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"To send men to the firing squad, judicial proof is unnecessary … These procedures are an archaic bourgeois detail. This is a Revolution!”
- Che Guevara
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Alain de Benoist addresses the rise of "illiberalism", from his speech to the 2019 colloquium of Institut Iliade:
The causes of the rise of illiberalism are evident, and in many regards connect with those that explain the success of populist parties today. Firstly they fit into the observation that liberal democracies nearly everywhere have transformed into financial oligarchies cut off from the people: ineffectiveness, powerlessness, corruption, parties transformed into simple machines to get elected, the reign of experts, shortsightedness, etc. Another observation is added to this, which is more serious: in liberal democracies, nations and peoples henceforth no longer have the means to defend their interests. What meaning can the sovereignty of the people actually have if governments no longer have the independence necessary to determine their major orientations in economic, financial, military matters or even foreign policy for themselves? Can they continue to impose juridical principles that, instead of promoting the cohesion of peoples and the perpetuation of their common values, lead to their dissolution?
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The evil effects — and I aim dealing more with the moral side of the question — I think you will agree with me that our productive system is demoralising and degrading to the human family (Hear, hear.) Now take the commercial ethics of this life, and does it not develop the worst side of human nature? (Hear, hear.) It develops too much of that instinct which distinguishes the savage. The savage is noted for the exercise of cunning. It is a question of what he can take, and is not that one of the faculties developed in all forms of business. Scheming, cunning, lying, and dishonesty are associated with our commercial enterprise. We have fraud perpetrated by men of intelligence who ought and do know better. I take it that the human family is inherently good. I go against that old idea of always crediting our human frailties to original sin. (Cheers.) I say that humanity is inherently good if we only let it have a chance to exercise its goodness (Renewed cheers.)
There is in commercial life a system of ethics which will not stand setting up side by side with the Decalogue. You cannot get along sometimes without telling lies. Adulteration of goods is very common. The gospel of cheapness has such a hold upon people, and the pressure of competition so keen that if you are to make your way in the commercial world, as in other walks of life, you are forced, I insist, to give way if you are to succeed. To get on you must do as other people do — or you will go down. We have surrounded our commercial men in such an entanglement that they cannot be expected to do right. I do not look at what men should do, but what is reasonable to expect them to do under the circumstances in which they are placed. (Hear, hear.) I say that if we have a set of conditions under which it is impossible for men and women to do right we are responsible for them. We have the power to utterly change these conditions. We have control over the circumstances under which we live more than any other animal, therefore we are responsible for the conditions under which we live. Men are all struggling against each other. Men start in business and do not think about the market being already supplied by others who are only making a bare living. They think that if they can by advertising secure more custom that they are justified in doing it. What do they care for their fellows so long as they can get on? Get on is the essential submitted to us. If you do not get on you are a failure in society. These evils are produced by the system under which men deal with each other. The characters of the employers are influenced by it.
On the workers’ side the evils are, perhaps, more felt. We have on their side enforced idleness and poverty. Poverty with all its wretched surroundings — the most degrading thing in all the world. We have unworthy dealings, and all the discontent engendered thereby. Always crushing downwards — the man losing all self-respect as he goes. How can you expect a man to stand against the influences surrounding him. The strong stand for a time, but we have no right to put the weak in a position that will compel them to go down. We have the evils of ignorance amongst those less fortunate than ourselves in not knowing right from wrong. We have coarseness, lack of refinement, even brutality. You cannot expect the working classes — especially those who are crushed most low — to be so polished and nice as those who have nothing else to do but study how to be polished and nice. These evils are directly attributable to that condition of society which it has set up to be over itself.
The weaker men and the women suffer. Women undoubtedly suffer most. At one time it was the boast of the Anglo-Saxon race — in the ages of chivalry — that they would defend their women. To-day our sisters are shut out and degraded to the lowest of all depths, even to prostitution. Those who know most about that say that there is not one in a thousand of them who ever chose that life. They have been driven to it — driven to it for want of bread. I am charging this to the social system we have set up. It is physically and morally degrading to the human race. (Hear, hear.)
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from "The Ethics Of New Unionism", a speech delivered for the Australian Socialist League in 12 June, 1892 by William Guthrie Spence, trade unionist and labour politician who was instrumental in founding the Australian Workers' Union
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The revolutionary Wilhelm Liebknecht responded:
“True. He was the most hated, but he was also the most loved. Most hated by the oppressors and exploiters of the people; best loved by the oppressed and exploited, as far as they are conscious of their situation.”
Our job today is make the oppressed and exploited conscious of their situation, and armed with scientific socialism, to win socialism in Canada and around the globe.
Workers of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains!
We have a world to win!
"Arm The Proletariat And Seize The Means Of Production"
Karl Marx
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****Important article exposing the idpol lies that prostitution is compatible with socialism****
Contrary to some pro decrim advocates, who defend prostitution as legal work compatible with Marx’s philosophy, an analysis of his writings shows that to him, there is no emancipation in prostitution.
Regulation advocates hold that a prostitute’s activity should be officially recognised, so as to be integrated into the general system of work, whether this work is performed by a salaried employee or independently. Some of these movements recognise prostitution as unfulfilling work, while asserting it to not be worse than other types of manual labour. These ‘regulators’’ reasoning amounts to the claim that the only difference between these two types of work is that one is legally recognised while the other is not. They also appeal to the Marxist analysis of salaried workers in order to claim that prostitution should be legally recognised so that prostitutes can improve the conditions of their work.
Concrete work, abstract work
Attributing a regulatory position to Marx stems in reality from a number of misunderstandings as to the Marxist conception of work. First, Regulation advocates overlook the historical determination of capitalist production, as well as the dual nature of work in general. When Marx conceives of work from an anthropological point of view, the individuals’s productive activity cannot be separated from the means of their work (tools and materials), nor from its products. This dimension, defined as “concrete work,” holds for all societies across history. However, Marx highlights a second dimension, specific to the capitalist mode of production: “abstract work.” This dimension reduces work to a single production of exchange-value, independently of the activity, of means of production and concrete products. As the Regulation advocates do not take these distinctions into account, it is only by exploiting this idea of “abstract work” that they are able consider prostitution as work.
With their perspective determined by our current mode of production, those who favour regulation project the capitalist point of view onto numerous social and human relations. As such, through their undeclared use of the Marxist concept of “abstract work,” the Regulation advocates end up promoting the commodification of vast swaths of productive human activities not yet monopolised by capitalism. By claiming a legal extension of abstract work so as to include prostitution, those who favour regulation promote nothing less than the management and regulation of sexual activity by the market. In this battle, the concern for rights and legality constitutes for capitalism an important stage on the way towards obtaining successful exploitation.
Materialist sexual activity and abstract work
Defining abstract work, Marx writes, “We may disregard the determined character of productive activity and thus the useful nature of work; it remains nevertheless a consumption of the human capacity for work. Dressmaking and weaving, while qualitatively distinct as productive activities, are by turns a productive consumption of cerebral material, of muscle, of nerve, of hand, etc., and thus are, in this sense, both examples of human work,” (Capital, book 1). It is this “etc.” that those who favour regulation think could include sexual activity in the Marxist conception of abstract work. Yet this extension is, to put it lightly, cavalier; had Marx, this great theorist of work, intended to include the commercial use of the intimate parts of the body, he certainly wouldn’t have left it implicit in an “etc.”
If we specifically consider the question of prostitution, we affirm that prostitutory activity – of all the types of “human work” Marx addresses – is the sole activity where what is sold is in fact sold nowhere else, in no other work. If the worker does “rent their body’ to the capitalist (with their muscles, their nerves, their brain, etc.), the prostitute, on the contrary, is the only one to authorise access to intimate body parts, which are on the contrary never included in the sale of work capacity for all of the workers discussed by Marx. Prostitution is as a result the only activity where the rental of the individual’s body includes one, or several body parts that are formally excluded from such transactions practically everywhere. We observe here then how, and in what absolutely specific way prostitution radically departs from the whole of “human work” discussed by Marx in the first book of Capital.
If we specifically consider the question of prostitution, we affirm that prostitutory activity – of all the types of “human work” Marx addresses – is the sole activity where what is sold is in fact sold nowhere else, in no other work. If the worker does “rent their body’ to the capitalist (with their muscles, their nerves, their brain, etc.), the prostitute, on the contrary, is the only one to authorise access to intimate body parts, which are on the contrary never included in the sale of work capacity for all of the workers discussed by Marx. Prostitution is as a result the only activity where the rental of the individual’s body includes one, or several body parts that are formally excluded from such transactions practically everywhere. We observe here then how, and in what absolutely specific way prostitution radically departs from the whole of “human work” discussed by Marx in the first book of Capital.
Prostitution and lumpenproletariat
In addition, those who favour regulation neglect to mention that Marx had explicitly spoken about prostitution. If it is true that in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Marx still seems to be searching for a position on the prostitution question, later and up until at least the first book of Capital, we discern the consistency of Marx’s stance on this matter. Whether in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, or in The Classes Struggles in France, or in the first book of Capital, we note that prostitution is systematically placed beside what Marx calls the “lumpenproletariat.”
According to Marx, this category is constituted of the impoverished proletariat and others fallen into misery, who had abandoned class warfare and ceased to resist. According to Marx, it was historically constituted as the enemy of the proletariat, although it in part originates therein. The lumpenproletariat is generally composed of “a mass completely distinct from the industrial proletariat, a nursery of thieves and of all sorts of criminals, living off of society’s waste, individuals without a chosen profession, drifters, people without vows and without home, differing according to the degree of culture in every nation, never belying the character of scoundrels,” (The Class Struggles in France). If prostitutes are in this category, we might retain then that, first, prostitution is not placed in a “positive” class of work, in that the work does not constitute an achievement for humans; and secondly, that it is distinct from the proletariat. In these conditions, it does not even fit the definition of a “negative” type of work, as it exists under the auspices of capitalism (in other words work paid with capital). This means that, even if Marx recognises forms of prostitution paid for with capital and falling under the category of “productive work” – as is the case in the “brothels” evoked by Marx as an example in Theories of Surplus Value – he nevertheless does not integrate it into the realm of work.
Indeed, even in the first book of Capital, when Marx describes the fringes of workers, those most dominated, he speaks about the “lowest fallen” but does not include there the category of prostitute. It is doubtless useful to attentively read this excerpt from Class Warfare in France: “From the days of the court to the dim café, the same prostitution reproduced itself, the same shameless fraud, the same thirst to enrich oneself, not by production but by the filching of others’ existing wealth.” Marx evokes here a thirst to enrich oneself not by way of production but by the thievery, fraud, etc., that is characteristic of the upper class as of the lumpenproletariat. However, one cannot say that the prostitute “steals” from the client, nor that the client “steals” from the prostitute. In this case what motivates Marx’s classification?
There are several possible ways to approach this question. I will only propose one: prostitution is an issue that occupied Marx throughout his work, while always remaining on the margins. It is possible to understand that the prostitute, like the criminal, is for Marx the lowest degree to which capitalism reduces human life. If prostitution can be envisioned from a capitalist point of view as criminal activity (the latter Marx, in Theories of Surplus Value, says it is a “producer” in the sense that it grants work to the judge, the locksmith, the criminologist, the scientist, etc.), these being activities where the individual has finally accepted the degree to which capitalism wants to reduce him, by dispossessing him not only of objective conditions that allow him to work, as is the case for the proletarian, but also of all the elements that form the basis for his “humanity.” The individual of the lumpenproletariat is in a way a person who has “ceded” their humanity, who has given up on the fight and on the resistance which constitute, for Marx, the productive activity, “this rude, but fortifying school of work,” (The Holy Family). This is a person who is ready to sell all of themselves, and finds themselves in “the situation of the lone and ruined proletarian, the last degree to which the proletarian falls when they have ceased to resist to the bourgeoisie’s pressure,” (German Ideology). From this we can understand that there is not, according to Marx, any emancipatory perspective to prostitution, which constitutes on the contrary a radical loss of the link attaching this “living organism” to their share of resistance and of humanity.
Marx is perfectly conscious of the violence in the relations of domination exercised over prostitutes women. He writes: “Prostitution is a relation where it is not only the prostitute who is degraded, but also the john, whose ignominy is all the greater,” (Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844). If to Marx prostitution falls under the category of the lumpenproletariat and not that of the proletariat, this is not a condemnation of prostitutes but on the contrary a condemnation of harmful work to women and a call for their emancipation from a situation to which they have been reduced. This emancipation of women should notably be brought about by the worldwide abolition of prostitution, which will be accompanied by social measures as well as by a full recognition of women in the social world of work.
If children made up a part of workers in the 19th century, some societies chose not to wait until the recognition of children’s rights: they chose on the contrary to simply withdraw children from the labour market. A ban on children’s work and work “harmful to women”: this is the position Marx defended in an interview with the Chicago Tribune in December 1878. If we were able to abolish children’s work without the need for a labour law, it is more than ever time that our societies and our fight arrives at the same result with regard to prostitution.
*Saliha Boussedra is a PHD candidate in Political Philosophy at the University of Strasbourg, France.
Many thanks to Sarah Myers who translated from French into English for us!
This article is also available in Spanish here and also here
There is also a version in Portuguese here.
Article original : http://projet.pcf.fr/93934
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