Class differentiation into castes dissolves the moral authority needed for coercion

Evidence

These phenomena proper to the upper classes will make more difficult any coercion on the working masses to make them conform to the needs of the new industry. In any case they are determining a psychological split and accelerating the crystallisation and saturation of the various social groups, thereby making evident the way that these groups are being transformed into castes just as they have been in Europe. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1128

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• DEFINE: Gramsci sketches caste formation — a mechanism for how privileged groups harden into exclusionary, self-reproducing blocs, portable to how racialized castes cohere.
• XREF: Direct building block for the reader’s module on race-thinking and imagined community — caste crystallization is the Weberian/racialization scaffold later readings use.

Related

• Castes exploit the human need for society to extract total conformity (similarity 0.79)