In Amsterdam, I met a Russian prostitute once whose name was really Natasha. When she told me, I said "No kidding", and she showed me her identification to prove it. She wasn't trafficked though, it was more an individual entrepreneurial activity. In Amsterdam she could make a net income of maybe a hundred or several hundred euro's a day, if you were reasonably skilled at john-spotting, and because the rouble at that time was pretty low, this represented a fortune to her. It was pretty easy Keynesian economics, if you knew how to do it. I met a Polish guy who operated on the same principle. If the name of the bourgeois game was "getting something for nothing", okay, then we are going to deal with this in another way, that was the thinking. It is a revolt at the level of exchange though, not the level of production.
Generally, when neo-conservatives talk about prostitution, they have in mind women who need to be protected. But this involves a massive sexist, class-biased distortion of the real situation, and doesn't differentiate between many different sorts of activity, and the motivation for that activity, and who exactly engages in it. Prostitution ought to be analysed both from the supply side and the demand side, without gender bias, since both women and men, boys and girls, engage in it, and this includes transvestites and transsexuals. Sex becomes work, and people trade in it, that is the basis of it, on the basis that some people want to sell it, others want to buy it and have the money to do so, and yet others want to mediate in the process as a pimp or Madam or social policy maker. This occurs both formally as a professional activity and informally on a casual basis. For example, if the demand on your sexual organs is very great, then you start to charge money, and indeed that is exactly how a middle-class friend of mine from New Zealand explained it to me. Then you can ask, why do some people sell sex, and why do some people want to buy it, but there are millions of reasons, just like, for example, if I ask "why do people want to buy a bottle of Coke ?". You may all laugh at me for talking about the concept of "porosity of exploitation" but if you examine how millions of people are forced, for one reason or another, into a position where they have nothing to sell anymore but sex, then you wouldn't be laughing anymore. Prostitution is, according to my analysis, the future for many people on the earth under capitalism, other things remaining equal, because the more sexuality becomes integrated into the accumulation process, and the more people must rely on individual resources which they do not really have (for example, through debt) the more those people who "fall out of the boat" in this sense are forced into prostitution. And in this way, capitalism begins to sort out what love really is, in a negative, reified way. Which is what capitalism does: it creates hell on earth for masses of people, but simultaneously develops the productive forces to such an extent, that we can at least see what heaven on earth would look like. Rather than engaging in moral ostentation, my point of view is that the topic provides a powerful critique of capitalism and an argument for socialism. And I don't think socialists should ignore it, for example by excluding many prostitutes from the proletariat, ignoring that they are capable of engaging in a contest of strength, and capable of exposing the hypocrisies of the moneyed classes. In fact, the Dutch Socialist Party has published articles on it in a dispassionate way. If you think it through, prostitution is a conduit for Capital to re-establish real slavery. Many authors have observed, that the effect of the operation of free markets is to increase social inequality, because the strong outcompete the weak. The more money you have, the more money you can make, simple as that. This means, that the expansion of the unregulated market will, other things being equal, ultimately sort out who is strong and who is weak in such a comprehensive way, that it condemns a significant fraction of humanity permanently to the social scrapheap, relying on stronger people who are momentarily weaker than they are for an income. Point is, this social inequality is directly reflected also within human beings as well, who may be superstrong on one side of themselves, and weak as babies in some other respect, and this has important implications for the character structure of the individual. But if psychologists simply focus on individual characters, they miss the problem by a mile, because they ignore the total social situation which generates those characters in the first place. My boss in the Statistics Department, an Australian woman of Jewish-Catholic background who said to me candidly she didn't like Dutch men, told me in a most patronising way, that I needed some more "character". What a total bitch ! In reality, my character has never changed, and it did not need changing, it needed correct expression in people with real character, not the whoredom and gadgets which the bourgeois class dangled in front of my eyes as the epitome of the good life. I deliberately opted for Marx and his school at university, and not for the school of Christ, whose progressive ideas more or less died out and were mystified after the Essenes. Marx worked with Engels, who was a factory owner, but who thought the same way about the topic. The bourgeoisie prattles about "intellectual property rights" while it steals other people's ideas and commits great crimes, but the effect of this is, that many of the exploited will turn to prostitution as buyers and sellers, not just out of necessity, but as an issue of personal freedom - because they feel that they are no longer able to establish their own sexual/social relations in a free way, and that their lives have been screwed up by the perceptions of other people about their sexuality and talents, obtained in immoral ways, for example through spying on people in their private lives, or obtaining personal information about them without consent, to force them into acceptance of a certain way of life under the banner of "love". The bourgeoisie insists theoretically on a private/public distinction as a basis for civil conduct, but in practice constantly violates the very same principle. Therefore this whole question needs to be grasped dialectically, and not in a stupid, moralistic way, especially since you can love people literally to death. To conclude, I would like to cite the much maligned and exploited Ernest Mandel on this topic: "Slave owners who are prepared to kill thousands of slaves, because they were disobedient or in revolt (or even as a deterrent against disobedience or revolts) are not so dumb to believe, that they could survive without slave labour. They act in this way, because they are convinced, that through this murder, hundreds of thousands of other slaves will continue to perform their work, while this would not be the case, or less so, if the disobedience or revolts would escalate and spread." (from "Marx, Engels and the problem of the double moral standard in class society"). When I wrote my story about "The Amazing Grace of Elliot Abrams", this refers to the fact that the ultimate reward of the slave-drivers to the slaves, and their idea of the liberation of the slaves, is that the slaves become slave drivers. You can think about that tonight when you drive home in your car, and reflect on the morality of the working class. Jurriaan
