this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2024
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You don’t know what you’re talking about + there will be no prostitution under communism + lumpenprole isn’t an insult or moral indictment
Unless you have a fairly specific definition of prostitution, some people will always be willing to exchange goods or labour for sex regardless of economic or political system.
Prostitution isn’t the presence of negotiated sexual activity any more than capitalism is the presence of market activity. Exploitation is a defining characteristic of both.
Edit: Alexandra Kollantai already thoroughly explored this topic in 1921.
I feel like that falls under a fairly specific definition of prostitution.
this is why "sex work" leftists often lean on the "unpaid emotional and sexual labor in relationships" thing really hard
This presupposes private property and an inherent bourgeois philosophy being instilled in the people. Utter nonsense.
Omg under communism small business prostitutes will exchange sex for food vouchers!!
Personal property still exists under communism, as do scarce commodities. Barter is hardly bourgeois philosophy.
Commodities exist under communism? Holy wow!! Truly a fruit of epoch-making wisdom!!
You act like it's blatantly obvious that commodities would exist under communism and mock the person who pointed it out to you, yet you vehemently deny that something else just as obvious as the existence of commodities will also still very much exist and have a place under communism, calling it utter nonsense and requiring "bourgeois philosophy" without any explanation. That something else involves sex, though. Hmm. Funny how work that involves sex always brings out a specific type with an angry and reactionary axe to grind.
At least u/porcupine can make a reasonable case by redefining prostitution as something other than and separate from sex work rather than denying the legitimacy and validity of sex work.
It’s blatantly obvious that commodities would not exist under communism, just as it’s obvious that private property, exchange property, would not (and with it the treatment of sex not as a private affair but a thing to be bought and sold, even in the realm of marriage).
You highlight the work aspect of sex work as if I’m saying it’s not work, or to say that it‘s work only quantitatively different from manufacturing goods, delivering goods, etc. I’m not saying sex work is immoral or impure or condemning it based on moral judgement.
Someone may sleep with many members of society and be supported in their needs by the community through the immense wealth of the people under communism, but the support of their needs would not be predicated on their sleeping with members of the community. And their activity would necessarily not contribute to the welfare of the whole community but only persons selected.
Replacing cash with goods doesn’t make prostitution not sex work or change the relations at play. People misunderstand communism, due to a misunderstanding of its relation to early communal society, as some sort of return to the end stage of historical communities where everyone lives in common low development and individual exchange happens under the table. There will be no room for individual exchange because the phase of individual ownership of items of exchange has passed, and in fact communism will free sexual relations from the restrictions of private property, and therefore of even de-facto prostitution such as the marriage based on financial dependence.
Ok, maybe I was wrong about what you were saying. Do you think sex work is work, then?
Would the needs of any other members of that society be predicated on the work they do?
I'm not sure what you mean by this. Surely making sure the members of a community are able to lead happy and fulfilling lives is contributing to the welfare of the whole community. Human sexuality is undeniably an important aspect (for the majority of people) of a person's over all sense of happiness and fulfillment. There being members of the community that help ensure everyone else in the community has that sense of fulfillment, members of the community who are explicitly willing and happy to provide it as a service (labor), is a positive, even necessary contribution to community wellbeing.
I never implied otherwise. I wasn't the person who said "some people will always be willing to exchange goods or labour for sex regardless of economic or political system." But they are correct, and you are not when you call that "bourgeois philosophy" and "utter nonsense." Even in a system where that kind of tit-for-tat exchange is unnecessary, it is absurd to say that it will never happen.
That may be, but that is not an error I'm making. As I briefly mentioned in a response to another comment, there will always be people who are unable or unwilling to form the kind of relationships usually required for sexual activity and thus sexual fulfillment. There will also always be people who choose to develop skills that help provide people with that kind of fulfillment sans any other form of relationship. You may say that such a thing is so different from the kind of purely transactional relationship we traditionally characterize as prostitution that it may as well not be called prostitution. Fine. But the same thing can be said for countless other forms of labor that people do under capitalism to survive, but that under communism would just be "something I enjoy doing," that is still labor and provides a service to society. Like an actor who enjoys giving performances that provide other people with entertainment (as one of countless other possible examples).
First. Yes, you were wrong! What in their writing suggested they thought SW wasn’t work?
Second. No? Have you read even the most basic communist theory? Communism is a society based upon the principle of “from each according to his needs to each according to his ability.” Meaning that you take what you need (in terms of commodities and services) and give what you can (in terms of labour). How don’t you know this?
Third. what you described isn’t prostitution. Entering into sexual relations with people because that’s what you want to do isn’t prostitution! Someone that sleeps with a lot of people under capitalism isn’t necessarily a prostitute are they? Also, this whole paragraph seems to completely misunderstand the conceptualisation of “professions” under communism. Read The German Ideology.
Fourth. Saying it presupposes bourgeois philosophy being instilled within individuals is the correct opinion. The idea of trading a service for a piece of social wealth is inherently tied to the existence of private property; the kind of prostitution we’re talking about being tied to bourgeois property and relations, thus to bourgeois philosophy.
Fifth. completely ignoring the material reasons for things like being an Incel and treating them as inherent aspects of some eternal and transcendent humanity. Please try to engage in dialectical materialist analysis!
I'm "redefining" prostitution? What percentage of prostitutes across history do you believe fit into a definition that isn't characterized by exploitation? Do you believe a statistically significant percentage of prostitutes are independently wealthy self-employed hobbyists? I would argue that's redefining prostitution.
I've seen people in these spaces carry a bunch of weird moralizing stigma about the "sex" part of sex work rather than the "work" part into these conversations, and I promise that's not where I'm coming from. As far as I'm concerned, sex between consenting adults is a morally neutral act, and people who engage in sex work under capitalism aren't guilty of anything more than any other proletarian commodifying their labor to survive.
Under communism (a classless, stateless, moneyless society), the economic and class relations that force people to perform sexual labor as a means of subsistence won't be present. People will still have sex, but nobody will be coerced into having sex in exchange for food, shelter, or medical care. When people choose to have sex, it will be between mutually consenting adults for its own sake. Prostitution won't be an occupational category under communism because the purpose of labor under communism is about fulfilling social need. A society where jobs are assigned based on fulfilling social need isn't going to be assigning people whose primary contribution to society will be having sex with strangers and not being able to say "no", because coerced sex isn't beneficial to society. I would say that a person living under communism who has their needs of subsistence met, works a socially productive job, and chooses to have sex with any and every consenting adult they want outside of that job isn't definitionally a prostitute. Prostitution as a "job" is inseparable from economic and class relations that must be abolished in order for communism to come about.
What percentage of plumbers across history do you believe fit into a definition that isn't characterized by exploitation? Sex work is work. Period. Just like other work, it can be done because a person enjoys it, but under capitalism (or other modes of production that exploit workers) it will always involve exploitation. If you want to define prostitution as something that always involves exploitation, ok fine, but then you also have to separate that out from sex work, which absolutely does not inherently require exploitation and most certainly would still exist even if all economic coercion were eradicated (that is, under communism rather than capitalism).
(Emphasis above is mine). Under communism, the economic and class relations that force people to perform any labor as a means of subsistence won't be present.
No shit. There will still be plumbers too, but they won't be coerced into it in exchange for food, shelter, or medical care. Almost all of your arguments so far can be applied exactly the same to any number of other forms of labor.
So finally we get to some reasoning (flawed though it is) for why sex work would be different than any other work. You think that sex work doesn't fulfill a social need. Sexual fulfillment is a social need. There will always be people who find it difficult to find partners due to all kinds of possible scenarios (including having no time to build a relationship due to dedicating all of it to other interests or necessary labor). And there will similarly always be people willing to provide that, people who have dedicated their time to become skilled at providing that. Refusing to recognize them as fulfilling a social need is simply being sex-negative and it's always shocking to me that there are still leftists who don't understand this.
Under a communist society, social labour is socially planned.
Possibly, there will not be any allocation of labour into sex work. But if 2 consenting adults exchange favours for sex, then there is also no reason for the government to get involved.
Another possibility is that the government does allocate labour to brothels, but this is a political question of priorities whose answer depends entirely on the citizens of this hypothetical state.
There are some arguments as to why any communist state that is created today shouldn't allocate labour into state-run brothels. Any existing communist state would face massive challenges that it should prioritise.
I don't disagree. That's part of the point I'm trying to make. I believe it's idealistic, however, to insist that removing the profit motive from plumbing will convert the occupation to purely passion-driven volunteers. Work is, more often than not, unpleasant. People will still be required to clean up shit, pick dead animals off of streets, lay shingles on roofs, and mass produce textiles. People will need to do those things because industrial society requires them to function. The universe of people that would do that work purely out of a sense of personal gratification will always be hilariously smaller than the universe of people who will be required to do that work to keep society functioning. If you're envisioning a society where "work" is only ever performed on a purely voluntary basis for the joy that people get from the task itself whenever they feel up to doing it, I'm sorry to say that's not communism. "From each according to their ability" does actually require people that are able to perform socially necessary labor to do so even if they don't always love it or feel like doing it. Marx was not a utopian or an anarcho-primitivist.
Explain to me how you believe prostitution works as an occupational category where you believe society is owed sex by prostitutes, but prostitutes are not obligated to provide it indiscriminately to society? I believe a just society prioritizes one person's bodily autonomy over another person's "entitlement" to be sexually stimulated by another. Sex is important to individual well being, but you personally being sexually serviced by a stranger is not an essential building block of society. I know this is a tightly controlled secret that you don't see much on the internet, but people actually are capable of sexually stimulating themselves. People are equally capable of independently negotiating mutually fulfilling sexual relationships that meet the sexual needs of all parties without reducing one party to a commodity being bought and sold. People will find it much easier to do that when they're not struggling for subsistence.
I'm not categorically ruling out the possibility that there are some people that will just love the abstract depersonalized concept of sex so much that they would willingly fuck anyone indiscriminately. I say good for them, and as long as they stay safe and get consent, they should follow their bliss. I'm pretty confident they'll still need to have another job that keeps the lights on, the trains running, or the people fed, and they'll be free to follow their bliss on their personal time. I'd say the same thing about real estate agents, advertising models, and YouTubers who get Patreon subscribers to pay for livestreams of them sleeping. These are all things you can turn into a job under capitalism, and they're all things you could broadly still do, under communism, but I think it's fair to say they wouldn't still be jobs under communism.
Man, that's going to make telling people I'm on a diet a whole lot more awkward.