the problem with these people is that they are hard-wired to see the world as a battle between classes.
trans and LGBTQ or race is not a class though.
Classism comes as divide that existed in the past.
For instance from a world where ordinary people could not look at rich people, or speak to them unless they were spoken to.
We don't really live in that world socially exactly as before.
it was the academic frameworks of the critical-theory pioneers (later to be known as the "fathers of the New Left") that extended Marxian prolitariat/capitalist class struggle into a wider range of groups.
This post interested me. So I looked up the
Frankfurt School. From what I read, they were Marxists in the 1920s who were dissatisfied with the political & economic theories of the time, i.e. capitalism, communism and fascism. Basically, they wanted to change the world to make it better, but found that their Marxist ideas were not working.
So they became disillusioned with relying on classical Marxism. So they switched to studying the works of those that Marx's works were based on, people like Hegel, Kant, and Max Weber, and Marx's own works, in order to understand Marxism better.
And they did that for a very specific reason - namely that the historical reality of the 20th century was a major blow to the idea of the prolitariat as a revolutionary force.
Well, it was a major blow to the Positivists, because Marx's approach of dialectical materialism was about studying history by measuring material value. Capitalism wasn't exactly helping the poor, the weak and the oppressed. But communism wasn't making the poor materially wealthier, and fascism was making some materially wealthier at the cost of others.
Since Positivism was all about figuring things out by empirical measures, and Marx's material judgements were empirical measures, they couldn't exactly argue that Marx was wrong.
However, Marx's own theory of dialectical materialism predicted this, because the political factionalism and reactionary politics had happened many times before in history, such as in the Wars of the Roses and the English Civil War.
Those times also had solutions, as those crises came to an end as well. But that would have required learning from the past, and they were Modernists, and Modernists believed that you didn't need to understand the past to embrace the present and the future.
Instead, they embraced their Will to Power, which was to have a nice life by being academics that read books and told their students what those books meant.
So they studied the works of the popular contemporary writers of the time: Marx, Hegel, Kant, Weber, and a few others, and developed their ideas from their theories, without concern for any requirement to ensure that their ideas matched reality, like academics who kept their jobs by evading trying to critique their own ideas and point out when their own theories were disproved by real life.
During the 1930s the Frankfurt-school academics realized that the working class could no longer serve as the focal point of social change, so they instead shifted focus to more general social "superstructures".
Marx was based on Hegel. Hegel was trying to achieve a "unity of opposites" of Kant's Categories. Kant's Categories were abstract super-structures. So it would be tempting to assume that they meant a unified monolithic theory of social super-structures like "sexuality" and "morality".
However, Hegel developed dialecticism, which is about living with 2 logical opposites that cannot be reconciled, that you need both of. The essence of it is "when in Italy, speak Italian. When in France, speak French. When at a wedding, be happy. When at a funeral, be sad." So it's the Western version of Taoism.
Kant's Categorical Imperative is understood better in light of the example of "the murderer at the door". If you lie to the murderer that his intended victim is not in your home, then you've sanctioned lying. What happens now? Then a murderer may come to your home claiming to be seeking asylum from evil police who intend to kill him. You send the police away. They catch the murderer later. But in the meantime, he has killed 10 more people. You saved one life by your lies, but caused 10 more to be killed. Is humanity really better off?
So when you think deeply about Hegel and Kant, the ideas of the Frankfurt School don't seem so noble or rational.
there's also a specific reason why groupings related to sexuality play such a big role in this new class-struggle theory; namely that in order to go into this wider framework of societal superstructures they married Marxian ideas with psychoanalysis. And as we all know Freud was obsessed with sexual stuff. This eventually resulted in works like Marcuse's "Eros and Civlization", which have reverberated through history and to this day drive progressivist obsession with gender, homosexuality, transsexuality etc.
Yes, Freud was interested in the libido.
But when his therapy worked, it worked in such ways that meant that sexuality was coincidental to the treatment. E.G. in psychoanalysis, the emphasis is that the treatment comes through the patient being made to perform his/her own analysis of the patient's prior experiences that resulted in the dysfunction.
one interesting question which i have thought about - without having a definitive answer - is why these ideas re-emerged which such force during the last decade or so.
Simple. After the fall of the U.S.S.R., the Western left cheered, as now we could all live in a world of optimism and liberal freedoms.
The New Left wanted to offer all African-Americans the opportunity to own their own home. But they didn't have the money in the budget. Alan Greenspan, the head of the Federal Reserve at the time, suggested to President Clinton that he could do a deal with Wall Street: Wall Street would give poor African-Americans mortgages, in return for the repealing of the Glass-Steagall Act, which freed banks to invest in the stock market. Sounded like a win-win-win.
By 2008, millions defaulted on their mortgages, bursting a massive financial bubble, and causing a global financial meltdown on a scale last seen in the Crash of 1929 that brought about World War 2. No-one trusted the banks anymore, not even the bankers themselves. The world moved on. But no solutions were provided. Ever since then, chaos has reigned.
The continuing lack of trust in the financial systems to provide a decent income for people, has made a lot of working-class people feel that the left-wing cannot be relied upon to stop the rot, and so many have turned to right-wing groups.
The neo-liberal solution to the situation has been to redefine the right-wing from laissez-faire capitalists to authoritarian fascists, and to blame all the problems of current situation on racism, sexism and homophobia from alt-right fascists.
Thus, for the left-wing to justify that position, they have to take the opposite stance, and push for greater anti-racism, greater anti-sexism, i.e. greater feminism, and greater anti-homophobia, i.e. pushing for more and more LGBT rights.
But then the minute that the New Left find a solution to the issues of racism, sexism and homophobia, then the world will start wondering why the economy is STILL in deep doo-doo, and thus will start realising that the New Left don't have any real-life solutions to the major real-life problems of society.
My working theory is that it was a combination of several things; 1) a higher-education "bubble" which drove masses of millennials into social-sciences studies with the resulting exposure to these theories, 2) an extremization of the left due to Trump, 3) a latch-on effect from the me-too situation around 2017, 4) emergence of social media (where moral outrage is the main currency)
These are all good answers.
Ultimately, though, they are consistent with my answer above: blame the right-wing for the problems of society, and justify that, by pushing harder for more of the things that the New Left were pushing for before.
It's making all these issues into bubbles, as they don't deal with the inherent economic problems that need to be resolved in order to make these bubbles viable.
So it's only a matter of time until someone has to do the accounting for each of these issues, and reveals that these things cannot work until the economic issues have been resolved. Once that happens, each of these bubbles will burst in the same ways as the housing bubble burst, and then confidence for the New Left to resolve these issues in the future will dissipate.
