Combatting Exploitation & Oppression
Angela Zachary
8/20/2024
All working people in the U.S. experience exploitation—the theft of productive value by the owning class. Exploitation is the central component of our capitalist system and is what makes the owning class so wealthy. This system creates problems of epidemic proportions within the working class: alienation, exhaustion, depression, social anxiety, self-harm, etc. To make matters worse, many working people also experience oppression—a system of exclusion from vital societal resources and the targeting of groups for special persecution, surveillance, and/or policing. We are all familiar with the communities most affected by oppression: the Queer community, people of color, immigrants, women, the disabled, Muslims, etc. The owning class enflames and exacerbates these social divisions to separate working people from one another. The question for workers is this: how do we combat exploitation and oppression within our society?
The prevailing notion in America is that the way someone overcomes exploitation and/or oppression is for them to “rise above” their plights, to make themselves strong, independent, and fierce in the face of those who would misuse and abuse them. Such individuals are lauded in the mainstream press: poor single mother writes books in a coffeeshop while caring for child, becoming a worldwide celebrity author of children’s books; the son of a substance using mother and incarcerated father finishes college, establishes a tech startup, and becomes a millionaire before turning thirty years-old; a gay man defies societal norms by enlisting in the military, rising within the ranks, and becomes a successful politician; etc. etc. etc.
The problem with such stories is not that the oppression and exploitation these folks faced are illegitimate; on the contrary, they certainly are real and should be struggled against. The problem with these stories is that they reinforce the ruling class’s ideology that exploitation and oppression cannot be abolished, so it is up to people to individually overcome these systemic issues. Within this narrative, these societal ills are “necessary evils” to be dealt with and we should heap praise and attention upon those who were able to “pull themselves up by the bootstraps” to achieve a better standard of living for themselves. As usual, the root of the problem is left unaddressed and the focus is shifted to individuals who have successfully overcome the symptoms. At the end of the day, according to them, if you’re still suffering under exploitation and oppression, you have no one to blame but yourself, and you must strive to earn a better placement in society through sheer force of will.
This poisonous ideology has seeped into the consciousness of most segments of America’s working class. Take, for instance, the oppression of women in society: we rightly recognize that sexism, patriarchy, and misogyny are widespread problems, but fail to grasp the full extent of damage such bigotries inflict, both on women and on men. Women are told that we must be strong, independent, and fierce and that we must combat the cruelty of our oppressors by becoming cruel ourselves. This has created generations of young women who are told that the answer to their oppression can be found in becoming oppressors themselves. We are taught to be rabidly individualist in our mindset, to embrace the selfishness that characterizes our economic ordering as a personal virtue. Similar arguments are made for the Black and Queer communities in the forms of so-called “Black” and “Rainbow Capitalism.”
Similarly, working people in general are constantly told an analogous narrative: “If you don’t like being exploited at your job, then go start a company yourself!” Such an absurd statement, and others like it, fail to account for the obvious material reality that not everyone can be a business owner, nor should that be the goal to begin with. As with oppression, the owning class insists that to overcome exploitation, a worker should rise the ranks to become an exploiter themselves. Again, the feeble “solutions” presented to working people are those characterized by individualism, selfishness, and isolation.
The truth is that exploitation and oppression can be abolished and not just dealt with on a case-by-case basis. In order to overcome these systemic issues, a collectivist approach is needed. The trajectory of human development illustrates this fact: from independent tribes to individual skilled craftspeople and small proprietors, production in the various industries has now evolved into a complex system of interdependence between workers who collectively labor to produce the goods and services each of us enjoy and utilize. Production in modern industry, in other words, has become a collective enterprise. This has wrought great things, most especially a production capacity that can actually meet the needs of humanity; of course, under capitalism, production is not planned to meet human needs, but instead is designed for profit. This is why humanity must push towards our next phase of development where the planning of production matches the collective approach of production itself—an economic system of production moved by the will of the working class.
Collectivism, then, holds the key to ending exploitation and oppression. The insistence upon personal gain and recognition, the hyperfocus on what an individual wants out of organizing (as opposed to how we can push forward for the common good of all working and oppressed people), the cruelty expressed towards others simply to assert one’s individuality… these practices, and the philosophy of individualism that undergirds them, must be abandoned and replaced with a philosophy and approach to organizing that embraces collectivism, worker democracy, and movement-focused organizing. That last point is essential: our organizing work must always be focused on building a working class movement, not personalities, career propulsion, or demagoguery.
Allowing the occasional oppressed and/or exploited person to “ascend” into the class of exploiters and oppressors is not an answer. We, as working people, should loudly denounce such ideas. We should also push back, through patient education, whenever these individualist strains and sentiments begin to seep into our communities and organizing circles. Here in my native Chicago, I have been involved in numerous left/progressive movements, organizations, and political parties over the years and have seen such sentiments derail and destroy entire groups. This is a problem not easily recognized at times because we live in such a hyper-individualist society that such tendencies can often appear normal and proper. Nevertheless, through rigorous self-analysis and, when necessary, self-criticism, left/progressive collectives can use tested and proven theory and ideology to educate their members and to pull their work back to the proper course.
Our exploiters and oppressors have meticulously crafted a society in their own image, reflecting and indoctrinating their individualist ideology into the working class of America. As organizers, we must familiarize ourselves with their tactics, our history, and the conditions in which we are organizing; through this scientific, strategic, and analytical approach, we have the power to draw working and oppressed people into a movement aimed at our collective liberation. Together, we can build a society and world that reflect the working class’s collectivist and democratic principles—a world where human needs come first and the days of exploitation and oppression are put behind us.