3.3 The Core Logic of Oppressionism

The Logic of Endless Mobilisation

From Framework to Logic

Having seen how a new moral framework displaced its rivals and spread through the institutions of culture, we now examine the internal blueprint that gives it coherence and power.

The preceding chapters traced the shift from class-based politics to a moral framework centered on identity and structural oppression, a shift that began in universities and filtered into public discourse. We have seen how this framework took shape in academic theory, how it displaced earlier socialist and liberal traditions, and how it spread through the institutions of culture in ways that were rarely recognized as the arrival of a new ideology.

We now turn to its internal logic. Oppressionism is not a loose collection of activist causes or a temporary political trend. It is a coherent worldview with a consistent account of how power operates, what justice demands, who is entitled to speak with authority, and where moral responsibility rests. Its claims reinforce one another, forming a portable structure that can be applied to almost any domain of life.

This chapter traces that internal blueprint. It identifies the principles that give the ideology coherence and the mechanisms that allow it to adapt, embed itself in institutions, and continually renew its moral urgency by reframing issues and expanding its reach. In doing so, it shows how a set of academic concepts became a moral-political system capable of shaping culture without needing a party, a leader, or even a name.

Power as the Primary Reality

Oppressionism begins with the claim that all human relations are structured by domination and subordination, a view rooted in post-structuralist critiques of liberal neutrality. There is no neutral ground. Even apparently voluntary exchanges take place within an unequal field of power that sets the terms, shapes expectations, and determines outcomes. As Michel Foucault argued in The History of Sexuality (1976), “Power is everywhere… because it comes from everywhere”, operating at the most local and everyday levels of life. Power is not a substance to be possessed or a resource to be withdrawn. It is a shifting web of relations, what Foucault described as “capillary” in nature, that organizes and directs every social interaction.

This power is systemic. It is embedded in laws, norms, cultural practices, and language. Pierre Bourdieu described this embedding as habitus in Outline of a Theory of Practice (1972) and as symbolic power in Language and Symbolic Power (1991): the deeply internalized dispositions that make domination feel natural. It operates as much through what is taken for granted as through overt rules and coercion. Stability, in this view, is not the product of consensus but the sign that domination has been normalized, rendered invisible, and accepted as natural. Antonio Gramsci, in Selections from the Prison Notebooks (1971), called this hegemony, the capacity of a ruling group to make its worldview appear as common sense so that resistance feels unnecessary or even unthinkable.

A familiar analogy is that of a fish in water. The fish does not notice the water until it is removed from it. Likewise, people often do not see the power structures they inhabit until those structures are disrupted or exposed. In the logic of Oppressionism, power is the water of social life: omnipresent, sustaining or constraining, and shaping movement even when unseen, a metaphor often invoked in sociological analyses of structural inequality.

From this starting point, the central moral question is never whether power exists, but who holds it, who is subject to it, and how it is distributed. Power is not morally neutral. The primary ethical test for any action is whether it dismantles or sustains existing structures of domination. As Iris Marion Young argued in Justice and the Politics of Difference (1990), injustice is not only about the distribution of resources but about “the institutional context that determines the conditions of people’s lives”, a formulation that shifts the focus from individual acts to systemic arrangements.

This perspective carries immediate implications. It leaves no room for the idea that power is confined to formal authority or specific institutions, that constitutional arrangements can fully contain it, or that any part of life can exist outside its reach. Once adopted, it casts suspicion on claims of neutrality, requires scrutiny of all relationships for hidden domination, and treats disengagement as a moral failure. As Steven Lukes argued in Power: A Radical View (1974), power can operate by shaping preferences and perceptions, making resistance seem unnecessary. In the logic of Oppressionism, there is no private sphere beyond power, no refuge in personal neutrality, and no innocence in inaction.