Re: SEXPLOITATION? What is at stake in Cuba?

[Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Mine wrote:

>In fact, Cuban
>government's outlawing of prostitution after the revolution was an
>attempt " to
>address the social conditions that made prostitution an attractive option for
>women". Although they were not quite successful with this, they at
>least tried.
>Moreover, outlawing should not ip so facto lead to criminalizing or
>victimizing
>women. These are two seperate technical issues. That is the difference between
>outlawing in a capitalist country (where prostitution is seen as a choice by
>women to be punished, and prostitutes as "morally harmful beings to society"
>bullshit etc..) and outlawing in a socialist country.

"Socialism in one country" suffers an inevitable distortion
(beginning with the need for national security expenditure &
repressive measures that wouldn't be necessary if it were not under
siege by imperialism, as well as a kind of asceticism which reminds
one of Rousseau's love of Sparta).  That said, prostitution was
either non-existent or minimal in the more optimistic early decades
of socialism in Cuba when the country received aids & favorable terms
of trade from the Soviet Union & the Eastern Bloc and standards of
living were on the rise.  Prostitution (as well as other forms of
practices that Revolutionary Cuba used to frown upon) returned, as is
noted in the article "Sexploitation?: Sex Tourism in Cuba," with the
collapse of the socialist trading bloc & the worsening terms of trade
for most nations on the periphery in the political economy of global
capitalism.  Unlike certain other nations, however, the socialist
government of Cuba is not encouraging "sex tourism."  But laws,
including laws that seek to regulate sexuality, are after all part of
the superstructure, not the base.  As long as material conditions
that create economic needs that motivate some people to turn to sex
work, there will be sex work.  Change the base, and superstructural
changes will accompany it.

Unlike moralist feminists, I don't think of sex work in itself as bad
-- it is bad only when people are either coerced into it by parents,
armed forces, debt servitude, etc. or motivated by economic need
alone to engage in it even when they don't like this line of work.
It's the same with any line of work.  I believe Marx was essentially
correct when he noted: "Prostitution is only a particular expression
of the universal prostitution of the worker" (_Economic and
Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844_).  (Sexism is part of the problem,
but it is not just women who engage in sex work -- both before &
after the rise of capitalism, many boys & men have engaged in
prostitution; and sexism, too, should be analyzed properly as part of
political economy, not as if it were merely a "bad idea" that could
be abolished by fiats.)

What is necessary to abolish the exploitation of prostitutes is the
same as what is necessary to abolish the exploitation of all workers:
the establishment of socialism worldwide.

Yoshie