## Introduction

Feudalism, plantation slavery, animal agriculture, and the modern welfare state are usually treated as fundamentally different systems. This project argues that they run on the same logic: what I call *meritocratic reasoning*, the moral reasoning that makes class exploitation seem deserved and necessary. The argument draws on Marxist analysis, evolutionary biology, anthropology, and needs-based frameworks.

What follows here is an outline of the framework and what I have and will touch on itself.

## 1. Meritocratic reasoning

Meritocratic reasoning should be distinguished from "meritocracy" understood as a set of institutional practices like credentialism and competitive selection. It is the underlying logic on which all such practices depend.

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 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.

But meritocratic reasoning is only one of four modes through which class rule maintains itself. *Accommodation* means people comply despite recognizing injustice, because the costs of contestation exceed what they can bear. *Foreclosure* means the institutional architecture (fiscal rules, treaty constraints, credentialism, the fragmentation of knowledge into disciplines that cannot see cross-domain connections) prevents alternatives from becoming visible or contestable. *Endogenous generation* means the market produces its own legitimation: because some workers do become employers, the hierarchy appears to result from differential performance, giving meritocratic reasoning an empirical anchor no prior legitimation system had. In mature capitalist societies, accommodation and foreclosure do more work than justificatory belief — which is why refuting the ideology is necessary but not sufficient. The most effective contemporary mechanisms are not getting people to believe the system is just, but raising the costs of contesting it and preventing them from seeing how it works.

The essay "[More to Lose Than Our Chains](https://beyondmeritocracy.info/blog/more-to-lose)" develops the full argument, including the four legitimation modes and the *incorporation gradient* — the continuum from full membership in a society's national project down to complete exclusion, which determines how much of each mechanism different populations are subjected to and how much violence can be deployed against them.

## 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 and Marshall Rosenberg's refinements, grounded in evidence from evolutionary biology, reproductive biology, cultural anthropology, and comparative primatology, it identifies thirteen dimensions of need: subsistence, protection, connection/belonging, recognition, understanding, participation, play, creation, identity, autonomy/freedom, order/harmony, efficacy/power-to, and mourning/celebration. These are universal and non-hierarchical — 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. In most domesticated species, human breeders imposed selection for tameness from outside. In humans, on Christopher Boehm's account of how subordinate coalitions hold would-be dominants in check and Richard Wrangham's of what that enforcement left in the body, subordinates drove it from within the group, cooperating to suppress aggressive dominants, over evolutionary time, as a selection pressure that shaped the species biologically. The mechanism is contested — Wrangham emphasises coalitionary execution of aggressive males, Chris Knight the ritual coalitions of female kin — and nothing here depends on settling it. 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 needs concept does different analytical work at four levels across the collection. At the *biological* level, needs are neurobiological systems whose frustration produces measurable pathology: the stereotypy — bar-biting, pacing, self-mutilation — reveals which motivational system was blocked. "[What Sentience Is For](https://beyondmeritocracy.info/blog/cross-species-needs)" develops this and extends the framework across species: if the grounding is biological, it cannot be species-specific to humans. At the *perceptual* level, evaluative language suppresses needs-awareness by replacing "what does this person need?" with "what does this person deserve?" The [NVC essay](https://beyondmeritocracy.info/blog/nvc) traces how Rosenberg's structural diagnosis was depoliticized and what conditions would allow needs-perception to develop. At the *organizational* level, needs are what competing solidarities address — which of the thirteen dimensions, at what depth, through what satisfiers — and dimensional breadth determines which solidarity outcompetes which. "[Why Competing Solidarities Tend to Win](https://beyondmeritocracy.info/blog/why-competing-solidarities-tend-to-win)" develops the full apparatus, including the biological-anthropological foundation (drawing on Hrdy, Boehm, Knight, and Lewis). At the *structural* level, the material mechanisms of class rule — institutional separation, commodification, social reproduction reorganized under class control — produce the specific patterns of need-frustration the other three levels diagnose.

The essay on "[MacIntyre's *After Virtue*](https://beyondmeritocracy.info/blog/macintyre)" 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](https://beyondmeritocracy.info/blog/education)" 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.

None of this is 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. What capitalism adds is a deepening mechanism: the *commodification sequence* (imposition of dependence, extraction without reorganization, extraction through reorganization, financial mediation, interconnection-deepening, state de-risking) progressively restructures each domain's internal logic, so that the separation deepens over time rather than stabilizing — each stage creating the institutional infrastructure for the next.

## 4. Competing solidarities and material stakes

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, the participation is bounded by the interests of capital, 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. A further mechanism reinforces this: *form-switching* — when organized resistance raises the cost of extraction along one channel, the system redirects extraction through channels the resistance left uncontested. Abolition destroyed legal ownership of persons; within two decades, convict leasing reconstituted racialized exploitation through different institutional forms. Decolonization ended direct colonial administration; extraction was redirected through conditionality mechanisms already under development. Partial resistance produces form-switching rather than ending extraction, because it is organized around a partial solidarity that corresponds to one axis of the system's operation. Only resistance organized across enough axes simultaneously could block the redirection.

The essay "[More to Lose Than Our Chains](https://cosmonautmag.com/2024/02/on-capitalism-and-class-rule-moving-beyond-the-pmc-debate/)" develops the argument about workers' material stakes in class rule. "[Why Competing Solidarities Tend to Win](https://beyondmeritocracy.info/blog/why-competing-solidarities-tend-to-win)" explains why these formations are so durable and what it would take to outcompete them, drawing on ten case studies (four right-wing, six left) analyzed through the needs-dimension framework and six analytical tools (organizing dimension, aspirational dimension, governance form, sub-organizational architecture, reproduction conditions, terms of belonging). "[Do We Need the Fiction?](https://beyondmeritocracy.info/blog/do-we-need-the-fiction)" takes on the adjacent claim that meritocratic sorting, however flawed, is a necessary condition of social order.

## 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 work 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 "[Living and Non-Living: Why Emancipation Is an Energy Question]()" develops the energy framework in full, engaging with Andreas Malm, Timothy Mitchell, Andre Gorz, and Jason W. Moore. "[Energy, Ecology, and the 'Transition'](https://cosmonautmag.com/2026/05/energy-ecology-and-the-transition-why-logistics-is-a-class-question/)" takes up the practical and logistical dimensions: system costs, material constraints, the class consequences of the build-out, and why capital's enthusiasm for renewable energy cannot be read as evidence that substitution will work. "[Where the Logic Is Most Complete](https://beyondmeritocracy.info/blog/where-the-logic-is-most-complete-animal-use-and-meritocratic-reasoning)" argues for the inclusion of animal exploitation within the framework of class analysis, and "[Bred Into Existence](https://beyondmeritocracy.info/blog/bred-into-existence-animal-exploitation-and-the-reproduction-of-class-rule)" grounds that argument structurally by extending social reproduction theory to show that animal reproductive exploitation is generated by the same mechanism as gendered exploitation — capital's appropriation of reproductive labor, pushed to its extreme at the point on the incorporation gradient where countervailing pressure is absent.

## 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. "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: 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](https://beyondmeritocracy.info/blog/innocence-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](https://beyondmeritocracy.info/blog/education)" 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 operation that enables participation in organized harm.

The essay "[Just Doing Your Job](https://beyondmeritocracy.info/blog/on-personal-responsibility-and-careerism)" 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

The myth of redemptive violence, as Walter Wink called it, is the narrative pattern in which threats to order are embodied in an ontologically evil enemy whose destruction *is* the solution. It suppresses the question the rest of this project argues class-structured societies are designed to keep people from asking: what does this person need? By making the enemy monstrous, the myth ensures the question never arises. It operates most effectively at the level of affect rather than argument, through stories internalized long before critical faculties develop, and its durability derives not from any particular content but from its structural fit with the requirements of class legitimation.

The essay "[The Myth That Makes Violence Sacred](https://beyondmeritocracy.info/blog/redemptive-violence)" traces the myth from ancient Mesopotamian cosmology through contemporary popular culture.

### Evaluative language

Marshall Rosenberg's Nonviolent Communication identified a complementary mechanism operating at the level of everyday speech: the language of evaluation, judgment, and *desert* that systematically replaces the question "what does this person need?" with the question "what does this person deserve?" Where redemptive violence operates through narrative and affect, evaluative language operates through the ordinary vocabulary of institutional life — grading, diagnosing, judging, classifying — training people to process others through evaluative categories before any empathic registration can occur. Rosenberg saw this as a structural diagnosis, not a communication technique; the subsequent depoliticization of NVC into corporate mediation and personal development illustrates how class-structured societies absorb genuine critical insight and return it in individualized form.

The essay "[The Radical Core and Its Disappearance](https://beyondmeritocracy.info/blog/nvc)" examines what Rosenberg saw, how it was depoliticized, and where the most ambitious attempt to recover its structural core — Miki Kashtan's Nonviolent Global Liberation framework — stalls without the materialist analysis of class exploitation that structural transformation requires.

## 7. Class relations within movements

The structural analysis applies to the left's own organizations. Professionalization produces *class relations within movements*: credentialed intermediaries who exercise power over constituencies without meaningful reciprocity, justified by the same meritocratic reasoning that sustains class rule everywhere. The credentialed NGO professional who controls access to resources and claims authority on the basis of expertise is exercising a class relation, and the reasoning used to justify that position is the same circular logic the framework identifies in every other domain.

This is not a complaint about individual organizations. It is a structural feature of the organizational ecology of developed societies, where dense associational ecologies have been thinned out and replaced by professionalized, grant-dependent, single-issue intermediaries whose survival is decoupled from active constituent participation. The shift from organizing (where the members develop the power analysis and lead escalating action) to advocacy (where professionals act on behalf of a passive constituency) follows predictably from any organizational feature that decouples the organization's material survival from its members' active engagement — whether through grant dependency, automatic dues checkoff, or the replacement of activism with donation.

The essay "[What to Do About NGOs?]()" traces this dynamic across foundations, advocacy organizations, and social movements, with case studies from the Netherlands and the United States. "[Whose Power Is It?]()" develops the argument for the case where it matters most — the trade union, the only organization in the civil society landscape whose stated function requires the active collective power of its members — through the FNV's four-decade trajectory, the McAlevey organizing framework, and US comparative cases that show what the reversal looks like when it works.

## 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 whose labor sustains them, 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 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. I welcome questions, criticism, and engagement, particularly from people involved in organizing.

## Bibliography

Boehm, Christopher. *Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior*. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.

Hrdy, Sarah Blaffer. *Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding*. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009.

Knight, Chris. *Blood Relations: Menstruation and the Origins of Culture*. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991.

Lewis, Jerome. "BaYaka Pygmy Multi-Modal and Mimetic Communication Traditions." In Chris Knight and Jerome Lewis, eds., *The Social Origins of Language*. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.

Lewis, Jerome. "Egalitarianism and Kinship." In *The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology*, edited by Hilary Callan. Wiley, 2018.

Max-Neef, Manfred, Antonio Elizalde, and Martín Hopenhayn. *Human Scale Development: Conception, Application, and Further Reflections*. New York: Apex Press, 1991.

Rosenberg, Marshall B. *Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life*. 3rd ed. Encinitas, CA: PuddleDancer Press, 2015.

Wink, Walter. *Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination*. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992.

Wink, Walter. *The Powers That Be: Theology for a New Millennium*. New York: Doubleday, 1998.

Wrangham, Richard. *The Goodness Paradox: The Strange Relationship Between Virtue and Violence in Human Evolution*. New York: Pantheon, 2019.