The World Federation of Trade Unions May Day Declaration---May Day Is Our Day!

The World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU) in the name of its more than 92 million affiliates all over the world salutes, on the occasion of this great day, all the workers who live, work and struggle in every corner of the world. May Day was, is and will be a beacon for the struggles of yesterday and tomorrow despite our enemies’ efforts. May Day has to be a message of resistance against bourgeoisie, imperialists and their international alliances’ policies.

At the same time, the workers’ blood which was shed in Chicago on 1886 reminds us of our duty today; it reminds us that nothing is given for free; every right or freedom that was conquered by our class has been won through sacrifices, conflicts and organized struggles.

Today, whilst technology and scientific progress have contributed to the increase of the produced social wealth, our class’ living conditions have been deteriorating. In every capitalist country, the bosses attack our class achievements: they are sweeping through salaries, pensions and social security; they are privatizing everything, they don’t hesitate to attack even the sacred right to strike! Strike is the most powerful weapon we have in our hands and we are not going to allow anyone to limit, confine or convert it to a dead letter!

At the same time, they are intensively preparing and conducting regional wars.They pave the way for new massacres that will maximize their profits, for new imperialist interventions that will destroy nations, spill peoples’ blood and deprive them of their natural resources. The ongoing imperialist intervention in Libya and Syria, the growing aggression against Venezuela, the US decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, the massacre of Saudi Arabia against Yemen, the tension on the Korean peninsula, they are all indications that multinationals have smelled new profitability areas; and every time this goes through the dead bodies of workers.

Under the current conditions of the deep economic crisis of capitalism and intense competition among various imperialist centers to control new markets, our most powerful weapons are INTERNATIONALISM and SOLIDARITY. No worker must feel alone. All together, we must move on with Solidarity and Internationalism, building the Unity of the working class to give practical effect to Karl Marx’s motto “proletarians of all countries unite”.

In this context, and on this anniversary, the WFTU expresses its solidarity with our persecuted brothers, the immigrants and refugees, who either because of imperialists’ bullets or because of poverty and misery generated by this system, are forced to leave their homeland. The WFTU will continue to be on their side, fighting for a world without exploitation and refugees. Immigrants must become an integral part of unions, unite with local workers and fight together for wages, rights, against wars and interventions.

We join our voice with the heroic Palestinian people in order to gain their own independent and democratic homeland.

At the same time, we stand by the side of the struggling female worker, the one who suffers from double exploitation. The WFTU female members, at the recent World Women’s Congress in Panama, declared loud and clear that they want equal rights to work, society and life. The WFTU also fights and will continue to fight for this equality. It’s the same orientation that we follow for the the youngsters, as the new generation of workers have the task to honor the best May Day struggle traditions.

This year, the WFTU, by giving its hand to anyone who has stood up, has announced the year of trade union education and training. Our purpose is that the new shifts of workers be insubordinate, militant, enemies of class compromise and collaboration. We honor the year of trade union training and we call on every union to contribute to the militant truth, revealing the true meaning of May Day and the sacrifices the working class made for it. By rescuing the past, the very memory of our movement, we leave a legacy for tomorrow’s struggles and we also have a tool for the future. It is a duty to know the history of our movement.

The WFTU takes steps forward, strengthens and grows: and that’s what frightens our opponents. There is no other way than to make it present everywhere, in every corner of the world, so that there is no longer a hungry, dismissed, hunted or persecuted worker. The WFTU must be a “trench” of struggle for a future without exploitation of man by man. This is how the vision of the first Secretary General of the WFTU, Luis Saillant, envisioned in 1945 will be brought to life: “The WFTU for the workers of the whole world!”

LONG LIVE MAY DAY!

From Mexico

From the Partido Comunista de Mexico.

Four May Day comments and declarations from Cuba---May Day Is Our Day!

The following comments and declarations are from Granma:

On November 18, 1959, Fidel stated "… Given its power, given its triumph since January 1, May Day has become a powerful factor, decisive in the political life of the country, because, with the general strike called with the Rebel Army, it was the working class that delivered the final blow to plans to snatch the people's victory at the last moment, as they had done on other occasions ..."

And on April 30, 2009, "We hope that every May Day, thousands of men and women from all corners of the planet share International Workers day with us… Not in vain, long before January 1, 1959, we proclaimed that our Revolution would be a Revolution of the humble, by the humble, and for the humble. The successes of our homeland in the spheres of education, health, science, culture, and others, and especially in the unity of the people, are being demonstrated, despite the ruthless blockade."

And...

"… Given its power, given its triumph since January 1, May Day has become a powerful factor, decisive in the political life of the country, because, with the general strike called with the Rebel Army, it was the working class that delivered the final blow to those plans to snatch the people's victory at the last moment, as they had done on other occasions ..."---Fidel Castro

The following article from Granma has the headline "Honoring working class heroes":

Men and women who have devoted their lives for the benefit of society were awarded the honorary title of Heroes and Heroines of Labor of the Republic of Cuba, presented by José Ramón Machado Ventura, second secretary of the Party Central Committee.

A dozen men and three women were presented this Sunday, April 29, with the honorific title of Heroes and Heroines of Labor of the Republic of Cuba, by José Ramón Machado Ventura, second secretary of the Party Central Committee.

The workers we award today summarize an almost anonymous labor of dedication, integrity and altruism, seeking to exalt the homeland, stated Consuelo Baeza Martín, member of the secretariat of the Cuban Workers’ Federation (CTC), during the ceremony held at the Laguito Protocol Hall, in the capital.

It is our duty to recognize those who have spent their lives producing, serving and creating, she added.

Among those awarded was Sarat Martín Iglesias, who has worked in the selection of tobacco leaves in the 13-18 Basic Unit of Cooperative Production (UBPC), in Pinar del Río, for 45 years. “This title is the fruit of sacrifice,” she noted, “and it has given me more strength to continue working and working for as long as I can.”

“I have dedicated my life to harvesting coffee. 12 or 15 cans a day,” noted Alexis Guevara Sosa, of the Manuel Sánchez López UBPC, in Guantánamo. “And while I am healthy, I will continue working for my country,” he added.

Meanwhile, Ramón León Monteagudo, an agricultural worker from Villa Clara stressed: “This is the biggest thing that has happened to me in the 50 years I’ve been working. And it is the greatest thing that can happen to any worker.”

Also receiving the recognition were José Rubiera Torres, senior specialist in Meteorology; Eduardo Lozada León, head specialist of special works of the FAR Military Projects and Investigations Enterprise; Ricardo García Acosta, a driver at the Jagüey Grande School Bus Station; Valerio Hernández Pérez, a mechanic from Villa Clara; Juan López Palacio, professor of the Las Villas Central University; Rolando Jiménez Valdivia, a taxi driver in Sancti Spíritus; Francisco Rafael Martínez, typography inspector in Las Tunas; Salvadora López Riera, of the Sea Industry Basic Enterprise Unit in Granma; and the Guantánamo residents Anselma Betancourt Pulsan, professor at the Faculty of Medical Sciences, and Carlos Veranes Michel, a crane operator.

Ten workers also received the Lázaro Peña Order in the First Degree; a further 18 received the same Order in the Second Degree; and 16 received the Order in the Third Degree. Meanwhile, three workers were awarded the Jesús Menéndez Medal.

Likewise, the workers of the Architecture Projects Enterprise of Matanzas received the Lázaro Peña Order in the Second Degree; and those of the Felipe Herrera Arcia UBPC, the Agribusiness, Forestry and Tobacco Workers Union of Artemisa, the Sergio Soto Valdés Refinery, and the Sancti Spíritus Energy and Mines Union, were presented with the Jesús Menéndez Medal.

The event was attended by members of the Party Political Bureau Salvador Valdés Mesa, first vice president of the Councils of State and Ministers; Ulises Guilarte de Nacimiento, secretary general of the CTC; Roberto Morales Ojeda, a vice president of the State Council and Minister of Public Health; and Teresa Amarelle Boué, secretary general of the Federation of Cuban Women.

And...

This May Day the Cuban people will lead a massive, vibrant, joyful, and conscious march reaffirming to the world the commitment of the island’s workers to the new government, Raúl, and the Party.

This, according to Ulises Guilarte de Nacimiento, a member of the Party Political Bureau and secretary general of the Cuban Workers’ Federation (CTC), who added that “In order to talk about the impact of the Cuban Revolution, we must, of course, talk about its workers movement.”

Speaking during a press conference held Monday, April 23, Guilarte de Nacimiento noted that the traditional march will be an opportunity to honor Fidel, express support for the updating of the country’s socio-economic model of socialist development, and send a message of solidarity to trade union friends worldwide.

According to the Cuban official, “Unity, Commitment, and Victory,” will be the main slogan of the event set to be led by the Education, Science, and Sport Trade Union, with phrases such as “May Day: commitment to the Homeland,” “In Cuba, a single Revolution,” and “80 years of principles,” also featuring on banners.

Guilarte de Nacimiento added that this year workers are being called upon to “Exploit productive reserves; reaffirm our responsibility to the working class by generating the wealth needed by our people; substitute imports and consolidate exports, in order to turn the complex economic situation currently facing the country, into productive victories.”--Jesús Jank Curbelo

May Day Is Our Day!---Second Posting

We continue our postings of May Day declarations.  Posting here does not indicate full agreement with all of the views expressed or with all of the organizations highlighted.  

1. The Communist Party of Turkey (TKP) and the Communist Party of Greece (KKE), on the event of International Workers’ Day 2018, send warm militant greetings to the working class, the peoples of both countries and our region, and we call upon them to strengthen their common struggle against the bourgeois governments and the anti-people policies, capital and its power, to massively condemn imperialist wars and to develop the struggle for the overthrow of capitalist barbarism, for socialism, which is the future of the peoples.

2. The KKE and the TKP struggle for labour, popular interests, rely on proletarian internationalism, international solidarity, and with these principles face the complex developments in our region.

The contradictions and competitions around the wealth-producing resources, energy pipelines, the conquest of markets and the control of strategically important areas, penetrate the imperialist system and are strongly manifested in our region forming the basis for the "hot spots", imperialist interventions and wars such as those in Syria, Libya, Iraq.

The USA, Russia, China, Germany, France, Britain and other EU Member States are leading the competition, involving a large number of capitalist states, including Turkey and Greece, in order to promote the interests of the bourgeoisie.

Both cooperation and competition between the bourgeoisie of Turkey and Greece serve their own interests and have nothing to do with the interests of the peoples.

3. The KKE and the TKP condemn the anti-popular policy of the bourgeois governments of both countries, the repression, the persecutions against the Communist Party and the Communist Youth of Turkey, the anti-communism that is used in our countries as a "tool" for promoting anti-popular policies.

4. Our parties express their deep concern about the developments in the Aegean and the Eastern Mediterranean and oppose any increase in hostilities and warfare. We express our opposition to border violations in the Aegean and the controversy over the international treaties that have established the borders in the region.

The KKE and the TKP support the position of not changing the borders and the treaties that define them and struggle for the disengagement of the two countries from imperialist plans, the return of military forces from NATO and other imperialist missions abroad, and demand NATO to withdraw from the Aegean Sea.

The peoples of Turkey and Greece have nothing that divides them and have an interest in demanding to live peacefully and to fight for their own future, to abolish exploitation of man by man.

5. Experience has shown that the two countries' participation in NATO and the expansion of this imperialist military center in the region is directed against the peoples and Peace and both CPs will continue their struggle for the disengagement of our countries from NATO.

6.The EU is a transnational association of capital and is constantly becoming more dangerous to the popular interests. Our parties are opposed to the integration of new countries in the EU, such as Turkey, and we support the right of each people to struggle for disengagement from this imperialist union, a goal for which the KKE has struggled consistently over time.

7. The KKE and the TKP condemn once again the imperialist wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and the 7-year bloody imperialist war conducted by the USA, NATO and the powerful EU states against the Syrian people, in competition with Russia and Iran, which has cost hundreds of thousands of dead and millions of refugees.

We condemn the imperialist attack (April 14th) of the USA, France and Britain, together with the support of NATO and the EU, against Syria with the pretext of the use of chemicals by the Syrian army. We express our international solidarity with the Syrian people. We continue the antiwar, anti-imperialist struggle and greet the popular mobilizations against the imperialist attack.

Our parties have denounced the imperialist pretexts about the confrontation of terrorism and have revealed that the criminal organization “Islamic State” and other similar organizations were created, funded and trained by the USA and their allies to promote imperialist projects in the region.

Our parties denounce the presence of Turkish military forces in Northern Syria and demand the immediate withdrawal of all foreign troops from Syria, supporting that developments in this country - as in every country - are a matter of its own people.

The Kurdish issue cannot be resolved for the benefit of the peoples of the region with the assistance of the USA, NATO and the EU on the basis of their own aspirations. The rights of the Kurdish population and the settlement of the Kurdish issue for the benefit of the peoples of the region are linked to the common struggle of the peoples of the region, the development of consistent anti-imperialist action, the struggle for workers’ power.

The TKP and the KKE are against the incitement of minority, real and non-existent issues, the rise in irredentism used to change the borders, and we call upon the communists of the region to take the lead against imperialist plans, nationalism and any “Great Idea” plans.

8. The KKE and the TKP express their solidarity with the Cypriot people, Turkish Cypriots and Greek Cypriots, and support a just and viable solution to the Cyprus Issue, with the withdrawal of the occupiers and all foreign troops, for an independent Cyprus with one sovereignty, one citizenship and an international personality, without foreign bases and troops, a common homeland for Turkish Cypriots, Greek Cypriots, Latins, Armenians and Maronites, without foreign guarantors and patrons.

9. Our parties express their solidarity with the people of Palestine which is struggling against Israeli occupation.

They condemn the provocative position of the USA that recognizes Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and the unacceptable attitude of the EU that identifies the "perpetrator" with the "victim". Our parties support the recognition of an independent, sovereign Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital, on the borders of 1967.

10. The TKP and the KKE cooperate in the theoretical journal "International Communist Review", the "European Communist Initiative", the International and Regional Communist and Workers’ Parties meetings and, together with other Communist parties, will continue the effort to strengthen the unity and the struggle of the communist movement for its revolutionary regroupment.

Our parties address the peoples of the two countries, the peoples of the region, and we call upon them to strengthen the struggle against the exploitative system which generates crises, unemployment, poverty, refugees, educational-cultural degradation, interventions and imperialist wars. To strengthen the efforts for the class unity of the working class, the social alliance with the oppressed by the monopoly popular strata, to develop the class struggle, the struggle for the workers' power, for socialism, which in our day is more timely and necessary than ever.

April 2018
Communist Party of Turkey (TKP)
Communist Party of Greece (KKE)

May Day Is Our Day!

May Day is Tuesday. Salem's Statesman Journal newspaper points out today that this traditional day of international working-class solidarity has been refashioned to include other issues as well, but I disagree. Any issue or cause which concerns the world's working-class should get a hearing on May 1, and all workers should debate the issues, challenge capitalist hegemony, show unity, take action, and resolve with passion and joy and determintion to fight back and build a better world on May Day. What we want to avoid are sterile debates and a focus on one issue or another, and what we want to chisel in stone and remember is the big picture of how capitalism oppresses and exploits us and that another and better world is possible. May Day is our day---and so is March 8 (International Working Womens Day) and November 7 (Revolution Day) and July 26 (Cuban Revolution Day) and many other days as well.

A disappointing number of youth activists do not know the history of May Day, its origins in the United States and among immigrant workers here, or all that has happened the world over as May Day strikes and protests have erupted over the years and have often been met with repression. And there is little recognition that May Day is an official holiday for much of the world, but not in the US where it began, and that many heroic socialist governments marked the day by celebrating their considerable achievements. Readers can go here and here to begin reading all abouit it.   

We post below a May Day declaration from the International Conference of Marxist-Leninist Parties and Organisations (CIPOML). We will post other declarations as well in order to show unity and in order to show a diversity of thought in our part of the world's revolutionary political spectrum.

  

To all workers, working people, oppressed nations, brothers and sisters,

May Day is approaching, the international day of unity, struggle and solidarity of the working class, the day when we raise our demands on the streets against capitalist exploitation and imperialist aggression.

Unfortunately, we cannot talk of many positive changes in our lives since last May Day. We work more in the factories, workplaces and fields but our wages have not increased, nor have our working and living conditions improved. Many of us struggle to make ends meet. More of us become unemployed for longer periods. Our retirement ages are being raised but not our pensions. We do not have much time for leisure or holiday. Fellow women workers do not have equal rights as men in this capitalist system which has taken over patriarchal hegemony from previous systems of exploitation. They cannot find employment easily in every sector, nor can they get equal pay. Violence against women, economic and political repression and discrimination is on the rise, let alone decreasing. The motto “future belongs to the youth” is, in practice, no more than empty words for the bourgeoisie. Young people who have to start working from a young age instead of going to school are in fear of their future.

In many countries, including the ‘democratic’ ones, political reactionarism and the tendency towards fascism is on the rise, so is racism, chauvinism and the extreme right wing parties. Freedom of expression, gathering and demonstration, political and trade union organisation, press freedom, etc. are being restricted. Corruption of governments in Latin America, Turkey, Iran and many other countries can no longer be hidden. Bourgeois democracies are restricted, especially in Europe, with tightened political rights. In Eastern countries which have historically stronger material and cultural basis for authoritarianism, democratic rights and freedoms are already on a tight rope. In those countries who seem to implement democracy to save face there is a tendency to ignore even the appearance. Cosmetic changes in countries such as Saudi Arabia does not change this tendency. If one of the reasons why political reaction is on the rise is the fact that it is becoming harder for the bourgeoisie to rule and they feel greater need for extraordinary measures, the other is that the working class and the working people are disorganized across the world and their low level of struggle for their own independent demands.

Capitalist monopolies exploit the workers in other countries as well as their own and plunder the natural resources of oppressed peoples. Competition between these international monopolies and between capitalist-imperialist countries is intensifying. This rivalry manifests itself in trade wars which was sparked by Trump’s protectionist custom duties, Europe and China responding in the same way, as well as in military clashes. Tension between the US on the one side and Russia, China, North Korea and Iran on the other fuels concerns of a big war.

The world is no longer unipolar and the US has lost its unrivaled hegemony, but it is still the most powerful imperialist country in terms of its economic, political and military presence in many parts of the world and in terms of its armament expenditures. However, there has not emerged yet a unified rival against the US, even though there are signs of a formation of some polarizing blocs. Having UK as an ally the US is trying to impose itself on the rest of Europe. But European countries insist on their own interests and no longer accept to unify under the US umbrella through institutions such as NATO. Russia has been standing against the US for some time. China is trying to reinforce its economic and military might, while in the meantime avoiding an open confrontation. Germany has a similar position.

The “West” responded to Russia’s harsh rivalry in Syria and Ukraine with the expulsion of Russian diplomats following the suspected poisoning in the UK, and with the bombing of Syria with missiles following the alleged use of chemical weapons in Duma. The US, UK and France joined forces against Russia, while Germany stayed out of this coalition. Russia took a step back and did not respond. China was contented with condemning this attack. These developments show that the blocs have not settled yet and are still loose, but weapons are used quite easily.

In the last few years, Syria has been the main scene for the fight for hegemony over the oil fields in the Middle East. First, it was the “proxies” which were the clashing forces, but now main actors are taking part. The fight was between various groupings such as ISIS or FSA, with the backing of big imperialist countries and reactionary regional governments. But now the USA, Russia, Iran, Turkey, Israel, Saudi Arabia (in Yemen), UK, France and Germany show their presence in the region with their own military forces and are fighting fiercely. Imperialist capitalist world, the so-called “international community”, does not care for the countless number of deaths and displacement of Syrians. They are only concerned about preventing refugees coming into their own countries.

However, this is not an easy job. Because of the poverty and war, mass migration from the Middle East, Africa and Western Asia cannot be stopped. Refugees are drowning every day in the Mediterranean.

Capitalism shows its inhuman face in every occasion and evidence of this can be found in deteriorating living and working conditions and intensified exploitation as well as in their preference of war over peace. Another one is present in the destruction of the environment for the drive for more profit, just like Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement.

May Day is the day of going onto the streets to shout out our demands against the exploitation and aggression of international bourgeoisie and imperialism and our aspiration for a world without classes and exploitation.

May Day is the day of raising our demands for an end to wars and plunder of the resources of the oppressed peoples.

May Day is the day of shouting louder our demands for social rights, a shorter working week and for equal pay for equal work.

May Day is the day of showing our might as a united force of billions of working people against the capitalists in every part of the world.

May Day is the day of unity, struggle and international solidarity of the working class.

Let us go onto the streets on this Mayday to claim our rights, as a united force!

Let us unite to end the hegemony of the bourgeoisie!

Long live May Day!

Long live the international unity and struggle of the working class!

Down with capitalism and imperialism!

International Conference of Marxist-Leninist Parties and Organisations (CIPOML)

Sex Workers, Coal Miners, And Morality---Part Seven of Seven

This is our final post in this series. Thank you for sticking with this. We provided links to many sources not because we necessarily agree with all of them, but because we try to do basic socialist educational work and make room for some differences of opinion. This is not the final word, and this series represents only my opinions. Readers are encouraged to send in criticism. Opposing socialist points of view on these topics may be found here and here. More thoughtful counter-arguments can be found here, here, and here. Whether one believes that sex work is productive labor in our understanding of the term or not, or whether one believes that a revolutionary workers' movement should prioritize taking up the matter of sex work or not, I hope that the quote which sparked this series has been disproved.   

Revolutionary Morality

Morality exists in relationship to the specific forms of property and distribution present in society and to the ability of those forms to displace older forms and overthrow the old ideologies and make new circumstances possible. We do not have the morality of 19^th century England or of late-1930s Germany with us today. Methods of production and distribution have changed, class relations changed, different political and economic forces are at work, the superstructure built from the base of capitalist exploitation is different, and all of this has come with cultural shifts which make the difference for us.

Revolutionary socialism anticipated these changes in capitalism when it held state power in the USSR, China, and other countries, and by maintaining a critical and self-critical approach to society, and by being at the forefront of social movements. The greatest advancements in Marxism came from revolutionary states and movements in Asia, Africa, and Latin America and in the Soviet Union, where the working-class held power. Marxism rediscovered its origins in Asia, Latin America, and Africa.

Revolutionary socialism never rejected morality as such. What we have rejected is moralism which is external to human activity, the kind of thinking which says that nothing has changed over the centuries or that human beings are the same always and forever, or that some divine law dictates this or that development. We reject the opportunism of those who always look at things subjectively and also the false determinism of those who deny human agency. We find real pleasure in non-transactional relations with others. We look for equality between people, not hedonism.

Our search for equality derives from our belief that change and motion are constantly occurring and creating what is new while maintaining something of the old, that opposition and new unities occur naturally, that change can be understood in quantitative and qualitative ways, that the arc of social development bends towards social progress, and that necessity is a guiding principle of progress. The individual finds her meaning, power, and creativity through relations with others by constantly experimenting, analyzing, and engaging with those around her. We think about relativism in terms of the contradictions between what exists and what is possible, desires and necessity, alienation and the project of joining thought and activity or action, and the scientific and dispassionate search for truth. Marx wrote:

The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question. Man must prove the truth—i.e. the reality and power, the this-sidedness of his thinking in practice. The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking that is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question…The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-changing can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice…All social life is essentially practical. All mysteries which lead theory to mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of this practice.

Each society has unique and negotiable characteristics, ideologies and cultures which legitimate its power relations. Social crises and ruptures create new ideas and new moralities. The most recent economic crisis, rivalries between the capitalist and imperialist powers, the ever-present pressure to reward the wealthy at the expense of the exploited and oppressed, increasing automation, the racist reaction to the Obama presidency, the failures of neoliberalism, racism, neo-colonialism, and the growth of precarious employment may expose capitalism’s worse side. They have also replaced certain ideas and moralities with nihilism. We have a president and a right-wing who publicly assert that at least some forms of sex work are valid economic activities which can be regulated by contract. The present bare-knuckled capitalism is overthrowing the morality which previously caused people to look down on sex work in hypocritical ways.

We also have a left which often criticizes capitalism everywhere and anywhere except when it comes to sex work. This point is not new, but it takes on a new life when we consider how class analysis, womens’ liberation, intersectionality, and understanding emotional labor---all necessary aspects of revolutionary theory and practice---are distorted by non-Marxist leftists who are searching for a revolutionary force other than the working-class allied with oppressed national groups (the African diaspora, Chicanos, First Nations peoples, and others). We are not libertarians or anarchists. The libertarians prize the idea of contracts entered into between equals, but we say that sex workers do not enter into mutually-beneficial economic or emotional relations with those who employ them. There is no free contract involved. And we do not emphasize negation as the anarchists do because negation, by itself, is an unscientific and unsound social principle which makes exercising collective power and ultimately abolishing the means of coercion impossible. Sex work embodies coercion by its very existence. All work may have an element of coercion involved under capitalism, but sex work maintains its coercive relations across time and place and circumstances.

It seems that the movements which prioritize validating sex work and focusing on questions of morality and patriarchy---different matters which I'm generalizing here---sidestep understanding the nature of work. People who take an opposing position may better understand work, but they only rarely talk about the legitimacy of work. Patriarchy and imposed morality are ancient negative external and anti-social forces which stand at the core of modern capitalism, but their forms change over time and these changes matter a great deal. We do not patriarchy and morality by talking about sex and gender subjectively, or by taking our discussions of sex and gender and patriarchy out of historical context and class relations, or by asceticism. We instead seek to transcend the broken identities and social relations which imposed morality and patriarchy foster by building new and whole people through class struggle and by constructing from that a revolutionary humanism.

The problem posed by Sprankle’s sentence is not about an old morality constraining our views. It is instead about our failure to grasp a revolutionary Marxist humanism and a path forward in which both the alienated labor of mining coal and the commodification of sex and sex work are eliminated. Radical Marxist humanism projects that a working-class government would plan the transformation and elimination of mining under conditions of workers' sovereignty. Revolutionary society, governed by the principles of liberation and solidarity, would set about eliminating sex work, gender oppression and exploitation, and heteronormativity not from the standpoint of an old morality but from the standpoints of necessity, of ending all forms of economic and political oppression and exploitation, and freeing the human spirit from its cell. A revolutionary working-class government must consolidate power as it leads the struggle to transform society, but society itself must be engaged in transformation so that exercising revolutionary power is the people’s project.

The international dimension cannot be overlooked. Sex work is globalized, racialized, gendered, and it exists in ever-greater measure as part of the imperialist nightmare. Rich white men from the First World drive sex tourism, and we know that the U.S. military’s presence in the Third World also helps account for a globalized sex trade and has for generations. We wonder if the growth of the sex trade in parts of the Third World was not enabled by First World entrepreneurs who went to the Third World countries seeking lower production costs for their factories and sought incidental “entertainment” as well. These First World entrepreneurs have so often aided and depended upon military regimes and local mafias in order to establish their businesses. We also note that the same sort of First World men who finance, operate, and patronize sex work operations also engage in trophy hunting in the Third World and that the Trump administration and major transnational corporations aid and abet them. The sex trade becomes a means for foreign currency exchange and the trafficking in human beings. It exists as part of a permanent arms or war economy and counts on the defeat of revolutions and refugee crises for its sustenance.

In addition to taking advantage of desperate refugees and social chaos and the defeat of revolutions across the Third World and the former USSR, the sex trade industry increasingly preys on children and seniors here and abroad. Of course we support sex workers in their efforts to defend themselves, survive, and live in dignity. The NGOs working in these areas are not up to the task and are most often the products of First World “saviors” who have no viable political and economic paradigm to counter the capitalism which created modern sex work in the first place. We object to the moralism of the NGOs and project revolutionary consciousness instead. We support sex workers not in order to somehow “socialize” sex work or normalize or accept the commodification of intimacy and desire, but in order to abolish sex work under socialist conditions. One of the first attacks on socialism was that we seek to “nationalize women” and we have spent more than a century refuting this stupid insult.

To return once more to Spankle’s comment, we say that coal miners engage in social production and create a commodity. Organizing miners is therefore a revolutionary socialist necessity. We seek to abolish mining as part of a larger process of transcending unsustainable energy development and replacing it with a planned, ecologically-friendly energy sector owned and operated by society and by the people employed in that sector working through a socialist state. Sex workers do not engage in social production and they do not create commodities. The presence of sex work indicates uneven capitalist development, usually small entrepreneurial activity, coercion and human trafficking, and a “second economy” which will always threaten social development---all things which socialists oppose. Such a “second economy” provided a basis for the reactionary capitalist forces which overthrew socialism in the Soviet Union and eastern and southern Europe and which today threaten Cuba.

In the 1980s I was part of the fight to win mining jobs for women, getting pay and working conditions in better order to meet women miners’ needs, and making seniority work in this new situation. This was a bitter fight, much of it with our own people, and we had to fight a very basic battle in saying that women miners were not prostitutes (as many people charged). We had to say this over and over again. We gained ground, but the near-total collapse of the coal industry set us back. In recent years we have heard the sexualized “Drill, baby, drill!” chant and slogans from pro-mining company people like "The deeper I go, the more she likes it"---now a popular and completely disgusting sticker seen around the mines. Conceding the point that miners and sex workers are the same is to concede ground in a vital class battle.

Sex Workers, Coal Miners, And Morality---Part Six Of Seven

Here is our sixth post in a series of seven examing some questions raised by sex work, revolutionary theory and practice, working-class politics, coal mining, and morality. We invite your responses. 

Our Two Poles of Thought

Lenin and Kollontai had somewhat contradictory approaches in these matters, and neither has the last word, but the two poles of thought they established mark commonsensical guides for us even today, a point of departure for understanding modern sex work. We return to the points made by Marx, Engels, Beard, and Brown in order to restate our case.

Solid feminist scholarship has documented that the creation of the nuclear family and monogamous marriage were linked to the rise of private property as a social form, as a way of organizing production and distribution and society at large. The historic emergence of the family as an economic unit dominated by men has been tied from the earliest days to the development of classes. The most hard-hearted side of capitalism is now bringing us widespread environmental destruction and economic crises which in turn create nihilism and chaos and undermine the very family structures capitalism once created. No one is being liberated.

One peculiar contradiction which we live with grants that most of us---those who are not imprisoned or enslaved or otherwise held in bondage---are free to the extent that we own our bodies but must sell our labor power in order to survive. We also experience a contradiction between ownership and control. For instance, a woman who is not imprisoned or on parole or probation and who is a citizen has a legal claim to autonomy. Still, the law which grants her autonomy requires that she work to earn a living  and is buttressed by a false morality and by customs which do not allow her ready access to healthcare, abortions, housing, an adequate wage, childcare, and social advancement. Her situation is more desperate if she is a woman of color, LGBTQIA2S+, disabled, or without papers. The slogan “Our bodies, ourselves!” drew its great strength from its explicit challenge to capitalist law and morality.

Sexual gratification under these conditions may appear as a commodity, or in a commodified form. Bourgeois marriage, living together, and sex work may all be about reproducing labor power, or some kind of social reproduction of labor power, or the commodification of desire or male domination---but sex work is not labor power being sold or exchanged for the creation of another commodity, and the commodification of desire does mean that desire has itself been commodified. The sex worker and the coal miner are different here. Most sex work is not waged labor, or at least not in the sense that coal mining is waged labor. The obvious similarities between the two do not make them identical. We can also say that much sex work is unwaged.  

Work and class relations in a capitalist society mean that there are inevitable conflicts between workers and bosses. Capitalism also has incredible regenerative powers which are evident in daily life. Consider the constant effort to convince us that there is no alternative to capitalism as well as the “economic recoveries” and the trade wars and “hot” wars. A necessary part of modern capitalism’s regenerative powers involve reconstructing the individual to be both the optimal worker and the optimal consumer, as well as a passive citizen who either lacks a unique identity or who claims an identity which can be easily managed and manipulated. Sex work may fill certain gaps as human beings search for human contact, human warmth and understanding, and solace as the capitalists accumulate profits and power at the expense of the workers, but here two contradictory tendencies develop. Sex work may fulfill certain needs, but it appears to clash with existing morality. The commodification of desire makes capitalism somewhat vulnerable to the protests and demands of those who provide sexual gratification.

Workers are, by definition, people engaged in producing things, and we therefore draw the defining characteristics of our identities from being in fields, factories, offices, and schools where exploitation occurs. Service, administrative, and educational workers enter the working-class by engaging in their work with others, by being vital to the reproduction of labor power, by working under conditions which increasingly look and feel like factory work, by serving what are essentially apprenticeships (college and university), through their self-consciousness of being workers, by being directly linked to social production and distribution, and by being denied middle-class incomes and status. In a sense, workers become proletarians when we gain a sense of ourselves as a class and think and act for ourselves. 

It is unimaginable that a movement for social change can take place without middle-class democrats, small farmers, small businesspeople, and professionals also taking part. And it is absolutely impossible that social justice work can be launched without the leadership of women, people of color, LGBTQIA2S+ people, and all who experience particular forms of oppression under capitalism. But if exploitation is to end, it will be because people at the points of exploitation make a revolution, a new system of economic and political relations takes hold, and workers use our power to reconstruct society. No other class or social category existing in capitalist society is positioned to be able to accomplish this by itself. The capitalists can appropriate or coopt most forms of rebellion, but they cannot fully appropriate or coopt the working-class, and particularly those sections of the working-class where class exploitation and other forms of oppression intersect. As Kollontai and Lenin pointed out, the revolutionary alliance of the working-class and the oppressed peoples will best be able to determine how social relations are to be reconstructed on truly human terms and that a revolution demands our total concentration and will. Our point is that there is no revolution if there is no working-class revolutionary movement and party.

We repeat the point that it is the sale of labor as a commodity in order to create other commodities---what is called wage labor and exploitation--- which creates the surplus value (and desires, perhaps) needed for modern sex work to exist. The surplus value created by industrial production and administration, including mining, helps to create the surplus value needed for sex work to exist in its modern terms. Destroying the capitalist relations which create surplus value through exploitation will deal a blow to the existence of sex work, but it will not make sex work disappear entirely. We can say that sex work is one of the better examples of how the capitalist free market works if we look at power relations present in the sex work trades and how wages and payments are set there and at the consequent degradation of human beings. We can also argue that no free market exists for sex work precisely because of the power imbalance and degradation inherent in the work.

A recent news item had it that there are now brothels in Europe which use artificial intelligence mannequins programmed to have limited conversations and tell male customers what they want to hear. It has been alleged that this is becoming quite popular, to the point that in one urban area double-parking near such a brothel is creating traffic problems. We hope that it is self-evident to our readers that such phenomenon only demonstrates advanced forms of alienation and despair present in the capitalist world, a terrible misuse of technological development for profit, and the dissolution present in the First World, and that such phenomena arise in part as an abusive reaction to progress made by women. Our struggle forms in great measure around building and supporting revolutionary womens’ movements and being in solidarity with them as they carry out a revolutionary program. Our struggle also forms around ensuring real technological development for society’s needs and putting people before profits.

Providing sexual gratification to someone in exchange for money may seem like selling one's labor power for the sexual gratification of another person. The commodity being sold by a sex worker could perhaps be the power that workers have to do the work that is required to sexually gratify another person. A power exchange may take place, but that is not an exchange of commodities or an exchange of labor power (which is itself a commodity) for commodity production. We can also say that sex workers do not sell their bodies, but instead sell the ability to please, gratify, or comfort. These views are not without merit, but labor power, commodities, and the commodification of desire and the search for companionship are not so abstract. Commodities have a material existence by their nature, labor power being a special exception. The imposed moralistic view of sex workers as only people who sell their bodies misses the reality of patriarchal social relations and how they are linked to modern capitalism. Sex and sex work have been commodified, but they are not commodities. The difference is in their identities and functions and in the markets in which transactions take place.

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Sex Workers, Coal Miners, And Morality---Part Five Of Seven

This is the fith in a series of seven posts taking up questions of sex work, class and class formation, revolutionary theory and practice, and socialist morality. Here we have a brief examination of some words from Lenin which form a response to Alexandra Kollontai, who we spent time with in our third and fourth entries. Please read our first post in this series in order to understand why we are posting on these topics. Your comments and criticisms are invited! 

Lenin’s Response

Lenin objected to some of Kollontai’s points while maintaining a critical and self-critical attitude. The socialist Clara Zetkin records the following from Lenin:

“… (A) large part of the youth is keen on ‘revising bourgeois conceptions and morality' concerning sexual questions…The new values are crystallizing slowly, in struggle. In the relations between man and man, between man and woman, feelings and thoughts are becoming revolutionized. New boundaries are being set up between the rights of the individual and the rights of the whole, in the duties of individuals…It is a slow and often a very painful process of decay and growth. And particularly in the sphere of sexual relationships, of marriage and the family. The decay, the corruption, the filth of bourgeois marriage, with its difficult divorce, its freedom for the man, its enslavement for the woman, the repulsive hypocrisy of sexual morality and relations fill the most active minded and best people with deep disgust.”

Kollontai and Lenin shared a critique of bourgeois morality and hypocrisy and an analysis of the laws and customs which oppressed and exploited women. Lenin noted “The desire and urge to enjoyment easily attain unbridled force at a time when powerful empires are tottering, old forms of rule breaking down, when a whole social world is beginning to disappear. Sex and marriage forms, in their bourgeois sense, are unsatisfactory! A revolution in sex and marriage is approaching, corresponding to the proletarian revolution…Nothing could be more false than to preach monkish asceticism and the sanctity of dirty bourgeois morality to the youth. It is particularly serious if sex becomes the main mental concern during those years when it is physically most obvious. What fatal effects that has!”

Lenin framed part of the problem in theoretical and subjective terms. He said that “The changed attitude of the young people to questions of sexual life is of course based on a `principle' and a theory. Many of them call their attitude `revolutionary' and `Communistic.’ And they honestly believe that it is so…Although I am nothing but a gloomy ascetic, the so-called ‘new sexual life' of the youth–and sometimes of the old–often seems to me to be purely bourgeois, an extension of bourgeois brothels. That has nothing whatever in common with freedom of love as we Communists understand it You must be aware of the famous theory that in Communist society the satisfaction of sexual desires, of love, will be as simple and unimportant as drinking a glass of water…Its adherents maintain that it is Marxist. But thanks for such Marxism which directly and immediately attributes all phenomena and changes in the ideological superstructure of society to its economic basis! Matters aren't quite as simple as that.”

Lenin saw “this glass of water theory is completely un-Marxist, and moreover, anti-social.” Here Lenin went beyond a crass mischaracterization of Marxism and said, “In sexual life there is not only simple nature to be considered, but also cultural characteristics, whether they are of a high or low order…The relations of the sexes to each other are not simply an expression of the play of forces between the economics of society and a physical need, isolated in thought, by study, from the physiological aspect. It is rationalism, and not Marxism, to want to trace changes in these relations directly, and dissociated from their connections with ideology as a whole, to the economic foundations of society…As a communist I have not the least sympathy for the glass of water theory, although it bears the fine title `satisfaction of love.' In any case, this liberation of love is neither new, nor Communist…In bourgeois practice it became the emancipation of the flesh.”

Lenin anticipated his critics and added that “I don't mean to preach asceticism by my criticism. Not in the least. Communism will not bring asceticism, but joy of life, power of life, and a satisfied love life will help to do that. But in my opinion the present widespread hypertrophy in sexual matters does not give joy and force to life, but takes it away. In the age of revolution that is bad, very bad…The revolution demands concentration, increase of forces…Dissoluteness in sexual life is bourgeois, is a phenomenon of decay. The proletariat is a rising class. It doesn't need intoxication as a narcotic or a stimulus…It must not and shall not forget, forget the shame, the filth, the savagery of capitalism. It receives the strongest urge to fight from a class situation, from the Communist ideal…Self-control, self-discipline is not slavery, not even in love…”

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Sex Workers, Coal Miners, And Morality---Part Four Of Seven

This is our fourth entry of seven taking up questions of sex work, class, revolutionary politics, and morality. As in our third section, we are here spending some time with the Russian revolutionary Alexandra Kollontai. Kollontai served in the Russian revolutionary movement, was an outstanding thinker and writer, and was the first woman appointed to serve as an foreign ambassador. Please check our first section in order to best understand what has provoked this series. And please send in helpful comments and criticisms.

Kollontai did not reject morality, but she did qualify its practical meaning. She wrote “What is the fundamental quality of the working class? What is its strongest moral weapon in the struggle? Solidarity and comradeship is the basis of communism. Unless this sense is strongly developed amongst working people, the building of a truly communist society is inconceivable. Politically conscious communists should therefore logically be encouraging the development of solidarity in every way and fighting against all that hinders its development. Prostitution destroys the equality, solidarity and comradeship of the two halves of the working class. A man who buys the favors of a woman does not see her as a comrade or as a person with equal rights. He sees the woman as dependent upon himself and as an unequal creature of a lower order who is of less worth to the workers’ state. The contempt he has for the prostitute…affects his attitude to all women. The further development of prostitution, instead of allowing for the growth of comradely feeling and solidarity, strengthens the inequality of the relationships between the sexes.”

She developed these ideas by adding:

Prostitution is alien and harmful to the new communist morality which is in the process of forming…In bourgeois capitalist society all attempts at fighting prostitution were a useless waste of energy, since the two circumstances which gave rise to the phenomenon–private property and the direct material dependence of the majority of women upon men–were firmly established. In a workers’ republic the situation has changed. Private property has been abolished and all citizens of the republic are obliged to work. Marriage has ceased to be a method by which a woman can find herself a “breadwinner” and thus avoid the necessity of working or providing for herself by her own labor…

But we also need to understand the importance of creating a communist morality. The two tasks are closely connected: the new morality is created by a new economy, but we will not build a new communist economy without the support of a new morality…Communists must openly accept that unprecedented changes in the nature of sexual relationships are taking place. This revolution is called into being by the change in the economic structure and by the new role which women play in the productive activity of the workers’ state. In this difficult transition period, when the old is being destroyed and the new is in the process of being created, relations between the sexes sometimes develop that are not compatible with the interests of the collective. But there is also something healthy in the variety of relationships practiced...

Can we who uphold the interests of working people define relationships that are temporary and unregistered as criminal? Of course we cannot. Freedom in relationships between the sexes does not contradict communist ideology…

A relationship is harmful and alien to the collective only if material bargaining between the sexes is involved, only when worldly calculations are a substitute for mutual attraction. Whether the bargaining takes the form of prostitution or of a legal marriage relationship is not important. Such unhealthy relationships cannot be permitted, since they threaten equality and solidarity. We must therefore condemn all prostitution, and go as far as explaining that these legal wives are “kept women” and what a sad and intolerable part they are playing in the worker’s state…

Kollontai’s criticisms of evolving socialism were clearly stated in subjective and objective terms. “We must ruthlessly discard the old ideas and attitudes to which we cling through habit,” she wrote. “The old economic structure is disintegrating and with it the old type of marriage, but we cling to bourgeois life styles. We are ready to reject all the aspects of the old system and welcome the revolution in all spheres of life, only…don’t touch the family, don’t try to change the family! Even politically aware communists are afraid to look squarely at the truth, they brush aside the evidence which clearly shows that the old family ties are weakening and that new forms of economy dictate new forms of relationships between the sexes. Soviet power recognizes that woman has a part to play in the national economy and has placed her on an equal footing with the man in this respect, but in everyday life we still hold to the ‘old ways’ and are prepared to accept as normal marriages which are based on the material dependency of a woman on a man.”

Kollontai was seeking to extend the revolution and socialism more deeply into daily life. Today we argue that her “two-halves” statement falls far short of understanding gender identity in a revolutionary way. We transcend Kollontai’s shortcomings here by going to the core of her thinking. She wrote “In our struggle against prostitution we must clarify our attitude to marital relations that are based on the same principles of ‘buying and selling’. We must learn to be ruthless over this issue…We have to explain unequivocally that the old form of the family has been outstripped. Communist, society has no need of it. The bourgeois world gave its blessing to the exclusiveness and isolation of the married couple…in the atomized and individualistic bourgeois society, the family was the only protection from the storm of life, a quiet harbor in a sea of hostility and competition…In communist society this cannot be. Communist society presupposes such a strong sense of the collective that any possibility of the existence of the isolated, introspective family group is excluded…New ties between working people are being forged and comradeship, common interests, collective responsibility and faith in the collective are establishing themselves as the highest principles of morality…”

Kollontai repeated her point and provided important contrasts when she wrote “… (U)nder communism all dependence of women upon men and all the elements of material calculation found in modern marriage will be absent. Sexual relationships will be based on a healthy instinct for reproduction prompted by the abandon of young love, or by fervent passion, or by a blaze of physical attraction or by a soft light of intellectual and emotional harmony. Such sexual relationships have nothing in common with prostitution. Prostitution is terrible because it is an act of violence by the woman upon herself in the name of material gain. Prostitution is a naked act of material calculation which leaves no room for considerations of love and passion. Where passion and attraction begin, prostitution ends. Under communism, prostitution and the contemporary family will disappear. Healthy, joyful and free relationships between the sexes will develop.”

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Sex Workers, Coal Miners, And Morality---Part Three Of Seven

This is the third part of our seven-part series taking up questions of sex work, working-class identity, socialist morality, and revolutionary history. In this section and the next section we spend some time with the great Russian revolutionary Alexandra Kollontai. Please refer back to our first entry in this series in order to track our point of departure and where we're coming from. Your comments are most welcome. 

Kollontai’s Intervention

Alexandra Kollontai, the Russian communist, took up the position of working-class women in Russia and concerned herself their status before and after the communist revolution. She recognized in her powerful writings that women in pre-revolutionary society were dependent upon capital and their husbands and that “free love” could not take place so long as such dependence existed. By itself the radical-sounding slogan of “free love” meant little more than bourgeois censure and misery to working-class women. Kollontai argued that what mattered more to working-class women was “the attendant social and economic conditions which define the complicated obligations of the working-class woman…it matters to her too whether her husband has the right to dispose of her earnings, whether he has the right by law to force her to live with him when she does not want to, whether the husband can forcibly take her children away, etc…The question of relationships would cease to be such a painful one for the majority of women only if society relieved women of all those petty household cares which are at present unavoidable (given the existence of individual, scattered domestic economies), took over responsibility for the younger generation, protected maternity and gave the mother to the child for at least the first months after birth.”

Kollontai wrote:

In opposing the legal and sacred church marriage contract, the feminists are fighting a fetish. The proletarian women, on the other hand, are waging war against the factors that are behind the modern form of marriage and family. In striving to change fundamentally the conditions of life, they know that they are also helping to reform relationships between the sexes. Here we have the main difference between the bourgeois and proletarian approach to the difficult problem of the family….

Before these formulas of “free relationships” and “free love” can become practice, it is above all necessary that a fundamental reform of all social relationships between people take place; furthermore, the moral and sexual norms and the whole psychology of mankind would have to undergo a thorough evolution…What about the jealousy that eats into even the best human souls? And that deeply-rooted sense of property that demands the possession not only of the body but also of the soul of another? And the inability to have the proper respect for the individuality of another? The habit of either subordinating oneself to the loved one, or of subordinating the loved one to oneself? And the bitter and desperate feeling of desertion, of limitless loneliness, which is experienced when the loved ceases to love and leaves? Where can the lonely person, who is an individualist to the very core of his being, find solace? The collective, with its joys and disappointments and aspirations, is the best outlet for the emotional and intellectual energies of the individual….Without the “unique,” “one-and-only” twin soul, even the socialist, the collectivist, is quite alone in the present antagonistic world; only in the working class do we catch the pale glimpse of the future, of more harmonious and more social relations between people.

Writing in 1921, Kollontai framed sex work as prostitution and wrote “Prostitution is above all a social phenomenon; it is closely connected to the needy position of woman and her economic dependence on man in marriage and the family. The roots of prostitution are in economics. Woman is on the one hand placed in an economically vulnerable position, and on the other hand has been conditioned by centuries of education to expect material favors from a man in return for sexual favors–whether these are given within or outside the marriage tie. This is the root of the problem…” She analyzed prostitution by arguing that “It is also significant that in the capitalist countries prostitution recruits its servants from the propertyless sections of the population. Low-paid work, homelessness, acute poverty and the need to support younger brothers and sisters: these are the factors that produce the largest percentage of prostitutes. If the bourgeois theories about the corrupt and criminal disposition were true, then all classes of the population ought to contribute equally to prostitution. There ought to be the same proportion of corrupt women among the rich as among the poor. But professional prostitutes, women who live by their bodies, are with rare exceptions recruited from the poorer classes. Poverty, hunger, deprivation and the glaring social inequalities that are the basis of the bourgeois system drive these women to prostitution.

Kollontai’s analysis was not one-sided or oblivious to morality. She wrote that “…prostitutes in the capitalist countries are drawn, according to the statistics, from the thirteen to twenty-three age-group. Children and young women, in other words. And the majority of these girls are alone and without a home. Girls from wealthy backgrounds who have the excellent bourgeois family to protect them turn to prostitution only very occasionally...More often than not they are victims of the hypocritical 'double morality.'”

Kollontai’s experiences as a revolutionary leader gave her the advantage of understanding new relations in a communist society. She accurately contrasted capitalist and socialist societies when she wrote “The workers’ revolution in Russia has shattered the basis of capitalism and has struck a blow at the former dependence of women upon men. All citizens are equal before the work collective. They are equally obliged to work for the common good and are equally eligible to the support of the collective when they need it. A woman provides for herself not by marriage but by the part she plays in production and the contribution she makes to the people’s wealth. Relations between the sexes are being transformed. But we are still bound by the old ideas. Furthermore, the economic structure is far from being completely re-arranged in the new way, and communism is still a long way off. In this transitional period prostitution…keeps a strong hold. After all, even though the main sources of prostitution–private property and the policy of strengthening the family–have been eliminated, other factors are still in force. Homelessness, neglect, bad housing conditions, loneliness and low wages for women are still with us. Our productive apparatus is still in a state of collapse, and the dislocation of the national economy continues. To struggle against prostitution chiefly means to struggle against these conditions---in other words, it means to support the general policy of the Soviet government…The correct slogan was formulated at the first All-Russian Congress of Peasant and Working Woman: ‘A woman of the Soviet labor republic is a free citizen with equal rights, and cannot and must not be the object of buying and selling.’… (P)rostitution harms the national economy and hinders the further development of the productive forces. We know that we can only overcome chaos and improve industry if we harness the efforts and energies of the workers and if we organize the available labor power of both men and women in the most rational way. Down with the unproductive labor of housework and child-minding!...Prostitution is not compatible with the Soviet workers’ republic …it does not contribute to the development and strengthening of the basic class character and of the proletariat and its new morality.”

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Sex Workers, Coal Miners, And Morality---Part Two Of Seven

This is our second article in a seven-part series examining how sex work differs from other forms or kinds of labor, what moral and political questions arise for us as we reflect on this question, and how socialists view morality. Please see the first article in the series in order to track our points of departure in this series. We invite your feedback.  

Sex Workers, Coal Miners, And Marriage

On the surface, the most basic difference between sex workers and coal miners is that one appears to be engaging in reproducing labor power, or helping to do so, and that their body has been commodified, while the other is selling labor power as a commodity in order to create commodities. A “moralistic view of sexuality” is not immediately at question here. Miners sell their labor power (a commodity) in order to produce a commodity (coal). A specific and historically-determined process of class differentiation and class relations stands behind that: coal has been developed as an industrial resource in order to carry out production, mines are privately-held entities run by capitalists or syndicates, and the people who work in the mines are working-class and form part of an industrial proletariat.

Sexual gratification has certainly been commodified. This commodification of sexual gratification and desire has taken place under specific conditions: social orders in which women exercised at least relative power were overthrown, and this rupture---this attack on what was usually manifested as early communistic societies—meant a rupture or crisis between human beings and the natural world. Today we look upon ourselves as separate from ecology, and we view all that is around us in terms of use value. Gender and gender identity and morality as an external regulatory force spring directly from this rupture. At some point heteronormativity arose, that pernicious ideology of making heterosexuality dominant. This rupture and later colonialism imposed the idea that only two genders exist. The doctrines of the arising ruling classes became the ruling ideas, imposed on society through the coercive accumulation of power and property by a small faction of society. Marx, Engels, and other socialist theoreticians and leaders took up these matters directly. Marx wrote:

In the approach to woman as the spoil and hand-maid of communal lust is expressed the infinite degradation in which man exists for himself, for the secret of this approach has its unambiguous, decisive, plain and undisguised expression in the relation of man to woman and in the manner in which the direct and natural species-relationship is conceived. The direct, natural, and necessary relation of person to person is the relation of man to woman. In this natural species-relationship man’s relation to nature is immediately his relation to man, just as his relation to man is immediately his relation to nature–his own natural destination. In this relationship, therefore, is sensuously manifested...the extent to which the human essence has become nature to man, or to which nature to him has become the human essence of man. From this relationship one can therefore judge man’s whole level of development. From the character of this relationship follows how much man as a species-being, as man, has come to be himself and to comprehend himself; the relation of man to woman is the most natural relation of human being to human being. It therefore reveals the extent to which man’s natural behavior has become human, or the extent to which the human essence in him has become a natural essence–the extent to which his human nature has come to be natural to him. This relationship also reveals the extent to which man’s need has become a human need; the extent to which, therefore, the other person as a person has become for him a need–the extent to which he in his individual existence is at the same time a social being.

The Communist Manifesto has these memorable lines:

The bourgeois sees in his wife a mere instrument of production. He hears that [under communism] the instruments of production are to be exploited in common, and, naturally, can come to no other conclusion than that the lot of being common to all will likewise fall to women…He has not even a suspicion that the real point aimed at (by communists) is to do away with the status of women as mere instruments of production.

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Sex Workers, Coal Miners, And Morality---Part One Of Seven

This is the first in a seven-part series exploring the differences between sex workers and coal miners and questions of socialist morality. As always, we invite helpful responses from our readers.A provocative quote attributed to professor and sex therapist Eric Sprankle has appeared on Facebook and has been the subject of some discussion. Sprankle has been quoted as saying, “If you think sex workers ‘sell their bodies,’ but coal miners do not, your view of labor is clouded by your moralistic view of sexuality.” The quote and the discussions it is provoking have given us the opportunity to reflect on how revolutionaries and socialists view labor, morality, and sex and sex work.

Nothing on Sprankle’s website indicates what his politics are, but he has a sincere and scientific interest in dealing with real problems faced by real people, particularly young people and seniors, and that he has a strong record of dealing with the stigmas attached to sex work. Much of the advice he offers seems reasonable, and he seems to be about providing safe space and research on human sexuality. He has impressive credentials and leads the Sexual Health Research Team at Minnesota State University, Mankato. That Team examines “sex work stigma, the effects of sexually explicit material, older adult sexuality, and the intersections of sexual health and genital piercings.”

The quote attributed to Sprankle above, and the thinking on which it may be based, seems problematic to me. Articulating what is problematic about the quote is difficult; there is a need here for understanding some of the finer points of Marxism which do not come easily to us. Labor, sex work, morality, and class analysis most often appear as separate endeavors, lacking common points of intersection, for people who either do not understand revolutionary Marxism or who have rejected it. The absence of a mass revolutionary working-class movement with a unifying ideology and specific political institutions (a revolutionary political party, the means for carrying on socialist and working-class education, specific revolutionary organizations representing women and youth, a radical movement taking up sexual and mental health as part of a class struggle) means that we lack a reference point for a unified revolutionary world view.

Before we go more deeply into what is problematic here from a socialist point of view, let’s pick up on five important concepts.

A commodity is produced by labor which satisfies some human need or desire, and is produced for sale on a market. Commodities have value (the socially necessary labor needed to produce them) and use-value (that part of the commodity which meets human desires or needs). The value of a commodity, which stands apart from its price, is determined by the labor time required to produce it. Commodities and commodity production contain all of the antagonistic relations between workers and bosses. Sex work, which appears to us as more a form of chattel slavery or indentured servitude, also gives rise to antagonistic relations between sex workers and those who own, manage, and purchase their services. But in most sex work the sex worker is acting as a small entrepreneur and is not part of what we think of as "social production” or as mature capitalist relations of production---the production of commodities with both value and use value carried out by a working-class. We call small entrepreneurial economic activity a “petty bourgeois” form of production.

We will also read about “commodification.” This is used loosely here and simply indicates the transformation of human relationships and activities into commercial relationships, relationships of buying and selling where a transaction takes place and buries the human contents of these relationships and actions beneath commerce. Our relations and actions often have the look and feel of being commodities even where they aren’t. Desire and gratification can be commodified when they are shoehorned into a box, turned into something transactional, or bargained over.

We read the following in the Communist Manifesto:

The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors”, and has left no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment”. It has drowned out the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom - Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.

The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage laborers.

The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation into a mere money relation.

Commodification has both oppressive and exploitative and liberating and progressive aspects. On the one hand, it degrades all of us by turning relationships and human activity into specialized wage labor and turns our relationships and actions inside-out, attaching capitalist logic and a price tag to everything. At that point even the most basic acts of human solidarity seem separate from us. On the other hand, commodification tends to abolish forms of oppressive domestic work, opens the possibility of better domestic relations, and opposes old superstitions which oppress people. It can mark a temporary and fleeting advance where the patriarchal family is a dominant social form.

I refer in passing to chapters in pre-history, times before the advent of patriarchy and states. Eleanor Marx is often quoted as having said that “women…have been expropriated as to their rights as human beings, just as the laborers were expropriated as to their rights as producers. The method in each case is the only one that makes expropriation at any time and under any circumstances possible – and that method is force.” Engels drew out the point with these words:

The overthrow of mother right was the world historic defeat of the female sex. The man took command in the home also; the woman was degraded and reduced to servitude; she became the slave of his lust and a mere instrument for the production of children…In order to make certain of the wife’s fidelity and therefore the paternity of his children, she is delivered over unconditionally into the power of the husband; if he kills her, he is only exercising his rights…

Our starting point is Engels’ The Origins of the Family,Private Property and the State, but readers should engage with the works of Heather Brown and Mary Beard to come up to speed. We don’t look backward to a primitive communism in which women had relative equality under conditions of scarcity and self-sufficiency, but forward to a world in which absolute equality under conditions of solidarity and development exists.

Our ability to work---what we call “labor power”---is a commodity, but it is a commodity unlike all others. It has a price (wages) and it must be constantly “reproduced” or replenished in order to be fully productive. It exists only in living human beings and it is the only commodity a worker has to sell. Workers sell our labor as a commodity in return for money. The capitalist uses his money to buy commodities, and then sells a commodity in order to make a profit. It is not the capitalist’s labor that makes him money, but his money that makes his money. The major forces in capitalist society are therefore always at cross-purposes.

When we talk about “reproducing labor power” and the “social reproduction of labor power” we are most often speaking about activities which educate and train workers and enable us to rest and replenish ourselves so that we can return to work and create surplus value (profits) for the employers. Others have a different understanding.Unwaged emotional labor, most often carried out by women, has been basic to reproducing labor power. Profits are created by the working-class producing commodities and providing service for sale on a for-profit market. The profits we create or generate are taken by the capitalists and create additional economic activity and create and maintain a social superstructure which ensures that capitalism, government by the ruling class and its executives, and capitalist law and order hold sway. So much of what passes for knowledge, the arts, science, sociology, politics, psychology, and human nature exists in the context of this superstructure. We include gender, gender identity, and commodified sexual gratification as parts of the social superstructure. The workers employed in the arts and in scientific, sociological, and psychological study and work, and those who provide the unwaged emotional and physical labor needed to reproduce labor power and who provide commodified sexual gratification, have tremendous abilities to disrupt business-as-usual under capitalism, but they do not have, by themselves, the ability to revolutionize society.

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