Introduction

In The Reactionary Mind, Corey Robin argues convincingly that self-identified reactionaries are driven above all by a desire to silence anyone they consider their inferiors, with violence if needed — partly because they believe "such people" have no right to be heard, partly because they fear losing their own status, and partly because they think society can only function when everyone "knows their place." This struck me as a useful insight, and it raised a question: could the views of the center-left — liberals and progressives in the US, liberal and social democrats elsewhere — be similarly summarized? Because whatever else they believed, they clearly did not subscribe to the egalitarianism and solidarity that I consider the core of left politics.

David Graeber's Debt helped me see that this way of thinking is not confined to reactionaries, and that it makes more sense to speak of a reactionary mindset — one that people slip into depending on context and on their relationship to the person in question. But it was Thomas Frank's Listen, Liberal that brought the picture into focus. Most progressives, however progressive they may be in their personal dealings, embrace a form of elitism every bit as indefensible as the kind favored by conservatives. They too believe in institutionalized inequality and the desirability of hierarchy — they just use different metrics. Where reactionaries sort people by birth, wealth, or strength, progressives sort by education, credentials, professional status, cultural taste, and intelligence.

The question that has occupied me since is what connects these superficially different forms of hierarchy. The answer, and the argument this project develops, is that they are all expressions of a single underlying logic — one I call meritocratic reasoning.

What meritocratic reasoning is

Meritocratic reasoning is not the same as "meritocracy" understood as a set of institutional practices (credentialism, standardized testing, competitive selection). It is something more fundamental: the generative logic through which any form of class exploitation is rationalized and made to seem natural.

The logic has two formulations, one positive and one negative. The positive — "those who are or do better deserve more" — sounds almost unobjectionable, which is why most people accept it without scrutiny. But it is inseparable from its corollary: "those who are or do worse deserve less." Together they produce a circular justificatory structure. People who are found wanting — because poor, because migrant, because female, because uncredentialed, because disabled — are said to owe their subordinate position to their own deficiency. The exploitation is reframed as a consequence of what they lack. The circle closes when the structural conditions that produce the deficiency are treated as evidence that the deficiency is real. Colonial subjects shouldn't be "granted" self-rule because they are too uneducated — never mind that their colonizers denied them education.

This is not specific to capitalism or to modernity. It is the reasoning through which any class relation is justified: feudal, patriarchal, colonial, bureaucratic. What changes across contexts is the content — which groups are found wanting, which deficiencies are cited, which institutions enforce the judgment — but the logical structure is identical. This means that what we normally think of as categorically different forms of social organization — the caste system, plantation slavery, colonial occupation, feudalism, but also the modern liberal welfare state — can be understood as variations on the same theme. They are all institutional arrangements in which it is considered acceptable to maintain inequality, with the oppression "justified" by reference to whatever metrics of merit are locally dominant. The structures differ in how rigid they are, how much violence they use, and which traits they sort by. But if you object in principle to institutionalized oppression and discrimination, then what matters is not which metrics are used or how flexible the system is, but whether the institution builds on or contributes to exploitation.

Why both formulations must be rejected

A large part of why most people embrace meritocratic reasoning is that they only associate it with its positive formulation — "those who contribute more deserve to be rewarded" — without considering the corollary. This seems hopeful, because it means that even though this logic is pervasive, most people recoil when asked to explicitly endorse the proposition that some people deserve to suffer. Nevertheless, the two formulations are inseparable. Every time we accept that some people deserve more, we implicitly accept that others deserve less. And in practice, people and institutions constantly act on this, especially when the targets are people they don't care for.

Consider how few people respond to news of harm coming to homeless people, or to incarcerated people, or to migrants who die at sea. Consider how the United States responded to the attack on the Twin Towers by invading two countries, causing the deaths of over a million people as "collateral damage." Consider how Madeleine Albright, as Secretary of State, publicly defended the claim that five hundred thousand dead Iraqi children were an "acceptable price" for an attempt to oust Saddam Hussein — with the word children doing all the rhetorical work, because the adults were already presumed to deserve whatever befell them. In each case, meritocratic reasoning does the same work: it classifies people as deserving of what happens to them, and this classification makes the violence invisible as violence.

The more everyday version is the common experience of watching someone carry a grudge, or take disproportionate revenge for a slight — behavior that most adults recognize as immature in a friend, but accept when carried out by institutions they identify with. We understand that "they hurt me, so it's okay for me to hurt them back" is poor reasoning when an individual does it. We are far less willing to apply the same standard to states, employers, or organizations that claim to act on our behalf.

Two common defenses of meritocracy need addressing. The first is that although current metrics of merit are flawed, we'll eventually find fair ones. This cannot justify what we know to be exploitative arrangements in the present. But more fundamentally, it presupposes what needs to be argued: that it is legitimate to classify some people as deserving less than others. The second defense is that as long as minimal living standards are "acceptable," there's nothing wrong with organizing society along meritocratic lines. But this ignores everything we know about how inequality works: that any wealth and status differences increase over time, because those with advantages use them to secure more; that parents with privilege work to pass it on; and that those who benefit from inequality have a strong interest in ensuring that those without property never gain political control. The phrase "undeserving poor" captures the circularity neatly. Does it mean "undeserving of being poor"? Or does it mean "poor because undeserving" — with the poverty itself serving as evidence of the deficiency? The ambiguity is the point: it allows the conclusion to do the work of justification while masquerading as description.

Why it's structural, not just attitudinal

If meritocratic reasoning were merely a bad habit of thought, it could be addressed through better arguments and moral education. But it is not. It is produced and reproduced by the way social life is organized under class rule.

The argument I develop across the essays on this site is that class exploitation operates by reorganizing the integrated fabric of social reproduction — the set of practices through which human communities address their members' needs — by separating it into institutionally distinct domains, each under class-structured control. The market addresses subsistence, partially and conditionally, through the wage. The state addresses protection, selectively, in ways calibrated to maintain property relations. The family addresses affection and care, under patriarchal authority, in forms shaped by the economic dependence of women and children. Religious institutions address meaning and identity, in forms that legitimate hierarchy. The professions address understanding and creation, gatekept by credentialing, organized to serve institutional interests. Each domain operates by its own logic, serves its own masters, and addresses a narrow range of needs — while the others are left to be filled by whatever is on offer.

Meritocratic reasoning is what makes this separation seem natural. It teaches people to accept that different domains of life operate by different rules, that different people deserve different treatment, and that the sorting mechanisms that determine who gets what are broadly legitimate. We learn this not through explicit instruction but through immersion in institutions organized on these principles — the family, the school, the workplace, the state bureaucracy — from early childhood onward. What these institutions teach, at a basic level, is to respect authority, to accept the beliefs of those with institutional power as true, to work toward goals chosen by others in exchange for extrinsic rewards, and to silence intrinsic motivation to the extent that it doesn't overlap with institutional demands.

This is not a conspiracy. It is the ordinary functioning of institutions organized under class rule. The more thoroughly someone internalizes the rules, and the greater the overlap between their personal interests and the ones fostered by institutional structures, the more motivated they will be to succeed within the system — and the less likely they are to question whether the system should exist. The result is a professional and managerial cohort that pays lip service to equal moral value while actively supporting or passively accepting arrangements that deny it.

Why it persists: competing solidarities and the stakes of class rule

If the analysis stopped here — meritocratic reasoning is pervasive, it's institutionally reproduced, we need to reject it — it would amount to a moral appeal: see the problem, change your thinking, organize differently. And moral appeals, however well-grounded, have a poor track record against material interests.

The deeper reason meritocratic reasoning persists is that many people, including many workers, have real material stakes in the class arrangements it justifies. This goes well beyond "false consciousness." Workers personally derive use values from class relations — from credential-based status, from the capacity to direct others' labor in the workplace or the household, from access to social spaces that exclude those deemed inferior, from ethnic and national privileges that provide real protections and real infrastructure. These advantages are tangible, and they give large sections of the working class a genuine, if partial, interest in maintaining class rule.

Meanwhile, the needs that class-structured institutions leave unmet — for participation, for identity, for recognition, for community — are addressed instead by what I call competing solidarities: nationalism, sectoralism, religious communalism, ethnic identification. Each of these provides real protections and real belonging, addressing a broader range of needs than class-based organizing typically does. But each also enforces compliance as a condition of membership, restricts solidarity along non-class lines, and reproduces internal hierarchies. The nation-state provides law, welfare, infrastructure, cultural belonging — but the protections serve property relations, the participation is bounded by the interests of capital, and the identity is defined to cut across class lines, binding worker and employer together as nationals against the foreign worker who shares the class position but not the passport.

Competing solidarities outcompete class solidarity in large part because they offer broader composites of need-fulfillment and at least some measure of community control. They are material forms of social organization, backed by real institutional resources and real enforcement, and they will not be dislodged by appeals to "true" class interest.

What follows

If the above analysis is correct, then the conventional left strategies — better arguments, better demands, better messaging — are necessary but insufficient. The problem is not that workers don't understand their interests. It is that their interests, as structured by class rule, genuinely pull in different directions.

The task, then, is not merely to reject meritocratic reasoning (though that is essential), nor merely to expose class exploitation (though that too is necessary). It is to build forms of collective life whose integration is comprehensive enough to outcompete the competing solidarities that currently organize most people's social existence — forms in which subsistence, identity, participation, creation, and care are addressed together, under the control of the people doing the reproducing.

This means, concretely: building organizations that treat their members as whole people embedded in communities rather than as atomized grievance-holders. Organizations that address the full range of needs that class-structured institutions fragment and neglect. Organizations that embody the social relations they seek to create — not as a moral preference for consistency, but because organizations that reproduce class relations internally train their members in the habits and justifications that sustain class rule externally. And it means confronting, honestly, the fact that many workers will resist these changes precisely because they have real stakes in existing arrangements — stakes that cannot be wished away or argued away, but must be addressed materially.

None of this happens overnight, and the obstacles are enormous. But neither is there a defensible alternative. Simply "living our own lives in the best way we know" is far too costly to those at the receiving end.

About this project

The essays on this site develop the analysis sketched above. They draw on Marx's early writings on human need and alienation, on anthropological and biological research into cooperative breeding and social reproduction, and on Manfred Max-Neef's framework of fundamental human needs — adapted here with a power analysis the original lacks. The guiding method is to take seriously that human beings have a shared set of non-hierarchical needs, and to ask what happens to the practices that address those needs when class rule reorganizes them into separate institutional domains, each serving different masters.

This approach makes it possible to analyze forms of exploitation that conventional Marxist frameworks struggle with — gendered household labor, credential-based hierarchies, ethnic and organizational power — as expressions of the same underlying logic, rather than as separate "issues" requiring separate theories. It also makes visible why competing solidarities like nationalism, sectoralism, and religious communalism are so durable: they address real needs that class-based organizing typically neglects, even as they reproduce the divisions that class rule depends on.

The project is ongoing. Some pieces address the theoretical framework directly; others apply it to specific political contexts and organizing challenges. I welcome questions, criticism, and engagement — particularly from people involved in organizing. The framework benefits from being challenged.