TREES ARE RARELY ASSESSED as significant cultural heritage in Australia; the bar is too high. When a project manager gets on the blower and asks ‘now listen, but is it heritage?’, a professional applies the standard frameworks of his or her calling, and decides—with a standardised process—either a yes/no significance answer, or a level of significance (from ‘little’ to ‘exceptional’). Human involvement in the thing or place is the most important: places where historical events happened, buildings made by specific people, artefacts of a known history. The reason trees rarely meet the ‘but is it heritage?’ test is because they’re ephemeral by nature, growing and reproducing themselves and dying by themselves, without people needing to be involved. ‘Cultural landscapes’, the fashion of the 2000s, remedy part of the question of individual trees by seeing the forests, but there’s generally no such thing as a ‘heritage tree’. You see the problem already.

The test is a European one, and doesn’t account for Indigenous relationships with specific trees and specific places associated with them. And when the chainsaw teams come in to fell the tree, the Courts are asked to deal with the question of heritage, on significance terms, and on the basis of specific forms which the defendants either did or didn’t correctly fill out, or in the argument of the corporation, ‘previous assessments of the tree …“did not reveal characteristics consistent with cultural modification”’, that is, the involvement of a person in the business of the tree. It’s a racist system, but it’s more than that too: ours is a degraded and barbarous culture of forms, as I wrote the last time the Philistines detonated a culturally significant place:

the only thing that matters is is the letter of the law, because that’s how the application forms will be drawn up, and forms are where power is exercised.

In the 1960s and 1970s the Australian heritage industry came into being with an odd-couple political deal between architecture-fanciers and Communist building workers, both protesting barbarism in their own way. What was obvious then, was that without a protective law, the status of ‘heritage’ was fundamentally decided by power: real people risking the sack or arrest to protect places, and on the other side, real thugs, real fist-fights. When the architecture-fanciers betrayed the unionists and formalised the process, making Heritage Acts, it was deliberately to eliminate that element of plain power of ordinary people, and to deny the concept that ‘Heritage’ was whatever anyone cared enough to protect.

But is it ‘heritage’? If people are willing to be sacked or arrested for it, you already know the answer.

THE FOUR DAY WEEK is both an attractive demand and a realistic utopia, an acheivable measure any of us could feasibly gain, and with it, improve our lives. But wait! Our society’s totalising culture of shouting-productivity and management will strike back with demands of its own:

“Managers need to be comfortable that these hours are being used for that particular purpose (of passion) and not to do chores, or to work on your own little start-up [or] business when not explicitly stated,” she says.

Absolutely no. We can all imagine the kind of management where the tradeoff for a four-day week—or any other arrangement of increasing leisure—is increasing intrusion of management onto recreation time. We’ve all heard of the (in theory) rather nice arrangements where software developers in major firms are given company time to work on open-source projects; we all know about lawyers and professionals working pro bono. This isn’t that, this is colonisation of private time. One person’s ‘romance day’ of fulfilling tasks and self-actualisation can so easily turn to HR measuring those things against firm profitability. Clocking off should be exactly, and completely, that.

I AM READING DANIEL Markovits’s The Meritocracy Trap, which is very good, compelling, and is crystallising thoughts on human merit I’ve been recently having. It’s a fairly compelling argument that the reproduction of the ruling class, today, happens at the level of transferring skills and educational training, and through elites exploiting their own labour, of specific kinds which create value in the context of our times (financial services, law, business, technology, and so on). It’s slightly less compelling in the Australian context, where the older forms—your parents buying you a house in Sydney—still work fine. Yes, I’ve been saying to myself as I turn the virtual pages of my e-reader, yes, that observation relates to the way I see the world. Yes, that is the way the ideology works. The book happens, as I happen to be, caustically enduringly angry.

And then the challenge:

Tweet by Yuan Yi Zhu: ‘I’ll go further and say that the reason for the sudden popularity of the anti-meritocracy case has more to do with traditional elites’ realisation that they are being out-competed than with concern for those left behind by meritocratic competition.’

Yes, but I think also no. Yes, the notion that anti-meritocracy is fear of competition rings absolutely true thinking of the Fairfax stable of papers’ long-term fixation on selective schools, Asian children, and exam coaching: a fear that comes exactly from the insecurity of an Australian white ruling class. No, because if there’s a ‘sudden’ anti-meritocracy case it’s at least four years old, when Helen Andrews in a 2016 Hedgehog Review was making the same meritocracy-critical arguments in reverse, arguing that these things (the concentration of power, the increasing inequality between winners and losers of the race, the stamping of failure on the second-rans), were good, actually:

For all its flaws, this elite does have many virtues. Its moral seriousness contrasts favorably with the frivolousness of certain earlier generations, and its sense of pragmatism, which can sometimes be reductive, can also be admirably brisk and hard-nosed. What is needed is someone who can summon a picture of the meritocratic elite’s best selves and call others to meet the example. But this process can begin only when this new ruling class finally owns up to the only name for what it already undeniably is.

One alternative is aristocratic self-denial, in the Russian 19thC manner, such as e.g. Francesco Pacifico, Workplace Hacks:,

Our class is a scam.
There is no merit in success. Until we destroy the impression of merit in people’s success, every discussion will be muffled by fascination—by the apparently objective, natural, collective fascination with success and successful people. This already happened with aristocrats. At some point in the 20th century they lost the bulk of their ability to impress. It should happen to us, too. We must lose our allure.

The ‘We’ is the key to all of this I think. It’s meritocracy’s great appeal that it individualises; on its face it is every candidate competing against the test, every career a separate arc of talent. Making or breaking has meaning. Hard work is rewarded, virtue recognised. Friends don’t help each other, nobody does favours, and each deserved outcome is the best of all possible worlds. Because merit must be imagined as an individual capacity (or else commit the error of bell-curvy prejudice) here is no, can never be any, meritocratic ‘we’ of belonging, or ‘one of us’. As the result, the fact of ruling class political and economic power, increasingly obvious to insiders and outsiders, threatens the whole ideology.

So a ruling class ‘we’ is up in the air, even if there’s definitely an identification of a ‘them’, from everyone who’s been pushed aside. A meritocratic ruling class by definition can’t be class-conscious: the moment it accepts the name, and responsibilities of collective rule, it also must accept the consequences of increasing wealth inequality and abuse of power, and must fold back to individualism, or else admit that it’s failing at its core aim of fairness for all. (As the saying goes, faber est suae quisquae fortunae, fuck you, Jack, I’m alright).

We start by recognising things that exist. A class that transfers benefits to itself, reproducing its power, using the tools of merit, is an existing fact. Just because it tells lies to itself about its own deserts, doesn’t mean we need to believe them. Markovits said as much to the Yankee Puritans at Jacobin:

The meritocratic suggestion that hierarchy is compatible with democratic equality because elites deserve their earned advantages is circular. Notions of meritocratic desert cannot justify inequality because they depend on inequality. And merit is not a natural virtue but rather an ideological conceit, built to launder an otherwise offensive distribution of advantage. Merit — in this precise sense — is a sham.

WE VIEW CORRUPTION IN public office as, generally, a bad thing. When a politician or official takes [what looks like] a bribe, we expect them to be punished. On its face, corruption of public processes breaks our norms against fairness, because we expect the State to evaluate things—policies, projects, people—on the basis of equality, and natural justice, not whose brown paper bag was heaviest. But I want to praise corruption, not bury it.

There are two points of view in this recent article in the ABC on labour hire staffing of the commonwealth public service. The first is institutional:

A former senior Defence Department executive, Paddy Gourley, has warned against this trend for years, saying it allows corruption to flourish. "The basic point is it opens up scope for nepotism and corruption in public service staffing," he said.

The second is more prosaic, from a self-identifying APS prole:

Mr Wilson, 25, said the outsourcing of government work had another effect: it had left young people like himself with far less hope of ever becoming a public servant. "It's kind of disappointing to realise that there really is no way in, aside from a tiny number of spots in the graduate program," he said.

These two evaluations of how the APS runs its affairs are completely correct. The staffing cap requires managers to buy labour on the sly if they want to carry out the functions demanded of them, and everyone knows the public service career route is basically closed to outsiders. But this state of affairs is also perfectly acceptable to a meritocratic view of the world, which, as I've become more and more convinced, is opposed to any sense of egalitarianism and human dignity.

Public service cultures in Australia have always been tinged with crookedness, and some—like local Councils—veer between moderate integrity and hopeless, endemic corruption. The City of Sydney Council (as Hilary Golder's book shows) has been constantly, repeatedly, sacked for its cultures of graft, starting in the mid-19thC, long before democracy. It's worth asking why cultures of corruption endure, when meritocratic ones are so fleeting, and I don't think the fatalism of 'there's always corruption it's human nature' is sufficient. If corruption is natural, why is it so bad?

A meritocratic system rewards the ability to pass tests. The virtues it selects for are aptitude, skill, confidence, education, and experience of systems, as well as hard work. These things aren't to be sneezed at. They're not quite enough, either. In the context of growing inequality—when there aren't enough 'winning' spots—a meritocratic system creates more and more losers, and raises the stakes. The result of accelerating qualificationism is people being told they aren't worthy, and with more and more tests, they're told that more and more often. It links the dignity of having a job and career with winning it against a field of other people.

Relationships of patronage and support, which are other names for corruption and nepotism, reward other virtues and talents than the ones our society values. Older, crookeder systems reward qualities like loyalty, attention to the needs of the institution, a strong sense of collective identity and goals, staunch support within groups and teams, talent-spotting and career development by superiors and bosses, protecting one's mates, and task orientation (just 'getting things done') as opposed to process orientation (making sure things are accountable). Those things aren't to be sneezed at either. Indeed, there's a long anarchist tradition that describes exactly those attitudes and practices as 'mutual aid'.

It's true that such systems benefited a narrow elite, consolidated power in the hands of people who did not value the public interest, and protected bullies, abusers, plain criminals, and worse. They elevated people who were incompetent, and locked out genuinely talented people. But look at the results of 'meritocratic' systems. Look at the mates-games that are key to Australian political economy. Are they very different?

One of the aspects of the City of Sydney Council's older culture of rorting was that it was partly about redistribution: it was a corrupt early 20thC Labor Party's way of giving jobs to the boys, and shoring up the support of inner city working class communities in suburbs like Paddington, Surry Hills, Redfern, and Glebe. Corruption was a client relationship, where bosses who didn't provide for their communities were replaced with others, who could. More jobs were provided than were really needed. Obviously, those communities no longer exist, nor do the prosaic ordinary jobs that were their basis of support. Joe Flood's 'The Fires', about a similar period in New York City, when corrupt municipal cultures were being rooted out and replaced with 'fair', algorithmic, testing practices for running things, noted that the loss of these older ethnic Tammany Hall systems also mean the loss of real expertise for making things happen, with tragic results. A corrupt boss is still a boss, and still has to perform tasks.

Corrupt systems make no pretence of being arbitrary. They're unfair, but don't pretend to be anything but what they are. When young people correctly identify that they're being locked out of systems that claim to be 'fair', though, and identify the choke point—'merit selection'—is it any wonder they take the next logical step, and realise that 'merit' is just another ideology of protecting privilege?

Ryan Boyd, LARB, This Long Whine:

Since the 1960s, he emphasizes, medical document-keeping has changed. In privatized health-care markets, where cost and risk are transferred to individuals, therapists write less openly and less interestingly, and contra the rich narration and character descriptions that distinguish his earlier records, now a patient’s archive is about “handing you expeditiously on to the next provider, the notes a sort of bill of lading.” There are plenty of kind, skilled, well-meaning individual doctors and therapists, but the system in which they practice turns patients into sources of revenue trailed by miscellaneous records...

A Very Public Sociologist, A Cultural Sociology of Mass Stupidity:

The neoliberal self comes packaged with other consequences: on how the individual sees themselves in the world. While this mode of governance is prescriptive about individuality, choice, and responsibility, excludes collectivism... and reinforces one's powerlessness in the face of the world, it compensates by endowing the neoliberal self with ontological and epistemological sovereignty. Put plainly, I'm all that matters and I know best. If then the cultural accent is on self-responsibility and effort, there is no higher power dictating what is and isn't true apart from your own opinions.

The Phoblographer, In the 1960s, High Resolution Color Photography Pained The CIA:

The US Government’s relationship with Kodak has always been fascinating. Labs and facilities in Rochester, NY, were developed just to deal with Classified photography and clandestine missions. Processes and films born there catered to Uncle Sam’s needs. But one can only imagine the dismay of the Chairman on September 11th, 1963: the date that Colonel Jack D Ledford filed a report saying that they started work on high-resolution Color Photography on behalf of the CIA. When they sent the negatives to Kodak, the company told the CIA that they needed some time. According to a Declassified document, Kodak wasn’t equipped to process the 9-inch materials and wouldn’t have them until the next month. Even by those standards, that’s a long time for anyone to wait to get their film back.