[PEN-L:11779] Re: Sex work and choice

["William S. Lear" <rael@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, August 14, 1997 at 10:09:20 (-0700) Harry M. Cleaver writes:
>> 2. In fact, if we take the petty bourgeois morality out of the picture,
>> prostitution is work just as any other work, except that a prostitute owns
>> the means of production, and under most circumstances she is paid for the
>> "product" rather than for the time. ...
>
>Wojtek: I think the "owning of the means of production" assumes a
>dualistic and alienated relationship between prostitutes and their
>bodies/minds/personalities. I can't see any more reason for looking at
>these aspects of prostitutes as "means of production" than I can for any
>worker. These are parts of themselves, the parts they must sell the use of
>in order to earn income, just like other workers sell the use of their
>arms, hands, minds, personalities. We may not like the way these parts of
>us are used/abused but that doesn't make them "means of production". They
>are elements of our laborpower, our ability and willingness to work as
>well as parts of our being and potential for all kinds of activity, not
>just work.

Correct me if I am wrong in my reading of Marx's "Pre-Capitalist
Economic Formations" of the Grundrisse, but is it not there argued
that the "means of production" are *immanent* in the worker?
Disagreement with this, or a slight lapsus of the old calami, might
lead Wojtek to state that the prostitute "owns" the means of
production, when in fact this skill/commodity cannot be "owned" until
the "highly energetic solvent" of capital is applied to create the
"*plucked*, object-less *free workers*", as Marx puts it, with tools
and skills commodified, externalized, alienated from the worker.

As I (shakily) understand things, the defining relationship of
capitalism is that between workers and capitalists.  Capitalists are
those who *own* the productive property (capital) of the community,
whereas workers own no productive property and must rent themselves to
the capitalists in return for a wage.  In order to have this
relationship, labor must be "free" in Marx's term, meaning, it must be
somehow commodified (made to exchange with money) and circulate about
freely---that is, not tied to property or tradition, or owned
permanently by anyone in particular (as in, say, slavery).  To achieve
this, "the separation of free labour from the objective conditions of
its realization" must occur, meaning workers must be "freed" of
productive property ("the objective conditions of its realization");
in fact property is defined by Marx to originally be "the relation of
the working (producing or self-reproducing) subject to the conditions
of his production or reproduction as his own"; it is in this sense
that workers are commonly referred to as "propertyless" in Marxist
discourse.  This second step entails "dissolution of small, free
landed property as well as of communal landownership" in which the
worker "relates to himself as proprietor, as master of the conditions
of his reality" and to "others in the same way", just as would a
farmer who owned his own land and worked it to provide the "sustenance
of [himself] and of his family, as well as of the total community"
relate to other such farmers.

So, reading this, and assuming the absence of a pimp, are prostitutes
properly considered capitalists, as Wojtek would imply by his claim
that they "own" the means of production, or are they more like the
pre-capitalist peasant of Marx's comments above?


Bill