More to Lose Than Their Chains: Class Rule and the Problem of Worker Ambivalence

The Problem

For roughly 150 years, the socialist and communist left has organized around one foundational assumption: that our proximate fight is with capitalism. I believe this assumption is wrong, and that it explains much of our failure.

Our fight is with class rule — the broader system of institutionalized relationships through which some people get others to perform labor for them without meaningful reciprocity, and in which there are thousands of different ways in which advantage and disadvantage are meted out and expressed. Capitalist wage exploitation is the most widespread and politically important form of this, but it is not the only one. Treating it as though it were has cost us dearly.

The cost shows up in two ways. First, many workers benefit enough from other aspects of class rule, from gendered divisions of labor to professional hierarchies to ethnic and cultural advantages, that they are genuinely ambivalent about abolition. These advantages are tangible, and perceived as natural. Second, many marginalized workers look at the left's promise of "an end to capitalism" and correctly see it as insufficient. It says nothing about the exploitation and marginalization they experience in the private sphere, in their families and communities. So they stay away — not out of apathy, but because the offer isn't good enough.

These two problems (ambivalence among the relatively advantaged, and distrust among the marginalized) are connected. Both stem from a definition of class that is too narrow: one that focuses on wage labor and ownership of the means of production while ignoring the many other ways class rule reproduces itself.

If this diagnosis is right, it has major consequences for how we organize — consequences that go well beyond choosing better demands or better messaging. It requires rethinking what workers' organizations are for.^[1]

1. Capitalist Class Societies Are Maturing, Not Declining

For well over a century, most of the left has repeated some version of the claim that capitalism is "in decline."^[2] This has gone largely unchallenged, despite encouraging wishful thinking and complacency in equal measure. The working class certainly made serious attempts to overthrow capitalist rule in the past century, and came closer than most people now realize. But those attempts failed, and the organizations and splinter factions that survived have done far too little to analyze why they failed — preferring, in most cases, to keep waiting for the next crisis to do the work for them. Our base assumption should be that capitalist class societies are still maturing, and that the ruling classes have spent the past century getting much better at absorbing and neutralizing challenges to their rule.

Consider the broad trajectory. From the late nineteenth century onward, and with increasing force after 1917, mass organizing and the existence of a socialist movement with state power generated enormous pressure on ruling classes to make concessions. Workers' organizations built mutual aid networks, cooperative housing, educational institutions, and health funds; states, under pressure, expanded public provision — social safety nets, public transportation, affordable housing, universal education — partly as genuine concessions, partly to channel demands into forms they could control. These gains strengthened the working class and made it easier to refuse unsafe and particularly exploitative conditions. For decades, the propertied classes could do little about this — the class was too well-organized, and an unprecedented economic boom (fueled by postwar reconstruction and cheap energy) underwrote its confidence.^[3]

But the ruling classes were learning, and the benefits were unevenly distributed in ways that undermined our projects from the start. Even during the boom years, they made inroads. To use the postwar US case as an example, the New Deal and GI Bills enforced racial and spatial segregation by design. Union leaderships expelled Communists. A cross-class coalition of employers, legislators, and unions pushed white working-class women back into the home. And the very success of social-democratic reforms generated new tools for class rule. Managing welfare states forced bourgeoisies to build enormous legal-regulatory apparatuses, which in turn spread and normalized capitalist relations of production, created a new stratum of professional and managerial workers with expectations of social advancement, and increased public dependence on the bourgeois state.^[4]

The result was not decline but consolidation. By the time the postwar boom ended (through a convergence of industrial competition, the oil crises, the Sino-Soviet split, and the failure of 1968) the ruling classes had the tools and experience to roll back earlier gains. From the late 1970s onward, they privatized, marketized, and destroyed or neutered the very organizations that had been built on a class-collaborationist basis. The working class, meanwhile, had grown dependent on state provision and had largely dismantled its own independent organizations, or failed to prevent the undermining of those that remained.

A defender of the decline thesis might respond: isn't the need for increasingly elaborate mechanisms of adaptation itself evidence of decline? A system that requires ever-larger regulatory apparatuses, financialization, and the constant reorganization of class relations just to reproduce itself is hardly thriving. There is something to this. I have no particular quarrel with the observation that capitalist reproduction has become more complex and costly over time.

My quarrel is with the political conclusion that typically follows: that this complexity itself presages collapse, or that the contradictions will eventually force unity. This version of the decline thesis has substituted prophecy for strategy for over a century, and encourages the left to wait for conditions to do the work that only organizing can do.

This does not mean the system faces no limits. The ecological feedback loop — fossil fuel depletion, agricultural land degradation, biodiversity loss — is degrading the material base on which class rule's reproduction depends. The energy regime that underwrites contemporary accumulation is physically contracting in ways that no amount of institutional sophistication can override. Class rule is getting politically smarter while its material basis deteriorates. But the political maturation and the material contraction are not the same process, and the latter does not cancel the former. A system that is simultaneously more resilient to political challenges and less materially sustainable is more dangerous, not less — because the response to material contraction, absent organized alternatives, is not collapse but the intensified exploitation of living bodies: longer hours, worse conditions, expanded coercion, the displacement of ecological costs onto those least able to resist.^[5]

The strategic conclusion is the same either way: we need to build now, on the terrain that actually exists, rather than on the terrain we hope a future crisis will create.

2. Class Rule Beyond the Wage Relation

The consequences of this narrowing are not only strategic but analytical.

The postwar test case

Take the postwar United States again. The combination of the draft, ongoing military occupations, and expanded access to tertiary education meant very few men were unemployed. During the war itself, millions of women had worked in factories. Unionization rates were high. Workers were in an exceptionally strong bargaining position.

And yet, after the war, a cross-class coalition of husbands and prospective fathers pushed white working women out of the workforce and back into the home.^[6]

This cannot be adequately explained using a purely capitalist economic framework. The labor market would have benefited from their continued participation. What drove it was that men, across class lines, wanted access to a use value that markets couldn't provide: domestic labor, care, sexual availability, and social deference.^[7]

A recurring pattern

This was not an anomaly. Offering working-class men control over women is one of the oldest and most reliable techniques for securing compliance with class rule. Post-revolutionary France saw the Napoleonic Code strip women and children of legal autonomy, and bourgeois reformers subsequently constructed gendered household authority as a deliberate strategy of labor discipline — using housing design, moral surveillance, and the wife's domestic role to suppress working-class independence, against the resistance of a working class that largely refused the family form.^[8] Fascist movements made a similar promise to the men they mobilized: the restoration of male dominion over women and the household.^[9] The pattern extends into the present. The global sex tourism industry (actively promoted by institutions like the World Bank as a "development" strategy) continues to commodify gendered exploitation in ways that fragment working-class solidarity in the countries where it operates.^[10]

But the privatized household has a second form of bottom-up pull that most analyses understate: parental authority over children — control over their labor, time, development, and social world — combined with an aspirational stake in the child as vehicle for class reproduction. The authority is a domain of unaccountable power that collective child-rearing arrangements would distribute and subject to accountability. The aspiration — the child as carrier of name, status, property, legacy — gives the authority its content, and its weight varies with property values. The care this produces is genuine; what counts as a good future for the child is class-determined. Together, authority and aspiration give both parents a stake in the privatized family form, not only men. The gendered dimension binds men; the parental dimension binds everyone who has children. Together they make the family resilient from below as well as from above.

The pattern is consistent: wherever class rule faces pressure, available responses include offering men from the subordinate classes private dominion over women as compensation for their public subordination, and granting both parents authority over dependents and an aspirational stake in their children's class trajectory. These work precisely because they provide use values that cannot be obtained through the market, and that are experienced as personal and intimate rather than political. It is class rule operating through the private sphere, and no framework that restricts "class" to wage relations can see it.^[11][12]

A broader definition

I propose that class relations are those that allow a dominant party to get others to do work on terms they set, on an ongoing basis, without having to meaningfully reciprocate.^[13]

A natural objection: isn't this too broad? After all, many relationships involve asymmetric effort, from friendships to family bonds to casual social obligations. What distinguishes a class relation from an ordinary social asymmetry?

The answer is institutionalized power. Class relations are not simply cases where someone gives more than they get. They are relationships in which the asymmetry is backed by institutional, economic, or social power that the subordinate party cannot easily escape, and that structures their options going forward. A husband who can have his wife committed, fired, or left destitute if she refuses domestic labor is in a class relation with her. A friend who freeloads on your hospitality is not — unless your social world is structured such that refusing him carries real consequences.^[14] The key is whether the non-reciprocity is enforced and reproduced by arrangements that extend beyond the dyad: legal systems, property relations, organizational hierarchies, cultural norms backed by social exclusion or violence.

"Work" here includes not just commodity production or paid service, but care, domestic labor, emotional and sexual labor, deference, and institutional compliance. But the definition is not unlimited. It excludes purely personal dynamics that lack institutional backing, even when those dynamics are exploitative in colloquial terms.

In capitalist societies, the politically primary form of this is control over the labor of others through ownership of the means of production: the ability to privatize gains, direct revenues, and compel workers to further an owner's goals. But production and sale are not the only sources of use values that matter to people. There are many others that don't involve markets or wage relations at all. Family life, friendships, sexual and romantic relationships, the maintenance of households and communities — all of these require labor. Much of that labor is difficult or impossible to commodify, because people don't want to obtain everything that matters to them through the market.^[15]

What follows from this? Since institutionalized power asymmetries make it possible to obtain these without reciprocating, individuals will seek to do so. Any arrangement that allows this can become a class-societal benefit, a material stake in its maintenance.^[16][17] And the more such arrangements exist, the more normal the whole thing feels.

How non-market exploitation is maintained

Since these use values can't be obtained through employment contracts, the coercion works differently. Four mechanisms stand out:^[18]

Devaluation of labor. Certain kinds of work (domestic labor, care for children and the elderly, emotional support) are culturally coded as duties, as expressions of love, or as not-really-work. This makes it invisible as exploitation even to those performing it.

Devaluation of persons. The people who do this work are dehumanized or assigned lower status — through "scientific" justifications, through religious and cultural norms, through simple habituation to disrespect. In the extreme, their exploitation is defined as not-exploitation because they are defined as not-fully-human.

Coercive enforcement. Direct and indirect violence (state violence, economic exclusion, social ostracism) sets the floor. It establishes what happens to those who refuse, which disciplines everyone else. The firing of married women, the criminalization of poverty, the breaking of strikes: all of these affect what people can demand for their labor, both paid and unpaid.

Artificial scarcity. Restricting access to valued goods and positions — housing, credentials, secure employment, leisure, healthcare, cultural goods — ensures that workers compete laterally for what's available rather than challenging the restrictions themselves.^[19] The more desirable things are kept scarce, the more people invest in the hierarchies that distribute them, and the more they resent those who seem to be getting something for nothing. This turns the defense of inequality into a felt moral conviction: if I had to compete for this, why shouldn't you? Scarcity doesn't just constrain choices; it trains people to see competitive allocation as fair.

These four mechanisms are not applied uniformly. They operate through what I elsewhere called the incorporation gradient: the continuum from full membership in a society's "national project" (or its organizational, professional, or communal equivalent) down to complete exclusion. Where someone sits on this gradient — determined by some combination of gender, ethnicity, legal status, credentials, confession, and class markers — determines how much of each mechanism they are subjected to, and how much violence can be deployed against them before it generates political consequences for the people doing it. Credentialed metropolitan citizens sit near the top; undocumented migrant workers sit near the bottom; and the distance between them is maintained not by any single sorting criterion but by whichever markers are locally available and institutionally enforceable.

The gradient is not merely inherited from pre-existing prejudice — it is actively manufactured, through legal architecture and through the everyday sorting work of organizations and social groups. Immigration law produces populations that are physically present but legally vulnerable; criminal law does the same to domestic populations (the criminalization of vagrancy converting the dispossessed into a legally targetable labor force is the oldest instance; felon disenfranchisement and post-release conditions are contemporary ones). Employers, unions, professional associations, religious bodies, and kinship networks do the rest — hiring selectively, excluding historically, gatekeeping credentials, enforcing conformity, routing opportunities along familiar lines. The border is not a barrier to labor mobility; it is a tool for calibrating the degree of legal vulnerability under which a labor force operates; organizational sorting calibrates the rest.^[20]

The gradient explains why the same class society produces different forms of class-societal benefit for workers at different positions on it. The form — racial wage in one context, credential gatekeeping in another, patriarchal compensation in a third — varies with gradient position, but the mechanism is the same: relative advantage over those below, defended in proportion to its precariousness. This is why attempts to address one form of hierarchy (say, racial) without addressing the gradient itself tend to redirect the sorting: the system concedes one axis and recalibrates through others.

These mechanisms are maintained primarily through socialization. Authoritarian family dynamics teach children to accept non-reciprocal relationships as normal. Schools teach deference to institutional authority. Ethnic chauvinism and patriotism channel ingroup solidarity into support for ruling-class projects, up to and including wars.^[21][22]

Europe's postwar "guest worker" programs are a case in point: millions of workers were imported to undermine local labor power, with racial and cultural prejudice ensuring that domestic workers made little effort to organize alongside the newcomers — a division the propertied classes exploited to suppress wages across the board.^[23]

Because binding operates through socialization and daily practice, not just through the provision of material goods, alternatives that merely replace one provider with another do not break it. A welfare state that delivers healthcare, education, and pensions bureaucratically may address material deprivation, but it does not rebuild the collectively governed practice that class rule disrupted. Workers remain recipients rather than participants; the dependence shifts from employer to state, and the habits of deference remain intact. What actually erodes the binding is collective self-organization that addresses the same domains through shared practice: mutual aid that requires participation, not just eligibility; childcare that is collectively governed, not just provided; political education that develops pattern recognition through experience rather than instruction from above. The distinction is between breadth (how many domains an alternative addresses) and depth (whether it does so through practice that rebuilds self-directed activity or through provision that reproduces dependence in a new form). Breadth without depth replaces one set of masters with another.

Organizational use values

There is a third domain, besides the market and the private sphere, where class relations operate: within organizations themselves.

Managers claim the work of their teams in negotiations for promotions and bonuses. Tenured professors build careers on the labor of adjuncts and doctoral students. Bureaucrats derive status and security from controlling access to services. None of these people own the means of production. But all of them derive use values from the positions they hold — use values that give them a concrete, material interest in the perpetuation of hierarchy.^[24]

The more such positions exist, the more people have a stake in class rule that goes beyond their wage. The simple dichotomy between "owners" and "workers" was never adequate, but it has become less useful still as capitalist societies matured and proliferated organizational hierarchies.

Class position as the sum of interests

All of this implies that a person's class position is not adequately captured by whether they own the means of production, or even by their relationship to surplus value. It is better understood as the sum of their interests in maintaining class rule: in the market, in the private sphere, in organizational life, and in the many overlaps between these.^[25] The class has more to lose than its chains, and most of its members know this intuitively even when they can't articulate it.

I don't say this to counsel despair — it's actually a precondition for serious organizing, once you accept it. But let me be precise about what I mean by "ambivalence," since this is a strong claim. I am not arguing that workers sit around weighing the pros and cons of class rule. I am arguing something more structural: that many workers who occupy positions of relative power, over subordinates, over family members, over less-credentialed or less-protected workers, develop justifications for that power that parallel ruling-class ones.

The most common form this takes is a version of Kant's argument about "immaturity": the conviction that those below you are not yet ready to govern themselves, and that your role as intermediary — manager, bureaucrat, party cadre, head of household — is therefore necessary and benign.^[26] This logic is as prevalent among liberal technocrats who believe the public needs expert guidance as it is among Maoists who see the party as the necessary translator of "the popular will" into political action. In both cases, the intermediary's position is justified by the claimed incapacity of those they mediate for — a self-serving judgment that is rarely tested and never voluntarily relinquished.

On top of this, there are the more straightforward cases: workers who defend national barriers because these protect their relative advantages, men who resist the equalization of domestic labor, credentialed and craft workers who support gatekeeping that maintains their scarcity premium.^[27][28] In none of these cases is "ambivalence" the right word for a conscious deliberation. It is closer to what happens when material interests and moral commitments pull in different directions and the material interests win by default — especially when the prevailing ideology provides ready-made justifications for why they should.

But there is a deeper mechanism than either material interest or ideological justification, and it helps explain why ambivalence is so resilient. Class societies have made hierarchical standing the primary route to experienced agency — to the felt capacity to make decisions, shape one's environment, exercise competence, and matter. People do not need to endorse a hierarchy to compete within it; they need only to be in a situation where their capacity to act runs through it. The result is that hierarchies are played, with rules, advancement markers, improvisation within constraints, and the intrinsic motivation that competitive play generates. Academic credentials, the corporate promotion ladder, organizational rank within religious or political movements, even the informal status hierarchies of neighborhoods and friendship circles — all of these are games whose play-character makes participation self-reinforcing independently of belief in the game's justice. You can think the system is rigged and still invest in climbing it, because the climbing is where agency lives.

When an existing status hierarchy erodes — corporatist welfare institutions, industrial-era occupational identity, colonial racial privilege — what has been lost is not only material provision or ideological certainty but avenues for experienced agency. This is one structural reason that reactionary movements grow precisely when existing hierarchies collapse: they offer new status games, new avenues for experienced power, in circumstances where the old ones have been dismantled.^[29]

Crucially, these stratifications are not static. Because capitalist production is constantly being reorganized (through technological change, shifts in demand, the creation of new industries and the destruction of old ones) there are always fresh opportunities for workers in specific sectors to improve their position by acquiring the right skills or entering the right field at the right time. Programmers, for instance, have commanded high wages for decades despite being almost entirely unorganized, simply because their labor remained scarce relative to demand. Some become consultants; a few, with access to capital and the right niche, become capitalists outright — a trajectory actively encouraged by stock-based compensation. The orthodox expectation that proletarianization will eventually flatten these distinctions and produce easy unity is therefore structurally wrong: capitalist dynamism constantly regenerates intra-class stratification even as it dissolves specific instances of it. There is no plateau at which the class will have been sufficiently homogenized for unity to become straightforward.^[30]

Without organizational practices that address these dynamics rather than wishing them away, calls for "unity" will continue to ring hollow.

3. The PMC Debate as Case Study

The recurring debate over the "professional-managerial class" illustrates what happens when the left tries to grapple with intra-class divisions using analytical tools that weren't built for them.

The debate is older than its left variants suggest. Its original formulation belongs to James Burnham, the ex-Trotskyist turned conservative who argued in The Managerial Revolution (1941) that managers were becoming a new ruling class displacing the bourgeoisie, a thesis he drew from to justify his subsequent rightward trajectory as a founding editor of National Review. That a reactionary and left contributors to the same debate arrive at structurally similar conclusions (the growth of a managerial stratum signals the displacement of bourgeois control) from opposite political directions should give us pause about the analytical framework both sides share.^[31][32]

On the left, the debate has surfaced in roughly the same form three times: in the 1970s, when the Ehrenreichs identified a growing group of workers who considered themselves progressive but looked down on those they called "workers"^[33]; after the New Left's collapse, when it went dormant; and again after Bernie Sanders' first presidential campaign, when a new generation sought to explain the passionate hostility of "progressive, middle-class voters" to his program. Catherine Liu's Virtue Hoarders is a recent contribution. Mike Macnair reviewed it for the Weekly Worker , criticizing her use of "class" while offering an analysis that I think reproduces the core problem in a different form.^[34]

The debate keeps recurring — and keeps failing to resolve — because it involves two analytical disputes that the standard framework can't settle.

Dispute 1: Does the growth of "the PMC" signal capitalist decline?

Macnair argues that it does. In his view, the growth of this social group reflects the expansion of the state at the expense of the private sector, which signals a loss of bourgeois control and therefore decline.

I think this gets the relationship between the state and capital backwards. States positioned favorably in the currency hierarchy fund provision through two mechanisms: taxation and endogenous credit creation. The fiscal constraint that makes "state vs. private sector" look zero-sum is not a material limitation but a political choice, enforced through the ratchet — Maastricht's fiscal rules, central bank independence, balanced-budget orthodoxy — that forecloses it independently of the tax regime (the framework develops this in the welfare-circuit section).^[35] State demand generally stimulates private-sector growth rather than displacing it.

The advent of neoliberal public-private partnerships has gone further — reorganizing the state so that public expenditure directly constitutes private accumulation. The de-risking state absorbs downside risk through PPP guarantees and market-maker-of-last-resort operations while investors capture all upside returns (Gabor's "Wall Street Consensus"). Growth of the state apparatus does not come at the expense of the private sector; it extends the terrain on which capitalist relations of production operate.

The causal relationship runs the opposite way from Macnair's picture. The postwar expansion of credentialed employment produced the political constituency through which the welfare settlement was dismantled, not defended: as the professional and managerial strata grew, a larger fraction of the population came to experience high marginal income tax rates as penalizing their own earned success — meritocratic reasoning applied reflexively — and the political base for progressive taxation contracted accordingly. Capital did not lose ground to a state captured by professionals; professionals became the constituency whose self-understanding rationalized the transfer of surplus from public provision to private accumulation. And the professions themselves — medicine, education, credentialed caring work, financial advising — are the institutional vehicles through which new domains are commodified and drawn into capital's circuits, not held outside them. PMC growth tracks the advance of commodification, not capital's retreat from it.^[36]

The mechanism is recursive: each cohort does not merely occupy the niche its stage of commodification created — it actively generates the institutional conditions for the next, because career incentives, institutional position, and meritocratic self-understanding orient professionals toward deepening commodification rather than constraining it. The distinction between "state" and "private sector" on which Macnair's argument depends cannot survive contact with a recursive process that runs through both simultaneously — the state destroys alternatives at the first stage and de-risks the financialized product at the last, while professionals administer each transition in between — formalizing the captured domain through credential regimes, reorganizing it under market logic, intermediating its financialization.

Furthermore, when professional and managerial strata use state power to constrain the propertied classes, they typically do so by spreading class-societal norms further (through means-testing, criminalization of poverty, privatization of public services, credentialism) not by challenging the principle of private ownership. The "War on Drugs" and the gutting of welfare through appeals to "fiscal responsibility" are policies that stabilize class rule, not ones that undermine it.^[37]

Dispute 2: What is the PMC's relationship to class rule?

Macnair focuses on self-enrichment and the functioning of the bourgeois state, but misses the more consequential problem.

To the extent "the PMC" shares a common orientation, it is toward facilitating class rule, not toward expropriating or neutralizing the propertied classes. Its members believe in the separation of powers, the sanctity of contracts, the value form, meritocratic selection. At their most radical, they want the state to fund uneconomic services and restrain corruption. Even if they achieved full political dominance, the societies they administered would remain capitalist.^[38]

The more important point concerns how this works inside organizations. As I argued in the previous section, the expansion of professional, managerial, and regulatory roles has given a large fraction of waged workers real power over other workers. This doesn't make them a separate "class" in any rigorous sense; most of them work for wages and have no control over the means of production.^[39] But it does mean they have material interests in class rule that go beyond their wage: the ability to claim others' work, to control access to resources and services, to derive status from organizational position. The strength of these interests varies with institutional conditions — a department head who controls hiring has different stakes than a frontline supervisor with no discretionary power — but where such positions carry genuine authority over others' prospects, the interests are real.

The proliferation of such roles has two effects. First, it increases mass support for the principle of hierarchical organization, because more people directly benefit from it. Second, it creates real intra-class conflicts (between managers and managed, between credentialed and uncredentialed, between permanent and precarious) that obstruct unification. The ruling classes understand this, even if we don't: The multiplication of intermediate positions functions as a technique of class rule, whether or not it was designed as such.^[40] The fact that something similar happened in the USSR and in most unions (the emergence of entrenched managerial strata that reproduced class dynamics internally) is negative proof that the workers' movement failed to anticipate or combat this.

Macnair argues that most people do not "seek power over others" as an end in itself. I narrowly agree. But this is beside the point. What matters is that many workers exercise power over others as a routine feature of their working lives, and that many more benefit from class-societal arrangements restricting others' autonomy — over abortion rights, gender expression, behavioral conformity, ethnic hierarchies, or access to housing and education. These are not mere attitudes to be overcome through correct political education. They are material practices embedded in people's daily lives, and they will not disappear after a revolution that addresses only wage exploitation.

Which means that most of the working class will defend class relations as desirable in at least some contexts. "Defend" here ranges from passive accommodation — complying because the costs of contestation exceed the margin for risk — to active championing of specific hierarchies, with most workers falling somewhere in between depending on the domain. Denying this in the name of "unity" hasn't worked — not in a century of trying.

Patriarchy, racism, and other forms of class exploitation

One further point. While it is likely that some form of patriarchal rule was the first type of class exploitation affecting humans, I don't think it useful to treat any specific division of labor as "substructural to class" and therefore partially separate from exploitation under capitalism, as Macnair suggests.

The exploitation of women and children is not a residual pre-capitalist formation. It is another form of class exploitation — one whose persistence allows the propertied classes to pay women and children less, treat them worse, and divide those who work for a living. The same applies to ethnic and other forms of exploitation. And since capitalist development constantly creates new forms of marginalization and new populations to be proletarianized, treating each one as a separate "issue" results in playing whack-a-mole. What's needed is an analysis that recognizes them all as expressions of the same underlying logic — which is what the broader definition of class relations proposed here is meant to provide.^[41] And the unified definition predicts something the "overlapping systems" alternative cannot: when organized resistance raises the cost of exploitation along one channel, the system redirects through channels the resistance left uncontested. Abolition destroyed legal ownership of persons; within two decades, convict leasing and debt peonage reconstituted racialized exploitation through different institutional forms. Decolonization ended direct colonial administration; extraction was redirected through conditionality mechanisms the Bretton Woods institutions had already been developing. This is form-switching, and it follows from the singularity of the underlying logic: the forms are connected, so blocking one produces another.

4. Meritocratic Reasoning

Meritocratic reasoning is the ideological mechanism that operates across all these forms of class exploitation. It is distinct from meritocracy as a state ideology or as a set of institutional practices (credentialism, standardized testing, competitive selection). Meritocratic reasoning is something more fundamental: it is the generative logic through which any form of class exploitation — feudal, patriarchal, colonial, bureaucratic, capitalist — is rationalized and made to seem natural.^[42]

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 woman, because poor, because migrant, because disabled, because insufficiently credentialed — are said to owe their subordinate position to themselves. Their exploitation is reframed as a consequence of their own deficiency. The circle closes when the structural conditions that produce the deficiency are treated as evidence that the deficiency is real.

This is not a feature specific to capitalism, or even to modernity. What changes across contexts is the specific content — which groups are found wanting, which deficiencies are cited, which institutions enforce the judgment — but the logical structure is identical. And because the logic is so general, it can be applied to new groups and new forms of exploitation as they emerge, which is why the principle of class rule is so resilient in the face of challenges to any particular form of domination. Abolish one justification and the same reasoning structure generates another.

Two related arguments identify adjacent phenomena without reaching the same claim. Gramsci's concept of hegemony identifies the fact that ruling-class values are naturalized — that domination is maintained through consent as much as coercion. Bourdieu's symbolic violence identifies one key mechanism: the internalization of cultural hierarchies that make domination feel like merit. Neither identifies the specific logical structure through which this naturalization operates across different contexts. "Hegemony" tells us that domination is naturalized; meritocratic reasoning identifies how — through the circular attribution of subordinate position to the subordinate's own deficiency. "Symbolic violence" captures the mechanism within the domain of cultural capital; meritocratic reasoning identifies the same logic operating across all domains of class exploitation — gendered, ethnic, organizational, economic — with identical formal structure but different surface content each time.

If the problem were only hegemony, counter-hegemonic culture would suffice. If the problem is a reasoning form, then what's needed is the capacity to recognize the form itself across its many instantiations — which is a different kind of political education.

But meritocratic reasoning, important as it is, is only one of four modes through which class rule maintains itself. Identifying the other three matters because they explain something meritocratic reasoning alone cannot: why compliance persists even where justificatory belief has broken down.^[43]

The second mode is accommodation. People can see the system as unjust and still comply with it, because the costs of contestation — lost wages, lost standing, lost security, lost relationships, sometimes lost safety — exceed what they can bear within the time horizons available to them. Accommodation is not belief but calculation: the arrangement's injustice is recognized, and treated as not worth the personal price of contesting. This mechanism does not require ignorance or ideology; it only requires that the institutional architecture impose sufficient costs on contestation and distribute the benefits of compliance in ways workers cannot afford to forgo. It is why the most accurate structural critiques can circulate widely without generating contestation commensurate with their reach: people can agree that the system is rigged and still calculate, rationally, that challenging it exceeds their margin for risk.

The third mode is foreclosure. Class rule in mature capitalist societies does not depend primarily on people believing that the hierarchy is just. It depends on preventing them from being able to contest it effectively — through the fragmentation of knowledge into disciplines that cannot see cross-domain connections, through the geographic scatter of dispossession (a privatization here, a debt crisis there, a land grab somewhere else — no single population experiences enough of the pattern to name it), through credentialism that gates who counts as a legitimate speaker, and through the cognitive separation of the zone where accumulation operates from the zone where liberal commitments apply. Most people do not need to believe the arrangement is just. They need only to lack the analytical tools or political standing to contest it effectively. This is why accommodation and foreclosure do more work than justificatory belief in sustaining class rule in its mature forms — a point the left has been slow to grasp because it keeps looking for the ideology to refute.^[44]

The fourth mode is endogenous generation: the market produces its own legitimation without any external ideological apparatus. Because the market is formally open and some workers do become employers, the hierarchy appears to result from differential performance rather than structural position. The statistical reality of some upward mobility gives it an empirical anchor that no other legitimation system has ever had — it is individually rational to believe in the possibility of advancement even when it is structurally improbable, because the belief is confirmed by observable cases. This is what makes capitalist legitimation qualitatively harder to contest than feudal or tributary forms: the system does not need priests or ideologues to tell you your place is deserved — its ordinary operations produce the evidence that seems to confirm it.

The mechanism is structurally analogous to what the companion essay calls gradient climbing: the system binds previously marginal populations by converting them into partial beneficiaries, whose visibility legitimates the hierarchy to those still below. Imperial service binds the climber through state-organized violence employment (Scottish settlers, Irish police, Sikh regiments); market advancement binds the climber through ordinary economic mobility. Both produce constituencies with stakes in the hierarchy they now partially occupy. Market-based advancement is the capitalist-specific variant — the version in which recruitment into the system's coercive apparatus is not required, because the system's ordinary economic operations do the same work.

These four modes operate under different conditions and tend to shift as class rule matures. Active justification predominates where market dependence is not yet generalized and the dominated population's institutions must be replaced (the colonial civilizing mission, development discourse, forced assimilation). Endogenous generation predominates where market dependence is deep enough that the market produces its own justification. Foreclosure predominates where extraction is mediated through institutional architecture the population has no reason to examine — financial governance, the shadow banking system, the treaty architecture that locks in austerity. Accommodation predominates wherever material security is precarious enough that disruption carries cascading costs workers cannot absorb — most sharply in the contemporary competition state, where declining real wages and institutional precarity have narrowed the margin for risk across broad sections of the working class.

As commodification deepens, the balance shifts from active justification toward endogenous generation — though as layering, not replacement: each predecessor mode remains available whenever new extraction (gentrification, platform work, data enclosure, new credential regimes) needs local cover. What changes is the ratio: the background operation of mature capitalism increasingly runs on the structural modes, while active justification does targeted work at the leading edge of each new dispossession. The implication is that in the societies where most of us organize, refuting the ideology is necessary but not sufficient — because the system's most effective contemporary mechanisms are not getting people to believe it is just, but raising the costs of contesting it and preventing them from seeing how it works.

But meritocratic reasoning is also the mode most deeply embedded in daily experience. We absorb it through socialization — through schools that rank and sort, workplaces that reward compliance, and institutions that require us to prove our "worth" in order to access basic goods and services. The more time we spend in such institutions, the more natural the logic feels, and the less likely we are to question the principle that people's needs should be met differentially based on how they are valued by those with institutional power.^[45] The structural modes do more aggregate work in mature capitalism, but meritocratic reasoning is what makes them feel like the way things are rather than like arrangements that could be otherwise.

For organizing, this means that contesting class rule requires both: developing the capacity to recognize meritocratic reasoning across its instances (the political-education task), and developing the analytical tools that the system's ignorance-production mechanisms are specifically designed to prevent (the cross-domain task). Workers need to be able to see the same logic operating when a woman is told she's paid less because she "chose" a caring profession; when a migrant is told he deserves worse conditions because he "chose" to come; when a laid-off factory worker is told to "retrain"; and when a community is told it's poor because it lacks "human capital." These are not separate ideological problems. They are instances of a single method of rationalization, and naming it as such is a precondition for building the kind of solidarity that can withstand divide-and-rule. But they also need to be able to see the connections between domains — between the cheap goods in the supermarket and the structural adjustment that cheapened the inputs, between the credential that gates their advancement and the enclosure that destroyed alternative forms of knowledge — and these connections are precisely what the existing organization of knowledge production is structured to make invisible.

5. What This Means for Organizing

None of this is new. Marginalized and progressive sections of workers' organizations have repeatedly tried to convince the broader movement that ending class rule requires more than fighting wage exploitation. Almost every time, the broader movement ignored, marginalized, or expelled them.^[46] Even now, as what remains of the organized left belatedly changes, partly through its own collapse, the integration of these insights is ad hoc, usually justified through liberal language about "diversity and inclusion" rather than as a consequence of class analysis itself.

The source of the problem is clear enough. For over a century, the left has treated workers' organizations as instruments for obtaining state power, with all other questions (gendered exploitation, ethnic divisions, internal democracy, the reproduction of managerial hierarchy within the movement itself) to be addressed afterwards, or to be resolved automatically by the seizure of power.

But if class rule operates across multiple domains, and if many workers have concrete stakes in its perpetuation, then this approach simply doesn't work. It leaves all non-wage forms of class exploitation intact, every intra-class division available as a wedge issue. And it asks workers who benefit from some aspects of class rule to join a movement that neither acknowledges nor confronts those benefits — which is why so many of them don't. That approach (roughly "Bolshevik," though it goes back to Marx's time) has had over a century to work. It hasn't.

So what follows?

If class rule binds workers through monopoly over valued goods across multiple domains — wages, but also domestic authority, organizational standing, credential-based status, national-institutional protections — then only organizations that rebuild alternatives across those same domains can unbind them.

The companion essay on competing solidarities finds that where left organizational infrastructure persists, right-wing solidarities cannot establish themselves. CPI-M areas blocked Hindutva penetration; anarchist barris blocked the Falange. The mechanism this essay predicts is confirmed in the cases where left infrastructure was broad enough. These cases demonstrate defensive success (blocking the right from capturing territory), not the abolition of class rule internally. Organizing works defensively even when depth and internal transformation remain incomplete, which means the two problems are analytically separable.

The specific form this takes is self-organization: not ideological conversion, but the reassertion of collective self-directed activity that class rule exists to deny and undermine. The framework essay identifies four mechanisms through which self-organization does this work — reducing dependence on what the system monopolizes, compounding institutional capacity through residue that subsequent cycles inherit, constituting counter-power dense enough to organize reproduction on its own terms, and producing counter-knowledge that contests the system's ignorance production.

This is why the system targets organizational infrastructure with such specificity: union-busting, surveillance, the assassination of organizers, the criminalization of mutual aid, the destruction of autonomous educational institutions. These are not incidental to class rule but constitutive of it: the stakes bind workers only as long as collective self-organization remains foreclosed.

The primary task: building healthy workers' organizations

The building of healthy, democratic, and internally honest workers' organizations must become a primary goal of the struggle against class rule — not an instrument for seizing state power, to be discarded or disciplined once it has served its purpose.

The binding analysis sets the scope. An organization that wins higher pay while leaving patriarchal compensation, ethnic wages, or credential gatekeeping intact has loosened one binding mechanism while leaving the system's reserves untouched — and the form-switching analysis predicts what follows: concede on wages, tighten on status; extend recognition to one group, sharpen exclusion of another. Addressing all the domains through which binding operates is not a moral aspiration but the condition for preventing form-switching from absorbing the gains. The same logic applies internally: an organization that reproduces managerial hierarchies, tolerates ethnic or gendered subordination among its members, or treats internal democracy as a luxury is not merely falling short of its principles — it is functioning as a competing solidarity, providing class goods while reinforcing the binding mechanisms class rule depends on.^[47][48]

These are two distinct problems, and the companion essays address them at different levels. This essay analyzes the external challenge: how class rule binds workers across multiple domains, and why organizations that leave domains uncontested will see their gains absorbed through form-switching. "The Peace of the Factory" addresses the internal challenge: how organizations reproduce class rule within themselves through coordinator crystallization, boundary hardening, aspirational capture, and gendered domain separation, and what design features counteract those pathologies. Neither level is sufficient on its own. An internally well-designed organization that contests only one domain will be form-switched around. An organization that attempts breadth across domains while reproducing hierarchy internally will lose its capacity to sustain that breadth. And even organizations that solve both problems still face societal-level accommodation and foreclosure — the mechanisms section 4 argues do more work than justificatory belief in mature class societies — which operate at a scale no organizational design can reach.

But breadth alone is insufficient. As argued in section 2, organizations that provide goods and services bureaucratically — however many domains they cover — produce dependence rather than collective self-governance. Red Vienna is the negative case: broad socialist infrastructure (subsistence, education, culture, housing) delivered through top-down provision that channeled participation into mobilization rather than self-governance — and when the Dollfuss coup came, the base had no capacity to resist independently of the leadership. What builds resilience is provision through shared practice: collectively governed childcare, mutual aid that requires participation, political education that develops pattern recognition through experience. That essay develops this as the distinction between synergistic satisfiers (those that address needs on their own terms) and inhibiting satisfiers (those that constrain autonomy while providing subsistence).

A related point about gender. "Not tolerating gendered subordination" is a principle; the historical evidence shows that principles are insufficient. The companion essay on competing solidarities finds that every left case it examines deferred the confrontation with gendered exploitation, and every one paid for it. The difference between failure and partial success was structural: autonomous women's organization with initiating power over the broader movement (the Mujeres Libres model), gender constitutive of organizational form (Rojava's binding co-presidency), not gender added as a committee or department. As long as the confrontation with patriarchy is treated as one item on a list of injustices rather than as a design requirement that shapes the organization's architecture, it will be deferred, because the men who benefit from deferral control the decision.

Two qualifications are needed here, because they bear directly on what these organizations can realistically promise. Even if the organizational problem were solved — even if we built movements broad enough to foreclose form-switching — the material conditions for emancipation would still have to be met. A post-revolutionary society that lacks sufficient concentrated energy and the machinery to deploy it has only one way to build: intensify the exploitation of living labor, which is to say, deepen exploitation under a different political form. This is the developmental trap that every revolutionary project has faced.^[49] The trap is triple: insufficient energy forces intensified exploitation of the living; the machinery that could substitute for living labor is constitutively shaped by capital's requirements and presupposes the social relations of domination it was built to serve; and that same machinery presupposes ecological throughput rates whose continuation degrades the material base on which production depends. The energy regime is the material basis of all three constraints.

This does not counsel despair any more than the ambivalence argument does. But it means that organizational practice and material preconditions are complementary requirements, not alternatives, and that any serious strategy must address both.^[50] The prescriptions that follow are necessary but not sufficient.

A second qualification concerns organizational design. Even with adequate material conditions, the scalar problem remains unsolved: every historical case that built locally rooted, dimensionally comprehensive solidarity was destroyed by forces operating at larger scales — Franco's army, the Dollfuss coup, COINTELPRO, the Turkish invasion of Afrin. How to compose local solidarities into coordinated action at the scale of the forces they face, without subordinating local to center (the Comintern pattern) or leaving local defenseless (the anarchist pattern), has not been figured out.

These two qualifications are not independent. The companion essay on organizational design argues that the constraints on organizational design compose into a dependency chain that terminates in the material conditions the design cannot provide: the design features require a politically conscious core in the membership to sustain them; that core requires a credible aspirational horizon; the horizon requires extensive practice to be credible; the practice requires material conditions that support reproduction across multiple domains; and those conditions are least available in the core-country metropolitan contexts where the design is most needed. The scalar problem compounds this: the same material conditions that make the design features operable are also what would make coordination at larger scales possible, because an organization with no territorial base, no independent funding, and no militant minority has nothing to federate. The material preconditions and the organizational design problem are not separate caveats but composing constraints, and the composition is what makes the problem harder than either qualification alone suggests.

Combating class collaboration without nostalgia

If the past century teaches a second lesson, it is that the workers' movement's dependence on state-provided use values (built without any critique of bourgeois control over their delivery) left it unable to resist neoliberal rollback when it came. This was compounded by the fact that neoliberal managerialism closely resembled the bureaucratization that had already crippled our own organizations and the USSR, making it almost impossible to critique one without confronting the other.

The material basis of this dependence deserves direct treatment, because it explains both why rollback succeeded and why restoration is structurally impossible on the old terms. The framework essay develops the welfare-imperialism circuit in full: imperial extraction made the postwar surplus available, taxation and credit creation distributed it through public provision, and the arrangement bound metropolitan workers to a national framework whose imperial dimension was structurally invisible to them — the labor aristocracy thesis grounded in institutional rather than conspiratorial terms. The contemporary erosion was sketched in Dispute 1 above. What matters here is the conclusion: the surplus continues to flow but increasingly bypasses public provision on its way to private accumulation, and the legitimation crisis this produces — visible across the core in the rise of MAGA, AfD, Rassemblement National, Sweden Democrats, Fratelli d'Italia — is not a prediction but current events, driven by the architecture's systematic destruction of its own distribution mechanism.^[51]

The solution is obviously not to demolish the state or wish for its collapse. Workers won't learn anything from immiseration, and there is no shortcut past the hard work of building new organizations from the ground up. But the left does need to develop a critique of dependence on a state apparatus that is mistrusted and feared by many — if only because the populist right currently holds a near-monopoly on critiques of bureaucracy and the welfare state, while the rest of the left mostly advocates uncritical reintroduction and expansion of state services, and remains fixated on parliamentarianism as the only route to power.

And that critique needs to be honest about the imperial dimension: the postwar welfare states were built on imperial surplus distributed within ethnically homogeneous populations that had never had to practice cross-ethnic solidarity at scale. Their institutional architecture assumed the continuation of the included population. They are not a model to be restored; they are a historically specific configuration whose material conditions no longer exist and whose exclusions were structural, not incidental.

A further dimension of binding that the welfare-circuit analysis tends to obscure: the metropolitan cost ratchet. As public provision degrades, the costs of reproducing working-class life — housing, healthcare, childcare, education credentials — have risen dramatically, and each cost functions not merely as a burden but as a binding mechanism. High housing costs bind workers to their mortgages and therefore to their employers, their local tax base, and the property-value regime that determines whether their principal asset appreciates or collapses. Credential inflation binds them to the education system — not just for the credential's content but for the sorting function it performs, since the credential's value depends on scarcity that would be destroyed by universal free access. Healthcare costs bind them to employer-provided insurance (in the US) or to the state provision whose erosion they fear (in Europe). Childcare costs bind them to arrangements — family, informal networks, expensive private provision — whose continuation depends on conditions they cannot unilaterally change. These are not just costs that leave less room for political engagement. They are the material mechanism through which the welfare-state competing solidarity continues to bind even as it degrades: workers defend an arrangement that is failing them because the cost of exit — losing the house, losing the credential's market value, losing healthcare, losing childcare — is higher than the cost of enduring degraded provision.

This produces a specific political dynamic the essay's analysis predicts. Does the degradation of provision loosen the bindings (as provision fails, it delivers less, and the binding weakens) or tighten them (as provision degrades, what remains becomes more precious, and workers defend it more fiercely)? The answer varies by domain and class position. For workers near the bottom of the cost ratchet — renters rather than owners, workers without employer-provided insurance, parents without childcare access — degradation loosens binding because they have less to lose. For workers in the middle — mortgaged homeowners, workers with employer-provided benefits, parents dependent on specific childcare arrangements — degradation tightens binding because the remaining provision is what separates them from the bottom. The political implications diverge: the loosened populations are available for alternative competing solidarities (left or right); the tightened populations are available for reactionary defense of existing arrangements.

The right's success in mobilizing the tightened middle — defending "what we have" against perceived threats from below — is the cost-ratchet mechanism operating as political strategy, and it works because the binding is material rather than ideological. Workers who defend exclusionary arrangements are not necessarily racist or chauvinist in their motivations; they are defending the material position the cost ratchet makes precarious, and the defense takes exclusionary form because the institutional architecture channels it that way.

Solidarity as practice, not slogan

Solidarity must be practiced — in propaganda, in education, and in the daily functioning of our organizations. This means treating anti-chauvinism work as a direct consequence of class analysis — which is what it is, once "class" is defined broadly enough. And it means accepting that unity is hard work — that it requires honestly confronting the material interests many workers have in maintaining aspects of class rule, instead of pretending those interests away. The pattern-recognition and cross-domain work described in section 4 is part of this practice, not a separate educational program.

We must also learn to engage with the existing ecosystem of social movements and NGOs, however imperfect.^[52] Much of the practical agitation, political education, and solidarity work is already being done — inconsistently, often in liberal frameworks, frequently captured by professional activists with conflicting incentives. But the alternative to engaging with this messy reality is the sectarian purity that has left us marginal for decades.

This engagement has to be clear-eyed, though. The professionalization of social movements is itself a form of class rule: the credentialed NGO professional who derives income and status from an intermediary position between funders and "beneficiaries" is exercising power over others without meaningful reciprocity, which is a class relation by the definition proposed above. The companion essay "What to Do About NGOs" develops this in full — the funding mechanisms, the advocacy/mobilizing/organizing distinction, concrete cases. What matters here is the consequence: any serious engagement with this ecosystem has to grapple with the material interests of NGO staff in maintaining things as they are, because those interests will resist democratization, rotation, and de-skilling for the same reasons that any other form of class privilege is defended.

These dynamics are not specific to NGOs. They threaten any organization that accumulates institutional apparatus. The companion essay on competing solidarities documents the same pattern in the pre-1914 SPD (professionalization converting participatory culture into performance, institutional interests displacing oppositional purpose), in Red Vienna (the negative case analyzed above), and in the AKP's trajectory from grassroots mobilization to "sanctified neoliberalism" (organizational complexity routing participation to non-economic dimensions where it could not contest class-serving decisions). In each case, the organization's own institutional success generated class interests within it that drove it toward accommodation with the system it was built to challenge. But what the cases also share is that the organizational form through which the success was accumulated determined how much leverage those interests had: the SPD's centralized treasury, concentrated leadership and accumulated press infrastructure made its institutional interests maximally punishing to defy in 1914; a differently designed organization with the same accumulated interests would have faced a different choice set. The companion essay on organizational design develops this as a three-mechanism analysis: endogenous class interests, exogenous state pressure, and the mediating organizational form that determines how much the second can extract from the first.

The underlying principle is general: any organizational feature that decouples the organization's material survival from its members' active engagement reproduces the professionalization pattern. Structural mechanisms that maintain the coupling are needed: base control over leadership selection and recall, mandatory rotation, de-skilling of specialized functions so that the organization is not dependent on irreplaceable professionals, and independent funding that does not flow through intermediaries whose class position is shaped by the funding relationship.

The Chicago Teachers Union's CORE transformation — a rank-and-file caucus capturing an existing union through internal elections in 2010 and redirecting it from service-model unionism toward organizing — is the strongest contemporary evidence that structural features can keep professionalization contestable. But the case is more complicated than the single-reversal story suggests. Fifteen years after the original capture, CORE developed financial opacity (five years of withheld audits revealing adverse auditor opinions), suppression of internal dissent (the House of Delegates banning publication of its own minutes), and leadership acting against its own bylaws — the pattern the structural features were supposed to prevent. A reform caucus (REAL) formed within the membership and ran on transparency in May 2025, demonstrating that the structural features did their permissive work: an internal opposition could form and contest. They did not do preventive work. The companion essay on organizational design develops the case in full and draws the implication: what the design features actually do may be better measured by the interval between reform captures than by whether the pattern re-emerges at all.^[53]

Precedents

These principles are not new. Several organizing traditions have attempted versions of what I'm arguing for. Each achieved something real, and each fell short in ways worth examining. I'll sketch four, focusing in each case on what worked and what the tradition's framework could not address.

Deep organizing. Jane McAlevey's work (both as a practitioner and in No Shortcuts, 2016) builds workers' organizations that treat members as whole people embedded in communities rather than as atomized grievance-holders. Her methods are concrete: identify organic leaders (people others already turn to, not self-selectors), build supermajority participation before acting, use structure tests to verify real support. The method works best where workers' communities and workplaces overlap, as in healthcare and education.

Brazil's MST (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra) extends the integration further, folding land occupation, education, gender politics, production, and political formation into a single organizational practice grounded in territorial control. The territorial base is what makes the dimensional integration possible: settlement schools, cooperatives, and seed networks can function as permanent infrastructure because they sit on land the movement physically controls.^[54]

The limitation in both cases is twofold. First, neither approach treats the non-commodified forms of class exploitation discussed above — credential-based hierarchies, meritocratic reasoning as such — as objects of analysis or contestation. Second, neither develops an adequate critique of political dependence on bourgeois parties and the state: McAlevey's model channels worker power into contract fights and union density within existing political structures, while the MST's relationship with the PT (Workers' Party) demonstrated a distinctive form of metabolization — the PT did not absorb the MST organizationally but made its core demand structurally irrelevant by combining agribusiness promotion with compensatory welfare, producing organizational erosion through demand-redundancy rather than through the class-collaborationist capture the previous section describes. That infrastructure survived the PT's fall and Bolsonaro's hostility — but the territorial base depends on the process of land commodification being arrested at an early stage — alternatives not yet destroyed, land not yet financialized — a semi-peripheral condition unavailable in core-country metropolitan settings where that process has run to completion. Both cases represent the best versions of what they are. What neither offers is a strategy for fighting class rule beyond the wage and beyond the state under conditions of deep commodification.^[55]

Democratic organization-building. Ella Baker's organizing philosophy, developed through SNCC and documented in Barbara Ransby's Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement (2003), treated democratic organization-building — not organization-building in general, but democratic form as such — as a primary goal rather than a means to campaign victories. Her critique of charismatic leadership and her insistence on developing local decision-making capacity treated democratic organization as the goal, not the vehicle. SNCC at its best practiced this: young organizers embedded in local communities, following local leadership instead of bringing in external agendas.

But SNCC ultimately fractured, along lines of race, gender, and strategic direction, in ways that confirm the difficulty of what I'm proposing. The organization had no general framework for understanding why intra-movement divisions proved so persistent, and no developed practice for confronting the material interests (in racial privilege, in gendered authority, in credential-based status) that its members brought with them into the movement. Baker understood the problem intuitively; SNCC as an organization could not institutionalize the solution.^[56]

Confronting intra-class privilege. The Sojourner Truth Organization, active in Chicago-area workplaces during the 1970s, tried something different: making the confrontation of intra-class privilege a precondition for class unity rather than a byproduct of it. Drawing on C.L.R. James and informed by the legacy of John Brown, STO organizers worked to create situations in which white workers could experience cross-racial solidarity as materially superior to racial division — not through lectures about privilege but through joint action in which the division was concretely costly. The premise was that you cannot simply tell workers their investment in racial hierarchy is against their interests; you have to build organizational contexts in which they discover this through practice. The same point applies more broadly: all forms of class-societal benefit — not just racial privilege — need to be confronted through organizational practice, not ideological correction.

Where STO fell short was twofold. First, it focused on one axis of privilege (race) without developing a general analysis of why workers invest in class rule across multiple domains. Second, it remained a small cadre organization that never achieved mass scale — in part because its confrontational approach to white workers' racial investments, however principled, was difficult to sustain without the broader organizational infrastructure that could make cross-racial solidarity consistently rewarding in practice.^[57]

Political education as pattern recognition. Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968) and the Highlander Folk School's practice — documented in Myles Horton's The Long Haul (1990) and in Horton and Freire's joint We Make the Road by Walking (1990) — are organized around developing the capacity to recognize meritocratic reasoning as a form. Freire's "conscientization" is the process of learning to see structural patterns in one's own experience — as opposed to having them explained from above. His critique of "banking education" — in which the teacher deposits knowledge into passive students — is itself an analysis of how institutional structures reproduce class dynamics through their form, not just their content. Highlander put this into practice: the citizenship schools that trained Rosa Parks and SNCC organizers combined literacy education, political analysis, practical skills, and identity-formation in the same space, through the same activities. The method was effective enough that the state of Tennessee revoked Highlander's charter in 1961.

But both had gaps. Freire's framework identifies the pedagogical form but lacks a class analysis of why banking education is systematically produced — it remains closer to a critique of institutional culture than to an analysis of class reproduction. And Highlander, for all its effectiveness, functioned as an educational institution that trained leaders for other movements rather than building organizational power of its own. It addressed the political education deficit without solving the organizational one — which is why its graduates' subsequent impact depended entirely on the quality of the organizations they returned to.^[58]

What these cases share with the Spanish ateneos, Red Vienna, the pre-1914 SPD, the Proletkult, and Rojava is a pattern: what succeeded was the degree to which the organization addressed multiple dimensions simultaneously, treating workers as whole people and building forms of social life that could compete with what the right provides through churches, mosques, and nationalist organizations. What failed was, in each case, identifiable: professionalization converting play into performance and institutional interests displacing oppositional purpose (the SPD); top-down provision channeling participation into mobilization rather than self-governance (Red Vienna); metabolization by a nominally sympathetic state (the Proletkult); cadre instrumentalization suppressing the participatory dimensions (Rojava); gender deferred until it was too late (every historical case except Rojava); and reproduction conditions (education pipelines, media, spatial anchoring) that the state destroyed or that the movement never built.

The form-switching mechanism developed in section 3 explains the pattern these cases share: each tradition narrowed to a partial solidarity that the system redirected around. The civil rights movement is a further instance — organized resistance made overt racial discrimination too costly, and the system compensated through formally race-neutral mechanisms (mass incarceration, predatory lending, residential sorting) that maintained the extraction while satisfying the new legitimation constraints. None of the traditions sketched above organized across enough axes simultaneously that redirection became impossible — which is what the combination this essay calls for would need to do.^[59]

This does not mean form-switching makes resistance futile. Each transition was forced by organized struggle, and each new form operated under changed legitimation constraints that created terrain for future resistance — convict leasing had to route through criminal law rather than property law, which constrained its form and created new vulnerabilities. But the pattern does mean that the left's recurring experience of winning battles and losing the war is a structural feature of how class rule adapts to challenge, and it will continue until resistance is organized broadly enough to foreclose the redirection.

There are likely other traditions — and other theoretical frameworks — that deserve attention here. Ambedkar's analysis of caste, for instance, appears to parallel the argument I've been making: caste as institutionalized non-reciprocal exploitation maintained through socialization and the circular attribution of subordinate position to the subordinate's own deficiency is meritocratic reasoning applied to a non-capitalist class relation. His strategic conclusion — that you cannot fight caste by fighting capitalism alone, because caste operates across domains that a purely economic framework cannot see — would, if this reading holds, constitute independent confirmation from a very different context.^[60]

An adequate strategy would need to combine what the strongest of these traditions did well — the MST's and McAlevey's operational discipline, Baker's commitment to democratic capacity-building, STO's willingness to confront intra-class privilege, Freire and Highlander's integrative pedagogy — while addressing what each left out. That combination does not yet exist, and figuring out how to build it is the work ahead of us.

In sum

It was a strategic mistake to think we could end capitalism by fighting capitalism. The proximate fight is with class rule — the full system of institutionalized relationships through which some people get others to perform labor for them without reciprocity, in the market, the household, and organizational life, and everywhere these overlap. Fighting this effectively requires a broader definition of class, an honest accounting of why unity is difficult, and organizations whose internal practices embody the solidarity they preach. None of that is simple, and none of it will be quick.

We are working against a century and a half of received wisdom in which the Marxist left treated the building of healthy worker organizations as instrumentally valuable at best — something to be tolerated insofar as it served the struggle for state power. Changing this will require argument, experimentation, and a good deal of patience. But the theoretical and practical foundations are there, scattered across traditions that rarely talk to each other, and enough people are already doing parts of the work — even if they don't always share our terminology — that there is something real to build on.

Notes

Bibliography

Ambedkar, B.R. Annihilation of Caste. 1936. Critical edition edited by S. Anand, with an introduction by Arundhati Roy. London: Verso, 2014.

Araújo, Djacira. Pedagogia Do Movimento Sem Terra e Relações de Gênero. São Paulo: Lutas Anticapital, 2019.

Bhattacharya, Tithi, ed. Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression. London: Pluto Press, 2017.

Burnham, James. The Managerial Revolution: What is Happening in the World. New York: John Day, 1941.

Carson, Clayborne. In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981.

Carter, Miguel, ed. Challenging Social Inequality: The Landless Rural Workers Movement and Agrarian Reform in Brazil. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015.

Chaves, Christine. "Mystique: MST Rituals and Dilemmas." Revista de Antropologia, 2022.

Chibber, Vivek. The Class Matrix: Social Theory after the Cultural Turn. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2022.

De Grazia, Victoria. How Fascism Ruled Women: Italy, 1922–1945. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.

Donzelot, Jacques. The Policing of Families. 1977. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Pantheon Books, 1979.

Du Bois, W.E.B. Black Reconstruction in America. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1935.

Federici, Silvia. Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 2004.

Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. 1968. Translated by Myra Bergman Ramos. New York: Continuum, 1970.

Graeber, David. Bullshit Jobs: A Theory. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018.

Graeber, David. Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Brooklyn: Melville House, 2011.

Glen, John M. Highlander: No Ordinary School. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1996.

Graeber, David. The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy. Brooklyn: Melville House, 2015.

Horton, Myles. The Long Haul: An Autobiography. New York: Doubleday, 1990.

Horton, Myles, and Paulo Freire. We Make the Road by Walking: Conversations on Education and Social Change. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990.

Hudson, Michael. Super Imperialism: The Origin and Fundamentals of U.S. World Dominance. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1972.

Issa, Daniela. "Praxis of Empowerment: Mística and Mobilization in Brazil's Landless Rural Workers' Movement." Latin American Perspectives 34, no. 2 (2007).

James, C.L.R., Raya Dunayevskaya, and Grace Lee Boggs. State Capitalism and World Revolution. 1950. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1986.

Kant, Immanuel. "An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?" 1784.

Koonz, Claudia. Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family, and Nazi Politics. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1987.

Lenin, V.I. Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. 1917.

Liu, Catherine. Virtue Hoarders: The Case Against the Professional Managerial Class. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2021.

Lukács, Georg. Lenin: A Study on the Unity of His Thought. 1924. Translated by Nicholas Jacobs. London: NLB, 1970.

Mandel, Ernest. "The Marxist Theory of Imperialism and Its Critics." 1966.

Mazzucato, Mariana. The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths. London: Anthem Press, 2011.

McAlevey, Jane. A Collective Bargain: Unions, Organizing, and the Fight for Democracy. New York: Ecco, 2020.

McAlevey, Jane. No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.

Ransby, Barbara. Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003.

Robinson, Cedric J. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. 1983. 3rd ed. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020.

Roediger, David. The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. London: Verso, 1991.

Saito, Kohei. Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023.

Schmidt, Jeff. Disciplined Minds: A Critical Look at Salaried Professionals and the Soul-Battering System That Shapes Their Lives. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000.

Schroeder, Arnold. Fight Like an Animal. Podcast. Available via Against the Internet, https://www.againsttheinternet.com/.

Staudenmaier, Michael. Truth and Revolution: A History of the Sojourner Truth Organization, 1969–1986. Oakland: AK Press, 2012.

Tarlau, Rebecca. Occupying Schools, Occupying Land: How the Landless Workers Movement Transformed Brazilian Education. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019.

Therborn, Göran. The Ideology of Power and the Power of Ideology. London: Verso, 1980.

Therborn, Göran. The Killing Fields of Inequality. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013.

Ticktin, Hillel. "The Nature of an Epoch of Declining Capitalism." Critique 26, no. 1 (1998).

Trotsky, Leon. "The War and the International." 1914.

Uetricht, Micah. Strike for America: Chicago Teachers Against Austerity. London: Verso, 2014.

Vergara-Camus, Leandro. Land and Freedom: The MST, the Zapatistas and Peasant Alternatives to Neoliberalism. London: Zed Books, 2014.

Vogel, Lise. Marxism and the Oppression of Women: Toward a Unitary Theory. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1983.

Wray, L. Randall. Understanding Modern Money: The Key to Full Employment and Price Stability. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 1998.

Wright, Erik Olin. Class Counts: Comparative Studies in Class Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Wright, Erik Olin. Classes. London: Verso, 1985.