Dirt_Possum [any, undecided]

Oh there’s plenty of room for someone who is informed to get angry and rightly ridicule people who deserve it.

the opinion on the topic you are not informed about displays your values and having it might be beneficial to you.

And it might be detrimental to you just as easily. There’s no way to know which without being informed, but an ignorant opinion based on “values” (aka vibes and what you want to be true rather than what is true) is more likely to hurt you or others in the long run. Just as being a racist bigot who has a wrong opinion about people of color might find that holding their racist opinion is immediately beneficial to themselves if they’re in a similarly bigoted community, being a bigot is ultimately harmful for reasons I would hope wouldn’t need to be explained.

An example would be a parent who doesn’t want any gender-related issue to be discussed in the school.

Yet their uninformed opinion is harmful. Gender issues are inevitably part of our world and learning about them will not only prepare children to have an understanding of them that their ignorant parent lacks and help make the world safer and more livable for everyone as a result, but if that child themselves turns out to be gender stereotype non-conforming, then learning about those issues will help them better understand themselves and potentially save them from much of the misery inflicted on them by an ignorant populous.

Most of the people I’ve known who were into anime were women, some of them are even anime artists. In the 00s, I only knew about anime because a girlfriend of mine (platonic) was into it and tried to get me into it and I thought it was mostly something that only interested other girls. I was aware of Sailor Moon and knew girls who had posters of it in their rooms, but never knew any males who admitted to liking it so hearing that anime is thought of as a guy thing is still strange to me.

Hexbear is mostly white. So maybe don’t use it.

I’m shocked that drug dealing is coming up here as an example of criminality in so many comments. It’s very literally only criminal behavior because the us made it criminal behavior to crush poor people, radicals, and minorities, and most people know that

I’m hoping that most people here understand that and are using it as an example of criminality only as a way to talk about lumpen as a class that relates to the means of production differently than most of the rest of the proletariat (but I don’t know, I also wouldn’t have thought there would be so many leftists who seem to think that sex work isn’t work or that no forms of it could possibly exist under communism). But either way, what I do find shocking about it is how many people here think that they have less revolutionary potential than the rest of the US proletariat which is extremely right wing. Like the comment “drug runners aren’t gonna help us do communism dude.” Well, they’re hell of a lot more likely to than all the reactionary regular proletarians who are Trump and Biden law and order supporters.

You highlight the work aspect of sex work as if I’m saying it’s not work, or to say that it‘s work only quantitatively different from manufacturing goods, delivering goods, etc. I’m not saying sex work is immoral or impure or condemning it based on moral judgement.

Ok, maybe I was wrong about what you were saying. Do you think sex work is work, then?

Someone may sleep with many members of society and be supported in their needs by the community through the immense wealth of the people under communism, but the support of their needs would not be predicated on their sleeping with members of the community.

Would the needs of any other members of that society be predicated on the work they do?

And their activity would necessarily not contribute to the welfare of the whole community but only persons selected.

I’m not sure what you mean by this. Surely making sure the members of a community are able to lead happy and fulfilling lives is contributing to the welfare of the whole community. Human sexuality is undeniably an important aspect (for the majority of people) of a person’s over all sense of happiness and fulfillment. There being members of the community that help ensure everyone else in the community has that sense of fulfillment, members of the community who are explicitly willing and happy to provide it as a service (labor), is a positive, even necessary contribution to community wellbeing.

Replacing cash with goods doesn’t make prostitution not sex work or change the relations at play.

I never implied otherwise. I wasn’t the person who said “some people will always be willing to exchange goods or labour for sex regardless of economic or political system.” But they are correct, and you are not when you call that “bourgeois philosophy” and “utter nonsense.” Even in a system where that kind of tit-for-tat exchange is unnecessary, it is absurd to say that it will never happen.

People misunderstand communism, due to a misunderstanding of its relation to early communal society, as some sort of return to the end stage of historical communities where everyone lives in common low development and individual exchange happens under the table.

That may be, but that is not an error I’m making. As I briefly mentioned in a response to another comment, there will always be people who are unable or unwilling to form the kind of relationships usually required for sexual activity and thus sexual fulfillment. There will also always be people who choose to develop skills that help provide people with that kind of fulfillment sans any other form of relationship. You may say that such a thing is so different from the kind of purely transactional relationship we traditionally characterize as prostitution that it may as well not be called prostitution. Fine. But the same thing can be said for countless other forms of labor that people do under capitalism to survive, but that under communism would just be “something I enjoy doing,” that is still labor and provides a service to society. Like an actor who enjoys giving performances that provide other people with entertainment (as one of countless other possible examples).

What percentage of prostitutes across history do you believe fit into a definition that isn’t characterized by exploitation?

What percentage of plumbers across history do you believe fit into a definition that isn’t characterized by exploitation? Sex work is work. Period. Just like other work, it can be done because a person enjoys it, but under capitalism (or other modes of production that exploit workers) it will always involve exploitation. If you want to define prostitution as something that always involves exploitation, ok fine, but then you also have to separate that out from sex work, which absolutely does not inherently require exploitation and most certainly would still exist even if all economic coercion were eradicated (that is, under communism rather than capitalism).

Under communism (a classless, stateless, moneyless society), the economic and class relations that force people to perform sexual labor as a means of subsistence won’t be present.

(Emphasis above is mine). Under communism, the economic and class relations that force people to perform any labor as a means of subsistence won’t be present.

People will still have sex, but nobody will be coerced into having sex in exchange for food, shelter, or medical care.

No shit. There will still be plumbers too, but they won’t be coerced into it in exchange for food, shelter, or medical care. Almost all of your arguments so far can be applied exactly the same to any number of other forms of labor.

Prostitution won’t be an occupational category under communism because the purpose of labor under communism is about fulfilling social need.

So finally we get to some reasoning (flawed though it is) for why sex work would be different than any other work. You think that sex work doesn’t fulfill a social need. Sexual fulfillment is a social need. There will always be people who find it difficult to find partners due to all kinds of possible scenarios (including having no time to build a relationship due to dedicating all of it to other interests or necessary labor). And there will similarly always be people willing to provide that, people who have dedicated their time to become skilled at providing that. Refusing to recognize them as fulfilling a social need is simply being sex-negative and it’s always shocking to me that there are still leftists who don’t understand this.

Even the so called criminal element isn’t properly considered in the traditional view of lumpen. At least from what I’ve seen, there is almost always a failure to understand that large swathes of the lumpenproletariat are simply parts of the proletariat that had no economic recourse, lacking even the ability to survive by legally selling their labor, and became lumpen by necessity. Consider redlined ethnic minorities who are denied even bare minimum legal employment and resort to drug dealing as the only means of survival. Many of them put the money they make directly back into their destitute communities. They absolutely have revolutionary potential and some of them have class consciousness on a level far beyond that of the vast majority of legal working proletariat.

You act like it’s blatantly obvious that commodities would exist under communism and mock the person who pointed it out to you, yet you vehemently deny that something else just as obvious as the existence of commodities will also still very much exist and have a place under communism, calling it utter nonsense and requiring “bourgeois philosophy” without any explanation. That something else involves sex, though. Hmm. Funny how work that involves sex always brings out a specific type with an angry and reactionary axe to grind.

At least u/porcupine can make a reasonable case by redefining prostitution as something other than and separate from sex work rather than denying the legitimacy and validity of sex work.

This is interesting but I’m extremely skeptical.

Same here. I don’t understand economics well enough to have an opinion I trust enough to criticize it, but all of this seems like it flies in the face of what I do understand of Marxist economics. There was another information dense comment about these things in this thread by u/Droplet but that one at least seemed to be in line with my poor understanding. @Droplet@hexbear.net could you respond to what u/ComradeRat is saying? Are you more or less in agreement? For that matter, do you know if Zak Cope is more or less in agreement with Michael Hudson?

I think Gaia answered that question pretty well in the affirmative, as have countless communist sex workers before her, that yes, it absolutely can and does help people, including women. Anyone who says otherwise is discounting the voices of women and comrades. That doesn’t mean there aren’t terrible examples of exploitation in the sex industry and that it isn’t dominated by power imbalance. But so too are there terrible examples of exploitation and abuse in most other low wage work. From miners to service industry workers. Sex work is work, and it doesn’t deserve scorn or disdain any more than any other form of work. As communists, this should not be a difficult concept to grasp, but unfortunately patriarchal, reactionary brainworms still infect a not insubstantial subset in some leftist spaces.

Removed by mod

Not a bad post except for that you just had to throw in some sexist SWERF garbage in #7.

Thank you for extra information. If you’re the person I think you are, then I felt like the scrubbing of all your old comments/posts was a big loss to the collective information and wisdom that can be found by digging through hexbear. I rolled my eyes at the foolish decision to remove your informative comment here in this thread. I mean, agree or not, it’s great having an actual Chinese perspective, and then to see it get deleted on a pro-China thread as “ultraleftism” was very funny. But it was a gutpunch when I saw you had deleted all the comments on your old account! Keep posting, comrade, some of us really do appreciate it.

The banning of this user is extreme liberalism. Did nothing wrong. Would be my nomination for number 2 otherwise.

Here we have a 4-day old account listing off the obvious cool regulars and the hexbear mainstays, but then touting a banned user who bordered on wreckerism and who repeatedly violated site-wide rules, comm rules, picked unnecessary fights with comrades, used handfuls of alts to try to evade their ban, and did a bunch of other shit I won’t list here. But their banning was “liberalism” and they “did nothing wrong.” Very sus.

Link to the thread: https://old.reddit.com/r/AskIreland/comments/17jyi5j/thoughts_on_irish_people_joining_the_british_army/k74mucl/?context=3

The confidence these imbeciles have as they spew their revised versions of history to fit their bullshit worldview makes my blood boil.

God, have to agree with that other commenter - truly pathetic. Take a break from being a champion of justice on Reddit, it’s really warping your sense of reality

Pathetic, legitimately on the level of holocaust denial

You’re out here denying well documented atrocities, kinda ironic.

Bud, don’t be ignorant of actual facts. Costs nothing to enlighten yourself.

“oh Italians weren’t ‘fully’ white, they were only 70% white whereas WASPs were 100% white and black people were 0% white, and the line to have rights is 50%”

…But that’s exactly how most racists saw it (and many still do). It is silly, but that doesn’t change the fact that it was indeed a common worldview that did shape laws that in turn reinforced it. Are you saying that racists didn’t believe in a racial hierarchy?

I would like to hear what some of our news mega comrade’s opinions are on this. Like @SeventyTwoTrillion@hexbear.net’s, or @Awoo@hexbear.net’s and other Marxism-educated regulars there, because of the geopolitical focus of the news mega and how often things like the Western World, Global North, and Imperial Core are heavily discussed.

The way I’ve always thought of it is that “Western” is just an informal way of saying Imperial Core. That it’s all a matter of who is doing imperialism to whom, who is benefiting from imperialism and who is being exploited by it. That it’s not a matter of culture, language, etc., and is only a matter of race and racism because it’s racist reasoning and racist justification at the heart of imperialism.

FINALLY.

About goddamn time. Better late than never (I mean fucking obviously, I just wish it had been decades or even a century sooner).

I hope he died knowing that the empire he spent his life orchestrating atrocities for is also spiraling the drain.

🦀 all x 1000.

Yeah, every anti-natalist I’ve ever read or spoken with cared much more about “overpopulation” than the issue of consent at being brought into existence. Anti-natalism is without any doubt very strongly tied to malthusian nonsense even if some of the more philosophically educated among them like to couch it in terms of sentience and consent. To think otherwise is to completely misunderstand the movement.

Edit to clarify: I know that there are plenty of people who exist who hold the position that what is problematic is that life inherently involves suffering and so bringing it about is causing suffering which is immoral. I’m even somewhat sympathetic to that view even if I don’t agree with the very premise of it. But I’ve (personally, anecdotally) never seen those people refer to themselves as anti-natalist. However those who have self described as anti-natalist and certainly any of them who considered themselves part of a movement were eco-fash adjacent malthusians. The overall anti-natalist movement is deeply entwined with and cannot be separated from malthusianism.