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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