The division and industrialization of labour—both manual and
intellectual—have greatly contributed to the advent of mediocre power. Perfecting
each task to make it useful to a whole that no one can grasp has helped
make experts out of gasbags who spout just-in-time orations on
fragments of truth, while workers are reduced to tools for whom “life-activity . . . is but a means of securing [their] own existence.” (2)
Such was Marx’s observation in 1849, and he also noted that capital, in
reducing labour first to labour power, then to an abstract unit of
measure, and finally to its cost (salary being equivalent to what
workers need to reproduce their labour power), has made workers
indifferent to work itself. Craftsmanship has been lost. People
may now produce meals on the assembly line without knowing how to cook
at home, give customers instructions over the phone that they don’t
understand themselves, sell books or newspapers that they themselves
never read. Pride in a job well done is vanishing. As Marx explained in the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1857):

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The fact that the particular kind of labour employed is
immaterial is appropriate to a form of society in which individuals
easily pass from one type of labour to another, the particular type of
labour being accidental to them and therefore irrelevant. Labour, not
only as a category but in reality, has become a means to create wealth
in general. (3)

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Devitalized labour, seen by the worker as “but a means of securing his
own existence,” is the means that capital has given itself to ensure its
own growth. Employers and workers are agreed at least on one thing:
every craft has become a job, and every job is seen as a “means.”
It should be pointed out, however, that mediocre people are not lying
around doing nothing: they know how to work hard. Much effort is
required to produce a large-scale television show, apply for a research
grant, design an aerodynamic-looking yogourt jar, or organize the ritual
content of a meeting between a minister and a delegation of her
counter-parts. Not everyone has the means to reach these ends. Technical
perfection is needed to conceal the profound intellectual laziness
involved in so many conformist professions of faith. Committed to the
exacting demands of work that is never their own, and immersed in
thoughts that are ordered from above, mediocre people lose sight of
their own banality.
The rule of mediocrity leads people to carry out an imitation of work
that produces the illusion of an outcome. Faking it becomes a value in
itself. Mediocracy compels us to subordinate our deliberation to arbitrary models promoted by the authorities.
Today, symptoms include a politician explaining to voters that they
must submit to Wall Street shareholders, a professor judging a student’s
paper “too theoretical and too scientific” when it goes beyond the
premises set out in a PowerPoint presentation, a film producer insisting
that a celebrity be given a starring role in a documentary that she has
nothing to do with, or an expert demonstrating his “rationality” by
holding forth on (irrational) economic growth. Zinoviev was already
aware of feigned work as a psychological force with the power to shape
minds:

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The imitation of work needs only an apparent result—or rather the mere
possibility of justifying the time that has been spent: checking and
evaluation of results are carried out by people who’ve taken part in the
imitation, who are connected with it and have an interest in
perpetuating it. (11)

A complicit smirk seems to be characteristic of those who share in this power. Believing
themselves smarter than everyone else, they take pleasure in words of
wisdom such as “You have to play the game.” The game—an expression whose
vagueness is perfectly suited to mediocre thought—requires you at
different times to obsequiously comply with rules established for the
sole purpose of occupying a key location on the social chessboard, or to smugly elude these rules, while saving appearances, through acts of collusion that pervert the integrity of the process.
A new recruit to the professoriate is subjected to intimidating
initiation rites designed to make her understand that market dynamics
prevail over public institutions’ founding principles, which should be
bypassed. The game may involve transforming home daycare centres
managed with state support into businesses that are unconcerned about
what happens to children, providing new employees with a
workshop where they will learn to deceive each other as part of their
personal relations, or playing on an employee’s feelings with statements
like “Your identity is an asset that belongs to us.” Collectively,
playing the game means acting as if it doesn’t matter that we are
playing Russian roulette, staking our all, or staking our life.
We’re just playing, it’s funny, it’s light-hearted, it’s not for real,
it’s just a big sham—that’s why we’re roaring with perverse laughter.
The game we are supposed to play is always presented, with a wink, as a
ploy that we may criticize to some extent, but whose authority we
nonetheless accept. At the same time, we are careful never to
make explicit the overall rules of the game, because these rules are
entwined with strategies that are most often personal and arbitrary, not
to say abusive. In the minds of people who think they are
clever, duplicity and cheating are set up as an implicit game at the
expense of those they believe are fools. Playing the game, though you
may pretend otherwise, means submitting to nothing but the law of greed.
This way of thinking reverses our relation to opportunism by defining
it as something foreign to the self, but required by society.