On Mon, 18 Aug 1997, Karl Carlile wrote:

> >From Karl Carlile:
>
> Prostitutes do not necessarily form part  of the working class since
> they do not sell labour power as a commodity. They are not wage
> workers.

While not claiming any expertise, I suspect there is much more variation
in the economic relations of prostitution than this seems to imply,
ranging from truly independent entrepenuers to wage workers to slaves.

> By contrast the prostitute sells his/her body, as opposed to labour
> power, as a commodity on the exchange market. This means that s/he
> sells her/his body piece meal over a sustained period. Her/his body is
> the commodity. The purchaser of her/his body relates to it as a
> commodity. In this sense s/he is a simple commodity producer: an
> independent commodity producer. This means that the class character of
> the prostitute is petty bourgeois rather than working class.

I'm afraid this form of strict Marxist analysis leaves me a bit cold. And
again, I think it's difficult to generalize......

> However there is a form of oppression and exploitation when the pimp
> forcibly extracts a portion of this value from the prostitute. S/he
> extracts value in the form of money from the prostitute outside of the
> exchange process. Nothing is exchanged by the pimp for this value in
> its money form. It is simply appropriated by the pimp. In this sense
> this relationship of appropriation takes place outside the limits of
> value relations. Consequently not only does the pimp/prostitute
> relationship transcend capitalist relations but it also transcends
> simple value relations. The pimp acquires value gratis by virtue of the
> fact that the prostitute sells her/his body as commodity.

Actually, I think the pimp often does provide some "value", by arranging
transactions and providing some form of protection from police, other
pimps, or violent customers.

> Another distinction is that in the case of the slave the body is sold
> all at once while in the case of the prostitute it is sold piece meal.
> It is sold on a continuous basis. This means that even though s/he
> sells her body it is not sold in toto. Consequently even though s/he is
> engaged in the business of selling it, because of the peculiar way in
> which it is done, s/he still maintains overall ownership over it
> outside business hours. It is this peculiarly limited form in which her
> body is sold that prevents the prostitute from being reduced to the
> status of a slave.

Again, this isn't always the case. The massive industry in child
prostitution in Thailand and India (to name two examples) often involves
the outright purchase of young girls by urban pimps--a purchase made
possible by the desperate poverty of the girl's parents, and traditionally
patriarchal social structures that see female sexuality as a commodity men
may dispose of.

> The prostitute reproduces his/her body so that s/he can sell it on the
> market. By selling his/her body as commodity s/he is exchanging the
> form of value in the form of commodity for the form of value in the
> form of money. The latter is the value form by which she can continue
> to reproduce her body  in order to sell it again. Now the prostitute
> who tends to produce a "better quality body" by putting more labour
> into the reproduction of her body increases the value of her body and
> thereby the price she gets for it.

This sort of analysis is so abstracted from the social & cultural
realities of prostitution, and from any sort of moral framework we would
(hopefully) want to bring to this analysis, that it makes me shudder. See
below.....

  > The prostitute contributes to the creation of value as a simple
> commodity producer by selling her body as a commodity. S/he then makes
> a contribution to the economic system by creating value. As a petty
> commodity producer s/he is petty bourgeois and not a member of the
> working class. Her/his petty bourgeois position will tend to reflect
> itself in her/his politics and culture. Her/his economic condition, as
> prostitute, tends to be a function of the specific character of the
> capitalist economy at any given time, the quality of her/his body as commodity,
> the degree to which her/his body as commodity enters the exchange
> process, whether or not s/he has a pimp or employer and the character
> of her/his relationship to either.
>
> To sum up: As far as the circulation process goes there takes place equal
> exchange between the prostitute and her/his customers. In that sense
>there is no exploitation of the prostitute. People who are quick to frown
on prostitution because the body is sold as a use value  tend to
> be reluctant to frown on the selling of labour power by workers. Why should
>selling one's body be qualitatively any worse than selling one's labour
>power to an industrial capitalist. Both can be considered alienating and
>oppressive as forms of human conduct. Yet the selling of labour power is
>experienced as an acceptable social norm  beyond moral reprobation.
>Indeed the latter ipso facto entails exploitation whereas the former does
>not. Workers who are the customers of prostitutes are not ipso facto
>exploiting them.
>
> Greetings Karl Carlile
>
>
Let me get this straight. When I purchase sex from a prostitute, who more
often than not is driven to this profession by desperate poverty, physical
coercion, addiction, or some combination of these than I'm not being
exploitative, just because I might be a "worker"? It would seem to me that
I'm clearly taking advantage of another's misery for my own pleasure.
Perhaps that's not how exploitation is defined in Capital, but I don't
take that as my bible.

I don't think we can analyze this in a cultural or social vacuum. To
really understand what's exploitative about this relationship, we need to
look at it in some sort of context. What are the social values attached to
such behavior? What are the circumstances that lead people to enter this
profession? How are their lives affected by their status as prostitutes?
What about child prostitutes?

In my limited exposure to prostitution (no, not as a participant--a
thousand times worse, I think, than using another's toothbrush) I can't
escape the evident misery of those trapped in this occupation.
Prostitution is nearly universally associated with violence, substance
abuse, and (increasingly) the spread of STDs, most notably AIDS. Very few
who are in this profession would be there, I suspect, in the absence of
economic desperation, physical coercion, or addiction. Nor can the
different cultural values assigned to the wage worker and the prostitute
be dismissed as irrelevant--these values are central to the degradation
experienced by prostitutes. It's an interesting academic argument to ask
what the real differences are, but.....

Chomsky, I think, argues that in the absence of any genuine scientific
theory of human behavior we need to evaluate actions in a moral framework.
I see no evidence of such a framework in this analysis, and as such it
seems to be an extension of the universal "market values" promoted by the
owners of capital in the modern economy. As such, it is equally supportive
of the interests of pimps and the masters of transnational capital......