The Ideological Vacuum
Oppressionism emerged from the ideological vacuum created when the Cold War ended and communism collapsed around 1991. The West had triumphed not only militarily and economically but also morally, convincing itself that history had reached a final stage. Without an external opponent, liberal democracy lacked a counterforce that could test, refine, or restrain it. Political life lost its generative force of ideological opposition, and the idea of progress was redirected inward. This absence of tension created the conditions for a new moral ideology to take root.
The Moral Legacy
Although communism disintegrated as a state system, its moral architecture survived. The narrative that divided humanity into oppressors and oppressed remained compelling, because it offered both purpose and clarity in an increasingly complex world. In Western societies that had already absorbed many socialist values through social democracy, the old moral grammar easily found new hosts. Activists, academics, and policymakers began to reinterpret inequality not in terms of production and ownership but in terms of recognition and identity. What had once been an economic critique of power became a moral one.
The Shift to Identity
The decisive mutation occurred when class was replaced by identity as the central axis of justice. The post-industrial economies of the West no longer supported a coherent working-class movement, but moral energy still required an object. Race, gender, and sexuality became the new categories through which injustice was perceived and moral authority asserted. This shift allowed moral politics to flourish in affluent societies by focusing on representation, emotion, and harm rather than on material deprivation. The result was a new hierarchy of virtue that transformed progressive politics into a moral rather than economic project.
The Incubator and Blueprint
This new worldview incubated in universities, particularly within the humanities and social sciences, where many intellectuals sought continuity after the decline of Marxist politics. Academic theorists combined the critical tools of Marxism with the linguistic and cultural focus of postmodernism and structuralism. They argued that power operated not only through institutions but also through language, symbolism, and social norms. Antonio Gramsci’s idea of a “war of position” provided the strategy: change the culture, and the institutions will follow. Universities became laboratories for this gradual cultural revolution, producing both the language and the moral logic that would later spread across media, business, and government.
The Method of Spread
Oppressionism is not Marxism reborn but its moral successor. It spreads not through manifestos or revolutionary parties but through the quiet power of norms, policies, and language. Its strength lies in its ability to inhabit liberal ideals such as justice, equality, and inclusion, and to subtly redefine them from within. Bureaucracies, corporations, and cultural institutions adopted its vocabulary in the name of progress, often without recognizing the underlying shift in meaning. By the time it acquired a name, its assumptions were already embedded across society. Its anonymity was its greatest protection and the secret of its early success.