Alienation, sex work and marx

He is a classic liberal, formerly centre-left American (i.e. your traditional Democrat voter). He says he's politically homeless now although thanks to his thorough criticism of critical theories, these days he is usually accused of being a right-wing extremist.

(Fair warning, he lays into some feminist claims with the same gusto as he tears into critical theories. And he does have a point with some of his criticism. Which is not a happy thought for me, especially since some of the things he criticises have led us to a place where the doctrine of gender identity can reign supreme.)

“Marx was just one of a number of people trying to make sense out of the extraordinarily horrendous economic and social conditions of the masses in the 19th century and find a way out of them.

Side note: this is also where the prevailing myth comes from that children today are starting puberty earlier and earlier.

At the same time as Marx is observing the conditions the masses are living in, doctors are starting to keep records when puberty starts and finishes, and when girls get their first period.

Only conditions are so inimical to normal childhood development, malnourishment, pollution and disease ensure that puberty starts later than at any time before. Of all the skeletons archaeologists dug up in London from that time, around a quarter of all those who died in their mid twenties had not yet finished puberty.

Emile Zola's novels describing the conditions the poor live in in France at the same time, have various young characters whose delayed sexual maturity is remarked upon. There is also IIRC quite a lot of sex with no worrying about pregnancy among the youth because the girls and young women in their late teens are not yet menstruating.

It's difficult to truly understand how awful the conditions are for the masses, but if you consider that archaeological evidence shows that two thousand years ago children started puberty between the ages of ten and twelve, and a thousand years ago they started puberty between the ages of ten and twelve and five hundred years ago the same, then the industrial revolution changes everything. Suddenly children start puberty much much later. The average age at menarche today is 13 years. When Marx wrote his analysis of capitalism, the average age at menarche was 17 or 18.

(Of course, life expectancy also takes a hit at this time.)

Anyway, in the 170 years since then, conditions have steadily improved. By the 1950s the average age at the onset of puberty had pretty much returned to the human norm of ten to twelve, and the average age at menarche was around 13 again.

There has been very little change in terms of these milestones in developed countries in the last 60 years or so, although where living conditions remain poor, puberty and menarche still start later. Rapid improvements in living conditions during the 20th century went hand in hand with strong downward trends observed in the onset of those milestones of adolescent development.

Understandably, researchers who collected the data in all this time grew very alarmed at the ever more rapid onset of puberty and menarche, thinking that the data collected during Marx's time was the norm and everything else since a deviation.

In actual fact this is a basic data collection error.

Illustrative though of why Marx would have been so concerned about the conditions the masses were living in. Because they were so harmful to life, some fundamental milestones of child development were badly affected.

This website has good stuff onthewomanquestion.com/

I started it and it's very readable as well.

“Marx was just one of a number of people trying to make sense out of the extraordinarily horrendous economic and social conditions of the masses in the 19th century and find a way out of them. The fact that there have been political movements associated with his name that have enacted great evil is another issue. You could equally say that that whole tradition of 19th century leftist thought is the reason we have constraints on capitalism, public services and a welfare state, and are not still sending our children to work to death in sweatshops. And if that seems like hyperbole, consider that there are plenty of places in the world where they still are.“

This. I always think Marx is someone who needs to be properly contextualised. He based a lot of his analysis on what he witnessed in the slums of Victorian London. He and Engles wrote the Communist Manifesto in 1848- a year when most countries in Europe had some kind of (bourgeois, pro-capitalist) revolution.

A challenge with using the Marxist theory of alienation as the source for a critique of prostitution is that it is a critique of all wage labour: All wage labour is alienating -- and in that sense sex work is work, ie an exploitative commodification of the human body. So the concept of alienation does not pick out what is distinctively unacceptable about prostitution.

Actually, though, I don't understand the appeal of the mantra 'sex work is work' at all. So what if sex work is work? Some work (including sex work) is hazardous and dehumanising to the point that, as a society, we prohibit it.

Discredited or not, Marxism is the theory much of the left cleaves to. It's everywhere you look, but it's particularly embedded in academia and cultural institutions. Critical race theory is rooted in Marxism. So is the doctrine of gender identity. As well as queer theory. Granted, the latter two as well as many on the left are currently pretending that class isn't a thing anymore, but Marxist ideas are permeating throughout both their beliefs and their activism.

IOW a wide variety of people, from a wide variety of disciplines and perspectives, have found Marxist analysis fruitful as one component in understanding both the history and the current culture of their field. That should be enough to demonstrate the childishness of trying to write it off with Reds Under The Beds scaremongering as kimikosnightmare would wish.

Marx was just one of a number of people trying to make sense out of the extraordinarily horrendous economic and social conditions of the masses in the 19th century and find a way out of them. The fact that there have been political movements associated with his name that have enacted great evil is another issue. You could equally say that that whole tradition of 19th century leftist thought is the reason we have constraints on capitalism, public services and a welfare state, and are not still sending our children to work to death in sweatshops. And if that seems like hyperbole, consider that there are plenty of places in the world where they still are.

What's the podcast Charlie?

I agree regarding the term ‘sex work’; I was just acknowledging that the terminology I am using is what it was called at the time I was writing about, not making a comment on the terminology today.

No, prostitution is entirely appropriate. Don't try prettifying it by calling it "sex work"

Sex worker also includes brothel owner and pimp.

I've got to agree with KimikosNightmare here. Sex work is a manipulative, dishonest term created to sabotage the fight against prostitution. The term doesn't just include those profiting from prostituted women, it also includes activities that do not fall under prostitution, such as lap dancing, selling nudes on OnlyFans and camera or telephone sex.

Here's an excerpt from a paper on international human rights laws and what they say about prostitution that makes clear why we should not use the term "sex work" instead of prostitution:

The Charter of the United Nations gives all UN bodies and agencies the obligation to promote the respect of the “dignity and worth of the human person” and of the “equal rights of men and women”. Given that prostitution is recognised as a violation of the dignity and worth of the human person by international human rights law, all UN bodies and agencies are obliged to contribute to the elimination of prostitution and the protection of its victims. As a consequence, UN agencies and bodies are further obliged to oppose the use of the term “sex work”, which aims at normalising, and sometimes promoting, what is considered a human rights violation.

A PDF of that paper can be downloaded from the following link

www.cap-international.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/ProstitutionUnderIntlHumanRightsLawEN.pdf

Sex worker also includes brothel owner and pimp.

But given the horrific reality of Communism and Marxism whenever put into practice what purpose does such an analysis hold for bolstering the case against such normalisation?

Reading the OP, I expect that this is in the context of the deep contradiction of the established left-wing's position on prostitution as sex work, which must be fully decriminalised and framed as work like any other and their professed belief in Marxism and neo-Marxism. If I wanted to show that being a Marxist is incongruous with supporting the practice of prostitution, it would be logical to look to Marx's own writings.

The Communist Manifesto, Mein Kampf and Mao's Little Red Book are of no interst other than their historical relevance for setting out their respective demented and evil ideologies.

I wish that were true. Critical theories, of which the doctrine of gender identity is but one (albeit one with huge destructive potential already resulting in harm), are rooted in Marxism. If one seeks to oppose these critical theories and prevent them from dominating society and keep its proponents from power, one must know where these theories are coming from.

I'm currently listening to a podcast deep diving into all of these texts and it has been eye opening to see it all laid out so clearly. A lot of the things happening right now, the tactics, the arguments, even no debate are making much more sense now. And that is helping me find a much more efficient way to respond to extremist demands and tactics.

Now don't get me wrong, the podcast is challenging at times, in more ways than just the obvious - if you're not an academic or have prior knowledge of these highly theoretical concepts, it can be both difficult to comprehend the issue and difficult to focus as long as required. But as I found even the first episode I listened to very useful in understanding the current situation, I have persisted. It took me three weeks to listen to that first episode as my attention span is not the best when the subject matter is so difficult, and I'll probably listen to it again now that I'm working my way through the whole podcast in order.

And finally, let me just finish with this: those who cannot remember the past, are condemned to repeat it. As a society, we need to understand how and why these ideologies held sway with their followers if we want to prevent them plunging us into another totalitarian regime based on these concepts. We are well on the way towards just such an outcome. It is in my view therefore neither navel-gazing nor pointless to understand the root texts of these ideologies.

It doesn't make a convincing case because such a discredited theory in to prop up an argument about why prostitution is bad simply looks ridiculous, is unlikely to change anyone's mind , assuming there is interest anyway.

Discredited or not, Marxism is the theory much of the left cleaves to. It's everywhere you look, but it's particularly embedded in academia and cultural institutions. Critical race theory is rooted in Marxism. So is the doctrine of gender identity. As well as queer theory. Granted, the latter two as well as many on the left are currently pretending that class isn't a thing anymore, but Marxist ideas are permeating throughout both their beliefs and their activism.

“It doesn't make a convincing case because such a discredited theory in to prop up an argument about why prostitution is bad simply looks ridiculous, is unlikely to change anyone's mind , assuming there is interest anyway.”

You’ve never done a social sciences degree! Using Marxist/ historical materialist theory to explain political or social phenomena is very mainstream.

Marx wrote mainly about ‘why capitalism is bad’ rather than ‘what communism would or should look like’.

given the horrific reality of Communism and Marxism whenever put into practice what purpose does such an analysis hold for bolstering the case against such normalisation?

I suppose you might find it an interesting intellectual game but beyond that?

Patronising much?

OP asked for reading recommendations so that she could read and judge for herself.

What's the point on coming on a thread like this and saying "don't bother reading around this - I can save you the trouble and tell you what I think instead"?

It's important to read background materials with a range of conflicting views both to inform one's own view and to persuade others, regardless of whether some random stranger says it's a bad idea- it's perfectly reasonable for OP to ask for reading recommendations, and it's odd that you seem to be disparaging her for asking for the wrong recommendations.

You were clearly allowed to read the source material to make up your own mind, so why are you so against others following in your footsteps and doing the same?

Ps I have used the term prostitution as this is what it was called in the nineteenth century and I think it is inappropriate use the modern day term of sex work in that context.

I am not a Marxist feminist at all, but I would link prostitution and marriage before the late nineteenth century, and possibly later, in the prevailing idea that women were property. That is not saying marriage was a form of prostitution (although I can see the basis for that argument in the Victorian times), but that marriage historically saw women as the property of husbands and prostitution saw women as the available property of men.

Think about the fact that women had no legal rights to property on marriage until 1882, no access to higher education and professional employment opportunities until the late nineteenth century, unequal access to divorce in England until 1923 and rape within marriage was illegal until 1991. A man could take another man to court if he slept with his wife (not sure when that stopped) because of the idea that women were property. This is not navel gazing intellectualism, but how life used to be. In fact, you could go beyond this and look at the history of child custody, which also comes from the idea that children were property, and indeed, until 1839 (I think) property of the father.

Then think about the high value put on women’s virginity and chastity in the respectable classes and the sexual double standard in the nineteenth century, the idea that it was more acceptable for men to have sex outside marriage and not for women, indeed there was the term ‘fallen woman’; young women were seen to be in danger of seduction from men. So one way of protecting the daughters of the respectable classes was to allow prostitution so men had somewhere to go, which was not the daughters of the respectable classes. Prostitution was of course rife in Victorian Britain. And those women who were engaged in prostitution were poor single women who were not paid equal wages for the manual work they did (given the concept of a family wage which paid men more assuming they would have a wife and children to provide for).

So you could look at it through a class-based lens. If the men of the wealthier classes were accepted as having sex outside marriage but their wives were expected to be chaste virgins when they meet, where were those men going for sex? The servant classes and women engaged in prostitution. That relies on an idea that women are available for money, ie they are property to be bought. If you bring in the Contagious Diseases Acts, then you can extend the argument to say that women were also seen as the property of the state.

So it is not saying that marriage was exactly prostitution but the two things were linked in the class and gendered (in the second wave sense of gender hierarchies) social order where women did not have equal legal rights and were viewed as property, not autonomous citizens.

That is of course a historical argument and there have been substantial legal changes around marriage and women’s citizenship since then. But Marx was writing in the nineteenth century, not now. So I am not sure you can apply the ideas of a traditional marriage in the Victorian sense to today.

Marx has been discredited?

That's news to me!

Quick bit from wiki-

'Marx has been described as one of the most influential figures in human history, and his work has been both lauded and criticised.[17] His work in economics laid the basis for some current theories about labour and its relation to capital.[18][19][20] Many intellectuals, labour unions, artists, and political parties worldwide have been influenced by Marx's work, with many modifying or adapting his ideas. Marx is typically cited as one of the principal architects of modern social science.'

No doubt a fascinating topic for feminists on here but largely irrelevant elsewhere.

Oh sorry back to front! You're right it's against.

If you've never read the theory how do you know that it doesn't make a convincing case though? Maybe it does. Maybe it would to you but not to me.. Dunno I've not read it (yet!).

The OP says that her understanding is the opposite. That it's a bad thing.

You would have hated it here a few years ago! It went super academic theoretical for a few years. I didn't visit much then...

Politics is worth studying I mean it's a well respected subject. Gives insight into all sorts of things.

It's not your thing that's fine but your reaction just seems s bit OTT! It's one thread with about 4 posters on it! No big deal.

I suppose my point is this seems to me to be theoretical navel- gazing of the highest order.

Kimikos not of interest to you clearly.

Of interest to some.

I don't understand your reaction. Reading Marx won't turn OP into a dictator.