Capitalism is one society made up of two worlds.

Those welcomed into the ranks of the wealth-owning elite can expect a life of privilege – good health, the best education money can buy, high incomes and an enormous degree of control over their lives, their surroundings and broader society.

For those born into the working class, whose collective submission and relative poverty are necessary to a system organised around production for profit, it is a very different story. It is frequently a story of shortage, inadequate services and illness-inducing stress. For those who present a particular obstacle to wealth accumulation, such as Aboriginal people – whose occupation of land prevents its exploitation through cattle grazing, tourism or mining – the situation is worse still.

Significant effort goes into papering over these social gulfs – whether through the myth of the egalitarian “fair go” or inane rhetoric about how we are all part of “Team Australia”.

The reality is that inequality permeates every aspect of human existence under capitalism, shaping our sense of identity, aspirations, relationships and achievements from the beginning to the end of life.

Early life

Our class position affects us even before we see the light of day. The Longitudinal Study of Australian Children demonstrated that the extent and quality of medical care women receive during pregnancy varies enormously based, not on need, but on socioeconomic status.

Wealthier women have access to higher quality and more specialised care and have, on average, healthier babies. Those in the richest quarter of the population are more than three times more likely to receive regular attention from an obstetrician during pregnancy than women in the poorest quarter. Poor and working class women are much more likely instead to rely on a less qualified general practitioner.

Perinatal death and low birth weight are also more likely to be experienced by working class women’s babies. Women in the poorest three quarters of the population were more than twice as likely to have underweight babies as those in the top quarter. A 2013 Council of Australian Governments Reform Council report found that babies born to women in low income suburbs had a 6.3 percent chance of being underweight, as opposed to 3.6 per cent in wealthier areas.

Among Aboriginal babies the numbers are even higher: 12.6 per cent are underweight, and the rate of stillbirths is 50 percent higher.

Infant mortality also accords with the class divide. A 2012 study found that babies born in the western suburbs of Sydney were 44 percent less likely to live beyond infancy than those born in the more affluent eastern suburbs.

Children born to wealthy parents also share a range of other benefits. According to the Reserve Bank, children of the richest one-fifth of households will have access to 62 percent of the nation’s private wealth, be three times more likely to receive an inheritance and will be the beneficiaries of nearly half of all the inherited wealth in Australia. Those in the bottom fifth will have access to only 1 percent of the nation’s private wealth and, if they get an inheritance at all, will have a share in less than 8 percent of the national total.

They will likely die sooner than their richer counterparts, with life expectancy for wealthy children exceeding that of the poorest by six years, while that of Aboriginal people continues to be 17 years below the average.

Well-off children are also more likely to participate in early childhood education programs, which have a significant beneficial effect on later learning, confidence and achievement. According to a 2013 report by the Australian Institute of Family Studies, children in the bottom 80 percent of households were found to be half to three quarters less likely to take part in organised preschool activity than those in the top 20 percent.

Schooling

Schooling further entrenches this divide. Data released this year by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development found that Australia’s schools are among the most socially stratified in the OECD. Working class and poor children are overwhelmingly concentrated in under-resourced, funding-starved schools, while wealthy children enjoy abundant educational opportunities.

As Murdoch University academic Laura Perry has shown, this results in children who attend schools in low socioeconomic status areas lagging on average three years behind their counterparts in wealthier areas. Poorer schools also have more limited curricula, fewer extracurricular activities and larger class sizes, all of which have a significant impact on the development and well-being of young people.

Far from improving, inequality in schooling is increasing as a result of class-biased government policy. A Productivity Commission report released in January found that between 2007 and 2012, government funding to private schools increased by 3.4 percent, while the increase to public schools, which rely almost solely on this funding to operate, was just 2.4 percent. Coming in under the official inflation rate, this is a cut to public school funding.

Measured per student, private schools receive 40 percent of overall government school funding despite educating only one-third of students. This grossly unfair situation is made worse by the fact that the vast majority of students who require and should be entitled to extra resources attend public schools – 84.7 percent of Indigenous students, 76.6 percent of students with a disability and the majority of students from a non-English-speaking background.

Such an astounding disparity in resource allocation, and unashamed channelling of wealth towards the already obscenely privileged, sends a clear message about who does and does not matter in our society. This shapes the self-image, expectations and aspirations of young people in myriad ways, and in so doing helps prepare them for a life either of privilege and control or of submission and oppression.

Tertiary education

The disparity in Australia’s school system is compounded in the tertiary sector, despite the unprecedented expansion of higher education over the last 40 years.

The proportion of students from the poorest quarter of the population who attend university has not risen appreciably despite the total number of domestic undergraduate enrolments increasing three-fold between 1974 and 2010. Instead, it has remained relatively stable at 14 to 16 percent since 1989.

Students from private schools continue to be far more likely to enrol in tertiary education than those from government schools – more than 2.5 times more likely, according to University of Canberra academic Jenny Chesters.

Chesters has shown that educational attainment among young people is heavily correlated with that of their parents (which in turn is a product of their class position) and that low participation by working class students can be attributed to, among other things, “a lack of financial resources to undertake university study; lower educational aspirations; lower levels of educational attainment and a lack of awareness of the possibilities and benefits of tertiary education”.

The conditions and experience of working class life mitigate against university participation, particularly at elite institutions, in a way that is entirely foreign to middle class and wealthy young people. “At an individual level”, she writes, “cultural capital and family expectations can influence low [socioeconomic status] students’ perceptions about the difficulties and risks of undertaking higher education compared to being in the full-time labour market.

“At the institutional level, universities also perpetuate structural inequalities through the power and control they exert over the curriculum taught in secondary schools and their institutional habits and traditions which may deter young people from low SES families from applying.”

University education has lasting consequences for those who complete it, not least because graduates can expect to earn 35 percent more than those with only secondary school levels of education, and up to $1 million more over their lifetimes.

Employment and the workplace

The class divide in the education system importantly prepares people for working life. The children of the rich enter adulthood having acquired a sense of superiority, an expectation of control and access to resources, a competitive nature, extensive social networks amongst the privileged and the ability to give orders, all of which the private school system, elite colleges and wealthy social cliques function to equip them with.

Children of the working class, on the other hand, by the time they embark on working life, are much more likely to have become accustomed to taking orders, deferring to the more privileged and living with a sense of alienation from the powerful institutions that dominate social and working life. This lack of control, and an acceptance of that reality to a greater or lesser degree, is a central aspect of working class oppression under capitalism.

Acquiescence to the demands of the workplace is crucial from the capitalist class’s point of view, because this is the key site in which the massive economic inequality of capitalism is maintained and perpetuated. For bosses to make profits – and ever greater profits in order to stay in business and outdo their rivals – they must pay workers only a fraction of the value of the goods and services they produce. The more miserly the wages that bosses can get away with paying, the greater their profit margins and capitalistic success.

By definition, wages can never be “fair”, because they can never equal the actual value of the wealth workers generate. Bosses must underpay workers to turn a profit, although the degree to which they are able to do this depends on a range of political and social factors, the most important being the strength of workers’ organisations.

Over the past 40 years, the capitalist class in Australia has been waging a sustained campaign to keep wages and conditions down in order to boost profit margins in a leaner world economy. This has resulted in greater inequality. As Sharon Friel, professor of health equity at the ANU, describes, “In Australia, the wages of a worker in the bottom 10 percent of income earners have risen by 15 percent since 1975, while wages of people in the top 10 percent have risen by 59 percent.”

During the 2000s, the share of national income going to labour, as opposed to the capitalist class, has declined by 5.8 percent.

Survival and stress

The median net income of a household containing two adults and two children is just over $90,000, or about $1,700 per week, meaning that half of all equivalent households in Australia survive on less than that, and a half on more. The National Centre for Social and Economic Modelling estimates the cost of raising a child to be approximately $458 per week for a middle income family, while the total amount spent on raising two children to the age of 21 is $800,000.

For parents of children with disabilities, the figure is three times higher. The average cost of child care, if it is available at all, is a whopping $83 per day – making work very difficult for lower income parents. Time out of the workforce adds a further downward pressure on income for those already struggling.

The cost of housing in Australia eats up a larger proportion of household income today than ever before. Repayments on a mortgage for a median priced house in a capital city amount to around $570 per week.

So just paying for the basic necessities of life absorbs the big majority of weekly income for well over half of all households in Australia. The stress of not being able to provide adequately for children, working long hours and fear of unemployment is thus a persistent feature of working class life in a way it has not and never will be for those at the top.

Health effects

These factors have serious health consequences for workers. A series of academic studies cited in a 2008 VicHealth research report repeatedly demonstrate a connection between socioeconomic status and poor health.

Unemployment, insecure or unfavourable working conditions and low self-esteem, depression and mental health problems disproportionately affect workers and those with less power in society. Poor or insecure work is associated with higher rates of smoking, cardiovascular disease, cancer, obesity and other chronic health conditions, and women in casual or insecure jobs are much more likely to experience sexual harassment or unwanted sexual advances at work than their better off counterparts.

Lack of control at work and absence of reward for effort and stress, all of which are integral aspects of working life under capitalism, are associated with smoking, mental distress and a range of other negative health outcomes.

In addition, the workplace is unsafe for most workers. While a boss would never even consider the possibility of being killed or injured at work short of a private jet malfunction or bad oysters at lunch, this is a day to day issue for many workers. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, six out of every 100 workers will experience a work-related injury or illness in any given year. Around 200 workers are killed at work in Australia annually, as documented by Safe Work Australia, and many more die as a result of work-related health conditions.

And if work is bad, unemployment is even worse. Benefits are woefully inadequate, the effect on self-esteem is chronic, and the punitive approach of the government means that the unemployed are forced to accept degrading treatment at the hands of parasitic “mutual obligation” agencies, forcing many to drop out of the job market altogether. The situation is even worse for Aboriginal people – Indigenous unemployment is four times that of non-Indigenous.

Retirement and old age

Once workers are old or their bodies wrecked, they no longer have any value in capitalist terms. The capitalist class resents supporting those who make no contribution to the generation of profits and who are not independently wealthy. Winding back age pension entitlements, raising the pension age and the “marketisation” of aged care have thus been a long term, if politically unpalatable, aim of governments and corporations.

According to the Combined Pensioners and Superannuants Association of NSW, this has led to greater inequality, with many retirees “not on an equal footing when it comes to superannuation, which extends existing inequalities in the system … [particularly affecting] women, people with disability, carers, people in casual jobs and those who are unemployed, particularly in later life”.

The wealthy are able to take advantage of tax breaks and benefits that those with less or no superannuation or other wealth cannot. Studies have shown that just 5 percent of retirees enjoy 37 per cent of the total benefits from tax breaks. The expectation, or compulsion, on the part of government that retirees will depend on superannuation and home ownership to fund their retirement has created a situation where the age pension is under pressure to be reduced and low income earners and renters face the stress and indignity of increasing financial insecurity in old age.

You only need to watch one of the many ads for funeral insurance to see the effects of this – worrying about burdening younger loved ones with their funeral costs is what retirement for those without wealth is all about, as much as it is enjoying some well-earned years without the drudgery of waged labour.

Capitalism must be overthrown

The exploitation of the majority by a wealthy minority is a precondition for capitalist production and the perpetuation of the system, and the basis of all social inequality. The vast majority of people therefore must be coerced into accepting their subordinate position within the social order if capitalism is to survive, even at the same time as they are surrounded by ostentatious wealth.

Class division is far more than an economic relationship. It requires systematic oppression of the mass of working people – denial of workers’ right to exercise control over society and their lives, limited access to resources and social services, personal subordination to the needs of bosses and the damaging effect that has on social life and self-esteem.

Our rulers and supposed “superiors” today do not claim a mandate from God as they once did, but justify their position through appeals to meritocracy and the “hard work” they put in to be at the top.

Yet the oppression of the working class creates a situation where the rich will always succeed and appear to posses more “merit” than those denied access to the means to develop skills, knowledge and ability. The reality of class difference, which is itself a product of systematic inequality, is frequently referenced by those in power to justify the status quo – indicating the circular logic that underpins modern capitalism.

Such ideology is necessary because, as much as the class divide is the source of capitalism’s all-important profits, it is at the same time the basis of a profound instability in the system. The oppression and subordinate position that workers share creates the basis for them to challenge and organise against aspects of capitalism that at other times might be taken for granted.

Workers’ crucial role in production gives them a potential power that no other group can match, and which depends on collective, democratic organising and action to be realised. This is what raises the possibility of socialism, a society organised democratically by workers, in which the class divide would be done away with for good.