u/Frogsknecht - originally from r/GenZhou
After a (now locked) discussion on prostitution arose not too long ago, we were reminded that there still remains a large portion of Marxist-Leninists who lack a concrete view on “sex work”, i.e. prostitution, pornography, and so forth, and who, as a result of this position, take on accident an apathetic and passive view towards what is in reality one of the cruelest and most severe forms of exploitation which arose from the development of not only modern capitalism, but from property relations in general; “sex-work” is a practice which has roots in the very beginning of our history as human beings, emerging during our transition from primitive savagery into organized civilization. What is the nature of this curious form of work, and what are we, as Marxist-Leninists, supposed to make of “sex-work”?
To be doing this, we will be studying Engels’ Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State, in particular Chapter 4, The Monogamous Family, which is itself an analysis of anthropologist Lewis Morgan’s Ancient Society; for reference, it will take us a short bit before we get to talking about prostitution, because it’s necessary to understand the history of marriage first.
The History of Marriage and its Reasons
In his work, Engels takes time to explain – among other things – the various conditions which led to the rise of the monogamous social relation as the common form of marriage which all humans adhered to. This comes as the result of thousands of years of primitive social development, as humankind slowly organizes into tribes and by way of natural selection, those tribes which fail to adapt to the changing social relations are doomed to collapse internally or fall to outside pressures.
For example, Engels explains in a previous chapter that one of the first developments in human social relations was the development of the concept of pedophilia, that it was wrong to have intercourse with a child of a certain developmental level, prior to sexual maturity. Those tribes which lacked this instinct, and which permitted pedophilia, quickly died due to birth-related illness, dysfunction, etc. The prevention of pedophilia, i.e., the relation in which all adults were allowed to have intercourse with one another, but children were excluded and not permitted, is the Consanguine family type. This is the first instance of “marriage” – all members of the society were “married” to one another, except for the children.
In this form of marriage, therefore, only ancestors and progeny, and parents and children, are excluded from the rights and duties (as we should say) of marriage with one another. Brothers and sisters, male and female cousins of the first, second, and more remote degrees, are all brothers and sisters of one another, and precisely for that reason they are all husbands and wives of one another. At this stage the relationship of brother and sister also includes as a matter of course the practice of sexual intercourse with one another.
The prohibition of incest was the second social development to form, with many tribes adopting the idea that intercourse between people of the same mother was wrong – this led to the first instance of Punaluan marriage, a social relation by which those in a tribe were all married to another, except children were excluded, and intercourse between brothers and sisters was prohibited. A group of brothers from one mother would marry a group of sisters from another mother. The taken partners are then referred to as wives and husbands. Over time, the concept grew to include prohibiting incest between cousins, both “first” cousins and “second” cousins. Engels explains that this stage is infinitely more important than the Consanguine phase, because it is truly the first step into an actually organized form of social marriage as a means of preserving property relations.
If the first advance in organization consisted in the exclusion of parents and children from sexual intercourse with one another, the second was the exclusion of sister and brother. On account of the greater nearness in age, this second advance was infinitely more important, but also more difficult, than the first.
Through all of this, humankind adopted these forms of marriage to conform to man’s developing but still very primitive society. Consanguine and Punaluan marriage evolved as ways of sustaining the tribe’s population prior to the development of private property. In these times, we might observe that, rather interestingly, women occupied a very high social position in relation to men when compared to modern industrial societies:
Communistic housekeeping, however, means the supremacy of women in the house; just as the exclusive recognition of the female parent, owing to the impossibility of recognizing the male parent with certainty, means that the women – the mothers – are held in high respect. One of the most absurd notions taken over from eighteenth-century enlightenment is that in the beginning of society woman was the slave of man. Among all savages and all barbarians of the lower and middle stages, and to a certain extent of the upper stage also, the position of women is not only free, but honorable.
But this system was doomed to collapse eventually as well. It worked when the tribe needed to sustain itself while there was very limited social contact, homes were temporary, and bad weather could mean death of a thousand year lineage at a day’s notice. But after the development of private property, the interests of the components making up the tribe changed, and the position of women in society plummeted.
“Fake” Monogamy: Controlling Women
Monogamy’s rise as the predominant social form of marriage coincides nearly perfectly with the development of man’s concept of private property, which emerged after the productive forces of society reached such a point that certain forms of labor – hunting, gathering, and so on – became superfluous, and thus a surplus of goods took place and some people had to work less than others. How did this situation lead to monogamy as a social construct?
The simple explanation is that, owing to the fact that children are an extension of their parents, the children of those who own private property are an extension of the propertied class, i.e., it is in their self interests, just as much as their parents, to defend the sacred right to property, the new developing social form of unequal and exploitative development. The child, after all, is the one who inherits your property. This isn’t just some universal rule: all tribes at some point had a struggle between the ones that stood to lose from development into this system of private property inherited along family lines, and those that stood to gain. But in each case, those that stood to gain won the struggle, and in the cases where they didn’t, the tribe ended in destruction owing to its primitiveness and lack of development in the face of changing material conditions.
It [monogamy] is based on the supremacy of the man, the express purpose being to produce children of undisputed paternity; such paternity is demanded because these children are later to come into their father’s property as his natural heirs.
Engels explains that, in many societies, there lies a period wherein group marriage and monogamous marriage exist side by side, and women are required to “purchase their chastity” in order to be owned by only one husband rather than a group. It was through this manner that the best off women of society were granted elevation from group marriage into the monogamous system first, while the lower castes were left behind for some time.
What causes the arrival of monogamy? Monogamy arose as the social structure to guarantee the validity of the child as the inheritor of property. The concept of private property is incompatible with the concept of group marriage, of all the primitive marriage types, because the child as the “heir” to one’s property cannot be secured – with multiple husbands and multiple wives, any kid could come from a number of places with no definite father from whom he was guaranteed the right of property. So monogamy – a strict social relation of marriage between one woman and one man – became the norm. This method granted everyone to know which kid belonged to whom, which property was going where after which person’s death, etc. It was of course a very convoluted and unstable system in its beginnings, but over time it strengthened and became more formalized.
Engels, however, explains that the “monogamy” which we know is, in reality, not “monogamy” at all, but rather, a “monogamy” only for women and a free, open “polygamy” for men, owing to the nature of the property relations that gave rise to monogamous marriage in the first place:
It is distinguished from pairing marriage by the much greater strength of the marriage tie, which can no longer be dissolved at either partner’s wish. As a rule, it is now only the man who can dissolve it, and put away his wife. The right of conjugal infidelity also remains secured to him, at any rate by custom (the Code Napoleon explicitly accords it to the husband as long as he does not bring his concubine into the house), and as social life develops he exercises his right more and more; should the wife recall the old form of sexual life and attempt to revive it, she is punished more severely than ever.
It is here that we can see the monogamous system, although representing an irreversible advance in society, is a system wherein the position of men is invariably higher than the woman. Whereas the man retains all the privileges of group marriage, the woman is put under the most brutal and coercive regiments of the monogamous form. Engels points out that this is a massive contradiction, as, despite being the strictest form, the monogamous marriage drives the two parties to have the most acutely conflicting interests; and that, under the private property relation, monogamous marriage is inherently exploitative as its primary purpose is the preservation of the male’s private property. In a sense, we can see that the monogamous marriage is only monogamous for the woman. It is here that the inevitable road to prostitution, to moral and physical degradation, and to the solution we seek as Marxists is paved.
Private Property and the Monogamous Form: The Birth of Prostitution
Now that we have sufficiently studied the history of marriage, its forms, and its relation to private property, we can properly study the history of its offshoot, prostitution, and its forms, relations to private property, and so forth.
Engels explains that, though it might appear opposite in dynamic, the ceremonial “purchase of chastity” was, in reality, the birthplace of modern prostitution. The right to “buy” and “sell” one’s chastity was, at its core, the reverse of the idea that one can “buy” and “sell” sex. Once this institution was formalized and so prominently celebrated in religious thought, its counterpart, the purchase and sale of sex, was an inevitable outcome.
Hetaerism [concubinage, in this case quasi-prostitution] derives quite directly from group marriage, from the ceremonial surrender by which women purchased the right of chastity. Surrender for money was at first a religious act; it took place in the temple of the goddess of love, and the money originally went into the temple treasury. The temple slaves of Anaitis in Armenia and of Aphrodite in Corinth, like the sacred dancing-girls attached to the temples of India, the so-called bayaderes were the first prostitutes…
Similarly, Engels explains how, in this seemingly “monogamous” form of chaste marriage, women – owing to their relegation as mere objects of producing heirs to private property – fade into machines, into non-persons, and the sanctity of the social relation that is marriage is undermined to an extreme extent as its robbed of its various components and left merely as the bare acquisition of a mate for offspring, without love or passion:
Young women are booty and are handed over to the pleasure of the conquerors, the handsomest being picked by the commanders in order of rank; the entire Iliad, it will be remembered, turns on the quarrel of Achilles and Agamemnon over one of these slaves. If a hero is of any importance, Homer also mentions the captive girl with whom he shares his tent and his bed. The legitimate wife was expected to put up with all this, but herself to remain strictly chaste and faithful… a friend who preferred his friend’s wife could share her with him; and it was considered quite proper to place one’s wife at the disposal of a sturdy “stallion,” as Bismarck would say, even if he was not a citizen. In Euripides a woman is called an oikourema (the word is neuter), a thing for looking after the house, and, apart from her business of bearing children, that was all she was for the Athenian – his chief female domestic servant. The man had his athletics and his public business, from which women were barred; in addition, he often had female slaves at his disposal and during the most flourishing days of Athens an extensive system of prostitution which the state at least favored…
It was not in any way the fruit of individual sex-love, with which it had nothing whatever to do; marriages remained as before marriages of convenience. It was the first form of the family to be based, not on natural, but on economic conditions – on the victory of private property over primitive, natural communal property.
It is this bizarre state of affairs which leads the prostitute, the woman who has surrendered all of her being in order to satisfy men’s needs, to become somehow a simultaneously despised and respected member of society; as a prostitute, she is respected for her obedience, but as a woman she is despised for her promiscuity:
The Spartan women and the elite of the Athenian hetairai [prostitutes] are the only Greek women of whom the ancients speak with respect and whose words they thought it worth while to record. It was precisely through this system of prostitution that the only Greek women of personality were able to develop, and to acquire that intellectual and artistic culture by which they stand out as high above the general level of classical womanhood as the Spartan women by their qualities of character. But that a woman had to be a prostitute before she could be a woman is the worst condemnation of the Athenian family.
Similarly, Engels explains that the horrendous view of women that monogamous marriage imparted upon men is also responsible for the birth of formal homosexual relations, specifically in an abusive and pedophilic form.
The men, who would have been ashamed to show any love for their wives, amused themselves by all sorts of love affairs with hetairai; but this degradation of the women was avenged on the men and degraded them also, till they [the men] fell into the abominable practice of Knabenliebe [pedastry/pedophilic homosexuality]…
I feel that I should note, because I know how some of our comrades might perceive this: this is NOT a condemnation of homosexuality, not on my part or Engels’ part. It is only an acknowledgement of how this form of love arose originally under harsh and exploitative conditions. I kept this in because I felt it might be useful for our comrades who struggle to understand the seemingly odd stance communist parties in countries like China take on LGBT issues.
The homosexual social form will (and mostly has) developed out of this. But originally, it came as the result of a social system alienating women.
To conclude this section, I will extrapolate: we can see from all we have learned that prostitution arose as a social form to allow women an escape from this miserable condition under the monogamous marriage; whereas group to monogamous marriage was characterized by the “purchase” of chastity, prostitution under the monogamous system is characterized by the sale of chastity. The woman sells her chastity for a period of time, and in that time is granted relief from the monogamous system.
Prostitution: An Analysis
Now that we have sufficiently studied the origins of prostitution, of marriage, and of prostitution’s relation to property, it’s time to analyze prostitution and its place in history. To do this, we must understand the objective facts about prostitution and its future development:
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Prostitution arose as a social form to appease men’s desires; after men had alienated women into property, had robbed them of their status of human beings and relegated them only to wives, to “housekeepers”. The element of “sex-love”, as Engels calls it, was eradicated, and sex became a mere formality for the propagation of babies. Sex-love became separated into sex, with wives, and love, with lovers/mistresses/concubines. Sex became a mere mechanic in the process of developing and replicating private property.
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Prostitution is the sale of a woman’s chastity. It is the surrender of a woman’s right to self, “purchased” from them. It’s inherently exploitative: should a woman retain her dignity, refuse to sell her self as a prostitute, refuse the absolute degradation of her body as a means of avoiding starvation – in other words, sex under the threat of actual death – then she retains her status as “woman” prior to “prostitute”. This is the contradiction: capitalism cannot guarantee women the right to be a human before a prostitute. It is the best off – those who first had the money to purchase their chastity, and who have never sunk to such a level that they were required to surrender it for food – that are guaranteed their status as women above all else, and with dignity, even if only to a partial extent of that granted to men. This is, under capitalism, the exception, and cannot be the norm.
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The abolition of private property means the abolition of prostitution. Prostitution is a direct result of private property, and is one of its most intensely exploitative and degrading forms, on par with using child-labor in the acquisition of minerals in mines. Prostitution was the direct commodification of women’s chastity, of their right to self, and to defend the idea of prostitution under socialism is to 1. defend private property, as a necessary relation for upholding prostitution and 2. to out oneself as having no grasp of the woman’s historical position as an exploited person, who has always been at the disadvantage of private property relations, who have always had the coercive system being used against them, and who would never willingly degrade themselves in such a way if they had a choice. They do it for bread and not for the sex.
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Prostitution is objectively wrong, a vestige of a primal form of social organization, the Punaluan family. It is an objective step backwards into a primitive social relation that was already developed out of, and an attempt at the re-subjugation of women to men adapted to modern monogamous marriage. It decidedly prevents the active development of the women proletariat by strengthening their position as wives and servants and by granting them only freedom through slavery.
Prostitution is, in the final analysis, a social relation which uses the propertied status of men to coerce unpropertied women into sexual intercourse, in defiance of the monogamous system. The monogamous system itself is not something which is inherently bad – it’s developmentally an improvement from previous systems. But it can only truly become a monogamous, i.e. for both parties, marriage under socialism, when property relations are in the process of being abolished and the relation between man and woman is a relation, as Engels said, of sex-love, of passion, and not of proprietorship. A true monogamous system demands the actual fidelity of not just the woman, but the man. It’s only through this that a truly prosperous, truly equal society, wherein women and men are equal not on an ideological ground, but on a real, material basis, can be achieved. To conclude, from Engels:
What we can now conjecture about the way in which sexual relations will be ordered after the impending overthrow of capitalist production is mainly of a negative character, limited for the most part to what will disappear. But what will there be new? That will be answered when a new generation has grown up: a generation of men who never in their lives have known what it is to buy a woman’s surrender with money or any other social instrument of power; a generation of women who have never known what it is to give themselves to a man from any other considerations than real love, or to refuse to give themselves to their lover from fear of the economic consequences. When these people are in the world, they will care precious little what anybody today thinks they ought to do; they will make their own practice and their corresponding public opinion about the practice of each individual – and that will be the end of it.
Edit: /u/ComradeFrunze made a good comment I thought worth adding:
the Marxist idea of supporting sex-workers is to ensure they are not assaulted or killed (as is common in capitalism), and to assist them from escaping the sex work industry. While in a capitalist idea of “supporting” sex-workers is to directly support the sex-work industry by being Johns.
The goal under socialism is to eliminate prostitution and sex-work, by changing the material conditions that causes it to appear. It should just be SEX, not SEX WORK.
u/G1adi4tor - originally from r/GenZhou
Hey this might be the best post I’ve ever read on this site (and I was a lurker for a couple years before I made this account…). Thank you so much for putting so much work into this.
I was one of the people in that thread who was waffling but you definitely set my mind right on whether or not prostitution should be illegal, you 100% changed my view on that. Also Engels on point as always.
But also I’m curious. I kind of noticed there was a huge cultural divide in that thread. I’m a yankee bastard for context so I could just have some residual lib brainwashing here, but I support a sexually permissive culture - honestly in my experience girls I’ve dated have been way more into exploring exhibitionism than I was. I totally support women’s liberation and the porn industry is inherently exploitative. I totally think it should be a crime to produce porn commercially, but I actually don’t think it’s that uncommon for couples to just make porn just for the hell of it.
I’m having a hard time filtering out the culture-related perspectives (commenters from sexually repressive cultures vs commenters from sexually permissive cultures) from material analysis though.
I guess this might be kind of a huge question, but what’s the materialist answer? I personally think sexual permissiveness is an indicator of secularity, which results from prosperity & uplifting people from the social conditions that enable religion & reactionary social conservatism to spread. I thought that was the Marxist position, but I’m willing to open my mind again on that.
u/Frogsknecht - originally from r/GenZhou
Aw thank you comrade, I’m glad I could help <3
This is definitely true. This post was more about prostitution than pornography, I want to make a second post on pornography sometime but it’s a slightly more complicated issue. Pornography under a commercial context is exploitative like you said, and is essentially just advanced prostitution, but sexually explicit material isn’t necessarily inherently pornography. Here’s an example: if you were to film a video of you doing something sexually explicit, in a socialist society, where would you post that? Without intending to make profit on it, you don’t really have any reason to be putting it out for mass consumption. Perhaps you simply want to show yourself off – in that case, you can find someone who would like to see you, and send them the video in question; is it still porn in that case? Or is it just a private, erotic video?
That’s the kinda way you have to think with this, under a socialist society, at least over time, the places where pornography is shared would likely be gone, and the motive for mass production/consumption of pornography would have been phased out. It’s not that porn would be viewed as abhorrent, it’s that it would be viewed as nonsensical. Why put yourself out for all to see, when you could put yourself out for whoever you want to see instead?
Two examples: both the PRC and DDR (east germany) banned and criminalized the production of pornography. But, while consumption is illegal in both cases, you wouldn’t know it if you visited. East Germany actually had such a thriving “porn” industry that the state practically helped manage it at some points, though it was tame (not censored, but not graphic either), and often was presented with a quasi-medical or “naturist”/nudist context, rather than a pornographic one. In China, pornography is illegal but not only is it relatively easy to find non-pornographic “erotica” online, it’s also possible to find actual pornography made in nearby countries like Japan. The most the authorities ever do is visit your house if you downloaded pornography to tell you, “Please don’t download pornography because it’s illegal” and then leave. Most of the time they won’t even bother doing that since everyone knows the person is going to get a VPN and then immediately go back to watching porn once the cops leave lmao. Production of porn (as a producer, not actor) is a BIG nono though, and can get you time in prison. I forgot the laws on the actual actors themselves.
But like you said, it’s also a cultural thing. In the DDR, sex and pornography were WAY more openly talked about than in China. Germany has a strong nudist culture, and it was not at all infrequent during the DDR era for the party to publish nudist magazines that had slightly sexual undertones. Similarly, foreign porn was rarely labeled as porn by the state, and was usually categorized as “adult entertainment” or “erotica”. It was only the particularly hardcore things that were labeled as pornography and banned.
Yes and no. It’s not “permissiveness”, permissiveness can actually be a sign of sexual immaturity a lot of the time, and overestimating own’s own permissiveness to sex is what leads to so many incidents of women who are raped and don’t fully realize they were raped until sometimes years after. It’s moreso that sexual maturity, i.e., understanding the consequences of sex, the material and ideological implications, where sex came from, and so forth, that indicates a healthy and thriving society. A natural consequence of this is society seems to become more “permissive”, but in reality, it’s becoming less permissive of the negative aspects. 2020 Americans might be more permissive towards the idea of consensual premarital sex than 1960s Americans, but they are much less permissive of catcalling, harassment, and so forth. As per the unity of opposites, it’s less permissions which grant us more permissions. Women are freer to dress in a sexually provocative way if they live in a society where men are unfree to grope passing women, if that makes sense.
u/veinss - originally from r/GenZhou
It’s an excellent post but here’s the problem: Engels, the main source here, had a limited knowledge of world history and non-european cultures and reactionary ideas like romantic love and relating love to sex filter through his arguments. He’s right both in his analysis of the origin of patriarchy through patrilineal family and (fake) monogamy and in his conclusions on the abolishment of property relations but there’s a lot of missing nuance on the transitional and alternative forms to the patrilineal family and heterosexuality. I won’t dwell on that because I’d rather look towards the present and future
So, a material class based analysis. We’re all aware that poverty and desperation are the main drivers behind sex work, like they are the main drivers behind any other form of work under capitalism. But a very peculiar thing happens with sex work where cultural capital can come into play and lead to very different outcomes. Take two poor working class girls armed with nothing but a phone and their cultural capital wanting to get into sex work. One might decide to escort independently on twitter, start an onlyfans, start camming and start making porn while the other may be struck standing in a cold street corner because she lacks the information, the knowledge, the cultural capital to do these things. She may be entirely unaware of these possibilities. Poverty itself plays a limited role here because not much other than a phone and internet is needed at least to start, it’s a matter of education and culture. The difference here is major. We can’t as marxists consider the escort making top 5% income compared with the rest of the national population to be in the same position as the street prostitute in severe poverty. We have to acknowledge the fact that there is a petty bourgeoisie sex work and a proletarian/lumpenproletarian sex work.
Which leads me to the next thing, the future world, IF we are being successful in building socialism then year after year millions upon millions of people will stop being poor, will get phones (porn production studios) and will get access to education and culture. The naive and honestly baffling expectation I’ve found often among the more prudish communists is that people will then cease to consider sex work an option. This is highly unlikely though. I think people having financial stability, decent jobs, their basic necessities met, extremely powerful handheld computers and cameras plus knowledge of thousands of years worth of philosophical discussion on sex and gender theory might actually lead to more porn and sex work. Perhaps even more so in a society with collective child-rearing and early education. You’d need a literal horny police to prevent this. Same thing with drugs by the way in that the poorer and lesser educated are less likely to try them and far more likely to harm themselves if they do. The scientific and technical aspects need to be considered too, by the end of this century (much earlier for many of these) we will likely have improved male and female contraceptives, cures for all known STDs, artificial wombs, all senses enabled VR, and widespread robots and androids for all sorts of functions. That’s the environment where people living under advanced socialism-near communism will get to decide whether they want sex work to be a thing or not.
Even after the value form is abolished and currency is no longer used I doubt people will stop exchanging sex for intangibles or some other kind of *thing* tbh. The main issue here is that while some are adamant about conflating love and sex, idealizing sex and reproducing social structures like the family our increasingly cosmopolitan future society comes with a good deal of people for whom sex is a casual thing that might be done out of play or boredom. I agree with Engels when he says “When these people are in the world, they will care precious little what anybody today thinks they ought to do; they will make their own practice and their corresponding public opinion about the practice of each individual”
u/Frogsknecht - originally from r/GenZhou
Everyone has limited knowledge of world history and non-european cultures. Engels was far ahead of his time in this regard. The bulk of his analysis is based on Lewish H. Morgan’s Ancient Society, an anthropological work from 1877, which was groundbreaking in that it was a thorough study of all sorts of groups and tribal organizations, from Iroquois to Ethiopians. This wasn’t Engels from 1845, this is a late work from 1884; for reference, Lenin was 14 years old at this time.
As for romantic love, and the relation between sex and love, I can’t quite understand how these are reactionary concepts.
The type of family structure Engels is observing in particular in the chapter I used for this was the Greek monogamous family. This is the most developed type of familial structure; there isn’t an “alternative form” to the patrilineal family, because any “alterative form” invariably leads up to the patrilineal form by default, when given enough time. The inherent laws of development always lead to this natural conclusion when arriving at the division of private property, the creation of social classes, and the development of the state as an institution for upholding property laws. This is what Engels explains in the chapters after the one I used.
In some exceptional cases, sometimes as a result of colonialism, outside contact, or sometimes just insularly, there would be found primitive societies which seemed to possess characteristics of both group marriage and monogamous marriage at the same time: for instance, certain societies had structures wherein a man would have a “wife”, and then under her a group of “second wives”, with whom he could replace his main wife at any time, and who were all as equally responsible to bear heirs as the first wife.
This is a really good point that I wish I mentioned. There is definitely a difference, and it seems like many people here are arguing because they see “sex-work” and immediately think of the petit-bourgeois, self-employed kind, and not of the lumpenproletarian kind. The former is arguably exploitative, the latter is inarguably exploitative.
It’s not an expectation out of prudishness, nor is it an expectation that people will cease “considering sex work an option”. Moreso, it’s that people won’t consider sex work to be work. It will be just sex. If they are having sex because they need to sustain themselves, it is sex work. If they are having sex because it’s fun, it’s sex.
Shame on those people. I would hope a good socialist society would see such “men” dragged to the street and beaten if they tried to pull such a thing. Sex should be a free relation between free individuals. The second you introduce commodification, sex becomes an unfree thing.
Or passion or love, too. All of these reasons work. But the one thing sex should not be is a coercive means of survival. This is the crux of my position.
Yes! That’s why I included it, I think it’s a truly insightful example of “the negation of the negation” (or sexual relations in this case)
u/veinss - originally from r/GenZhou
This is the core of the matter. So if someone studies insects because its fun and doesn’t gets anything out of it what he does is no longer work or science? And what does this imply? Can this person no longer contribute or be taken seriously since he’s no longer working? Or on the contrary does this person become more relevant or respected once they stop working? And if our socialist society advances to the point where near everyone is doing whatever they find fun, is nobody working then? Work as a concept ceases to have any meaning then? What concepts do you propose then to distinguish the thing you do most of your time because you enjoy the most, the thing you do to collaborate with others in creating common living conditions, the thing you do because it’s necessary? the thing you also enjoy and do in your spare time? the thing you do or know about you’re socially renowned for?
I think there’s a much better way to think about this. Ask a physicist. To work is to spend energy. Even playing entails work. Not only the work involved in building the playground or producing the videogame but also the work involved in motion, in jumping, in figuring out the game mechanics, in practicing and getting good. Sex is always work, it involves the expenditure of energy you get from your daily food. Sex with several people in one day is a lot of work. Sex also involves skill and has an aesthetic, artistic dimension and surely it isnt too much of a stretch to say that it can be art. So… in the communist future sex will just be sex? The work (as in energy spent) involved, the skill, the artistry, the fame of people will somehow become irrelevant?
Can you explain why though? Lets say I’m back in middle school and a girl wants me to do her homework in exchange for a glance at her boobs. What exactly becomes unfree and does my decision even matter?
u/Frogsknecht - originally from r/GenZhou
Yes! No longer work at least. It is leisure. It would still very much be science though, that’s a different thing altogether.
I think you will find that in socialist societies, “sex workers” were met with this exact attitude. “You have sex with people for money? That is not work, that is merely rape with concessions to the victim; let’s find you a real job and really provide for yourself, sustain yourself, and live a prosperous life.”
It’s not whether or not they “find it fun”. It’s whether or not they are doing it because they find it fun, or because they need to in order to survive.
We already have a science to do this, Marxism-Leninism. By appraising the material conditions and implications of each of these activities, we can understand if they are forms of work done out of necessity, leisure, a mixture of the two (selling accordions on etsy or something), etc.
I think Marx says this in Capital actually:
You say:
But, I have to point out a flaw here. The obvious implication it seems you’re making is that, it’s not only work to produce the commodity, but to consume it. It would be, essentially, tantamount logic to saying eating bread was work.
If figuring out the game mechanics, practicing to get good, jumping, etc., were work and not leisure, then people would be payed to play video games. But they’re not, except under exceptional conditions, wherein playing the game ceases to become a leisure and begins to become work; ceases to become “friendly competition” and becomes a thing which is trained for, gambled on, and so forth.
Video games are played for leisure, except by specialists who do it as a profession, as work. The same applies for sex.
Then, pardon me asking such a slippery slope question but, according to the only conclusion of your logic – running in a circle for hours on end until you die is work.
Work must be done to accomplish a task. It is the task, and the conditions under which the task are determined, that should be analyzed.
I dunno dude that’s kinda middle school stuff, not really what’s on my mind when I think about prostitution and the development of patriarchal family relations over history y’know. If she said she’d do it for ten dollars then it’s unfree because it’s coerced by her economic need for ten dollars. So I guess if you really wanna use middle schoolers for the example then yeah, if she was coerced by her need (and presumed inability) to complete her homework, it’s an unfree decision on her part, regardless of what you say in the matter.
Out of curiosity, are you asking because this actually happened? I’m sorry if that sounds sarcastic but I’m serious. It’s okay to say, “Huh, maybe I shouldn’t have done that” if you feel guilty about it. It doesn’t make you a bad person or anything of the sort. That’d only be if you continued to do it repeatedly after learning it was wrong.
u/veinss - originally from r/GenZhou
Yes. The same applies to everything. Any activity can be taken to the level where it becomes work. And yes, society can shame any of this work into obscurity based on ideology. Should we shame sex work into obscurity? The problem here is you’re not giving any reason why we should other than pointing out than past socialist states have done it but these states were wrong on several issues (homosexuality, trans rights, understanding drugs). More importantly we’re trying to figure out if sex work is likely to happen in advanced socialism and communism because if it is then what is the point of banning and shaming during the lower phase of socialism?
Running in circles is work. Work can be dumb. Mountains of oil are burned for stupid ass reasons every day, thousands upon thousands of man-hours of work are spent inefficiently and sometimes doing the exact opposite of the intended goals. It’s still work, it still costs, it’s so real it can kill you or kill a society. Animals work as hunters and if they spend energy in a dumb way they can become weak and easy prey for other animals.
But anyway, socialism develops the productive forces towards ever increasing automation, constantly freeing up human labour from menial mechanical tasks so I guess you’d agree that in advanced socialist society necessary activities are less likely to require direct human labour. This means most work will be done in non-necessary non-essential activities. Science, administration, entertainment, art. But no value form, no currency, no exchange. Can trading for sex happen under these conditions?
If we’re trying to think about future socialist society then middle school is an excellent place to look at. Most of us weren’t behaving like drones of capitalism back then. The thing with the girl happened. That girl was from a much wealthier family than me and mostly wanted to flirt, I got to see them without doing work for it but I also did her homework a few times. It was win-win cooperation, I dont think it was wrong at all and this is exactly the kind of thing I think will happen in full communist post scarcity utopias. You cant police people from making these kind of deals. And this is just a softer version of what other poster here was saying about how they’d suck dick for someone to mow their lawn. The important thing is that policing is entirely unenforceable
u/Frogsknecht - originally from r/GenZhou
this isn’t true for any socially necessary form of work. the second it becomes not socially necessary, it ceases to be work.
I don’t think I did this? I did for pornography because it’s a much trickier position to understand without examples. For prostitution it takes only a historical materialist analysis to show its backwardness as a social system.
Who pays for this kind of work? What do you call someone who does this kind of work? Where are there examples of anybody doing this kind of work?
Labor must be socially necessary, it cannot just be superflous labor. Marx explains that in Capital.
But “oil burning” is not work, and there is nobody hired to “burn oil”. There are people employed to do other things, to do work, who burn up oil in the process.
No, because as you said, there is no exchange of commodities. This implies near communism, that the society is working “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”. This would mean that sex is taking place not as an exchange of commodities, but from two people according to their ability, to two people according to their needs. I.e., straightforwards, consensual sex. Not sex work.
I’m not sure I agree with that.
If it was flirting and not done in exchange for you doing her homework then it was free and consensual from both parties yes.
People will flirt? I’d say so yes.
Though, there will be no “utopia”.
Now this is different. This is sex work, i.e. straightforward prostitution. And it would not be permissible in any socialist society, no matter how “willing” the party selling sex says they are.
[deleted] - originally from r/GenZhou
[removed]
u/ComradeFrunze - originally from r/GenZhou
Why not just OFFER BLOWJOBS. there shouldn’t be any trade involved. Why can’t someone go around offering blowjobs to anyone they’d like? If they truly want to give a blowjob, they would do that right?
u/Frogsknecht - originally from r/GenZhou
Why not just ask for a blowjob without offering anything?
u/ComradeFrunze - originally from r/GenZhou
you cannot use middle school as a future socialist society example just because a girl flashed her boobs there