Meritocracy is a much debated concept at both the explanatory and evaluative levels of analysis. It occupies a most privileged position among the foundational legitimating tropes and master myths of the neoliberal era, for certain. However, at the level of causal explanation, it seems most implausible to attribute most individuals’ lot in life to their personal merits or demerits, at least in any society characterized by any significant degree of inequality in terms of wealth and resources. To frame the issue in more familiar terms, without equal opportunity, there can be no meritocracy. In other words, in capitalist society – indeed, any hierarchically-structured society – it is inevitably a utopian ideal. Of course there are degrees of utopianism, and no ideal can become hegemonic without being at least partially true. The myth of meritocracy ultimately relies upon beliefs about the prospects of social mobility – if not for oneself, at least for one’s children. The trajectory of the Spanish political economy since the mid-fifties, its partial incorporation into the outer limits of the advanced capitalist core, brought with it profound transformations in the social structure. Spain emerged with the rest of Southern Europe as a full-fledged consumer society, experiencing successive decades of rising living standards, including a massive expansion of public education, and a proliferation of new middle class career opportunities, which in turn allowed for reasonable prospects of upward social mobility for the “best” and the “brightest,” or at least the most savvy at making social connections, among the ranks of the Spanish working class. The mechanism of co-optation, the possibility of exit upwards out of working-class conditions and even away from the popular neighborhoods into which one is born, so much more efficient than repression in terms of defusing the potential for the emergence of demands for collective, popular power. However, the politics of austerity have fundamentally altered the balance of the equation in the calculus of consent amongst the dominated and the dispossessed. Belief in a better tomorrow is coming to sound more and more gullible every day. Economic “recovery” itself has come to be defined in terms determined by the forces of international finance, any challenge to the plutocrats in control of the Troika ever-more explicitly met with threat of punishment in terms of the so-called prima de riesgo. The plutocrats have thus far effectively protected their interests since the outbreak of the crisis, having managed to convert a crisis of over-extended private banks into a crisis of sovereign-debt for Spain. But the price of this successful manoeuvre has been a dangerous descent from hegemony into undisguised dominance. Herein lie the underlying roots of the still-unfolding organic crisis of Spains representative governing institutions.
Posted on: Fri, 31 Oct 2014 15:05:00 +0000
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