Involutions or meritocracy, or: the death of competitive individualism by Clippy?
....alongside the spectre of Microsoft's intellectual monopoly capitalism
Are the Anglocapitalist countries meritocratic, unlike contemporary China1? Is this system a meritocracy? Was it a meritocracy; is it no longer the meritocracy ‘it once was’?
These are the questions I want to keep exploring this week as I follow up thinking about involutions, because the presence or absence of meritocracy seems central to generating an observer position that can parse the distinction between the involutions held to be happening of late – ‘theirs’, and ‘ours’ – the ‘ledger’ that’s operating, or no longer operating, and the good old days that once were, but can no longer be.
As usual, the discipline in play is that I keep typing, and do whatever I can to keep thinking with my fingers at talking speed, then try to hit publish at the end of the working day.
Is the system a meritocracy?
(Allow me to play Rawls for a few paragraphs in setting out minimal conditions and normative implications…)
Meritocracy is central to how resources and opportunities are distributed here and now. Or: they are supposed to be. Meritocracy is ‘as it should be’.
I think immediately of job advertisements. Here, notions and practices of meritocracy appear-to-be-central, wherever ‘competitive applicants’ address their cover letter, selection criteria, and CV to a prospective employer (which: they must, nearly everywhere).
This context is normative enough to be tantamount to a kind of currency, and central enough to be part and parcel of the norm-set we all live by. This makes practised understandings of meritocracy crucial to the wager we all engage in when we expend time submitting a job application. This is tied to a social imaginary of openness-to-the-best applicant on behalf of the receivers, where we suppose and they suppose – and they do not pretend, so we don’t have to. For if applying does not involve us in a competitive process where success is possible and at stake (and more likely, the better a candidate one is); if, it turns out, the job has already been given to a family member, friend, or insider; or if people of my body, their appearance, and your passport status will be rejected from consideration, then – why bother2?
That ‘all of the above’ routinely happens, without our knowledge, after we’ve taken the trouble to apply, only shows us to the point:
In the absence of meritocracy, the job applicant is a job supplicant, the receiver a deceiver.
As this gloss suggests, a society of ‘competitive individuals’ can only be meritocratic, and has to uphold this aspiration indefinitely, as all other historically/culturally pervasive methods of distributing job opportunities upset what turns out to be the one notion that tends to be capable of rendering the entire process meaningful and worthwhile as a ‘job market’.
We can think of counterfactuals from two perspectives. On the one hand, we can think of family professions and inherited offices, closed guilds, family, friends, and insider networks, or lottery, randomness, or happenstance. On the other, we can consider opportunities actively pushed open to nearly anyone, as in this famous enlistment scene in Stripes, or, right toward the other end, conscription and coerced labour, as work that is foisted or forced upon us against our consent, without our choice, do or die.
Even in the absence of sufficient knowledge, meritocracy is a widely held positive value ‘we’ have to invest in, or a disbelief we have to suspend. This is, in part, because all applicants are flying blind, though to differing degrees.
Here we all are then, my fellow applicants. Our collective ‘submission’ to this partially blind – im/partially blind? – process renders us all differential insiders in a community of fate that, from then on, has to remain meritocratic (or say it’s striving for this), or destroy the hope and belief holding the trust keeping the whole thing working and meaningful. And finally, from the moment we submit, in order for everything just mentioned to make sense and keep making sense, this is a process we have no choice but to entrust to an insider group of strangers, people with institutional standing, well known to one another, unknown to us as yet, discussing us in our absence. The supposed meritocracy of any mundane job application involves us all in relations of hope, trust, and faith – after the death of God, via a set of explicable and defensible procedures. From Jesus of yore, to the Habermas of 19813.
In historical-relative terms, is this not something highly improbable, almost miraculous?
It also turns out to be extraordinarily important to the maintenance of meaningful, relational, reciprocal relations, all the more so in large cities where we are mostly strangers to one another and nearly always have to begin on a transactional footing before we get to know one another. The structure of most dating apps ‘host’ this drift from transaction to intimacy – or transaction to transaction – via different modes and styles of human intercourse.
~
(Depeche Mode interlude4…)
Reach out, touch faith
Your own personal Jesus
Someone to hear your prayers
Someone who cares
Your own personal Jesus
Someone to hear your prayers
Someone who's there
Feeling unknown
And you're all alone
Flesh and bone
By the telephone
Lift up the receiver
I'll make you a believer
Take second best
Put me to the test
Things on your chest
You need to confess
I will deliver
You know I'm a forgiver
Reach out, touch faith
Reach out, touch faith
Your own personal Jesus
Someone to hear your prayers
Someone who cares
Your own personal Jesus
Someone to hear your prayers
Someone who's there
Feeling unknown
And you're all alone
Flesh and bone
By the telephone
Lift up the receiver
I'll make you a believer
I will deliver
You know I'm a forgiver
Reach out, touch faith
Your own personal Jesus
Reach out, touch faith
Reach out, touch faith
Reach out, touch faith
(Reach out, reach out)
Reach out, touch faith
Reach out and touch faith
~
Perhaps meritocracy is as important as calculability and the ensuing mundane relations of exchange between supply and demand, price and value? We could even add competition and meritocracy there as a third pair, and notice: they all have a ledger in play, and not Heath as the Joker.
Relations of the modern ledger, in the market society of competitive individuals:
supply and demand
price and value
merit and competition
∴
As a ‘successful applicant’, we ‘got the job’ knowing (or believing, but being allowed and encouraged to believe, hopefully never being disabused of the belief) we were deemed to ‘have the merit’ on the other candidates. As such, we are then invited into a set of responsibilities for which we are duly remunerated, with which we can then buy lunch, pay our mortgage, fund our retirement, and, you know, live… (see back to the earlier posts on jobs, labour, and work), all linked back up the top of last week’s post, right here.
So then, is the system – our system? – a meritocracy (and does ‘our’ belief in ‘it’ make it ‘ours’)? In a sense it has to be, because it has already been declared as the game in play, in the same way that supply and demand and price and value have to square those circles when we distribute goods or exchange property and commodities for money.
Meritocracy thus also has a redeeming value for the selfsame system: if capitalism is the only game in town, and we all have to sell our asses on the job market, well then, at least the job market is supposedly open to the best applicant: may the best ass ‘win’.
“[T]he possessor of labour-power follows […] , timid and holding back, like one who is bringing his own hide to market and has nothing to expect but — a hiding” (Marx, Capital, Googled).
To that extent, wherever Anglocapitalist society is not meritocratic, we have a legitimation crisis on our hands5, or the spectre of involutions toward institutional corruption, techno-feudalism, Brazilianisation, racket society, or monopoly capitalism (of which, more in a moment).
There’s a lot riding on meritocracy, perhaps even more than I’d considered when I started writing the above paragraphs, one coffee ago.
Was it (ever) a meritocracy; is it no longer a meritocracy?
Over the past few years, I’ve been reading a lot of actually really different thinkers usually referred to as the Frankfurt School. During the 30s, until the onset of the war, Horkheimer played with the analytic value of rackets as a way of understanding how the National Socialists had taken power through violent conflict with other groups in urban space in the 20s, as well as how their domination functioned as/like a protection racket in the 30s, once in power6.
In the later 30s Horkheimer also urged Neumann, and Kirchheimer to explore the topic of rackets as a kinda-sorta theory of society. Without rehearsing the eddies and meanders of what Wiggershaus calls this ‘unfinished torso’ of critical theory, Horkheimer effectively called off the dogs of racket theory by the early 40s7. For Kirchheimer, this left him holding a hard-won essay that no longer had its promised home in the Zeitschrift – in spite of its merit, and its author’s efforts. A variant of it appeared in English in 1944 as ‘In Quest of Sovereignty’. Here, in what was in effect the ‘final word’ of racket theory – due to its kinda sorta abandonment by the chapo – Kirchheimer’s interpretation indicates that ‘racket’ is a polemical notion8 descriptively analysing monopolistic tendencies in contemporary society (fascist and capitalist) that are about the disintegration of meritocracy.
Kirchheimer at length:
“In popular usage the term carries a related connotation of apparent significance. If somebody asks another, ‘What is your racket?’, he may intend merely to inquire about the other’s professional status, but the very form of the question refers to a societal configuration which constitutes the proper basis for any individual answer. It expresses the idea that within the organizational framework of our society attainment of a given position is out of proportion to abilities and efforts which have gone into that endeavor. It infers that a person’s status in society is conditional upon the presence or absence of a combination of luck, chance, and good connections, a combination systematically exploited and fortified with all available expedients inherent in the notion of private property.
Rackets seem to correspond to a stage of society where success depends or organization and on access to appropriate technical equipment rather than on special skills. As the number of positions in which organizational or other specialized intellectual skills are required becomes rather restricted, most aspirants have merely to adapt themselves to easily understandable technical processes. Privileges that depend on distinctions in individual ability become increasingly rare. In acquiring and maintaining social positions it is not so much special skill that matters; what matters is that one gets the chance to find access to, and be accepted by, one of the organizations that dispose of the technical apparatus to which the individual has scant possibility of access.
The term racket is a polemical one. It reflects on a society in which social position has increasingly come to depend on a relation of participation, on the primordial effect of whether an individual succeeded or failed to ‘arrive’. Racket connotes a society in which individuals have lost the belief that compensation for their individual efforts will result from the mere functioning of impersonal market agencies… It is the experience of an associational practice which implies that neither the individual's choice of an association nor the aims that the latter pursues are the result of conscious acts belonging to the realm of human freedom” (160-161, emphases mine).
Kirchheimer would have seen the printed English proofs of his final essay in New York City, or perhaps Washington DC, in 1943, by which time he was working for the OSS9. But of course, he was in the United States because he had fled Nazi Germany for Paris in 1933, because, after 1933, being one of Carl Schmitt’s most promising doctoral students hadn’t helped his prospects, as a Jew and Marxist. In this societal context, the polemical use of the term racket is unambiguous. It is something we can see in the gangster metaphorics noticed by Brecht and Neumann in the 30s and 40s10, as well as substantively via the wholesale plunder of Jewish family resources by the regime, as rendered in such pitch perfect sinister urgency in Feuchtwanger’s Oppermanns, and later explored in scholarly detail by Götz Aly and Adam Tooze11. In other words, it was easy enough for Brecht and Horkheimer to liken the brutality and opportunism of National Socialist street brawling to the way that Capone took over Chicago. And it’s also easy to show how, once in power, top Nazis carved out fiefdoms for themselves and their friends and families, looted all the best art and real estate, doled out the plunder to their Aryan supporters, and offshored a lot of the gold and capital to Switzerland.
However, it is very difficult for the Anglocapitalist world to see itself as in any way like this: even after the land appropriations of the ‘New World’ – over the half millennium between 1492 to Guantanamo – even though the ‘making of the taking’ stretches back at least to Queen Elizabeth’s looting of the bullion plundered by Spanish, and the monopoly powers given by same to the East India and Hudson Bay Company in 1600. We can learn, if we’re curious, that Hitler’s interpretation of lebensraum was inspired by the Anglophone geopolitics of Mackinder and Mahan, by Karl May’s cowboy novels, and by the existence of Canada and Australia (see Tooze in Wages… ). But ‘somehow’, the Anglocapitalist belief endures: plunder and looting, organised theft by closed groups, exclusion of the talented on the basis of ethno-sectarian prejudice, that is what They do. Here, there is only supply and demand, price and value, competition and merit – accurately calculated and enforceably contracted, ‘liberty under law’12.
Moreover, America’s postwar ideology built a whole collective North Atlantic identity that sees itself as being about human freedom, in contrast with the ‘totalitarianism’: of the USSR, of Al Qaeda and Saddam and Assad and the Taliban, of Putin’s Russia, of Xi’s China, etc etc etc. If not for us (or US), so the ideology expresses, no markets, no meritocracy*.
But what if supply and demand, price and value, and competition and merit… what if it involuted… what if it no longer worked (if it ever really did); what if it were no longer liberty under law as usual, capitalism as usual, but… something worse?
~
The most recent New Left Review contains an interesting if slightly oblique response to Morozov’s 17k word monster on techno-feudalism. Whilst explicitly about monopoly, it immediately implies that capitalism as usual – thus meritocracy – has been eclipsed by an accumulation strategy “to a significant extent driven and sustained by predation and by the assetization of intangibles” (159), which only the Tech Titans have the scale and heft to engage in. Without getting lost in the weeds of the techno-feudal aspects of the debate, what interests me most here is the notion, also more-or-less shared by the authors having it out in ‘said debate, that what is now happening is is no longer business as usual, no longer capitalism as usual13.
Rikap’s response to Morozov gives particular focus to Microsoft’s monopoly tendencies, exploring in detail how that corporation’s practices can be described as ‘intellectual monopoly capitalism: the appropriation of societal knowledge via intellectual property and market power.
It is indicative, given where I opened this post, that the usage of the tools of Microsoft’s Office suite comprise one of the most important transferable skills of our meritocracy14; that this post is drafted on Word, which is the effectively unchallenged word processing software for Roman alphabets; that I am bound to use Microsoft’s products for work, as my organisation – like so many others – has chosen Microsoft as its provider of software and cloud services15; and that Microsoft has a big prong into 2020s AI, including via its stake in ChatGPT.
All of this raises the possibility that something like monopoly capitalism and its rackets might be emerging: but is this anything like what Kirchheimer or Pollock were suggesting in their interpretations of rackets and monopoly capitalism? No, but yes, but no, but yes, but no… not quite… but… have a read and get back to me and let me know what you think…
At any rate, what Rikap paperclips for us is how Microsoft’s intellectual monopoly capitalism will (to the extent they pull it off) entrench a societal dynamic which is no longer meritocratic, but, as Kirchheimer indicated (in a very different context), is fundamentally about
who already has access,
who can use their monopoly power to keep dominating, and (for us)
a dynamic of “financialization, inequality and stagnation” (161).
2020s Microsoft, the descentent of the clunky but cuddly Tech Titan who gave us Clippy, could, thus, be an improbable avatar of the involution of Anglocapitalism.
The rolling curling inward of Clippy… we should have known.
~
(What follows is is the ‘escape velocity’ postscript point for this post, for next time).
However… since when?
That is to say: all of the above accounts imply some kind of time in which it was business as usual, when there was meritocracy. For 2020s debates like those of techno-feudalism, the implied ‘good old days’ might have coincided with Microsoft’s clunky-but-cuddly 90s to 2008 (roughly the End of History years 1989-2008), or might have been Le Trente Glorieuses between 1945-7316. For Kirchheimer, like the rest of the Frankfurt School, the BeforeTime Golden Age is murkier17 – and this is something noticed by Frederic Jameson in a parallel context their critique of the one-dimensional, heteronomous subject of postwar consumer capitalism. I'm reaching the limit of any blogee's attention by now, but I leave you, dear reader, with this quote from the person who is not Ireland's best selling whisky, Jameson:
“…The lasting achievement of the Frankfurt School, meanwhile, lies… in its vivid demonstration of the reification of the subject under late capitalism – a demonstration that ranges from Adorno’s diagnoses of the fetishization of aesthetic perception (and of artistic form) all the way to Marcuse’s anatomy of the language and thought patterns of One-Dimensional Man. What we must now observe is that the demonstration depends for its force on the hypothesis of some previous historical stage in which the subject is still relatively whole and autonomous. Yet the very ideal of psychological autonomy and individualism, in the name of which their diagnosis of the atomized subject of late capitalism is made, precludes any imaginative appeal back beyond bourgeois civil society to some preindividualistic and precapitalist social form, since the latter would necessarily precede the constitution of the bourgeois subject itself. Inevitably, then, the Frankfurt School drew its norm of the autonomous subject from that period in which the bourgeoisie was itself arising and progressive class, its psychological formation conditioned by the then still vital structure of the nuclear family; and this is the sense in which their thought has with some justification been taxed as potentially regressive and nostalgic” (Jameson, here, 392).
I see it as crucial that Liu asserts that America is a kind of ‘cut-throat meritocracy’, here. I don’t have enough understanding to establish and nuance the precise extent to which China is/not meritocratic, and I defer to the descriptions Liu and others give, and how these line up with what Hessler is characterising with the struggles of North, in his great piece, here. Fundamentally though, I’m a Westerner reading the New Yorker in English, so I can only notice what people better placed than me are saying, draw attention to undernoticed aspects of it, and try to connect it to those chunks of contemporary reality I have some limited understanding of.
The point add would then be that ‘in’ a meritocracy, any derogation from this norm set would be actively corrosive, would positively generate cynicism and disaffection, destroying the ?passive? or ?ambient? trust that enables it all to work (or, at least, enables us to proceed ‘as if’ this is so).
The Habermas of Theory of Communicative Action. I won’t add what Luhmann’s critical theory of Habermas’ theory makes of all this… a regress of windows like the Clippy pic purloined for this post.
The lyrics to Personal Jesus stage a set of fantasy relations whose *personal* fulfilments are the inverse of the meritocracy of the job application – which has to remain impersonal. Gorz stages this in the ‘split’ between working and living that comes alongside the unfolding functionalisation of the division of labour… I’ll come back to this as I think it’s fascinating, but here, Gorz writes: “This splitting of the social system and this divorce between different rationalities produces a split within the lives of individuals themselves: their professional and private lives are dominated by norms and values that are radically different from one another, if not indeed contradictory. Within large organizations, professional success requires a will to succeed according to the purely technical efficiency criteria of the functions one occupies, irrespective of content. It demands a spirit of competition and opportunism, combined with subservience towards superiors. This will be recompensed – and compensated – in the private sphere by a comfortable, opulent, hedonistic lifestyle. In other words, professional success becomes the means of achieving private comfort and pleasures that have no relation with the qualities demanded by professional life. These qualities are not connected with personal virtue, and private life is sheltered from the imperatives of professional life.
Thus it is that the private virtues of being a good father and husband, or being liked by one’s neighbours, can be combined with the professional efficiency of the civil servant who moves without difficulty from serving a republic to working for a totalitarian state, or vice versa; or that the mild-mannered collector of objets d’art and protector of birds can work in the manufacture of pesticides or chemical weapons, and in a general way, that the high-ranking or middle manager, after putting in a day’s work serving the economic values of competitiveness, productivity and technical efficiency, wants nothing more, when his work is finished, than to go home to a little haven where economic values are displaced by the love of children, animals and the countryside, or doing little jobs about the house. We shall return to this later” (Gorz, CER, 36).
As well as, of course, just ‘business as usual’, exploitation as per normal, &c &c. The point in this section is not to play Marx, but to play Rawls, in order to get at the system’s supposed eigenvalues (which I also notice I too – and still – have some belief in… )
Check Martin Jay’s okay post on it, as well as this one, extrapolating from this book, and especially Scheit’s great chapter on racket theory, which is the best substantive summary of ‘the rackets’, both in its own terms in intellectual history, as well as how we might/not think about it now.
And this mattered greatly to the (differing!) extent that the thinkers being so directed were also dependent on Felix Weil’s money, which Horkheimer was managing (and which really mattered when you were a Germanophone refugee without an automatic ‘in’ into American academia). It’s low-hanging fruit, but for sure there were some racket-y aspects to how Horkheimer looked after Felix’ money, as well as how opportunities and collabs were dispensed and collaborators disposed of.
…and for a student of Schmitt, we know the value of polemos is not ‘merely rhetorical’.
A job that was ‘hooked up’ for him, for Marcuse, and for Neumann, on the basis of good connections (and because they needed alternative employment, cos Felix’ money couldn’t carry them all). See this volume on their contributions.
Brecht by his play Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (not his best, it has to be said), Neumann via his scattered references to gangsterism in Behemoth, eg
“The expansion of the labor front’s insurance business received a tremendous stimulus by the decree enjoining all occupations not covered by federal social insurance, to be insured. The lion’s share went to the labor front’s German Ring.
Is that development a negation of capitalism? I do not believe so.
On the contrary, it appears as an affirmation of the living force of capitalistic society. For it proves that even in a one-party state, which boasts of the supremacy of politics over economics, political power without economic power, without a solid place in industrial production, is precarious. There is no doubt that German capitalism dislikes this development. There is no doubt that this process has intensified the contempt in which the old bureaucracy and the industrial leadership hold National Socialist gangsterism, which, in less than four years, built up the biggest industrial empire of Europe by expropriation, outright theft, and ‘shake-downs’” (304-5).
Respectively: Hitler’s Beneficiaries and The Wages of Destruction.
I see one of the enduring critical values of ‘first gen’ critical theory to be about excoriating postwar US capitalism, including by seeing it as fundamentally akin to National Socialism.
As Ken Wark says in their recent title, is this Capital is Dead: Is This Something Worse?
If you are a gun at Excel, you basically have a job already… as someone who got ‘good at’ PowerPoint and Word, I wonder if I plumped for the wrong soft in the suite.
The fact that Azure pipped Amazon’s AWS really matters here, too.
Just don’t try to get hired as anything but a white male citizen.
For privileged AustroHungarian Jews like Zweig, it’s clear that the time before 1914 was (t)his Golden Age of Security. For Germanophone Jews in the Germany formerly known as Prussia, this is already quite ambiguous, although reading back on Benjamin’s reflections of his 1900s Berlin childhood, it could be pretty sweet, if your Jewish family was the rich and assimilated kind, with intergenerational capital, property and prospects.