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Lumpen: “We will lose everything if we go to communism!”
The “everything” they are talking about: Human sexuality as a commodity
Great read, comrade! It succinctly addresses all the common reservations, I will be sharing and linking this whenever this tired discussion comes up again. o7
I don’t understand the opposition to porn in general, as opposed to the commodity production of porn. Socialism is against commodity production, not labor and the production of use values.
At one point you compare porn addiction to gaming addiction. Games are also produced as commodities and are designed to be addictive for profit. So is the answer to ban game production? Or is it to provide health care for all addictions, and to replace commodity production of games by something more intelligent and democratic?
To be honest, I seriously do not believe that there are enough people who wish to record themselves in action and upload it for the world to see to still qualify pornography as an industry, and thus warrant the existence of dedicated media (websites, magazines, TV channels, etc.)
There are two trends pointing in the opposite direction. Taboos against porn are eroding, making it more socially acceptable. Advances to the means of communication (the internet, smartphones) mean that a video that might have been seen by a thousand people in a single city 50 years ago can now be seen by millions all over the world.
This is first and foremost poverty allievation, because poverty is what drives people to prostitution.
I’m all for poverty alleviation. If that reduces the number of porn performers globally to 0, because nobody wants to do the work, that’s fine with me. Nobody should have to do sex work. But if like 1000 people or 10,000 still want to make porn, and they can entertain billions, that’s also fine with me.
The problem with porn (and many other industries today) is that it is itself a result of commodification, and could not exist – at least in my view – without the commodification and objectification of the human body.
If we remove the profit motive of video games, we could still make them as entertainment; that’s not inherently a problem (the problem around video games is when they promote reactionary ideas and people spend 8 hours a day playing them without doing anything else, right?). If we remove the profit motive of porn, the potential for trafficking still exists even in a socialist society. The potential for abuse in order to reach views and fame still exists. This exists already on TikTok and social media of all places, which I didn’t include in the essay, but on TikTok especially dangerous “challenges” like dry scooping pre workout exist (powder dries your mouth instantly and can make you choke), or taking a whole tub of it at once (a whole tub is enough for a caffeine overdose), all for views.
Especially if we consider socialism and not communism, i.e. living alongside the capitalist hegemon. This is the reason, I believe, that all AES in existence have banned prostitution and pornography in any form. In communism, honestly, your guess is as good as mine how people will see it and live with it–or not. But for this I can point to this essay about drug use: https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Essay:On_drug_use, and our relationship to it in communism, specifically:
Workers, even for convenience, would already coexist materially as a collective throughout their days, at work, at home or at leisure, so naturally there would be tendencies to collective habits.
As for the spread of it, my argument in the essay answered the common take I see that there will be exhibitionists, the famous exhibitionists that exist in the thousands, that will want to share their body and sexual activities with other people. There I seriously don’t believe that there will be enough of what are ultimately amateur porn stars to justify any specific platform put in place. I doubt there will even be a handful; actresses do this for the money and sell their videos (they are just reuploaded without permission which may lead to the impression that they enjoy sharing these activities freely). And this brings another problem of course, how do you know that the actress gave her consent for anything that happens? Porn sites under capitalism are actually full of rape (in the sense of not giving consent for an act AND actually filming rape and posting the act online, I’m not joking), stolen home videos, revenge porn.
We would have to prove that all of that can disappear to accept porn under socialism. Otherwise it remains antithetical to the revolution, i.e. the false consciousness argument.
I love discussing this stuff with intelligent comrades! It makes me scrutinize my own position more thoroughly.
The problem with porn (and many other industries today) is that it is itself a result of commodification, and could not exist – at least in my view – without the commodification and objectification of the human body.
There is an important distinction here between the commodification of labor-power (of a proletarian) and the commodification of the laborer themselves (enslavement). I searched for an example of the commodification of the laborer in porn and found this article. A performer tried to leave pornography to become a surgical tech but was not allowed to graduate. She tried two other careers with the same result:
Hurt but still undeterred, Gauge went to criminal justice school, then to makeup artist school. When she applied for jobs, she’d be passed over in favor of someone with less experience and training… After eight years of this treatment, at the age of 33 she decided to return to the porn industry…
This seems to be what you have in mind. But on closer inspection, her career was destroyed not by porn (the commodity or the industry) but by a set of social relations, patriarchy. The patriarchy treats sex workers as an inferior caste of people who are not allowed to leave that industry. Blaming the commodity instead of the social relation sounds to me like commodity fetishism.
IMO the comparison to drugs is flawed for the same reason. Drugs literally, materially destroy the body by causing organ failure. Porn “destroys” the body of performers only within patriarchal social relations which devalue sex workers and decree that they’re not allowed to leave pornography.
The important question is how much of the fight against patriarchy has to happen before socialism can be achieved, rather than afterwards. In Marx’s time the fight against slavery had to come before the fight against capitalism, because a worker could not join the proletariat (sell their labor-power as a commodity) if they themselves were a commodity. If Marx’s words about white supremacist slavery also make sense for the patriarchy, then labor cannot emancipate itself in the male body while it is branded in the female body. The enemy today is not porn (the commodity or the industry) any more than the enemy in Marx’s day was cotton. The enemy is the set of social relations treating one set of workers as a separate and inferior caste outside of the proletariat.
W.E.B. Du Bois wrote that Black laborers ended slavery in the US by escaping the plantations by the hundreds of thousands in what amounted to a general strike: “the black worker won the war by a general strike which transferred his labor from the Confederate planter to the Northern invader, in whose army lines workers began to be organized as a new labor force.” They did not end agriculture in the US, they ended the particular set of social relations excluding them from the proletariat. Isn’t the answer the same for sex workers?
The difficulty I face is that we are talking about a socialist future, when most resources against porn are focused on the capitalist reality of it. To be honest I’ve had to read a few things here and there and remade my reply a couple of times lol. This is all in the conditional, and even if worldwide socialism was achieved tomorrow, the way it looks tomorrow vs. the way it looks in 100 years, and then 500 years will all be different, and this topic is no exception. That is perhaps the curse of dialectics, but also its power. So there can be no definite answers.
I completely agree that the bigger contradiction here is the patriarchy. Porn is a symptom, but we must also attack the symptoms to some extent. Landlordism is a symptom of class antagonisms, and we attack their private property which attacks the class antagonisms (not destroying them as that is impossible, but putting the proletariat above the bourgeoisie… well, you know the rest already).
However, I would disagree that only slavery commodifies the human body. Turning something into a commodity to be bought and sold on a market, in this case the human body, also happens in the sex industry. A proletarian, no matter how difficult their job, will sell their labour-power, their capacity to perform labour. Prostitutes and porn actresses have only one thing to sell, their bodies. The distinction is very important and makes all the difference.
In that sense we must also be able to find out if pornography can exist without the patriarchy (or will exist).
There is a whole host of feminist articles against pornography and very deep critiques, but I’m always worried they are liberal and fall short in some ways that a marxist could catch, and that I just lack the necessary feminist education to understand where they would fall short. There’s this study, for example: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0020174X.2018.1487882 which has an interesting opener:
Pornography has proved adept at repackaging itself in response to feminist critiques, with polished appeals to the legitimating rhetoric of choice, and casting pornography as healthy sexual expression that contributes to women’s sexual (and economic) liberation.
We see the mutable aspect of any capitalist industry here, where they will repackage our critiques, our changing social relations and sell it back to us.
But this is in capitalism and we are talking about socialism. We would have to first be sure that there can be no profit motive or exploitation (in the marxist meaning) for it to exist in socialism – I’m thinking of the Chinese model here for example, where some amount of private property is allowed.
Next we would also have to be sure that there can be a way to make “ethical” porn – that is, porn without all the problems we outlined before. And one of the problems is the very real and documented consequences on the consumers of pornography, and even today’s “ethical” porn is not exempt. This site: https://fightthenewdrug.org/get-the-facts/ has good data on this. For some things the solution sounds easy; stop abuse in the bedroom by filming safer, healthier porn. But it still is porn at the end of the day: a voyeuristic practice that leads to the objectification of people, the potential for addiction, and that many women think is cheating (and they are right).
And I personally don’t see it for the foreseeable future, and I think that’s why all AES banned porn (I tried looking up on this but it’s riddled with frankly elementary school level anticommunist propaganda so no luck so far).
But mostly I’m sometimes dismayed at some comrades – not you, and you made great arguments – that can’t seem to imagine life without porn. It’s an industry that has existed for about 100 years only, it has never been part of human history and already much like capitalist realism, we are being “pornography realistic”, where it’s easier for us to imagine communism than a world where we don’t have access to porn at any time.
If we could meet up somewhere down the line, I think it would be where pornography cannot exist in the early stages of socialism – the contradictions are too high, and by the time there can be such ethical (or healthy) porn that does not fetishize minorities, that does not lead to abuse, that does not rely on trafficking, that does not lead to objectification or commodification, it is most likely people will not even want porn by then and so, much like the withering away of the state (or exactly like withering away) there would be no reason to outlaw it because it wouldn’t exist, at least in any meaningful form. But this is again speculation because we can’t even imagine a world that far ahead. Maybe in 500 years after worldwide socialism the social relations will have changed so much that partners will not think porn is cheating and not care if their spouse watches it. Maybe objectification of the human body will be a concept left in our less enlightened times, and maybe people will have healthier, less alienated lives that prevent the rise of addictions. And so they could consume porn healthily and safely, who knows. Until then, we are still left to face the contradictions that are presented to us…
If you’ve read the article I linked at the end: https://proletarianfeminist.medium.com/a-socialist-feminist-and-transgender-analysis-of-sex-work-b08aaf1ee4ab, I’m also interested in your thoughts on it.
You write that sex work sells the body, and not just the labor-power. But that’s exactly what looks like fetishism to me. The performer sells their labor-power for a definite period of time to film a movie. After that, the porn company does not own their body and cannot film a second movie with them unless it buys more of their labor-power. Only the patriarchy regards the performer’s body as sold and degraded. The patriarchy says that the performer is now in a lower caste and unsuitable for other work, that their body is essentially “sold” but to the whole industry as in the Salon article I linked.
I read your proletarianfeminist article. I agree with most of the 7 suggestions at the end, including decriminalization and de-stigmatization of sex workers. Glorifying johns is liberal consumer activism. Glorifying pimps is bourgeois class warfare against workers. Socialists should not do either.
But I can’t get behind total abolition. She quotes a Canadian group saying that “we must reject the idea that prostitution could be a solution or a social safety net for proletarian women; instead we should fight for creating real opportunities–employment, education, etc.” But why not both keep it as a safety net and create real opportunities? Rather than getting rid of safety nets, seat belts, etc, shouldn’t we try to avoid needing them but still have them?
The author herself used sex work to provide housing and medical care for herself and her family. Would she have been better off if sex work had been abolished before she could buy her mother’s cancer medicine?
Her answer would probably be that if we provided housing and health care, then sex work would not have been necessary. I agree. If we were capable of providing housing and health care to everyone, and if as a result sex work completely disappeared on its own, without our having to abolish it, I’d be totally fine with that.
But what if we can’t? What if our ability to provide the necessities is imperfect or takes a long time in the lower stage of socialism? In case we can’t, shouldn’t we at least leave the safety net in place?
Ah, you lost me there unfortunately:
But why not both keep it as a safety net and create real opportunities? Rather than getting rid of safety nets, seat belts, etc, shouldn’t we try to avoid needing them but still have them?
There are two situations, one being prostitution in capitalism and the other prostitution in socialism.
In capitalism, prostitution is never going to be abolished – and we see that with groups trying to get it legalised, regulated, and “detabooifed”. This is not a judgment but just the facts we are living in.
In socialism, we are inheriting that structure & institution and must decide what to do with it. We are entirely able then to provide programmes so as to make prostitution so irrelevant, it can be banned and made illegal. I addressed illegality in my article; it doesn’t necessarily mean that prostitutes would be jailed for providing their services, but that there is a legal basis to enrol them in the programmes. These could look much like China’s did (or the USSR before them, or Cuba…) – provide housing, provide education and then job opportunities. Following from the examples of past and present socialism, I have no reason to believe there is no material way today to cut prostitution straight up – this is the material reality we are currently in. It’s not a safety net for the women who are trafficked into it, and so should be a priority for a socialist state to take care of. As Parenti said, there are no poor countries, there are over-exploited countries. Huge amounts of wealth are being siphoned by the national and international bourgeoisie, when they could be used right now on their people. Thus I can’t think of any country that couldn’t tackle prostitution and pornography right away.
So indeed:
The author herself used sex work to provide housing and medical care for herself and her family. Would she have been better off if sex work had been abolished before she could buy her mother’s cancer medicine?
We can assume not, but that is in a capitalist framework and I think even she recognizes this is the nature of prostitution in capitalism. Anything is better than starving to death, some workers even accept slave contracts (e.g. when your employer holds your passport). We must aim that this does not happen to anyone and that they do not have to resort to such choices.
Only the patriarchy regards the performer’s body as sold and degraded
I wouldn’t say only the patriarchy does this. The objective analysis is that most prostitutes (by and large they are trafficked in the so-called third world) are not doing this by any choice, they are doing it for survival and sometimes under duress. Thus they do not have labour-power to sell, the only commodity the proletarian can sell to survive, and they must sell the only next thing they can: their body. They are cut out of the formal economy. I lifted this completely from the other article, under the section called “Selling the only commodity we have left: our bodies”.
it doesn’t necessarily mean that prostitutes would be jailed for providing their services, but that there is a legal basis to enrol them in the programmes.
That makes sense, if these programs are about keeping them safe from bad pimps/johns and helping them exit sex work when they’re ready.
Hey, thanks so much for publishing this article and taking the time to write detailed responses! I need to read more about the topic, maybe the Parenti book mentioned in the proletarianfeminist article.
I noticed some shortcomings on your line of thought, and I will share my understanding of the matter.
Pornography is media produced entirely for the purpose of instant, sexual (self) gratification
For the purposes of this essay we are concerned about pornography as it exists in capitalism
This is where I believe some issues arise. When you define pornography as media created for the purpose of sexual gratification, this makes it hard to analyze the overall production of media depicting sexual intercourse throughout history. Most of the time, we cannot analyze intent of the authors or artists producing a depiction of sex.
We do know that depictions of sexual intercourse has been made all over history, from cave-dwelling humans to ancient civilizations and our current bourgeois society. This already hints us that sexual intercourse may also be depicted in a socialist society, independent of the intent of the artists, but certainly in a different way sexual depictions are produced in a capitalist society.
The reason pornography in capitalism is different, as comrade @T34@lemmygrad.ml mentioned, is because in capitalism pornography is produced for profit. Your definition of pornography in a capitalist society may be mistaken because considering this, pornography is not produced for the purpose of sexual gratification. Sexual gratification would be the “use-value” part of the equation.
The second issue is that depictions of sexual intercourse in capitalism is a particular, not an universal. The universal would be the production of media depicting sexual intercourse, which has accompanied humans for thousands of years. Besides that, I completely agree that pornography, as it currently is, has no place in a socialist society. It’s a massive industry based on systematic sexual and economic exploitation, rape, human trafficking, threats and abuse of image for profit.
Having said that, I wanted to also share my speculations of “sex work”. This is not a critique nor an analysis, only speculative thoughts:
I do believe that a socialist society towards communism will feature sexual activity as work. If we remove the “sinful” shell of religious demonizing of sex, much like massage, sex relaxes tensions accumulated during daily life and routines and is a really beneficial, sometimes even essential, element of human health and well-being.
However, we obviously wouldn’t see it as a commodified and intrinsically exploitative activity, but as a science, a study of techniques to enhance pleasure and relaxation for therapeutic purposes for those in need, such as the case for stress or if someone for some reason has difficulty having sex with others.
