In a recent interview with Jordan Peterson, Elon Musk stated that one of his values was “meritocracy, as much meritocracy as possible, so you get ahead as a function of your skill, and nothing else.”
“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.
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.”
There is no such thing as generic “merit,” or “skill.” One can only demonstrate skill at doing something — 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 “bullshit jobs” would show enormous amounts of overlap.
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.”
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.
And because mass production uses such large-scale, capital-intensive, and expensive 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.
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.
As Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis pointed out decades ago in Schooling in Capitalist America, “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.
By definition, any redesign of the system to serve other interests — for example ours — will be defined as “radical.” And it will be.
