I, Commodity

"Free Market" - free for whom? (Amnesty International)

Yesterday, the British National Union of Students highlighted cases where students in England are increasingly turning to prostitution to make ends meet as their course fees and living costs rocket. The Government suitably wrung its grasping hands, claiming all sorts of measures of support are in place, but the evidence seems pretty incontrovertible. And, regardless of your views on prostitution itself, how surprising is it? In any recession in history, desperate people have turned to desperate means to survive.

The evidence of this and other research on prostitution does show that it is rarely a voluntary choice and it is a dangerous field to work in for all manner of reasons - violent clients, health risks, persecution by the police, and exploitation by pimps.

But it is the ultimate and logical outcome of free market capitalism. An economy that commodifies, prices and profits from any resource at all is hardly likely to stop at the exploitation of the human body. It very happily harvests the brainpower and physical abilities of employees in every walk of working life - capitalism rests on creaming off as large a premium on the value of employee labour over the cost of paying for it. So, if you are ready to squeeze excess value from people's brains, why would you refrain when it comes to the sex organs?

Angela Merkel's Germany, which in spite of its EU-philia remains an example to all neoliberal right wingers around the world, has taken this view of profit before people a step further.

Germany has legalised prostitution - brothels are now legitimate businesses. To the schlock horror concern of the ultra-capitalist Daily Telegraph, this normalisation of the sex industry has included threatening to withdraw unemployment benefits from unemployed women under 55 years of age who turn down the offer of a job working as a prostitute.

Back in 2005, a woman sent for interview by the local Job Centre faceshas her unemployment benefit after she refused a job providing sexual services in what turned out to be a brothel - although German legislators originally considered exempting prostitution from the benefit rules, they apparently concluded that it would be too difficult to determine the difference between brothels and pubs. Similarly, women who have worked in call centres in the past are being pressured into working on sex chat lines as some twisted form of suitable alternative employment.

No kidding, here is the story.

More recently, the avowedly right wing government has even made an exception to its normal tax-phobic beliefs to introduce sex-tax meters in Bonn streets, a sort of pay-as-you-earn scheme for prostitutes - as long as they keep feeding the meter, they won't be arrested for touting for business. On top of that, there is a slew of evidence and testimony that since it has been legalised, the use of prostitutes has become a not infrequent form of staff benefit for higher paid management in many German companies. Corporate orgies for meeting sales targets and as an additional bonus for the guys at the top are, according to Der Spiegel, now a common place event, no different to the traditional company golf tournament or booze-trip to the races - prostitutes or ponies, either are bought up as disposable entertainment.

How far are we from this German scenario in the UK?

Not far really - as noted above, every other part of the body is used economically, so it is only the legal status and practices around prostitution that stops this scenario arising in Britain. But things often just short of or even a cover for prostitution, like the chance to be a pole dancer or an escort, are already used as evidence for people proving whether or not they are genuinely looking for work while on benefits.

Prostitution itself  remains in a legal tangle which frequently leads to already victimised women being victimised even further while their clients and pimps are ignored by the authorities. But the libertarian right wing are among the most ardent proponents of legalising prostitution - for precisely the argument that sex workers should be able to use their assets - their bodies - to earn profit. In their world, any resource, service or product should be able to be exchanged for money.

What it often means in practice with prostitution is that it legitimises a sector which remains one of coercion, both physical and economic. As many surveys have shown, it is at the heart of the modern slave trade and legalising it does little if anything to protect the workers - arguably it can make their lot even worse. After all, if the Government  is keen to deregulate safety laws for factories and shops, it is doubtful brothels will even get a look-in. Perhaps one answer might be some form of licencing through a body like the English Collective of Prostitutes, which would give sex workers more ability to have some small degree of control over their lives as well as safer working conditions.

The capitalist economy sees humans as just one other factor of production, bought and owned by the holders of capital, and exploited for every last copper of profit possible. Women especially, but often men too, are commodified and objectified in thousands of ways by the media and the advertising industry: whether from selling the right clothes, the right perfume, the right size, through to the blatant exploitation to be found in increasingly "hard porn" on the internet and elsewhere. So why, in capitalist thinking, would you eschew the opportunity to be had from selling sexual intercourse?

The sad tales from Germany, while shocking, are not in the least surprising. By one stream of capitalist thought, our unique personalities, our amazing skills and our hard labour make us nothing more than "Human capital" - just one other segment of the system, one more cog in the wheel. No job is too degrading, no work too demanding, no wage too low, when there's money to be made - and you, your flesh and blood, are just one more commodity to be bought and sold.

The apotheosis of the  free market.

Free Market

Tea Party serves a Bitter Brew

It has been easy to laugh in recent weeks as Christine O'Donnell has risen to international prominence as the Tea Party-sponsored Republican candidate for Senator for Delaware in this week's mid-term elections for the US Congress. This tub-thumping evangelical  has propounded rather bizarre views on masturbation and genetics; and in seeking to impose her religious values in the name of traditional America, revealed her ignorance of the US Constitution in a toe-curling embarrassing episode. Perhaps needless to say, she is set to be decisively defeated - although current polls do show her standing improving in the closing days.

Yet even if the Tea Party doesn't make all the gains it has hoped for, there is little doubt it has led the debate throughout this campaign. Headed up by former Veep candidate Sarah Palin, it has put the Obama Presidency on the defensive with a head-on charge feeding off every conceivable source of bigotry, division and loathing. It has nourished Americans' worries about threats from inside and outside. Although for some of their leaders the focus has been on cutting tax and government, for others political debate has been eschewed in favour of an apocalyptic battle of Good versus Evil in the run up to the End Times. A fervent of fear - of Muslims, of socialism, of "Big Government" - has been whipped up in a well-funded attempt to galvanise a vote for a rather nasty, corporate-friendly right wing coup d'etat. Even the hated BP, culprit of the Gulf oil spill disaster, has got in on the act.

Oil multinational BP sponsors
the TP


It is not new. Nor, for all that we may sneer on this side of the Pond, is it peculiar to America. It is merely the latest of a range of populist phenomena that have risen in the era known, if not quite as the end of days, then as the "End of History" - the supposed final triumph of market capitalism with the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. Two years later, Italy saw the rise of Berlusconi's Forza Italia movement to win power barely four months after its formation, and Canada saw the Reform Party of Preston Manning wipe out the Conservative Government in a single election. So now in turn the Tea Party harvests the disaffected as capitalism's victory turns sour.

It is a tactic as old as politics itself. Just as ancient Athenian demagogues found individual scapegoats to blame for their policy failures through the ritual of ostracism, now the right wing seeks to shift blame for unemployment, inequality and social disorder onto carefully selected, vulnerable targets. In France, Sarkozy's fumbling regime recently turned its ire on Romanian gypsies, deporting them en masse. In Britain, street movements like the English Defence League, who have made common cause with the Tea Party, drunkenly demonstrate in Muslim areas. Across Europe, a dark stain of xenophobia and Islamophobia is spreading, with the far right rising in elections in Austria, Sweden, the Netherlands and throughout eastern Europe.

Underpinning the thump and thud of their jackbooted march on both sides of the Atlantic is the endlessly repeated accusation that any who are not with them are against them. Obama is castigated not merely as being in political error or misguided on the economy. Rather, he is a traitor, a fifth columnist Communist-Nazi,  a secret Muslim, or even some biblical beast heralding the Apocalypse.

Satanic Obama from inquisitr.com

America's last brush with mass populism was the Perot insurgency in the 1992 election. The economic boom subsequently dissipated much of this, but the in the new recession, populism is breeding again, far nastier, far more vicious than Perot's quixotic adventure. The injection of an increasingly hysterical evangelical fundamentalism, with tens of millions of its followers earnestly believing that the world will end in their lifetimes, makes this movement dangerous beyond belief in a nuclear weapons state.

O'Donnell may go down in defeat tomorrow, but the diet of lies that has nurtured an atmosphere of fear will go unabated. The fact is that, just as extremists in the UK like the British National Party have leeched on the genuine grievances of poorer sections of society, mainstream politicians have abandoned them. The Soviet collapse saw politicians across the world rush to not merely expunge "Communism" from their lexicons, but "socialism" and even "social democracy" too.

The old centre-left has failed because of an unholy combination of political cowardice, lack of imagination and rank careerism. A political class quite dislocated from ordinary life has emerged as never before as corporate power has taken over more and more control of western governments, many of which now resemble little other than subsidiaries of multinationals, at the beck and call of unelected businessmen.

Consequently, taken for granted by the parties that once represented them, alienated and devalued by an exploitative system with ever increasing inequality, it is little wonder that many people are angry and looking for an alternative. The mainstream no longer works for ordinary people struggling to make their way in a world where decisions are increasingly taken by remote, faceless and unaccountable bodies and people. Politicians are pastiches of what they claim to be, arrogantly deriding and squeezing out any alternative viewpoints with the once ridiculous claim that there is only one possible poltical system. It is fertile ground for populists and the biggest mistake would be to assume that the grievances the Tea Party and its ilk speak to and exploit are not perfectly genuine, valid ones.
More than ever, the Left, in the USA, in Europe and elsewhere, needs to rise to the challenge - to show that there is a better economics, a sustainable and fairer one. We need to argue that the "free market" has failed comprehensively and won't ever work properly again. We can no longer collude with the status quo. If we don't provide that alternative, the Tea Party and its friends will do so instead, and the future they have in store for us is not a pleasant one. Not pleasant at all.

The last tea party to make any sense...