legal or economic insulation take on higher arrest risk and contribute materially to land back and community defense funds.

• Design in cycles. Plan actions in bursts with clear escalation and decompression phases. Use retreat periods for political education and strategic redesign.

• Measure sovereignty gained. Track tangible outcomes such as land transferred to trusts, community safety programs established, treaty rights enforced, or cultural institutions funded.

These steps convert aspiration into structure.

Conclusion

Economic class remains a powerful analytic tool. Capitalism is a system of extraction that degrades lives and ecosystems. But in settler colonial societies, class is braided with race and conquest. To pretend otherwise is to organize with a partial map.

If you want a united movement, you must be willing to surrender the comfort of a single axis explanation. Center sovereignty. Institutionalize frontline leadership. Choose targets that reveal overlapping systems of domination. Innovate before your tactics fossilize. Count self rule gained, not just bodies assembled.

Solidarity is not the erasure of difference. It is the disciplined coordination of distinct struggles toward a shared horizon of liberation. When Black and Indigenous peoples lead and economic justice campaigns align with land, culture, and safety, unity becomes more than rhetoric.

The question is not whether class matters. It does. The question is whether you are ready to rebuild your movement so that sovereignty, not wages alone, sets the tempo. What would change in your next campaign if land back, not pay raise, became the measure of success?