One of the main reasons that liberal discussions of privilege and oppression typically ignore class is because it is easier to pull apart how it is artificial and maintained intentionally. It’s really obvious how rich people could rid themselves of major aspects of their privilege-redistribute wealth, give power and control back to workers and communities. So it’s harder for rich people to play the “I can’t help being rich, there’s nothing I can do about my privilege except play the ‘let’s all get along’ card”.
Even though, in reality, all forms of oppression involve the privileged actively holding onto power and involve an entire exploitative system. For example, men absolutely do benefit from sexism and oppression of women, and very few actively try to eliminate male privilege and sexism. But it’s common for men to use the fact that “being a man” is in itself a neutral thing to obscure the fact that the entire social system built around sexism and oppressive notions of what it means to be men/women exists to oppress women and exploit women’s labor.
And that’s less easy to obscure with class, though liberals sure do try. Because what makes someone rich other than wealth, assets, control, social connections? It’s pretty blatantly absurd to pretend like “wealth” is some sort of inherent condition and the only problem is ideas around it. Every -ism of societal oppression is institutionalized, involves exploitation, and is given meaning by that system. This is part of what Black scholars mean when they talk about white people vs Whiteness.
Wealth though, isn’t skin color, gender, sexuality, etc.-it’s really easy to make the more direct connections.
Any real in depth analysis of class, of classism, requires an admission that oppression is institutional and that “just all speak nicely to each other” could never be an adequate solution.
Which is one of my big problems with the insistence that using a term like classism is a liberal move obscuring exploitation and capitalism because capitalist oppression is institutionalized. All oppressive systems are. Racism, ableism, sexism, heterosexism, cissexism, etc. are also all institutionalized and not solvable without systematic changes. Do you think racism does not materially benefit white people and materially harm people of color? Do you think sexism is just about “hate” and not exploitation of women’s labor? Do you think modern capitalism could ever have existed without colonialism? Thinking that any type of oppression would be ended by niceties and not systematic reform is buying into liberal views of oppression rather than doing material analysis of oppressive systems.