| HN Mirror

Using terms 'intuitively' usually means (often unconsciously) including a whole lot of ideological baggage. I actually do disagree with your model of the world; I don't think groups have interests as such, but that individuals have interests, many of which overlap to some degree with similarly situated people who could be said to be part of the same class.

The problem with the Marxist approach to theory (which arguably the fault of Marx's followers as much as himself) is that it over-emphasizes class membership to the point of abrogating individuality. In theoretical discussions,t he experience of people whose experience is more nuanced or at odds with their apparent class status are often dismissed with the claim that the individual has a 'false consciousness' of his or her own situation; While capitalistic (and implicitly, patriarchal) social models do aim to be self-sustaining by promulgating ideology about 'the way things are' and domesticating or even commodifying dissent, the Marxist ideological system can be just as much of a straitjacket, which is one reason for the relatively recent rise of intersectionality theory, with women, ethnic minority groups, sexual minorities and so forth asserting their separate and distinct identities. This is a big reason that left politics seem so fragmented, because each new identity group often plays out similar social dynamics to the one that gave rise to it; so you could say that Marx identified working, middle, and upper economic classes, and that feminists later sought a distinct identity because Marxist theory described some of their issues but ignored a lot of others; in turn black feminists, lesbian feminists, and so on had to carve out their own identities because the main trunk of feminism seemed to be constructed out of white and heteronormative assumptions which ignored distinctly different aspects of their experiences, and so on. Intersectionality theory comes at things from the perspective that people can have membership in multiple classes and that the interests, assumptions, or structures of those classes don't necessarily align neatly.In the context of this discussion, I'm saying that sex work is a lot more complex than just something that negatively affects women as a class, and to to simplify it into such is to marginalize quite a lot of people within the class of sex workers by saying that their experiences and perspectives are irrelevant and should be ignored.

I can't tell whether you mean to reference blackface as just an example of a class issue or to draw an analogy with sex work. If the latter, I think it fails because blackface was about excluding capable performers from the white economic market for entertainment despite the demand for their output, whereas class-based objections to prostitution rest on the argument that any kind of commercial relations involving sexuality are fundamentally exploitative/oppressive and should be forbidden.