> According to Marcuse, the latter is associated with "societal division of labor derived from knowledge and confined to the administration of functions and arr

> According to Marcuse, the latter is associated with "societal division of labor derived from knowledge and confined to the administration of functions and arrangements necessary for the advancement of the whole." I.e. social status is decided by productivity. Maybe we're talking past each other, but I don't see it that way at all, and it's hard for me to tell if Marcuse is speaking positively or negatively about the latter "rational exercise of authority", when contrasted with domination. If he speaks positively of it, which I think he does (I may be wrong, feel free to correct me) then although the distribution of goods would not follow a meritocratic order, the distribution of power (as a rational exercise of authority) might. My own disagreements with Marcuse aside, I accept you're correct on the point of his rejection of meritocracy considered as allocation of goods. Coming full circle, I found your comments twice as helpful and informative to me as ten of Scott's blog posts. >hardly anything about class and means of production "For the vast majority of the population, the scope and mode of satisfaction are determined by their own labor; but their labor is work for an apparatus which they do not control, which operates as an independent power to which individuals must submit if they want to live. And it becomes the more alien the more specialized the division of labor becomes. Men do not live their own lives but perform pre-established functions. While they work, they do not fulfill their own needs and faculties but work in alienation." might be a sentence pulled right out of Capital, if it weren't in Eros. >Whatever is wrong with capitalism, it's not an ideology. No one planned it. Capitalism is at the very least based on several ideological factors which must be constantly reproduced within society, namely the ideology of rights, bourgeois democracy, and double freedom of the worker (free to sell his labour, free from the product of the production process). But just like the idea of communism wasn't invented by one guy, the development of capitalism wasn't led by one guy either. The state and our own internalization of the value-form reproduces this ideology.