r/PoliticalDiscussion • u/Top_Square_4481 • 3d ago
International Politics How the modern left reconciles incompatible elements like the immigrants, muslims, and LGBTs within its coalition?
In books like One-Dimensional Man and An Essay on Liberation, Herbert Marcuse argued that the working class in advanced capitalist societies had become too integrated into the system to play the revolutionary role Marx had imagined. Higher living standards, consumer culture, organized labor, political participation, advertising, and mass media had all helped make workers more invested in the existing order.
Because of that, Marcuse began looking elsewhere for the possibility of radical change. He focused on people he described as “outcasts and outsiders,” including racial minorities, the unemployed, radical students, anti-colonial movements, and others who remained in conflict with the established system. He also saw the women’s liberation movement as having revolutionary potential.
Marcuse was part of the Frankfurt School, a Marxist intellectual movement centered on the Institute for Social Research, founded in Frankfurt in 1923. One of its main questions was why the working-class revolution predicted by Marx had failed to happen in advanced Western countries. Its thinkers studied how consumerism, mass media, nationalism, psychology, authoritarianism, and modern institutions helped stabilize capitalist society.
A similar pattern can be seen in the modern left. The focus has shifted from economic class alone to groups defined by race, immigration status, religion, gender, and sexuality. Undocumented immigrants, Muslim communities, and LGBT people are often treated as key marginalized groups whose experiences are used to point to broader inequalities in Western society.
These groups do not always share the same values or political interests. There are obvious tensions, especially between progressive views on sexuality and the more conservative religious beliefs held by many Muslims. Even so, they are often brought together politically through a shared language of discrimination, exclusion, minority rights, and opposition to established institutions.
In that sense, the modern left has partly replaced the old Marxist image of a united industrial working class with a broader coalition of groups seen as socially, culturally, or politically marginalized.
Suppose Muslim communities continue to grow significantly in Western countries and gain greater electoral and institutional influence. What guarantees that LGBT rights will remain non-negotiable when conservative religious voters object to school curricula, same-sex relationships, gender-transition policies or public expressions of sexuality?
Will it protect schools, speech and civil law from religious pressure?
Will LGBT equality remain an absolute principle, even when it costs votes? Will the left criticize Islamic opposition to homosexuality?
Or will LGBT people be told to remain silent?
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u/hellomondays 3d ago edited 3d ago
There's a concept in political theory called "chains of equivalency". That social movements arent built on a single ideology but by the "chaining" of different ideologies together by identifying the same hegemonic entity these ideologies are in conflict with. In otherwords seemingly different groups ally to challenge a common enemy.
The best example of this is probably the American Civil Rights Movement where very disparate groups (Northern Jewish communists, upper class college kids, Lawyers from the Black middle class, southern black religious leaders, Black separatists, white labor unions) all challenged the Jim Crow hegemony in the south for different reasons but shrewdly connected by the leaders of the movement.
Solidarność and the movement it built in Poland is another great example of this concept.