> Something tells me it's a bit worse for the "consolidated account" than for the prostitute. The prostitute still represents a kind of natural economy: presumably her customer looks to her for the satisfaction of a "natural" sexual need. In the context of the market, we must ready ourselves to satisfy needs that the market itself has created and which may have no "natural" foundation at all.
Well they do say that prostitution and pimping are the oldest professions, which can operate through bartering within natural economy (as Marx uses that term in the Grundrisse for example) and are not dependent on money. But the concept of the "natural" is an ideological concept, and this is discussed by John Bellamy Foster, Alfred Schmidt and Norman Geras. The Greens make the same point: the way we perceive what is "natural" and "not natural" is socially constructed and subject to sectional interests, except the Greens have no coherent critique of capitalism (refer also my post in reply to Sabri). For a socialist, the question is that of the working classes and their friends asserting their own human nature, their own naturalness, and that is one of the foundations of socialist politics, as against Leninism. In part, Marx's own concept of naturalness is suspect, simply because he could not free himself completely of the ideology of his time, and because he was only one individual. But he used to read Shakespeare a lot, and of course Shakespeare would say things like "all is fair in love and war". According to Adam Smith, humans have the natural propensity to truck, barter and exchange. According to Marx, people have the natural propensity to produce and be creative. Jurriaan
