Welcome to a new year. Let’s start with a bang—a bang aimed directly at the myth of meritocracy.

The promise of meritocracy is the ultimate spectacle of the modern capitalist state: a compelling narrative that dazzles and misdirects. It suggests that social and economic rewards are distributed based on individual talent, effort, and achievement. In Australia, this idea is deeply entwined with the national mythology of the “fair go.” Yet this is an illusion—a superstructural narrative that actively obscures the foundational class dynamics determining life outcomes. It is a system that thrives on our lack of language to articulate the unfreedom it creates, framing constraints as personal choices.

Meritocracy is not a neutral mechanism for sorting ability; it is an ideological framework that legitimises inequality and naturalises the reproduction of class power. It performs a crucial sanitising function, transforming systemic critiques into stories of individual exception. But how does this machine actually work? There are hints in the Australian conditions of education, work, and wealth that expose how the dead labour of inherited capital triumphs over the living labour of current effort, how the weekly ritual of alienated work sustains the illusion, and how the entire edifice relies on our collective belief in a ladder that was never meant for all to climb.

Let’s go.

The Educational Apparatus: Manufacturing Consent for Class

The education system functions not as a great equaliser but as a key apparatus for reinforcing and legitimising class stratification. The disparity in funding and resources between schools in affluent suburbs and those in working-class or rural areas is not an accidental failure of policy; it is the logical outcome of a system where education is contingent on the economic base of its community. The existence of a robust private school system, heavily subsidised by the state, creates a parallel, privileged educational track for the children of the bourgeoisie and the upper echelons of the petty bourgeoisie. This material segregation ensures that the social capital and advanced pedagogical resources necessary for success are concentrated among those already in possession of wealth.

Prestigious universities, such as the University of Melbourne and the University of Sydney, are often presented as pinnacles of meritocratic achievement. However, their admissions processes, even with schemes like HECS-HELP, are far from neutral. So-called “holistic” assessments, which value extracurricular activities, leadership roles, and polished personal statements, are fundamentally assessments of cultural capital. This cultural capital is not innate; it is a commodity purchased through access to private tutoring, music lessons, international travel, and the leisure time that comes from not requiring part-time work. The high cost of living near campus centres in major cities further acts as a material barrier. These institutions do not simply reward merit; they filter for students whose familial class position has already equipped them with the requisite social and cultural signals, thereby perpetuating the existing class structure under the guise of academic excellence.

Crucially, this system serves a dual function: it reproduces class privilege while simultaneously sterilising its own contradictions. The university campus, often imagined as a site of radical thought, is more accurately a controlled environment where dissent is institutionally managed. By admitting a select few from disadvantaged backgrounds and framing this as a victory for meritocratic fairness, the system sanitises the revolutionary potential of a fundamental critique of its own structure. It transforms a systemic, class-based analysis into an individual narrative of exceptionalism and mobility, as explored in this analysis of sanitised dissent. In doing so, it protects the underlying hierarchy, offering the appearance of progress and openness—a revolution without the danger—while ensuring the machinery of intergenerational class reproduction continues uninterrupted.

The Workplace: The Veil of Exploitation and Social Capital

Within the Australian workplace, the rhetoric of merit-based promotion and hiring serves as a potent tool for masking the exploitative relationship between capital and labour. The persistent underrepresentation of Indigenous Australians, migrants, and women from working-class backgrounds in leadership positions is frequently attributed to a lack of individual initiative or qualification. A materialist analysis, however, locates the cause in systemic barriers, including the artificial scarcity and gatekeeping that characterise many elite professions. As noted in my rant about modern work, “And on Mondays, We Wear Disappointment”, much professional training functions as a hazing ritual designed less to develop superior skill and more to filter people based on their ability to endure institutional pressure, thereby protecting hierarchies of power and reward.

Furthermore, career advancement is disproportionately determined by social capital—the networks and connections one can leverage. In industries like finance, law, and politics, progression is frequently less about what you know and more about who you know. These networks are not open markets; they are closed circuits of privilege, often cultivated through elite educational institutions and family connections. This reality exposes the myth of the level playing field. The intense competition fostered in Australian workplaces, characterised by long hours, precarious contract work, and the normalisation of unpaid internships, is a mechanism for extracting maximum surplus value from labour. Those without the safety net of family wealth are forced to endure these conditions out of necessity, while those with such a net can afford to take risks and accept low-paid opportunities that ultimately serve as stepping stones.

The pressure to constantly prove one’s merit is a form of psychological management that pits workers against each other, obscuring their shared class interest. This management is sustained by a collective performance—the weekly ritual of work where we pretend that what we’re doing matters beyond survival. We participate in an elaborate stage show that justifies why a manager’s coordination is valued exponentially more than the workers’ execution, or why one profession commands multiples of another’s salary, despite comparable social value. This ritual naturalises the alienation of selling our time for goals we don’t share, keeping us from asking the most dangerous question of all: what we would contribute, and who we would become, if we were free from the imperative to work for a wage.

The Foundation of Class: Wealth, Property, and the State

The entire edifice of meritocracy crumbles when confronted with the material reality of wealth concentration and property relations. Australia’s growing wealth inequality is not a random outcome of varying individual effort; it is a structural feature of a capitalist economy where capital begets more capital. A significant portion of the wealth of the Australian elite is not earned through labour but inherited or acquired through the ownership of assets like property and stocks. The narrative of the self-made individual is a statistical anomaly used to validate a system where intergenerational transfer of capital is the primary driver of class position.

The housing market stands as a stark monument to this reality, laying bare the central contradiction between a commodity’s use-value—its utility as shelter—and its exchange-value—its price as a financial asset. Home ownership, a traditional marker of middle-class success, has become increasingly inaccessible to younger generations and the working class precisely because the system prioritises its exchange-value. This is not a failure of their merit but a direct result of a political-economic system that treats housing as a vehicle for capital accumulation rather than a social good. Policies like negative gearing and capital gains tax discounts are state-sanctioned mechanisms that funnel wealth towards the asset-holding class. They facilitate a direct transfer of value—which originates from the socially necessary labour time of workers across society—into private hands through asset appreciation. This represents a state-subsidised capture of wealth, where dead labour (capital embodied in property) is leveraged to extract value from living labour (the ongoing work of the populace), a fundamental class relation explored in our earlier analysis of value and profit.

Conversely, the welfare system is framed not as a necessary social wage or a right, but as a conditional “handout,” reinforcing the ideological division between the deserving and undeserving poor. This narrative disguises the fact that the most significant government subsidies flow to the wealthy in the form of capital gains, effectively socialising the cost of risk for asset holders while pathologising the poverty of those whose labour generates the underlying value.

Ideology and Power: The Machinery of the Myth

The persistence of the meritocratic myth relies on a powerful cultural superstructure that actively shapes our perception of reality. The Australian ideal of the “fair go” performs a crucial ideological function by presenting the social order as fundamentally just. It individualises systemic failures, directing blame for poverty or lack of mobility onto the individual while absolving the economic structure of any responsibility. The system operates not through visible chains but by wrapping constraints in an illusion of choice, where the logic of capital itself regulates our life’s possibilities like an elastic band that allows only limited movement from our class-determined starting point. We feel nominally free to strive, yet lack the vocabulary to name the systemic forces that predetermine the range of our ascent.

The media plays a key role in this, celebrating “self-made” success stories that carefully edit out the advantages of class background, inherited wealth, or fortuitous connections. This media function is a core component of the political spectacle, designed to transfix and misdirect. As we saw in “From Spectacle to Substance: Reframing Political Discourse”, the spectacle works by individualising systemic problems, accusing those who fail of being flawed and celebrating victors as inherently meritorious. This bread and circuses approach, where politics becomes a rigged game of personalities, keeps the public analysing players rather than the rules, ensuring that the veil of lies over the underlying economic structure remains intact.

This ideology has a great psychological impact. The internalised belief in meritocracy creates immense mental strain, as individuals are compelled to interpret their social standing—whether of success or failure—as a reflection of their inherent worth. This generates alienation, as people are estranged from their own labour and from each other, transformed into competitors in a zero-sum game. Authentic values of community, creativity, and solidarity are eroded in favour of a relentless pursuit of external validation through degrees, job titles, and income—the key signifiers of success in a capitalist society. We are encouraged to follow our whims as true freedom, while in reality our true selves are the selves we curate against a world that heavily suggests we become anxious, productive, and perpetually striving consumers.

Ultimately, political power reflects and protects this economic base. The Australian political class is largely drawn from a narrow segment of society, sharing educational and social backgrounds. This is not a coincidence but a manifestation of class power. Policy decisions, from funding cuts to public services to regressive tax structures, are consistently made to benefit the capitalist class, yet are rhetorically framed as encouraging hard work and enterprise. This demonstrates that the state, in its current form, operates primarily as a committee for managing the common affairs of the bourgeoisie, not as a neutral arbiter of merit. The political spectacle ensures this reality is obscured, focusing debate on personalities and scandals rather than on studying the motivations of those who make decisions and how they use the law to keep their advantage. The goal is not to serve the people but to obtain and retain power for a privileged coalition.

Towards a Materialist Alternative

Moving beyond the myth of meritocracy requires more than policy tweaks; it demands a fundamental dismantling of the ideological and material machinery that sustains it. This begins by rejecting the spectacle of individual striving and the sanitised narratives of mobility that protect the underlying system. Our task is to reclaim the language to articulate our unfreedom and to collectively redefine success. True success must be divorced from the accumulation of dead labour (private capital) and reoriented towards the liberation of living labour, measured by collective well-being, democratic control of production, and the fulfilment of human need. This is not a call for a fairer meritocracy, but for its abolition as a governing social principle.

Systemic reforms must target the material base that generates inequality. This means not only funding public education but democratising it to end its role in manufacturing class consent. It necessitates de-commodifying housing, actively severing its exchange-value from its use-value as shelter. It requires a progressive tax system that dismantles the architectures of wealth concentration, directly challenging the intergenerational transfer of capital. These are not mere technical fixes but strategic interventions to rupture the circuits that reproduce class power.

The alternative to the alienating competition of meritocracy is the cultivation of genuine class solidarity. It is to recognise, as laid bare in the weekly ritual of disillusionment, that our collective power is the only force capable of challenging the dictatorship of capital. The aim is not to create a world where a few more individuals can climb the ladder, but to break the ladder itself. We must build a society where work is freed from the stage show of meaningless profit-seeking and directed toward purposes we determine—where, freed from the imperative to sell our time, we can finally discover and contribute what we would do if we were free. This is the substance beyond the spectacle. This is not a matter of fairness, but the necessary step in the material struggle for human liberation, where the free development of each becomes the condition for the free development of all.