In 2015, I became an abolitionist vegan. Once I understood that 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, I couldn't unsee it. The connection isn't merely analogical. If your framework identifies the organized extraction of living beings' energy and labor as the material substrate of class domination, then a society that abolishes this for humans while maintaining it for other animals at industrial scale hasn't overcome the logic — it has drawn a species line through it. This commitment informs the theoretical framework throughout, particularly the analysis of energy and emancipation.

Getting into advocacy, I quickly ran into a wall talking to people, which led me to Marshall Rosenberg's Nonviolent Communication. NVC gave me a vocabulary for thinking about human needs as concrete and universal — not as luxuries to be earned or privileges to be distributed, but as conditions that every person requires in order to function. It also made visible how thoroughly our ordinary ways of speaking and thinking are saturated with judgments of desert and blame, and how much of what passes for moral reasoning is really the demand that others suffer for failing to meet our expectations. That insight — that the logic justifying harm is embedded in how we talk and think, not just in how institutions are organized — remains central to the project.

A few years of further reading brought me to the question that gave the blog its name: why does the left keep losing? Not tactically — there are plenty of tactical explanations — but structurally. Why do workers so reliably organize along national, ethnic, sectoral, and religious lines rather than class lines? And why does the left, including most of its radical wing, have so little to say about this beyond blaming "false consciousness" or "ideological hegemony"?

The initial insight was that meritocratic reasoning — the logic by which people are sorted into those who deserve more and those who deserve less — operates far more broadly than most critics of meritocracy recognize. It isn't just a feature of liberal credentialism or professional-class snobbery. It is the generative logic through which any form of class exploitation is rationalized: feudal, patriarchal, colonial, capitalist. Seeing this allowed me to connect things that are usually treated as separate problems — why progressives look down on the uncredentialed, why colonial subjects were denied self-rule on the basis of the education they were denied, why institutionalized violence against marginalized people provokes so little outrage — as expressions of a single underlying mechanism.

The earlier essays on this site reflect that initial stage of the argument. They're uneven — I was learning to write for a public audience, and some of them try to do too much at once. I've left them up because the core observations still hold, even where I'd now frame them differently.

Since then, the project has developed considerably, both through continued reading and through practical involvement in organizing. Three developments in particular changed how I think about the problem.

The first was engaging seriously with the anthropological and biological literature on cooperative breeding — the research into how human social reproduction actually works at the species level. This gave me a material grounding for claims that had previously rested more on moral intuition and on Rosenberg's needs-based thinking: human beings have a shared set of non-hierarchical needs, and the practices that address those needs are, in the species-typical pattern, integrated and collectively governed. Class rule breaks that integration by separating social reproduction into institutionally distinct domains — market, state, family, church, workplace — each under class-structured control. Meritocratic reasoning is what makes that separation seem natural.

The second was discovering Manfred Max-Neef's framework of fundamental human needs, which operationalized what Rosenberg had identified at the interpersonal level into a diagnostic vocabulary applicable to institutions and social structures. Max-Neef identifies nine dimensions of need — subsistence, protection, affection, understanding, participation, idleness, creation, identity, and freedom — and insists, against Maslow, that they are non-hierarchical. Adapted with a power analysis the original lacks, this framework makes it possible to map precisely what class-structured institutions provide, what they leave unmet, and where competing solidarities step in to fill the gaps.

The third was the realization — reinforced by organizing experience — that workers are not simply deceived into supporting class rule. Many of them derive real material and social benefits from it: from gendered divisions of labor, from credential-based hierarchies, from ethnic and national privileges. This means the problem of working-class disunity is not primarily one of consciousness but of material interests that genuinely pull in different directions. Any serious left strategy has to reckon with this honestly, rather than treating worker investment in class rule as a deviation from their "true" interests.

These three developments converged into the framework that the current essays develop: an analysis of class rule as a system broader than capitalism, reproduced through multiple overlapping forms of exploitation, rationalized by meritocratic reasoning, and sustained by competing solidarities that address real needs class-based organizing typically neglects. The strategic implication is that building durable class solidarity requires building forms of collective life that address the full range of human needs under collective governance — not as a utopian aspiration, but as a practical condition for outcompeting the solidarities that currently organize most people's social existence.

The writing on this site is addressed to people involved in or thinking about left organizing. I try to be rigorous without being academic, and to write in a way that's useful to movements rather than to careers. I don't have all the answers — much of what's here is provisional and benefits from being challenged. If you have questions, disagreements, or suggestions, I'd welcome hearing from you.