4 ms·

If somebody wouldn't have sex with you of their own volition, but is coerced into doing so for need of food and shelter, then how can it be consensual?

Teever 9y ago
So I guess we can reduce any job that someone does for a living down to slavery now?
- jim-jim-jim 9y ago
  As a socialist I think this could be said about a lot of labor under capitalism. Yes.
  - Teever 9y ago
    This mentality does a disservice to people who are actually living in slavery.
    - realusername 9y ago
      Why exactly? There's different degrees of slavery and independence, it's not black and white. Poor people don't really have a choice with their lives, they do whatever people command to them so they can just to get enough to get food.
    - freehunter 9y ago
      Some black slaves in the US South got to live in the house, eat and drink with their masters, whip other slaves, and maybe even got an education. They lived in luxury compared to the field workers. They were still slaves.
      - frankc 9y ago
        Could the slaves quit their jobs? This whole sub-thread is completely preposterous.
        freehunter 9y ago
        Can someone making just enough to get by quit their job? Technically, sure. But they lose their home, they lose their insurance, they lose their car, their children get taken from them. And now they can't find another job because they have no house and no car, and they can't get another car because they have no job and no credit. So they stay, no matter what, because quitting is a death sentence.
  - core-questions 9y ago
    This is so easy to type, but I imagine it would be much harder for you to devise any kind of system wherein I get to maintain a high standard of living and somehow don't have to work for a living. My employers tell me what to do, yes; but have you ever thought that perhaps I like the exchange, and find it valuable to have someone who tells me what to do to get to an end result where I get a decent, reliable wage for doing so? And how under socialism am I going to be freed from having to labour? If nobody labours, nothing will get done. Conversely, if I labour and see a massively reduced benefit from doing so personally, I will hardly be inspired to work hard.
    - meko 9y ago
      These are earnest questions seemingly asked in good faith so Ill try to respond in kind (although my comments are all dead for some reason, so I hope you can see this). socialism is not about 'ending work', it's about the relationship the worker has to his output. "but who will clean the toilets?" probably the same people that do it now, but they will be paid the full value of their labor instead of having most of it skimmed off the top in the name of "profit". Corporate Profit doesn't really exist in socialism, because profit by definition is surplus value. This value needs to ends up in the hands of the people who produce it. under this, toilet cleaning (sanitation) becomes a more lucrative job prospect because the compensation would be higher. "but how can businesses be run without a single private entity handing down orders from the top" same as they are now, with people working together. It may seem like a stretch to think of a society where the population is empowered enough that employees can self administrate, but ome needs to look no farther than the open source community for good examples of it being possible. "but software developers are smart people! they aren't like the mindless drones doing my laundry" arguments for why that is textbook classism aside, we got ourselves into this position because that's the society we've cultivated, it's not some fundamental aspect of our species that 'most of us are dumb that's why we need rich people to tell us what to do' on some level that's true, we are but animals. However it applies to economic elites too: they are also just animals, and despite the smoke and mirrors still deal with the limitations of our biology. being smart or good at something should be it's own reward. having more money than they can reasonably spend ends up becoming a self preserving entity on it's own, rent seeking and legalized bribery and so on. if you want to learn more about this phenomena, I recommend reading Marx's Das Kapital. it's easy to think we have a "high standard of living" under capitalism when that's all we've known, especially in the last bastion of the middle class that is the tech sector. but look at our (non)prescription drug use, depression rates, access to healthcare and living necessities for the most vulnerable (children, special needs, elderly minorities), our unemployment rate, our incarceration rate, our impact on the environment, the international conflicts and affairs we're involved in and you'll find a _very_ different picture being painted. If it wasn't for empty calories like McDonald's and Coke we'd probably have a food crisis too, but instead we just make the poor fat with sugar and other junk.
belorn 9y ago
Its not uncommon to hear rhetoric that calls the military a form of institutional murder, the police for institutional violence, and employment for institutional slavery. They all hold some truth, but is also miles alway from the crime that they propose to hold similarities for. The is a tangible difference in the type of coercion that exist in forced labour compared to wage slavery, just like there is a difference between the coercion in rape compared to prostitution.
deleted 9y ago
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dragonwriter 9y ago
> If somebody wouldn't have sex with you of their own volition, but is coerced into doing so for need of food and shelter, then how can it be consensual? By that argument, wage labor is slavery just as much as prostitution is rape. So, yeah, if you're that kind of socialist, there's a coherent argument for that point. But if you aren't, you may have trouble justifying why economic coercion overrides consent in one case but not the other. Myself, I'm somewhere in the social democratic (US-style “democratic socialist”, perhaps, but not what that label would apply to outside of the US) range, and I agree that there is in fact an element of economic coercion in many but not all cases of work-for-pay in a capitalist economy (including, but not uniquely so, prostitution) which makes consent unclear in the general case and clearly absent in some specific cases, but that the best corrective is alleviating the fundamentally coercive nature of the system by improving the social safety net, not trying to ban the kind of work people are more likely to do only if economically coerced (which just leaves people either coerced into some other kind of work or, stuck in the conditions that they sought to escape by accepting distasteful work under duress, or—often—still coerced into exactly the same undesirable work, but without effective legal recourse for additional abuses in the working relationship.)

Teever 9y ago

So I guess we can reduce any job that someone does for a living down to slavery now?

jim-jim-jim 9y ago
As a socialist I think this could be said about a lot of labor under capitalism. Yes.
- Teever 9y ago
  This mentality does a disservice to people who are actually living in slavery.
  - realusername 9y ago
    Why exactly? There's different degrees of slavery and independence, it's not black and white. Poor people don't really have a choice with their lives, they do whatever people command to them so they can just to get enough to get food.
  - freehunter 9y ago
    Some black slaves in the US South got to live in the house, eat and drink with their masters, whip other slaves, and maybe even got an education. They lived in luxury compared to the field workers. They were still slaves.
    - frankc 9y ago
      Could the slaves quit their jobs? This whole sub-thread is completely preposterous.
      - freehunter 9y ago
        Can someone making just enough to get by quit their job? Technically, sure. But they lose their home, they lose their insurance, they lose their car, their children get taken from them. And now they can't find another job because they have no house and no car, and they can't get another car because they have no job and no credit. So they stay, no matter what, because quitting is a death sentence.
- core-questions 9y ago
  This is so easy to type, but I imagine it would be much harder for you to devise any kind of system wherein I get to maintain a high standard of living and somehow don't have to work for a living. My employers tell me what to do, yes; but have you ever thought that perhaps I like the exchange, and find it valuable to have someone who tells me what to do to get to an end result where I get a decent, reliable wage for doing so? And how under socialism am I going to be freed from having to labour? If nobody labours, nothing will get done. Conversely, if I labour and see a massively reduced benefit from doing so personally, I will hardly be inspired to work hard.
  - meko 9y ago
    These are earnest questions seemingly asked in good faith so Ill try to respond in kind (although my comments are all dead for some reason, so I hope you can see this). socialism is not about 'ending work', it's about the relationship the worker has to his output. "but who will clean the toilets?" probably the same people that do it now, but they will be paid the full value of their labor instead of having most of it skimmed off the top in the name of "profit". Corporate Profit doesn't really exist in socialism, because profit by definition is surplus value. This value needs to ends up in the hands of the people who produce it. under this, toilet cleaning (sanitation) becomes a more lucrative job prospect because the compensation would be higher. "but how can businesses be run without a single private entity handing down orders from the top" same as they are now, with people working together. It may seem like a stretch to think of a society where the population is empowered enough that employees can self administrate, but ome needs to look no farther than the open source community for good examples of it being possible. "but software developers are smart people! they aren't like the mindless drones doing my laundry" arguments for why that is textbook classism aside, we got ourselves into this position because that's the society we've cultivated, it's not some fundamental aspect of our species that 'most of us are dumb that's why we need rich people to tell us what to do' on some level that's true, we are but animals. However it applies to economic elites too: they are also just animals, and despite the smoke and mirrors still deal with the limitations of our biology. being smart or good at something should be it's own reward. having more money than they can reasonably spend ends up becoming a self preserving entity on it's own, rent seeking and legalized bribery and so on. if you want to learn more about this phenomena, I recommend reading Marx's Das Kapital. it's easy to think we have a "high standard of living" under capitalism when that's all we've known, especially in the last bastion of the middle class that is the tech sector. but look at our (non)prescription drug use, depression rates, access to healthcare and living necessities for the most vulnerable (children, special needs, elderly minorities), our unemployment rate, our incarceration rate, our impact on the environment, the international conflicts and affairs we're involved in and you'll find a _very_ different picture being painted. If it wasn't for empty calories like McDonald's and Coke we'd probably have a food crisis too, but instead we just make the poor fat with sugar and other junk.

belorn 9y ago

Its not uncommon to hear rhetoric that calls the military a form of institutional murder, the police for institutional violence, and employment for institutional slavery. They all hold some truth, but is also miles alway from the crime that they propose to hold similarities for. The is a tangible difference in the type of coercion that exist in forced labour compared to wage slavery, just like there is a difference between the coercion in rape compared to prostitution.

deleted 9y ago

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deleted 9y ago

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dragonwriter 9y ago

> If somebody wouldn't have sex with you of their own volition, but is coerced into doing so for need of food and shelter, then how can it be consensual? By that argument, wage labor is slavery just as much as prostitution is rape. So, yeah, if you're that kind of socialist, there's a coherent argument for that point. But if you aren't, you may have trouble justifying why economic coercion overrides consent in one case but not the other. Myself, I'm somewhere in the social democratic (US-style “democratic socialist”, perhaps, but not what that label would apply to outside of the US) range, and I agree that there is in fact an element of economic coercion in many but not all cases of work-for-pay in a capitalist economy (including, but not uniquely so, prostitution) which makes consent unclear in the general case and clearly absent in some specific cases, but that the best corrective is alleviating the fundamentally coercive nature of the system by improving the social safety net, not trying to ban the kind of work people are more likely to do only if economically coerced (which just leaves people either coerced into some other kind of work or, stuck in the conditions that they sought to escape by accepting distasteful work under duress, or—often—still coerced into exactly the same undesirable work, but without effective legal recourse for additional abuses in the working relationship.)