"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."
Not the future, the present. I think this is what Marx had in mind when he wrote "Money is the pimp between man and the object of his desire." All human activity under capitalism is alienated: we prostitute our intelligence, our labor, our bodies, and some, our sexuality. Whether capitalism furnishes a negative definition of love is debatable. It may be that some will react to the present order by understanding that the only thing you can exchange love for...is love; some may even realize that love cannot be bartered for anything...even love; but the great majority seem to have reached a very different conclusion: everything is for sale; you are what you buy. I think it is this specter that haunts global consciousness -- that to be able to buy nothing is to be nothing. And thus, in our effort to exist on a social level (when that society is a capitalist one), in accepting the terms of a capitalist existence as essential to human identity, we come to fear the demise of capitalism as a loss of our most essential selves.
Joanna
