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class="blog-content-post"> <div class="category-title headline"><a href="https://c4ss.org/content/category/feature-articles" rel="category tag">Feature Articles</a></div> <div class="blog-content-post-title headline">Meritocracy is Bullshit</div> <div class="blog-content-meta"> <span class="byline"><a href="https://c4ss.org/content/author/kevin-carson" title="Posts by Kevin Carson" rel="author">Kevin Carson</a> </span> | <span class="author-patreon"> <a href="http://patreon.com/kevincarson">Support this author on Patreon</a></span> | <span class="date"> September 24th, 2024</span> </div> <div class="source-info"></div> <div class="blog-content-post-text"> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">In a recent interview with Jordan Peterson, Elon Musk </span><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20240724013841/https://fortune.com/2024/07/23/elon-musk-backs-down-from-45-million-a-month-pledge-to-trump-says-he-doesnt-subscribe-to-cult-of-personality/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">stated</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> that one of his values was “</span><span style="font-weight: 400;">meritocracy, as much meritocracy as possible, so you get ahead as a function of your skill, and nothing else.” </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“Meritocracy” is often framed by liberals as a thing that would be good if we actually had it, as opposed to the current non-meritocratic system. The present system is at fault because it fails to provide equal educational and training opportunities for all, and because career advancement and pay do not reflect objective and uniformly applied standards of skill and performance.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">But even if the system operated according to such rules, meritocracy would still be bad. Aside from everything else, meritocracy is bullshit because it presupposes the legitimacy of the dominant institutional framework and its standards of “merit.” </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">There is no such thing as generic “merit,” or “skill.” One can only demonstrate skill at doing </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">something</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> — at performing some particular kind of task. The idea of “skill,” as a neutral characteristic that can be objectively measured, ignores the fact that the tasks themselves are selected by those in authority and assigned to their subordinates, in a context where overall institutional goals are determined by those whose interests they serve.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">In fact people are graded on “merit” according to their effectiveness in serving a system of power whose primary purpose is wealth extraction, and their “skill” at carrying out tasks that are necessary to keep that system of power functioning.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Imagine Auschwitz functioning as a meritocracy, and the “skills” on which a member of its staff would be graded. If we reflect on it, it should quickly become obvious that “meritocracy,” as a concept, is completely worthless unless we first evaluate the legitimacy of the tasks themselves and the parties whose ends they serve.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Consider the most highly compensated occupations under American capitalism. A large share of them reflect the underlying institutional facts that most large-scale economic enterprise is hierarchically managed on behalf of absentee owners. Owing to all the ways that top-down power distorts information flow in a hierarchy, the decisions made by senior managers at the top of an organizational pyramid are worse than those that would be made by workers with direct knowledge of the production process, or people directly responsible to them. But absentee-owned capitalist enterprises cannot afford to put workers directly in control of production because of the inherent conflicts of interest. Workers know that any contribution they make to increased productivity will be stolen from them by management in the form of speedups or downsizing.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">For similar reasons, there is a proliferation of bean-counting, surveillance, and lower management jobs as a result of the same basic irrationalities: workers cannot be trusted to do their best or to use their situational knowledge effectively, when they know their interests are directly opposed to those running the organization. That’s why cooperative plywood factories in the Pacific Northwest have only about a quarter the number of front-line managers compared to their capitalist-owned counterparts. When workers own and manage the factory, their self-interest is sufficient motive to do their best, put their knowledge to effective use, and sanction slackers.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Also for similar reasons, society at large is infested with guard labor of various kinds — cops, security guards, contract lawyers, etc. — in order to compensate for the conflicts of interest stemming from concentrated wealth and absentee property ownership.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">In other words, a Venn diagram of all these tasks — skill at performing which are the basis for evaluating “merit” — and what David Graeber called “</span><a href="https://library.lol/main/C119AD778E28BAAF1AB58332ADD748C1"><span style="font-weight: 400;">bullshit jobs</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">” would show enormous amounts of overlap.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Most of the jobs I’ve described so far are secondary to actual production, and simply reflect the institutional irrationalities involved in the ownership and supervision of the production process. But the organization and structure of production itself reflects one possible choice out of many alternatives, and is determined primarily by institutional and class interest rather than by any generic standards of “efficiency.” </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Mass production itself is only more “efficient” than decentralized production at the community level, for the most part, because of market incentives and price structures distorted by massive state subsidies to input costs and protection against competition. And given the predominance of mass production, the technical skills required and rewarded for are far different from those that would prevail in a decentralized economy. Mass production involves artificially large-scale and capital-intensive production technology, and has historically been associated with a movement — commonly known as Taylorism or Fordism — to deskill production workers on the shop floor and shift skill and decision-making authority upward into the hierarchy of engineers and managers. In a decentralized economy on the model of Italy’s Emilia-Romagna region, in contrast, production involves much smaller, high-tech general-purpose machinery, and requires technically proficient shop floor workers with a wide range of machine skills.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">And because mass production uses such large-scale, capital-intensive, and </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">expensive</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> machinery, it requires running the machinery at full capacity in order to minimize overhead. As opposed to an economy organized on a demand-pull basis, like that of the low-overhead shops of Emilia-Romagna, mass production requires — in order to keep the machines running — undertaking production without regard to demand, and then organizing society so as to guarantee consumption of the goods thus produced. So we wind up not only with a high-pressure marketing industry and long-distance shipping, but with enormous levels of waste production to fully utilize capacity: a military-industrial complex, subsidized sprawl and car culture, planned obsolescence, and generally shoddy design. There are credible estimates that, absent such waste production and irrationality, we could produce the existing standard of living with a 15-hour work week.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">So even a large part of direct production and distribution work probably qualifies as bullshit jobs. This means that many or most of our standards of “skill” and “merit” actually amount to — in Peter Drucker’s words — doing well that which should not be done at all.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">As Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis pointed out decades ago in </span><a href="https://library.lol/main/42719A4F7CAA0DBCD2CEB05165C1F0C6"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Schooling in Capitalist America</span></i></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">, “meritocracy” is a self-serving ideology of the ruling class, which frames the particular institutional and class structure we live under as something that just spontaneously happened because it was the most efficient way of doing things, or because people “wanted it that way.” But in fact, it was created through the exercise of power by the people who directly benefited from the decisions, and is set up in such a way as to be administered by those who have internalized the values of those at the top. It’s a system that’s kept going by creating the kind of people who see it as inevitable, and are skilled at doing the things necessary to serve it — that’s what selection for “merit” means.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">By definition, any redesign of the system to serve other interests — for example ours — will be defined as “radical.” And it will be.</span></p> </div> </div> </div> </div> <div class="blog-sidebar"> <div style="border: 1px solid #CCC; margin: 5px; width: 170px; padding: 8px; "> <div id="radslide-2"><div class="radslide"><a href="https://store.c4ss.org/index.php/product/anarchy-democracy/"><img src="https://c4ss.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/A.D-cover.png" alt="Anarchy and Democracy" /></a></div><div class="radslide"><a href="https://store.c4ss.org/index.php/product/fighting-fascism/"><img src="https://c4ss.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/51o7J4INDL._SX331_BO1204203200_-1.jpg" alt="Fighting Fascism" /></a></div><div class="radslide"><a href="https://store.c4ss.org/index.php/product/markets-not-capitalism/"><img src="http://c4ss.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/MarketsNotCapitalism.jpg" alt="Markets Not Capitalism" /></a></div><div class="radslide"><a href="https://store.c4ss.org/index.php/product/anatomy-of-escape-book/"><img src="https://c4ss.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Screenshot_20190415-130601_Drive.jpg" alt="The Anatomy of Escape" /></a></div><div class="radslide"><a href="https://store.c4ss.org/index.php/product/organization-theory/"><img src="http://c4ss.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/organization1.png" alt="Organization Theory" /></a></div></div></div> <div class="sidebar-section"> <div class="textwidget"></div> </div><div class="sidebar-section"><h2 class="title">Supporter Updates</h2> <div class="textwidget"><form style="border:1px solid #ccc;padding:3px;text-align:center;" action="//feedburner.google.com/fb/a/mailverify" method="post" target="popupwindow" onsubmit="window.open('//feedburner.google.com/fb/a/mailverify?uri=CenterForAStatelessSocietySupporterUpdates', 'popupwindow', 'scrollbars=yes');return true"> <p>Enter your email address:</p><p><input type="text" style="" name="email"/></p><input type="hidden" value="CenterForAStatelessSocietySupporterUpdates" name="uri"/><input type="hidden" name="loc" value="en_US"/><input type="submit" style="" value="Subscribe" /></form> </div> </div> <div id="tags"> <a href="https://c4ss.org/content/tag/bullshit-jobs">Bullshit Jobs</a>, <a href="https://c4ss.org/content/tag/capitalism">capitalism</a>, <a href="https://c4ss.org/content/tag/context">context</a>, <a href="https://c4ss.org/content/tag/irrationality">irrationality</a>, <a href="https://c4ss.org/content/tag/merit">merit</a>, <a href="https://c4ss.org/content/tag/meritocracy">meritocracy</a>, <a href="https://c4ss.org/content/tag/nazism">Nazism</a>, <a href="https://c4ss.org/content/tag/ownership">ownership</a>, <a href="https://c4ss.org/content/tag/rationality">rationality</a>, </div> <div id="sidebar-social"> <a href="JavaScript:void()"><div id="facebook"></div></a> <a href="JavaScript:void()"><div id="twitter"></div></a> <a href="JavaScript:void()"><div id="reddit" ></div></a> <a href="https://www.tumblr.com/share" title="Share on Tumblr"><div id="tumblr" ></div></a> <div class="dropdown" id="facebook-dropdown"><div class="social-internal"></div></div> <div class="dropdown" id="twitter-dropdown"><div class="social-internal"><iframe allowtransparency="true" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets/tweet_button.html" style="width:130px; 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