Alienation, sex work and marx

[drwitch]

Does anybody know of any literature that examines sex work from a Marxist perspective. I'm not completely sure about what I'm getting at but it's to do with the idea that it is the (according to Marx) the comodification of labour that causes alienation. Thus when sexual activity is transactional either through prostitution or in a traditional marriage it is profoundly alienating and worse because it's your actual bodies

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 @CharlieParley. this is it exactly you put it much better than I could

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

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.

What's the podcast Charlie?

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.

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.

“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.

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

This website has good stuff onthewomanquestion.com/

“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.

[quote GrainneMhaol]This website has good stuff onthewomanquestion.com/[/quote]
It does thank you

@Diaryofamadwoman

What's the podcast Charlie?

New Discourses by James Lindsay. It is very theoretical in places, but mostly aims to help the audience understand the theories behind critical theories, like the doctrine of gender identity or critical race theory.

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.)