Pressure, force or violence exercised to prevent the political expression of a collective subject.
Political nature of oppression
Oppression is a political fact. It is not individuals, but collective subjects who suffer oppression... however much such a situation ends up taking the form of discrimination against the individuals who supposedly form them. To oppress implies using political power to prevent the organization and affirmation of a collective subject as such, that is, as a political subject.
Not just anyone can oppress; in fact, only those who have state tools at their disposal can. Roma patriarchs, Catholic priests or the leaders of a sports club can discriminate against young people or women in the decision-making of their organizations, but they cannot create laws or use the state apparatus -from the media to the judges- against them.
Their power in this society is communitarian or associative, not political; it affects only those who have previously decided to accept it, not society as a whole. It is not in itself worrying that a religion is against abortion or divorce and expels its members if they have an abortion or get divorced. What is worrying is that they can change the laws.
On the other hand, an individual can be discriminated against without the group to which he or she supposedly belongs suffering any oppression at all. Moreover, a huge group may suffer widespread discrimination... without there being any oppression.
For example, employment statistics and studies on job interviews show that the dominant values and aesthetics are reproduced over and over again in the form of a massive and invisible discrimination. Dark-skinned people with curly hair, fat and ugly people, are systematically and repeatedly marginalized in any job selection process and even when they try to rent a home. This example, although banal, should make us ask ourselves what conditions a social group must meet in order to be considered an oppressed political subject in bourgeois society.
Which social groups are oppressed?
It is obvious that the proletariat, like all exploited classes before it, is a necessarily oppressed class: otherwise exploitation could not be sustained. Everything in society denies it, starting with the very essence of capitalism, which presents every exchange, including that of labor power for wages, as an exchange between equal values, and therefore a "fair" exchange.
Not to mention the democratic logic and the discourses on the nature of society and the state: everything concurs in denying the existence of exploitation, presenting its mechanisms as natural and preventing the constitution of the workers as a political subject. Their own spontaneous organization, the one that appears in mass strikes, is considered a violation of social peace, and the very strike assemblies in the workplace an attack on sacrosanct property.
On the other hand, we have the petty bourgeoisie. It is neither socially revolutionary -it can only offer variants of capitalism- nor is it exploited; on the contrary, it participates in exploitation when it does not exercise it directly. But it is undoubtedly oppressed: from anarcho-liberalism to Stalinism, by way of Proudhon and popular nationalism, all its ideological creations tell us that, if it were up to it, the power of the state would be used to counteract and even eliminate the overwhelming competition that big capital and its companies represent for it. But obviously, that is not what the capitalist state is for.
The oppression of the petty bourgeoisie, which the bourgeoisie, through the state, contains and subordinates to its own needs, makes it a tremendously active and restless class, especially in periods of crisis.
It will then take up the struggle against the most diverse oppressions: that of the nation, that of women, that of racial or linguistic minorities... even that of Nature or of animals, as a way of partially confronting its own oppression (that is why they are called "partial struggles"). But in order to justify each of them, it has to build a political subject that the state would supposedly be preventing from expressing itself, constituting itself and determining itself. That is to say, it has to convince us that "the nation" or "the people", "women", or the "community" of race or language, form a homogeneous political subject with characteristic and distinct interests and a historical horizon of its own.
In accepting or not accepting the existence of such collective political subjects lies the difference between fighting against linguistic discrimination and being a nationalist, between fighting against discrimination against women and being a feminist, fighting against racism, etc.
Discrimination is not oppression
Accepting the idea that demographic profiles that suffer more or less systematic discrimination form political subjects means denying that they are divided by antagonistic class interests. Because when those class antagonisms assert themselves, the famous political subjects so eagerly constructed by petty-bourgeois ideologies are blown apart.
How can it be in the interest of the workers to march under popular banners to give a national state of its own to a petty bourgeoisie complaining of linguistic or cultural discrimination? Do the bourgeois woman and the working woman have the same interest? Is it worth dividing platforms and demands with our fellow workers in order to support the eagerness of petty-bourgeois women to find an equal place alongside the men of their class on boards of directors, in company management and in the top posts of the state?
Attempts to build Frankenstein political subjects out of pieces of different social classes fall apart at the first shock of the antagonisms that pit those classes against each other.
Moreover, there is no shortage of historical examples of oppressed classes that build power out of the generalization of discrimination. A regional petty bourgeoisie with national aspirations can exercise discrimination and generalize it if it controls cultural and religious institutions... but it will be oppressed if the state does not let it advance in its aspirations to statehood. Contemporary history is full of examples.
Who are the oppressed classes?
Although discrimination is widespread, the only material oppressed political subjects are the various subaltern classes of capitalist society. And each one suffers class oppression in a very different way. As different as their interests are contradictory to one another.
The call center operator, the migrant day laborer and the Andalusian worker in Llobregat may suffer discrimination, in the first case for being a woman, in the second for being a migrant and in the last for not speaking the language of their bosses and of the politicians who claim to represent them. But the oppression they suffer is that of the proletariat. Their interest lies in confronting exploitation, that is, in their class acting and asserting itself politically. Their political interest in no way lies in the female or migrant sectors of the petty bourgeoisie gaining a place in the state, nor in Spanish nationalism prevailing over the pro-independence petty bourgeoisie.
The fact that the petty bourgeoisie fights to assert itself politically by trying to turn its factions into the head of interclassist political subjects does not make these subjects any way out or opportunity for the workers. On the contrary, their success depends first of all on the capacity of their narrative and their practice to divide the workers into so many inert masses ready to trail behind each of the petty-bourgeois factions they represent. That is to say, every advance of the partial movements of the petty bourgeoisie is a setback for the necessarily unitary movement of our class.