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 work for them without meaningful reciprocity. 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 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.

What This Essay Argues

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. The rest of this essay develops the argument in five steps:

1. Capitalist class societies are maturing, not declining. The ruling classes have spent a century learning to manage, absorb, and neutralize challenges. Waiting for collapse is politically narcotic.
2. Class rule reproduces itself well beyond the wage relation. There are many "use values" people want that can't be obtained through markets: in family life, in social status, in organizational power. The ability to extract these without reciprocity is a class relation too, and it gives large sections of the working class a stake in the system.
3. The "PMC debate" shows what happens when the left encounters intra-class power relations it can't explain. The recurring argument about whether professionals and managers are "really" workers or "really" enemies keeps failing to resolve because an anti-capitalism framework has no tools for analyzing how class rule operates within the class.
4. Meritocratic reasoning is the ideological glue that holds class rule together. Not just as a state ideology, but as a generative logic through which any form of exploitation is rationalized and made to appear natural.
5. We need a different organizing logic – and several traditions have attempted parts of one. The essay examines what each achieved and where each fell short, and argues that an adequate strategy would need to combine their strengths while addressing what each left out.

I'll take each in turn.^[1]

1. Capitalist Class Societies Are Maturing, Not Declining

For roughly 150 years, 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. Since waiting for collapse has yet to pay off, we should try being empirical about it. 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 1930s onward, mass union organizing and the existence of a Soviet sphere generated enormous pressure on states to build social safety nets, public transportation, affordable housing, universal education, and regulatory institutions. These gains strengthened the working class and made it easier to refuse 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. Even during the boom years, they made inroads: enforcing racial and spatial segregation through the New Deal and GI Bills, expelling communists from unions, pushing 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.

So although organized labor certainly won immense concessions during its heyday, this in no way spelled capitalist "decline." It spelled adaptation. Bourgeois societies learned to manage dissent, absorb demands, and reorganize class relations on new terrain. They got better at it with practice.

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 presages collapse, or that the contradictions will eventually force unity. This version of the decline thesis has been politically narcotic for over a century. It substitutes prophecy for strategy, and encourages the left to wait for conditions to do the work that only organizing can do. Whatever one thinks about the long-term trajectory of capitalism, the strategic question remains the same: 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 left has long treated "capital," "the bourgeoisie," or (more vaguely) "capitalism" as the main enemy. In practice, this has meant treating capitalist wage exploitation as the only politically relevant form of class exploitation, with everything else understood as secondary, derivative, or to be dealt with after the seizure of state power. The consequences have been severe.

This singular focus encouraged workers' movements to ignore or paper over internal divisions, divisions that then remained available as wedge issues for liberals, the right, and the propertied classes, while simultaneously allowing opponents to perform hostility to "capitalism" without ever questioning the principle of class rule itself.

But the problem isn't only strategic. It's analytical. The standard framework (centered on ownership of the means of production and the extraction of surplus value) simply cannot explain important features of how class societies actually work.

The postwar test case

Take the postwar United States. 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, white working women were pushed out of the workforce and back into the home – with broad support from a cross-class coalition of husbands and prospective fathers.^[5]

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, supplied on a non-reciprocal basis within the household.

A recurring pattern

This was not an anomaly. Offering working-class men control over women and children 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, consolidating patriarchal authority within the family at precisely the moment bourgeois property relations were being entrenched in law.^[6] Fascist movements made a similar promise to the men they mobilized: the restoration of male dominion over women and the household.^[7] And 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.^[8]

The pattern is consistent: wherever class rule faces pressure, one available response is to offer men from the subordinate classes private dominion over women as compensation for their public subordination. This works precisely because it provides 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.^[9][10]

All of which suggests we need a broader definition of class relations.

A broader definition

I propose that class relations are those that allow a dominant party to get others to do work for them on an ongoing basis without having to meaningfully reciprocate.

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.^[11] 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.

This means the definition is broad by design: it has to be, in order to capture the full range of relationships through which class rule operates. But it 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 besides what derives from control over production and sale, there are many use values that matter to people and 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, and 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.^{[12] [13]}

What follows from this? Since people care about these non-market goods, and since institutionalized power asymmetries make it possible to extract them without reciprocating, individuals will seek to do so. Any arrangement that allows this can become a class-societal benefit, a material stake in the maintenance of class rule.^[14] 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 extracted through employment contracts, the coercion works differently. Three mechanisms stand out:

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.

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.^[15] 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.^[16][17] Artificial scarcity – especially of the nicer use values – encourages lateral competition among workers rather than solidarity.^[18]

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 extract use values from the positions they hold – use values that give them a concrete, material interest in the perpetuation of hierarchy.^[19]

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. The class has more to lose than its chains, and most of its members know this intuitively even when they can't articulate it.^[20]

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 the justifications used by the ruling classes themselves. 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.^[21] 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.^[22] 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.

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.

Until we take these dynamics seriously – and develop organizational practices that actually address them 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.^[23][24]

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"^[25]; 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 and, while rightly criticizing Liu's sloppy use of "class," offered an analysis that I think reproduces the core problem in a different form.^[26]

The debate keeps recurring – and keeps failing to resolve – because it involves two genuine 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. In the richer and politically dominant states, government spending is at best weakly constrained by taxation. State demand generally stimulates private-sector growth rather than displacing it.^[27] The advent of neoliberal public-private partnerships has only deepened this symbiosis. 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.

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.^[28]

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

Macnair focuses on self-enrichment and the functioning of the bourgeois state. These are real issues, but they miss 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. They have neither the ability nor the aspiration to overthrow capitalist relations of production, and even if they achieved full political dominance, the societies they administered would remain capitalist.^[29]

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.^[30] 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 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.^[31] 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 that restrict the autonomy of those below them – whether those restrictions concern 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. 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.^[32]

4. Meritocratic Reasoning

There is an ideological mechanism that operates across all the forms of class exploitation discussed above, and it is so pervasive that it usually goes unnoticed.

I call this meritocratic reasoning. 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 specific form of class exploitation is rationalized and made to seem natural.^[33]

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. It is the reasoning form through which any class relation is justified: feudal, patriarchal, colonial, bureaucratic. 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.

It is worth distinguishing this claim from two related arguments. 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. Both are valuable. But 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 the same formal structure but different surface content each time. The distinction matters practically: 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.

The pervasiveness of this logic also explains why it is so difficult to dislodge. 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.^[34]

For organizing, this means that combating class rule requires learning to recognize and name the reasoning form itself, across all its instances. 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.

5. What This Means for Organizing

These aren't novel insights. Over the past century, 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, they were ignored, marginalized, or expelled.^[35] 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?

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.

In practice, these organizations must fight all institutionalized forms of exploitation and divide-and-rule, not just the ones that show up on a pay stub. And this fight must happen within the organizations themselves as much as through their external campaigns. An organization that reproduces managerial hierarchies, tolerates ethnic or gendered subordination among its members, or treats internal democracy as a luxury is not building toward the abolition of class rule – it is practicing the opposite, however radical its program may sound.^[36]

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 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.

Solidarity as practice, not slogan

Solidarity must be practiced – in propaganda, in education, and in the daily functioning of our organizations. This means learning to explain how meritocratic reasoning structures class exploitation across domains, so that workers can recognize it and resist it. It 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.

We must also learn to engage with the existing ecosystem of social movements and NGOs, however imperfect.^[37] 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 not just a strategic problem – it is itself a form of class rule. The credentialed NGO professional who controls access to resources, who claims authority over strategy on the basis of expertise, 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 same meritocratic reasoning operates throughout: the expert's judgment validates the compromise, the compromise validates the expert's position, and anyone who objects is dismissed as unrealistic or sectarian. Organizational dysfunction in NGOs (the narrowing of scope to satisfy funders, the substitution of single-issue campaigns for systemic challenges, the silencing of internal dissent) tends to be discussed as though it were a problem of bad strategy or insufficient radicalism. But these are better understood as consequences of the class interests of the people who run them: their careers depend on the continuation of the problem they claim to address, their authority depends on the claimed incapacity of the people they serve, and their material position depends on the funding relationships that constrain their politics. Any serious engagement with this ecosystem therefore has to grapple with the material interests of NGO staff in maintaining things as they are – not just their politics – because those interests will resist democratization, rotation, and de-skilling for the same reasons that any other form of class privilege is defended.

Precedents

These principles are not new, even if the argument proposed here is. Several organizing traditions have attempted versions of what I'm arguing for. Each achieved something real, and each fell short in ways worth examining.

Deep organizing. Jane McAlevey's work (both as a practitioner and in No Shortcuts, 2016) represents the most developed contemporary model for building 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 results, where applied, have been impressive – particularly in healthcare and education, where workers' communities and workplaces overlap. Brazil's MST (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra) has gone further still, integrating land occupation, education, gender politics, production, and political formation into a single organizational practice that comes closer than most movements to treating organization-building as a primary goal.^[38] 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) reproduced exactly the class-collaborationist dynamic described in the previous section – dependence on a party that delivered state resources without challenging bourgeois control over their delivery. Both 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.^[39]

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), came closest to making democratic organization-building a primary goal rather than a means to campaign victories. Baker's critique of charismatic leadership and her insistence on developing local decision-making capacity went further than any comparable tradition in treating 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.^[40]

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 key insight, documented in Michael Staudenmaier's Truth and Revolution (2012), 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.^[41]

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) – offer the closest existing model for 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.^[42]

What these cases share with the Spanish ateneos, the Black Panthers, and early Soviet cultural projects discussed in the companion essay is a pattern: what succeeded was the degree to which the organization addressed multiple dimensions of class rule simultaneously – treating workers as whole people, confronting intra-class privilege through practice, building the capacity for pattern recognition. What failed was, in each case, a narrowing: to the workplace, to a single axis of privilege, to pedagogy without organizational power, to campaign victories without internal transformation, or to dependence on bourgeois parties rather than autonomous capacity-building.

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 in striking ways: 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.^[43] I flag this provisionally rather than asserting it, because the point deserves more careful study than I can give it here.

More generally, the sketches above are starting points for investigation, not definitive assessments. I am not an authority on any of these movements, and each deserves the kind of serious, critical engagement that a few paragraphs cannot provide. The point is that 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 work 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