Why does capitalism reproduce oppression?

New to Marxism: Session 4 of 6

Racism, oppression and liberation

Capitalism divides society into classes, but class is not the only inequality people experience. Racism, women’s oppression, hostility towards LGBT+ people and the exclusion of disabled people shape where people can live, the work they do, their treatment by the state and their freedom to control their own lives.

These oppressions cannot be explained simply as individual prejudice or distractions from class struggle. They have material roots in class society and are reproduced through institutions such as the family, borders, workplaces and the state. The working class cannot unite by ignoring them. It can become a force for universal emancipation only by fighting for the liberation of all the oppressed.

What you will learn

• How Marxists distinguish oppression from exploitation without separating them.
• How capitalism inherited and reshaped racism, women’s oppression and LGBT+ oppression.
• Why fighting oppression is necessary for working-class unity and cannot be postponed until after a revolution.

Exploitation and oppression

All workers are exploited under capitalism because the capitalist class controls the surplus produced through wage labour. But workers do not all experience the same forms of oppression. Racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, disability oppression and national oppression impose additional barriers and dangers on particular groups.

Oppression can cross class lines. A wealthy woman can experience sexism, for example, while using her wealth to reduce its effects and participating in the exploitation of working-class women and men. An oppressed group therefore does not automatically share one political interest. Class position shapes both how oppression is experienced and which solutions people seek.

The distinction matters. If oppression is treated only as another name for exploitation, socialists will fail to understand its particular institutions, experiences and movements. If it is treated as entirely separate from class society, its material foundations and its connection to capitalist power disappear from view.

Marxism examines each oppression historically. It asks how a division arose, how capitalism reproduces it, which social forces benefit from it and what kind of struggle can abolish its foundations.

The origins of oppression

Human societies have not always been divided in the same ways. The emergence of private property, a social surplus and class rule transformed earlier divisions of labour into systematic inequalities. Ruling classes developed states, laws, religious doctrines and family structures that protected property and organised the reproduction of society.

Capitalism broke apart many older hierarchies and proclaimed formal equality before the law. It also created new forms of oppression and adapted existing ones to a world market divided into competing nation states. Legal equality could coexist with enormous material inequality because property, economic power and the organisation of everyday life remained unchanged.

Specific oppressive laws can be abolished and attitudes can change. These victories matter. But capitalism repeatedly recreates inequality through the labour market, the unequal burden of care, borders, policing, housing and access to services. Oppression is therefore neither eternal nor simply a collection of bad ideas. It is historically created and can be abolished—but doing so completely requires the transformation of the social relations that sustain it.

Racism, empire and borders

Modern racism was shaped by the expansion of capitalism through conquest, slavery and colonialism. Ruling classes developed theories of racial hierarchy to justify dispossession, forced labour and empire. These ideas survived the abolition of slavery and the end of formal colonial rule because imperialist domination and the inequalities it created did not disappear.

Borders give governments and employers the power to divide workers according to nationality and immigration status. Migrant workers can be denied services, prevented from changing jobs or threatened with detention and deportation. This makes them more vulnerable to exploitation and harder to organise. Politicians then blame migrants and racialised minorities for low wages, scarce housing and failing services produced by capitalism and government policy.

Racism is therefore more than personal prejudice. It is reproduced through immigration controls, policing, prisons, employment, housing, education and the political nationalism of the ruling class. It can provide workers in an imperialist country with limited relative advantages, while weakening their collective ability to resist exploitation.

The answer is not to ask those facing racism to put their demands aside for the sake of unity. Real unity requires equal political, social and workplace rights for everyone, opposition to immigration controls and organised resistance to racist state violence. Workers from an oppressor group have a particular responsibility to challenge the prejudices and privileges used to tie them to their rulers.

Fascism represents the most extreme organised threat. It seeks to build a mass movement capable of destroying working-class organisation and terrorising oppressed groups. It must be confronted through mass mobilisation, united working-class action and organised self-defence—not by relying on the police or bans imposed by the capitalist state.

Women, the family and social reproduction

Women’s oppression arose with class society, private property and the need to control inheritance. Capitalism transformed the family while preserving its economic role. The family remains a central institution through which children are raised, workers are cared for and labour power is reproduced from one generation to the next.

Much of this domestic and caring work is unpaid and still falls disproportionately on women. Capital therefore receives an enormous subsidy: the daily and generational reproduction of the workforce without paying its full social cost. Women are also concentrated in low-paid caring and service work, face discrimination and violence, and are denied full control over reproduction.

Capitalism pulls women into social production while repeatedly trying to return the costs of care to individual households. This contradiction creates the basis for collective struggle. Socialists fight for equal pay, free universal childcare, properly funded public services, reproductive freedom and the socialisation of domestic and caring work. We support a mass working-class women’s movement capable of fighting both the state and sexism inside the labour movement.

LGBT+ liberation and disability discrimination

The capitalist family is sustained not only by economic pressure but by ideas about acceptable sexuality and gender. Lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans people challenge norms that present one form of family and one division of gender roles as natural and unchanging.

Important legal rights have been won through struggle, but discrimination, violence and attempts to reverse those gains continue. Trans people in particular have become targets for campaigns that seek to divide them from women and the rest of the working class.

Socialists defend full legal and social equality, bodily autonomy and freedom of gender expression. We reject attempts to set women’s and trans liberation against each other. Both require opposition to coercive gender roles, violence, underfunded services and state interference in people’s bodies and personal lives.

Disabled people face a society organised around what employers consider profitable and buildings, transport and services designed without their participation. The problem is not an individual’s impairment but the social barriers that deny people independence and full involvement. An end to this discrimination requires accessible housing, transport and workplaces, properly funded support and services, and the democratic reorganisation of society around human need rather than profitability.

Unity through struggle

Members of the working class do not enter a movement free from the ideas of capitalist society. Racism, sexism and hostility towards LGBT+ and disabled people can be reproduced in trade unions, parties and campaigns. Ignoring this in the name of unity leaves existing inequalities intact and drives oppressed workers away from collective organisation.

Oppressed groups need the right to organise through caucuses and movements, formulate their demands and challenge discrimination within broader working-class organisations. This self-organisation does not have to mean political separation from the class struggle. It can strengthen the whole movement by making it confront divisions that weaken it.

Socialists support struggles against oppression even when their leaders are liberals, nationalists or non-socialists. We seek the broadest united action around concrete demands while retaining the freedom to argue that liberation cannot be completed through representation within capitalist institutions or the advancement of a privileged minority.

Nor can socialists postpone liberation until after a revolution. A movement divided by oppression will not be capable of taking power, and a workers’ state would inherit oppressive practices and ideas from capitalism. The struggle against oppression must transform the workers’ movement before, during and after the socialist revolution.

Liberation and socialism

Socialism would attack the material roots of oppression by abolishing class exploitation, socialising care, ending economic dependence, dismantling borders and placing housing, workplaces and services under democratic control. It could use society’s resources to make equality substantive rather than merely legal.

But no change in property relations can make every prejudice disappear automatically. Oppressed people would continue to require the right to organise and ensure that their demands shape the new society. Human liberation is not a secondary benefit that arrives after socialism. It is part of the process through which the working class becomes capable of creating it.

Key terms

• Exploitation: the extraction of surplus value from wage labour by the capitalist class.
• Oppression: systematic inequality, discrimination or coercion directed against a social group and reproduced through institutions and social relations.
• Racism: a system of oppression developed through slavery, colonialism and imperialism and reproduced through state policy and social institutions.
• Social reproduction: the work and institutions involved in maintaining people and reproducing the workforce, including care and domestic labour.
• Self-organisation: the right of an oppressed group to organise around its own experiences and demands within or alongside a wider movement.
• Fascism: a mass counter-revolutionary movement that seeks to destroy working-class organisation and terrorise oppressed groups.

Read and discuss

For a group session, everyone should read this guide and at least one of the two short introductory readings.

Start here

• Workers Power, O is for Oppression — a short introduction to the distinction and relationship between exploitation and oppression.
• Workers Power, Where we stand: sections 7 and 8 — our principles on racism, borders, fascism, women’s oppression and LGBT+ liberation.

Go deeper

• Workers Power, Marxism and Women’s Liberation — a systematic Marxist account of the origins of women’s oppression, the family and the struggle for liberation.
• Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State — the foundational Marxist attempt to trace the historical relationship between property, the family and women’s oppression.

Questions for discussion

1. Why is it useful to distinguish oppression from exploitation?
2. How does capitalism materially reproduce racism and women’s oppression?
3. Why can formal legal equality coexist with systematic oppression?
4. How can oppression within the working class weaken every worker’s ability to struggle?
5. Why do Marxists support the self-organisation of oppressed groups?
6. What is wrong with both ‘wait until socialism’ and the belief that liberation can be completed without overthrowing capitalism?

Activity: turn formal unity into real unity

Choose a workplace, union or campaign in which one group faces a specific barrier—for example insecure immigration status, inaccessible meetings, harassment, unequal caring responsibilities or discriminatory treatment.

Identify one demand addressing that barrier, one change to how the organisation operates and one form of self-organisation or representation that would enable those affected to shape the struggle. Discuss how these measures would strengthen the whole movement rather than divide it.