Tag: Communism

Hello, do you have posts about sex work and communism (or a tag I could consult)? I have a SWERF friend and she’s very very strongly socialist (leaning towards communism). I would love to direct her to some literature on the subject but I honestly have no idea where to start.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/2011/11/socialist_whores_what_did_karl_marx_think_of_prostitution_.html

Marx viewed it as just another way people sold labor (he thought it would vanish eventually along with the traditional family unit… I have… complicated feelings about that, I mean I think sex work as a direct exchange for commodities will probably disappear as we reach a post scarcity society, but I do think there will always be people who make their labor contribution to society in the form of sexual labor), Engles was a dick about it but fuck him.  (also that article confuses questionable socialism with communism so it’s not ideal).

I think the foremost thing she probably needs to understand about sex work, is it’s work.  Here are some things she might bring up:
BUT WHAT ABOUT THOSE POOR WOMEN IN THIRD WORLD (I hate that term) COUNTRIES, THEY AREN’T HAPPY AND 2 OUT OF 3 DESPERATELY WANT TO STOP BEING SEX WORKERS?  YUP but that’s not unique to the sex trade, sweatshops, and violent horrible bosses, and terrible working conditions, and even sexual brutality exist across a huge number of industries.  If you ask a worker who works in horrible conditions in almost any industry if they want to leave that industry, they will say yes, from the workers producing H&M tatt in unsafe factories under vicious bosses in Bangladesh, to the enslaved agricultural laborers working on cocoa plantations, to the underpaid, over worked and oft mistreated workers in our very own fast food industry, I’m pretty sure all of those people would very much like to escape their work.  The working conditions that currently exist in an industry do not indicate the inherent morality of the product.  Sex work is not worse than other work, sex workers are more likely to be brutalized because we are stigmatized, our work made illegal and SWERFs are always fanning the flames of belief in our inherent degradation.  If there will still be farming, and clothes and quickly available hamburgers after the revolution, there will still be sexual services.

BUT WHAT ABOUT TRAFFICKED WOMEN?

Slave labor is bad.  Sexual labor is labor and forced labor is dehumanizing, inherently an act of extreme violence and subjugation.

BUT PORN ENCOURAGES SEXISM?

Only in men who are already violent misogynists, and then only violently misogynistic porn, not all images of people fucking must be violently misogynistic, not to mention non-sexual images of violent misogyny cause the same effects in these men.  The problem is the misogyny in media, and in our culture, not with images of humans fucking (or doing other activities people might masturbate to, like tap dancing, popping balloons, eating sandwiches, doing automotive repair, or literally anything else because there’s a fetish for everything)

Why is the sex industry the one industry that won’t exist after the revolution comes?  Like no one’s like “gotta eliminate bakeries, people wanting to buy muffins is inherently exploitive,” or “better eliminate wedding singers, because when you pay someone to perform a service they become nothing but an object and you feel entitled to them” or “can’t have women cleaners, it makes men feel entitled to women’s domestic labor/believe all women are maids” or “better not have mining anymore, enslaved laborers are kept in unforgivable conditions and routinely beaten.”

Like let’s say we have actual real socialism, everyone receives what they need regardless of whether or not they can or do work?  Right?  If she’s saying no one will choose to do sex work, she’s wrong, I genuinely like my job (except for the part where I have to work really long hours to keep the bills paid) today I talked to a shy lonely guy about how to talk to a lady he likes, and I got a foot rub.  I like talking to lonely people, I like people being happy, I like people getting off, it doesn’t get me off, but it gives me the warm fuzzies, I like hearing all the weird shit that exists in the human sexual psyche.  I only wish I got more female clients.

I think that the problem is A: Capitalism creates shitty labor conditions and B: Sexism exists, and when it stops existing men will treat sex workers with respect like any other person who performs a service that makes them happy (we’ll also stop being shitheads to manicurists and waitstaff) and more women will see sex workers and there will be more male sex workers, because right now women are told that they should only have sex to validate their physical desirability and that’s how women are told to parse desire, and that’s fucked up.

IDK what brand of SWERF is she?

Mathematics of Injustice

First of all, let me say “everyone gets paid the same” has never ever been a communist platform.  We don’t have a problem with hard working guy getting paid more.  We have a problem with lazy ass rich dude getting money other people earned simply because he already has money.

Capital is literally defined as “money used to make more money” and capitalism is a system in which you can get money for doing literally nothing but already having money, if that doesn’t prove that A: capitalism makes wealth pool at the top and drains it away from the bottom, and B: shit’s fucked up, I don’t know what does.  

But now let’s talk about the meth head and the family man again, let’s say the meth head gets 15K a year working as say… a convenience store clerk.  Let’s make shit simple and give the family man a 30K a year, about average for a middle class dude.  Now, if we were to give the meth head as much as the family man that would be a raise of 50% of the family man’s salary, you with me?

Okay, now let’s talk about Whoopit  Wilkins III who never works, who gets money because his great great great great granddad ran a mill and he inherited a great big eternally increasing trust fund.  Let’s say he earns 100 mill a year, which is moderate for a 1%er given that the Waltons earn 1 bill a year each just from their walmart dividends.

Now how many times mr. nice hard working family man’s salary does he get?  3333.33X (the three repeats).  Now, that means how many years mr. nice hard working family man have to work to make as much as Whoopit Wilkins III gets in one year.  Over three thousand years.

Now if it’s 50% unjust for a meth head who doesn’t work to get as much as the family man wouldn’t that make 3333.33% unjust for Whoopit to get that much more than the family man?

Which makes capitalism at least 3283.33333333% more unjust than a socialist system with a guaranteed basic income of 30,000 per person. 

tiredcommunist:

piertumlocomotor:

bobsavage:

social-cap1tal:

piertumlocomotor:

gremlins2thenewbatch:

piertumlocomotor:

I have yet to meet a single person who honestly thinks communism or anarchism (not comparing them, I know they’re different ideas) that can give me a logical and reasonable arguement as to why it would work. Because they won’t. Communism looks good on paper, but it always falls apart. And as for anarchism…it’s pretty obvious why that can’t even gain decent footing. I know capitalism isn’t a perfect system, but it’s sure as shit what we’ve got, and you’re going to have to deal with that until something better can be implemented.

u just ignoring the many dozens of communes and revolutionary experiments that have been going on for decades now? ever heard of the zapatistas? the currently developing struggle in rojava? i can point u to several entire towns in spain that have implemented post-capitalist methods of living for quite some time now. if u wanna be defeatist have fun doing that

Small scale works pretty well sometimes, I’ll admit that. But I’m talking about people who think making America a communist country would be a step forward, or the people who can even begin to imagine that anarchism is a good idea.

It would be a good idea and a step forward because right now there are six empty houses for every homeless person, and the only reason why this is is because these people don’t have the capital, which is a social construct, required to live in these homes. There are also people starving while supermarkets and restaurants throw out food that is perfectly fine.

‘Communism doesn’t work’ is so boring to repeatedly here when like, capitalism does? Pretty much every third world country is capitalist. Every single impoverished person in the first world is living under capitalism. How is capitalism working for these people exactly?

It’s very easy to point out the bad. America, Canada, Australia, all of the UK, France, etc, are all capitalist countries. And you know, you’ve got a point, I’ll give you that. But that’s not capitalism, that’s the person running the country. If you actually listened to what I said, I know capitalism isn’t perfect. It’s a flawed system, but at least it can actually work.

Australia is forcing the closure of indigenous communities as  we speak, because they are considered a ‘drain on resources’. This is a country founded on the theft and land and murder of indigenous populations – and the imperative driving those actions both historically and today are  economic, are founded in capitalism, are not just ‘a bad guy prime minister’ that is the most ridiculous liberalism I’ve ever heard.

What do you mean why would it work?  Also communism has only been tried on a large scale using a shitty Stalinist model.  Why do internal combustion engines work?  Why do forks work?  Why anything?  Do you mean how, because that’s still a very broad question, what aspects are you particularly wondering about?  I mean honestly, the Soviet economy was pretty good for a long time despite the shitty Stalinist system, really ticking along.  I mean I think the obvious changes one needs to make are 1. Not letting Stalin a literal paranoid schizophrenic take power, 2. Democratize early, 3. Things are owned by the people who work there, not by the state because that did not go well, 4. Not so much with the gulags and show trials. 5. Not so much with the instituting a dictatorship, 6. No purges.  7. Direct democracy rather than single party oligarchy, 8. Listening to rather than crushing dissent 9. Not murdering everyone with a knowledge of management, 10. Not turning all the media into a pro-us propaganda mill

Like Mao, good intentions or not didn’t understand how to manage agriculture which is why the famines occurred.  You need to keep the people who know how to do that around to keep shit running and also y’ know killing people is bad.

Pretty much: Not being a dictatorship

Also America’s economy is falling apart due to free market policies, ditto Canada, middle class disappearing, whole sections of the country in disrepair.  Germany and Australia both have strong labor unions, which prevent their capitalists from going “full rabid self destructive baboon” as they have in the states, but it’s still a system that ultimately destroys itself because it focuses on short term profitability rather than long term growth, and puts the well being of companies in the hands of investors (who are actually the least interested in the long term well being of the company, as they all want to quickly raise the stock price and sell, which leads to shit like asset stripping) rather than in the employees who are those mostly intertwined with the long term survival of the company