This project develops a single argument: that what connects feudalism, plantation slavery, animal agriculture, and the modern welfare state is not just "hierarchy" or "power" in the abstract, but a specific logic, one I call meritocratic reasoning, that rationalizes any form of class exploitation and makes it seem natural. The argument draws on Marxist analysis, evolutionary biology, anthropology, and needs-based frameworks to build a picture of how class rule works, why it persists, and what it would take to overcome it.
I arrived at this framework through encounters with Corey Robin, David Graeber, abolitionist veganism, Marshall Rosenberg's Nonviolent Communication, and Thomas Frank — discussed on the [About page]. What follows here is the framework itself.
1. Meritocratic reasoning
Meritocratic reasoning is not the same as "meritocracy" understood as a set of institutional practices like credentialism and competitive selection. It is something more fundamental: the moral logic that makes exploitation seem deserved and necessary.
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, the two formulations produce a circle. You classify a group as deficient — because poor, because migrant, because female, because uncredentialed, because nonhuman — and then use that classification to justify treating them worse. The worse treatment produces the very conditions (lack of education, lack of resources, lack of legal standing) that you then point to as proof that the classification was correct. Colonial administrators denied colonized peoples education, then cited their lack of education as proof they weren't ready for self-rule. Employers pay women less, then treat women's lower earnings as evidence they contribute less. Factory farms breed animals into dependence and docility, then cite that dependence as proof they couldn't survive without human management. The circle closes so neatly that most people never notice it's a circle.
This logic is not specific to capitalism or to modernity; it is as old as class rule itself. The examples above already cut across multiple forms of exploitation — colonial, patriarchal, speciesist — each operating by its own metrics but running the same underlying reasoning. What changes across contexts is the content: which groups get sorted out, which deficiencies get cited, which institutions enforce the sorting. But the structure is identical, which is why these forms of exploitation so readily coexist and reinforce each other. A caste system and a liberal welfare state differ mainly in how rigid the sorting is, how much violence backs it up, and which traits they sort by. If you object in principle to institutionalized oppression, then what matters is not how they sort but whether the institution builds on exploitation at all.
The essay "Against Class Rule" develops the full argument for why meritocratic reasoning should be understood as the generative logic of class exploitation, and distinguishes it from related concepts like Gramsci's hegemony and Bourdieu's symbolic violence.
2. Needs and the human baseline
The framework rests on a claim about what human beings are and what they need. Drawing on Manfred Max-Neef's taxonomy of fundamental human needs — subsistence, protection, affection, understanding, participation, identity, creation, and freedom — it takes seriously that these needs are universal and non-hierarchical. They are not rewards to be earned but conditions of functioning, shared across the species.
The biological grounding for this claim comes from research into cooperative breeding and human self-domestication. Humans are cooperative breeders: a species in which the raising of offspring depends on care from multiple adults, not just biological parents. This arrangement, as Sarah Blaffer Hrdy has argued, selected for the capacities that make human sociality possible — empathy, perspective-taking, intersubjectivity. Infants who could solicit care from multiple caregivers survived; those who could not, did not. The human capacity for solidarity is not a cultural achievement layered on top of a selfish animal nature. It is a biological feature of the species, produced by the material conditions of reproduction.
The self-domestication hypothesis adds a further dimension. Coalitionary enforcement against aggressive dominants — the collective suppression of reactive aggression by cooperating subordinates — was not merely a behavioral pattern but an actual selection pressure that shaped the species over evolutionary time. Unlike the domestication of other animals, which was mainly imposed externally, human self-domestication was driven from within the group. The human baseline was itself produced by a proto-political process: collective action against domination operating as selection across thousands of generations.
What matters for the framework is that for most of human history, the practices addressing human needs were collectively governed. Child-rearing, food provision, protection, ritual, and decision-making were woven together within the same community of people who depended on each other. They were not split into separate institutional domains. This is visible in the ethnographic record: Jerome Lewis's long-term work with the Mbendjele BaYaka documents shared care, polyphonic music as a mode of self-governance, and ritual practices that address identity, participation, and affection simultaneously.
Class rule disrupts this.
The essay "Why Competing Solidarities Tend to Win" develops the biological-anthropological foundation at length, drawing on Hrdy, Boehm, Knight, and Lewis. The essay on "MacIntyre's After Virtue" uses the framework to reinterpret moral incoherence as a product of institutional separation rather than philosophical failure.
3. Institutional separation
If meritocratic reasoning is the logic that makes exploitation seem deserved and necessary, institutional separation is the mechanism that produces and reproduces it.
Class rule reorganizes social reproduction by separating it into institutionally distinct domains, each under class-structured control, and each addressing only a narrow slice of what people need. 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 behind credential gates, in service to institutional interests. Each domain operates by its own logic, serves its own masters, and addresses a narrow range of needs, leaving the rest to 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 determining who gets what are broadly legitimate. We learn this not through explicit instruction but by growing up inside institutions that run on these principles. What these institutions teach, at a basic level, is to defer to authority, to work toward goals others choose for us in exchange for extrinsic rewards, and to silence our intrinsic motivation wherever it doesn't serve institutional interests. The essay "Disciplined into Deserving" argues that class-structured education is the primary training ground for these dispositions: not through what it teaches but through what it trains — grading, ranking, credentialing, compliance, and the habit of experiencing differential treatment as deserved.
This separation also explains why the common perception that need-satisfaction is a zero-sum game is so deeply entrenched. Class-structured institutions make need-satisfaction zero-sum by parceling it out conditionally: you get subsistence through the market if you can sell your labor, protection through the state if you are a citizen, belonging through the nation or the community if you conform. When every domain of need-fulfillment is conditional and competitive, the experience of scarcity is not a misperception but an accurate description of how class-structured institutions actually work.
This is not specific to capitalism. Tributary, feudal, and slave-holding societies all produced their own versions of institutional separation. The forms differ — which institutions do the separating, which roles are assigned, which categories of people get designated as deserving less — but the underlying structure is consistent across class societies.
4. Competing solidarities and material stakes
If the analysis stopped at institutional separation and meritocratic reasoning, 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 of us, including many who work for a living, have real material stakes in the class arrangements it justifies. This goes well beyond "false consciousness." People 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 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, what I call competing solidarities — nationalism, sectoralism, religious communalism, ethnic identification — step in to address needs that class-structured institutions leave unmet: participation, identity, community. Each 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 and reproduces internal hierarchies. The nation-state provides law, welfare, infrastructure, and cultural belonging; but the protections serve property relations, capital bounds the participation, and the identity cuts 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 address more of what people actually need, and give them at least some measure of community control. Institutional resources and enforcement back them, and appeals to "true" class interest will not dislodge them.
The essay "More to Lose Than Their Chains" develops the argument about workers' material stakes in class rule. "Why Competing Solidarities Tend to Win" explains why these formations are so durable and what it would take to outcompete them.
5. Energy, bodies, and animal exploitation
The framework makes a claim that most left analysis avoids: that class exploitation, at its most fundamental, rests on the organized extraction of endosomatic energy — energy from living bodies. Compelling other bodies, human and animal, to convert their metabolic energy into work that benefits you is the material substrate on which class relations are built. The slaveholder, the feudal lord, the farmer, and the capitalist all do the same thing at the level of energy: they arrange social relations so that other organisms' bodies become sources of exosomatic energy for them. The forms differ. The material logic does not.
This means animal exploitation is not an analogy for human class exploitation. It is another form of the same thing. The relationships between humans and other animals are older and more complex than the word "domestication" suggests — animals sought out human settlements as well as being captured by them, and the resulting interdependencies took many forms before they were reorganized into systematic extraction. But what matters for the framework is that the large-scale organization of animal endosomatic energy was the first form of organized extraction of living labor, and the archaeological record strongly links unequal control of animals to the emergence of wealth inequality and social stratification. The Eurasian pathway — in which the exploitation of animal endosomatic energy was combined with the exploitation of human endosomatic energy — proved to be the deeper and more robust route to class domination, and through colonialism and industrialization it is this pathway that structures the global system today.
The distinction between living and non-living exosomatic energy is critical. A coal seam does not experience its extraction. Miners and the draught horses they work with do. If living exosomatic energy sources have needs and capacities, and if having needs and capacities is sufficient for having an interest in not being subjected to organized extraction, then consistency requires posing the emancipation question for nonhuman animals as well. A society that ends the wage relation but continues to extract endosomatic energy from animal bodies at industrial scale has not overcome the logic of class domination — it has drawn a species line through it.
The energy framework also reveals a structural tendency of class societies: when concentrated non-living exosomatic energy becomes scarcer or more expensive without adequate substitutes, the system compensates by intensifying the extraction of endosomatic energy from living bodies. This is what happened in the early Soviet Union, what happens in regions experiencing energy poverty today, and what will happen at larger scales if the energy base contracts without replacement.
The essay "The Material Conditions of Emancipation" develops the energy framework in full, engaging with Andreas Malm, Timothy Mitchell, Andre Gorz, and Jason W. Moore. "Veganism and the Acceptance of Violence" argues for the inclusion of animal exploitation within the framework of class analysis.
6. How it is maintained: cultural and psychological mechanisms
The structural analysis explains why meritocratic reasoning persists. But class rule also requires active cultural and psychological maintenance — mechanisms that train people to accept exploitation as natural and to participate in it without experiencing it as such. Three essays develop these mechanisms in detail.
Innocence as a technology of legitimation
The concept of "innocence" functions not as a restraint on violence but as a license for it. When the cosmic or moral order is understood as just and suffering as merited, then harming someone requires that they be shown to deserve it. "Innocence" names the default condition from which people can fall, and it is the fall — the loss of innocence, the demonstration of guilt — that authorizes violence. This is meritocratic reasoning applied to bodily integrity: the same logic that sorts people into those who deserve access to subsistence and those who do not is applied to the question of who deserves to continue existing without harm.
The logic operates wherever innocence is withdrawn. Colonial powers found colonized peoples "guilty" of savagery. States waging war find enemy populations "guilty" of aggression. Criminal justice systems warehousing surplus populations find them "guilty" of offenses whose criminalization is itself a product of class legislation. In each case, the withdrawal of innocence makes violence invisible as violence.
The essay "Innocence and the License to Kill" traces the historical development of this concept from ancient cosmologies through moral accounting to universalized moral worth, showing how each stage refines the legitimation apparatus rather than restraining it.
Institutional role compliance
Most of us spend the majority of our waking lives acting within institutional roles — as employees, managers, bureaucrats, professionals. These roles teach people to stop seeing their actions as morally significant. We learn that "work" operates by different rules than "life," that following orders is not the same as choosing to act, and that compliance is a virtue rather than a moral choice. School is where most people first practice this compartmentalization, as "Disciplined into Deserving" argues, but workplace and professional socialization deepen it.
This suspension of moral awareness is not a personal failing. It is structurally produced by the institutional separation described above. When different domains of life operate by different rules, it becomes intuitive to believe that different moral standards apply in each. And it operates on a continuum: the same cognitive operation that allows a salesperson to push an unnecessary service allows, in different circumstances, far worse. The person who has learned to reduce others to institutional categories — "applicant," "client," "target" — has practiced the exact operation that enables participation in organized harm.
The essay "Just Doing Your Job" develops this argument and shows how it connects to the broader framework, including the extension to nonhuman animals: the institutional infrastructure required to treat living bodies as raw material does not stay neatly contained on one side of the species line.
The myth of redemptive violence
Class societies require populations that accept the violent maintenance of existing arrangements as natural, necessary, and just. One of the technologies through which this acceptance is produced is what Walter Wink called the myth of redemptive violence: the narrative pattern in which order is established and maintained through the destruction of an ontologically evil enemy. The myth teaches that some threats cannot be reasoned with, that violence against them is not merely permitted but righteous, and that the failure to respond with force constitutes naive weakness rather than moral commitment.
The myth operates most effectively at the level of affect rather than argument, through stories internalized long before critical faculties develop. Its durability derives not from any particular content but from its structural fit with the requirements of class legitimation: any society founded on organized violence will tend to produce narratives that sacralize violence. The essay "Redemptive Violence and the Stories We Tell" traces the myth from ancient Mesopotamian cosmology through contemporary popular culture, showing how it suppresses the question of needs — the question that, as the rest of this project argues, the legitimation apparatus of class-structured societies is designed to keep people from asking.
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 we don't understand our interests. It is that class rule structures our interests to pull in genuinely different directions.
The task is to build forms of collective life that address subsistence, identity, participation, and care together, under the control of the people doing the reproducing, comprehensively enough to outcompete the competing solidarities that currently organize most people's social existence. This means building organizations that treat their members as whole people embedded in communities rather than as carriers of a single political demand. 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 of us will resist these changes precisely because we have real stakes in existing arrangements — stakes that no amount of wishing or arguing will dissolve, and that only material alternatives can address.
None of this happens overnight, and the obstacles are enormous. But neither is there a defensible alternative. The cost of inaction falls on those least equipped to bear it.
The essays on this site develop the analysis outlined above. Some address the theoretical framework directly; others apply it to specific political contexts and organizing challenges. They draw on Marx's early writings on human need and alienation, on the biological and anthropological research summarized above, and on Max-Neef's framework of fundamental human needs, adapted here with a power analysis the original lacks. I welcome questions, criticism, and engagement, particularly from people involved in organizing. The framework benefits from being challenged.