Religion, social status, and property each dominate as power sources at different historical stages

Evidence

The fallacy of the socialists37 lies in supposing that because in the present stage of European society property as a source of power is predominant, the same is true of India, or the same was true of Europe in the past. Religion, social status, and property are all sources of power and authority which one man has to control the liberty of another. One is predominant at one stage; the other is predominant at another stage. That is the only difference. If liberty is the ideal, and if liberty means the destruction of the dominion which one man holds over another, then obviously it cannot be insisted upon that economic reform must be the one kind of reform worthy of pursuit. If the source of power and dominion is, at any given time or in any given society, social and religious, then social reform and religious reform must be accepted as the necessary sort of reform. — Ambedkar, B R, Annihilation of Caste_ The Annotated…, 851

Categorization

• XREF: Plausibly connects to Marxist debates on base vs. superstructure and the ‘economic interpretation of history’ debates in Miliband and other sources on power sources. — connects to: Who controls land destiny is a live question about wealth versus prayer throughout society — Winona LaDuke, All Our Relations: Native Struggles for…, 68; Ideological labels track whichever social cleavages dominate each era.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that which power source dominates is historically contingent, making the ‘right’ reform socially indexed rather than eternally economic, is dense enough to sit with.