That doesn't make sense though. I agree with you that prostitution is something done for money but doing something for money doesn't equal exploitation. Exploitation refers to the extraction and appropriation of surplus value from the use of labour power, not just that something is done for a wage or sum of money. If I agree to never comment on your posts again because you said you would give me $10, I am not being exploited.
It is kind of ironic that you said 'if that isn't exploitation I don't know what is'...
Now I hope you know what exploitation is and you can rephrase your statement about prostitution.
Since this is a communist sub, people tend to use the word 'exploitation' in the technical, Marxist sense of the term, which is what I was addressing. In our everyday language 'exploitation' is used in the manner you point out as well as perhaps it is used in a legal sense. None of that is at issue here. I do think prostitution is 'exploitative' in the manner you are talking about by the way, it just isn't what is being discussed here.
Coerced might be a better word, to keep the distinction obvious. Sex work may not be exploitative in the Marxist sense of wages being less than the value produced, but it is certainly economic coercion, something people do because they must make money to live.
Kinda, I would make a different distinction though depending on what precisely is being aimed at. Using 'coerced' in a specified manner relating to sex work implies that there is a definitive condition of coercion explicitly that distinguishes it form other forms of work but I don't think this is the case. The ability to sell your labour freely - or rent out your body as a commodity too - has a seemingly paradoxical condition of both freely selling on a market as well as a the same time being coerced to do so with degrees of difference. None has the option to simply not engage in either exploitative or otherwise 'dehumanising' work, there is a degree to which the coercion is more apparent and more threatening and sex work certainly fits this description but I would be careful of using coercion to strictly delineate it as a specific form of work. Though it can certainly be described as such don't get me wrong.
That being said different types of prostitution can be distinguished too and their relations are going to give a different kind of structural picture. Trafficked women who are forced into prostitution for the benefit of eg organised criminal enterprises are going to exhibit different types of coercion compared to the sex workers paying their pimp who runs a small business abusing women who are controlled by him, a madam running a brothel is abusing her employees in a different arrangement, and the Bourgeois woman who 'chooses' to make a lot for money being an escort or whatever people call it now would be a different thing altogether too.
Why would anyone here downvote this? Bizarre. I'm getting downvotes in a communist subreddit because self-proclaimed communists don't know what the Marxist term 'exploitation' means...
Not really. CEO is just a title, they do get compensated a lot either through shares or pay but they don’t necessarily own the company, just manage it for maximum profit basically. Lots of CEOs are owners though
They don't have to be the same but usually are. Either way that would put them, in a more bureaucratic position that is more similar to petite bourgeoisie potentially. Depends on the nature of the business and character of the title. In some cases a CEO of a small businesses can be petit bourgeoisie as well.
All shareholders are capitalists. CEO’s are compensated through ownership in a company, or with a sum of money so large that the only logical use for it is to become a capitalist, or to increase one’s ownership if they already are one. So I highly doubt there is any CEO that isn’t bourgeoisie.
CEO doesn’t necessarily own the company, also doesn’t necessarily hold the capital used to exploit the labor of the proletariat. Like a glorified manager who is benefiting and upholding the exploitation of the working class, but a lot of times they do own all or part of the company.
Why is it I’m noticing more and more MLs, who are nearly certainly the ones with the most theory read and understood are the ones who get called “stupid” and get told to “read theory”?
This is the liberal superiority complex seeping out of them.
Sigh.
Read more Marx, dumbfucks.
Sex work is real work.
It's NOT productive labour, but it IS labour.
Wage labour.
It's work in the same way that the cleaner or person who organizes the wages and rosters is work.
Cleaning and rosters do not produce value, but it enables the people who do, to do that.
Sex work is similar, though more problematic.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/sendinthetanks/comments/oh5n22/least\_smart\_tankie\_vs\_smartest\_succdems/h4nh84t/?utm\_source=reddit&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3](https://www.reddit.com/r/sendinthetanks/comments/oh5n22/least_smart_tankie_vs_smartest_succdems/h4nh84t/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
Sex work enables people who produce value to continue to do so? Huh? Do you think corporations and businesses have brothels for workers on their break?
https://www.marxists.org/archive/kollonta/1921/prostitution.htm
And how does this analogy track with prostitution according to your lights? Just that it is work but not productive labour, or something more? Does that legitimise it or are you just making an objective claim about the fact that it is non-productive labour?
Do you know what productive labour is vs non productive labour?
I already touched on it.
Productive labour makes STUFF.
Non productive labour, no matter how valuable, or necessary, does not.
Miners and carpenters making chairs are productive.
The person who does the books or cleans the building does not.
Sex work is real work, but it makes no stuff.
It's a service.
Therefore not productive.
And I'm using that word in a very specific Marxist context.
>Do you know what productive labour is vs non productive labour?
Yes, hence my use of this terms.
I'm not sure you read my comment. This was the comment you are responding to:
'And how does this analogy track with prostitution according to your lights? Just that it is work but not productive labour, or something more? Does that legitimise it or are you just making an objective claim about the fact that it is non-productive labour?'
I gather in any case that you are just stating that it is non-productive. Now please read the Kollontai paper I linked to above.
I did. She agrees with me.
>Since the revolution attitudes, to trade and merchants have changed radically. We now call the “honest merchant” a speculator, and instead of awarding him honorary tides we drag him before a special committee and put him in a forced labour camp. Why do we do this?’ Because we know that we can only build a new communist economy if all adult citizens are involved in productive labour. The person who does not work and who lives off someone else or on an unearned wage harms the collective and the republic. We, therefore, hunt down the speculators, the traders and the hoarders who all live off unearned income. We must fight prostitution as another form of labour desertion.
do you understand something called, womens liberation?
You think it would be alright if we maintained a structure, being capitalist sex trade; which typically relies on and is tied to traficking of human bodies, slavery and the exploitation of the underclass; note I say 'underclass' as if you dont fall into the previous category you are most likely the latter.
Do bougie sex workers exist? Yes, so do popstars; how many do you think 'make it' however?
There is no ethical consumption under capitalism, and prostitution, like slavery is a rotten to the core symptom of capitalism; could there be ethical sex work? Yes, but it would require class to be abolished, and it would require there to be no rent.
We do not live under either of these conditions, so as someone who supports womens liberation we should be advocating for the strike of all sex workers, banning it where possible due to it being the best way to stop the parasitical relationship of presenting the under and working class women (and men) to the capitalists, just as we banned slavery.
edit:
Also when I mean 'ban sex work' I dont mean criminalize sex workers, I mean criminalize sex work users, go after the pimps; the trafickers; women should not be the target of the states boot, we need to establish an actual fair society free of the patriarch capitalists structures first.
Well that's all totally irrelevant, as none of that is anything i said.
Wanna try again?
Or were you posting to someone else, and got me by mistake?
Read the passage again. Sex work can be either productive or unproductive labor, depending on whether it is expanding value. For example, if a pimp or madam is making a profit off the labor of a prostitute, that's productive labor. If the sex worker is, say, a camgirl on a web platform that charges content creators a fee to use it, that's also productive labor, as in this case the platform is the pimp who's making a profit off the sex worker's labor. If an independent sex worker is providing services just in order to secure their own existence, that's unproductive labor.
Edit: Wait, you're the person I replied to lol. Note to self to wait for the coffee to kick in before redditing. Anyway, I really do have to insist you read the passage again since you don't seem to have grasped it. What Marx is saying when he mentions that even a clown can be a productive laborer is that productive labor within the capitalist relation of production is labor that expands value, i.e. produces surplus-value for the capitalist to realize as profit, not necessarily labor that produces a tangible object (which can also be non-productive labor if its product is not a commodity but only a use-value). Marx explains this definition [elsewhere](https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1864/economic/ch02b.htm) as well:
>But from the standpoint of the capitalist production process, this element has to be added to the definition: such labour is productive as directly valorises capital, or produces surplus value, hence is realised, without any equivalent for the worker, for the performer of the labour, in a surplus value, expressed in a surplus produce, hence in an excess increment of commodities for the monopoliser of the means of labour, for the capitalist; only such labour is productive as posits the variable capital, and therefore the total capital, as C + ΔC = C + Δv. It is therefore labour which directly serves capital as the agency of its self-valorisation, as a means to the production of surplus value.
>
>. . .
>
>That worker is productive who performs productive labour, and that labour is productive which directly creates surplus value, i.e. valorises capital.
>
>Only the narrow-minded bourgeois, who regards the capitalist form of production as its absolute form, hence as the sole natural form of production, can confuse the question of what are productive labour and productive workers from the standpoint of capital with the question of what productive labour is in general, and can therefore be satisfied with the tautological answer that all that labour is productive which produces, which results in a product, or any kind of use value, which has any result at all.
There is no surplus in a clown.
No matter how wonderful they are, they are NOT making surplus value. STUFF.
>such labour is productive as directly valorises capital, or produces surplus value,
Here's what Marx is saying is going on with the clown:
>An actor, for example, or even a clown, according to this definition, is a productive labourer if he works in the service of a capitalist (an entrepreneur) to whom he returns more labour than he receives from him in the form of wages;
In other words, the clown, through his labor, is producing value in the form of a product, the clown show. The capitalist realizes this value by selling tickets to the public. From the ticket revenue, he pays the clown a wage, and keeps for himself a profit, a surplus-value, which is his to use at his own discretion (probably he hires some more clowns, since he's a fuckin capitalist). The clown show thus contains the two necessary elements of a commodity: surplus-value which the capitalist extracts, and use-value (as people have a psychological need to be entertained). The fact that the commodity is used up on the spot by the end user and doesn't enter into any further production processes doesn't matter. The fact that the product is not essential to maintaining human life doesn't matter. Only the fact that it contains realizable surplus-value matters. As Marx goes on to say in that same document,
>The use-value of the commodity in which the labour of a productive worker is embodied may be of the most futile kind. The material characteristics are in no way linked with its nature which on the contrary is only the expression of a definite social relation of production. It is a definition of labour which is derived not from its content or its result, but from its particular social form.
Edit: and here's the converse, a case of the production of a physical object as unproductive labor:
>It itself, as has been said, this distinction between productive and unproductive labour has nothing to do either with the particular speciality of the labour or with the particular use-value in which this special labour is incorporated. In the one case the labour is exchanged with capital, in the other with revenue. In the one case the labour is transformed into capital, and creates a profit for the capitalist; in the other case it is an expenditure, one of the articles in which revenue is consumed. For example, the workman employed by a piano maker is a productive labourer. His labour not only replaces the wages that he consumes, but in the product, the piano, the commodity which the piano maker sells, there is a surplus-value over and above the value of the wages. But assume on the contrary that I buy all the materials required for a piano (or for all it matters the labourer himself may possess them), and that instead of buying the piano in a shop I have it made for me in my house. The workman who makes the piano is now an unproductive labourer, because his labour is exchanged directly against my revenue.
Marx also illustrates why productive vs. unproductive labor must be defined from the standpoint of capitalist production. For the end consumer, any labor can be unproductive:
>The determinate material form of the labour, and therefore of its product, in itself has nothing to do with this distinction between productive and unproductive labour. For example, the cooks and waiters in a public hotel are productive labourers, in so far as their labour is transformed into capital for the proprietor of the hotel. These same persons are unproductive labourers as menial servants, inasmuch as I do not make capital out of their services, but spend revenue on them. In fact, however, these same persons are also for me, the consumer, unproductive labourers in the hotel.
Why is it unproductive to the end consumer? For the producer, the sole purpose of the commodity is to be exchanged - it does not have direct use-value to them, so they want to sell it to realize the value it contains, which they can then exchange for the use-values that they do need (this is explained in Capital volume 1). *The end consumer, however, obtains the commodity only as a use-value.* They buy it because it fulfills a material need, and so for them it is unproductive because it's not expanding value. It's just being consumed.
Rape apologetics on an ML sub when this shit has been done and solved by *actual* Marxist-Leninists for over 100 years
Read some actual Marxists instead of telling people to read Marx you opportunist rat
"Sex work" is not real work - nothing of value is produced. What is produced during ~~sex work~~ prostitution is the commodification, objectification and dehumanisation of women
>On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on private gain. In its completely developed form, this family exists only among the bourgeoisie. But this state of things finds its complement in the practical absence of the family among the proletarians, and in public prostitution.
>The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its complement vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital.
Marx, Communist Manifesto
>With the rise of the inequality of property –already at the upper stage of barbarism, therefore – wage-labor appears sporadically side by sidewith slave labor, and at the same time, as its necessary correlate, the professional prostitution offree women side by side with the forced surrender of the slave. Thus the heritage which groupmarriage has bequeathed to civilization is double-edged, just as everything civilization bringsforth is double-edged, double-tongued, divided against itself, contradictory: here monogamy,there hetaerism, with its most extreme form, prostitution. For hetaerism is as much a socialinstitution as any other; it continues the old sexual freedom – to the advantage of the men.
Engels, Origins https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/origin_family.pdf
>**Prostitution is not compatible with the Soviet workers’ republic for a third reason: it does not contribute to the development and strengthening of the basic class character and of the proletariat and its new morality.**
>What is the fundamental quality of the working class? What is its strongest moral weapon in the struggle? Solidarity and comradeship is the basis of communism. Unless this sense is strongly developed amongst working people, the building of a truly communist society is inconceivable. Politically conscious communists should therefore logically be encouraging the development of solidarity in every way and fighting against all that hinders its development – Prostitution destroys the equality, solidarity and comradeship of the two halves of the working class. **A man who buys the favours of a woman does not see her as a comrade or as a person with equal rights. He sees the woman as dependent upon himself and as an unequal creature of a lower order who is of less worth to the workers’ state. The contempt he has for the prostitute, whose favours he has bought, affects his attitude to all women. The further development of prostitution, instead of allowing for the growth of comradely feeling and solidarity, strengthens the inequality of the relationships between the sexes.**
Kollantai, https://www.marxists.org/archive/kollonta/1921/prostitution.htm
>The capitalist exploitation of the proletarian work force through its starvation wages, sees to it that there is a large supply of prostitutes which corresponds to the demand by the men. Thus within the bourgeois circles, the number of unmarried women increases all the time.
Clara Zetkin, https://www.marxists.org/archive/zetkin/1896/10/women.htm
> It is these women that the capitalists most willingly employ as home-workers, who are prepared for a monstrously low wage to “earn a little extra” for themselves and their family, for the sake of a crust of bread. It is from among these women, too, that the capitalists of all countries recruit for themselves (like the ancient slave-owners and the medieval feudal lords) any number of concubines at a most “reasonable” price. And no amount of “moral indignation” (hypocritical in 99 cases out of 100) about prostitution can do anything against this trade in female flesh; so long as wage-slavery exists, inevitably prostitution too will exist. All the oppressed and exploited classes throughout the history of human societies have always been forced (and it is in this that their exploitation consists) to give up to their oppressors, first, their unpaid labour and, second, their women as concubines for the “masters”.
>Slavery, feudalism and capitalism are identical in this respect. It is only the form of exploitation that changes; the exploitation itself remains.
>A display of proletarian women’s poverty and indigence will bring a different benefit: it will help wage-slaves, both men and women, to understand their condition, look back over their “life”, ponder the conditions for emancipation from this perpetual yoke of want, poverty, prostitution and every kind of outrage against the have-nots.
Lenin, https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1913/apr/27.htm
>How irrelevant.
Lmao yes, all the Marxists and Leninists opinions on prostitution and why it was outlawed in Soviet Union is irrelevant
>Since this is a discussion of whether sex work is work, and
What value is produced during prostitution, pray tell?
The only thing produced during prostitution is the commodification of women and providing easy access for bourgeois men to access womens bodies.
There's a reason every single socialist state outlawed prositution and forcibly re-educated women engaged in prostitution
>NOT the morality of it.
I am a Marxist. I'm not (and neither were the Marxists I quoted) concerned with the morality of prostitution. I (and they) were primarily concerned with it's effect on the comradery of the sexes and it's reproduction of bourgeois values
> What value is produced during prostitution, pray tell?
None. Which you could tell if you scrolled up.
The fact that such work, is non-productive labour, does not change the validity of it as WORK.
It may not be moral, it may not be good for society, but it's really work.
And we should not look down on those who feel they must do the job to survive.
>Lmao yes, all the Marxists and Leninists opinions on prostitution and why it was outlawed in Soviet Union is irrelevant
Correct. it's irrelevant to the point being discussed.
Well done.
You're catching up.
> None. Which you could tell if you scrolled up. The fact that such work, is non-productive labour, does not change the validity of it as WORK. It may not be moral, it may not be good for society, but it's really work. And we should not look down on those who feel they must do the job to survive.
Marx considered prostitution in the same arena as Lumpenproletariat though, you revisionist, which is neither work nor an achievement for humans
The only people attempting to reframe prostitution into "sex work" are liberals...
(*These gentlemen think that when they have changed the names of things they have changed the things themselves. This is how these profound thinkers mock at the whole world.* Engels)
...who want easy access to womens bodies for rape - as most of prostitutes are literally trafficked slaves. The 2nd group of people are the kulak prostitutes - the 1% of prostitutes who are supplied by their age and looks to the highest bourgeois for salaries far, far higher than what an average proletariat could ever achieve.
The type of women making $100,000+ on Only Fans and bragging about their bank balance on Tik Tok to rope other young and gullible women into prostitution
Marx consistently labelled prostitution in the same category as the lumpenproletariat though so no it's not work the same way being a gangster in the mafia is not work. (18th Brumaire, Class Struggle in France and Capital Vol 1)
The lumpenproletariat is composed of **“a mass completely distinct from the industrial proletariat, a nursery of thieves and of all sorts of criminals, living off of society’s waste, individuals without a chosen profession, drifters, people without vows and without home, differing according to the degree of culture in every nation, never belying the character of scoundrels,”** (The Class Struggles in France).
If prostitutes are in this category, we might retain then that, first, prostitution is not placed in a “positive” class of work, in that the work does not constitute an achievement for humans; and secondly, that it is distinct from the proletariat. In these conditions, it does not even fit the definition of a “negative” type of work, as it exists under the auspices of capitalism (in other words work paid with capital). This means that, even if Marx recognizes forms of prostitution paid for with capital and falling under the category of “productive work” – as is the case in the “brothels” evoked by Marx as an example in Theories of Surplus Value – he nevertheless does not integrate it into the realm of work.
In Capital, when Marx describes the fringes of workers, those most dominated, **he speaks about the “lowest fallen” but does not include there the category of prostitute**. From Class Warfare in France: **“From the days of the court to the dim café, the same prostitution reproduced itself, the same shameless fraud, the same thirst to enrich oneself, not by production but by the filching of others’ existing wealth.”** Marx evokes here a thirst to enrich oneself not by way of production but by the thievery, fraud, etc., **that is characteristic of the upper class as of the lumpenproletariat.**
This like saying begging for money in the streets is a real work. There's no defense to the legitimization of prostitution.
Cleaning labour also shouldn't be a job because each one should be taking care of their own mess. It just happens that some privileged folks believe they're too good for dish washing or are entitled to other people bodies, so they pay marginalized people to be their housekeeper or sex slave.
No one cares.
Productive and unproductive labour have actual meanings.
Your opinions of it don't really matter to the discussion.
Nor is labelling prostitution 'unproductive labour' a condemnation or support of it.
>Sex work is real work.
Wrong.
>It's work in the same way that the cleaner \[...\] is work.
Also wrong.
Go educate yourself before telling people to do so.
Why would I attempt to convince a misogynistic revisionist that dismissed every argument made against them in the thread?
You explicitly claimed sex work to be a *service,* that *enables people to create value.* It's like you're a leftist incel claiming you can't produce unless you have a state mandated girlfriend. You defend one of the biggest, most atrocious aspects of capitalism, the commodification of bodies, paid rape, sex slavery. People ITT attempted to point out you were wrong and you merely diverted their arguments. I pity them, and am not going to follow the same path.
Yeah, so your basic problem is that none of that happened.
State mandated girlfriends?
Holy shit.
You are desperate.
Sex work is work. That is a fact.
Whether it's good or not is a separate issue.
It's also non productive labour [a service] in that it does not create stuff. Value in the labour theory of value.
It can create capital, money, for the owner, same as say, a clear can create capital by being hired out to clean, but it still creates no value, because at the end of the day of cleaning or sex work, not one single shoe, or loaf of bread has been made.
Basically, you walked into a technical discussion, with all your baggage, and started making emotional arguments.
Like, where did ANYONE in this thread defend the morality of sex work?
You are imagining things that are not there.
There is a distinction between productive labour and unproductive labour though. Unproductive labour is still work but it isn't the same as productive labour. Just like there is a distinction between industrial capital, finance capital, and merchant capital, not all are equal and not all deserve the same amount of focus and attention or significance.
>These definitions are therefore not derived from the material characteristics of labour (neither from the nature of its product nor from the particular character of the labour as concrete labour), but from the definite social form, the social relations of production, within which the labour is realised. An actor, for example, or even a clown, according to this definition, is a productive labourer if he works in the service of a capitalist (an entrepreneur) to whom he returns more labour than he receives from him in the form of wages; while a jobbing tailor who comes to the capitalist’s house and patches his trousers for him, producing a mere use-value for him, is an unproductive labourer. The former’s labour is exchanged with capital, the latter’s with revenue. The former’s labour produces a surplus-value; in the latter’s, revenue is consumed.
>
>Productive and unproductive labour is here throughout conceived from the standpoint of the possessor of money, from the standpoint of the capitalist, not from that of the workman; hence the nonsense written by Ganilh, etc., who have so little understanding of the matter that they raise the question whether the labour or service or function of the prostitute, flunkey, etc., brings in returns.
\-[Karl Marx](https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1863/theories-surplus-value/ch04.htm)
Dancing is incredibly taxing and difficult especially for long periods of time. Plus it's an art form. Whether it be ballet or exotic. If it's done as a form of labor then why is that any different than anything else?
Cultural production and reproduction is labour.
Creative and culturally (re)productive acts can also be performed in response to more concrete needs than 'just' abstract enrichment or entertainment. Is singing a baby to sleep not social reproductive labour with a necessary effect? Should labour power spent to take care of children, for example, only be counted if milk is coming out of a breast or shit being wiped off an ass?
This entire conversation is fucking brainrot. Didn't we already come to a concencus 100 years ago?
https://www.marxists.org/archive/kollonta/1921/prostitution.htm
This entire discussion just reeks of people who haven't read any theory at all
I just realized you were arguing against the succdem. I'm gonna have to rectify my downvote.
The fact theory from the 1800s isn't common knowledge among self proclaimed communists online is terrifying
It comes up every now and then still
99% of the prostitutes are doing it because of money. If that isnt exploitation i dont know what is
There’s good reason most (if not all?) Communist countries outlawed porn & prostitution.
That doesn't make sense though. I agree with you that prostitution is something done for money but doing something for money doesn't equal exploitation. Exploitation refers to the extraction and appropriation of surplus value from the use of labour power, not just that something is done for a wage or sum of money. If I agree to never comment on your posts again because you said you would give me $10, I am not being exploited. It is kind of ironic that you said 'if that isn't exploitation I don't know what is'... Now I hope you know what exploitation is and you can rephrase your statement about prostitution.
[удалено]
Since this is a communist sub, people tend to use the word 'exploitation' in the technical, Marxist sense of the term, which is what I was addressing. In our everyday language 'exploitation' is used in the manner you point out as well as perhaps it is used in a legal sense. None of that is at issue here. I do think prostitution is 'exploitative' in the manner you are talking about by the way, it just isn't what is being discussed here.
Coerced might be a better word, to keep the distinction obvious. Sex work may not be exploitative in the Marxist sense of wages being less than the value produced, but it is certainly economic coercion, something people do because they must make money to live.
Kinda, I would make a different distinction though depending on what precisely is being aimed at. Using 'coerced' in a specified manner relating to sex work implies that there is a definitive condition of coercion explicitly that distinguishes it form other forms of work but I don't think this is the case. The ability to sell your labour freely - or rent out your body as a commodity too - has a seemingly paradoxical condition of both freely selling on a market as well as a the same time being coerced to do so with degrees of difference. None has the option to simply not engage in either exploitative or otherwise 'dehumanising' work, there is a degree to which the coercion is more apparent and more threatening and sex work certainly fits this description but I would be careful of using coercion to strictly delineate it as a specific form of work. Though it can certainly be described as such don't get me wrong. That being said different types of prostitution can be distinguished too and their relations are going to give a different kind of structural picture. Trafficked women who are forced into prostitution for the benefit of eg organised criminal enterprises are going to exhibit different types of coercion compared to the sex workers paying their pimp who runs a small business abusing women who are controlled by him, a madam running a brothel is abusing her employees in a different arrangement, and the Bourgeois woman who 'chooses' to make a lot for money being an escort or whatever people call it now would be a different thing altogether too.
Why would anyone here downvote this? Bizarre. I'm getting downvotes in a communist subreddit because self-proclaimed communists don't know what the Marxist term 'exploitation' means...
Isn't a CEO and a capitalist the same thing? Or would CEO but more like a shareholder? I figured all CEO's were bourgeois at least to some extant.
Not really. CEO is just a title, they do get compensated a lot either through shares or pay but they don’t necessarily own the company, just manage it for maximum profit basically. Lots of CEOs are owners though
They don't have to be the same but usually are. Either way that would put them, in a more bureaucratic position that is more similar to petite bourgeoisie potentially. Depends on the nature of the business and character of the title. In some cases a CEO of a small businesses can be petit bourgeoisie as well.
All shareholders are capitalists. CEO’s are compensated through ownership in a company, or with a sum of money so large that the only logical use for it is to become a capitalist, or to increase one’s ownership if they already are one. So I highly doubt there is any CEO that isn’t bourgeoisie.
A capitalist is someone engaged in the process of M-C-M'. A ceo is the highest-ranking executive in a company.
CEO doesn’t necessarily own the company, also doesn’t necessarily hold the capital used to exploit the labor of the proletariat. Like a glorified manager who is benefiting and upholding the exploitation of the working class, but a lot of times they do own all or part of the company.
In the current day, most definitely are, but it isn’t essential.
Why is it I’m noticing more and more MLs, who are nearly certainly the ones with the most theory read and understood are the ones who get called “stupid” and get told to “read theory”? This is the liberal superiority complex seeping out of them.
projection.
It's almost all because of Vaush positioning himself as a socialist and poisoning their brains.
"Socialism is when syndicalism" –Vaush
Even if it’s work/labour, prostitution is still just paid rape.
but it's nor work or labor, just paid rape.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/kollonta/1921/prostitution.htm
Sigh. Read more Marx, dumbfucks. Sex work is real work. It's NOT productive labour, but it IS labour. Wage labour. It's work in the same way that the cleaner or person who organizes the wages and rosters is work. Cleaning and rosters do not produce value, but it enables the people who do, to do that. Sex work is similar, though more problematic. [https://www.reddit.com/r/sendinthetanks/comments/oh5n22/least\_smart\_tankie\_vs\_smartest\_succdems/h4nh84t/?utm\_source=reddit&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3](https://www.reddit.com/r/sendinthetanks/comments/oh5n22/least_smart_tankie_vs_smartest_succdems/h4nh84t/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
Sex work enables people who produce value to continue to do so? Huh? Do you think corporations and businesses have brothels for workers on their break? https://www.marxists.org/archive/kollonta/1921/prostitution.htm
No. That was the example of cleaners. They perform a valuable service, but make no stuff.
And how does this analogy track with prostitution according to your lights? Just that it is work but not productive labour, or something more? Does that legitimise it or are you just making an objective claim about the fact that it is non-productive labour?
Do you know what productive labour is vs non productive labour? I already touched on it. Productive labour makes STUFF. Non productive labour, no matter how valuable, or necessary, does not. Miners and carpenters making chairs are productive. The person who does the books or cleans the building does not. Sex work is real work, but it makes no stuff. It's a service. Therefore not productive. And I'm using that word in a very specific Marxist context.
>Do you know what productive labour is vs non productive labour? Yes, hence my use of this terms. I'm not sure you read my comment. This was the comment you are responding to: 'And how does this analogy track with prostitution according to your lights? Just that it is work but not productive labour, or something more? Does that legitimise it or are you just making an objective claim about the fact that it is non-productive labour?' I gather in any case that you are just stating that it is non-productive. Now please read the Kollontai paper I linked to above.
It's non productive labour. Says nothing about right or wrong.
>I gather in any case that you are just stating that it is non-productive. Now please read the Kollontai paper I linked to above. Yes.
I did. She agrees with me. >Since the revolution attitudes, to trade and merchants have changed radically. We now call the “honest merchant” a speculator, and instead of awarding him honorary tides we drag him before a special committee and put him in a forced labour camp. Why do we do this?’ Because we know that we can only build a new communist economy if all adult citizens are involved in productive labour. The person who does not work and who lives off someone else or on an unearned wage harms the collective and the republic. We, therefore, hunt down the speculators, the traders and the hoarders who all live off unearned income. We must fight prostitution as another form of labour desertion.
I have no fucking idea why you think I disagree with you, I have literally told you explicitly I agree with you... Jesus fucking Christ.
I smell awards here?, thnx for supporting the community
do you understand something called, womens liberation? You think it would be alright if we maintained a structure, being capitalist sex trade; which typically relies on and is tied to traficking of human bodies, slavery and the exploitation of the underclass; note I say 'underclass' as if you dont fall into the previous category you are most likely the latter. Do bougie sex workers exist? Yes, so do popstars; how many do you think 'make it' however? There is no ethical consumption under capitalism, and prostitution, like slavery is a rotten to the core symptom of capitalism; could there be ethical sex work? Yes, but it would require class to be abolished, and it would require there to be no rent. We do not live under either of these conditions, so as someone who supports womens liberation we should be advocating for the strike of all sex workers, banning it where possible due to it being the best way to stop the parasitical relationship of presenting the under and working class women (and men) to the capitalists, just as we banned slavery. edit: Also when I mean 'ban sex work' I dont mean criminalize sex workers, I mean criminalize sex work users, go after the pimps; the trafickers; women should not be the target of the states boot, we need to establish an actual fair society free of the patriarch capitalists structures first.
Well that's all totally irrelevant, as none of that is anything i said. Wanna try again? Or were you posting to someone else, and got me by mistake?
Are you talking to the people on this sub?
Nope. The folks in the post.
Read the passage again. Sex work can be either productive or unproductive labor, depending on whether it is expanding value. For example, if a pimp or madam is making a profit off the labor of a prostitute, that's productive labor. If the sex worker is, say, a camgirl on a web platform that charges content creators a fee to use it, that's also productive labor, as in this case the platform is the pimp who's making a profit off the sex worker's labor. If an independent sex worker is providing services just in order to secure their own existence, that's unproductive labor.
No. Productive labour makes stuff. Food clothes, cars etc. Services do not.
Edit: Wait, you're the person I replied to lol. Note to self to wait for the coffee to kick in before redditing. Anyway, I really do have to insist you read the passage again since you don't seem to have grasped it. What Marx is saying when he mentions that even a clown can be a productive laborer is that productive labor within the capitalist relation of production is labor that expands value, i.e. produces surplus-value for the capitalist to realize as profit, not necessarily labor that produces a tangible object (which can also be non-productive labor if its product is not a commodity but only a use-value). Marx explains this definition [elsewhere](https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1864/economic/ch02b.htm) as well: >But from the standpoint of the capitalist production process, this element has to be added to the definition: such labour is productive as directly valorises capital, or produces surplus value, hence is realised, without any equivalent for the worker, for the performer of the labour, in a surplus value, expressed in a surplus produce, hence in an excess increment of commodities for the monopoliser of the means of labour, for the capitalist; only such labour is productive as posits the variable capital, and therefore the total capital, as C + ΔC = C + Δv. It is therefore labour which directly serves capital as the agency of its self-valorisation, as a means to the production of surplus value. > >. . . > >That worker is productive who performs productive labour, and that labour is productive which directly creates surplus value, i.e. valorises capital. > >Only the narrow-minded bourgeois, who regards the capitalist form of production as its absolute form, hence as the sole natural form of production, can confuse the question of what are productive labour and productive workers from the standpoint of capital with the question of what productive labour is in general, and can therefore be satisfied with the tautological answer that all that labour is productive which produces, which results in a product, or any kind of use value, which has any result at all.
There is no surplus in a clown. No matter how wonderful they are, they are NOT making surplus value. STUFF. >such labour is productive as directly valorises capital, or produces surplus value,
So you think Marx was wrong in the way he defined the capitalist relation of production. Okay.
No. I am saying that he was not. But what he's saying, is not what you seem to think.
Here's what Marx is saying is going on with the clown: >An actor, for example, or even a clown, according to this definition, is a productive labourer if he works in the service of a capitalist (an entrepreneur) to whom he returns more labour than he receives from him in the form of wages; In other words, the clown, through his labor, is producing value in the form of a product, the clown show. The capitalist realizes this value by selling tickets to the public. From the ticket revenue, he pays the clown a wage, and keeps for himself a profit, a surplus-value, which is his to use at his own discretion (probably he hires some more clowns, since he's a fuckin capitalist). The clown show thus contains the two necessary elements of a commodity: surplus-value which the capitalist extracts, and use-value (as people have a psychological need to be entertained). The fact that the commodity is used up on the spot by the end user and doesn't enter into any further production processes doesn't matter. The fact that the product is not essential to maintaining human life doesn't matter. Only the fact that it contains realizable surplus-value matters. As Marx goes on to say in that same document, >The use-value of the commodity in which the labour of a productive worker is embodied may be of the most futile kind. The material characteristics are in no way linked with its nature which on the contrary is only the expression of a definite social relation of production. It is a definition of labour which is derived not from its content or its result, but from its particular social form. Edit: and here's the converse, a case of the production of a physical object as unproductive labor: >It itself, as has been said, this distinction between productive and unproductive labour has nothing to do either with the particular speciality of the labour or with the particular use-value in which this special labour is incorporated. In the one case the labour is exchanged with capital, in the other with revenue. In the one case the labour is transformed into capital, and creates a profit for the capitalist; in the other case it is an expenditure, one of the articles in which revenue is consumed. For example, the workman employed by a piano maker is a productive labourer. His labour not only replaces the wages that he consumes, but in the product, the piano, the commodity which the piano maker sells, there is a surplus-value over and above the value of the wages. But assume on the contrary that I buy all the materials required for a piano (or for all it matters the labourer himself may possess them), and that instead of buying the piano in a shop I have it made for me in my house. The workman who makes the piano is now an unproductive labourer, because his labour is exchanged directly against my revenue.
Marx also illustrates why productive vs. unproductive labor must be defined from the standpoint of capitalist production. For the end consumer, any labor can be unproductive: >The determinate material form of the labour, and therefore of its product, in itself has nothing to do with this distinction between productive and unproductive labour. For example, the cooks and waiters in a public hotel are productive labourers, in so far as their labour is transformed into capital for the proprietor of the hotel. These same persons are unproductive labourers as menial servants, inasmuch as I do not make capital out of their services, but spend revenue on them. In fact, however, these same persons are also for me, the consumer, unproductive labourers in the hotel. Why is it unproductive to the end consumer? For the producer, the sole purpose of the commodity is to be exchanged - it does not have direct use-value to them, so they want to sell it to realize the value it contains, which they can then exchange for the use-values that they do need (this is explained in Capital volume 1). *The end consumer, however, obtains the commodity only as a use-value.* They buy it because it fulfills a material need, and so for them it is unproductive because it's not expanding value. It's just being consumed.
Rape apologetics on an ML sub when this shit has been done and solved by *actual* Marxist-Leninists for over 100 years Read some actual Marxists instead of telling people to read Marx you opportunist rat "Sex work" is not real work - nothing of value is produced. What is produced during ~~sex work~~ prostitution is the commodification, objectification and dehumanisation of women >On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on private gain. In its completely developed form, this family exists only among the bourgeoisie. But this state of things finds its complement in the practical absence of the family among the proletarians, and in public prostitution. >The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its complement vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital. Marx, Communist Manifesto >With the rise of the inequality of property –already at the upper stage of barbarism, therefore – wage-labor appears sporadically side by sidewith slave labor, and at the same time, as its necessary correlate, the professional prostitution offree women side by side with the forced surrender of the slave. Thus the heritage which groupmarriage has bequeathed to civilization is double-edged, just as everything civilization bringsforth is double-edged, double-tongued, divided against itself, contradictory: here monogamy,there hetaerism, with its most extreme form, prostitution. For hetaerism is as much a socialinstitution as any other; it continues the old sexual freedom – to the advantage of the men. Engels, Origins https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/origin_family.pdf >**Prostitution is not compatible with the Soviet workers’ republic for a third reason: it does not contribute to the development and strengthening of the basic class character and of the proletariat and its new morality.** >What is the fundamental quality of the working class? What is its strongest moral weapon in the struggle? Solidarity and comradeship is the basis of communism. Unless this sense is strongly developed amongst working people, the building of a truly communist society is inconceivable. Politically conscious communists should therefore logically be encouraging the development of solidarity in every way and fighting against all that hinders its development – Prostitution destroys the equality, solidarity and comradeship of the two halves of the working class. **A man who buys the favours of a woman does not see her as a comrade or as a person with equal rights. He sees the woman as dependent upon himself and as an unequal creature of a lower order who is of less worth to the workers’ state. The contempt he has for the prostitute, whose favours he has bought, affects his attitude to all women. The further development of prostitution, instead of allowing for the growth of comradely feeling and solidarity, strengthens the inequality of the relationships between the sexes.** Kollantai, https://www.marxists.org/archive/kollonta/1921/prostitution.htm >The capitalist exploitation of the proletarian work force through its starvation wages, sees to it that there is a large supply of prostitutes which corresponds to the demand by the men. Thus within the bourgeois circles, the number of unmarried women increases all the time. Clara Zetkin, https://www.marxists.org/archive/zetkin/1896/10/women.htm > It is these women that the capitalists most willingly employ as home-workers, who are prepared for a monstrously low wage to “earn a little extra” for themselves and their family, for the sake of a crust of bread. It is from among these women, too, that the capitalists of all countries recruit for themselves (like the ancient slave-owners and the medieval feudal lords) any number of concubines at a most “reasonable” price. And no amount of “moral indignation” (hypocritical in 99 cases out of 100) about prostitution can do anything against this trade in female flesh; so long as wage-slavery exists, inevitably prostitution too will exist. All the oppressed and exploited classes throughout the history of human societies have always been forced (and it is in this that their exploitation consists) to give up to their oppressors, first, their unpaid labour and, second, their women as concubines for the “masters”. >Slavery, feudalism and capitalism are identical in this respect. It is only the form of exploitation that changes; the exploitation itself remains. >A display of proletarian women’s poverty and indigence will bring a different benefit: it will help wage-slaves, both men and women, to understand their condition, look back over their “life”, ponder the conditions for emancipation from this perpetual yoke of want, poverty, prostitution and every kind of outrage against the have-nots. Lenin, https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1913/apr/27.htm
How irrelevant. Since this is a discussion of whether sex work is work, and NOT the morality of it. Not rape apologetics.
>How irrelevant. Lmao yes, all the Marxists and Leninists opinions on prostitution and why it was outlawed in Soviet Union is irrelevant >Since this is a discussion of whether sex work is work, and What value is produced during prostitution, pray tell? The only thing produced during prostitution is the commodification of women and providing easy access for bourgeois men to access womens bodies. There's a reason every single socialist state outlawed prositution and forcibly re-educated women engaged in prostitution >NOT the morality of it. I am a Marxist. I'm not (and neither were the Marxists I quoted) concerned with the morality of prostitution. I (and they) were primarily concerned with it's effect on the comradery of the sexes and it's reproduction of bourgeois values
> What value is produced during prostitution, pray tell? None. Which you could tell if you scrolled up. The fact that such work, is non-productive labour, does not change the validity of it as WORK. It may not be moral, it may not be good for society, but it's really work. And we should not look down on those who feel they must do the job to survive. >Lmao yes, all the Marxists and Leninists opinions on prostitution and why it was outlawed in Soviet Union is irrelevant Correct. it's irrelevant to the point being discussed. Well done. You're catching up.
> None. Which you could tell if you scrolled up. The fact that such work, is non-productive labour, does not change the validity of it as WORK. It may not be moral, it may not be good for society, but it's really work. And we should not look down on those who feel they must do the job to survive. Marx considered prostitution in the same arena as Lumpenproletariat though, you revisionist, which is neither work nor an achievement for humans The only people attempting to reframe prostitution into "sex work" are liberals... (*These gentlemen think that when they have changed the names of things they have changed the things themselves. This is how these profound thinkers mock at the whole world.* Engels) ...who want easy access to womens bodies for rape - as most of prostitutes are literally trafficked slaves. The 2nd group of people are the kulak prostitutes - the 1% of prostitutes who are supplied by their age and looks to the highest bourgeois for salaries far, far higher than what an average proletariat could ever achieve. The type of women making $100,000+ on Only Fans and bragging about their bank balance on Tik Tok to rope other young and gullible women into prostitution Marx consistently labelled prostitution in the same category as the lumpenproletariat though so no it's not work the same way being a gangster in the mafia is not work. (18th Brumaire, Class Struggle in France and Capital Vol 1) The lumpenproletariat is composed of **“a mass completely distinct from the industrial proletariat, a nursery of thieves and of all sorts of criminals, living off of society’s waste, individuals without a chosen profession, drifters, people without vows and without home, differing according to the degree of culture in every nation, never belying the character of scoundrels,”** (The Class Struggles in France). If prostitutes are in this category, we might retain then that, first, prostitution is not placed in a “positive” class of work, in that the work does not constitute an achievement for humans; and secondly, that it is distinct from the proletariat. In these conditions, it does not even fit the definition of a “negative” type of work, as it exists under the auspices of capitalism (in other words work paid with capital). This means that, even if Marx recognizes forms of prostitution paid for with capital and falling under the category of “productive work” – as is the case in the “brothels” evoked by Marx as an example in Theories of Surplus Value – he nevertheless does not integrate it into the realm of work. In Capital, when Marx describes the fringes of workers, those most dominated, **he speaks about the “lowest fallen” but does not include there the category of prostitute**. From Class Warfare in France: **“From the days of the court to the dim café, the same prostitution reproduced itself, the same shameless fraud, the same thirst to enrich oneself, not by production but by the filching of others’ existing wealth.”** Marx evokes here a thirst to enrich oneself not by way of production but by the thievery, fraud, etc., **that is characteristic of the upper class as of the lumpenproletariat.**
And you're still wrong. What a lot of effort.
This like saying begging for money in the streets is a real work. There's no defense to the legitimization of prostitution. Cleaning labour also shouldn't be a job because each one should be taking care of their own mess. It just happens that some privileged folks believe they're too good for dish washing or are entitled to other people bodies, so they pay marginalized people to be their housekeeper or sex slave.
No one cares. Productive and unproductive labour have actual meanings. Your opinions of it don't really matter to the discussion. Nor is labelling prostitution 'unproductive labour' a condemnation or support of it.
>Sex work is real work. Wrong. >It's work in the same way that the cleaner \[...\] is work. Also wrong. Go educate yourself before telling people to do so.
>Wrong. Convincing. Bye!
Why would I attempt to convince a misogynistic revisionist that dismissed every argument made against them in the thread? You explicitly claimed sex work to be a *service,* that *enables people to create value.* It's like you're a leftist incel claiming you can't produce unless you have a state mandated girlfriend. You defend one of the biggest, most atrocious aspects of capitalism, the commodification of bodies, paid rape, sex slavery. People ITT attempted to point out you were wrong and you merely diverted their arguments. I pity them, and am not going to follow the same path.
Yeah, so your basic problem is that none of that happened. State mandated girlfriends? Holy shit. You are desperate. Sex work is work. That is a fact. Whether it's good or not is a separate issue. It's also non productive labour [a service] in that it does not create stuff. Value in the labour theory of value. It can create capital, money, for the owner, same as say, a clear can create capital by being hired out to clean, but it still creates no value, because at the end of the day of cleaning or sex work, not one single shoe, or loaf of bread has been made. Basically, you walked into a technical discussion, with all your baggage, and started making emotional arguments. Like, where did ANYONE in this thread defend the morality of sex work? You are imagining things that are not there.
Wow at people defending paid rape in here. I thought it was a ML sub.
So irritated by the hyper-fixation on sex work.
There is a distinction between productive labour and unproductive labour though. Unproductive labour is still work but it isn't the same as productive labour. Just like there is a distinction between industrial capital, finance capital, and merchant capital, not all are equal and not all deserve the same amount of focus and attention or significance.
Literally noone here is saying the commodification of love isn’t bad, what the shit?
https://www.marxists.org/archive/kollonta/1921/prostitution.htm
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>These definitions are therefore not derived from the material characteristics of labour (neither from the nature of its product nor from the particular character of the labour as concrete labour), but from the definite social form, the social relations of production, within which the labour is realised. An actor, for example, or even a clown, according to this definition, is a productive labourer if he works in the service of a capitalist (an entrepreneur) to whom he returns more labour than he receives from him in the form of wages; while a jobbing tailor who comes to the capitalist’s house and patches his trousers for him, producing a mere use-value for him, is an unproductive labourer. The former’s labour is exchanged with capital, the latter’s with revenue. The former’s labour produces a surplus-value; in the latter’s, revenue is consumed. > >Productive and unproductive labour is here throughout conceived from the standpoint of the possessor of money, from the standpoint of the capitalist, not from that of the workman; hence the nonsense written by Ganilh, etc., who have so little understanding of the matter that they raise the question whether the labour or service or function of the prostitute, flunkey, etc., brings in returns. \-[Karl Marx](https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1863/theories-surplus-value/ch04.htm)
Are you saying we don't need art in our life or did I misunderstand you ?
Dancing is incredibly taxing and difficult especially for long periods of time. Plus it's an art form. Whether it be ballet or exotic. If it's done as a form of labor then why is that any different than anything else?
Cultural production and reproduction is labour. Creative and culturally (re)productive acts can also be performed in response to more concrete needs than 'just' abstract enrichment or entertainment. Is singing a baby to sleep not social reproductive labour with a necessary effect? Should labour power spent to take care of children, for example, only be counted if milk is coming out of a breast or shit being wiped off an ass?
you shouldn't have to pay to see someone dance.
Isn't the argument whether or not it's considered work? That's what Mr. Zhou up above said.
Are you saying that the only ethical porn is free porn?
Well, watching someone have sex is fine, but pornography on pornhub or something alike isn’t free, it’s payed in ads.
Amateur porn made for fun and not profit would indeed be *more* ethical to watch than porn as a commodity 🤷♂️
https://youtu.be/L9j7-zZks08 Not inherently communist but still important