A lot of leftists have adopted the view that sex work is something positive, liberatory, just another type of work that should be supported like wholesome small businesses while ignoring the reality of just how fucked it is (the why on why it’s fucked and why it’s rapey is in my other comments), I’d argue more often than not this is done deliberately to justify their own unhealthy views.
The post + title combo and some background of OP of this post (not the tweet) makes me believe they are exactly this type of person, which is what I was responding to. I am not arguing that “sex workers are enemy of the working class”, that’s stupid and I highly doubt anyone sane or anyone here at all says that except some Marx quote which OP references if one was to read it in the most disingenuous way possible.
It is work, they are workers, but it’s a horrible job that can easily be and must be abolished even before commodity form dies.
That being said:
But sex workers have to be centered in the project for their own liberation, as only they are able to liberate themselves.
Alright, with all due respect, what the fuck are you talking about? Workers struggle is one and the same, there are no “unique worker struggles”. The historic task of proletariat is to abolish the anarchic mode of production, private property and commodity form completely (in other words, the current state of things) in favor of production for use in a classless, stateless society. Sex work would literally cease to be a thing, if someone truly wants to fuck a ton then they’re not a prostitute but a ‘playah’ since no exchange takes place other than one of actual consent, with all the survival needs and freedoms being provided freely already.
Even as early as DOTP, there would be no reason to keep sex workers or lumpenproletariat in their positions given their misery and the ability for counter-revolutionaries to mobilize them. Reintegration to the labor pool is the most sane choice.
Without a proletarian revolution, there is no emancipation.
P.S. you use “division of labor” in the wrong way. What it refers to is not when workers go and cry about whose job is real or not, but a concept where people split into specialized roles during labor process. It is it’s own can of worms that is completely unrelated to this topic.
Re: the poster of this lemmy post - fair, I haven’t looked into them and I agree that the application of sex-work positive liberatory language can be applied to anti-worker reaction.
Re: divisions of labor - a few quotes from Principles of communism
Labor was more and more divided among the individual workers so that the worker who previously had done a complete piece of work now did only a part of that piece. This division of labor made it possible to produce things faster and cheaper. It reduced the activity of the individual worker to simple, endlessly repeated mechanical motions which could be performed not only as well but much better by a machine. In this way, all these industries fell, one after another, under the dominance of steam, machinery, and the factory system, just as spinning and weaving had already done.
But at the same time, they also fell into the hands of big capitalists, and their workers were deprived of whatever independence remained to them. Gradually, not only genuine manufacture but also handicrafts came within the province of the factory system as big capitalists increasingly displaced the small master craftsmen by setting up huge workshops, which saved many expenses and permitted an elaborate division of labor.
This is what you are talking about. However, later:
The existence of classes originated in the division of labor…
The form of the division of labor which makes one a peasant, another a cobbler, a third a factory worker, a fourth a stock-market operator, has already been undermined by machinery and will completely disappear.
So this doesn’t contradict your point, but it does add some depth to it. If divisions of labor are the basis of class, and class is a social relation defined and differentiated by material conditions, then it is more than just “people split into specialized roles during labor process,” it isn’t anywhere near that neutral. It absolutely defines our social reality, differences based on these divisions generate different lived experiences.
What the fuck I’m talking about
Theses on Feuerbach, I:
The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism – that of Feuerbach included – is that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object or of contemplation, but not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively. Hence, in contradistinction to materialism, the active side was developed abstractly by idealism – which, of course, does not know real, sensuous activity as such.
Feuerbach wants sensuous objects, really distinct from the thought objects, but he does not conceive human activity itself as objective activity.
So Marx is saying that the old materialist view considered everything in the abstract, separated and distinct, views as the thing in itself. The part that I’ve become really conscious of is his constant use of the concept of “sensuousness” which I take to mean something like experience, where an individual senses something in their environment.
Theses III:
The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-changing can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice.
This lands on a particular conclusion. Marxist materialism conceptualizes “the thing, reality” as a process that begins with individual sensing/experiencing, contemplation of experience, and activity that changes something in the world. These changes are experienced by the subject, so that this is a cycle of social development that is concretely centered in human experience and activity. This is affirmed in Marx by his adaptation of the labor theory of value, which centers human labor power in capitalist production. He took Ricardo’s more abstract “old materialist” formulation and expanded it to include the actual time and energy of.people, unlocking its revolutionary potential. Lenin described how class consciousness is structural, rather than purely individual.
This process is the fundamental insight of Marx, this insight represents the actual turning of Hegel on his head.
unique worker struggles
There is one unified worker’s struggle, the working class against the capitalists, but divisions in labor create totally different experiences between workers. For example, Marxists have tried, and failed miserably, to convince the broad majority of black workers that there is one worker struggle, because frankly, it’s too abstract. But what black people understand is that white people literally can not understand racism. We don’t experience it directly, so we can only understand it in the abstract. What white people can do, is involve ourselves in the actual work of black liberation. We gain real experience in struggle, centering black experience in order to identify the actual causes and effects of racial discrimination. Like we all know racism comes from capitalism, but that’s too abstract and doesn’t actually connect the experience of the individual to the material consequence. Lots of people deny it out of hand because it doesnt match their experience. Because of alienation, workers don’t experience every aspect of our material conditions, but we do have direct experience of bad or dangerous conditions, certain kinds of exploitation, etc. These fundamental experiences are commonly used by union organizers to develop class consciousness and solidarity. It isn’t hard for people to see how our struggles connect us, but it does take a little help connecting our lived experiences to class struggle. And that connection does not occur without direct experience, combined with direct involvement in the struggle to improve material conditions.
Every worker has these conditions working on them but every worker experiences them differently due to divisions caused by capitalism. Divisions in labor not only occur between different types of jobs, but fundamentally, between genders, races, ethnicities, levels of education, etc. The economic opportunities afforded to an educated white cis straight man are objectively different than opportunities afforded a black trans woman with a “criminal” record. This is a social division that is fundamental part of divisions of labor. The jobs you can get vs the jobs I can get. And if I’m working as a software engineer and someone else is working as a prostitute the differences between our experiences are compound and chasmic. I will not understand that person’s experiences, at best i can sympathise, which only gets me so far.
However my liberation is dependent on theirs because it is fundamentally one struggle. This is why I would rely on a sex worker to define the concrete conditions of their oppression, working together to discover the actual nature of their oppression and how that connects to my own, rather than only understanding these things at the most abstract level in the most general way. Only by reckoning with the actual conditions people experience can we see how other people’s experiences are connected to pur own. Understanding the worker struggle as one struggle, if only considered in abstract theory, can never generate real solidarity, and therefore is not by itself a road to socialism. We have to prove it to ourselves and to others every day and in every way possible.
Conditions vary widely from place to place, time to time, occupation to occupation. The existence of broad material generalities does not invalidate concrete specificities. And those concretions are based exclusively in the experiences and practical activity of people. Broad generalities misapplied to the whole of society only compound contradictions, into which the bourgeois will sow corruption and reaction. Compromises will have to be made, socialism is fundamentally a transitional process, and there are certain broad changes to society that have to be made. Like, if we really want to abolish sex work, we could put a huge dent in it by, for example, universalizing free high quality childcare and education, healthcare, housing, jobs guarantee, welfare programs, and in the process, develop a drastically different social reality for all workers. But if we want sex workers to join the struggle, we have to prove that we understand and are making real accommodations for their experiences. And if we don’t want sex workers to join the struggle, well then who else are we leaving out?
Yes, everyone’s individual experience might have some differences, not everyone might be experiencing the same things. However, these differences more often that not are results of superstructures (law, institutions, etc), the form of which entirely depends on the base (mode of production).
As preface to A contribution to the Critique of Political Economy says:
In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.
Trans people get discriminated against by law and institutions, ruling class spreads propaganda against them because they attack the holy nuclear family, which serves the base in providing new workers for capital to exploit and grow with. Minorities get discriminated against due to them being a convenient target to increase capitalist rate of profit (with profit being what current production is based on) and to divide the proletariat via the spread of ruling class ideas that help preserve them. Sex workers, both ‘successful’ and desperate are where they are both due to capitalism’s tendency to commodify everything, even intimate human experience and due to necessity to keep an impoverished reserve army of labor to allow the decrease of wages.
It all has the same exact root, and no matter how many idpolers cry about it, there can’t be any long-term emancipation unless material conditions undergo a shift in a way where these concessions would actually positively serve the base. Slavery was abolished given how it was a pre-capitalist institution that was no longer efficient to keep, result being (not quite) equality under capital. Women were put to work in the factories rather than being traditional stay-at-home wives in the form of legal guardianship due to the growth of capital and need for more workers or labor shortages (especially during wartime). Various forms of welfare were introduced as a response to growing worker discontent as a way for bourgeois to preserve their class rule and pacify them, but more importantly it was done during the times when bourgeois states were prospering thanks to the superprofits WW2 provided and they could more than easily afford them, stimulating profit rates for private owners in the process. All of these things were changes to the superstructure that historically made sense to implement, but none emancipated from capitalism, only at best providing equality under it or an equality in exploitation.
And it is precisely why the idea of “unique struggle for every identity” is nonsense and turns into, at best, demands for equality in exploitation and at worst, a tool of division like with feminism, link to a short-ish article about it. There is no alternative or substitution to class struggle.
And even without all that, and maybe I’m severely misinformed about this, but there doesn’t even seem to be a sex worker struggle taking place, with it either being some highly localized union activity demanding for more legalities (hardly a movement where international support on underused social media platform matters) or straight up an imaginary product of sex pest leftists aiming to legitimize their porn addictions by claiming that “sex work is necessary!!” or some demented shit like that.
Like, if we really want to abolish sex work, we could put a huge dent in it by, for example, universalizing free high quality childcare and education, healthcare, housing, jobs guarantee, welfare programs, and in the process, develop a drastically different social reality for all workers.
Which is why this is just pure reformist idealism. Look at the real world, most bourgeois countries are arming for a third imperialist war but can hardly reach the sums mandated by NATO or are straight up getting close to defaulting on debts (like US). Welfare back in the day was possible because of WW2 super profits that came up thanks to the untold amount of destruction and death destroying capital and creating more investment opportunities for financial capital, raising the rate of profit. Today, even the most starry eyed social democrat that gets voted in can’t defy laws of physics and generate enough money for the budget to afford anything above small scale social programs that likely has millions of asterisks attached, especially as time goes on and crisis deepens, making austerity necessary.
You also do touch up on “we must do this” “we must support this” as if proletarian movement comes from random lemmy users or voluntarists/individuals/great men rather than proletariat themselves. Don’t fall into such delusions of grandeur, proletariat as a class has to emancipate themselves and not some ahistorical outside organization, with class organs such as the party developing out of this struggle. Until then, there is nothing an individual can do, change can only be accomplished through unified mass action.
If there is some “unique workers struggle” but no proletarian movement, all it can hope to do is beg the ruling class for… something. If there is a proletarian movement, then complete emancipation is possible, rendering the former isolated struggle pointless and to be clear, there’s nothing stopping them from joining it and doing their part on the barricades or even becoming part of class organs, talking about specific demands of theirs if it hasn’t been addressed yet. It’s one struggle.
Honestly I wrote all this just because I would feel bad to ignore a wall of text someone put effort into writing, but even though we don’t see eye to eye at least you can see where I’m coming from.
Thank you for the thoughtful reply. I would like to clarify a few things on my end, but we’ve both made our cases so I’ll try to be brief.
I am not pro-identity politics, I am critical of idpol. This is demonstrated by citing Marx as the basis for my argument. Idpol is anti-Marxist. I haven’t completed my criticism of identity politics, but I am not an adherent.
What you are calling idol, is critical pedagogy.
I never said unique worker struggles, I said unique worker experiences. You are putting that on me, i have been consistent for one worker struggle. Its one struggle with many qualities. Those qualities are determined by material relations, but the movement itself is made up of the individuals in those relations. In order to reach those individuals you have to understand their conditions, and in order to understand their conditions you have to have deep connections within their communities, within the lives of those individuals. There is one struggle.
Wrt my “demands” for sex workers, yes I believe in revolutionary reforms, so did Marx. I am not a reformist but I think this is the actual political difference between us, my political education was very demand-centered. It is in many ways a weakness that I have to make accommodations for. Part of my organizing experience is in developing political programs. This is an area of activity for me. I don’t think this makes me a reformist idealist because the way I develop and apply that program is active and practical. But I am aware of the strengths and weaknesses of this approach since I have direct experience with them in an organizing context with a revolutionary character.
“We must do this/we must support this” okay this is a legit call out, its another peculiarity of the tradition I come from and frankly it drives me crazy, meanwhile yes I also do this. However it isn’t coming from a random Lemmy user, its coming from a 50 year old socialist tradition. I agree with you though, I don’t like it even though I do it. If this was an article I was editing I would have reframed my point to exclude this wording.
So this is what passes for a short response from me lol. Thanks for the discussion!
A lot of leftists have adopted the view that sex work is something positive, liberatory, just another type of work that should be supported like wholesome small businesses while ignoring the reality of just how fucked it is (the why on why it’s fucked and why it’s rapey is in my other comments), I’d argue more often than not this is done deliberately to justify their own unhealthy views.
The post + title combo and some background of OP of this post (not the tweet) makes me believe they are exactly this type of person, which is what I was responding to. I am not arguing that “sex workers are enemy of the working class”, that’s stupid and I highly doubt anyone sane or anyone here at all says that except some Marx quote which OP references if one was to read it in the most disingenuous way possible.
It is work, they are workers, but it’s a horrible job that can easily be and must be abolished even before commodity form dies.
That being said:
Alright, with all due respect, what the fuck are you talking about? Workers struggle is one and the same, there are no “unique worker struggles”. The historic task of proletariat is to abolish the anarchic mode of production, private property and commodity form completely (in other words, the current state of things) in favor of production for use in a classless, stateless society. Sex work would literally cease to be a thing, if someone truly wants to fuck a ton then they’re not a prostitute but a ‘playah’ since no exchange takes place other than one of actual consent, with all the survival needs and freedoms being provided freely already.
Even as early as DOTP, there would be no reason to keep sex workers or lumpenproletariat in their positions given their misery and the ability for counter-revolutionaries to mobilize them. Reintegration to the labor pool is the most sane choice.
Without a proletarian revolution, there is no emancipation.
P.S. you use “division of labor” in the wrong way. What it refers to is not when workers go and cry about whose job is real or not, but a concept where people split into specialized roles during labor process. It is it’s own can of worms that is completely unrelated to this topic.
BTW that’s not my downvote
Re: the poster of this lemmy post - fair, I haven’t looked into them and I agree that the application of sex-work positive liberatory language can be applied to anti-worker reaction.
Re: divisions of labor - a few quotes from Principles of communism
This is what you are talking about. However, later:
So this doesn’t contradict your point, but it does add some depth to it. If divisions of labor are the basis of class, and class is a social relation defined and differentiated by material conditions, then it is more than just “people split into specialized roles during labor process,” it isn’t anywhere near that neutral. It absolutely defines our social reality, differences based on these divisions generate different lived experiences.
What the fuck I’m talking about
Theses on Feuerbach, I:
So Marx is saying that the old materialist view considered everything in the abstract, separated and distinct, views as the thing in itself. The part that I’ve become really conscious of is his constant use of the concept of “sensuousness” which I take to mean something like experience, where an individual senses something in their environment.
Theses III:
This lands on a particular conclusion. Marxist materialism conceptualizes “the thing, reality” as a process that begins with individual sensing/experiencing, contemplation of experience, and activity that changes something in the world. These changes are experienced by the subject, so that this is a cycle of social development that is concretely centered in human experience and activity. This is affirmed in Marx by his adaptation of the labor theory of value, which centers human labor power in capitalist production. He took Ricardo’s more abstract “old materialist” formulation and expanded it to include the actual time and energy of.people, unlocking its revolutionary potential. Lenin described how class consciousness is structural, rather than purely individual.
This process is the fundamental insight of Marx, this insight represents the actual turning of Hegel on his head.
There is one unified worker’s struggle, the working class against the capitalists, but divisions in labor create totally different experiences between workers. For example, Marxists have tried, and failed miserably, to convince the broad majority of black workers that there is one worker struggle, because frankly, it’s too abstract. But what black people understand is that white people literally can not understand racism. We don’t experience it directly, so we can only understand it in the abstract. What white people can do, is involve ourselves in the actual work of black liberation. We gain real experience in struggle, centering black experience in order to identify the actual causes and effects of racial discrimination. Like we all know racism comes from capitalism, but that’s too abstract and doesn’t actually connect the experience of the individual to the material consequence. Lots of people deny it out of hand because it doesnt match their experience. Because of alienation, workers don’t experience every aspect of our material conditions, but we do have direct experience of bad or dangerous conditions, certain kinds of exploitation, etc. These fundamental experiences are commonly used by union organizers to develop class consciousness and solidarity. It isn’t hard for people to see how our struggles connect us, but it does take a little help connecting our lived experiences to class struggle. And that connection does not occur without direct experience, combined with direct involvement in the struggle to improve material conditions.
Every worker has these conditions working on them but every worker experiences them differently due to divisions caused by capitalism. Divisions in labor not only occur between different types of jobs, but fundamentally, between genders, races, ethnicities, levels of education, etc. The economic opportunities afforded to an educated white cis straight man are objectively different than opportunities afforded a black trans woman with a “criminal” record. This is a social division that is fundamental part of divisions of labor. The jobs you can get vs the jobs I can get. And if I’m working as a software engineer and someone else is working as a prostitute the differences between our experiences are compound and chasmic. I will not understand that person’s experiences, at best i can sympathise, which only gets me so far.
However my liberation is dependent on theirs because it is fundamentally one struggle. This is why I would rely on a sex worker to define the concrete conditions of their oppression, working together to discover the actual nature of their oppression and how that connects to my own, rather than only understanding these things at the most abstract level in the most general way. Only by reckoning with the actual conditions people experience can we see how other people’s experiences are connected to pur own. Understanding the worker struggle as one struggle, if only considered in abstract theory, can never generate real solidarity, and therefore is not by itself a road to socialism. We have to prove it to ourselves and to others every day and in every way possible.
Conditions vary widely from place to place, time to time, occupation to occupation. The existence of broad material generalities does not invalidate concrete specificities. And those concretions are based exclusively in the experiences and practical activity of people. Broad generalities misapplied to the whole of society only compound contradictions, into which the bourgeois will sow corruption and reaction. Compromises will have to be made, socialism is fundamentally a transitional process, and there are certain broad changes to society that have to be made. Like, if we really want to abolish sex work, we could put a huge dent in it by, for example, universalizing free high quality childcare and education, healthcare, housing, jobs guarantee, welfare programs, and in the process, develop a drastically different social reality for all workers. But if we want sex workers to join the struggle, we have to prove that we understand and are making real accommodations for their experiences. And if we don’t want sex workers to join the struggle, well then who else are we leaving out?
Yes, everyone’s individual experience might have some differences, not everyone might be experiencing the same things. However, these differences more often that not are results of superstructures (law, institutions, etc), the form of which entirely depends on the base (mode of production).
As preface to A contribution to the Critique of Political Economy says:
Trans people get discriminated against by law and institutions, ruling class spreads propaganda against them because they attack the holy nuclear family, which serves the base in providing new workers for capital to exploit and grow with. Minorities get discriminated against due to them being a convenient target to increase capitalist rate of profit (with profit being what current production is based on) and to divide the proletariat via the spread of ruling class ideas that help preserve them. Sex workers, both ‘successful’ and desperate are where they are both due to capitalism’s tendency to commodify everything, even intimate human experience and due to necessity to keep an impoverished reserve army of labor to allow the decrease of wages.
It all has the same exact root, and no matter how many idpolers cry about it, there can’t be any long-term emancipation unless material conditions undergo a shift in a way where these concessions would actually positively serve the base. Slavery was abolished given how it was a pre-capitalist institution that was no longer efficient to keep, result being (not quite) equality under capital. Women were put to work in the factories rather than being traditional stay-at-home wives in the form of legal guardianship due to the growth of capital and need for more workers or labor shortages (especially during wartime). Various forms of welfare were introduced as a response to growing worker discontent as a way for bourgeois to preserve their class rule and pacify them, but more importantly it was done during the times when bourgeois states were prospering thanks to the superprofits WW2 provided and they could more than easily afford them, stimulating profit rates for private owners in the process. All of these things were changes to the superstructure that historically made sense to implement, but none emancipated from capitalism, only at best providing equality under it or an equality in exploitation.
And it is precisely why the idea of “unique struggle for every identity” is nonsense and turns into, at best, demands for equality in exploitation and at worst, a tool of division like with feminism, link to a short-ish article about it. There is no alternative or substitution to class struggle.
And even without all that, and maybe I’m severely misinformed about this, but there doesn’t even seem to be a sex worker struggle taking place, with it either being some highly localized union activity demanding for more legalities (hardly a movement where international support on underused social media platform matters) or straight up an imaginary product of sex pest leftists aiming to legitimize their porn addictions by claiming that “sex work is necessary!!” or some demented shit like that.
Which is why this is just pure reformist idealism. Look at the real world, most bourgeois countries are arming for a third imperialist war but can hardly reach the sums mandated by NATO or are straight up getting close to defaulting on debts (like US). Welfare back in the day was possible because of WW2 super profits that came up thanks to the untold amount of destruction and death destroying capital and creating more investment opportunities for financial capital, raising the rate of profit. Today, even the most starry eyed social democrat that gets voted in can’t defy laws of physics and generate enough money for the budget to afford anything above small scale social programs that likely has millions of asterisks attached, especially as time goes on and crisis deepens, making austerity necessary.
You also do touch up on “we must do this” “we must support this” as if proletarian movement comes from random lemmy users or voluntarists/individuals/great men rather than proletariat themselves. Don’t fall into such delusions of grandeur, proletariat as a class has to emancipate themselves and not some ahistorical outside organization, with class organs such as the party developing out of this struggle. Until then, there is nothing an individual can do, change can only be accomplished through unified mass action.
If there is some “unique workers struggle” but no proletarian movement, all it can hope to do is beg the ruling class for… something. If there is a proletarian movement, then complete emancipation is possible, rendering the former isolated struggle pointless and to be clear, there’s nothing stopping them from joining it and doing their part on the barricades or even becoming part of class organs, talking about specific demands of theirs if it hasn’t been addressed yet. It’s one struggle.
Honestly I wrote all this just because I would feel bad to ignore a wall of text someone put effort into writing, but even though we don’t see eye to eye at least you can see where I’m coming from.
Thank you for the thoughtful reply. I would like to clarify a few things on my end, but we’ve both made our cases so I’ll try to be brief.
So this is what passes for a short response from me lol. Thanks for the discussion!