PROSTITUTION, EXPLOITATION AND CAPITALISM

From Class Struggle 51 July-August 2003
The Prostitution Act Reform Bill was passed into law on the 27^th June 2003 by the very narrow margin of one vote.Here we put a communist perspective on this issue and explain why we give critical support to this new law.

A very short history of sex work

This much-debated piece of legislation, though long overdue, was only passed because a Muslim MP Ashraf Chaudhary could not in good conscience vote either for or against it and so abstained.

For this decision he has been pilloried by many as either indecisive, a traitor to Islam or bowing to pressure from his party leader. Asked on the night why he had followed this course of action he responded with the statement that though he could not for religious reasons vote for the Bill, he could not vote against it as it contained some important protections for workers.

Chaudhary was realistic enough to know that just because of his moral objections to prostitution, it was not going to go away. Therefore better to improve the law to make life safer for prostitutes than persecute them for what is a longstanding social practice.

Chaudhary is right. Prostitution has existed for as long as the patriarchal family as more or less ‘deviant’ sex outside marriage. The law and policing practices governing prostitution are the result of social attitudes that recognise that paying for sex outside marriage is widespread, but at the same time should not be ‘normalised’ as no different to marital sex. Why not?

In the patriarchal family the male head of the household was boss and his sons inherited his property.Marital sex was necessary to make sure that his sons were legitimate heirs. Women were paid for their sexual services by their upkeep and were also expected to be the moral champions of monogamy. Prostitution was tolerated because it fulfilled the need for sex outside marriage without threatening to destroy the patriarchal household.

Under capitalism this changed. The working class had no property to pass down to its sons. Instead the working class family became a ‘domestic factory’ for making babies to feed the bosses’ factories. To ensure that dad stayed around to feed the family production line, the ruling class tried to enact legislation to restrict extramarital sex. They also promoted the moralising myths that stigmatised prostitutes as deviants while their mainly male clients usually escaped the law.

Making up Morals

Those who opposed the Bill promoted lots of half-truths and untruths about the Bill and prostitution. They failed and the new Act will remove many of the negative effects of the old laws and in doing so will in time help to dispel some of the lies and myths that surround prostitution.

There have been myths perpetrated within New Zealand for many years about prostitution, most of which have come from the Church, the ‘moral’ right or the Radical Feminist movement These myths include the claim that prostitution was at one time illegal in New Zealand. It has never been illegal. Pimping, brothel keeping, living off the earnings and soliciting on the other hand are, and have been ever since the 19^th century. The obvious effect of these laws is to penalise the prostitute (and the pimp) but not the client.

The main aim and force of the Act is to remove these ‘crimes’ from the Statute books, as the present situation marginalizes the prostitutes and their families.It makes them and their families not only into criminals but also into easy targets for gangs and those who would exploit them for profit.

Job satisfaction for profits

The second myth that the moralists like to perpetrate is that no woman would willingly choose to be a prostitute. But nor do other workers choose freely to work for wages. The truth is that no worker is free to choose under capitalism, as the alternative is starvation or living in an oppressive relationship. Some prostitutes claim that they are not exploited or abused, but are professionals. So do many other workers take a pride in their job. Like the prostitute who does not see that extramarital sex props up the bourgeois family, they also fail to see that their labour produces profits for the bosses and props up capitalism.

Many women ‘try’ prostitution for economic reasons but the vast majority of these women very quickly find that it is not for them. In other words they look for a better job. It is neither ‘easy’ money nor is it morally debasing to the women who choose it as their profession. In that sense prostitution is service that people enter to earn a living. The truth is that it is capitalism and the patriarchal family that create prostitution that are immoral, not the actions of the prostitute or the client.

Pimps stand over tactics

Under the existing legislation parlour owners have more power over their workers than any other group of “bosses”. Though the fiction was maintained that these women were private contractors they were required to work rosters that did not necessarily take into account personal circumstances or commitments.When they refused to do impossible shifts or missed shifts, they were fined (these fines could range from $10 to $50 or more per shift missed). In one case we know of a worker fined (docked) over $500 when she failed to show up for a shift even though she was ill and had rung to inform the “boss” that she would not be in.

Women in parlours were often required to go with any man that chose them and were unable to refuse if they wished to continue to work in that establishment. This was illegal under existing legislation (it was illegal to force or coerce any person to take part in a sexual activity) but because of their marginalized position women could not complain. Under the new law this form of coercion carries with it a sentence of up to seven years in prison.

The law change has made it possible for these women to legally setup their own “houses” or “brothels” without the stand over tactics of the “boss”.There was even a group of parlour owners who opposed the law change for this very reason.As the law stood if a woman had any criminal conviction, and in particular a drug conviction, she was not permitted to work in a parlour and these were often the women who ended up working on the streets.These are the most vulnerable of workers in the industry and the law change will allow them to move off the streets into brothels or to rent a room from which they can work, though many may choose not to change the way that they currently work.

Brothels to pay tax, GST and ACC

This bill now brings parlours/brothels under the same legal restraints as other employers/businesses thus offering a modicum of protection to the workers through the need for these “bosses” to comply with the minimum standards set down by ACC and OSH for the workplace to be safe.So while revenue collection may well be one of the objectives of the bill it is not the only objective, as was portrayed by some of those who opposed it.

Already most parlours (at least in Auckland) require that they know the woman’s real name – this is verified by photo ID and their real addresses, and these are kept on record.Some even require IRD numbers, therefore most of the women who work in the massage parlours are already known to and in contact with the IRD, as are many of the women who work privately.In some towns and cities in New Zealand women are even required to register with the police if they wish to work there, Dunedin for example.

Radical liberal hypocrisy

So called ‘moral’ grounds were not valid reasons for those on the left to have opposed this bill.It is no good claiming that capitalism must be overthrown to get rid of prostitution, but meanwhile doing nothing to help prostitutes to organise and improve their conditions while we prepare for the revolution. The removal of the blatant oppression of women who work in this profession by the parlour owners, the ”bosses” and those who rent apartments with rent plus ‘extra use’ charges were very valid reasons to critically support the Bill.These are the capitalists that profit from the present situation and they are aided by those who choose to use moral grounds for their objections.

It is also wrong for some opponents of this bill to disguise their real agendas behind a professed concern about the conditions and pay of working women. Even if these views are sincerely held, prostitutes are also working women and to use them and their occupation in this manner is to debase their value as women and as human beings, and to treat them as commodities in just the same way as the parlour “bosses” do.

Defeating this bill would have done nothing to assist or alleviate the inequality of wages paid to women workers, nor would it have brought about pay equity or have made any progressive political change to the capitalist system in New Zealand.It would only have allowed the blatant exploitation to continue.

On the other hand, giving critical support for this Bill does not mean that we endorsed prostitution, any more than fighting for wage increases means we endorse wage exploitation. On the contrary capitalism will never by overthrown unless the workers mobilise to demand what they need now to the point where they are strong enough to take it themselves! Prostitutes now will have the same legal rights as other workers to organise and bring about reforms that can hasten the end of the patriarchal family and capitalism.

Crime and drugs red herrings

Another myth is that prostitution causes crime. But the problems associated with drug dependency, mental illness, and suicide cannot be laid “at the door” of prostitution as often these problems are pre-existing.These are problems brought about by the capitalist system and are not the product of any one industry.As figures for the number of women working in the industry are only estimates and often only take into account street walkers or at best include parlour workers, it is impossible to state that statistically this is a more dangerous occupation than many others, including nursing, being a doctor or any other high stress employment.

Another argument raised to prevent the passage of the Bill was that of very young persons taking part in paid sexual activities. Under the old law a man had as a defense the belief that the woman/girl was of the age of consent (this was 16 except if she was working in a massage parlour where the minimum age was 18). This has now changed.All sex workers now have to be of the minimum age of 18 and the onus is on the client to be certain of this.

As for the frequency of assaults and murder, this is higher for streetwalkers than others in the industry as these workers are by far the most vulnerable.This Act can help them to be safer and to move off the streets if that is what they want.But the figures for both assault and murder of women still show that it is women who choose to get out of abusive relationships that are at the greatest risk of both being assaulted and murdered, not prostitutes.

All these myths and misconceptions aside, the workers in the sex industry now have the chance to bring to themselves the greatest protection available to workers everywhere: they are now in the position to either form their own union or to join an existing union and achieve the strength of collective negotiating both for conditions of work and payment.Like the workers in any other industry, this will give them the potential to have control over their labour and remove it from the bosses’ sole discretion. They will not need to rely upon the law and the law enforcement agencies that will often fail to administer the law. They can organise themselves to fight for and defend their rights. And in that they deserve the support of all workers.

All out for the sexual revolution

As Marxists we recognise that prostitution today is the product of capitalism and patriarchy and will not go away until we abolish both. Meanwhile capitalism requires us to sell our labour to survive, and the selling of sexual services is also necessary for the reproduction of bourgeois families and capitalist society. For some these services are performed inside bourgeois marital-type relationships as partners. For others, these services are performed outside the family as prostitutes.

Both services perform a necessary function to capitalism and their providers deserve the same protections as other workers and the same respect.The changes now enacted in the Prostitution Reform Act mark an important step towards equality of opportunity and employment rights for sex workers outside the family who will now be better organised to meet the oppressive tactics of their bosses and the ruling class and pave the way not only for the sexual revolution but for the socialist revolution!

WORKERS' BAN ON CAPITALIST GENETIC ENGINEERING

Our position on GE is like that on Nuclear power. It is not safe under capitalism! We do not trust the bosses to do anything that affects workers lives because they are motivated solely by profit. We do not trust our health and safety on the job to the bosses, so why should we trust them or their state to regulate GE? This does not mean that we think that GE is necessarily bad. Under a socialist state where informed workers can democratically regulate GE many social benefits are possible. But we need socialism before we need GE! We reprint below a short excerpt from an article by Chris Wheeler responding to the Royal Commission’s Report based upon his experience of 20 years of monitoring the failure of Government environmental ‘controls.’

"…The Commission's report in favour of GE has now become an effective tool for beating the GE opposition and the Green Party in Parliament around the head - probably the only reason for this whole $NZ6.5 million taxpayer-funded farce in the first place! As PM Helen Clark, her parliamentary colleagues and the GE industry are now saying all across the NZ media: "You got what you asked for - a complete and comprehensive review of GE policy and science. The expert view resulting from the Royal Commission's deliberations is that GE is an essential part of New Zealand's economic survival and a leading aspect of our new 'Knowledge Economy' and must be allowed to go ahead with the minimum of restrictions. Now shut-up. Stop complaining, and accept the majority opinion."

Of course there are some derisory "controls" being recommended in the Royal Commission report, but in my past 20 years of direct involvement in agriculture issues and membership of official bodies deliberating on environmental control strategies in New Zealand, I have yet to see effective legislation or regulation controlling ANY aspect of the agrichemical abuse that New Zealand is notorious for in informed world environmental circles and GE abuse will fare little better. The Environmental Risk Management Authority (ERMA) cited in the Commission's report as the responsible agency overseeing GE trials and releases has been controlled from the first day of its establishment several years ago by powerful industry lobby groups with the necessary financial resources to fight any environmental group's submissions to a standstill.

For 20 years I have been involved in various attempts to place effective controls over the profligate application of carcinogenic pesticides by New Zealand farmers, which contributes to New Zealand's record levels of breast, prostate and bowel cancer, childhood leukemia and birth defects, and have met with continual official apathy and obstruction, particularly from official regulatory agencies. I and the knowledgeable anti-GE community in New Zealand have absolutely no faith in the new GE review apparatus being suggested by the Commission because we know that just as with appointments to the food regulatory Australia New Zealand Food

Authority (ANZFA) and ERMA, membership will be heavily weighted with GE industry stooges and political appointees guaranteed to preserve the status quo…"

GE run by the bosses? No Way!

Class Struggle No 40, August-September 2001

DISPELLING BAUDRILLARD

The arty intelligentsia of Auckland recently flocked to a public lecture by infamous self-promoting French ‘philosopher’ Jean Baudrillard. Like many French Professors who have become the darlings of the chattering classes, Baudrillard is an ex-Marxist who now professes a world-view in which social reality has been replaced by ‘hyper reality’. To make the point, ten years ago he claimed that the Gulf War did not happen? By that he meant that peoples’ experience of the war was on TV. This Western professor did not stop to think that the Iraqis killed in this war, or the US and UK troops who suffered from uranium poisoning, were not actors in a Hollywood war movie.

What’s worst about Baudrillard is that this stuff is boring word games. His first mistake was to say that language is more important than economics. Tell that to your bank manager or the judge. In a book called the Mirror of Production written back in 1973 Baudrillard closed his account with Marx. He said that Marxism was obsessed with production which doesn’t happen in reality. There is only the word ‘production’ and no ‘production process’. We only consume words, and if we consume goods this is only to reinforce the words. Why? Because capitalism requires us to believe the words in order to consume. Consume what? Words!

The fallacy in this thinking is that words are never enough to live on unless you are a professor. Think about it. Only professors get paid to produce words (journalists and other writers circulate words but don’t really produce them). Workers get paid to produce commodities which the boss sells to make a profit. This is how capitalism still works. The problem with Baudrillard and the intellectuals who consume his words is that he mistakes an interesting side Marx long ago explained how capitalism falsely presents itself as creating wealth in exchange. Commodities took on a fetishised existence as owners of their own value. Production disappeared up nature’s backside and only the circulation and consumption of commodities showed up as real. What Baudrillard does is take this phony existence to its absurd end point by claiming that not even the things we consume are real, only the signs or words that describe them. When nothing is real except the hype then that is hyper reality. The Gulf War did happen because it happened on TV. So what.

From Class Struggle No 38 April-May 2001

DISARMING CAPITAL

Why read Capital they said.It’s unintelligible and boring. Besides Marxism is dead.Wouldn’t it be better to throw everything into the anti-capitalist movement against the WTO and big business?

No we said. You should take Capital with you on demonstrations for something to read between police riots. It might have something to say about what kind of capitalism you should be anti. Besides it makes useful padding stuffed down your shorts.

What, all three (or is it four) volumes?You could make a suit of armour out of them – six books in all.

They thought we were joking but we said No never more serious. Marx said that we had to turn the idea of weapons into the weapon of ideas. You’re never better armed than with at least Volume 1 of Capital preferably the hardback edition.

Vol 1 is the best weapon because this is where Marx brings out his heaviest ideas.This is where he explains that the origin of surplus value and profits is in the labour time of the working class. That is a powerful idea because it says outright that capitalism lives off the surplus-labour of the workers.

It’s also a revolutionary idea which motivates us to go all the way to abolish wage labour and capitalist property and fight for socialism. There can be no half measures favoured by middle class greens and/or parliamentary cretins (to use Lenin’s term) bishops and social workers who are anti-bad capitalists and for kindly, caring ones.

Then we add Vol 2 to our armoury.Marx shows that capitalism has to build up a huge banking and state apparatus including the cops and army just to keep the capitalists profits rolling in. So there’s no point just being anti- the World Bank or big governments because they are merely the paid lackeys of the giant MNC’s.

The most powerful weapon of all is in Volume 3 where Marx proves that capitalism cannot survive without massive destructive crises that force the capitalists to destroy wealth, attack jobs and drive down workers’ living standards, health and life expectancy.

So there is no way that capitalism can be tamed, humanised, reformed, prettified or Blairised.To survive the workers have to unite, fight back and take over the ownership and control of the global economy.

If you don’t read Capital and understand it you won’t know this and your ideas will be those that the bosses pay to have drummed into you from childhood by your teachers, Hollywood, Rupert Murdoch, Tony O’Reilly and all.

We are not pacifists. We read Capital every week at:

Labour Forum, Avondale Community Centre. Mondays 7-30/9-30 pm. Next to Avondale Library, Rosebank Rd.

From Class Struggle No 37 February-March 2001

Chomsky's blurred Vision [February 1999]

Noam Chomsky recently visited New Zealand as a guest of the Peace Foundation. He spoke to overflowing audiences eager to hear his critique of the US role in imposing the neo-liberal New World Order on the rest of the world. While Chomsky has a long track record in exposing the lies and hypocrisy of the US in its exercise of power, he cannot explain why the US behaves like this. Nor can he explain where we go from here, or what to do. We argue that Chomsky's vision is blurred.

The core of Chomsky's argument is the US drive to dominate the world in the post-WW2 period by subordinating the rest of the world to its global plan. fact the beginnings of globalisation. The world was partitioned so that the developing countries would serve as suppliers of raw materials and labour for the developed countries. This exploitation of the third world required political policies that did not allow the populations in these countries to opt out of this global plan. The IMF and World Bank and its more recent offspring NAFTA, WTO the MAI etc, were the instruments of this plan. Against this third world nationalism backed by the Soviet Union was identified as the main enemy. US backed coups and the cold war to isolate and ultimately destroy the Soviet Union were the tactics designed to keep this global plan on track. Chomsky's writings over the last 30 years are really no more than documentation of the application of these policies in Latin America, Asia and the Middle East.

In a recent article in the New Left Review (No 230 July/August 1998) Chomsky develops this analysis further. He argues that the mechanisms for imposing this global plan are increasingly secret and outside democratic control. NAFTA and the MAI are examples of new agreements designed to force small states to accept trade and investment on the US terms that were conceived in secret. Resistance to these agreements only arose after their existence was 'leaked'. On the MAI Chomsky states: the MAI "would constitute a major attack on democracy; it would shift the decision-making power over social and economic affairs even further into the hands of private tyrannies that operate in secret, unaccountable to the public. Corporations had been granted the rights of immortal persons by radical judicial activism early this century; but the MAI grants them the rights of states" (p.25).

Chomsky concludes: "The long-term goal of such initiatives is clear enough to anyone with open eyes: an international political economy which is organised by powerful states and secret bureaucracies whose primary function is to serve the concentrations of private power, which administer markets through their internal operations, through networks of corporate alliances, including the intra-firm transactions that are mislabeled 'trade'. They rely on the public for subsidy, for research and development, for innovation and for bail-outs when things go wrong. They rely on the powerful states for protection from dangerous 'democracy openings'. In such ways, they seek to ensure that the 'prime beneficiaries' of the world's wealth are the right people; the smug and prosperous 'Americans'; the 'domestic constituencies' and their counterparts elsewhere." (p.27)

But what causes this power surge, and what do we do about it? Where do we go from here? Chomsky is a radical democrat; some would say an anarchist or libertarian socialist. He is certainly hostile to Marxism and Communism, which he associates with the Soviet Union. His solutions are to rally the citizenry to the cause of democracy and to bring these power plays under the control of the people. "There is no reason to doubt that it (this excessive power) can be controlled, even within existing formal institutions of parliamentary democracy (my emphasis). These are not the operations of any mysterious economic laws; they are human decisions that are subject to challenge, revision and reversal. They are also decisions made within institutions, state and private. They have to face the test of legitimacy, as always; and if they do not meet that test they can be replaced by others that are more free and just, exactly as has happened throughout history." (p.27)

Chomsky's logic is classic social democrat. Once the masses are informed, and reject the exercise of arbitrary power, then they can use the institutions of bourgeois democracy to "challenge, revise and reverse" such power. Here Chomsky detaches the state (and private) institutions from the 'political economy'. Lenin said that politics is concentrated economics. Chomsky reverses the power flow from 'political' to the 'economic'. There are no 'mysterious economic laws' he says. There is just the zero-sum game of a struggle for scarce resources. Who wins this struggle has the power. Therefore economics becomes reduced to politics – to decisions taken in secret, that can however be exposed and made public. So economic problems can be resolved by means of realising the ideal of parliamentary democracy.

What's missing from this analysis is any understanding of the economic social relations that motivate the power struggle. Already under capitalism, social relations exist depending upon whether one owns the means of production or not. Therefore power flows from the ownership of private property that enables the capitalist class to force wage-labour to work and produced surplus value, to politics. This power relationship cannot be reversed or revised by parliament. In fact parliament functions to defend this power relationship by defending private property. Parliament can respond to democratic demands only when private property is not challenged. But once workers become 'informed' i.e. class conscious, and begin to 'challenge, revise and reverse' existing power relations, the threat to the property relations, upon which such power rests, will ensure that the state renounces its democratic trappings and imposes direct rule upon its subjects.

That's why in the postwar period that Chomsky documents, no successful challenge to US power by means of parliamentary institutions has occurred inside or outside the US. The only successful challenges, all of which failed ultimately, arose from the exercise of non-democratic challenges; that is challenges that did not result from the existence of parliamentary democracy. They arose either from undemocratic elite opposition, such as that of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, or from mass struggles that by-passed the trappings of formal parliamentary democracy – street protests or civil disobedience in the US, or popular uprisings and mass movements such as in Cuba, Vietnam, Palestine, etc. Nor can it be argued that these social movements have succeeded in 'renewing' parliamentary democracy. The fate of the ex-SU and other so-called 'socialist' states proves this fact. Whatever the failings of so-called 'socialist' regimes - their non-democratic and bureaucratic nature etc - the return to 'democracy and free markets’ is an unmitigated disaster; unmitigated by any exercise of democratic rights in moderating the devastating impact of the market.

The failure of these radical movements which threatened to overturn bourgeois states is not due to their non-democratic form, but due to their suppression by the military might of imperialism in the name of 'democracy'. Therefore, it is naive and ultimately self-defeating for popular movements to have illusions in parliamentary democracy. The foundation of 'actually existing capitalism', as Chomsky calls it, is not an aberrant concentration of power that can be corrected by democratic process. No it is the underlying property relations, defended by the capitalist state, which can only be "challenged, revised and reversed" by extending the struggle for democracy to socialist revolution. Smashing the capitalist state, and creating a planned economy in which production is for need and not profits.

From Class Struggle, No 25, Dec 1998-Feb 1999

The Development of Capitalism in New Zealand: Towards a Marxist Analysis

John Macrae and David Bedggood

First published in Red Papers No 3, Summer 1978/79

1.0 INTRODUCTION

In this paper we present the outline of a Marxist analysis of the development of capitalism in New Zealand. Given the circumstances under which we are working, it is obvious that much that will be covered requires further research and further thought. Nevertheless, it reflects a point in the evolution of our thinking. It also repre­sents therefore as much a project of research as a definite statement of progress.

We shall show that N.Z.'s "national development" has been determined by its role as a semi-colony (white-settler colony or "colony proper" as distinct from colony) within the world-wide division of labour under capitalism. In taking this approach, we are engaged in theoretical class struggle against bourgeois conceptions of the causes of "development" which focus on there appearances and 'isolated instances' which are taken to represent the total social reality.

The method employed is that of Marx and Lenin, together with some reformulations and extensions of their work, which seeks to understand the working of the Capitalist Mode of Production (CMP) in terms of certain "laws of Motion" which operate not in any vulgar deterministic sense, but as a complex "structural causality" determined under spec­ific historical conditions of class struggle. Adopting this method, we intend to demonstrate its power in explaining the development of capit­alism in N. Z. as a complex inter-relation of economic, political and ideological causes which are determined in the "last instance" by the historic expansion of the CMP into the lands of white-settlement in the nineteenth century.

Rest of Part 1, and Parts 2, 3 and 4 can be found at
http://maximumred.blogspot.com/