What’s really the “main contradiction”?

Marxists talk about the “main contradiction” being that between the “bourgeoisie” (the owners of the lion’s share of society’s productive assets) and the working class. This conception is at the center of their worldview.

I identified as a Marxist for many years. For all the discussions about and critiques of the particulars (what would an alternative to capitalism look like? how could it be achieved?) it had seemed to me that the essential kernel of the ideology was irrefutable: Private ownership of the major means of production results in class division, plutocracy, and power elitism. It’s unjust and anti-social when the large enterprises (the destiny of which affects so many people and communities) are owned and controlled as private property. Capitalism enriches and empowers the bourgeoisie. Transition to an alternative is in the interests of the working class. Moreover, socialism has the potential, ultimately, to move society beyond class division entirely.

A globally influential world-historical movement was based on those premises. During the twentieth century country after country experimented with socialization of the means of production (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_socialist_states). When I realized that power elites continued to dominate in all cases, I started to question the Marxist worldview.

I came to the conclusion that the “main contradiction” is not, after all, between private and public ownership. Rather, it’s between community-based lifeways and mass society. Within a communitarian context you might observe varying degrees of inequality, but where people are familiar and directly interdependent you’re unlikely to have inequality to the extent of class division. Mass society (characterized by impersonal institutions and polities/cities/technologies beyond human scale) developed with the emergence of statist civilization five thousand years ago. It has everywhere and always been afflicted with plutocracy and power elitism, irregardless of the socio-economic system.

That’s why our social change vision should be informed by communitarianism rather than socialism.