Porn, NAMBLA and Bourgeois Moralism

(Letter)

17 April 2013

The “Young Spartacist” (3-22-13) article defends pornography... it raises questions about your method.

Who produces pornography? Capitalist companies. Who sells it? Capitalist companies. They exploit sex workers just as other capitalists do. Most pornography is mechanical, with almost no humanity. Everything in this society, especially human beings, are a commodity under capitalism. But you seem now to have become advocates of capitalist libertarianism.  

Of course, pornography appeals to the deep alienation in modern capitalist society between human beings.

But laws against pornography will not end that alienation. Only the destruction of capitalism and the formation of a socialist society will end pornography as we know it. But you don’t say that...

Marxists need to defend sexuality but not its commercialization. Neither do we have to defend NAMBLA, the North American Man/Boy Love Association. Again NAMBLA reflects the alienation of some individuals who gain power over youth through their pocket books rather than “love.” Sexuality again is turned into a financial transaction. Children cannot be expected to give “effective consent” which your writer requires from children.

Capitalism is haunted by mental illness and treatment is only available to the rich. Laws which ban one manifestation of capitalism will not work!

Earl Gilman

[All ellipses are the author’s.—ed.]

WV replies:

Earl Gilman’s objections to our article “Church of Avakian Decrees: No Nudes Is Good Nudes” (Young Spartacus pages, WV No. 1020, 22 March), a polemic against the Maoist Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), puts him in very unsavory company. And hardly for the first time: having been associated with an assortment of pseudo-Trotskyist currents over the decades, Gilman was aptly described in WV many years ago as “a walking culture medium for every deviation known to Marxism” (in “BT Provocation Fizzles,” WV No. 417, 5 December 1986).

In addition to enlightening us as to his opinion of the artistic qualities of “most pornography,” Gilman belabors the obvious—pornography is produced and distributed by capitalist companies. And so it is, along with the food we eat, the clothes we wear, the computer on which he composed his letter, etc. What does this prove? Merely that, like all commodities, porn has a use value. People buy it because they like it. Product of capitalism? Porn has been around for millennia. If, as Gilman puts it, “socialist society will end pornography as we know it,” surely it would only be to improve its quality.

Our attitude was concisely stated in the amici curiae brief filed by the Spartacist League and Partisan Defense Committee in the Supreme Court in 1988 against state use of RICO conspiracy laws to shut down publishers and distributers of allegedly “obscene” material (Fort Wayne Books, Inc. vs. State of Indiana, et al.). As the brief stated: “People have the right to read or look at whatever they want, to write, paint or film it too, and to engage in whatever sexual practices (or none at all) they choose, so long as they’re consensual. The point is neither to proscribe, nor prescribe, what kind of sex people ‘should’ have.” The arguments in our brief did not fall from the sky but were based on cited works of classic Marxism and the Enlightenment as well as scholars and writers from Harold Laski to Gore Vidal.

Our line should be simple enough to grasp for any self-described Marxist: Government out of the bedroom! But Gilman joins forces with purveyors of the truly twisted “morality” of the capitalist rulers and their state. Gilman’s smear of NAMBLA gives the game away. NAMBLA is an organization that supports the sexual rights of youth, including those in relationships with older men, and opposes laws that punish consensual relationships, such as reactionary “age of consent” laws. For this it has been the target of a vicious, decades-long witchhunt by the capitalist state and media. Gilman’s cheering on the crusade against NAMBLA is lamentably common for pseudo-socialists and establishment gay rights groups, serving as a measure of their proximity to bourgeois “family values” hypocrisy and their great distance from the class line, let alone from the remotest concept of real human freedom.

Sounding like the Victorian judges who imprisoned Oscar Wilde not only for homosexuality but also for “corrupting the morals of youth,” Gilman rants about NAMBLA supporters’ alleged “power over youth through their pocket books” and echoes the bigotry of the RCP in slandering NAMBLA as “child molesters.” To bolster his refusal to defend NAMBLA, Gilman asserts that “children cannot be expected to give ‘effective consent’,” period. Millions of sexually active teenagers can tell you differently, not to mention thousands of years’ worth of anthropological evidence, including literature, paintings, sculpture. “Age of consent” laws are aimed not at “protecting our children” but at imposing abstinence on and promoting guilt in youth who wish to have sex—and at locking up adults who “deviate” from the sexual “norms” that the ruling class tries to foist on the masses while they themselves, more often than not, honor those norms in the breach.

The Victorians put under lock and key all the artwork portraying sex, paganism and naked bodies that Britain had looted from ancient civilizations in the lands they conquered for their Empire. They also locked up Oscar Wilde. Gilman’s position draws from this well. Perhaps he thinks that the three topless women who carried an ANSWER Coalition banner in the “Free Bradley Manning” contingent at the recent gay pride parade in San Francisco were exploiting themselves. At any rate, his anti-porn nonsense and anti-NAMBLA screed play into the hands of a contemporary, very real anti-sex witchhunt by the capitalist state.