'Exploitation' vs 'Oppression'

A brief critical history of two ideas

An interesting shift in Left-wing thinking has been the move from ‘exploitation’ to ‘oppression’ as the great devil of society. 

‘Exploitation’ is the old-school Marxist way of looking at social evils - it is *concrete* and *economic* in its focus. Exploitation is the dance between the two main social classes, the proletariat and the bourgeoisie - the proletariat does all of the work and the bourgeoisie, who has all of the money, pays the proletariat as little money as possible. ‘Exploitation’ is the gap between the value of the work the proletariat does and what the bourgeoisie actually pays them. ‘Exploitation’ means that every day of work makes the rich richer while the poor just barely get to survive. 

‘Exploitation’, in Marxist theory, inevitably leads to the breakdown of the class system. The proletariat is exploited to its breaking point. The workers, not the money-men, are the ones with all of the strength - the workers know how to actually build things, since they are the ones who actually build them, while all the rich know how to do is bark orders at the poor. The workers are the ones with discipline, since they have been forced to have discipline, while the rich have become self-indulgent and soft. The workers are prepared to die, since being poor brings them to the very door of death, while the rich spend their whole lives trying to pretend that they’re immortal. Once the proletariat recognizes its position and throws off its chains, victory in the final conflict is inevitable. 

Depending on which Marxist you ask, the proletarian revolution will be a spontaneous, organic uprising when exploitation is at its most extreme, or it will be engineered by an intellectual elite devoted to raising revolutionary class consciousness. Either way, the 20th century saw an absence of spontaneous global uprising and a disastrous intellectual-elite-led revolution in Russia. 

Marx was vague about the actual mechanics of carrying out this revolution, and Lenin was laser-focused on seizing power rather than maintaining any theoretical coherence. By definition, revolutionary class-consciousness is that which carries out the revolution - the fundamental purpose of human thought is to destroy the hated enemy, so whatever destroyed the hated enemy was justified. The Soviet Union wasn’t a dictatorship of the proletariat so much as a dictatorship of a party claiming to bear a monopoly on revolutionary class consciousness, a party which embodied the very exploitation it claimed to overthrow. 

Outside of the Soviet Union, Marxist revolutionaries did not find the global proletariat to be waiting and ready - material inequalities in liberal democracies had been blunted by the rise of the modern welfare state, and capitalist societies had apparently become a little *too* good at raising living standards for their people. We see a shift from critiquing ‘capitalism’ to critiquing ‘consumerism’. The progress of capitalism did not lead to 99% of people having their arms torn off by factory equipment, but instead seemed to evolve into a form that most people in the West were willing to live with (with various degrees of enthusiasm).

With the dissolution of the idea of the proletariat as a global revolutionary class the central role of ‘exploitation’ lost its force. It has largely been replaced by ‘oppression’ - where ‘exploitation’ is *concrete* and *economic*, ‘oppression’ is *symbolic* and *linguistic*. Where ‘exploitation’ was about *productivity*, ‘oppression’ is about *self-expression*. Oppression, like exploitation, is taken to be a systemic global phenomenon, but its fuzzier nature means that everything gets to relate to everything else. Justice for Palestine is also abortion rights, and abortion rights are also environmental rights, and environmental rights are also lgbtq+ rights, etc. Any oppression is related to all oppression. Nothing can change unless everything changes. To focus on one thing is to concede defeat and become complicit in the system. People who don’t want everything to change hard enough and loud enough are the enemy, even if they agree with you about most things. The circle of good people is very small, and political action consists of kicking unworthy people out of this ever-shrinking circle - if your feminism isn’t anti-racist then it isn’t feminism, and if your anti-racism isn’t anti-ableist then it isn’t anti-racism. If you don’t meet all of these criteria then you will get the guillotine when the revolution comes, which will happen any day now when everyone wakes up and agrees with me, surely. 

I once saw myself as a Marxist, and I don’t anymore. All the same, I feel much more affinity for the old vision of ‘exploitation’ than I do for the new vision of ‘oppression’, at least as it is currently expressed. The proletariat has been replaced as the universal revolutionary class by ‘the oppressed’, victims of all kinds everywhere. When you hear ‘diversity’ what that generally points to is the idea of ‘the unity of the oppressed’, where misgendering a trans person is the same sort of phenomenon as bombing helpless civilians and bombing helpless civilians is the same sort of phenomenon as building market-rate housing.

Marx’s famous vision of communist utopia is “from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs”. Contribute as much as you can, receive as much as you need. Capitalism’s self-image would be something like “from each as they choose, to each as they are chosen”. Contribute as much as you want, receive as much as others want to contribute to you. The contemporary Left’s vision of utopia would be “from each as they choose, to each according to their needs”. Contribute as much as you want, receive as much as you need. In other words, a world where everything is provided and nothing is demanded. A world where nothing ever makes you feel bad, where nobody ever says No to you, a world where you are transported back to the way you were as a brand-new baby before your parents ever disciplined you or disappointed you.

I don’t think that ‘exploitation’ or ‘oppression’ are worthless concepts, or that people who talk in those terms are completely bankrupt - I DO think that those concepts are unworkable as guiding lights for thought and political development in general. Today I find myself saying “one, maybe two cheers for liberal democracy” not because of a foundational commitment to liberal democracy as the highest human ideal but instead because I see it as the least-bad of many bad alternatives for social organization. 

Improving the human world - often slowly, often in bits and pieces here and there, often first and foremost in our private lives - is what liberal democracy is all about. Taking what insights we can from ‘exploitation’ and ‘oppression’ without falling into their worst excesses is the best way to move forward that I can think of.