All services that are legal commodities are equal, be they sexual services, cleaning services, or whatever. Whether there is exploitation of the capitalist sort involved in the production of services depends upon whether producers are (A) cooperative workers (e.g., cooperatively-owned sex work collectives, cooperatively-owned cleaning services collectives), (B) petty producers (e.g., independent sex workers, independent cleaning workers), or (C) wage workers (e.g., sex workers employed by brothels, cleaning workers employed by cleaning service companies), though the boundary between (B) and (C) is often blurry, especially as capitalists want to pass off wage workers as "independent contractors" to avoid unionization, etc.
At 3:27 PM +1000 8/13/03, Bill Bartlett wrote:
>What you seem to be trying to wriggle out of is the simple
>comparison between men exploiting women as personal servants and
>women exploiting other women as personal servants. You think there
>is no comparison between a relationship based on formal wage slavery
>and old-fashioned marital slavery? Please! It is the same thing, so
>long as the slave is the victim of coercion.
>
>The domestic servant is coerced by economic want, to be the personal
>servant of someone. The dependant wife is also precisely coerced by
>economic want, to be the personal servant of her husband. Same thing
>exactly.
If it is poverty that mainly induces women to become economically dependent on their husbands, we may expect the poorest women to be the most dependent on men, but women's economic dependence on men is the least common among the poorest and the most common among the bourgeoisie in rich modern nations. That is because poor men whom poor women tend to encounter, sexually or otherwise, are the least capable of supporting dependents, especially as employment patterns have changed proportionally from manufacturing-centered to service-centered ones, with union density going down, too. In contrast, the richest men can afford to have women become totally economically dependent on them, so they often acquire "trophy wives" who do neither wage labor nor unpaid "household labor." -- Yoshie
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