Peter Frase

"our power isn't in being less different or strange...it's in making strange things seem possible".

The above statement, though today often attributed to antifa mascot Gritty, was actually made by Kate Griffiths of the Red Bloom Communist Collective. It reiterates themes discussed in a wonderful interview they did with Red Wedge magazine, entitled "Normie Socialism or Communist Transgression".

I've thought about it a lot these past few weeks, through Kavanaugh, the attacks on migrants, the transphobic attacks of the Trump administration, and now the synagogue massacre by a far right anti-semite. And how in each of these cases, I've had to step back and try to really understand how these political events feel to the people directly targeted by them, in contrast to me, who is of course enraged by it all but still feels mostly safe from it.

In particular I'm thinking about something the interviewer mentions, the "cries from some quarters of the Left bleating about transgression, pathologizing broader Left culture --- implicitly queer folks, but others as well, notably cultural producers. . . . the core of the complaint from some circles is that the Left are a bunch of oddballs". This is what Griffiths calls "normie socialism", a belief that we will somehow better relate to the "real working class" if we adapt to its supposedly bourgeois and patriarchal norms rather than running around like a bunch of freaks.

But what is it to be normal? Griffiths notes:

Mostly, it involves being rich enough not to be embarrassed, but it also involves not being too queer; participating in de facto and de jure segregation along lines of race, gender and citizenship in housing and the labor market; getting a job that matches your “potential” or education; or which can afford you signs of stability and affluence. The ideal is a life organized around the moral imperative of providing the best possible future for your children (which you should probably have) or at very least one which keeps you from being “dependent” on your extended family, the state, or other people at all beyond the medium of exchange. But that kind of “normal” is increasingly a pipe dream for anyone who ever had access to it and has always been tenuous-to-unattainable for much of the working class. For some parts of the working class it has always been, in fact, recognized as such and undesirable.

They go on to observe that the normie socialist discourse evades many conversations about the left's historical limitations, the way patrarchial, heterormative, or white supremacist norms and practices have held back organizing and distorted revolutions. And about how being "out" as a communist isn't separate from being out as queer, or trans, say. They all work together. And they're all weird. The vision of this communism isn't just one of traditional nuclear families with nice suburban lives, only with health care and a union and free education and a guaranteed government job.

It's a questioning and recombining of all identities and forms of social life, for which securing the basic physical necessities of life is merely the pre-condition. It's rejecting gender, the family, work as we understand them. It's the radical revaluation of values that, as Jasper Bernes observes in Commune, can be found in both the value form Marxism of Moishe Postone and the science fiction of Ursula LeGuin.

In other words, communism is really, really weird. And I wouldn't have it any other way.

And yet we have liberals and ostensible socialists, the Jonathan Chaits and Angela Nagles and even other writers at Jacobin peddling the fantasy that the alt-right is somehow a consequence of the left being too weird, too queer, too willing to question white supremacy or heteronormativity.

The resurgence of fascism, also documented in Commune, and the horrifying synagogue murders, should finally slam the door on those who want to blame the left for fascism, to pretend that if we just toned it down on Tumblr and got everyone back in the closet, sad boys in the suburbs would flock to us instead of the alt-right. But of course people like Chait and Nagle will keep peddling the same tired old line, as long as people are willing to pay to hear it.

And there are deeper, more important political battles ahead. The most popular socialist podcasts traffick in the supposed normality of themselves and their listeners, even as they flirt with right-leaning transgression in the form of "ironic" racism or anti-semitism. Leading figures in the Democratic Socialists of America seem to be captivated by a paranoid fixation on a supposed plague of "wokeness" and "identity politics", which they are certain will reduce a resurgent American socialism to solipsistic white-guilt struggle sessions if not ruthlessly supressed.

But what does it mean to take our weirdness seriously as political practice? The Le Guin and Postone idea can sound abstract and moralistic, detached from the concrete work of politics. But for me, it amounts to consciously trying to weird my politics and myself.

I am, in certain respects, pretty "normie": straight, cis, white, middle class, the stereotype of a DSA socialist. The point of saying this is not to navel-gaze or self-flagellate or essentialize identity categories, much as the anti-identitarians want to misrepresent it that way. It is to do the opposite, in fact---to try to trouble those categories and get weird. I can't change the advantages my social location gave me, and in fact I want to put them to use for the revolution. What I can do is try to spend more time in spaces that aren't full of people like me, and more time trying to develop political empathy, to see what being a transfeminist communist means, and what it is to struggle with, and against, identities other than the ones ascribed to me. In the process, I can get a little more weird.

I can, in other words, through listening and understanding, try to approach the kind of psychic mobility that would grant me, as the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu puts it, "a command of the conditions of existence and the social mechanisms which exert their effects on the whole ensemble of the category to
which such a person belongs (that of high-school students, skilled workers,
magistrates, etc.) and a command of the conditions, psychological and social, both associated with a particular position and a particular trajectory in social space." This is not a distraction from socialist or communist politics, it is that politics in practice. I would go so far as to say that without developing this command, good organizing is impossible.

Just as importantly, armed with greater empathy and knowledge, I can bring what I know back to the political work I do, and to the "normies". That means, at a larger scale, making sure that, for example, DSA is getting more involved in things like the International Women's Strike and the Trans Book Bloc, rather than recoiling from them in favor of some supposedly pure, "universalist" "class" politics. It means, at a smaller scale, talking to and encouraging fledgling comrades, whose politics may not have gotten much past the Bernie Sanders campaign, to think and act more radically and more deeply.

That's the way forward because it's ideologically and morally right, but also because it's strategically what is most likely to work. Certainly the anti-woketarian inquisitors in DSA mostly seem to have succeeded in generating a lot of ill will, disillusionment, and anger from people who could have been comrades. It's their excesses, and not some over-investment in being self critical about racism or patriarchy on the left, that I'm worried will drive people away and shatter promising organizing projects.

And as Griffiths argues:

I don’t think it will work on its own terms, that is, simply electing socialists or even more Democrats to office. It relies on an already unrealistic and static account of the commitments and sympathies of working class people, who like me, each have their own individual political stories of change, through relationships, through organization and through action. If any of this works, to the extent that it recruits newly politicized socialists, they aren’t going to stay still; we see that I think in a lot of the political expressions of local DSA chapters and working groups, and in even in the development of the Chapo Trap House fandom, which often exceeds its authors in political sensibility and vision.

In other words, warmed-over minimalist social democracy may get you closer to high tide, but it won't prepare you for what you find when you get there. These days I'm sometimes reminded of the antics of some of the Maoist and Trotskyist students of the 1960s, who thought they could connect with "real" workers by cosplaying as clean-cut, conservatively dressed normies. The real workers, of course, were already quitting their jobs, growing their hair out, and getting into sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Now as then, the times call for a politics and a sensibility that is, as the old line of Lenin's had it, "as radical as reality itself."

Keep Socialism Weird!

In the course of preparing some brief comments on the [Universal Basic Income](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income) for another site, I decided to write up my attempt to clarify some of the politics behind the current debates about UBI as a demand and as a policy. This is adapted from remarks I gave [earlier this year](https://business.leeds.ac.uk/about-us/article/universal-basic-income-and-the-future-of-work/) at the University of Leeds, for a symposium on the topic.

One of the major obstacles to clear discussion of UBI is the tendency to pose the issue as a simple dichotomy: one is either for or against basic income. In fact, however, it must be recognized that both the advocates and opponents of UBI contain right and left flanks. The political orientation one takes toward basic income--and in particular, whether one is considering it primarily from the perspective of labor, or of capital--has profound implications both for how one thinks a UBI should be fought for and implemented, and what one thinks it is meant to achieve.

The multiple poles of the UBI debate are represented in the following diagram:

The Left-wing version of Basic Income is associated with thinkers like Kathi Weeks and André Gorz. Their hope is that with a basic income, as Weeks [puts it](http://criticallegalthinking.com/2016/08/22/feminist-case-basic-income-interview-kathi-weeks/), "the link between work and income would be loosened, allowing more room for different ways of engaging in work." Moreover, Weeks argues, drawing on the legacy of the Wages for Housework movement:

> Demanding a basic income, as I see it, is also a process of making the problems with the wage system of income allocation visible, articulating a critical vocabulary that can help us to understand these problems, opening up a path that might eventually lead us to demand even more changes, and challenging us to imagine a world wherein we had more choices about waged work, nonwork, and their relationship to the rest of our lives.

Left UBI advocates like Weeks tend to see basic income as part of a broader set of demands and proposals, rather than a single-shot solution to every social problem (though this monomaniacal focus does have its adherents on the Left.) They thus support what Los Angeles collective The Undercommons [refers to](https://bostonreview.net/class-inequality-race/undercommons-no-racial-justice-without-basic-income) as "UBI+," in which a baseline guaranteed income supplements other forms of support, which they contrast with "UBI-," "a basic income advanced as a replacement for labor regulations and other security-enhancing government programs."

The danger of Right-wing basic income, or UBI-, was identified by Gorz in his 1989 [*Critique of Economic Reason*](https://www.versobooks.com/books/509-critique-of-economic-reason):

> The guaranteed minimum is an income granted by the state, financed by direct taxation. It starts out from the idea that there are people who work and earn a good living and others who do not work because there is no room for them on the job market or because they are (considered) incapable of working. Between these two groups, no lived relation of solidarity emerges. This absence of solidarity (this society deficit) is corrected by a fiscal transfer. The state takes from the one group and gives to the other. . .

> . . . The guaranteed minimum or universal grant thus form part of a palliative policy which promises to protect individuals from the decomposition of wage-based society without developing a social dynamic that would open up emancipatory perspectives for them for the future.

Something like this vision animates much of the advocacy for UBI in capitalist and conservative circles. The clearest exposition of this perspective comes from far-right writer Charles Murray, co-author of the [infamous](http://books.wwnorton.com/books/The-Mismeasure-of-Man/) *The Bell Curve*. His 2006 book [*In Our Hands*](https://www.aei.org/publication/a-guaranteed-income-for-every-american/) roots his basic income proposal in the right-wing tradition of Milton Friedman, and its subtitle makes explicit what UBI is supposed to be: "A Plan to Replace the Welfare State." He insists on "getting rid of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, Supplemental Security Income, housing subsidies, welfare for single women and every other kind of welfare and social-services program, as well as agricultural subsidies and corporate welfare."

It is something like this version of UBI that appeals to the likes of [Elon Musk](https://www.fastcompany.com/4030576/elon-musk-says-automation-will-make-a-universal-basic-income-necessary-soon). It is also the prospect that drives some on the left to vociferously oppose the idea. Sociologist Daniel Zamora, who I've [sparred](https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/12/beyond-the-welfare-state/) [with](https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/06/social-democracy-polanyi-great-transformation-welfare-state) on occasion, [argues](https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/12/universal-basic-income-inequality-work) that "UBI isn’t an alternative to neoliberalism, but an ideological capitulation to it." He argues that a political and economically feasible basic income could only be something like Murray's proposal: too little to live on (thus promoting the spread of precarious low wage jobs) and paid for with drastic cuts to the rest of the welfare state. Moreover, he argues that even a relatively generous UBI would only intensify the logic of neoliberal capitalism, by perpetuating a condition in which makes "market exchange the nearly exclusive means to acquire the goods necessary for our own reproduction."

Zamora calls instead for reducing the scope of the market through the struggle for [decommodification](http://www.peterfrase.com/2011/06/de-commodification-in-everyday-life/). This perspective is reflected by those like [Barbara Bergmann](https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/reducing-inequality-merit-goods-vs-income-grants), who [emphasize](http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0032329203261101?journalCode=pasa) the importance of directly providing "merit goods" like health care, education, and housing, rather than relying on the private market. This is important, because a Murray-style UBI- of marketized social provision would be radically inegalitarian for reasons I've [explained](http://www.peterfrase.com/2011/04/health-care-and-the-communism-of-the-welfare-state/) elsewhere. Bergmann's prioritization of this substantive service provision is reflected in the advocates of ["Universal Basic Services"](https://universalbasicservices.org/) as an alternative to Universal Basic Income.

Of course, Charles Murray and Elon Musk are still somewhat anomalous within the broader pro-capitalist Right. Some, like [James Pethokoukis](https://www.aei.org/publication/universal-basic-income-uncertain-need-with-worrisome-potential-costs/), argue that UBI is an unnecessary expense, because the breathless predictions of mass technological employment are unlikely to come true (echoing some of the analysis of leftist critics like [Doug Henwood](https://lbo-news.com/2015/07/17/workers-no-longer-needed/)). Others, like [Thomas Sowell](https://www.creators.com/read/thomas-sowell/06/16/is-personal-responsibility-obsolete), are philosophically opposed to "divorcing personal rewards from personal contributions."

Having set up four different poles of attraction, it's worth thinking about what attracts and repels each position in the debate to each of the others, again with reference to the diagram above. What unites the pro-UBI forces is a willingness to think beyond a society defined by work as wage labor. Even Murray, more of a traditionalist than some of the Silicon Valley futurist types, argues that reduced labor force participation is an acceptable and even desirable consequence of UBI, because it would mean "new resources and new energy into an American civic culture," and "the restoration, on an unprecedented scale, of a great American tradition of voluntary efforts to meet human needs." This finds its left echoes in those like Gorz and Kathi Weeks, whose UBI advocacy stems from her [post-work](https://www.jacobinmag.com/2012/04/the-politics-of-getting-a-life/) politics.

Arrayed against the post-work vision of Basic Income are those who treat work as something to be realized and celebrated, rather than transcended or dispensed with. On the Left, this takes the form of various "dignity of labor" arguments which, to use Weeks' framing of the issue, insist that our main goal should be ensuring *better* work, not less work. Often this is tied to a defense of the inherent importance of meaningful work, as when the [head of the German Federation of Trade Unions](https://www.dw.com/en/german-trade-unions-strictly-against-basic-income-concept/a-43589741) argued recently that "pursuing a job was crucial to structure people's everyday lives and ensure social cohesion."

In his new book [*Radical Technologies*](https://www.versobooks.com/books/2742-radical-technologies), Adam Greenfield concludes his chapter on automation with a defense of jobs, which "offered us a context in which we might organize our skills and talents," or at least "filled the hours of our days on Earth." A recurrent reference point for the job-defenders, like [Ha-Joon Chang](https://newhumanist.org.uk/articles/5329/why-sci-fi-and-economics-have-more-in-common-than-you-think), is Kurt Vonnegut's 1952 novel *Player Piano*, which imagines a highly automated future in which people are made miserable because the end of jobs has made them feel useless. (I cite the novel myself in [*Four Futures*](https://www.versobooks.com/books/1847-four-futures), although I attempt to mount something of a post-work critique of the story.)

This has certain commonalities with the anti-UBI Right, which also sees waged work as inherently valuable and good, although of course only for the lower orders. This can be rooted in a [producerist](https://www.jacobinmag.com/2011/01/hipsters-food-stamps-and-the-politics-of-resentment) view that ""he who does not work, neither shall he eat." But it can also simply be a driven by a desire to cement and preserve hierarchies and class power, a fear that a working class with additional economic security and resource base of a basic income would get up to "voluntary efforts to meet human needs" that are a bit more confrontational and contentious than Charles Murray imagines.

The final point to make about my diagram of the UBI debate is the relationship between its diagonal terms, which also turn out to have certain commonalities. Put simply, the diagonals connect positions that agree on the *effect* of UBI, but disagree about its *desirability*.

Connecting pro-UBI Leftists like Weeks and Gorz with anti-UBI traditional conservatives is the belief that a basic income threatens to erode the work ethic and ultimately undermine the viability of capitalism. It's just that the left thinks that's a good thing. And the overlapping analysis extends to the relations of *reproduction* as well as those of production. Weeks explicitly presents basic income as an historical successor to the demands of the Wages for Housework movement, a way of breaking down patriarchy and the gendered division of labor.

Historical experience with basic income experiments lends some support to this view. Analysis of the 1970s Canadian "Mincome" program, in which a basic income was provided to residents of a Canadian town, [found that](http://policyoptions.irpp.org/magazines/2001-odyssee-espace/a-guaranteed-annual-income-from-mincome-to-the-millennium/) "Families that stayed together solely for economic reasons were no longer compelled to do so, since individual members could continue to receive the [Guaranteed Annual Income] separately after a marriage breakup." From a feminist pro-UBI perspective, this shows the value of basic income in providing women the wherewithal to escape from bad relationships. But to the conservative UBI critic, the lesson is the opposite, as it shows how basic income can undermine the traditional family.

On our other diagonal, we find again an agreement on consequences and a disagreement on desirability. Charles Murray views Basic Income as a way to stabilize capitalism and remove the distortions and perverse incentives of the bureaucratic welfare state. Daniel Zamora views Basic Income as a way to intensify neoliberalism and remove the hard-won gains of decommodified services of the social democratic welfare state in favor of submerging all social life in market exchange. Unions fear that basic income will undermine solidarity based on organization in the workplace, a result that would no doubt be seen as a benefit by many of basic income's tech industry boosters (as well as nominally pro-labor renegades like [Andy Stern](http://time.com/4412410/andy-stern-universal-basic-income/)).

I've been reading, thinking and writing about Universal Basic Income off and on for over a decade, and in that time my sense of its political significance has shifted considerably. I would still call myself an advocate of UBI, for similarly post-work and feminist reasons as Weeks or Gorz. But as the concept is increasingly co-opted by those with right wing and pro-capitalist motivations, I think it's increasingly important to situate the demand within a "UBI+" vision of expanded services, rather than falling victim to the shortcut thinking that elevates basic income to a "one weird trick" that will transcend political divides and resolve the contradictions of late capitalism.

The current issue of the *New Yorker* has a story about the odd phenomenon of Chinese [lingerie merchants](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/08/10/learning-to-speak-lingerie) in Egypt. These immigrant entrepreneurs are apparently ubiquitous throughout the poor, conservative districts of upper Egypt, where they dispense sexy garments to the region's pious Muslim women. The cultural and geopolitical details of the story are interesting for a number of reasons, but I was struck in particular by a resonance with some debates that have recently flared up again about labor and automation, for reasons I'll get back to below.

"Robots will take all our jobs" is a hardy perennial of popular political economy. Typical of the latest crop is Derek Thompson of the Atlantic, who wrote an article (in which he quotes me), speculating about a ["World Without Work"](http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/07/world-without-work/395294/) in the wake of mass adoption of robotization and computerization. Paul Mason gives a more leftist and political rendition of [similar themes](http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jul/17/postcapitalism-end-of-capitalism-begun).

As I note in my recent Jacobin [editorial](https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/03/automation-frase-robots/), this kind of thing is not new, and is in fact an anxiety that recurs throughout the history of capitalism. Two decades ago, we had the likes of [Jeremy Rifkin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_Work) and [Stanley Aronowitz](https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/the-jobless-future) musing about the "end of work" and the "jobless future".

And these repeating waves of robo-futurism call into existence the same repeated insistence that robots are not, in fact, taking all the jobs. Doug Henwood was [on this beat](http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/Jobless_future.html) twenty years ago and remains [on it](http://lbo-news.com/2015/07/17/workers-no-longer-needed/) today. Matt Yglesias, [likewise](http://www.vox.com/2015/7/27/9038829/automation-myth), calls fear of automation a "myth".

One of the specific things that people like Henwood and Yglesias always cite is the productivity statistics. If we were seeing a wave of unprecedented automation, then we should be seeing rapid rises in measured labor productivity---that is, the amount of output that can be produced per hour of human labor. Instead, however, what we've seen is historically low productivity growth, compared to what happened in the middle and late 20th Century.

All of which leads commentators like Yglesias and [Tyler Cowen](http://www.amazon.com/The-Great-Stagnation-Low-Hanging-Eventually-ebook/dp/B004H0M8QS) to fret that the robots aren't coming fast *enough*. Typical of most writers on this subject, Yglesias just worries vaguely that increases in productivity won't happen for some unspecified reason.

I've argued a number of times for an (http://www.peterfrase.com/2012/03/technological-grotesques/) that connects the question of automation and productivity growth directly to wages and the general condition of labor. The basic idea is very simple. From the perspective of the boss, replacing a worker with a machine will be more appealing to the degree that the machine is:

* Cheaper than the human worker
* More convenient and easier to control than the human worker

This implies that if workers win higher wages and more control over their working conditions, their jobs are more likely to be automated. Indeed, arguments like this frequently crop up among critics of things like the [Fight for 15](http://fightfor15.org/) campaign, which demands higher wages for fast food workers and other low wage employees. Prototypes for automatic [burger-making](http://momentummachines.com/) machines are cited in order to warn workers that their jobs are at risk of being automated away.

I regard such warnings not as arguments against higher wages, but arguments for them. Workers, in the course of fighting for their interests, drive the [dialectic](https://www.jacobinmag.com/2012/02/the-dialectic-of-technology/) that forces capitalists to find less labor-intensive ways of producing. The next political task, then, is to make sure that the benefits of such innovation accrue to the masses, and not to a small class of robot owners.

What I fear most is not that all of our labor will be replaced with machines. Rather, like Matt Yglesias, I worry that it *won't*---but for a slightly different reason. Again, bosses prefer workers to machines when they are cheaper and easier to control. Hence the truly dystopian prospect is that the worker herself is treated as if she *were* a machine, rather than being replaced by one.

Which brings us back, finally, to the Chinese lingerie merchants. The article's author, Peter Hessler, speaks to one such merchant, and asks him to comment on the biggest problem facing Egypt. To his surprise, his subject, Lin Xianfei, has a quick answer: gender inequality.

But the point turns out not to be that Lin is some sort of secret passionate feminist. Rather, his perspective turns on the exigencies of capital accumulation. For it turns out that while one kind of patriarchy is an impediment to business, another kind can be quite valuable to the shrewd businessman.

The problem, from Lin's perspective, is that Egyptian women in his region don't work in wage labor at all, or if they do they only do so for short periods of time, before marrying and retreating into the home. Even worse, local norms about proper female behavior preclude taking women out of their homes to live on site in massive dormitories, as might be done in China. Thus it becomes unfeasible to run factories on 24-hour production cycles.

Hiring men, meanwhile, is out of the question---another man, Xu Xin, tells Hessler that Egyptian men are too lazy and undisciplined for manufacturing work. Hessler goes on to note that "at the start of the economic boom in China, bosses hired young women because they could be paid less and controlled more easily than men".

He proceeds to comment that female Chinese workers turned out to be "more motivated", as though he is identifying something distinct from their weaker power position relative to men. But it is really the same thing. "More motivated", here, refers to the motivation to work hard for the boss, for someone else's profits and someone else's riches. To behave, in other words, like obedient machines. The Chinese capitalist objects to the patriarchal structure of rural Egyptian society not because it is patriarchy, then, but because it is a form of patriarchy that is inconvenient to capital accumulation.

And sure enough, faced with recalcitrant humans, the textile magnates of Egypt turn to the same solution that the Chinese electronics firm Foxconn [adopted](http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2015/05/05/foxconns-robot-army-yet-to-prove-match-for-humans/) in the wake of worker uprisings there. Wang Weiqiang echoes the other industrialists' complaints about Egyptian labor: the men are lazy, the women "will work only during the daytime". As a result, "he intends to introduce greater mechanization in hopes of maximizing the short workday".

Greater mechanization and the maximization of a short work day might seem tragic to the capitalist, but it summarizes the short term goal of the post-work socialist left. Ornery, demanding workers work to drive technological developments that further this goal. And the socialist-feminist rendition of this project insists that we can prevent workers from being treated as machines not by shielding them with patriarchal and paternalistic morals, but rather by insisting that men and women alike can recognize their paid and unpaid labor in order to better [refuse it](https://www.jacobinmag.com/2012/04/the-politics-of-getting-a-life/).

There was a time when I might have called myself a "gamer." That is, I'm someone who plays and thinks about video games, and views them as a rich cultural form full of potential, both as art and as sport.

Now, however, even people who usually ignore games have been introduced to the figure of the "gamer," and he is something entirely different. The gamer is threatened by women who share his tastes, and calls them ["fake geek girls"](http://www.themarysue.com/on-the-fake-geek-girl/). The gamer reacts to Anita Sarkeesian's [criticism](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5i_RPr9DwMA) of sexist tropes in video games with a [bombardment](http://www.theverge.com/2014/8/27/6075179/anita-sarkeesian-says-she-was-driven-out-of-house-by-threats) of violent threats against her and her family. The gamer attacks feminist game creator Zoe Quinn with misogynist abuse and baseless allegations of corruption in reaction to a nasty blog post by a [bitter ex-boyfriend](http://www.theverge.com/2014/8/27/6075179/anita-sarkeesian-says-she-was-driven-out-of-house-by-threats).

It is not news that video games are often hostile to women, both as an industry and as a fan culture. Nor is it new that there are excellent feminist critics pointing this out within the games press, like [Leigh Alexander](http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/224400/Gamers_dont_have_to_be_your_audience_Gamers_are_over.php) and [Samantha Allen](http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/08/28/will-the-internet-ever-be-safe-for-women.html). But the latest debates over misogyny and games have boiled over with new intensity in discussions among game consumers and creators, and have also reached beyond these circles. The New Inquiry has rounded up a collection of [links](http://thenewinquiry.com/features/tni-syllabus-gaming-and-feminism/) for those who need to get up to date.

Evidently not everyone with a deep interest in games is a bitter, reactionary young man who reacts with violent misogyny to even the hint of social justice. But that faction of "gamers" has demonstrated its outsize ability to police the boundaries of debate and to drive out consumers, creators, and critics who challenge them, with the consent of a silent majority. What, politically, does this specific right-wing demographic represent?

The culture of video games has long been a fairly insular one---as has, to a greater or lesser extent, the wider "geek culture" in which it has been embedded, encompassing phenomena like Dungeons and Dragons, science fiction and fantasy novels and movies, and comic books. All of these forms have long histories of politically subversive, socialist, and feminist experimentation. But in their best-funded and most widely consumed commercial forms, they have especially catered to certain kinds of socially awkward boys and men, providing them with alternatives to dominant standards of masculinity.

At the same time, however, they cultivated an alternative misogyny, based on resentment of other men and a desire to usurp their patriarchal dominance, rather than overturn patriarchy entirely. Hence the geek culture is a [breeding ground](http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/05/27/your-princess-is-in-another-castle-misogyny-entitlement-and-nerds.html) for [Nice Guys](http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Nice_guy_syndrome) who see themselves as persecuted outcasts but are unable to get over their desire to control women.

It's impossible to dispute anymore that gaming is a completely mainstream mass-culture phenomenon in purely economic terms: consumer spending on games now [rivals or exceeds](file:///home/pefrase/Downloads/Global_Media_Report_2013.pdf) spending on music and movies. And yet these gamers cling to an identity as marginalized underdogs, even as they defend the game industry's existing practices of sexism, racism, and class exploitation.

Part of this has to do with the lag between economic and cultural acceptance. Games may be mainstream as an industry, but they have not yet achieved cultural parity with other media and other art forms. So we still get great film critics writing bumbling [rants](http://www.rogerebert.com/rogers-journal/video-games-can-never-be-art) about why video games can't be art, and the *New York Times* expressing wonderment at the notion that competitive sports can be [mediated](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/31/technology/esports-explosion-brings-opportunity-riches-for-video-gamers.html) by computers.

This is not unusual for any young medium; cinema and television faced similar lags. Eventually, people who grew up with games will be in positions of cultural authority, and the idea of games as an inferior or ephemeral medium will disappear.

The assimilation of games into the larger culture poses a problem for a reactionary segment of gamers, however. It means engaging with a society that, while it is still capitalist and patriarchal, still suffused with racism, has also been challenged for decades by those it has traditionally marginalized. Wider engagement inevitably [changes](http://www.vice.com/read/dungeons-and-dragons-has-caught-up-with-third-wave-feminism-827) the parameters of geek culture, as new voices and new ideas are incorporated. Some gamers would like it both ways: they want everyone to take their medium seriously, but they don't want anyone to challenge their political assumptions or call into question the way games treat people who don't look and think like them. They hate and fear a world where games are truly made by and for everyone; where women make up a [majority](http://www.dailydot.com/geek/adult-women-largest-gaming-demographic/) of the gaming audience; where a [trans woman](http://wiki.teamliquid.net/starcraft2/Scarlett) dominates one of the world's great eSports.

It's important to call these people what they are: not just anti-social jerks and not only misogynists, but as Liz Ryerson [says](http://ellaguro.blogspot.com/2014/08/on-right-wing-videogame-extremism.html), overall the *right wing* of people involved in games. No surprise, then, that they resemble conservatives who resentfully bemoan the liberal bias of Hollywood or the condescension of elite college professors. This isn't a problem with gamer culture. It's a problem with our entire culture, and specifically with the attitudes and behavior of a rightist, predominantly white and male section of that culture.

Right wing gamers project an overweening sense of superiority and entitlement, while at the same time constructing an identity based on marginality and victimization. In this, though, they aren't really that different from many revanchist movements in capitalist societies. They're much like the Tea Party right, which laments the disappearance of the America it recognizes---that is, the America where straight white men are systematically advantaged. This is a basic element of the [reactionary mind](http://coreyrobin.com/new-book/): a fundamental opposition to equality as such. So it is with gamers for whom, as Tim Colwill [puts it](http://games.on.net/2014/08/readers-threatened-by-equality-not-welcome/), "the worst possible thing that can happen here is equality." This group of angry gamers no longer "recognizes their country," as it were, what with all these women and queers and leftists running around.

This is why it's wrong to suggest, as [Ian Williams](https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/09/death-to-the-gamer/) does, that gamer culture's fatal flaw is to be "tainted, root and branch, by its embrace of consumption as a way of life." The idea that communities organized around shared cultural consumption are inherently reactionary is so broad as to be vacuous, and it could apply equally to movie buffs, sports fans, or Marxist theory aficionados. It's possible for any politics, left or right, to devolve into mere consumption choices. But that is not the problem currently on display among gamers. Indeed, the danger arises from their choice *not* to just passively consume, and to lash out in defense of what they believe "true" gamer culture should be.

The attacks on people like Anita Sarkeesian should be understood as collective political acts, and the reactionaries who carry them out should be understood as ideological representatives of a specific political tendency among those who create and play games, rather than waved off with moralizing Adbusters-ish rhetoric as a bunch of consumer dupes. What threatens these gamers is the notion that gaming does not exist only to reassure their misogynist preconceptions, and that they may have those premises challenged. For not only is the culture of games broadening, but even the big-budget commercial segment that most caters to the backward fantasies of these young men is contracting relative to other parts of the industry, like indie, mobile, and web games.

As [Leigh Alexander](http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/224400/Gamers_dont_have_to_be_your_audience_Gamers_are_over.php) points out in her more sophisticated deconstruction of the "gamer" identity, "It's hard for them to hear they don't own anything, anymore, that they aren't the world's most special-est consumer demographic, that they have to share." Change the words "consumer demographic" to "beneficiaries of the welfare state," and you could be talking about Tea Partiers defending their Medicare while denouncing welfare queens.

So this is not just a story about gamers. And within the boundaries of the games world, it is also not merely a story about a "toxic culture" among game fans, but rather about an industry that is structurally and systematically reactionary, and cultivates the same values among a segment of its consumers. It's not just 4chan mobs terrorizing writers and game designers, it's a games business that [pushes out](http://shawnelliott.blogspot.com/2013/05/leigh-alexander-and-i-agreed-to-move.html) workers who don't fit its political assumptions and demographic stereotypes, by way of the same sexist practices that [pervade](http://www.katelosse.tv/latest/2014/4/13/the-speculum-of-the-other-brogrammer) the tech industry generally.

Famous game designers and studio owners won't openly endorse the threats and terror of anonymous trolls, but those trolls are the shock troops that help keep the existing elite in power. The respectable men in suits will continue to hire the same boy's club while making excuses for why women just don't fit in as programmers or game designers or journalists. But the fascistic street-fighting tactics of the troll brigade work in the service of keeping everything in the industry the way it is.

Not only is it a useful tool for shutting down dissenting voices, the existence of these angry-nerd movements among fans and consumers does what fascistic movements always do: divide the working class by getting some of them to identity with the boss, which in this case serves to shore up the [hyper-exploitative](https://www.jacobinmag.com/2013/11/video-game-industry/) industry that Ian Williams has elsewhere described. The existence of a vociferously hostile vigilante squad shutting down dissenting speech makes it easier for studio heads to hire nothing but the same white men and then work them to death, for forum administrators to claim free speech and shrug at the hatred spewed on their pages, and for the industry to claim that they're only satisfying "the audience" when they reproduce the same narrow and bigoted tropes year after year. Meanwhile the "good" geeks get distracted from the main event as they tussle with the trolls, like [SHARPs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skinheads_Against_Racial_Prejudice) and Nazi skinheads brawling at a basement show.

Which isn't to say that death threats are a great look for the suits at the top of the game industry hierarchy. The trolls may sometimes get out of control, just as the Republican establishment sometimes loses control of the Tea Party, or the industrial capitalists sometimes lose control of the Nazi brownshirts. But that doesn't mean they aren't part of one dialectically inter-related political project. [The Cossacks work for the Czar](http://crookedtimber.org/2009/01/27/the-cossacks-well-they-work-for-the-czar/). The street fighters are there to police the boundaries of discourse, to forcibly drive out anyone who challenges the existing hierarchy---women, people of color, LGBT people, even the odd white man deemed to be [too sympathetic](http://www.dailydot.com/geek/4chan-hacks-phil-fish-over-his-defense-of-zoe-quinn/) to the women and the commies.

Gaming doesn't have a problem; capitalism has a problem. Rather than seeing them simply as immoral assholes or deluded consumerists, we should take gaming's advanced wing of hateful trolls seriously as representatives of the reactionary shock troops that will have to be defeated in order to build a more egalitarian society in the games industry or anywhere else.

There's a passage from [Barabara Ehrenreich](http://www2.metrotimes.com/news/story.asp?id=12327) that I used to find very powerful.

> The original radical . . . vision was of a society without hierarchies of any kind. This of course means equality among the races and the genders, but class is different: There can be no such thing as "equality among the classes." The abolition of hierarchy demands not only racial and gender equality, but the abolition of class.

Many still find this formulation appealing, judging by the frequency with which I see similar sentiments expressed by my peers. And I still find it beguiling as well. But over the years I've come to see that it's fundamentally wrong, and encourages a very misleading way of thinking about how class works.

Ehrenreich's framework is common among those who decry "identity" politics, and insist on the unifying and universalizing qualities of *class*, as against race and gender, as a banner under which to rally the Left. Sam Gindin, in his generally excellent [contribution](https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/06/unmaking-global-capitalism/) to the most recent *Jacobin*, accuses "identity politics" of "parsing the working class into ever more fragmented subgroups". He insists that identities "cannot combine into a new politics because their essence is their separateness. Something else is needed to bring them together in a broader, more integrated, and more coherent politics", and "that 'something' is class." He concludes that "class trumps, without underplaying, issues of identity."

Walter Benn Michaels, tireless critic of liberal race and gender politics, uses similar [language](http://edges.gmu.edu/interview-walter-benn-michaels/). For him, "battles over gender, race, and sexuality are battles against discrimination". This makes them utterly incommensurable with struggles over class, which "has nothing whatsoever to do with discrimination; it has to do with exploitation." Class is different, he says, because it is "a fundamentally unequal relation". Thus, while anti-racism or feminism insist only on equality between races or genders, class struggle differs in its insistence on *abolishing* the class distinction.

This kind of rhetoric relies on a flimsy and inadequate reading not just of race and gender, but of class as well. In order to portray class as the unifying symbol, and all other identities as merely divisive, it must juxtapose categories at completely different levels of analysis. It simultaneously neglects the way in which race and gender are part of social systems and not just individual identities, while ignoring the way that class, too, functions at the level of identity politics.

***

Ehrenreich, Gindin, and Michaels seemingly have no vision of anti-racism or feminism beyond the horizon of liberal tolerance. The only endpoint they can see is "equality among the races and the genders", which, as Gindin points out, implies that the "essence" of these groups "is their separateness". But they are the ones essentializing separateness, ignoring a whole tradition of activists and writers for whom the goal is not merely equality but the *abolition* of both race and gender.

You'd never know from these discussions that anyone had ever [troubled](http://binarythis.com/2013/05/23/judith-butler-explained-with-cats/) the gender binary. Among radical feminists, there has always been a current that sees the ultimate aim *not* as an equality between hypostatized essences, but as the [elimination](http://themcnamarareport.wordpress.com/2012/08/24/in-a-radical-feminist-world-there-is-no-transphobia-guest-post-on-zinniajones-com/) of the gender binary entirely.

In some versions, this can veer into calls for androgyny that have some uncomfortable [Harrison Bergeron](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron) overtones. But one can just as easily follow the path of [Silvia Federici](http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/permanent-reproductive-crisis-interview-silvia-federici), who calls it "absurd to assume that any form of gender specification must always, necessarily become a means of exploitation and we must live in a genderless world." This suggests that her utopia is a world in which gender differences don't disappear, they merely lose their function as categories of hierarchy and oppression. The performance of gender could then become more fluid, playful, and theatrical, following the models set down by queer and transgender cultures.

Likewise, radical understandings of race have viewed it as a social construct inseparable from the origins of capitalism, with "black" and "white" representing a dichotomy that must be overcome just as much as---or along with---the opposition between labor and capital. Barbara and Karen Fields demonstrate that racial categorizations are not pre-given, but must be painstakingly reproduced through a political and discursive practice of ["racecraft"](http://www.amazon.com/Racecraft-Soul-Inequality-American-Life-ebook/dp/B007LCYZCE). "The social alchemy of racecraft", they write, "transforms racism into race, disguising collective social practice as inborn individual traits, so it entrenches racism in a category to itself, setting it apart from inequality in other guises."

In a much older work emerging from the Communist tradition, Ted Allen wrote of the ["invention of the white race"](http://clogic.eserver.org/1-2/allen.html), and insisted that the "race" was not a biological phenotype, nor merely even a "social construct", but "a *ruling class social control formation*." No wonder, then, that Allen's research led followers like Noel Ignatiev to [demand](http://racetraitor.org/abolishthepoint.html) the "abolition of whiteness".

***

If all this goes to show that there is far more to anti-racism and feminism than liberal diversity politics, the notion of "class" evoked by the writers cited above can be attacked from the other directiosn. Ehrenreich, et al, speak of class strictly as an abstract *social structure*, and race and gender solely as individual *identities*. Yet each exists in both dimensions.

In an old essay at *Jacobin*, I tried to unpack the [dual meanings](https://www.jacobinmag.com/2012/11/an-imagined-community/) that "class" holds in the socialist imagination. Writers like Sam Gindin evoke "the working class" as the collective agent that can bring about universal liberation. But what does this term signify? Rather than trying to restate the point, I'll just quote myself on the curious career of "the working class" in leftist rhetoric:

> It did not simply mean class in the structural sense: workers who survive by selling their wage labor, confronting capitalists whose wealth comes from hiring that labor and producing for profit. The working class in that sense encompasses the vast majority even in the rich countries, but it has no sense of shared collective identity and hence is politically inert---it is a class "in itself" rather than "for itself," to use the old Marxist jargon. Hardt, Negri, Virno, and other contemporary theorists of the "multitude" gesture at something like this all-encompassing version of the working class, but in their hands the category expresses a hope for a future politics more than it identifies a concrete and existing collective agent.

> The working class as it existed in Old Left political discourse was a sociological category, and it often referred to a specific type of wage labor: the industrial proletariat, employed in large-scale factory work. Such workers were thought to be the leading edge of socialist politics not merely because they were exploited by capital, but because they occupied a specific environment that tended to forge a collective identity and to facilitate disruptive mass action: factories in which workers were employed for a long period of time, and where they were massed together each day performing similar, routinized work.

Today class in the second, sociological sense continues to appear in progressive rhetoric, but it has less economic specificity in deindustrialized economies dominated by precarious service sector work. Instead, it has largely been assimilated to the language of identity politics, treated as a set of cultural markers and practices that are correlated with having lower wages and fewer educational credentials. Academic [centers](http://cwcs.ysu.edu/about) exist to "increase awareness of and respect for working-class life and culture". There are organizations devoted to [battling](http://www.classism.org/about-class/what-is-classism) the evil of "classism". Class is conceived here not as Gindin's broad, integrating force, but in precisely the differential terms he ascribes to race and gender. Classism is defined by the "Class Action" nonprofit, for example, as "differential treatment based on social class or perceived social class."

One response to this, from the more traditional kind of class warrior, is to insist that this move is invalid, that class is different for the reasons Ehrenreich and Gindin give. But just because class is a structural relation doesn't mean it isn't *also* an identity. Class exists in its sociological sense, even if this is not identical with its status as an economic category. Classism is a real phenomenon, and it manifests itself even among those who are committed to class struggle in a more structural sense. It crops up every time a *soi-disant* leftist [ridicules](https://twitter.com/Mobute/status/480818342585188352) the tastes and mores of a rabble it perceives to be made up of fat, lazy, stupid rubes.

To say that combating classist attitudes is not a substitute for overthrowing class relations does not imply that such attitudes are irrelevant. To make an analogy with racism, my recent [post](https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/06/gentrification-and-racial-arbitrage/) argued that the anti-racist attitudes of individuals could still reproduce racist economic structures. Yet it would be a monstrous absurdity to claim, on that basis, that this absolves white people of the responsibility to try to be individually less racist. And so too, adjusting perceptions of those perceived as "working class" will not by itself abolish the capitalist exploitation of labor, but it is a necessary precondition for building a movement that can do so. To deny this is to insist that class remain at the level of abstract, academic theory rather than lived experience. It's the equivalent of the white person who can talk a good game about the history of racism but claims not to "see race" in everyday life.

***

Ultimately, the partisans of crude "class first" politics want to have it both ways: they claim class as an identity superior to all others, but they do so on the basis of an abstract structural definition of class that nobody directly feels or experiences as their identity. Once class as a lived identity is understood in its particularity, it becomes subject to the same limitations and contradictions that beset race, gender, and all other oppressed identities in capitalism. If one is labeled woman, or black, it is impossible not to be aware of that fact; yet only in rare instances does this manifest in a self-conscious and collective politics of feminism or black liberation. Likewise, identifying with the culture of the working class is not a sufficient condition for a *class politics*.

One of the more insightful---though not self-aware---demonstrations of this was Mark Fisher's recent [denunciation](http://www.thenorthstar.info/?p=11299) of academic identity politics as a "vampire castle". As an example of the invidious politics of identitarian division, he cites the case of British celebrity leftist Russell Brand. While noting that Brand is a famous millionaire, he nevertheless notes the way in which ostensible leftists criticized him in terms that can only be described as classist:

> Someone passed me a post written about Brand on Facebook. I don't know the individual who wrote it, and I wouldn't wish to name them. What's important is that the post was symptomatic of a set of snobbish and condescending attitudes that it is apparently alright to exhibit while still classifying oneself as left wing. The whole tone was horrifyingly high-handed, as if they were a schoolteacher marking a child's work, or a psychiatrist assessing a patient. Brand, apparently, is 'clearly extremely unstable . . . one bad relationship or career knockback away from collapsing back into drug addiction or worse.' Although the person claims that they 'really quite like [Brand]', it perhaps never occurs to them that one of the reasons that Brand might be 'unstable' is just this sort of patronising faux-transcendent 'assessment' from the 'left' bourgeoisie. There's also a shocking but revealing aside where the individual casually refers to Brand's 'patchy education [and] the often wince-inducing vocab slips characteristic of the auto-didact' -- which, this individual generously says, 'I have no problem with at all' -- how very good of them! This isn't some colonial bureaucrat writing about his attempts to teach some 'natives' the English language in the nineteenth century, or a Victorian schoolmaster at some private institution describing a scholarship boy, it's a 'leftist' writing a few weeks ago.

Rather than see how he is engaging in his own brand of identity politics, Fisher bizarrely uses this episode to prop up the notion of class as something that transcends identity. Which it does, but no more so than race or gender. Patriarchy is more than sexism; white supremacy is more than individual racism. And all Fisher demonstrates with this anecdote is that capitalism is more than just working class identity.

And what of class as a structural relation of power, in all its Marxist glory as a central category of the capitalist mode of production? Marx himself had a more sophisticated appreciation of it than many of his epigones; he famously [argued](https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch10.htm) that "Labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded." Class as an abstraction, as the extraction of labor time by capital, only manifests itself through concrete social forms---including gender, race, and what we call "class" in its cultural sense. A culture that's more richly developed in the UK than it is in the United States, but that in the U.S. sometimes stands in for "the straight white male working class", a useful marker for an exploited group that has no other markers of oppression to draw on.

But among intellectuals, appeals to class as the universal identity too often mask an attempt to universalize a particular identity, and exclude others. Appeals to class in the abstract neglect that the working class is always some particular working class, and it can be marked (the female worker, the black worker) or unmarked (the male worker, the white worker). Far too often, exhortations to reject "identity politics" in favor of "class" amount to an insistence that the unmarked worker be taken as the definitive example of the genre. Appeals to class thus degenerate into a kind of cultural populism, more comfortable visualizing the typical worker as a white coal miner rather than a black woman in an elementary school or behind a McDonald's counter. Higher wages can be a "class" issue but abortion or police brutality cannot, because the latter are too closely identified with the part of the working class that is marked by gender and race.

I prefer Robin D.G. Kelley's [rendering](http://nova.wpunj.edu/newpolitics/issue22/kelley22.htm) of the matter, in an essay on the white "neo-enlightenment" Left that is worth reading in full:

> Class is lived through race and gender. There is no universal class identity, just as there is no universal racial or gender or sexual identity. The idea that race, gender, and sexuality are particular whereas class is universal not only presumes that class struggle is some sort of race and gender-neutral terrain but takes for granted that movements focused on race, gender, or sexuality necessarily undermine class unity and, by definition, cannot be emancipatory for the whole.

Class politics ultimately confronts the same dilemmas as radical race and gender politics, as I discuss in my [review](https://www.jacobinmag.com/2012/04/the-politics-of-getting-a-life/) of Kathi Weeks. Emancipation of the working class means abolishing the class as such, and thus giving up the comforts of working class identity. That can sometimes seem like an impossible task. But it's essential that we face it, rather than comforting ourselves with the fable of class as the universal solvent that does away with all identity and leads directly to enlightenment.

It seems I'm in book-announcing mode this week. Today marks the release of three books from *Jacobin* magazine's [collaboration](http://www.versobooks.com/series_collections/112-jacobin) with Verso Books. The trio includes Benjamin Kunkel's *Utopia or Bust* (slightly silly profile of Kunkel [here](http://www.vulture.com/2014/03/benjamin-kunkel-marxist-novel-utopia-or-bust.html)), Micah Uetricht's *Strike For America* (excerpt [here](https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/03/uncommon-core-chicago-teachers-union/)), and Melissa Gira Grant's *Playing the Whore* (excerpt [here](http://www.thenation.com/article/178683/lets-call-sex-work-what-it-work)). I have my own contribution to this series planned for the future, but more on that later. For those in New York, the launch [event](https://www.facebook.com/events/1394747350786910/) is on Wednesday the 12th.

The books are all worth your time. But I want to especially highlight Melissa's which I think is an incredibly important work. I'm proud that for some time now, *Jacobin* has been consistently putting forward an alternative to the dominant narratives about sex work. I may have been [first](https://www.jacobinmag.com/2012/03/the-problem-with-sex-work/) to write there on these issues, but that was only opening the door to people far better versed in these issues than I, like [Melissa](https://www.jacobinmag.com/2012/08/happy-hookers/) and [Laura Agustín](https://www.jacobinmag.com/2013/08/prostitution-law-and-the-death-of-whores/).

*Playing the Whore* synthesizes a huge body of theory, research and activism by and for sex workers. But I hope it doesn't get pigeonholed as being about sex, or about sex work, or about feminism, though it is about all those things. There's a huge wealth of insight here about the meaning of contemporary labor, and the many complexities of trying to develop new identities that make class politics possible.

Crucially, the book reorients discussion of sex work in the direction of class politics more generally, and away from dehumanized narratives of victimization or the overwrought feelings of would-be middle class saviors. As Grant says toward the end of the book: "There's one critical function sex worker identity must still perform: It gives shape to the demand that sex workers are as defined by their work as they are by their sexuality; it de-eroticizes the public perception of the sex worker, not despite sex but to force recognition of sex workers outside of a sexual transaction".

Rather than attempt my own clumsy summary, I'll just tease you with more of Grant's own words. Here are some of the lines that stood out to me from each of her ten chapters, which I hope will encourage others to pick up the book and delve into the rich context that motivates them.

* **"The Police"**: "Rather than couching crackdowns on sex work as fighting crime, now some feminists appeal to the police to pursue stings against the sex trade in the name of gender equality. We can't arrest our way to feminist utopia, but that has not stopped influential women's rights organizations from demanding that we try."

* **"The Prostitute"**: "since the middle of the seventies, 'prostitution' has slowly begun to give way to 'sex work.' It's this transition from a state of being to a form of labor that must be understood if we're to understand the demands that sex work is work . . . the designation of sex work is the invention of the people who perform it."

* **"The Work"**: "All that is intentionally discreet about sex work . . . are strategies for managing legal risk and social exclusion and shouldn't be understood as deceptive any more than the discretion and boundaries a therapist or priest may maintain. But this necessary discretion warps under the weight of anti-sex work stigmas and policing."

* **"The Debate"**: "Is this the real fear then: not that more people are becoming prostitutes but that the conventional ways we'd distinguish a prostitute from a nonprostitute woman are no longer as functional?"

* **"The Industry"**: "To insist that sex workers only deserve rights at work if they have fun, if they love it, if they feel empowered by it is exactly backward. It's a demand that ensures they never will."

* **"The Peephole"**: "Surveillance is a way of knowing sex workers that unites the opportunity for voyeurism with the monitoring and data collection performed by law enforcement, by social service providers, or by researchers."

* **"The Stigma"**: "Naming whore stigma offers us a way through it: to value difference, to develop solidarity between women in and out of the sex trade. . . . Whore stigma makes central the racial and class hierarchy reinforced in the dividing of women into the pure and the impure, the clean and the unclean, the white and virgin and all the others."

* **"The Other Women"**: "Sex work informs their analysis of sexualization not because sex workers' lives are important but because sex work makes women who don't do it feel things they prefer not to feel. It is the whore stigma exercised and upheld by other women."

* **"The Saviors"**: "For those working in the antiprostitution rescue industry, sex workers are limited to performing as stock characters in a story they are not otherwise a part of, in the pity porn which the 'expert' journalists, filmmakers, and NGO staff will produce, profit from, and build their power on."

* **"The Movement"**: "Without its student liberation movement, its black liberation movement, its women's liberation movement, and its gay liberation movement I can't imagine San Francisco birthing a prostitutes' rights movement from a houseboat docked Sausalito."

As I said in an earlier post, my essay in the forthcoming *Jacobin* is structured around a review of political theorist Kathi Weeks' new book [*The Problem With Work*](http://www.dukeupress.edu/Catalog/ViewProduct.php?productid=48492&viewby=title). It's a timely and interesting book that effectively ties together a number of my preoccupations: the critique of wage labor, the deconstruction of the work ethic, the demand for shorter hours, universal basic income, the politics of the non-reformist reform. More than most other writers on these topics, however, Weeks connects all of these issues to feminism.

One of the benefits of making this link, which I wasn't able to cover in my essay, is that it gives you the analytical tools to understand sex work correctly. I'm continually enervated and depressed by the way Leftists will unthinkingly throw around [stuff like this](http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=378436448851269&set=a.200655096629406.57916.196601040368145&type=3&theater):

Or, to take another example, there was the incident where some right-wing nut called Elizabeth Warren a ["socialist whore"](http://gawker.com/5856124/crazy-heckler-calls-elizabeth-warren-socialist-whore) a few months ago. People whose politics I respect mostly treated that phrase as a bit of laughable word salad. But I've actually known a few socialist whores in my life, and they're good comrades! And as I [noted recently](http://www.peterfrase.com/2012/03/in-defense-of-the-tramps/), the right-wing connection between the threat of socialism and the threat of loose sexual morality is not an arbitrary one.

I was talking recently to an old friend and former editor at the late, lamented [$pread Magazine](http://www.spreadmagazine.org/), and she noted that many sex worker rights activists have little experience even interacting with the traditional Left, so reluctant are most leftists to come anywhere near their issues. She also lamented the unfortunate state of the debate over sex work, which tends to be reduced to two equally inadequate positions: a patriarchal moralizing that treats sex work as a uniquely awful form of exploitation in which women can only ever be regarded as victims, and a panglossian libertarianism that revels in sex work as a source of independence and self-expression while glossing over its less glamorous aspects.

The first perspective produces legislative atrocities like the proposed [New York City bill](http://blog.audaciaray.com/post/14224060152/this-morning-i-testified-at-a-new-york-city) that would have penalized taxi drivers for transporting prostitutes. The
second perspective can neglect the coercive and violent parts of the sex industry, which are real even if they tend to be misrepresented as the entirety of sex work. But the real problem with a lot of the more exuberant pro-sex work arguments and their anti-sex work counterparts is a bit more subtle: the issue with sex work is not the sex, it's the *work*. As Canadian writer and sex worker Sarah M. puts it in an article [at the rabble.ca website](http://rabble.ca/news/2012/02/would-be-sex-work-abolitionist-or-aint-i-woman):

> [T]o call sex work degrading, as if that's news, is to deny that all jobs are degrading . . . Conversely, that these jobs are degrading doesn't automatically make sex work empowering. It just makes it unexceptional. "Jobs" are degrading because capitalism is degrading, because waged work is degrading. . . . Sex workers don't want to make prostitution "a job like any other." It's already our job. As long as welfare and minimum wage work, which are neither consistent nor sustainable, are the only other options, we will continue to do sex work -- legally or illegally, in the open or hidden, safely or in dangerous places, depending on the other factors that determine how we do our work. Because work is about money.

The basic problem that afflicts many pro- and anti-sex work arguments is that they take for granted the desirability and legitimacy of *wage labor in general*. They are caught up in an ideology that says that work is supposed to be a source of meaning and dignity in life. They are therefore committed to either stigmatizing sex work as an illegitimate and particularly dehumanizing kind of work (if they oppose it) or endorsing it as being just as dignified and fulfilling as any other job (if they support it). Weeks sums this up perfectly in this passage from *The Problem With Work*:

> Feminist analyses of sex work offer an illustrative example of the limitations of certain efforts to claim the title of work when that also involves making use of the legitimacy conferred by its dominant ethic. Introduced originally as a way to intervene in the feminist sex wars, the label "sex work" sought to alter the terms of feminist debate about sexual labor (Leigh 1997). For example, as a replacement for the label "prostitution," the category helps to shift the terms of discussion from the dilemmas posed by a social problem to questions of economic practice; __rather than a character flaw that produces a moral crisis, sex work is reconceived as an employment option that can generate income and provide opportunity.__ Within the terms of the feminist debate about prostitution, for example, the vocabulary has been particularly __important as a way to counter the aggressive sexual moralizing of some in the prohibitionist camp, as well as their disavowal of sex workers' agency and insistent reliance on
the language and logics of victimization.__ The other side, however, has produced some comparably problematic representations of work as a site of voluntary choice and of the employment contract as a model of equitable exchange and individual agency. More relevant to our topic here, __it is important to recognize how much of the rhetorical utility of the label "sex work" stems from its association with conventional work values.__ For those involved in sex worker advocacy, __the term can serve not only as a way to foreground the economic dimensions of such labor practices, but as a way to insist on their essential worth, dignity, and legitimacy__, as---in the formulation of one advocacy group---"service work that should be respected and protected" (quoted in Jenness 1993, 67). I do not mean to deny the vital importance of these efforts, only to point out that they often tend to echo uncritically the traditional work-ethic discourse. Thus the prostitutes' rights group COYOTE ("Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics")
may succeed in calling off one of our old tired ethics, but in the process of doing so, taps into and reproduces another. __The approach usefully demoralizes the debates about the nature, value, and legitimacy of sex for wages in one way, but it often does so by problematically remoralizing it in another; it shifts the discussion from one moral terrain to another, from that of a suspect sexual practice to that of a respectable employment relation.__

I'm in favor of legalizing all forms of sex work for adults---not because I think it's necessarily such great work, but because I think being a legal worker is better than being an illegal worker. The sex work "abolitionist" position makes about as much sense to me as reacting to Foxconn by calling on China to ban factory work. But perhaps it's the troublesome "remoralizing" of work that Weeks identifies which is at the root of the uneasiness that pro-sex worker positions provoke in some Leftists. A lot of left-wing critiques of sex work, particularly in private conversations, strike me as the bad conscience of reflexively upholding the work ethic, rather than a coherent account of sex work in particular.

Not only does sex work destabilize the work ideology, it also conflicts with a bourgeois ideal of private, monogamous sexuality that also remains widespread on the left. If you want to oppose sex work without opposing work in general, you're forced to fall back on some normative claim about what counts as normal, natural sexual relationships. This is closely related to the tendency to fall back on a naturalized conception of "the family" as the subject of society and politics, as in one of my least favorite names for a progressive political party ever, the ["Working Families Party"](http://www.workingfamiliesparty.org/).

Laura Agustin has an interesting discussion of the status of sex work in an essay for [The Commoner](http://www.commoner.org.uk/). She notes that much discussion of contemporary sex work assumes that the most natural form of sexual relation is one that is mediated only by love or passion rather than by money or any other form of instrumentality. She then observes that no sexual relationship is ever so simple, and that the imbrication of sex with money and exchange has a long history. This is hardly foreign to American culture, as anyone who's familiar with ["The Millionaire Matchmaker"](http://www.bravotv.com/the-millionaire-matchmaker) is aware. But Agustin observes that "[i]n societies where matchmaking and different sorts of arranged marriages and dowries are conventional, the link between payment and sex has been overt and normalised, while campaigners against both sex tourism and foreign-bride agencies are offended precisely because they see a money-exchange entering into what they believe should be '
pure' relationships." Against those who would lament the corruption of such "pure relationships", she says that:

> I see no postmodern crisis here. Some believe that the developed West was moving in a good direction after the Second World War, towards happier families and juster societies, and that neoliberalism is destroying that. But historical research shows that before the bourgeoisie’s advancement to the centre of European societies, with the concomitant focus on nuclear families and a particular version of moral respectability, loose, flexible arrangements vis-à-vis sex, family and sexuality were common in both upper and working-class cultures (Agustín 2004). In the long run it may turn out that 200 years of bourgeois 'family values' were a blip on the screen in human history.

She goes on to say:

> For some critics, the possession of money by clients gives them absolute power over workers and therefore means that equality is impossible. This attitude toward money is odd, given that we live in times when it is acceptable to pay for child and elderly care, for rape, alcohol and suicide counselling and for many other forms of consolation and caring. Those services are considered compatible with money but when it is exchanged for sex money is treated as a totally negative, contaminating force---this commodification uniquely terrible. Money is a fetish here despite the obvious fact that no body part is actually sold off in the commercial sex exchange.

While I agree that no good can come of treating the commodification of sex as though it's qualitatively different from the commodification of other aspects of human relations, I can't be quite so sanguine on the implications of commodification in general. I am, after all, on record expressing my doubts about the indefinite expansion of both [wage labor]() and [commodification](). However, the problem I would identify does not have to do with the exchange of money itself, but with the power relations within which it is embedded. I'm inclined to return once again to Erik Olin Wright's concept of "capitalism between consenting adults", which he [invokes as part of his case for a Universal Basic Income](http://www.ssc.wisc.edu/~wright/Inc-equal.pdf):

> When Marx analyzed the process of “proletarianization of labor” he emphasized the “double separation” of “free wage labor”: workers were separated from the means of production, and by virtue of this were separated from the means of subsistence. The conjoining of these two separations is what forced workers to sell their labor power on a labor market in order to obtain subsistence. In this sense, proletarianized labor is fundamentally unfree. __Unconditional, universal basic income breaks this identity of separations: workers remain separated from the means of production (these are still owned by capitalists), but they are no longer separated from the means of subsistence (this is provided through the redistributive basic income grant). The decision to work for a wage, therefore, becomes much more voluntary. Capitalism between consenting adults is much less objectionable than capitalism between employers and workers with little choice but to work for wages.__ By increasing the capacity of workers to refuse
employment, basic income generates a much more egalitarian distribution of real freedom than ordinary capitalism.

It's undeniably true that many sex workers, if they had access to another source of income, would either leave the sex industry or demand better conditions for themselves. But the same could be said of [supermarket checkers](http://www.peterfrase.com/2011/09/conservative-leftists-and-radical-dockworkers/) or [factory workers](http://www.peterfrase.com/2012/02/a-victory-at-foxconn/). And that, ultimately, is the only argument against sex work that I think holds up: it's work, and work is [often terrible](http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2012/03/breaking-news-lots-people-really-dont-their-jobs-much).