What you are advocating is victim blaming. A very dangerous practice that is usually done by those committing the crimes, or by those priveledged few who has never been in a position where they didn’t have control over the situation.
That you use the term “True, there is a slim chance that that particular individual has tried to better themselves”, makes me think that you have no idea of how it is to live in a difficult situation.

The problem with oppression is that the majority group is almost always the middle one. Those that are neither oppressors or directly oppressed -the so called silent majority. In the case of capitalism, this is the Middle Class, and upper Working Class. People who live comfortably, and don’t want to “rock the boat”. It’s the silence of these people who perpetrates an oppressive system.
Those who are really oppressed usually are too busy surviving on a day to day basis to start any kind of rebellion. It’s the ones living comfortably who have the time, and power, to fight the oppressors, but they usually just sit on their ass and do nothing. Either ignoring the problem altogether, or turning to victim blaming so they don’t have to face the fact that oppression is going on.

Weirdmage: See, I agree with everything you say and I still find the opening statement poisonous. It is indeed NOT OK (in my view) to simply blame people in a generic way for not trying hard enough. But does that mean we shouldn’t write and tell and read stories of exceptional people, both real and fictional, who, through extraordinary effort and belief DO rise above what for most of us would be insurmountable circumstances? I think not. I’ll keep my stories of a selfish and elitist systems being crushed by their own short-sighted biogtry, but I’ll keep my stories of people whose tireless efforts to change or overthrow them – or merely to better themselves – meet with some (perhaps unlikely) success too. Inspiration and hope are powerful things.

I agree with this. This is the same thing that is happening with social security in the US. The people who say it isn’t needed are basically saying that “if you weren’t so lazy, and had applied yourself you wouldn’t be poor, and you shouldn’t expect the people who make an effort to pay for your laziness”. This is of course in most cases a false statement. So yes, I see that way of thinking as a way of suppressing individuals and giving them the blame for circumstances they have no control over.

This doesn’t mean that people should not try to overcome their circumstances. But we must be realistic enough to know that many will not succeed, and in those cases blaming the individual is giving up on changing the way society works. Ignoring that our capitalistic society is built on many people working long hours and still only barely making enough money to get by, is in fact itself a failure to try to achieve something better as a society.

The ultimate tool of capitalist oppression is blaming the individual instead of the system. Not everyone can be a millionaire business owner, someone has to get payed less than they contribute for those at the top to get rich.

I completely agree that you should shoot for the moon as often as you can, and my argument is that most people will not follow their philosophy, and their life will suck not because they are incapable of improving it, but because they didn’t try. Therefore, holding the individual responsible for their exploitation is not necessarily a bad thing, as in the most case you will be right, and it is in fact that individual’s fault.