ABSTRACT
During the formative period of sociology, many of the most influential social thinkers of their era thought that divisions based on ethnic attachments—which, as we have stressed throughout this book includes racialized ethnicity, ethnonationalism, and religio-ethnicity—would progressively erode and disappear. One version of this sort of thinking shaped Marxist thought, which was predicated on the assumption that the most fundamental divisions in society were class based. Ethnicity was sometimes a complicating factor that needed to be considered, but in the end one of the remarkable things about capitalism was that it would act like a solvent to dissolve ethnic divisions, thereby exposing in the starkest of ways the fact that class divisions in capitalism were the root cause of inequality. Class divisions were the source of the exploitation and alienation inevitably produced by capitalism. As workers gained consciousness of this reality, as they became class conscious, ethnic and other forms of solidarity and division would fade in significance.
