Against Meritocracy: Culture, power and myths of mobility

by Jo Littler

the idea of meritocracy has become a key means through which plutocracy – or government by a wealthy elite – perpetuates, reproduces and extends itself. Meritocracy has become the key means of cultural legitimation for contemporary capitalist culture.

The attempt to absorb the language of equality and identity politics into entrepreneurial self-fashioning has created lonely forms of selective empowerment, ones profoundly ill-equipped to deal with the wider structural causes of sexism, racism, environmental crisis and economic inequality.

Meritocracy may seem a very contemporary idea, but, as Raymond Williams argued in a book review in 1958, the ladder is a perfect symbol of the bourgeois idea of society, for, while it undoubtedly offers the opportunity to climb, ‘it is a device that can only be used individually; you go up the ladder alone’.

‘The simple fact’, they write, ‘is that there is far more talent, intelligence, hard work, and ability in the population than there are people lucky enough to find themselves in a position to exploit them’ (McNamee and Miller 2009: 19).

It is notable that plenty of millionaires who inherited their own wealth, including Boris Johnson and David Cameron, have conveniently promoted hard work as the most influential factor in social mobility.

you don’t get to become Prime Minister because you’re talented or because you work hard. You don’t even get there just because you’re rich. You get there by traumatising the homeless and skull-fucking a dead pig, and that ritual gives you power because you have demonstrated utter, pathetic submission to your fellow oligarchs.

Annie, then, is a story which has been vigorously resurrected at key moments of capitalist crisis, one which offers a very conservative, reassuring narrative about the problems of capitalism and the benevolent super-rich.

‘Well-rounded’ is a term similar to ‘merit’: a big, baggy capacious term with extensive scope for plural definitions.

Christopher Hayes calls today’s American SATS ‘affirmative action for the white middle classes’ because of the degree of pre-test tuition privileged families can put in to pass this supposedly ‘meritocratic’ test

Meritocracy as a social system is therefore a structural impossibility, and, as a cultural discourse, it is a damaging fiction.