"Lumpenproletariat" is exactly the kind of idea an educated German theorist would come up with in the wreckage of the industrial revolution and it's ridiculous to try to carry that notion forward to the age of cell phones and heavily armed maoist prostitutes and if anyone can't understand that you should throw grass at them until they stop being dorks because they're too far gone to touch it themselves.

Like ffs read even one anthro text about black market and grey market economies and stop treating The Man's legal system like anything but a criminal organization.

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[–] porcupine@lemmygrad.ml 2 points 3 months ago

What percentage of plumbers across history do you believe fit into a definition that isn’t characterized by exploitation? Sex work is work. Period.

I don't disagree. That's part of the point I'm trying to make. I believe it's idealistic, however, to insist that removing the profit motive from plumbing will convert the occupation to purely passion-driven volunteers. Work is, more often than not, unpleasant. People will still be required to clean up shit, pick dead animals off of streets, lay shingles on roofs, and mass produce textiles. People will need to do those things because industrial society requires them to function. The universe of people that would do that work purely out of a sense of personal gratification will always be hilariously smaller than the universe of people who will be required to do that work to keep society functioning. If you're envisioning a society where "work" is only ever performed on a purely voluntary basis for the joy that people get from the task itself whenever they feel up to doing it, I'm sorry to say that's not communism. "From each according to their ability" does actually require people that are able to perform socially necessary labor to do so even if they don't always love it or feel like doing it. Marx was not a utopian or an anarcho-primitivist.

Refusing to recognize them as fulfilling a social need is simply being sex-negative

Explain to me how you believe prostitution works as an occupational category where you believe society is owed sex by prostitutes, but prostitutes are not obligated to provide it indiscriminately to society? I believe a just society prioritizes one person's bodily autonomy over another person's "entitlement" to be sexually stimulated by another. Sex is important to individual well being, but you personally being sexually serviced by a stranger is not an essential building block of society. I know this is a tightly controlled secret that you don't see much on the internet, but people actually are capable of sexually stimulating themselves. People are equally capable of independently negotiating mutually fulfilling sexual relationships that meet the sexual needs of all parties without reducing one party to a commodity being bought and sold. People will find it much easier to do that when they're not struggling for subsistence.

I'm not categorically ruling out the possibility that there are some people that will just love the abstract depersonalized concept of sex so much that they would willingly fuck anyone indiscriminately. I say good for them, and as long as they stay safe and get consent, they should follow their bliss. I'm pretty confident they'll still need to have another job that keeps the lights on, the trains running, or the people fed, and they'll be free to follow their bliss on their personal time. I'd say the same thing about real estate agents, advertising models, and YouTubers who get Patreon subscribers to pay for livestreams of them sleeping. These are all things you can turn into a job under capitalism, and they're all things you could broadly still do, under communism, but I think it's fair to say they wouldn't still be jobs under communism.