Oppressors–oppressed distinction

Oppressors–oppressed distinction or dominant-dominated opposition, is an influential political argument. One of its first uses was by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel in his 1802 The German Constitution, in which he said that "The Catholics had been in the position of oppressors, and the Protestants of the oppressed." Its use by Karl Marx made it very influential, and it is often considered a fundamental element of Marxist analysis. The applications of it to some contexts have led some to consider their simplicity suspicious or dubious. Many authors have reprised it and readapted it to other contexts, including Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, Antonio Gramsci, Simone Weil, Paulo Freire and others. It has been used in a variety of contexts, including bourgeoisie versus proletariat, imperialism versus self-determination, the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, and others.

The theory of oppressor and oppressed nations has been part of Lenin's thought on imperialism, self-determination and criticisms of Social Democrats.

"That is why the focal point in the Social-Democratic programme must be that division of nations into oppressor and oppressed which forms the essence of imperialism, and is deceitfully evaded by the social-chauvinists and Kautsky. This division is not significant from the angle of bourgeois pacifism or the philistine Utopia of peaceful competition among independent nations under capitalism, but it is most significant from the angle of the revolutionary struggle against imperialism"

The political philosopher Kenneth Minogue provides a criticism of the oppressors-oppressed distinction in his work The Pure Theory of Ideology. In the book's introduction, Minogue resumes the problem of the dialectical concept of oppression:

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