[lbo-talk] money and s*x

shag carpet bomb shag at cleandraws.com
Wed Apr 7 04:14:45 PDT 2010


At 11:02 PM 4/6/2010, Dennis Claxton wrote:
>At 07:51 PM 4/6/2010, B. wrote:
>
>
>>Okay - "rent" them, Mr. Claxton? Whatever.
>
>
>I meant you buy sex, not people.

this made me think of one my favorite passages from a great book, Richard Edwards' Contested Terrain:

"Capitalism itself came into being when labor power (as opposed to merely labor's products) became a commodity, that is, a thing bought and sold in the market. ... Focusing on the central role of the labor process in this sequence, Marx noted that:

'The money owner buys everything necessary for [production], such as raw material [and labor power],. in the market, and pays for it at its full value .... The consumption of labor power is completed, as in the case of every other commodity, outside the limits of the market.... Accompanied by Mr. Moneybags and by the possessor of labor power, we therefore take leave for a time of this noisy sphere, where everything takes place on the surface and in view of all men, and follow them both into the hidden abode of production, on whose threshold there stares us in the face, "No admittance except on business." Here we shall see, not only how capital produces, but how capital is produced. We shall at last force the secret of profit making.

On leaving this sphere of [the market],...we thin we can perceive a change in the physiognomy of our dramatis personae. He, who before was the money-ower, now strides in front as capitalist: the possessor of labor power follows as his laboree. The one with an air of importance, smirking, intent on business; the other,. timid and holding back, like one who is bringing his own hide to market and has nothing to expect but -- a hiding.'

The market equality between buyer and seller of the commodity labor power disappears in this "hidden abode," and the capitalist takes change. No wonder the capitalist strides ahead, "intent on business," for it turns out that the commodity he has purchased is not what is useful to him. What the capitast buys in the labor market is the right to a certain quantify of what Marx has called labor power, the worker's capacity to do work. ...

But the capacity to do work is useful to the capitalist only if the work actually gets done. Work, or what Marx called labor, is the actual human effort in the process of production. If labor power remains merely a potentiality or capacity no goods get produced and the capitalist has no products to sell for profits. Once wages-for-time exchange has been made, the capitalist cannot rest content. He has purchased a given quantity of labor power, but he must now "stride ahead" and strive to extract actual labor from the labor power he now legally owns.

...

It is this discrepancy between what the capitalist can buy in the market and what he needs for production that makes it imperative for him to control the labor process and the worekers' activities. The capitalist need not be motivated to control things by an obsession for power; a simple desire for profit will do." (pp 11-12)

Which, when you look at it that way, comparing johns to capitalist and sex works to laborers in order to make claims about what's going on in the exchange is always a bit jarring - to me -- when it doesn't get at the structural factors that Edwards goes on to talk about.

I guess I liken it to the tendency we've sometimes seen on the list where people are called capitalist simply because they have lots of money or earn lots of money.

And then we can start - or I could start - blathering about Moishe Postone and domination an' all that.

shag



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list