I. Introduction: After Diagnosis
The preceding article completed a diagnostic work. It demonstrated the functional phase transition of wealth: when wealth exceeds a certain threshold, it changes from a means of direct use into a variable that controls others' feasible set; this phase transition occurs at the level of legal entities as well as natural persons. It demonstrated the pro tanto (prima facie, on this count alone) injustice of excess holdings, namely the distortion of rules through institutional capture, compressing others' choice space; it demonstrated that when this compression touches the survival baseline, injustice escalates into a violation of basic rights. The chain of diagnosis is complete.
The diagnosis deliberately stops at diagnosis. The preceding article does not write prescriptions, does not dispense medication, does not prescribe policy instruments. That is correct. Diagnosis has the honesty of diagnosis; conflating diagnosis with prescription would only make both vague.
But the question after diagnosis cannot be evaded. What should the deprived do?
If excess wealth has already lost moral protection (if the argument of the preceding article holds), then does reclaiming from excess wealth the resources necessary for survival possess legitimacy? If it possesses legitimacy, how can it be prevented from degenerating into universal robbery and violence? If it does not possess legitimacy, or if it possesses legitimacy but cannot be practiced, then where is the way out for the deprived?
These questions push us from the theoretical space of the preceding article into another space. Once action is touched upon, all the tools used in the preceding article (Rawls, public choice theory, Nozick, innovation economics) begin to show their inadequacy. They can diagnose the injustice of institutions, but under the premise that "institutions are deeply captured," their guiding power for "how the deprived should act" declines rapidly.
The discourse shifts accordingly. The preceding article completed its critique within the liberal tradition; this article departs from the boundaries of liberalism and moves toward the Marxist tradition. Anarcho-syndicalism, social democracy, and Arendtian republicanism all have theoretical resources on collective action. But anarcho-syndicalism lacks organizational persistence in history, social democracy depends on institutional channels, and the preceding article has already argued that these channels are blocked. The Marxist tradition is most pertinent here because, in historical experience, it has most systematically developed the proposition of "how the oppressed change structures through collective action" and has developed it into a sustained theoretical tradition rather than scattered insights.
II. The Legitimacy of Reclaiming and Its Dead End
2.1 Legitimacy: Derived from Diagnosis
First, acknowledge the premise: the deprived have the right to reclaiming.
This right follows directly from the diagnosis of the preceding article. If the property right claims of excess holdings have already lost moral protection (because wealth has phase-transitioned from a life resource into a control variable, because excess holdings have distorted rules through institutional capture, because this distortion has led to survival deprivation), then the reclamation of excess wealth is not equivalent to theft of ordinary property. Logically, reclaiming something that has lost moral protection does not constitute a violation. Just as resistance against a regime that has lost legitimacy does not constitute rebellion.
This argument is logically valid.
2.2 Dead End: Practical Consequences and Structural Limitations
The problem lies in practice, not in logic.
Individual reclaiming (one person or a small group directly seizing resources from excess holders) is in practice highly likely to degenerate into universal robbery and violence.
Two layers of argument need to be distinguished. The first layer is empirical: a person struggling on the survival line is extremely unlikely to engage in proportionality calculations before acting; he will not precisely judge which wealth is "excess," which holders are "participants in institutional capture," or how much to seize to exactly equal the amount deprived. What he does is the most natural thing: in hunger and anger, he takes what he can take, from whom he can take it. In this process, the theoretical distinction between "reclaiming" and "robbery" evaporates. This is a highly reliable empirical judgment about human behavior, but not an a priori certainty; in extreme cases, precise, disciplined reclamation actions are logically conceivable.
But the second layer of argument is logical and does not depend on empirical probability: Even if individual reclaiming maintained precision in some impossible manner (even if every actor precisely reclaimed only the deprived amount from true excess holders), it still would not change anything. Because it does not touch the structure. It redistributes a little resource within an unjust structure, but the structure itself remains unmoved. Excess holders will reaccumulate through the same institutional channels tomorrow. The deprived will be deprived again tomorrow. Individual reclaiming is a symptom rather than a treatment: it proves the injustice of the structure without changing the structure itself. This layer of argument does not depend on any empirical assumptions about human behavior; it is a deduction of structural logic.
Plunder does not possess legitimacy. Individualized seizure cannot structurally acquire legitimacy: it can neither distinguish itself from robbery in practice, nor distinguish itself from disorderly resource transfer in outcome.
2.3 The Rejection of Anarchism
Anarchism is also not a solution. Anarchism promises oppression-free autonomy, free association in horizontal networks. This ideal is beautiful. But it cannot answer a most basic question: In a world without order, who wins?
The answer is: the most violent person wins.
The outcome of anarchism is a tournament of violence. And in this tournament, those with the most resources naturally occupy an advantage. Excess holders can hire private armed forces, purchase security systems, and buy violence itself. Far from threatening excess holders, anarchism removes the last institutional constraint on them. In a world without rules, the combination of capital and violence is more reckless than in any institutional order.
Anarchism is hell for the structurally most vulnerable: it dismantles the institutional constraints that oppressors would otherwise have to worry about.
The position of this article needs to be distinguished from anarchism. The goal of anarchism is to eliminate institutions, to shatter order itself. The goal of this article is to reconstruct institutions, to establish an order not captured by excess holders. The direction of solidarity and rebellion is "different rules," not "no rules." This distinction is crucial: it means the goal of collective action is to replace the captured institutional framework. Solidarity, class struggle, and rebellion all take this as their premise: they demand structural change.
Individual reclaiming is a dead end. Anarchism is a more dangerous dead end. Their existence proves precisely the same thing: the nature of the problem is difficult to solve at both the individual level and the disorderly level. It demands a solution at the structural level.
III. The Boundaries of Liberalism
The preceding article completed its diagnosis using the tools of liberalism. But when it comes to "what is to be done," the explanatory power of those tools begins to decline. This is not to say that liberalism lacks a theory of action; on the contrary, it has a rich tradition. Rather, under the premise that "institutions are deeply captured," the efficacy of these theories of action is structurally limited.
3.1 The Landscape of Liberal Theories of Action
Liberal theories of action extend far beyond the two pillars of "individual rational choice" and "institutional reform." It has a rich landscape: Rawls systematically discussed civil disobedience and conscientious refusal; Habermas developed the theory of deliberative politics, emphasizing the dialogic power of the public sphere; Dworkin argued for rights litigation as a rule-of-law path against the tyranny of the majority; Tocqueville emphasized civic association as the social foundation of democracy; Ostrom demonstrated through empirical research that communities can achieve self-governance without state intervention. These are all powerful answers within the liberal tradition to "how ordinary people act."
To deny their existence would be dishonest. The problem is that each depends on its own presuppositions. Civil disobedience presupposes that the constitutional framework is overall legitimate and that public opinion has not yet been captured. The diagnosis of the preceding article challenges both presuppositions: when institutional capture is systemic rather than localized, "appealing to the majority's sense of justice" itself depends on an already polluted public sphere. Deliberative politics presupposes that public sphere dialogue is not structurally distorted. When media and agenda-setting are influenced by excess holders, the input end of deliberation has already been polluted. Rights litigation presupposes judicial independence, while the appointment of judges itself may be affected by institutional capture. Civic association presupposes that freedom of association is not undermined by economic pressure, while those exhausted from seeking survival have no energy to participate in association. Ostrom's self-governance model applies to the management of local common-pool resources, but when confronting national-level institutional capture, the scale of community self-governance is insufficient to constitute a lever.
This is not to say that these theories are invalid. In the early and middle stages of institutional capture, they can all play a role: civil disobedience can promote the revision of specific laws, deliberation can influence the public agenda, litigation can establish precedents, and association can accumulate social capital. But when institutional capture reaches the systemic degree diagnosed in the preceding article (when rule-making power, agenda-setting power, and meaning-production power are all held by excess holders), the explanatory power and efficacy of these theories of action decline rapidly. They can improve situations but are insufficient to change the structures that produce those situations.
Liberal theories of action are powerful under the presupposition of institutional neutrality. When this presupposition does not hold (when institutions themselves are part of the problem), its theories of action reach their boundary: they diagnose effectively but cannot guide action under conditions of deep capture.
IV. The Coordination Dilemma: Why the Deprived Have Not United
Liberal theories of action decline in efficacy under deep capture. But there is also a more basic question here: why do the deprived not unite? The reason is that uniting itself faces a structural dilemma.
4.1 The Paradox of Collective Action
Olson revealed a counterintuitive truth: when a group's interests are violated, every individual in the group has an incentive to wait for others to step forward while reaping the benefits. The costs of stepping forward (time, energy, risk) are borne by the individual actor, while the benefits are shared by the group. In a group of the deprived, everyone's rational calculation points to the same conclusion: if others act, I can benefit without acting; if others do not act, my acting alone will change nothing and I will bear all the risk. The result is that everyone waits and no one acts.
This is a structural consequence of rationality, not a moral defect. The deprived are not unintelligent; they precisely calculated risks and benefits and concluded that "waiting" is the optimal strategy. The dilemma lies in this: each individual's rational choice converges into a collectively irrational outcome where everyone continues to be deprived.
4.2 The Threshold Model: The First to Stand Up
Granovetter's threshold model further deepened this dilemma. Every person has a "threshold" for joining collective action: how many people they need to see already acting before they will follow. Some have very low thresholds: they dare to follow when one person stands up; some have very high thresholds: they dare to act only when they see half the people have moved. The problem is: if even the person with the lowest threshold is unwilling to be the first (because he does not know whether anyone will follow), the entire chain will not start.
The deprived face exactly this dilemma. Fear of unemployment. Fear of imprisonment. Fear of no response. Fear of becoming the first to fall, with no one behind. Everyone is waiting for others to move first, but everyone among the "others" is also waiting. Coordination failure is an intrinsic property of the collective action dilemma.
4.3 The Relationship between the Coordination Dilemma and Structural Protection
The coordination dilemma explains why the deprived, even when they recognize the injustice of institutions, do not automatically unite. It constitutes the foundational layer of the structure's self-protection mechanisms. Cultural hegemony makes people not question the legitimacy of the structure (consent); exhaustion leaves people without energy to resist (exhaustion); coercion makes people afraid to resist (coercion). But beneath these mechanisms, there is an even more fundamental layer: even if a person has questioned, has energy, and dares to resist, the coordination dilemma still leads him to choose to wait. Hegemony, exhaustion, and coercion are the explicit protective layers of the structure; the coordination dilemma is the implicit protective layer of the structure: it requires no designer, operating automatically through the deprived's respective rational calculations.
What is needed to break the coordination dilemma? A signal is needed (a signal that enough people see simultaneously) that lets everyone know "others are also moving." Historically, this signal is often a triggering event of hegemonic failure: an economic crisis makes everyone simultaneously realize that "the narrative is disconnected from reality"; a landmark event makes everyone simultaneously see that "the structure can be challenged"; a spontaneous action makes everyone simultaneously discover that "I am not the only one who thinks this way." Breaking the coordination dilemma does not require everyone to be persuaded; it only requires enough people to cross the threshold simultaneously, and this is precisely the moment when solidarity forms.
V. The Self-Protection Mechanisms of the Structure
This section shifts from normative argument to an explanatory framework; it proposes an analytical perspective for understanding "why the deprived do not automatically resist," rather than proving that "the structure must necessarily operate this way." This perspective draws on Gramsci's hegemony theory, Olson's logic of collective action, and insights from empirical sociology, without claiming to exhaust all explanations.
Why do the deprived not automatically resist? The coordination dilemma of Chapter IV provides a foundational-level explanation. But the structure's protection does not stop there; it also has more active mechanisms.
5.1 Consent: Cultural Hegemony
Gramsci's concept of "cultural hegemony" (egemonia culturale) provides a key explanation. The ruling class maintains its rule not only through coercion (police, courts, prisons) but even more through consent. It shapes what is considered "normal," "natural," and "inevitable."
Excess wealth is presented as a reward for ability, a return on diligence, a necessary condition for market efficiency. Inequality is presented as the cost of growth, the premise of competition, the corollary of freedom. These narratives are the structure's ideological protective layer, causing the deprived to understand unjust situations as just, or at least as inevitable: "That's how the world works," "No one can change it," "At least it's better than before."
The power of hegemony lies in defining what counts as "credible." When a deprived person attempts to question the legitimacy of excess wealth, what he faces is not only the suppression of power but also the exclusion by the entire meaning system: his questioning will be categorized as "envy," "unrealistic," "ignorant of economics." Hegemony does not need to persuade everyone; it only needs to ensure that alternative imaginaries are not produced, or that if produced, they are not taken seriously.
But hegemony is not a monolith; it has fissures and times when it fails. Economic crises cause material experience to disconnect from ideological narratives: the narrative of "the economy is growing" contradicts the experience of actually declining wages, and hegemony's explanatory power begins to crack. Generational replacement causes ruptures in hegemony's reproduction: the new generation does not share the previous generation's acceptance of the "natural order"; their lived experience provides a different frame of reference. Specific triggering events (wars, pandemics, financial crises) expose the structure's fragility, making alternatives that were originally "unthinkable" suddenly thinkable. Hegemonic failure is possible, though neither inevitable nor controllable, and solidarity is generated in these fissures: the collective action opportunity seized by the deprived when hegemony begins to loosen.
5.2 Exhaustion: The Deprivation of Time and Energy
Beyond ideological protection, there is more material protection: exhaustion.
A person who works fourteen hours a day just to barely support a family has no time to study how rules are distorted, no energy to organize the community, no surplus capacity to participate in politics. The oppression of the structure deprives the oppressed not only of resources but also of the time and energy to resist oppression.
This is part of the structure. One of the strategies of institutional capture is to ensure that the deprived are always in a state of "exhausted from seeking survival, with no time to resist." Low wages, long hours, precarious employment, a social safety net that may break at any moment: these are part of the structure's immune system, not merely "economic problems." A person exhausted from seeking survival will not resist; a person who does not resist will not change the structure; an unchanged structure continues to produce people exhausted from seeking survival.
5.3 Coercion: The Last Line of Defense
When consent and exhaustion are not enough, there is still coercion. Protesters are dispersed, organizers are surveilled, movements are infiltrated, leaders are co-opted or destroyed. Coercion is the structure's last line of defense. Though infrequently used, its very existence is sufficient to make most people choose endurance most of the time.
Coercion, consent, exhaustion—the triple protection mechanism constitutes the structure's immune system. Any individual-level challenge will be swallowed by this immune system. A protester is dispersed by police, a critic is marginalized by media, an organizer is undermined by economic pressure. The structure does not need a conspiracy to maintain itself: its operating mechanism itself continuously reproduces the conditions required to sustain it.
This is why individual reclaiming is a dead end: even if it occurs, the structure's immune system will absorb or crush it. Individual action cannot penetrate the structure's self-protection. The force that can penetrate it is, fundamentally, scale.
VI. Solidarity: The Most Fundamental Lever
6.1 From Individual to Collective
Individuals cannot penetrate the structure's immune system. But individuals are not isolated.
Those struggling on the survival line are not one person but millions. When scattered, they have no power; each person is exhausted from seeking survival in their own corner, unable to see one another, let alone coordinate action. But if they unite, they constitute the force within the structure most capable of countering institutional capture.
Solidarity is not a moral appeal. "We should unite" is a correct but useless statement: no one will, because of a single sentence, lower their guard, trust strangers, and bear the risks of collective action. Solidarity is forced out by the structure. When individual survival strategies (endurance, compliance, seeking survival separately) collectively fail under structural oppression, solidarity transforms from "what should be done" into "what must be done."
6.2 The Structurally Most Promising Response
Rather than saying solidarity is a "logical necessity" (implying there is no second path), it is more honest to say: when institutional capture reaches a systemic degree, solidarity is the structurally most promising response. History does not have only one path. The Nordic countries achieved significant redistribution through long-term labor movements and social democratic reform; the American New Deal corrected some extreme inequalities through internal institutional reorganization under the pressure of crisis; postwar Germany's social market economy embedded union co-determination rights within the institutional framework. The struggles in these cases (strikes, protests, political organization) were undoubtedly all forms of collective action, but they did not move toward revolution. They show: gradual reform can indeed change structures under specific conditions, and solidarity does not necessarily take the form of rebellion.
But conditions need to be distinguished. The common premise of the above cases is: institutional channels had not yet been completely blocked, the public sphere retained relative independence, and labor movements had organizational space and legal protection. When institutional capture reaches a deeper degree as diagnosed in the preceding article (when media, education, and agenda-setting are all systemically captured, when the legal framework itself is rewritten to limit collective action rights), the space for gradual reform narrows accordingly. In the early and middle stages of institutional capture, intermediate paths (legal litigation, union negotiation, consumer boycotts, community organizing) can improve situations; when capture deepens to a structural degree, the efficacy of these paths declines: they improve situations but do not change the structures that produce those situations. Collective action therefore increasingly becomes the fundamental lever as conditions deteriorate:
- One person cannot refuse unjust rules, but a million can.
- One person cannot make institutions respond, but a social movement can.
- One person is dispersed by police, but a million people dispersed becomes a revolution.
Piven and Cloward systematically argued this point: the reason the poor cannot improve their situations through conventional political channels is precisely because they most lack the resources required for conventional politics (money, organizational networks, political connections, time). Their fundamental bargaining chip is disruption (strikes, occupations, boycotts, disobedience). And disruption is effective only at a collective scale. One worker's strike is merely unemployment; a million workers' strike is a shutdown. The power of disruption comes from scale, and scale comes from solidarity.
But Piven and Cloward's empirical record also reveals a more severe fact: the victories of poor people's movements are often brief and fragmented, and concessions are frequently retracted after the window closes. This finding does not negate the logic of solidarity; on the contrary, it reinforces the necessity of solidarity. Brief, fragmented solidarity can only obtain brief, fragmented concessions. To change the structure rather than merely obtain concessions requires sustained, structured collective power, not a one-time solidarity action. The success of the Nordic countries and the New Deal confirms precisely this point: they were the result of decades of sustained organization, not one-time movements.
6.3 Solidarity as Weapon
Solidarity is the most powerful thing the deprived can still forge after everything has been deprived from them. It is a weapon, not a virtue.
Capital commands money, power, media, institutions, ideology, and police. What do the deprived have? They have numbers, a common structural position, and a common enemy: the set of rules that fixes them in their structural position, rather than some specific person. Numbers in themselves are not power—scattered numbers equal zero. But numbers in solidarity are the maximum magnitude that can open a breach in the structure's immune system.
This is why the structure's self-protection mechanisms (consent, exhaustion, coercion) are so devoted to preventing the formation of solidarity. The consent mechanism makes the deprived identify with the rulers' framework rather than with each other's situations; the exhaustion mechanism leaves the deprived without time and energy to organize; the coercion mechanism punishes those who attempt to organize. The triple protection guards against solidarity, not against individual resistance (which can be easily crushed).
VII. Class Struggle as Exit
7.1 Legitimacy Found from Another Path
The Marxist tradition provides the most systematic theoretical formulation of the logic of solidarity.
The core insight of class struggle theory is not "the rich are bad, the poor are good"—that is a vulgarization that Marx himself would not claim. Its true insight is: in unequal institutional structures, the collective action of the oppressed is a fundamental historical mechanism for changing structures.
The reason is structural. Collective action is not always correct (history has seen many wrong collective actions, manipulated movements, and tragedies of tyranny committed in the name of revolution), but structurally, the collective action of the oppressed is the key interrupting force against the self-reinforcing cycle of institutional capture:
Capital concentration → institutional capture → rule bias → further capital concentration
Are there other points of interruption? Technological change may break the existing capital landscape, but it is an accidental external factor that does not constitute an interrupting mechanism within the structure, and new technologies are often absorbed by existing capital. External shocks (wars, financial crises) may force institutional reorganization, but the direction of reorganization after the shock is still influenced by institutional capture. Intra-institutional self-correcting mechanisms (antitrust law, financial regulatory reform) do have historical precedents, but the enforcement intensity of these mechanisms is itself affected by institutional capture: the budget for antitrust law depends on the will of the legislature, and the legislature may have already been captured. The key distinction is: accidental interruption only temporarily halts the cycle without changing the cycle's logic; only when the oppressed use collective power to change the power structure of rule-making can the cycle be fundamentally interrupted. This is a structural description rather than a normative claim ("class struggle should be carried out"): if this cycle is not structurally interrupted, it will continue to operate until structural tensions are released in a more violent manner.
7.2 Class Struggle Is Not an Option but a Condition
Marx's judgment in the Communist Manifesto, that "the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles", is an analytical framework rather than a slogan: the transformation of social structures is driven by collective interest conflicts, not by ideas or moral persuasion. Ideas still matter, as Gramsci's hegemony theory precisely demonstrates. But the struggle of ideas ultimately serves structural change rather than replacing it.
Class struggle is a condition rather than an option: "Shall we engage in class struggle or not?" The collective action of the oppressed is their fundamental way out within the structure. If they do not, the structure will continue to operate and they will continue to be deprived. If they do, there is no guarantee of success, but at least the possibility of change exists.
Men make their own history, but they do not make it under circumstances of their own choosing. The deprived did not choose their structural position; they were born into it. But under given conditions, what they can do (fundamentally) is unite and collectively change these conditions.
7.3 The Re-foundation of Legitimacy
This is legitimacy found from another path.
Liberal legitimacy comes from institutions: in just institutions, rights are respected, procedures are followed, and legitimacy is conferred by procedure. This logic is valid within the diagnostic framework of the preceding article: the preceding article argued the injustice of excess holdings precisely by pointing out that they violate the requirements of just institutions (Rawls's first principle, fair value, the difference principle).
But when institutions themselves are unjust (when institutions are tools for excess holders to maintain their excess status, when channels for institutional reform are blocked), legitimacy can no longer be sought from institutions. Seeking legitimacy from unjust institutions is equivalent to seeking fairness in a rigged game; the outcome is predetermined.
A challenge may arise here: the preceding article used the liberal framework (Rawls, public choice theory) to make its diagnosis, while the liberal framework fails on the question of action. If the liberal framework fails in action, is the diagnosis it makes reliable? There is no contradiction: liberal tools are effective at the descriptive level (able to identify institutional capture, feasible set compression, survival deprivation) but fail at the normative action level (unable to guide how the deprived should act). This is like how medical tests can diagnose disease but cannot guide the patient in how to organize healthcare reform. The reliability of diagnosis and the sufficiency of prescription are different dimensions.
Legitimacy must come from another path. It comes from the collective action of the oppressed changing the structure. This is a re-foundation of legitimacy: when the legitimacy of institutions has gone bankrupt, the action of changing institutions acquires legitimacy. Violence itself does not thereby become legitimate (the preceding article has already argued the dead end of individual violence); yet in a structure that leaves people no space for peaceful change, collectively breaking this structure is a fundamental legitimate act.
The source of legitimacy shifts from "obeying institutions" to "changing institutions." This shift is premised on the diagnosis of the preceding article. Only when the diagnosis holds (only when the injustice of excess holdings has been argued, only when the blocking of institutional channels has been revealed) does this shift acquire its foundation. Action without diagnosis is blind; diagnosis without action is hypocritical.
VIII. Rebellion: The Inspiration of Nagasaki Hiroshi
Solidarity is the fundamental lever of the deprived. But solidarity itself is a condition (the formation of collective action capacity) rather than the specific form of action. When solidarity accumulates to the point of being able to challenge the structure, what form does collective action take? Nagasaki Hiroshi's "Hanran-ron" (Rebellion Theory) provides a response.
8.1 From Rebellion to Rebellion
Nagasaki Hiroshi's rebellion theory liberates "rebellion" from the framework of traditional revolutionary movement history.
"Rebellion" or "revolution" in traditional leftist discourse is often understood as a chain: vanguard party drafts blueprint → mobilize the masses → seize power → establish new order. In this framework, rebellion is the means, state power is the end, and the masses are the object of mobilization. The legitimacy of rebellion comes from historical laws ("historical necessity") or from the theoretical authorization of the vanguard party.
Nagasaki Hiroshi rejected this narrative.
In his view, rebellion is not a planned revolution with a detailed blueprint, not a historical decision made by a vanguard party on behalf of the people. It is the people themselves, after long endurance has reached its limit, breaking the structure that binds them in a collective, direct manner. The subject of rebellion is the masses themselves. The form of rebellion is the rupture of endurance.
8.2 Legitimacy Comes from Oppression Itself
Nagasaki Hiroshi's insight lies in this: the legitimacy of rebellion comes from the oppressiveness of the structure itself, rather than from any theoretical system's authorization, vanguard party's leadership, or historical law's guarantee.
This claim is not a simple equation of "oppression automatically produces legitimacy." Its argumentative logic is: after the conventional sources of legitimacy (institutional authorization, legal procedures, historical laws) have all failed under structural oppression, the source of legitimacy can only regress to the most basic pre-political fact: the necessity of human beings to maintain their own survival and dignity. The point is that after all conventional avenues of legitimation have been closed, the situation of actors maintaining their own survival and dignity itself constitutes the basis of legitimation. Nagasaki Hiroshi's rebellion is a regressive path of legitimacy after conventional avenues have failed, regressing to a level more fundamental than institutions.
This forms a closure with the logic of the preceding article. The preceding article argued the injustice of excess holdings: when wealth phase-transitions from a life resource into a control variable, when institutional capture leads to survival deprivation, the structure itself becomes the source of injustice. Nagasaki Hiroshi's rebellion theory says: facing such a structure, breaking it requires no further reason. The diagnosis has already provided the reason. The failure of conventional avenues of legitimation has been revealed by the preceding article, and the conditions for legitimacy's regression to the pre-political level have been satisfied.
8.3 Struggle as Exit
Struggle is an exit.
Not the only exit: if there is still space in the channels of institutional reform, if gradual reform can still advance, those are more preferable paths. No one "wants" rebellion. Rebellion is not an ideal or aspiration. It is the release after endurance has reached its limit, the last crevice that pressure finds when all other exits have been closed.
But when a structure leaves people no space for peaceful change (when institutional channels are captured, individual action crushed, and organizers of solidarity punished), rebellion becomes a consequence produced by the structure itself.
Arendt points out in On Violence: violence is the opposite of power: when genuine political power (the capacity for collective action) fails, violence fills the vacuum. On this specific question of the relationship between violence and power, Arendt's analysis is consistent with the argument: individual violence is a symptom of structural failure rather than a solution. It should be noted that Arendt's republican political philosophy has deeper disagreements with the Marxist tradition of class struggle; she would not agree with the judgment that "class struggle is a fundamental historical mechanism for changing structures." But this disagreement does not affect the validity of her specific judgment that violence fills the power vacuum. Arendt's argument also suggests the other side: when the capacity for collective action is restored, the "necessity" of violence recedes. Solidarity is a force that replaces violence: it transforms individual, chaotic, self-destructive violence into collective, directed, structure-changing action.
Nagasaki Hiroshi's rebellion is precisely this transformed collective action—the action of the masses using collective power to break the structure and rebuild order. Its legitimacy derives from oppression and its form from solidarity; its target is the structure that produced that oppression.
But it must be honestly faced: the historical record of solidarity and rebellion is full of failures. Movements are suppressed, organizations are infiltrated, leaders are co-opted or eliminated, revolutions replace old oppression with new oppression. There is no reason to assume that solidarity will necessarily succeed, that the structure will necessarily change, or that the deprived will necessarily obtain justice. So, what if solidarity also fails? Theory offers no consolation here. In an unjust structure, if the channels for peaceful change are blocked, individual action is crushed, and collective action is also suppressed, then the structure will continue to accumulate tension until it collapses in a more violent manner—either revolution or collapse. The failure of solidarity does not negate the logic of solidarity, just as a failed surgery does not negate the necessity of surgery. It only means: before structural change arrives, the costs will be borne by those least able to bear them.
IX. Conclusion: The Logical Chain from Diagnosis to Action
The logical chain running from diagnosis to action has been laid out across the preceding sections. Its weakest point is empirical rather than logical.
The most fragile link in this logical chain is the transition from hegemonic loosening to solidarity formation. The structure has powerful self-protection mechanisms, and hegemony also has conditions for failure, but between "hegemonic loosening" and "solidarity formation," there remain a large number of empirical questions that have not been adequately discussed: Under what conditions can the deprived seize the window of hegemonic loosening? What is the specific form of organization? How can organizations themselves be prevented from being captured? These questions exceed the scope of this article, but their existence must be honestly acknowledged. So must the historical record of solidarity and rebellion, which is full of failures. The claim here is the structural necessity of solidarity: in an unjust structure, solidarity and struggle are the fundamental direction, not the inevitability of solidarity's success. Necessity concerns direction, not a guaranteed outcome.
From diagnosis to action, from individual to collective, the logic is clear: this is not a choice but a condition. The work that remains is to understand how, in practice, the deprived build solidarity from within it.