What is "Special Oppression?"
What does CPUSA mean by "special oppression"?
Lenin correctly identified how the bourgeoisie uses national oppression to create a super-exploited stratum of the working class, foster a labor aristocracy, and shatter internationalist solidarity. The CPUSA Program analyzes that in the U.S. empire, this same logic is applied beyond nationality to other key social divisions. Thus, special oppression is the theoretical framework that explains how the capitalist system systematically extends the model of oppression to target people based on their sex, race, nationality, and other characteristics, creating distinct, super-exploited sections of the working class.
Just as national oppression generates super-profits from a nationally oppressed workforce, the special oppression of women, through systemic male supremacy, ensures a deeply exploited gendered stratum, burdened by both wage discrimination and unpaid domestic labor. The special oppression of Black people, rooted in slavery but maintained by modern institutional racism, functions with the core characteristics of a national question and works to actively stifle that development, creating another racially defined stratum for super-exploitation. These systems are not parallel tracks, they interlock, deviate, and fuse together into a unified structure of settler-colonial capitalist rule. Their shared, counter-revolutionary purpose is to prevent the unity of the multi-racial, multi-national, gender-diverse working class by ideologically poisoning it with white chauvinism, male chauvinism, and national narrow-mindedness.
Therefore, the struggle against every form of special oppression is, like the struggle against national oppression, not a separate endeavor but a central and revolutionary component of the class struggle itself. For our Party, to be the vanguard means to be the most consistent and active fighter against all these interlocking forms of oppression, understanding that this fight is the essential process for forging the real unity of the working class required to overthrow capitalism.
The Party's approach is not to mechanistically apply the concept of self-determination to all forms of special oppression, but to apply the underlying revolutionary democratic principle that it embodies: the right of oppressed peoples to lead their own struggles. For the oppressed nations, this means actively supporting their concrete right to national self-determination. For other specially oppressed groups who are not nations, it means steadfastly supporting their leadership and organization, autonomy, self-organization, or any other self-realized demands.
We understand that by supporting the organization and self-determination of the specially oppressed, we are not dividing the class, we are strengthening it. We are dismantling the pillars of bourgeois rule by forging a genuine, conscious unity.