One significant difference between sex work and other work is that, even in places where it is legal, the staunchest advocates of its 'normalcy' still make sure they advocate for 'support and pathways' for people wanting to leave the industry. You don't see that for any other work.
Put another way, if I owe my landlord backrent, I might agree to work off that debt by painting the place, doing the garden, even cleaning the toilets in the landlord's property and no one would bat an eyelid. If my payment takes the form of being willing to give him a blowjob, people *should* bat an eyelid.
Of course sex workers should be protected, unionised etc. But to treat it as the same as other work is a mistake. I saw a story in the paper a few years back where a woman in Germany was refused an unemployment benefit because she turned down a job as a receptionist in a brothel. I'm with the woman on that, not with the state treating the sex industry as just like any other just because it's legal.
When legalisation happened in New Zealand, I supported it, advocated for it, wrote in support of it. I differed from my Mao-leaning comrades on this because Maoists tend to be pretty staunch in drawing a direct line between sex work and sexism. I'm inclined now to think they were right. I certainly haven't seen anything I'd call progress for young trafficked women, indigenous Maori and immigrants in particular, since that law change.
Just as class reductionism is a mistake when it ignores the real and parallel oppression that is racism, intertwined with but not
simply a subset of class oppression to be resolved "come the revolution", it's equally a mistake when it ignores the parallel oppression that is sexism - the overwhlming majority of sex workers are women (and girls) after all, and their clients men. Many have been victims of abuse before and during their time as sex workers. We should not advocate their criminalisation but we must see it as different from other work.
On Sun, Sep 13, 2020 at 8:55 AM Louis Proyect <lnp3@...> wrote:
On 9/12/20 4:49 PM, rosalux wrote:
“The visceral negative reaction that many have to the
idea of themselves or their loved ones engaging in sex work
suggests that the left position of sex work being work is
neither intuitive nor desirable. Nonetheless, the contemporary
left has joined hands with liberal feminists, capitalists,
pimps, and bourgeois academics in insisting that sex work is
wage labor like any other.”
We have to understand that where the future goes may not at all be up to us.
My darkest fear for decades has been that the inevitable triumph of socialism might boil down to the last few survivors gathering in the ruins to share the last can of cat food.
Between the pandemic and the wildfires, we should realize that climate change is no intellectual construct. Capitalism is coming down and it will bring everything with it. The question is how far it falls before it either catches itself or the organized people can restructure a society that actually works for everyone.
I did expect such a reaction... There are indeed cottages and survival farms to retreat to, but this privilege is not for everyone. Not everyone has green fingers and the Land. Being an ex-trot and Coyoacán pelgrim I wish you luck 'transforming' complex industrial society with whatever flavor of marxism (ánd getting rid of the alienation). Seems hopeless to me, sorry. Dutch trotskyist Sal Santen wrote his goodbye back already in 1967 (Adios Compañeros), although for organisational reasons rather than theoretical ones.
Neoprimitivism is a welcome analytical tool these days, it may not be everybody's taste.
There must be room for vibrating crystals under a marxist economy of course, every computer has one.
Marx, as one of the first "bohemians" in 1840s Paris, was in fact quite the "hippie," 19th-century style, and his lifelong project was based on a fundamental commitment to human freedom, understood not only "materially," but "abstractly" as well.
"With the division of labour, in which all these contradictions are implicit, and which in its turn is based on the natural division of labour in the family and the separation of society into individual families opposed to one another, is given simultaneously the distribution, and indeed the unequal distribution, both quantitative and qualitative, of labour and its products, hence property: the nucleus, the first form, of which lies in the family, where wife and children are the slaves of the husband. This latent slavery in the family, though still very crude, is the first property, but even at this early stage it corresponds perfectly to the definition of modern economists who call it the power of disposing of the labour-power of others. Division of labour and private property are, moreover, identical expressions: in the one the same thing is affirmed with reference to activity as is affirmed in the other with reference to the product of the activity.
Further, the division of labour implies the contradiction between the interest of the separate individual or the individual family and the communal interest of all individuals who have intercourse with one another. And indeed, this communal interest does not exist merely in the imagination, as the “general interest,” but first of all in reality, as the mutual interdependence of the individuals among whom the labour is divided. And finally, the division of labour offers us the first example of how, as long as man remains in natural society, that is, as long as a cleavage exists between the particular and the common interest, as long, therefore, as activity is not voluntarily, but naturally, divided, man’s own deed becomes an alien power opposed to him, which enslaves him instead of being controlled by him. For as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic. This fixation of social activity, this consolidation of what we ourselves produce into an objective power above us, growing out of our control, thwarting our expectations, bringing to naught our calculations, is one of the chief factors in historical development up till now."
"Let us suppose that we had carried out production as human beings. Each of us would havein two ways affirmedhimself and the other person. 1) In myproductionI would have objectified myindividuality, its specific character, and therefore enjoyed not only an individualmanifestation of my lifeduring the activity, but also when looking at the object I would have the individual pleasure of knowing my personality to beobjective, visible to the sensesand hence a powerbeyond all doubt. 2) In your enjoyment or use of my product I would have thedirectenjoyment both of being conscious of having satisfied ahumanneed by my work, that is, of having objectifiedman'sessential nature, and of having thus created an object corresponding to the need of anotherman'sessential nature. 3) I would have been for you themediatorbetween you and the species, and therefore would become recognised and felt by you yourself as a completion of your own essential nature and as a necessary part of yourself, and consequently would know myself to be confirmed both in your thought and your love. 4) In the individual expression of my life I would have directly created your expression of your life, and therefore in my individual activity I would have directlyconfirmedandrealisedmy true nature, myhumannature, mycommunal nature.
Our products would be so many mirrors in which we saw reflected our essential nature.
This relationship would moreover be reciprocal; what occurs on my side has also to occur on yours.
Let us review the various factors as seen in our supposition:
My work would be a free manifestation of life, hence an enjoyment of life. Presupposing private property, my work is an alienation of life, for I work in order to live, in order to obtain for myself the means of life. My work is not my life.
Secondly, the specific nature of my individuality, therefore, would be affirmed in my labour, since the latter would be an affirmation of my individual life. Labour therefore would be true, active property. Presupposing private property, my individuality is alienated to such a degree that this activity is instead hateful to me, a torment, and rather the semblance of an activity. Hence, too, it is only a forced activity and one imposed on me only through an external fortuitous need, not through an inner, essential one."
"Wholeness" indeed. Is this an advertisement for Stoned Wheat Thins?
It should be obvious to anyone with a functioning intellect that the only way forward from the present crisis is through the revolutionary transformation of the existing complex advanced industrial infrastructure, not its destruction. There's no little grass shack or cottage with nine bean rows to retreat to. We've been all through that.
The late, brilliant, fallible David Graeber wrote (re "bullshit jobs"):
The answer clearly isn’t economic: it’s moral and political. The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger (think of what started to happen when this even began to be approximated in the ’60s).
But even Graeber supports the idea of being "productive"--lamentably weak, since he seems to mean nothing more by it than the direct production of physical objects, but still a concession to the material necessity of production. The "neo-primitivist" pile of steaming mere assertions is so gloriously free, philosophical, and enlightened that it scorns even this.
You can't be a Marxist and a really tuned-in hippy at the same time. Likewise, being "wisely eclectic" and "giving Marx his due in spite of his errors" isn't Marxism.
Why bother with Marxism when you could just set up a website and sell holy weetabix and vibrating crystals instead?
ONE EXTREMELY IMPORTANT THING ABOUT VINELAND which the review does NOT mention ---
It is MUCH MORE EASY to follow and understand than GRAVITY'S RAINBOW --- anecdotal evidence --- I personally read VINELAND cover to cover and couldn't get past page 30 in GRAVITY'S RAINBOW ---
(and this review made me want to RE-read VINELAND again and I still have no stomach to TRY and read GRAVITY's RAINBOW....)
On Sat, Sep 12, 2020 at 9:37 AM Louis Proyect <lnp3@...> wrote:
InVineland, his underappreciated 1990 novel, the
author of Gravity’s Rainbow anticipated
a United States in which security would become the greatest
good.
Nuclear has the
*density* required to provide energy for communism. Renewables,
for example, use far to much material for energy unit generated.
_
You might be right but your intervention on these
questions is identical to that of Leigh Phillips and Matt Huber.
You are for using nuclear power under capitalism. With these
plants generating nuclear waste, why would you trust the
capitalists to dispose of it properly when they are now laying
waste to water everywhere through fracking? From Wikipedia:
TheFernald,Ohiosite for example had "31 million
pounds of uranium product", "2.5 billion pounds of waste",
"2.75 million cubic yards of contaminated soil and debris",
and a "223 acre portion of the underlying Great Miami Aquifer
had uranium levels above drinking standards."
Obviously Trotsky was correct and Haldane was wrong since "peak coal" and "peak oil/gas" has never occurred (it will, way if we don't get off of using them), sadly, for the environment. Trotsky understood the positive potential of the atom, but factually and in methodology. Only nuclear allows the bulldozing of coal plants. Nuclear has the *density* required to provide energy for communism. Renewables, for example, use far to much material for energy unit generated.
Washington Post, September 12,
2020 at 10:23 a.m. EDT
Add to
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Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is privately
expressing concerns about Joe Biden’s presidential
campaign, according to three people with knowledge of
the conversations, urging Biden’s team to intensify its
focus on pocketbook issues and appeals to liberal
voters.
Sanders, the runner-up to Biden in the
Democratic primary, has told associates that Biden is at
serious risk of coming up short in the November election
if he continues his vaguer, more centrist approach,
according to the people, who spoke on the condition of
anonymity to describe sensitive talks.
The senator has identified several specific
changes he’d like to see, saying Biden should talk more
about health care and about his economic plans, and
should campaign more with figures popular among young
liberals, such as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
(D-N.Y.).
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Sanders urges
his supporters to come together to defeat
Trump
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) on Aug. 17
said President Trump is leading the U.S. toward
authoritarianism. (The Washington Post)
Asked for comment, Sanders’s team provided a
statement from Faiz Shakir, the senator’s former
campaign manager in the presidential race, saying that
Sanders is “working as hard as he can” to get Biden
elected but has advised some strategic adjustments.
“Senator Sanders is confident that Joe Biden
is in a very strong position to win this election, but
nevertheless feels there are areas the campaign can
continue to improve upon,” Shakir said. “He has been in
direct contact with the Biden team and has urged them to
put more emphasis on how they will raise wages, create
millions of good paying jobs, lower the cost of
prescription drugs and expand health care coverage.”
Shakir said Sanders “also thinks that a
stronger outreach to young people, the Latino community
and the progressive movement will be of real help to the
campaign.”
AD
The Biden campaign declined to comment.
Sanders led asurging
liberal factionduring the Democratic
primaries and scored early successes in Iowa, New
Hampshire and Nevada before ultimately falling short.
His critique of Biden’s approach reflects his status as
a longtime stalwart of the party’s left and a
self-describeddemocratic socialist.
But it is rare for such a prominent party
figure to repeatedly voice private criticisms of the
party’s nominee and acknowledge them publicly,
especially in the campaign’s final stretch. Sanders’s
decision to do so suggests the ongoing frustration among
liberals, who urgently want Biden to defeat President
Trump but are upset that he has taken a relatively
centrist path.
Biden is determined not to play into attacks
from Trump seeking to cast him as a radical or a
socialist. The nominee has distanced himself from
elements in his party calling for defunding the police,
implementing a single-payer health plan and banning
hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. Sanders supports the
latter two policies.
AD
Still, Sanders has worked hard to publicly
support Biden, and Democrats are eager to avoid the
divide between the senator and Hillary Clinton that hurt
the party in 2016. On Saturday, Sanders is slated to
host a virtual town hall that is expected to express
support for Biden.
But Sanders contends Democrats have the best
chance of winning if they stress economic populism,
those close to him said, rather than if they embrace a
sole strategy of attacking Trump and avoiding hot-button
issues.
Until now, there had been few outward signs of
discord between Biden and Sanders. Shortly after the
senator ended his campaign in April, hepromptly
endorsed Biden, offering an unequivocal stamp of
approval.
Associates of both men say they personally
like each other, having been Senate colleagues. After
Biden emerged as the presumptive nominee, the two formed
a series of task forces, made up of allies of both men,
that crafted policy recommendations on health-care,climate
changeand other topics.
AD
In some ways,Biden
has moved closer to Sanders’s brand of populismas
left-leaning activism has surged inside and outside the
Democratic Party. He has talked of a Franklin D.
Roosevelt-style presidency if he wins and urged sweeping
change to combat the novelcoronavirus,
racism and other issues.
But Sanders has come to worry about the Biden
campaign’s prospects, even as the Democratic nominee
leads Trump in the national polls, associates said.
Surveys in some potentially pivotal states show a closer
race between Biden and Trump, stoking nervousness among
Democrats still traumatized by Clinton’s 2016 defeat.
The people familiar with Sanders’s private
conversations said he has a expressed a sentiment that
the liberal, millennial slice of the party has not
received the attention its merits. As a candidate,
Sanders drew big crowds of hundreds — sometimes
thousands — of young, enthusiastic people with
left-leaning views.
AD
Another Sanders concern, according to one of
the people, is that the Biden campaign has kept its
distance from some of the marquee surrogates who
campaigned for Sanders and helped him attract a large
following. Ocasio-Cortez, for example, has not
campaigned closely with Biden.
As a candidate, Sanders frequently emphasized
his economic plans, which were geared toward curtailing
wealthy and powerful interests and championing
working-class people. Biden has recently been touting
his “Build Back Better” plan, which calls for immense
new investments in American jobs and industry.
And in questioning Biden’s outreach to Latino
voters, among whom Sanders showed strength in the
Democratic primary, the senator is touching on a topic
that is increasingly on the minds of Democratic leaders.
Polls have shown Biden leading Trump among
Latinos, but not as widely as many Democrats hoped. As a
result, fretful discussions are underway in the party
about Biden’s standing with Latino voters in
battleground states such as Florida, Arizona, North
Carolina and Pennsylvania, where Latinos could play a
pivotal role in the outcome.
Last week I blogged about the seeming gap between
Engels and Rachel Carsons, who is widely regarded as the founder
of modern ecological thought. It turns out that Engels
influenced Bukharin, who in turn influenced Haldane. So let
Foster connect the dots:
Rachel Carson was later to characterize the
Haldane-Oparin theory of the origin of life as constituting the
core of an integrated ecological view of life on the planet:
"From all this we may generalize that, since the beginning of
biological time, there has been the closest possible
interdependence between the physical environment and the life it
sustains. The conditions on the young earth
produced life; life then at once modified the conditions of the
earth, so that this single extraordinary act of spontaneous
generation could not be repeated. In one form or another, action
and interaction between life and its surroundings has been going
on ever since."
Foster points out that a delegation of Soviet
scientists led by Nikolai Bukharin to a British conference in
1931 had a major influence on Haldane, Joseph Needham and JD
Bernal, the big three of the British scientific left--the
Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin of their day. As I have
stated in the past, Bukharin had a much better grasp of ecology
than Trotsky. I cite Foster just below, followed by Trotsky from
"Radio, Science, Technique and Society".
Foster:
In his early daring work Daedalus: Science and
the Future (1924) Haldane had reflected on the eventual
exhaustion of coal and oil fields and of an economy based on
fossil fuels. He did not perceive this as a tragedy, however,
since the pollution from fossil fuels was very great. Instead,
he looked forward to an energy economy based on solar, wind, and
hydrogen energy. Demonstrating enormous foresight and ecological
concern, he wrote:
Ultimately, we shall have to tap those
intermittent but inexhaustible sources of power, the wind and
the sunlight. The problem is simply one of storing their
energy in a form as convenient as coal or petrol. If a
windmill in one's back garden could produce a hundredweight of
coal directly (and it can produce its equivalent in energy),
our coal mines would shut down tomorrow. Even tomorrow a
cheap, foolproof, and durable storage battery may be invented,
which will enable us to transform the intermittent energy of
the wind into continuous electric power.
Trotsky:
The atom contains within itself a mighty hidden
energy, and the greatest task of physics consists in pumping out
this energy, pulling out the cork so that this hidden energy may
burst forth in a fountain. Then the possibility will be opened
up of replacing coal and oil by atomic energy, which will also
become the basic motive power. This is not at all a hopeless
task. And what prospects it opens before us! This alone gives us
the right to declare that scientific and technical thought is
approaching a great turning-point, that the revolutionary epoch
in the development of human society will be accompanied by a
revolutionary epoch in the sphere of the cognition of matter and
the mastering of it ... Unbounded technical possibilities will
open out before liberated mankind.
I'm not trying to push American Affairs; I've only read a couple of articles they've published, and they were by people I already was familiar with.
Today, however, this link appeared in one of my subreddits, so since we've been talking about it, I'll post it here. It's Julius Krein in a discussion with Cornel West and Roberto Mangabeira Unger, as part of their American Democracy lecture series.
Reed has been under attack by a significant portion of DSA for
some time.
Is that so? I hadn't noticed. Nothing in Jacobin
or in Bread and Roses, the caucus that set the ideological
agenda for DSA through articles by its member Eric Blanc. In
fact, most of the criticisms of Reed come from people outside
DSA entirely, like me, Tempest magazine, Asad Haider, et al.
Reed has been under attack by a significant portion of DSA for some time. Still, he wants to make sure everyone knows there is a clear line between him and the post-leftists who generally support him and his views, in the hope they (IdPol leftists, "the left" in the general sense) will be appeased and do not shun him completely, an ignoble end to an illustrious career. (I don't think they'll be satisfied, but that's for another day.)
What he says about American Affairs and its publisher should be viewed in this light.
"Wholeness" indeed. Is this an advertisement for Stoned Wheat Thins?
It should be obvious to anyone with a functioning intellect that the only way forward from the present crisis is through the revolutionary transformation of the existing complex advanced industrial infrastructure, not its destruction. There's no little grass shack or cottage with nine bean rows to retreat to. We've been all through that.
The late, brilliant, fallible David Graeber wrote (re "bullshit jobs"):
The answer clearly isn’t economic: it’s moral and political. The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger (think of what started to happen when this even began to be approximated in the ’60s).
But even Graeber supports the idea of being "productive"--lamentably weak, since he seems to mean nothing more by it than the direct production of physical objects, but still a concession to the material necessity of production. The "neo-primitivist" pile of steaming mere assertions is so gloriously free, philosophical, and enlightened that it scorns even this.
You can't be a Marxist and a really tuned-in hippy at the same time. Likewise, being "wisely eclectic" and "giving Marx his due in spite of his errors" isn't Marxism.
Why bother with Marxism when you could just set up a website and sell holy weetabix and vibrating crystals instead?
In 1924 Haldane met Charlotte Burghes, a
newswoman and novelist. They soon became attached to each other.
However, Burghes was already married and had a son. In order to
obtain a divorce for her, which required cause, they arranged to
be discovered committing adultery (in a hotel). However, they
decided to change hotels midstream, and went so far as to ask
the private detec-tive, who had been hired to catch them in the
act (and whose identity they had detected) to carry one of their
suitcases to their new hotel, lest he lose sight of them. It
went off "without a hitch" and the next day the detective,
according to Haldane, "appeared in our bedroom with the morning
papers." The hoped-for exposure led to Haldane's formal
dismissal as a reader at Cambridge by a body called the Sex Viri
(referring to the six men that composed the body), a name that
encouraged much jocularity among those observing the scandal.
Haldane immediately took his case to the National Union of
Scientific Workers, and with their help managed to have the
decision immediately overturned. The consequence was that
"Haldane's name was now firmly placed in the vanguard of sexual
emancipation." The two married in 1926.
My friend David Roediger just sent me an article
touching on Telos, Herbert Marcuse and Franklin Rosemont, the
Chicago surrealist with the words "I seem to have the attached
as a pdf not link. In any case it probably comes under the
heading of being 'of interest to you, me, and a half dozen other
people in the whole world'--as the old Wobbly Fred Thompson used
to admonish when I proposed book ideas to the Kerr Company. But
you might like it on how the TELOS evolution was not entirely
unpredictable."
I'm wondering when my old chums in Spiked will adopt Carl Schmitt and his ideas. I think that Piccone's statement, cited by Louis, pretty much sums up the state of play in the Revolutionary Communist Party when it gave up the ghost to become Spiked back in 1997: '... half of our editors have retired intellectually and burned out politically, the other half [are] rapidly becoming senile, cynical or purely careerist, while the rest are beset by a combination of both…'
except the reviewer got the person making the threat outside the bar to the "Jersey Boys" wrong --- it was Nina's boyfriend Bobby B. telling Nina how he fights ....not Nina herself.
I agree that the book is great --- and it was great to learn that Elias is a friend of Steve Martin's ---
(I loved "The Jerk:" by the way ---- and I also was impressed that the review didn't give away TOO MUCH of the plot --- though it did a bit ....)
This
fucking dick Bill De Blasio used to show up at Nicaragua
Solidarity meetings in the late 90s. He caters to the needs of the
real estate industry, wealthy NYers and the police department. He
is Rudy Giuliani light.
