nickfaust

I saw one of your posts in the Feminists group about exploitation...

Well, the notion of exploitation preceded Marxism. The use the notion sees in "all porn is exploitation" statements seems to be a bit closer to the non-Marxist (and purely denotative) sense of "to take advantage of" or "to make advantageous use of." It probably doesn't refer to the extraction of surplus value from labor.

I don't often post in the Feminists group (I am there to learn, not to teach/preach), but one of my more prolific posting sessions there was arguing for exactly what you said when you equated porn-wage labor to non-porn wage labor. All porn (if wage labor) would be exploitative in an economic sense in the same way that all other wage labor is exploitative. Employers profit from paying people less than what they produce. As such, the Marxist analysis about the exploitative nature of wage labor (whether right or wrong) is an observation about how value/profit is produced. Moralism doesn't have to color the analysis, though a moral critique can follow the analysis.

I actually would argue that the Marxist conception of "exploitation" is more analytically useful than that used by anti-porn feminists because it is at least clear about what the nature of the advantage is and how it could be remedied. For instance, a collective in which workers directly enjoy the products of their labor would be one free from exploitation (in the Marxist understanding). In contrast, an all-female porn company (owners, models, camera people, etc.) would still be "exploitative" for anti-porn feminists because of their assumption that women would never choose to engage in sex work freely and that female agency is impossible in a patriarchal society.

Granted, "exploitation" is often used even by Marxists in the general sense (and moralistic sense) of "to take advantage," but I don't think that the mistake the anti-porn feminism is doing is just rehashing Marxist analysis (which they aren't really doing). Instead, I think their mistake is assuming that exploitation is unavoidable in porn because of very bad arguments they have regarding female agency and powerlessness.

It is finals week, so my brain isn't quite at full speed. I hope I am articulate.