Marx and the question of prostitution, Saliha Boussedra *
Contrary to the "regulationist" currents that defend prostitution as legal work compatible with Marx's thought, the analysis of his writings shows that for him there is no emancipation in prostitution activity.
The "regulationists" consider that the activity exercised by the prostitute must be formally recognized to be integrated into the general scheme of work-related activities, whether this work is that of an employee or an independent . Some of these currents recognize that prostitution does not belong to a fulfilling activity, while thinking that it is not worse than the activity of a worker. The reasoning of the regulationists leads to saying that the only difference that persists between these two activities is that one is a legal activity when the other is not. They also use the Marxian analysis of the salaried worker to say that prostitution must be legally recognized so that prostitutes can improve the conditions of their activities.
Concrete work, abstract work
To attribute to Marx a regulatory position is, in fact, based on a certain number of confusions concerning the Marxian conception of work. First of all, the regulators currents miss not only the historically determined dimension of the capitalist mode of production, but also the double nature of the work that is revealed there. When Marx considers work from an anthropological point of view, this implies that the human productive activity can not be separated from the individuals who perform it, the means of work (work tools and materials) and products of this activity. This dimension that defines "concrete work" is true for all societies and at all times. On the other hand, Marx highlights a second dimension that is specific to the capitalist mode of production, the "abstract work". This dimension reduces work to the sole production of exchange value, regardless of activity, means of production and concrete products. Since regulation of prostitution does not take these distinctions into account, it is only by adopting the notion of "abstract work" that it can consider prostitution as a job.
Impregnated with a view determined by our mode of production, the regulation of prostitution projects on a certain number of social and human relations the point of view of capital itself. Thus, regulationism is led, through the Marxian concept of "abstract work" which he uses without naming it, to promote the merchandising of large areas of human productive activities not yet monopolised by capital. By claiming a legal extension of the abstract form of labor to include prostitution activity, regulationism promotes neither more nor less than the management and regulation of sexual activity by the market. In this battle the issue of law and legality is an important step for capital to achieve a successful exploitation.
Venital sexual activity and abstract work
In defining abstract work, Marx writes: "If we ignore the determination of productive activity and therefore the usefulness of work, it remains that it is an expenditure of human labor power. Making and weaving, while being qualitatively distinct productive activities, are both a productive expense of brain matter, muscle, nerve, hand, etc., and are therefore, in this sense both of human labor "(Capital, Book I). It is in this "etc. That the regulationists think they can include sex in the Marxian conception of abstract work. This inclusion is cavalier, to say the least. If this great thinker of the work that Marx had had to integrate the commercial use of the private parts of the body, he would certainly not have left it in the implicit of a "etc. ".
If we specifically address the issue of prostitution, we find that the prostitution activity - of all the "human works" of which Marx speaks - is the one and only activity where what is sold is precisely what is not sold anywhere elsewhere, in no other work. If the worker "praises" his "body" to the capitalist (with his muscles, nerves, brain, etc.), the prostitute, on the other hand, is the only one who allows access to private body parts, never included. in the sale of the labor force for all the workers mentioned by Marx. Prostitution is therefore the only activity where the rental of the body of the individual includes part (s) of the body whose access remains everywhere else formally prohibited.
Prostitution and lumpenproletariat
Moreover, the regulationists fail to mention that Marx explicitly spoke of prostitution. If, in the Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, Marx's position on the question of prostitution still seems to be sought later on and until at least Volume I of Capital, we can find a consistent position of Marx in relation to that question. Whether in Louis Bonaparte's The Brumaire 18, in Class Struggles in France or in Book I of Capital, we find that prostitution is systematically on the side of what Marx calls the lumpenproletariat.
The latter, according to Marx, is made up of the ruined proletariat and the outcasts who have abandoned the class struggle and stopped resisting. According to Marx, he was historically constituted as the enemy of the proletariat, although it emanates from it in part. The lumpenproletariat is generally composed of "a mass clearly distinct from the industrial proletariat, a nursery of thieves and criminals of all kinds, living the waste of society, individuals without a declared occupation, prowlers, people without confession and without fire, different according to the degree of culture of the nation to which they belong, never belittling the character of lazzaroni "(Class Struggles in France). If prostitutes belong to this category of individuals, what we can remember here is that, on the one hand, prostitution does not belong to the register of a "positive" definition of work, that is, it is not an accomplishment for humans; and that, on the other hand, it appears as "distinct" from the proletariat. Under these conditions, it does not even belong to the "negative" definition of work as it exists under the aegis of capital (in other words, work paid for by capital). This means that, even if Marx is aware of forms of prostitution remunerated by capital and therefore "productive work" - as is the case in the "brothels" that Marx evokes as an example in the Theories on surplus value - it does not include it in the field of work. it appears as "distinct" from the proletariat. Under these conditions, it does not even belong to the "negative" definition of work as it exists under the aegis of capital (in other words, work paid for by capital). This means that, even if Marx is aware of forms of prostitution remunerated by capital and therefore "productive work" - as is the case in the "brothels" that Marx evokes as an example in the Theories on surplus value - it does not include it in the field of work. it appears as "distinct" from the proletariat. Under these conditions, it does not even belong to the "negative" definition of work as it exists under the aegis of capital (in other words, work paid for by capital). This means that, even if Marx is aware of forms of prostitution remunerated by capital and therefore "productive work" - as is the case in the "brothels" that Marx evokes as an example in the Theories on surplus value - it does not include it in the field of work.
Indeed, even when Marx describes the fringes of the most dominated workers and workers in Book I of Capital, he speaks in this respect of the "lowest precipitate", he does not include the category of "prostitute". No doubt it is useful here to read attentively this excerpt from Class Struggles in France: "From the court to the one-eyed cafe the same prostitution, the same shameless deception, the same thirst for wealth, not by production, but by the retrieval of the wealth of others already existing. Marx invokes here a thirst for wealth which does not pass through production but through theft, deception, etc., and which is peculiar to the upper middle class as to the lumpenproletariat. However, it can not be said that the prostitute "steals" the client, nor that the client "steals" the prostitute.
There are several possible tracks on this subject. We will only propose one here: prostitution is a question that has occupied Marx throughout his work, albeit in a relatively marginal way. It is possible to consider that the prostitute, just as the criminal, is, for Marx, the ultimate degree to which capital reduces human life. If prostitution can be considered from a capitalist point of view, just as the activity of the criminal (of which Marx - in the theory of surplus value - says that he is a "producer" in the sense that he gives work to judge, locksmith, criminologist, scientist, etc.), these activities are activities in which the individual has finally accepted what capital wants to reduce by dispossessing not only the objective conditions allowing the performance of his activity, as it is the case for the proletarian, but also of all the elements which, in a way, melt his "humanity". The lumpenproletariat individual is, in a way, the one who has "yielded" to his share of humanity, the one who has given up the struggle and the resistance that constitutes, for Marx, the productive activity, "that harsh but fortifying school of the work "(The Holy Family). He is the one who, ready to sell everything of himself, finds himself in "the situation of the only ruined proletariat, the last degree where the proletarian who has ceased to resist the pressure of the bourgeoisie falls" (German Ideology) . From where we can understand that there is no, according to Marx,
Marx is perfectly aware of the violent relations of domination exercised over prostituted women. He writes: "Prostitution is a relationship in which falls not only the prostitute but also the prostitute whose ignominy is even greater" (Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844). If, for Marx, the prostitution activity belongs to the lumpenproletariat and not the proletariat, it is in no way for him to condemn the prostitutes but on the contrary to condemn the work harmful to women and to emancipate them from the situation to which they are reduced. This emancipation of women will have to go through the worldwide abolition of prostitution, which is accompanied by social measures, as well as by full recognition of women in the social world of work.
If children belonged to the category of the world of workers in the nineteenth century, some companies were able to choose not to wait for the latter to get more rights: they chose, on the contrary, to withdraw the children purely and simply of the labor market. Prohibition of child labor and "work harmful to women" is what Marx defended in an interview with the newspaper the Chicago Tribune of December 1878. If we managed to abolish child labor Without going through a development of the "right to organise", it is time more than ever that our societies and our struggles achieve the same results for prostitution.
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