this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2023
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Good grief. I am sorry, but that stances like this one come from the mouths of comrades is the reason why I always object when a communism study guide for beginners does not include texts from Alexandra Kollontai.
Sex under coercion is rape. Work under the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie is done by proletarians under economic coercion as they have to work to be able to fulfill their basic needs. Therefore, sex as a means of living, or in other words, prostitution, is rape.
You have four options at this point: you can either accept this fact and move on; you can deny that work under a bourgeois dictatorship functions by placing working class people under economic coercion, a point at which you should consider why call yourself a communist anymore; or you could either deny that sex under coercion is rape or, heavens forbid it, that rape is acceptable under any economic system, both actions that would get yourself immediately kicked from any minimally respectable communist party. The choice is yours.
I mean... that's why I said "removed from context". All of this is context, context that was missing from previous comments (which read more like "how dare this woman not be traditional" to me). I agree that prostitution is coercive and wrong in every current implementation.
We are in a communist space. You have plenty context to work with: the last thing you have to expect of a critique of prostitution in a place like this is to be done from a point of view of religious puritanism and not from a perspective of principled marxist feminism, which is where @KommandoGZD 's comment and those following them came from.
The bourgeois state promotes the idea that all critiques to the existence of prostitution itself comes from conservative or reactionary perspectives. You are not immune to propaganda: before attempting to write a critique basing on the gut feeling that you get from reading something, try to read what is it that it is actually being said.
Current or otherwise. Prostitution is not defensible under socialism or communism either, and to know why I once again redirect you to Kollontai. I was writing here the bullet points of the text, but I have decided not to as no summary can substitute the proper reading of an original theory text.
As it says in the text, and as it was said in the first All-Russian Congress of Working Women: “A woman of the Soviet labour republic is a free citizen with equal rights, and cannot and must not be the object of buying and selling", and to this day we should still strive to build a proletarian society where this remains true.
“We are communists so we can’t reproduce brainworms on accident” is not a valid defense and you even point that out in this very same comment. I’m not immune to propaganda, but you aren’t, either. Here’s an important question: What about a male prostitute? Do any of these supposed critiques of prostitution as a concept independent of other social context (something that is already blatantly impossible, because no action has any measurable value when removed from all context) hold up if talking about a man selling sex? If it doesn’t, then it indicates the issue is patriarchy, which is a social context.
That aside, because the morality was of prostitution in general is kind of off topic here,
The belief is that this women is an idiot, or some sort of brainwashed fool for deciding to… well, they’re not even selling their body for sex in this case, they’re just having a lot of sex “for free” as far as I can tell. This is so blatantly dehumanizing it’s absurd. It is not idiocy to decide you want to support a military you like by fucking them. It’s weird, and it is not a good idea, especially with how blatantly evil the Ukraine military is and the extremely suspicious power dynamics at play in any military, but lots of human beings enjoy having sex and it isn’t really indicative of someone being brainwashed or being especially stupid for wanting to do something like this.
You could at least acknowledge the wording was a little weird, or anything other than immediately jumping to accusing me of being a brainwashed stooge. I am providing light criticism of the phrasing and tone of a thread, a tone which I think is indicative of a certain kind of brainworms. You can do some self-introspection or not, I don’t really care.
Edit: you are downvoting me far before you would be able to finish reading this comment. I can only assume you’re just pissed about being called out
Public service announcement: this is c/genzedong. We take the principled Marxist-Leninist line on prostitution (i.e., that it is reactionary and exploitative). If you wish to defend prostitution, you may get in your time machine, go to r/genzedong circa late 2021, and once there join the reddit brigaders who, every single week and to the great annoyance of every principled Marxist-Leninist on the site, would try to start a "discussion" about it.
A word of advice, however: don't start with that.
In response to the edited message: I have not downvoted you, nor have I done so in any message of yours other than the first one.
I can assure you, this woman didn't go from Texas to Kiev and got her own apartment plus a covering of its maintenance and of her own life needs with money that appeared out of thin air, with savings or by somehow landing a job as an accountant in warn-torn Ukraine: she is with no doubt charging soldiers for sex.
This woman saw a humanitarian crisis developing and her first choice to help was offering sexual services to soldiers in exchange of money. Yes, that someone develops this way of thinking is absolutely brainwashing done by liberalism.
I mean i hate to say this but, other than the fact that they obviously support the wrong side, I don’t see how us doing literally nothing is any better than that (from a moral perspective). Edit: oh yeah, I guess other than the sort of parasitic usage of traumatized people for money… nvm
From a personal/benefit-to-her perspective, I didn’t even think of that, and I agree that this is coercive towards her
Are we immune to brainworms? No. Are there low chances that the three people that you have replied to were all suffering from such, when the only thing you had against them was the gut feeling devoid of analysis that you had because of "the wording being a little weird"?
I do not think I am exposed in my day-to-day life to a substantial amount of propaganda pushing for a marxist perspective of the exploitation of women and its abolition. Both of us are, however, exposed to a fairly large amount of propaganda that attempts to promote the prostitution (that you defend) as an act of liberation. These two are not the same.
I am not defending prostitution as an act of liberation? I think even getting into this subject was a mistake, because I only cared about it because of the word “prostitute” being used to refer to something that I don’t think really counts as prostitution.
I was defending the abstract idea of someone having sex for reasons besides direct sexual attraction to their partner, not prostitution as we know or in any form our current definition would work with. Like, I don’t think prostitution would even be possible in a communist society, there wouldn’t be any goods or services to really bargain with if everything, including luxuries, was collectively owned
Like I know it looks like I’m moving the goalposts here, but I legitimately just think that the way I was explaining myself was incorrect
I was thinking of what the woman in the article was doing as prostitution, but thought that without any economic coercion or reason to do it, it wouldn’t be wrong. I realize now that without any economic coercion or reason to do it, it isn’t actually prostitution in the first place
It might be possible she is getting payment but the twitter post of her complaining about not getting with someone kind of makes me think she was just trying to get with people there? I mean, let’s be clear, being a weird war-sexpat is extremely gross, but it’s more horrifying and cynical than it is idiotic.
Added parenthesis to clarify.
Even if it was possible, it would still imply a form of labor desertion (in other words, social parasitism) by performing and obtaining benefit from an act that brings no productivity to the worker's state, not to mention that it is still an act of objectification. More on that text of Kollontai that I have linked before.
I mean, i think i agree with what you’re saying here, but in the context of communism specifically,
Wouldn’t communism not have a worker’s state anymore? Isn’t productivity kind of just a toxic hold over to be excised once the dictatorship of the proletariat is no longer necessary?
Also, what counts as production? Isn’t something produced just anything with a use-value? Isn’t sex technically a thing with a use-value? (Pleasure, or reproduction). Where’s the difference between it and, like, being a baker of sugary goods? Is this suggesting that people who specialize in making desserts should just stop doing that after we achieve socialism because it wouldn’t directly contribute to general production (and their products would disappear immediately after being consumed?)
Not defending prostitution under a communist or even socialist system, especially because i don’t think it’s possible, but I think it not being possible (or being somewhat coercive to the person doing it) would be the issue, not social parasitism (also, where’s the line between social parasitism and just being disabled? If someone can’t work, wouldn’t that mean that by this framework they deserve to either live without anything except bare necessities, or die from starvation?)
People still need to eat, drink and fulfill their other basic needs. "Productive" here does not mean to produce much of something with the least amount of resources possible, but to contribute to the fulfillment of society's needs.
No. The commodification of human relationships is one of the worst blights that exists in this world, and whoever aims to prolongue it is an enemy of socialism. As long as one sees human interactions as something to bbe bought and sold, they will be unable to understand what the liberation of the working people entails.
From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs. You are comparing (in a frankly offensive manner) those who cannot work to those who are not willing to work.
Shouldn’t this be argued for everything in general, not just human relations? Isn’t the damage capital does inherent to how it commodified everything, not just human relationships?
I think I agree with you based on that (and already agreed that it would be impossible to do prostitution and therefore flawed to even try under communism), but I don’t think your criticism is limited to just sex or human relationships, it implies that we should seriously consider the risks of having any kind of trade in our theoretical utopian communist society and I think that tracks.
Well, fair criticism, but in my experience the kind of people who are most often accused of not wanting to work tend to just be straight-up disabled people that can’t. My comparison was flawed, but I think my first reaction of disgust at the concept was warranted. Similar to how someone pointed out that removing the context from prostitution is silly, expecting me or anyone else to just ignore how similar concepts have been used to shit on disabled people is also silly. It’s not offensive to mention disabled people here, because what I’m talking about is their literal lived experience, being told they have to be productive to be valuable and then being blamed and gaslit when they tell others that they can’t. You can say that you’ll just listen to them when they protest but I honestly don’t believe you. Someone will ask “what stops a landlord from trying to reclaim their lifestyle by claiming they’re disabled?”, and then people will start casting doubt on disabled people’s experiences again, something that can only be avoided with a radical willingness to just let people not work.
The only consistent way we have right now to find out if someone mentally can’t do something, or is just choosing not to, is by pushing them to a breaking point, and I’ve seen too many people talk about how abusive that can be to even remotely want to fight for a society that keeps it around.
We should eliminate the impetus to work altogether. It’s toxic and shitty. If we have to force and coerce each other to do labor to survive as a species, I say we let ourselves die off. The void is better than torturing each other for the rest of time for no reason.
But that doesn’t have to be our future. Sure, we would need to remove reactionary elements and drastically reconstruct society, and that’s what a dictatorship of the proletariat is for. But, in my dream world (I understand this is absurd Utopianism, but bear with me), everyone would contribute to collective goals of their own free volition, because that’s what they naturally are inclined to do. There would be no need to coerce, or threaten, or even abandon anyone. Those who could work naturally would be inclined to work because there would be no systems or unfulfilled needs or contradictory goals stopping them (though personal goals would still exist, just encouraged to not be antisocial). And then, with no reactionary elements or notions of selfish grandeur or enlightenment through wealth in the heads of anyone, we would know that those who don’t want to work would actually just be the people who can’t, either because their brain won’t let them or because they’re phrasing having an unmet need badly.
In the meantime, I get the need for what is probably (in my view) a toxic level of discipline with a socialist state. We aren’t going to get rid of reactionaries by being nice to them. And I think the kind of people you refer to when you say that they don’t want to work, or social parasitism, only really exist as reaction. It is not a normal human inclination to just refuse to do anything for no reason. There has to be a system or condition to convince someone to do nothing helpful for anyone else, people get bored and will stumble their way into some level production otherwise. If we get rid of ideologically reactionary elements, the parasitic elements will wither. Trying to get rid of parasitic elements first is blindly shooting in the dark and we could end up with us shooting ourselves in the foot.
Labor shouldn’t be a painful process that human beings need to draw straws to fulfill. It is a natural aspect of our psychology. We can only imagine the idea of people willfully refusing to work out of “laziness” in a society where everyone works jobs that do no good and take disproportionate amounts of effort and time.
They are vastly, vastly less common and this is just a poor attempt at a counterpoint because conservatives also dislike male prostitutes, but the answer is that to the socialist male prostitution also represents a problem. It is a smaller problem in absolute terms, but on a "per capita" basis it is of similar severity.