Apparently, to be a member, you don't have to have an official position with the campaign. Just like you don't need to be a member of the Bush Administration to be a neoconservative. I guess it's too much to expect reporters at the New York Times to accept the limitations of journalism.

Labels: Hillary Clinton, Neoconservatives, New York Times

For the first post on this subject, see this entry on Friday. Here are a couple of comments, and my further elaboration:

Talking about sex workers as an example of capitalism's ability to market anything -- like cell-phones or SUVs -- misses the point. These affluent, white, middle class, politically sensitive men are all committing adultery. That will really bite you in the ass, in the end.

I'd be more interested if you had said "capitalism's NEED to market anything", or what Debord refers to as "the colonization of individual consciousness."

plato's cave | 05.24.08 - 12:57 pm | #


if they are single, they aren't.

I'm not sure what relevance this really has to do with capitalism per se, since while I can agree that how sexual desire is expressed can be affected to some extent by capitalist modes of production; the basic human desire to have sex is mostly hotwired into human beings as a basic human desire and need.

Challenging and ultimately replacing capitalism with a more egalitarian system certainly would change sexual relations and allow human beings more resources to express themselves sexually....but I'm not so sure that even a socialist society would go so far as to eliminate the need for a sex media or even the desire for sex work. Capitialism didn't create sexual desire, it just exploits it for the gain of the few.

But then again, I happen to be a libertarian socialist who happens to be more of a sexual progressive who defends sex work and sexual expression....so perhaps my views are peculiar. VMMV, as the saying goes.

Anthony
Anthony Kennerson | Homepage | 05.24.08 - 4:55 pm | #


It would seem to me that the fantasies and role playing involved, which seem to have evolved to a very high level in places like the Bay Area, are directly associated with the privileges of success in the region's capitalist, entrepreneurial economy. Wealth engenders an urbane rejection of middle class familial morays, and the ability to pay to gratify the desires of a such a lifestyle.

If Brecht were alive today, he would probably recognize the primacy of entertainment and communications technology in such an economy, a postmodernist view, of course, and how the creativity and imagination required by its participants necessarily crosses the boundary into their erotic lives, not to mention the influence of entertainment products upon consumers. So, it raises a question, could the world described in this article exist in a different kind of society, and, if so, in what form?

The article provides a clue elsewhere in the interview, in an answer not posted here. Reid later talks about how SF is really a small place socially and how you have to deal with the challenge of encountering your customers in more conventional settings. Of course, in a socialist or anarchist society, this would not be an issue, as sex work would be respected, as would be the gratification of sexual desire, and there would no reason to be embarrassed or discomforted by encountering one of your clients.

And, this gets to a more central point: sexuality in such a society would not be transacted through the mechanisms of commodity exchange. As a result, there would not be sex workers and clients, as they are currently understood, because the gratification of sexual desire and the playing out of one's fantasies would not be based upon your ability to pay to do so. Something which requires a lot of money in the society in which we currently live, only a few can afford to do it.

There is a well known dark side to the commodification of sex, and it periodically emerges in the Bay Area. For example, a man was extradited from Mexico a few years ago for having sex with young boys. Prostitution involving minors is common as it is in many places. Sex for money is invariably non-consensual, even for adults, because the number of people who would perform sex work without being paid is probably pretty small compared to the those who do it for money.

And what about the fantasies and role playing? Wouldn't they be different in a non-capitalist economy? Probably, but we can't say to what degree. Dominance and submission would appear to be human universals, but beyond that, who knows?

Richard Estes | Homepage | 05.25.08 - 8:11 am | #

And, what about the fact that the sex workers seem to be women and men serving men? Are there markets with women and men serving women? Are they anywhere near as substantial as the one serving men? If not, what's up with that?

Labels: American Culture, Neoliberalism, Postmodernism, Sexuality

Labels: Barack Obama, Elections, Hillary Clinton

All of you aspiring left sociologists, feminists, postmodernists . . . read this column by Violet Blue and decide:

I asked established escort and professional dominatrix Giselle Reid — who has worked in many regions of the country as well as internationally — what makes San Francisco clients different from clients from anywhere else.

Reid tells me, "My clients here, as anywhere I've ever worked, are primarily white, middle aged, upper middle class to upper class men. In my experience, and in general, the men of San Francisco make delightful clients. They tend to be politically liberal, with at least a rudimentary social/ecological consciousness."

Violet Blue: How does this translate in an everyday sense?

Giselle Reid: They have good and expansive taste in cuisine. They are less obsessed with orgasm than men who, in other parts of the world, cussed at themselves or me if they came too quickly or not at all. Often they are with me to have a good time, not to prove themselves. They are eager to have their asses played with. They are less likely to smoke. They are generally more informed and supportive of sex workers' rights issues and more willing to talk openly and objectively about sex work. They know and use the term "sex work." They are less likely to be homophobic and more open with their sexual curiosity about other men. They are more likely to bring their girlfriend, wife or other favorite sex worker with them. They are less likely to speak ill of their wives. Some of them call or write me on holidays and my birthday. And of course, they, like everyone in this great city, are generally better looking.

Violet Blue: Is there an experience you've had that characterizes the San Francisco client?

Giselle Reid: Here are four experiences that I feel characterize the San Francisco client: I once had a client ask me if it was OK to say hi to me if he ran into me at Pride. One client, as a sweet gesture of perversity, gave me the underwear her Craigslist date had removed in the bathroom and traded with her own over lunch earlier that day. I once asked a client if I could take the sample toiletries from his hotel room for the homeless and he assembled a little baggie for me and praised the act heavily. A first-time client who gave me his ass virginity looked at me meaningfully between moans of pleasure and said, "You have really beautiful eyes."

I'll give you a hint as to my perspective: the ability of a capitalist society to market sexuality and fantasy appears to be boundless. But, of course, as Brecht and Weill demonstrated in the opera The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, an opera centered around the theme of the marketization of human needs and desire, one has to be able to pay the price of admission or face the consequences.

Labels: American Culture, Neoliberalism, Postmodernism, Sexuality

The most recent news reports place the death toll at over 71,000.

Labels: China

According to psychologist Stephen Soldz:

In Soviet Russia, psychiatrists sometimes collaborated with the repressive regime by locking up dissidents in mental hospitals and injecting them with powerful psychotropic drugs, "antipsychotics" designed to treat schizophrenia. The Soviet psychiatrists were rightly condemned for their misuse of medicine for the un-therapeutic purpose of social control.

American health personnel are not immune from cooperating with efforts to misuse psychiatric drugs for social control purposes having no connection with those drugs' intended uses. The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) has been systematically administering psychotropic drugs to immigrants in the process of being deported as the Washington Post reported this week. Deportees who in the past had resisted deportation were injected with drugs, often a three drug "cocktail," in order to keep them pliant during deportation. These drugs included the powerful antipsychotic drug Haldol, as well as the antianxiety drug Ativan, and Cogentin, a drug used to treat the often severe Parkinsons illness like side effects of Haldol.

These drugs were prescribed by psychiatrists and administered by specially selected nurse "medical escorts." The drugs were administered in extremely high doses, sometimes rendering the deportees unable to speak. It sometimes took deportees days or even weeks to get the drugs out of their system. Thus Michael Shango was injected with 32.5 milligrams (mg) of Haldol, as well as 8.5 mg of Ativan and some Cogentin over 11 hours. His initial Haldol dose was 10 mg. Compare this with a usual Haldol dose of 2 to 5 mg repeated in 4 to 6 hours for "control of the acutely agitated schizophrenic patient with moderately severe to very severe symptoms" and 2 to 6 mg of Ativan daily for patients whose bodies have already adapted to the medication; lower doses of these drugs are recommended for new patients as people need time to adjust to them.

These drugs, especially Haldol are extremely powerful and are almost never utilized in individuals not diagnosed as actively psychotic. They can be extremely uncomfortable, especially if first administered in high doses and can disorient an individual for days. When Shango was imprisoned upon his return to the Congo, he was so disoriented that he didn't know where he was fortunately, friends helped him escape. It was weeks before he fully recovered from the drugs.

Soldz rightly places the responsibility for these abuses upon the medical professionals themselves:

In 35 years of practice, I have never had to give such high doses of antipsychotics to any person with any mental illness as is described in this story.

Again, we have an utter breakdown of the accountability of health professionals. As with the behavior of nurses and doctors in the war on terror prisons and the use of drugs for the CIA-State Department's rendition flights, we have a failure of understanding of professional ethics and complete passivity of the AMA and the American Nurses Association.

It is time for both Congress and the health professions themselves to investigate. Recently Senators Levin, Biden and Hagel wrote the Defense Department Inspector General requesting an investigation of the reports of involuntary detainee drugging. This new report of involuntary drugging may be investigated as well.

We need a mechanism, however, for a detailed examination of the perversions of the health professions by the current administration. I have previously called for a Truth and Reconciliation process to deal with the shameful cowardice of the health professions in actively and/or passively aiding the administrations' detention and interrogation abuses. Perhaps this process needs to be expanded to confront the broad range of health profession failures to actively oppose their professions' perversion by the forces of the state.

Or, as I more generally explained in regard to the involvement of psychologists in the tortures inflicted at Guantanamo:

One of the common features of an increasingly violent, unaccountable society is the degradation of its professional classes. Now, to some extent, they always invariably serve as functionairies for their masters, only the most independent minded align themselves with movements for radical social change, but, even so, they perform within a complex network of ethical limitations and analytical standards that legitimize their outward appearance of objectivity

Indeed, such limitations are essential to their effectiveness. After all, how else could Blackstone have permanently established the principles of larceny within Anglo-American jurisprudence in the 18th Century, thus criminalizing perquisites, an opaque, informal means of shared property rights in the production process by laborers, entrepreneurs and merchants in England, leading to the enshrinement of new, substituted system of wage labor? How else could Lombroso have persuaded so many that people reveal an inherent criminality through purported physiological deformities, deformities that, not coincidentally, matched the common perception of what was then known as the lower orders? . . .

Accordingly, instead of the education, ethics and methodology of the psychology profession legitimizing the abuse of detainees at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and elsewhere, quite the opposite has occurred. The abuse and the transparent rationalizations for them are delegitimizing the profession, exposing some of its participants, and its primary organization of governance, the American Psychological Association, as willing facilitators of these sadomasochistic practices. A similar phenomenon has occurred in the legal profession in regard to the judicial defense of these indefinite detentions and the conditions of confinement associated with them. One can only assume that the increased freedom to act violently and abusively more than compensates for the loss of institutional credibility and the potential domestic risk associated with it.

A similar tension between delegitimization and the benefits associated with the unencumbered use of violence and physical abuse is now repeating itself in relation to the deportation of detainees by ICE. One wonders, will any profession in the US, and its publicly pronounced ethical values, values frequently displayed to the rest of the world as a model to be emulated, escape being discredited by the purported war on terror? Of course, I can't avoid exposing my own cynicism by saying that Soldz's exhortation for Congress to take action strikes me as extraordinarily naive. Something more direct, more confrontational is necessary to reverse this perverse process.

Labels: "War on Terror", American Empire, Immigration, Sadomasochism

You may have already read this interview of Zinn by Ziga Vodovnik over at the COUNTERPUNCH website, but if not, I thought it worthwhile to post this excerpt:

Ziga Vodovnik: From the 1980s onwards we are witnessing the process of economic globalization getting stronger day after day. Many on the Left are now caught between a “dilemma” – either to work to reinforce the sovereignty of nation-states as a defensive barrier against the control of foreign and global capital; or to strive towards a non-national alternative to the present form of globalization and that is equally global. What's your opinion about this?

Howard Zinn: I am an anarchist, and according to anarchist principles nation states become obstacles to a true humanistic globalization. In a certain sense the movement towards globalization where capitalists are trying to leap over nation state barriers, creates a kind of opportunity for movement to ignore national barriers, and to bring people together globally, across national lines in opposition to globalization of capital, to create globalization of people, opposed to traditional notion of globalization. In other words to use globalization – it is nothing wrong with idea of globalization – in a way that bypasses national boundaries and of course that there is not involved corporate control of the economic decisions that are made about people all over the world.

ZV: Pierre-Joseph Proudhon once wrote that: “Freedom is the mother, not the daughter of order.” Where do you see life after or beyond (nation) states?

HZ: Beyond the nation states? (laughter) I think what lies beyond the nation states is a world without national boundaries, but also with people organized. But not organized as nations, but people organized as groups, as collectives, without national and any kind of boundaries. Without any kind of borders, passports, visas. None of that! Of collectives of different sizes, depending on the function of the collective, having contacts with one another. You cannot have self-sufficient little collectives, because these collectives have different resources available to them. This is something anarchist theory has not worked out and maybe cannot possibly work out in advance, because it would have to work itself out in practice.

ZV: Do you think that a change can be achieved through institutionalized party politics, or only through alternative means – with disobedience, building parallel frameworks, establishing alternative media, etc.

HZ: If you work through the existing structures you are going to be corrupted. By working through political system that poisons the atmosphere, even the progressive organizations, you can see it even now in the US, where people on the “Left” are all caught in the electoral campaign and get into fierce arguments about should we support this third party candidate or that third party candidate. This is a sort of little piece of evidence that suggests that when you get into working through electoral politics you begin to corrupt your ideals. So I think a way to behave is to think not in terms of representative government, not in terms of voting, not in terms of electoral politics, but thinking in terms of organizing social movements, organizing in the work place, organizing in the neighborhood, organizing collectives that can become strong enough to eventually take over – first to become strong enough to resist what has been done to them by authority, and second, later, to become strong enough to actually take over the institutions.

ZV: One personal question. Do you go to the polls? Do you vote?

HZ: I do. Sometimes, not always. It depends. But I believe that it is preferable sometimes to have one candidate rather another candidate, while you understand that that is not the solution. Sometimes the lesser evil is not so lesser, so you want to ignore that, and you either do not vote or vote for third party as a protest against the party system. Sometimes the difference between two candidates is an important one in the immediate sense, and then I believe trying to get somebody into office, who is a little better, who is less dangerous, is understandable. But never forgetting that no matter who gets into office, the crucial question is not who is in office, but what kind of social movement do you have. Because we have seen historically that if you have a powerful social movement, it doesn’t matter who is in office. Whoever is in office, they could be Republican or Democrat, if you have a powerful social movement, the person in office will have to yield, will have to in some ways respect the power of social movements.

We saw this in the 1960s. Richard Nixon was not the lesser evil, he was the greater evil, but in his administration the war was finally brought to an end, because he had to deal with the power of the anti-war movement as well as the power of the Vietnamese movement. I will vote, but always with a caution that voting is not crucial, and organizing is the important thing.

When some people ask me about voting, they would say will you support this candidate or that candidate? I say: ‘I will support this candidate for one minute that I am in the voting booth. At that moment I will support A versus B, but before I am going to the voting booth, and after I leave the voting booth, I am going to concentrate on organizing people and not organizing electoral campaign.’

An excellent interview that should be read in its entirety, especially for Zinn's insight as to how the direct action principle of anarchism has significantly influenced American social movements, such as the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.

In regard to the excerpt posted here, Vodovnik has elicited a candid response from Zinn as to one of the most fundamental dilemmas facing an anarchist: when should one participate in existing social structures and processes, such as elections, and when should one not? Apparently, it is only possible to muddle through as best as one can, based upon one's subjective perception of external perils and opportunities, and hope that one does not unintentionally legitimize, and thereby prolong, a system that one hopes to someday transform.

Labels: American Empire, Anarchism, Elections, Neoliberalism

Every now and then, less and less frequently, unfortunately, there are days when you just can't help being proud of where you live. In California, today is one of those days. Earlier this morning, the California Supreme Court released a 4-3 decision to the effect that same sex marriage must be permitted under the California Constitution. Predictably, gays and lesbians responded with tears of joy.

At last, my gay and lesbian friends will no longer be implicitly ostracized as social inferiors because they cannot receive the respect that we show for straight couples. Even so, I can't resist expressing my contempt for Justices Chin and Corrigan. Both dissented on the ground that such a decision should have been left to the voters of California. Indeed, Justice Chin, we should have left it to the voters of California to decide whether people can exclude Chinese people from owning property. Indeed, Justice Corrigan, we should have left it to the voters of this state as to whether women should have opportunities in the workplace equal to those of men. Cowardice is as easily found in the California judiciary as it is within the state's political system.

Finally, on a more personal note, congratulations to Shelly and Ellen, the affection and integrity of your relationship, something that many of us experienced all along, has finally been legally recognized. I remember interviewing Shelly several years ago on KDVS, and she off-handedly did something that must have been difficult. She described how she came out by merely raising her hand to donate $20 to the effort to defeat the Briggs Initiative, a measure that would have prohibited the employment of gays and lesbians as teachers, after being exhorted to do so by Harvey Milk in 1978. That was it, I was out, she said. After the accumulation of millions of other similarly brave decisions, the world changed.

Labels: California, Civil Rights, Same Sex Marriage