More to Lose Than Their Chains: Class Rule and 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.

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:

Capitalist class societies are maturing, not declining — but their material basis is contracting. The ruling classes have spent a century learning to manage, absorb, and neutralize challenges. The system is simultaneously more politically resilient and less materially sustainable. Waiting for collapse or universal proletarianization is a sedative, not a strategy.
Class rule reproduces itself well beyond the wage relation. Many of the things people want — status, domestic labor, organizational power, deference, parental authority over children — can't be obtained through markets. The ability to extract them without reciprocity is a class relation too, and it gives large sections of the working class a stake in the system. These benefits are distributed along an incorporation gradient that sorts populations into differential access to protections and exposures.
The "PMC debate" illustrates the problem. 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 classes.
Four legitimation mechanisms maintain class rule, not one. Meritocratic reasoning is the generative logic through which exploitation is rationalized. But it is complemented by accommodation (compliance despite recognizing injustice, because contesting costs more than complying), by foreclosure (the ratchet architecture and ignorance production that prevent alternatives from becoming visible), and by the market's endogenous generation of its own legitimation (making hierarchy appear earned). The most effective contemporary mechanisms are not getting people to believe the system is just, but raising the costs of contesting it and preventing them from seeing how it works.
Several traditions have attempted parts of a different organizing logic — and the structural reason they fell short is identifiable. Each achieved something real. Each narrowed to a partial solidarity that the system could redirect around. An adequate strategy would need to combine their strengths while addressing the form-switching problem and the material preconditions for emancipation.

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. 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. Communists were expelled from unions. White working-class women were pushed 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.

So although organized labor certainly won immense concessions during its heyday, this in no way spelled capitalist "decline." It spelled adaptation — and the adaptation produced new tools of control (welfare-state management, regulatory capacity, professional stratification) that did not exist before the challenge that provoked them.

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 been a sedative 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.

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 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 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, 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.^[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, supplied on a non-reciprocal basis within the household.^[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. This is a domain of unaccountable authority that collective child-rearing arrangements would distribute and subject to accountability, and it gives 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 unaccountable authority over dependents. 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]

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 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.

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. "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 extract these 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.^[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 extracted 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, experienced as a natural feature of the world rather than as a product of institutional sorting. 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, but the relationship remains non-reciprocal, 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 extract 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. 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 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.^[25] 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.^[26]^[27] 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.^[28]

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.^[29]

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.^[30]^[31]

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"^[32]; 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.^[33]

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. 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 the credit-creation path independently of the tax regime (the framework develops this in the welfare-circuit section).^[34] 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.

The mechanism is recursive. Capital's commodification of any domain proceeds through a sequence — destruction of non-commodified alternatives, formal subsumption, real subsumption, financial mediation, securitization, state de-risking (the framework develops this in full) — and each stage generates the credentialed employment that administers it. But each cohort does not merely occupy the niche its stage created — it actively generates the institutional conditions for the next stage, because career incentives, institutional position, and meritocratic self-understanding orient professionals toward deepening commodification rather than constraining it. The doctor who commodifies care creates the billing infrastructure that invites financial mediation; the financial advisor who interposes debt creates the raw material the securitization engineer packages. 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 credentialed professionals administer every stage in between.

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.^[35]

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.^[36]

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.^[37] 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.^[38] 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 others — 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. "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.^[39] 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; structural adjustment replaced it. 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

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.[^fn-beyondmerit]

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.

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 people who don't believe the system is fair still comply with it.

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 when the more consequential mechanisms are the institutional architecture that raises the costs of contestation and the ignorance production that prevents the system's operation from becoming visible.^[40]

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 meritocratic reasoning 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 — active justification (meritocratic reasoning), accommodation (contestation costs more than compliance), foreclosure (the ratchet mechanism + ignorance production preventing alternatives from becoming visible), and endogenous generation (the market appearing to confirm its own fairness) — 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. The civilizing mission gives way to "development," which gives way to the market appearing as the natural sorting mechanism, but each predecessor 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.^[41] 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, they were ignored, marginalized, or expelled.^[42] 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.

This is not only a theoretical claim. 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 — foreclosure of alternatives is what makes stakes bind; alternatives that break the foreclosure break the binding — 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.

The binding mechanisms this essay has catalogued (material provision, patriarchal compensation, ethnic/racial wages, credential gatekeeping) hold only when alternatives are foreclosed. 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.^[43]^[44]

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. The companion essay on competing solidarities 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.^[45] 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.^[46] The prescriptions that follow are necessary but not sufficient, and honesty requires saying so.

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.

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 metropolitan workers were bound to a national arrangement 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.^[47]

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 in-group's continuation. 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.

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.^[48] 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.

Structural mechanisms 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 doesn't 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 and redirecting it from service-model unionism toward organizing — is the strongest contemporary proof case that professionalization can be reversed, though it remains a single union rather than the kind of multi-domain organization this essay argues for.^[49]

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. 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) 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) extends the integration further, folding land occupation, education, gender politics, production, and political formation into a single organizational practice grounded in territorial control — the most dimensionally comprehensive left case documented, with the strongest reproduction conditions. 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.^[50]

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. The MST's deep infrastructure (settlement schools, cooperatives, seed networks) survived the PT's fall and Bolsonaro's hostility precisely because it was embedded in territory the movement physically controls — but this territorial base depends on incomplete land commodification, a semi-peripheral condition unavailable in core-country metropolitan settings. 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.^[51]

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 — not organization-building in general, but democratic form as such — 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.^[52]

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.^[53]

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.^[54]

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, 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 companion essay's two central findings are that the right outcompetes the left not by offering better ideology but by addressing more dimensions of need with greater depth, under structurally favorable reproduction conditions the left does not enjoy; and that the left's failures are not organizational accidents but consequences of the structurally asymmetric conditions under which it operates — the state tolerates and subsidizes the right's institutional infrastructure while destroying the left's.

The framework essay identifies the structural mechanism behind this recurring pattern: when resistance succeeds in raising the cost of extraction along one channel, the system redirects extraction through channels the resistance left uncontested — channels left open because the resistance was organized around a partial solidarity (one sector, one axis of privilege, one set of demands). This is form-switching. Section 3 above noted abolition→convict leasing and decolonization→structural adjustment as instances; the civil rights movement is a third — overt racial discrimination became 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.

The reason partial resistance produces form-switching rather than ending extraction is structural: the forms of solidarity that succeed at raising costs in one channel are typically organized around partial identities or partial demands — a nationality, a sector, a racial category, a gendered position — that correspond to one axis of the system's operation. They contest extraction along that axis while leaving other axes uncontested, which is what makes redirection possible. Breaking a configuration rather than forcing a form-switch would require resistance organized across enough axes simultaneously that redirection becomes impossible — which is precisely what none of the traditions sketched above achieved, and what the combination this essay calls for would need to do.^[55]

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. Abolition qualitatively changed the legitimation surface on which subsequent resistance could operate — 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 not a failure of will or strategy alone. It 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 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.^[56] 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 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

This essay originated as a response to Mike Macnair's review of Catherine Liu's Virtue Hoarders in the Weekly Worker. My first reply can be found here; Macnair's response here; my second reply here. The present piece substantially reworks and extends the arguments made in those exchanges.
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This has a long and impressive pedigree. See, among others, Trotsky, "The War and the International" (1914); Lenin, Imperialism: the highest stage of capitalism (1917); Lukács, Lenin: a study on the unity of his thought (1924); Mandel, "The Marxist theory of Imperialism and its critics" (1966); Ticktin, "The Nature of an Epoch of Declining Capitalism," Critique (1998). One particularly poignant entry is Lewis Corey's 1934 book declaring and analyzing the decline of US capitalism. Closely related is the tendency to add modifiers — "late," "monopoly," "post-" — that take on unhelpful lives of their own.
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Brought about by western economic maturation and dollar depreciation due to increasing industrial competition, oil reliance, and high US military expenditure abroad. See Michael Hudson, Super Imperialism.
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On university education as socialization, see Jeff Schmidt, Disciplined Minds. See also my essay "Disciplined into Deserving: Education and the Reproduction of Meritocratic Reasoning" for a fuller discussion of how educational institutions encode meritocratic values.
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The companion essay "How Class Rule Generates Imperial Forms" develops the ecological-material argument in detail, identifying two compounding trajectories: the institutional architecture's own success eroding the welfare circuit through which metropolitan consent was sustained (the ratchet mechanism — each commitment harder to reverse than to make — destroying the distribution mechanism while the surplus continues to flow), and the ecological feedback loop physically contracting the surplus available for distribution. The energy regime is the material substrate: the ratio of living to non-living energy in a production system is a class-political variable that determines where workers have leverage and what forms of exploitation are available. As concentrated energy becomes scarcer, the system compensates by intensifying exploitation of the living — the structural tendency the body text names. The energy dimension is developed fully in "Living and Non-Living: Why Emancipation Is an Energy Question" (forthcoming).
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Note that even if working men didn't initially realize or care about the advantage of economic control over their wives and children, they would start valuing it very quickly once it was institutionalized, because that's how these things go.
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A note on terminology: in Marx, "use value" refers specifically to the useful properties of commodities, as distinct from exchange value. I am deliberately broadening the term. The logic by which someone extracts domestic labor, sexual availability, or social deference without reciprocating is structurally identical to the logic by which an employer extracts surplus value: in both cases, one party obtains something they want from another's effort while institutionalized power ensures they don't have to give back equivalently. What the market framework obscures is that people routinely instrumentalize others as dispensers of use values, particularly where power asymmetries make this easy and consequence-free. The treatment of women across all class societies is the most pervasive illustration: their labor is extracted across domestic, sexual, emotional, and economic domains simultaneously, with the non-reciprocity enforced by legal, cultural, and physical means. Restricting "use value" to commodities makes this invisible to class analysis. Broadening it makes it legible.
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The Napoleonic Code (1804) entrenched patriarchal household authority at the moment bourgeois property relations were being consolidated in law. Jacques Donzelot, The Policing of Families (1977), documents how bourgeois reformers then deliberately constructed gendered household authority as labor discipline: Jules Simon declared the housewife "the privileged instrument for civilizing the working class" — she would "stamp out the spirit of independence in the working man." Housing was designed as a disciplinary tool ("the grave of the riot," its physician announced), with eligibility contingent on moral compliance. Working-class men largely resisted the family form (concubinage rates of one-third to one-half), and when asked why they wouldn't marry, consistently replied: "First give us back divorce, then we'll see." The family form was imposed against working-class resistance, not adopted voluntarily. Donzelot's Foucauldian framing ("governmentality," "necessary archaism") systematically depoliticizes what his own evidence shows to be deliberate class strategy.
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On fascist gender politics, see Victoria De Grazia, How Fascism Ruled Women: Italy, 1922–1945 (1992), and Claudia Koonz, Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family, and Nazi Politics (1987). In both Italian Fascism and Nazism, pronatalism and the reassertion of patriarchal family structures were significant elements of the broader program — not the sole driving force, but integral to the promise of national renewal offered to male supporters.
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See "Free Markets, AIDS and Child Prostitution" on the World Bank's promotion of sex tourism as development policy in Thailand, and how the resulting commodification of gendered exploitation fragments working-class solidarity. On the use of sexual exploitation as an elite management tool, see also the Democracy at Work discussion of Jeffrey Epstein.
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Federici's Caliban and the Witch (2004) argues that the early modern witch trials facilitated primitive accumulation by destroying women's autonomous social power. The framing overstates knowledge expropriation as the motive; the mechanism was the destruction of communal female social structures — healing networks, midwifery, informal authority — through the available pretext of religious-orthodoxy enforcement, at a moment when confessional consolidation and emerging state formation were intertwined (Protestant and Catholic states cooperated in the persecution while at war in every other respect). For the purposes of this essay, the better-documented modern cases suffice to establish the pattern.
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The argument that the household is a site of class exploitation rather than merely a support structure for wage labor has been developed most systematically under the heading of "social reproduction theory" — see Lise Vogel, Marxism and the Oppression of Women (1983), and Tithi Bhattacharya, ed., Social Reproduction Theory (2017). I developed the framework proposed here independently, but the overlap is substantial. Where I think my approach differs is in two respects. First, the "use values" framework is broader: it encompasses organizational hierarchies and ethnic exploitation alongside gendered domestic labor, treating all of these as instances of the same underlying mechanism. Second, and more fundamentally, the very term "social reproduction" is part of the problem. It accepts the division between "production" and "reproduction" as analytically real — treating waged production as the primary category and everything else as auxiliary to it. This concedes the primacy of capitalism at the level of vocabulary: the household becomes a site where labor power is reproduced for capital, rather than a site where class exploitation operates in its own right. What I'm arguing is that gendered exploitation is a class relation regardless of its relationship to capitalist production, and that a framework which can only see it as "reproductive" labor has already built in the narrowing I'm trying to overcome. I engage with this point at greater length in the companion essay.
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This definition operates at the level of social relations. It does not address the material substrate — energy, ecology — on which class rule depends. The companion essay "Living and Non-Living: Why Emancipation Is an Energy Question" argues that the ratio of endosomatic to non-living exosomatic energy in a production system is itself a class-political variable: it determines where workers have leverage, what forms of exploitation are available, and what material preconditions emancipation requires. The distinction between living and non-living exosomatic energy — between exploitation of living bodies and extraction from fossil deposits, wind, or sunlight — is arguably the framework's most fundamental analytical contribution, and its absence from this essay reflects this essay's focus on social relations rather than a judgment that the energy dimension is secondary.
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As Graeber notes in Debt: The First 5,000 Years, even seemingly informal parasitic relationships can become lethal where communal enforcement mechanisms exist — as in certain South Pacific societies where persistent non-reciprocity was understood as a grave social offense. The line between "informal" and "institutional" is thinner than it appears.
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One illustration of the absurdity of full commodification is Immanuel Kant's definition of marriage as a contract for the mutual use of your partner's genitalia for self-gratification.
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The closest precedent for this concept is W.E.B. Du Bois's "psychological wage of whiteness" in Black Reconstruction in America (1935), where he argues that poor white Southerners received a "public and psychological wage" — preferential access to courts, public spaces, and social deference — that compensated for their economic exploitation and aligned them with the planter class against Reconstruction. I arrived at the broader concept independently, but the convergence is instructive: what Du Bois identified in the specific context of postbellum racial politics is an instance of the general mechanism described here. David Roediger's The Wages of Whiteness (1991) extends Du Bois's analysis into the formation of white working-class identity more broadly and is also relevant.
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While the mechanism by which class-societal benefits generate ambivalence does not depend on imperialism (it operates in any class society with multiple forms of exploitation), the scale of those benefits in the core countries does. Many of the class-societal benefits this essay catalogues — cheap consumer goods, welfare state provision, national-institutional protections, the relative privilege of metropolitan workers over peripheral ones — are materially underwritten by imperial surplus transfer. The companion essay "How Class Rule Generates Imperial Forms" develops this in detail, arguing that imperialism is a dimension of class rule rather than a separate phenomenon, and analyzing the specific mechanisms (value regime arbitrage, income deflation, competitive elimination of autonomous development) through which extraction from the periphery sustains the class arrangements that bind core-country workers to the system. The incorporation gradient developed there — the continuum from full membership in the national project to complete exclusion — also operates domestically: credentialed vs. uncredentialed, citizen vs. migrant, white vs. racialized are positions on the same gradient that structures imperial extraction abroad.
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These four mechanisms do not operate statically. They deepen through a patterned sequence that the companion essay calls the commodification sequence: destruction of non-commodified alternatives (enclosure, fiscal coercion, withdrawal of public provision) creates money-form dependence; formal subsumption captures the output of activities whose internal logic is not yet transformed; real subsumption reorganizes the activities themselves; financial mediation interposes debt between households and the now-commodified necessities; securitization converts the resulting debts into tradable assets; and state de-risking guarantees returns on the financialized commodity. Each stage creates the institutional infrastructure and political constituency for the next — a ratchet operating within the commodification process itself. The four mechanisms described in the body text are present throughout, but their relative weight shifts as the sequence advances: coercive enforcement does more work at early stages (the Tudor vagrancy statutes, colonial hut taxes), while artificial scarcity and the devaluation of labor do more at later stages (credentialism, the cultural coding of care work).
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See the Whitehall Study into the British Civil Service on the health effects of functioning in highly graded social ranking systems. See also Manfred Max-Neef's work on needs hierarchies and the balancing of needs.
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The incorporation gradient is developed fully in the companion essay "How Class Rule Generates Imperial Forms." Its central analytical contribution for the present argument is that the categories through which it operates — racial, ethnic, gendered, legal-status-based, credential-based — are not independent axes of oppression that happen to intersect (as intersectionality theory typically frames them) but locally variable instantiations of a single mechanism: differential incorporation into the class order, with each position carrying a specific bundle of exposures and protections. Robinson (Black Marxism, 1983/2020) demonstrates that the gradient predates capitalism — Western civilization was already racially ordered through intra-European hierarchies before capitalism reorganized and extended them.
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For an accessible synthesis of research on the interaction between politics and biology, see Arnold Schroeder's work and podcast Fight Like an Animal, available via Against the Internet. His series on the biology of the left/right divide and his podcast on oxytocin are useful starting points for understanding why we cannot wish away human biology.
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The question of why workers identify with nation, ethnicity, sector, or religion rather than with class — and why these identifications are so durable — is developed fully in the companion essay "Why Competing Solidarities Tend to Win." That essay reframes competing solidarities as formations on a contested field rather than deviations from the "true" class interest: class solidarity is one contestant among others, not the natural default. It develops a thirteen-dimension needs framework (drawing on Max-Neef and Rosenberg, grounded in biological-anthropological evidence) and four analytical tools — the organizing dimension (what provides coherence), the aspirational dimension (what provides a transcendent horizon), the governance form (organized vs. mobilized), and reproduction conditions (the material, legal, educational, communicative, and spatial infrastructure that determines which solidarities persist). Ten case studies (four right-wing, six left) show that the right's formations outcompete the left's not because they offer community control — they govern through mobilized forms that screen class divergence — but because they address more dimensions with greater depth, and because the reproduction conditions (institutional apparatus, state tolerance, education pipelines, media, spatial anchoring) are structurally asymmetric in their favor. The left's best historical cases (Spanish anarchism, the pre-1914 SPD, Red Vienna) achieved substantial dimensional breadth but lost it through specific mechanisms: professionalization, metabolization, cadre instrumentalization, and the state destruction of organizational infrastructure. The family's resilience as a competing solidarity rests on triple anchoring: class rule from above, gendered interests from men, and parental authority from both parents. The implication for the present essay is that the attachment to national, ethnic, or sectoral identity described here is not primarily ideological — it is a rational response to the fact that these forms of organization address more of what people need, under conditions where the state actively maintains the asymmetry.
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Even today, when left parties like the Dutch SP engage with migrant worker issues, they tend to frame the arrival of overworked and bunk-housed newcomers as a problem for existing neighborhoods, rather than organizing alongside these workers through the unions. The focus on work visa schemes — as though illegalization has ever empowered workers — illustrates how left organizing can reinforce rather than bridge ethnic divisions.
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For this point, I am indebted to my reading of David Graeber's Utopia of Rules and Bullshit Jobs.
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"Immaturity is the inability to use one's own understanding without the guidance of another" — Kant, "An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?" (1784). The irony is that Kant framed this as a condition to be overcome, while those who invoke the logic in practice treat it as a permanent justification for their own mediating role. The same pattern recurs across every intermediary position in class society: the intermediary's role is justified by the claimed incapacity of those they mediate for, which is then never tested or relinquished.
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This is a more developed version of what Lenin, drawing on Engels and Hobson, called the "labor aristocracy" thesis: the claim that imperialist superprofits allow ruling classes to buy off a privileged stratum of workers. The traditional formulation is crude — it reduces the mechanism to bribery from colonial surplus and treats the bought-off workers as dupes. The argument here differs in two respects: first, the mechanism is not bribery but the structural availability of class-societal benefits across multiple domains; second, it does not depend on imperialism at all. Worker investment in class rule is a feature of any class society with multiple forms of exploitation, not a special product of the imperial periphery.
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The specific form that class-societal benefits take at any given moment is shaped by what the companion essay "How Class Rule Generates Imperial Forms" calls the mediating configuration: six factors (coercive capacity, capital-fraction access to the state, target population resistance capacity, position on the incorporation gradient, legitimation infrastructure, and the configuration of competing powers) whose interaction determines which forms of extraction and compensation are available. See [^fn-gradient] for the incorporation gradient's domestic application.
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The play dimension of status hierarchies helps explain why ideological critique alone fails to dislodge investment in class rule. You cannot argue someone out of a game they are playing for the experience of agency, any more than you can lecture someone out of a sport. What you can do is build organizational contexts in which experienced agency runs through different channels — collective decision-making, shared problem-solving, democratic governance of common resources — so that the status game loses its monopoly on what it feels like to matter. This is one reason the prefigurative tradition's insistence on democratic organizational practice is strategically important, not just morally preferable: it provides alternative avenues for experienced agency that compete with hierarchical status games. The STO's approach — building contexts in which cross-racial solidarity was experienced as materially superior to racial division — was effective precisely because it addressed the agency dimension, not just the ideological one.
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Vivek Chibber's The Class Matrix (2022) makes a complementary but narrower argument: that workers' structural dependence on the market makes individual strategies (job-switching, credentialing, compliance) more rational than collective action, because individual strategies are cheaper, safer, and have more predictable returns. This is a real mechanism, and it helps explain why solidarity is the exception rather than the rule even among workers with no particular investment in hierarchy. But it can only explain passivity — why workers don't organize — not active defense of class relations. It cannot account for why white workers sabotage cross-racial organizing, why men resist the equalization of domestic labor, or why credentialed workers defend gatekeeping. These are not cases of individual rationality outcompeting collective action; they are cases of workers investing in specific class relations because those relations deliver use values they want. Chibber's framework also inherits the limitation this essay diagnoses in the broader tradition: by defining class exclusively through market dependence under capitalism, it has nothing to say about gendered exploitation, organizational hierarchy, or any of the non-market class relations that give large sections of the working class a stake in class rule as such. The companion essay "How Class Rule Generates Imperial Forms" develops Chibber's analysis further in the imperial dimension, drawing on his argument that the class-power configuration determines whether developmental states can be installed and sustained — and specifically that the ISI/ELI choice (import-substitution versus export-led industrialization) is itself a function of the domestic balance of class power, not a policy option available to any state that chooses it. That essay also develops the "window closing" argument: that the geopolitical conditions that made successful developmental states possible (Cold War sponsorship, metropolitan market access) are no longer available, which means the path South Korea and Taiwan followed is structurally foreclosed for most contemporary peripheral states.
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James Burnham, The Managerial Revolution: What is Happening in the World (John Day, 1941). Burnham's political trajectory — from Trotskyist organizer to founding senior editor of William F. Buckley's National Review — is itself instructive: his analysis of managerial power led him not toward a broader critique of class rule but toward the conclusion that managerial dominance was inevitable and should be embraced on conservative terms.
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The most developed Marxist attempt to handle this problem is Erik Olin Wright's concept of "contradictory class locations" — see Classes (1985) and Class Counts (1997). Wright tried to map intermediate positions onto a grid of exploitation-based class categories. The approach is more rigorous than the Ehrenreichs' but shares a fundamental limitation: it still tries to assign people to discrete class positions rather than recognizing that class position is a continuum of stakes across multiple domains. The result is a taxonomy that keeps getting more elaborate without resolving the underlying analytical problem.
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See "On the Origins of the Professional Managerial Class," an interview with Barbara Ehrenreich in Dissent Magazine. The Ehrenreichs' analysis was the most notable left contribution to the PMC debate, though it rested on the unhelpful hard distinction between "material" and "ideological/cultural" production.
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See Macnair's review, "American 'Blue Labour'?" in the Weekly Worker.
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See L. Randall Wray, Understanding Modern Money (1998), and Mariana Mazzucato, The Entrepreneurial State (2011). In the richer and politically dominant states, the material tradeoff between state and private economic activity is far from zero-sum — except perhaps in times of genuine resource or labor scarcity.
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The neoliberal approach centers on privatizing social goods and services to increase opportunities for private wealth extraction, while restricting help to the "deserving poor" — mostly at the cost of the middling sorts, who pay an ever-increasing share of total taxes.
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"The PMC" is not one "class." It combines multiple forms of exploitation and rent-seeking that its members have access to, even as most of them now work for wages. What unites them is a structural commitment to facilitating class relations and commodification, not a shared class interest in the Marxist sense.
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The most developed Marxist attempt to handle this problem is Erik Olin Wright's concept of "contradictory class locations" — see Classes (1985) and Class Counts (1997). Wright tried to map intermediate positions onto a grid of exploitation-based class categories. The approach is more rigorous than the Ehrenreichs' but shares a fundamental limitation: it still tries to assign people to discrete class positions rather than recognizing that class position is a continuum of stakes across multiple domains. The result is a taxonomy that keeps getting more elaborate without resolving the underlying analytical problem.
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The most explicit examples of how class relations are taught concern hazing rituals in student organizations and the military, which serve a threefold purpose: to humiliate, to bond through shared humiliation, and to teach that exploitation is either unavoidable or rewarding. The cycle is perpetuated by everyone's subsequent entitlement to treat the next cohort the same way.
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Readers will notice the overlap with intersectionality theory as developed by Kimberlé Crenshaw and Patricia Hill Collins. The overlap is real: both frameworks insist that exploitation operates across multiple domains simultaneously and that people's positions in one domain affect their positions in others. Where I think this framework does something different is in grounding the intersection in a single generative principle — institutionalized non-reciprocity, rationalized through meritocratic reasoning — rather than treating each axis (race, gender, class) as analytically independent and looking at where they happen to cross. The risk with intersectionality as typically practiced is that it multiplies categories without explaining why these particular forms of exploitation co-occur and reinforce each other. The answer proposed here is that they are all instances of the same underlying logic, which is why they recur across very different historical contexts.
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The companion essay "How Class Rule Generates Imperial Forms" develops the production-of-ignorance argument in detail. The relevant mechanisms include disciplinary fragmentation (economics separated from political science from international relations from development studies, so that the connections between extraction and prosperity cannot be made within any single disciplinary framework), the geographic scatter of dispossession (each specific enough that no population experiences enough of the pattern to name it as a system), machine fetishism (Hornborg's term for the way technology's productive power appears as a self-contained property of the machine rather than as dependent on global asymmetric resource flows), and the sacred/profane distinction (Losurdo's term for liberalism's rigorous delimitation of a restricted zone where political norms apply from a vast zone where they do not). These mechanisms do not suppress knowledge — they organize knowledge production so that the relevant connections cannot be seen from any one position within it.
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See my essay "Disciplined into Deserving: Education and the Reproduction of Meritocratic Reasoning" for a fuller account of how educational institutions and workplace structures encode and reproduce meritocratic reasoning, and how this relates to the depoliticization of economic life.
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See, for example, the many books and talks by Noam Chomsky, Paul Goodman, Jeff Schmidt, and Marshall B. Rosenberg.
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The claim that organizations must embody the social relations they seek to create is central to the prefigurative politics tradition, from the anarchists through Murray Bookchin's libertarian municipalism to the Zapatistas' autonomous governance in Chiapas and the democratic confederalism practiced in Rojava. These are arguably the most developed contemporary experiments in what I'm advocating, and the Zapatista experience in particular deserves closer study than I can give it here. Where I think the argument of this essay adds something is in specifying why prefiguration matters: not as a moral preference for consistency, but because organizations that reproduce class relations internally are training their members in exactly the habits and justifications that sustain class rule externally.
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There is a biological complication here that I want to flag honestly, since it applies to my own prescriptions as much as to the arrangements I'm criticizing. Research on parochial altruism (see Schroeder's synthesis cited above) indicates that in-group bonding and out-group hostility are neurochemically coupled: the oxytocin-mediated processes that produce trust, generosity, and care within a group simultaneously intensify suspicion and aggression toward those perceived as outside it. This means that any organization that succeeds in building deep, multidimensional solidarity — the kind I argue is needed to outcompete nationalism, religion, and sectoralism — will, precisely because of that success, tend toward the parochial closure it is supposed to be an alternative to. Strong bonds, shared identity, and mutual care are the features that make a movement attractive; they are also the features that generate hostility toward outsiders and enforcement against internal dissenters. The defense of existing competing solidarities is not only a matter of rational self-interest (as argued in the body text) but of neurochemically reinforced group identification, which means dislodging it requires building alternative forms of belonging that compete at the same level. But how do you build an organization that is strong enough to outcompete existing solidarities while maintaining permeable boundaries, welcoming dissent, and extending concern beyond its membership? The biology says those two things pull against each other. This is a design problem, not a problem of principle, and neither this essay nor the companion piece on competing solidarities resolves it. I intend to address it in "The Peace of the Factory."
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The developmental trap is analyzed in detail in the companion essay, through the Soviet, Chinese, and Haitian cases. The Haitian case is the most instructive: the revolution succeeded in closing the most extreme channel of extraction, but the developmental trap ensured that the revolutionary state reproduced coerced labor on the plantations — not because of personal betrayal but because the only economy Saint-Domingue had was the plantation economy, and the only way to generate the surplus needed for military defense was to keep the plantations running through compelled labor. Marx himself identified the constraint: under "real subsumption," the machinery a post-revolutionary society inherits is constitutively shaped by capital's requirements — workers lose subjective capacity, cooperation becomes an alien power, and the technological infrastructure presupposes the relations of domination that produced it. Saito (Marx in the Anthropocene, 2023), recovering Marx's late distinction between productive forces of capital and productive forces in general, adds the ecological dimension: the inherited machinery presupposes not only the social relations but the ecological throughput rates — cheap energy, cheap nature, externalized waste — that the framework identifies as unsustainable. The path is doubly blocked: more machinery is needed to escape the trap, but more machinery closes the employment window further (each wave of industrialization absorbs less labor per unit of output), and the machinery presupposes ecological conditions whose continuation degrades the material base.
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This definition operates at the level of social relations. It does not address the material substrate — energy, ecology — on which class rule depends. The companion essay "Living and Non-Living: Why Emancipation Is an Energy Question" argues that the ratio of endosomatic to non-living exosomatic energy in a production system is itself a class-political variable: it determines where workers have leverage, what forms of exploitation are available, and what material preconditions emancipation requires. The distinction between living and non-living exosomatic energy — between exploitation of living bodies and extraction from fossil deposits, wind, or sunlight — is arguably the framework's most fundamental analytical contribution, and its absence from this essay reflects this essay's focus on social relations rather than a judgment that the energy dimension is secondary.
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The welfare-imperialism circuit is developed fully in the companion essay "How Class Rule Generates Imperial Forms." The scale is not marginal: Hickel, Sullivan, and Zoomkawala (2021), using their preferred exchange-rate method, estimate the annual transfer at approximately 7% of Northern GDP. That magnitude is method-sensitive, but it is a serious peer-reviewed estimate of scale, not a slogan. The postwar golden age of European social democracy coincided with the period of maximum terms-of-trade advantage for metropolitan economies and with the temporary elimination of industrial competition through wartime destruction — the physical annihilation of productive capacity creating a window of extraordinary profit margins that would have been impossible under normal competitive conditions. Each welfare-state regime type (Esping-Andersen's liberal, corporatist, and social democratic) distributed the imperial surplus differently and therefore produced different competing-solidarity structures — but what Esping-Andersen does not ask is where the surplus came from or what it meant that the populations among which it was distributed were so homogeneous. The typology describes three ways of distributing imperial surplus within a pre-sorted in-group; it does not describe three models for building solidarity in diverse societies.
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I have written more extensively about the organizational challenges posed by NGOs and professional activism here in Dutch; English expanded version forthcoming.
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The Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators (CORE) won leadership of the Chicago Teachers Union in 2010 and subsequently led the 2012 strike, the first major teachers' strike in Chicago in twenty-five years. For the organizational transformation, see Micah Uetricht, Strike for America: Chicago Teachers Against Austerity (Verso, 2014). The case is notable because CORE's success depended on building alliances with parents and communities — addressing dimensions beyond the workplace — while maintaining rank-and-file control over strategy.
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The companion essay on competing solidarities develops the MST as a full case study. Key sources: Rebecca Tarlau, Occupying Schools, Occupying Land (Oxford, 2019) for the education system and "contentious co-governance"; Miguel Carter, ed., Challenging Social Inequality (Duke, 2015) for cooperative agriculture, settlement-level governance, and the PT metabolization (especially Carter's epilogue on the land reform debacle and Branford's chapter on navigating PT governments); Leandro Vergara-Camus, Land and Freedom (Zed, 2014) for the MST-Zapatistas comparison and territorial decommodification; Christine Chaves, "Mystique: MST Rituals and Dilemmas" (Revista de Antropologia, 2022) and Daniela Issa, "Praxis of Empowerment" (Latin American Perspectives, 2007) for the mística; Djacira Araújo, Pedagogia Do Movimento Sem Terra e Relações de Gênero (Lutas Anticapital, 2019) for the gender analysis.
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See Jane McAlevey, No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age (Oxford University Press, 2016). Her subsequent A Collective Bargain (2020) extends the argument with additional case studies but does not substantially broaden the analytical framework beyond the workplace.
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See Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision (University of North Carolina Press, 2003). On SNCC's internal fractures, see also Clayborne Carson, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s (Harvard University Press, 1981).
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See Michael Staudenmaier, Truth and Revolution: A History of the Sojourner Truth Organization, 1969–1986 (AK Press, 2012). For the theoretical background in the Johnson-Forest Tendency, see C.L.R. James, Raya Dunayevskaya and Grace Lee Boggs, State Capitalism and World Revolution (1950).
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See Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968); Myles Horton, The Long Haul: An Autobiography (1990); Myles Horton and Paulo Freire, We Make the Road by Walking: Conversations on Education and Social Change (1990). On Highlander's history, see John M. Glen, Highlander: No Ordinary School (University Press of Kentucky, 1996).
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The form-switching analysis is developed fully in the companion essay "How Class Rule Generates Imperial Forms," which traces the mechanism across dozens of cases. The most instructive for the present argument is the American case: the trajectory from chattel slavery through Reconstruction through convict leasing through Jim Crow through civil rights through mass incarceration illustrates form-switching across two centuries, with each transition forced by organized resistance and each new form operating under the changed legitimation constraints the resistance produced. Therborn (The Killing Fields of Inequality, 2013) names the aggregate pattern "costless egalitarianism": existential equality (formal rights, recognition, anti-discrimination law) has advanced dramatically since ~1980 even as resource inequality has worsened. The system concedes what costs it nothing (recognition) while intensifying what costs others everything (extraction).
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See B.R. Ambedkar, Annihilation of Caste (1936), particularly his argument that caste cannot be abolished by economic reform alone because it is maintained through social and religious practice across every domain of life. For a contemporary reassessment, see S. Anand's critical edition of Annihilation of Caste with an introduction by Arundhati Roy (Verso, 2014). I am not yet sufficiently familiar with the secondary literature on Ambedkar's organizing practice — as opposed to his constitutional politics — to assess how far the parallel extends.
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More to Lose Than Their Chains: Class Rule and the Problem of Worker Ambivalence