Capitalism, Inequality and Meritocracy Colin Bird Review Essay forthcoming in Review of Politics (original) (raw)
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Capitalism and Inequality Re-Examined
Ever since capitalism came to be recognized as a new economic system, it has had vociferous critics, of whom none was more wide-ranging than Karl Marx. Marx recognized that behind its ideological patina of freedom, capitalism, like the exploitative systems of slavery and feudalism, was a social system in which a small class extracted from the mass of producers practically all output above that necessary for bare subsistence. An elite's ability to do so was grounded in its monopoly ownership of the means of production. However, Marx, and other critics faulted it for more than its exploitation and extreme inequality. Sharing much with romanticism, they believed that its very institutions of private property and markets corrupt society and its members. Nevertheless, Marx in particular recognized that capitalism, unlike earlier exploitative systems, was radically dynamic, producing unprecedented wealth, while transforming not only all it inherited from the past, but also its own nature so as to eventually even empower the producers. Yet his anti-private property and anti-market animus led him to believe that empowered producers would abandon these capitalist institutions. He did not imagine that the dynamism, wealth, and potential freedom that capitalism was delivering might have little chance of flourishing in the absence of these institutions. This article claims that Marx and other critics were wrong to fault capitalism's central institutions for the injustices that accompanied them. These institutions are not the problem. Instead it is the inequality that co-evolved with them and enables them to be used for exploitation. Ever since capitalism came to be recognized as a new economic system, it has had vociferous critics. It has been accused of generating inequality, grinding poverty, debased and alienated work, macroeconomic instability, destruction of community, more egotistic humans, and ecological devastation. For many of its critics, capitalism is not just exploitative but dehumanizing as well. The rejection of capitalism has often meant rejection of its fundamental institutions of markets and private property. However, most of the major faults identified by critics are not due to these institutions, but to the inequality that co-evolved with them and which enables an elite to use them to exploit workers and destroy the environment. Because many critics confuse the instruments with the cause, they advocate rejection of the full institutional order. Inequality has, of course, always characterized capitalism. Capitalism evolved with the rise of two new classes, one owning and controlling the means of production, the other dispossessed of all but its ability to labor. Inequality in income and privilege are the result of this specific form of wealth inequality and serve to reinforce it. It is from this extreme inequality in ownership and control of the means of production that the negative consequences of capitalism flow.
Meritocracy: the Third Way and the Effervescence of Capital
2018
Since the social-democrats dismissed the communist utopia and privileged instead the idea of a well-being founded on the production-consumption cycle, the Western electoral competition has been increasingly focused on the capitalist economy. Accordingly, the political dynamics shifted from the class conflict to the regulation of markets. On the social side, the removal of the previous conflict has freed the “spirit of capitalism” that has been able to settle even more pervasively in the symbolic relations between people. This new philosophy of money triggers a social game played on competition and the reward mechanism derived from it. In this sense, meritocracy is the criterion for governing this new order of capitalism. Within this context, this article discusses the contribution of the left movements and parties, in their historical-social evolution, to the construction of a meritocratic principle in Europe. It also investigates the political process that led the left to a strateg...
Meritocracy, in contemporary parlance, refers to the idea that whatever our social position at birth, society ought to facilitate the means for 'talent' to 'rise to the top'. This article argues that the ideology of 'meritocracy' has become a key means through which plutocracy is endorsed by stealth within contemporary neoliberal culture. The article attempts to analyse the term 'meritocracy', to open up understandings of its genealogy, and to comprehend its current use. It does so through three sections. The first section considers what might be wrong with the notion of meritocracy. The second traces some key points in the travels of the concept within and around academic social theory, moving from Alan Fox and Michael Young's initial, disparaging use of the term in the 1950s, to Daniel Bell's approving adoption of the concept in the 1970s, and on to its take-up by neoconservative think tanks in the 1980s. The third section analyses the use of meritocracy as a plank of neoliberal political rhetoric and public discourse. It focuses on the resonance of the term in relatively recent British culture, discussing how what it terms 'meritocratic feeling' has come to operate in David Cameron's ' Aspiration Nation'. This final section argues that meritocracy has become a potent blend of an essentialised and exclusionary notion of 'talent', competitive individualism and the need for social mobility. Today it is a discourse which predominantly works to marketise the very idea of equality.
Forms of Exploitation and Sources of Inequality within Capitalism
2015
At least nominally, capitalism embodies and sustains an Enlightenment agenda of freedom and equality.1 Typically there is freedom to trade and equality under the law, meaning that most adults – rich or poor – are formally subject to the same legal rules. But with its inequalities of power and wealth, capitalism darkens this legal equivalence. As Anatole France (1894) noted ironically: ‘The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.’ But this does not mean that legal equality is unreal or unimportant. On the contrary, legal systems enshrining such equality have been beacons of prosperity.
The Rise of the Meritocracy, 2017
l l THE RISE OF THE MERITOCRACY concerted protest. To understand what happened, and so be prepared for what is going to happen, we have to take the measure of the Populist movement, with its strange blend of women in the lead and men in the rank and file. The women's circles have produced evangelists be fore; their eclipse has usually been as sudden as their rising. Not so the leaders by whom we are now plagued. They have consolidated their strength. The Convention they organized at Leicester shortly before Christmas 2032 was their decisive moment. The women's circles would be mustered-that was well known; the women's sections of the Technicians' Party would be there-that was half allowed for. What was not expected was the attendance of so many representatives, men as well as women, from local branches of the Party and the Unions. In defiance of their leaders, they came from all over the country, and particularly from the North of England and Scotland-this hostility to London and the South is a sinister aspect of the agitation too much played down by government sociologists. Even the Association of Scientific Benefactors was represented. From Leicester sprang the ill-assorted conglomeration which has come to be known as the Populist Movement, with its strange charter. For the only time within living memory a dissident minority from the elite has struck up an alliance with the lower orders, hitherto so isolated and so docile. Their union fomented the local incidents in Kirkcaldy and Stevenage, South Shields and White hall, into the national crisis of last May. What does it all mean? Only the historians of the future will know, perhaps even they will not agree. Close as we are to the crisis, with every day bringing fresh news, it is impossible for anyone to be more than 12 PART ONE RISE OF THE ELITE CHAPTER ONE CLASH OF SOCIAL FORCES I. CIVIL SERVICE MODEL THE I87os have been called the beginning of the modern era not so much because of the Commune as because of Mr Forster. Education was then made compulsory in Britain, patronage at last abolished in the civil service and competitive entry made the rule. Merit became the arbiter, attainment the standard, for entry and advance ment in a splendid profession, 1 which was all the more an achievement because so many of our great-grandfathers were positively hostile to 'competition wallahs' in Brit ish government. Considering the opposition, it is re markable that by I 944 the most brilliant young men from Cambridge and Oxford were already going into the administrative class, there to guide the destinies of the nation; outstanding young men from the provincial universities into the hardly less important scientific and technical grades; worthy young men and women from the grammar schools into the executive grades; the less CLASH OF SOCIAL FORCES When no more assistant secretaries had to leave school at fifteen, and no more postmen were sent to Balliol, the great reform begun in the 1870s could at last be completed. The force of this example is difficult to overestimate. The names in the Imperial Calendar a hundred years ago adorned a civil service renowned, for good reason, as the best in the world. How close the analogy with modern society! Today we have an elite selected accord ing to brains and educated according to deserts, with a grounding in philosophy and administration as well as in the two S's of science and sociology. The administra tive class in the old civil service was also picked for brains and given an education which was far more than vocational, and yet had a bearing (like the Roman and unlike that other great Imperial Civil Service, of China) upon the tasks they were later called upon to perform. Today we frankly recognize that democracy can be no more than aspiration, and have rule not so much by the people as by the cleverest people; not an aristocracy of birth, not a plutocracy of wealth, but a true meri tocracy 1 of talent. Likewise, the old civil service exer cised, with skill and tact, a great deal more power than Parliament because it was so well chosen and well trained. Today each member of the meritocracy has an attested minimum rating of 125 (with the top posts for psychologists, sociologists, and Permanent Secretaries reserved since the Crawley-Jay award of 2018 for the over 160s): has not Tauber's retrospective method I. The origin of this unpleasant term, like that of 'equality of opportunity', is still obscure. It seems to have been first generally used in the sixties of the last century in small-circulation journals attached to the Labour Party, and gained wide currency much later on.
Critical Discourse Studies, 2015
This paper examines the way the metaphor of diversity provides a moral basis for inequality in Singapore's meritocratic education system. Based upon a collection of policy texts from 2002 to 2012, our analysis illustrates that the metaphor of diversity in policy texts provides ways for systemic discrimination within the education system and that this inequality is given legitimacy as necessary through various moral discourses. The paper employs a critical discourse analysis that draws upon the relationship between language analysis, the philosophical study of valuation, and political economy as a composite formulation of values to highlight the ways in which an argument for inequality permeates policy from within a frame of meritocracy, and to analyse how changes associated with new modes of value determination serve to legitimize inequality.