4. The Myth of [Class] Equality
Instead [of loyalty to other inmates or identifying as a class of prisoners], prisoners proclaimed their allegiances to themselves, their families, or to small prisoner sub-groups based on friendship, ethnicity, religion or geographical area.
Ben Crewe, Codes and Conventions (The Effects of Imprisonment)
Social class means power; how much or little of it you have · · · People with power are terrified that powerless people might identify with each other, and so they promote the idea that class does not exist · · · In the most advanced ‘late-capitalist’ phase of the system, class distinctions do seem to have been erased, but they have actually just been uploaded and distributed across society, making them harder to perceive.
Social class can be understood in terms of what you own, how much money you have, what kind of job you do, where you live, what kind of language you use, your taste, your education and your attitude to your fellows. But while all of these can be used as social markers — particularly in countries like the uk and India where class divisions have, historically, been very prominent — they are all secondary effects of what fundamentally divides people in a hierarchical society; power. The ‘upper’ classes give the orders, the ‘middle’ classes execute them and the ‘lower’ classes take them. Ultimately, it’s as simple as that; for every country on earth. It is undeniably true that social classes have internal subdivisions1, along with their own complex and shifting ‘interests’ which affect society and history, and which intersect with each other, creating a more complex class system than the standard lower-upper-middle model; the working class of the west, for example, took a precarious upward lurch into ‘the service economy’ when its manufacturing work was shipped wholesale to East-Asia a few years back, and the professional class of the West is, as I write, being eroded by artificial intelligence and an extreme polarisation of wealth driving the propertied middle up into the stratosphere and the merely educated middle down into the gutter. But, despite the many shifting, blurring and in some cases vanishing aspects of class, it is still only possible to understand a hierarchical society, and the formation of men and women’s attitudes within it, in terms of power-relations; of who, at the top, owns the system, who, in the middle, manages it and who, at the bottom, builds it or is excluded by it.
This is why, when John Major, the right wing leader of the British conservative party, said he hoped that Britain would soon be a classless society, and when Josef Stalin described the ussr as classless, and when just over half of Americans define themselves as ‘middle-class,’ and when Hitler said that the National Socialist State recognises ‘no classes,’ and when upper managers do away with signs of hierarchy in the equalising office, and when the mass-media publish article after article, book after book, on class, none of them ever mentions power. They want people who have no power to believe, because they have an exalted (uptitled) job-title, a mortgage, a degree, an iphone or shares in Wal-Mart, that ‘we are all middle-class now,’ or that class is a quaint out-of-date idea; of interest to Marxists perhaps, or to the English, but inapplicable in the ‘real’ world.
Elites want the poor, the powerless and the exploited to believe they have more in common with wealthy members of their own group (fellow blacks, whites, women, men, gays, straights, gamers, punks, and so on) than with poor, powerless, alienated and exploited members of other groups. Nothing horrifies power more than the prospect of power-based class solidarity2 — hence the tolerance, even promotion, of identity-based class solidarity — the formation and celebration of ‘communities,’ and concerted initiatives to grant them equal status within the system. Not a day goes by without an article being published bemoaning the gender pay gap or a corporate meeting being held on diversifying management to include more women, more ethnic minorities and more disabled people. Only a lunatic Nazi could oppose such initiatives. And yet, there’s not quite so much fuss about the power pay gap, or about levelling the playing field for the powerless classes, or about making serious structural changes so that ordinary working people — whatever their colour, gender or sexual proclivity — are not treated like chattel, or allowing ordinary people to freely shape their own environments. Somehow the inherent, systemic biases of the power-based market system, and the manner in which the system alienates everyone from their own nature, is ignored. But then, how could there be a fuss, when class doesn’t really exist?
Elite owners and their managers want classism (‘powerism’) to exist on the subtlest level possible, they want lower class students and workers to be unaware of how their relationship to power shapes their experiences and generates their feelings (of self-directed depression at failure or of frustration and inadequacy around wealthier types), elites and managers want their hatred of ‘chavs’, the homeless, the global poor and the lumpenproletariat (see myth 31) to be taken as judgements of hygiene (ugh! smelly!), sexuality (ugh! gender stereotype!), education (ugh! doesn’t understand apostrophes!) and taste (uh! overdressed!)3 and they want people with no power to believe that class-power is an ideological illusion, or if it does have any reality, that it is nowhere near as important as ‘equality issues,’ professionally-administered justice (squabbling over ‘rights,’ criminalising thought-crimes, etc.) and personal identity4 (not to mention the litany of often ludicrous subsidiary problems the media prefers to focus on), or, finally, if ordinary folk don’t feel sufficiently middle-class, that all they have to do is work hard and, sooner or later, they’ll be allowed into the Marvellous Club. The powerful want the powerless to believe these things and they want minority groups, neighbours and even generations5 to be continually at war, because it serves their class interests. You might not be aware of your class, but you can be quite sure that those who benefit from your lack of awareness are.
And yet. Clearly something has fundamentally changed since the days, not so very long ago, when ‘working-class solidarity’ was a force so powerful that it was able not just to slow the progress of capitalism but, in a few places, for a few brief moments, actually halt it. Class relations do still exist, wealth and power do still alter character and relationship in predictable ways, but exploitation, ownership and production have all been, to an extraordinary extent, internalised6. Who is the capitalist boss oppressing the freelance teacher, the Uber-driver, the Airbnb host or the office temp? There are owners and managers out there, somewhere, but their immediate physical presence seems somehow to have evaporated, while the exploitative power within their bodies seems also to have magically melted away, leaving Really Awesome People.
What is happening is extremely hard to grasp, yet dominates modern life. Class-relations have been obscured in the most subtle and pervasive way imaginable; they have been virtualised in the same way that communication (society and culture), capital and consciousness have; distributed through digital, Phildickian, networks and the hyper-focused minds which create and respond to them, leaving the technical expert very often with more power than the mere owner. Reality exists less and less in tangible form, yet its conceptual projection exerts more and more power over actual, sensate existence. Class-power7, capital, communication and consciousness increasingly exist nowhere, while projecting themselves everywhere, into each atomised, on-line, individual, who has become his own owner, manager, worker, teacher, lawyer, priest, scientist, artist, society and god. When he sickens or saddens he searches for an external cause, and finds nothing but complaint forms, call centres and discussion threads, all comprised of anxious people in the same weird situation. He concludes that he must be the problem, and goes out of his mind.
The upper class is comprised of the hyper-wealthy elites (ranging from ordinary multi-millionaires, to whom national laws do not apply, up to billionaires who can effectively buy nations) and, below them, the hyper-privileged salariat (extremely well-paid higher managers, civil-servants, consultants and the like). The middle-class is comprised of the profician (well educated technocrats and hipsters with the professionally credentialised power to take good, interesting jobs anywhere, for very good money) and, beneath them, the stressed and threatened drone (teachers, junior doctors, social workers, etc.). The lower class is made up of the traditional manual worker (also shrinking and threatened), the growing precariat (zero contract, ‘informal’ units in the gig economy) and the bog-standard poor (the underclass, the dregs). See Guy Standing, Work After Globalisation.
Well, almost nothing. Consciousness-based is a far greater threat, but beyond the scope of the present work.
Empathy, creativity and wisdom do not figure in such judgements, because the lower classes always come out on top in such measures. See, for example, Justin P. Brienza, Igor Grossmann Social class and wise reasoning about interpersonal conflicts across regions, persons and situations.
This isn’t to say that ‘gender’ or ‘race’ or other pc concerns are less important than ‘class’ — in fact in matters of real existential importance to men and women all such identity issues are irrelevant next to the alienating influence of the system on consciousness (see myth 32) — rather, that solving manifest problems of sexism and racism politically (positive discrimination, teaching black history, outlawing bad words and so on) leaves authoritarian hierarchies, professional dominance of public commons and the misery of the greater mass of humanity completely untouched. More homosexual footballers, more black ceos, more women building laptops... same poverty, same precarity, same powerlessness, same exploitation.
Boomers vs millennials is the current generational conflict in the west; ‘The tirade against the previous generation presents a false picture; it neglects class. Only a small minority of UK baby boomers went to university, while today half of all school leavers go on to some form of tertiary education. Many in the older generation suffered the ravages of de-industrialisation, as miners, steelworkers, dock workers, printers and so on were shunted into history. And most women had the added burden of economic marginality. The inter-generational interpretation could almost be a diversionary tactic, since it accords with a conservative view that carefully leaves out the role of globalisation (Willetts, 2010). Today’s youth is not worse off than earlier generations. The predicament is just different and varies by class.’ Guy Standing, The Precariat; the New Dangerous Class.
‘The neoliberal system is no longer a class system in the proper sense. It does not consist of classes that display mutual antagonism. This is what accounts for the system’s stability.’ Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics. See myth 18.
‘Power is no longer in the hands of the owners of capital. I can develop this idea by analyzing the multinational corporations. Here, as we clearly see, capital still exists; but it is now structured in terms of technical demands rather than in terms of the ideas formulated by a capitalist. Today, there is no longer any owner of capital who plays the part that could once be played by a captain of industry.’ Jacques Ellul, Perspectives on Our Age.
5. The Myth of Meritocracy
We are led by the least among us.
Terrance McKenna
Another means by which the system conceals its iniquity is the idea that anyone can rise to positions of power. This idea is given the name meritocracy · · · The reality is that very few rise from the bottom to the top. Allowing them to do so is actually tokenism · · · The masses are not, however, consciously prevented from rising. The system is structured to automatically reward conformity, ambition, highly abstract ‘intelligence’ and insensitivity. Thus merit, in practice, means mediocrity.
Privilege begets privilege and wealth, fame and elite education produce, in the system, the conditions by which they reproduce themselves. The reason why people with posh surnames have been in positions of power for hundreds or even thousands of years, why wealthy accents dominate the media, the arts and elite education, and why top jobs are staffed by elite graduates who grew up in wealthy houses is not merit, and never has been,1 but family connections, social capital (well-connected friends), cultural capital (accent, taste, manner, hyper-literacy and elite styles of thinking2), inheritance (and lavish ‘inter vivos’ gifts of money and property to family members) and the constraints of the market (which force the poor and culturally-excluded out of high-cost social networks and unpaid internships), all of which keep power confined to the ambit of the classes which currently wield it.
Elites prefer all of this to be a secret, or, at best, unmentionable. Instead, they like to promote the idea that we live in what they call a ‘meritocracy,’ a fabled land where merit, ability, intelligence, pluck and daring-do determine success. It is not, they want us to believe, through luck, crime, glad-handing, nepotism, and all the massive advantages of family wealth that inept halfmen get their Big Leather Chairs, their exciting jobs as wildlife cameramen, their elite degrees or their amazing breaks in the art world, but through talent, attitude, hard-work and moral fibre. Certainly we should give a few brainy, tasteful and, crucially, ambitious poor people a hand up; get an infusion of new blood into the boardroom, deprive the working classes of their leaders and give the impression of equal opportunity to the educational system. The professional left call this integration, but the correct name is tokenism.3 But whatever you call it, there’s really only one sort of person who naturally deserves to sit at the banqueting table; the ‘best and brightest.’ In the past it was the divinely ordained, the twice-born and the genetically superior who deserved to rule. Today it is the cultured, the industrious, the upright and, most especially, the qualified.
How the systems-man loves that word, ‘qualified,’ how noble it sounds, how dignified, how redolent of rightful, earned authority. That these qualifications are given by the system to those who own it, or have shown themselves gifted at serving it (see myth 17), this does not occur to him. He has achieved his success, while the multitude are destined for a life of debt-peonage and the misery of actually productive work. All of which is sad, to be sure, but it’s also kind of fair you see, because it’s a meritocracy, and so the excluded, the intractable, the slow and the unlucky kind of deserve it.
Those at the bottom of the Tower of Earthly Delights are there because they do not have enough merit you see. It’s not their lack of security, resources, time or power that has stunted their capacities, it is because they are hedonistic, fatalistic, impulsive, irresponsible, and, the perennial complaint of elites despairing at the weird reluctance of lower sorts to generate wealth for them, lazy.4 They should study more, plan ahead, defer gratification, raise their expectations, work harder, learn to spell, have a make-over and cook more risotto. ‘Pull themselves up by their boot laces,’ as the popular idiom has it; which might seem like a paradoxical image, but, on deeper reflection, the image of millions upon millions of cripples rolling around trying to pull themselves onto their own feet by tugging away at their boot laces for their entire futile lives; well, that turns out to be more or less perfect.
The Myth of Meritocracy is also used to harvest the support of the working class for right wing policies designed to punish the poor and hand more of the wealth they create over to responsible types who run things. It would seem, on the face of it, utterly astonishing that so many people at the bottom of society should vote for representatives of the hyper-wealthy, but in fact a large number of the working class believe themselves to be, as John Steinbeck put it, ‘temporarily embarrassed millionaires.’ They assume that mythic meritocracy will one day soon elevate them onto the Top Floor where the Tories, Republicans and co. will take care of their glittering assets.5 They cannot imagine that there is another kind of wealth, at their very fingertips.
Because all this talk about social mobility, tokenism, ‘equality of opportunity’, ‘equality of outcome’ and whatnot masks a far wider and far more disabling restraint on merit, which is never mentioned or discussed. When political commentators talk about ‘merit’ they are referring to the ability to memorise contextless facts, pass intensely abstract ‘intelligence tests,’ innovate in market-constrained directions, work, and hyper-specialise in work, to the point of total physical and psychological breakdown, accept confinement and coercion as inevitable — or, ideally, as magical and fun — and successfully fuck other people over; in short succeed at school and at work. That is merit, and a system which rewards it is what clever and insensitive mediocrities want; just as white supremacists want a system which rewards whiteness, feminists want a system which rewards women and scientologists want a system which rewards scientology. Genuine creative genius6, true community spirit, radical generosity, sensitivity, unconditional love, honesty, moral courage, craft-skill, self-sufficiency, spontaneity and responsibility do not count as ‘merit,’ and never have, and so the fact that these qualities, and those who possess them, are punished everywhere in the system is neither here nor there. Prejudice towards white people, that’s a problem (for right wing white people); prejudice towards Jewish people, that’s a problem (for Jewish folk), prejudice towards women, that’s a problem (for feminists), prejudice towards working-class accents, that’s a problem (for socialists), but prejudice towards sensitive people? Prejudice towards independent people? Prejudice towards honest people? Prejudice towards loving people? Hahahaha! Those aren’t problems! You can’t even see those things!
The reader may wonder, as many senior editors, ceos, upper managers and department heads occasionally do, how this punishment can occur; how it can be that principled, capable, sensitive and honest people are prevented from rising through the system while those at the top are given a free pass. ‘Nobody tells me what to write!’ says the wealthy journalist, ‘nobody tells me what to think!’ says the elite student, ‘nobody tells me what to do!’ says the director general; but nobody has to tell them what to write, think or do — which is how they rose in the first place. Those who reject the cruel and pointless restraints of schooling, the ludicrous assignments7 and the meaningless syllabuses (see myth 17) are marked as uncooperative, recalcitrant, undisciplined, strong-willed, unable to function well in a team or, in more serious cases, afflicted with oppositional defiant disorder (see myth 18). Those who defy the manager, who seek to circumvent the paperwork, who question the entire point, such ‘difficult’ people are passed over for promotion, their contracts are not renewed, their grip on the railings is released and they are ‘let go’. In a huxleyan system there is no need for a shady group of evil capitalists to tell people what to think when the system (and, consequently, the self) is structured so as to automatically select for obedience, conformity, mediocrity and, for the top jobs, complete insanity. Because negative personality traits tend to occur together managers, team-leaders and other Heads tend not merely to be cowardly spaniels or cruel monomaniacs, but beset by all manner of weird defects; strangely aggressive, or bizarre, awkward and indirect, or mind-bogglingly boring, or laughably uptight and self-regarding (the David Brent / Alan Partridge type), or skin-crawlingly creepy, or hauntingly absent, not really there. Not that such people don’t usually have a human core, struggling to get out, or that more recognisably human leaders don’t exist; but in both cases the immense pressure that the system puts on such humanity tends in one direction only; to breakdown.
Stephen J. McNamee, The Meritocracy Myth and James Bloodworth, The Myth of Meritocracy.
Which require an enormous amount of free time to acquire. Permitting the wealthy to have this time, and denying it to the poor or the excluded, is one of the principle means by which the system ensures that cultural capital accrues to those who can be trusted with it. See also myth 19.
The same techniques are used to diffuse the threat of revolutionary action from racial minorities. Black folk as a whole, for example, will never be permitted to rise from their position at the bottom of the pile, but if the system permits individual black people to go to nice schools and get nice jobs perhaps nobody will notice?
The rich work hard for their success, apparently. Cleaners, builders, factory-workers, miners, nurses and waitresses? They don’t count!
‘I worked on the Conservative advertising for two general elections. This was a subject we gave a lot of thought to, and it’s actually simple: a lot of poor people don’t think they will always be poor. They have aspirations just like everyone… They think that ‘OK, I’m not earning a lot now, but one day I’ll have a bloody great yacht,’ so they vote for the party they think will help them most achieve that great leap to riches and the one they identify with in their imaginary alternative life.
It’s the principle behind shows like ‘Bake Off’, ‘X-Factor’ and ‘The Voice’ and a host of other contests where ‘ordinary’ people suddenly strike it rich. It’s deeply rooted in human psyche, and the Tories know it.
The Conservatives are quite aware that they are pedlars of what is for most, false hope. They point out the Alan Sugars and Richard Bransons and say that you too can achieve this under their governance.’
Nick Schon, Group Creative Director at Saatchi and Saatchi, London. Note that they are not ‘pointing out’ the Director Generals of the bbc or the Lord Chief Justices; they know that these ‘achievements’ are never available to the hoi-polloi.
As opposed to the technical ability to innovate in a market-friendly manner which usually receives the name. See myth 19.
Stupid ways of working are, of course, endemic to a system run by stupid people for stupid reasons, but it is important to note that making people do stupid things serves as a test for conformity and a means of inculcating obedience. You can’t tell who is subservient if you only ask them to do sensible things.
6. The Myth of Competition
Competition: An event in which there are more losers than winners. Otherwise it’s not a competition. A society based on competition is therefore primarily a society of losers.
