> In message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, James Michael Craven
> <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes
> >But just as these privileged few don't speak for
> >me (also one of the "privileged few" in relative terms) and certainly
> >do not speak for the part-time teachers or the grounds keepers, so no
> >hooker from Canberra can speak for all "sex workers"--like a teenage
> >Blackfeet girl in Great Falls or a sex slave in Patpong--just because
> >she is doing tricks and is a self-proclaimed "activist" for sex
> >workers.
>
> Surely nobody disagrees with the idea that sex-slavery or underage
> prostitution is wrong. The sex-workers comments were not aimed at
> coerced or non-consensual prostitution, but at prostitutes who bject to
> being criminalised in the name of saving their honour.
>
> Fraternally
> --
> James Heartfield
We have seen the neoclassicals continually retreat as aspects of the
real world pop their little theoretical bubble: from perfect to
bounded rationality; from perfect to asymmetric information; from
perfect to asymmetric factor mobility; from maximization to
satisficing; and from free to constrained choice.
It goes deeper than some objecting to criminalization in the name of
saving their honor. Years ago, Milton Friedman treated the world to
turning his bullshit polemic "Free to Choose" into a TV Series. One
of his episodes was about the "miracle" of Hong Kong and how less
government, less regulation, less tariffs and quotas, low business
taxes produced these supposedly high rates of productivity etc. At
the time of filming he was staying at the Harbor Holiday Inn
(Penthouse) and while walking around with an open shirt and no tie
(the just folks look) he was visiting one sweat shop with clearly
ugly, crowded and unsafe conditions. He pointed out that in the U.S.
all these laws would mean that this sweatshop couldn't exist (New
York and other places is full of them which showed how real-world and
"just folks" he is) but that in Hong Kong these workers "choose" to
wrk under these conditions and if these well-meaning types who want
more regulation had their way in Hong Kong, Mr. so-and-so wouldn't be
"free to choose" to work or not to work.
Capitalism produces a whole host of slick facades to "show" that
choices are indeed free choices or if they are even "constrained
choices", we are all constrained and they are choices nontheless.
But the reality is that what appears to be "consensual" is the
"consent" given when the alternative is not simply less money but
rather no money; the "consent" given when the alternative is not
simply less comfortable shelter but rather no shelter; the "consent"
given when the alternative is a slow and horrible death.
Poor countries like India are seeing incidences of AIDS rising
dramatically and there is absolutely no doubt that contacts through
prostitution are the main pathway of transmission. They simply do not
have the resources to create "safe" brothels etc and the vast
majority of prostitutes are operating under conditions of forced
choice, risks and danger bearing no resemblance whatsoever to the
conditions enjoyed by a few entrepreneural/self-designated hooker
activists in Canberra. For these countries, it is literally a matter
of life and death and how to deal with strategically threatening
incidences of AIDS and other diseases with meagre resources and not
some parlor debate to be toyed with by house Marxists, self- absorbed
"Anarcho-Marxists" left business observers/business observers of the
left or whatever.
At Browning, the Blackfeet Clinic, operating on meagre resources is
stretched to the limit from dramatically rising incidences of AIDS,
leaving lost productivity for the Tribe and critically-needed
resources being diverted from other pressing epidemiological crises
(TB, malnutrition, low-birth-weight infants etc.) The primary sources
of the incidences of AIDS are young Indians (male and female)
returning to the reservation from prostitution in the cities and
males and their significant others being infected. This isn't some
nice theoretical debate; it is in-your-face reality.
Surely criminalization of prostitution will not solve anything and
surely criminalization leads to more underground activity and makes
it more difficult to control the disease trends. But the sanitized
brothels of Nevada and Canberra are light years away from the
brothels of Patpong, the conditions of young Indian prostitutes in
Great Falls or the conditions of a highway prostitute servicing long-
distance truck dirvers in India. And those, especially on the left
and even call themselves leftists, and then talk about "free choice",
or "free consent" or "consenual prostitution" under capitalism
and based on the isolated and perhaps self-serving or perhaps even
self-rationalizing rantings of a few white middle-class "high-class"
hookers in Canberra, well there is a party available for your
political action--the RIGHT-WING libertarian party.
Anarcho-Marxists? What's next? Communist Nazis or Nazi Communists?
Really the last comment on this subject.
Jim Craven
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