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.
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