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 grew out of a series of encounters that forced me to see the same pattern in places I hadn't expected.

Corey Robin's The Reactionary Mind convinced me that reactionaries want above all to silence anyone they consider their inferiors: because they believe such people have no right to be heard, because they fear losing their own status, and because they think society can only function when everyone "knows their place." This raised a question: could I summarize what liberals and progressives believe in a similar way? 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 doesn't belong to reactionaries alone, 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. Around the same time, becoming an abolitionist vegan confronted me with just how deep that mindset runs. The logic by which we justify harming animals — they're lesser, they don't matter as much, their suffering is an acceptable price — is structurally identical to the logic by which we justify harming marginalized humans. And the mutual hostility I encountered in the advocacy space, from all sides, made it impossible to miss that this was a general pattern. Getting into advocacy also led me to Marshall Rosenberg's Nonviolent Communication, which gave me a vocabulary for seeing how thoroughly judgments of desert and blame saturate our everyday speech and reasoning, and for thinking about human needs as universal rather than as rewards one must earn.

Thomas Frank's Listen, Liberal brought the picture into full focus. Most progressives, however progressive they may be in their personal dealings, embrace a form of elitism every bit as indefensible as the kind conservatives favor. 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, and cultural taste. The same logic, different content.

What meritocratic reasoning is

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.

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.

Why both formulations must be rejected

The reason meritocratic reasoning is so widespread is that people typically encounter only its positive face — "those who contribute more deserve to be rewarded" — without following the logic to its corollary. This seems hopeful: even where the logic is pervasive, few people will explicitly endorse the proposition that some people deserve to suffer. But the two faces 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 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 everyone already presumed the adults deserved whatever befell them. In both cases, 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.

Most people already know this logic is wrong; they just don't recognize it when it operates at scale. Watch someone nurse a grudge, or take disproportionate revenge for a slight, and you see it immediately: this person has decided the other party deserves what's coming to them, and that conviction has shut down any further moral reasoning. Most adults recognize this as immature when a friend does it. They can see that "they hurt me, so it's okay for me to hurt them back" is a way of giving yourself permission to stop thinking about consequences. But the same adults who would call this out in a friend will cheer when a state does it, or shrug when an employer does it, or defend it when an organization they belong to does it. The reasoning is identical, but the institutional framing makes it invisible. This is the everyday face of meritocratic reasoning: not a grand ideological commitment, but the small, reflexive conviction that the people getting hurt probably had it coming.

At this point, many people retreat to one of two defenses.

The first is that although current metrics of merit are flawed, we'll eventually find fair ones. But this concedes the present while defending the principle: it asks us to accept exploitative arrangements now on the promise that better sorting is coming. And even as a statement of principle, it presupposes exactly what it needs to argue: that it is legitimate to classify some people as deserving less than others. The question is not whether we can sort more fairly. The question is whether sorting people into more and less deserving is something we should be doing at all.

The second defense is that as long as everyone's basic needs are met, there's nothing wrong with organizing society along meritocratic lines. But this ignores everything we know about how class domination actually works. Wealth and status differences increase over time, because those with advantages use them to secure more. Parents with privilege work to pass it on. Those who benefit from class domination have a strong interest in ensuring that those without property never gain political control. "Acceptable" minimal standards have a way of eroding once the people setting them no longer depend on them.

The phrase "undeserving poor" captures the circularity of both defenses 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.

But if the logic is this pervasive, rejecting it as a moral error is not enough. We need to understand why it keeps reproducing itself.

Why it's structural, not just attitudinal

If meritocratic reasoning were merely a bad habit of thought, better arguments and moral education could fix it. But the way class rule organizes social life produces and reproduces it.

Human beings have a shared set of fundamental needs: for subsistence, protection, affection, understanding, participation, identity, creation, and freedom. Research into cooperative breeding and the anthropological record suggests that in the species-typical pattern, the practices addressing these needs are integrated and collectively governed — child-rearing, food provision, protection, ritual, and decision-making are not split into separate institutional domains but woven together within the same community of people who depend on each other. Class rule disrupts this integration.

The argument I develop across the essays on this site is that class rule reorganizes this integrated fabric 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.

This is not a conspiracy. It is how institutions ordinarily function. The more thoroughly someone internalizes the rules, and the greater the overlap between their personal interests and the ones institutional structures foster, the more motivated they will be to succeed within the system, and the less likely to question whether it should exist. The result is a professional and managerial cohort that pays lip service to equal moral value while actively supporting arrangements that deny it.

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

If the analysis stopped here — meritocratic reasoning is pervasive, institutions reproduce it, 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 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.

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, 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 that address subsistence, identity, participation, and care 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 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.

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, which I adapt 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, such as gendered household labor, credential-based hierarchies, and 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 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.