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.