Comment by dragonwriter | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dragonwriter | Hacker News Reader

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> Maybe that's true for Marxists but it's not true for "the left" more generally.

It's true of a lot of the non-Marxist Left, too.

> The environment it creates is ruthlessly competitive. Winners win big, losers starve.

Im struggling to see how you imagine a crackdown on voluntary sex work would make that better, except as a way of draining more resources from everyone (itself making more people starve) to guarantee that fewer people could make a living in voluntary exchange (making even more people starve.)

Sure, I think with genuinely left policies, there's be less people who felt that sex work that lots of people not doing it find unacceptably degrading was a net win, and so fewer people choosing to voluntarily engage in that; capitalism naturally is economically coercive that way. But there's nothing particular about sex work here, fewer people would accept agricultural field work at current wages, absent economic coercion, too. The fix for the problems capitalism creates index work has everything to do with capitalism and very little to do with sex work.

> Im struggling to see how you imagine a crackdown on voluntary sex work would make that better, except as a way of draining more resources from everyone (itself making more people starve) to guarantee that fewer people could make a living in voluntary exchange (making even more people starve.)

I'm "struggling to see" how you interpreted my post this way.

As long as we're both struggling here, please explain how sex work doesn't entail massively imbalanced power relations. I wasn't just talking about OnlyFans: the post I responded to says "sex work is stigmatized way more than it should be". But even if we're only talking about the internet, I think you're extremely naive if you think physical separation means there's no coercive power involved. The money comes from somewhere. And don't forget, there's a middleman between the performers and the audience.

> Sure, I think with genuinely left policies, there's be less people who felt that sex work that lots of people not doing it find unacceptably degrading was a net win, and so fewer people choosing to voluntarily engage in that; capitalism naturally is economically coercive that way. But there's nothing particular about sex work here, fewer people would accept agricultural field work at current wages, absent economic coercion, too. The fix for the problems capitalism creates index work has everything to do with capitalism and very little to do with sex work.

I can't parse this. I don't claim to know how to solve this problem or "the problems of capitalism".

I think that general revulsion toward capitalism has very little to do with Marx and much more to do with unfairness (perceived and real), cutthroat competition that seems to reward dishonesty, the dispossession of the losers in that competition, and crass materialism. To me, all of those things clearly apply here.

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