Reproduction; social and sexual Submitted by Joseph K. on Jan 13 2009
The practical everyday activity of wage-workers reproduces wage labor
and capital. Through their daily activities, "modern" men, like
tribesmen and slaves, reproduce the inhabitants, the social relations
and the ideas of their society; they reproduce the social form of daily
life. Like the tribe and the slave system, the capitalist system is
neither the natural nor the final form of human society; like the
earlier social forms, capitalism is a specific response to material and
historical conditions .
- Fredy Perlman
More:
http://libcom.org/blog/reproduction-social-sexual-13012009
...And arriving in the present
Just think of the proliferation of gay pride marches, the pink pound
etc. Demographics. Target markets. Far from being a "rigid, asexual
system", if going out on the weekend and engaging in whatever sexual
activity floats our boat helps us distract/recharge ourselves ready to
return to work on Monday morning, then capital's all for it. I think
the most useful theorist for the post-60s context is Slavoj Žižek.
Žižek argues that sexual repression has largely been replaced by
'jouissance' ('excess enjoyment') in consumer capitalism. Capital has
fully endorsed the slogan 'it is forbidden to forbid', and the
injunction is now to indulge to excess (for Žižek the commodity that
epitomises this is chocolate laxatives).
Consequently, the lesson of the past decades is that who or how you
fuck is in the final analysis apolitical. While open homosexuality is a
political (and perhaps suicidal) act in Iran, this is because it is in
contradiction to a particular mode of accumulation, not capital
accumulation per se. At most, changes in attitudes to sexuality will
accompany upsurges in class struggle - indeed they must. But it's only
in connection with class struggle that such struggles can take on a
revolutionary aspect rather than altering the configuration of
capitalist reproduction (not necessarily a bad thing as Iranian gays
will be the first to tell you); you can't fuck - or abstain - your way
out of social relation based on material dispossession. Equally, fun
doesn't have to be revolutionary, and like most things sex is more fun
when you leave the politics out of it.
