MIM Notes #226    January 15, 2001

Letter from England sparks debate about lifestyle, pornography, 
prostitution

Dear MIM:

Thanks for the journals. I send a manuscript copy of the first 
Guerrilla Press publication: 101 Questions to the CCA. This was 
originally published under the title "How to Make a Petrol Bomb." 
It was heavily censored by the hospital I am prisoner of. Please 
tell me what you think--publish all or some of it if you wish: it 
is Marxist.

I do have some criticisms of MIM line, but I have enough info from 
you now to write a full critique, which I will forward when it is 
finished. There is a lot of merit in what you are 
doing/saying/running.

The only point I would like to make, is that Britain's anarchist 
made a big point of fighting in both World Wars, and we had major 
casualties due to this.

Keep up the good work!

--Reader in England

October, 2000

MIM International Minister replies: This organization distributes 
"both" points of view on pornography, while advocating armed 
revolution led by the vanguard of prostitutes, meaning sex workers 
in England. One organization it mentions and distributes for says 
revolution "will mean a rise in the amount of pornography 
available. Censorship will not be enforceable." This is from the 
libertarian side of the anarchist movement that sees Internet 
pornography as indicative of true libertarian impulses.

Yet, the manuscript "101 Questions for the C.C.A." says 
"Pornography is the worst evil of the spectacle and the state, and 
must be destroyed by the people." Unfortunately, the document and 
others say pornography is Satanic, which may be true, but hardly 
relevant to scientific socialists: "We believe that Satanism is 
the main target in the struggle against the state. In recent 
years, the only thing standing between the people and the overall 
overthrow of the state has been the Church of Satan."

C.C.A. has something to say in its meld of anarchism and feminism: 
"Pornography is the highest evil of the spectacle that brainwashes 
the people into accepting the state. . . . The end of pornography 
should be the first demand of the revolutionary guerilla."

Given resolutions at our last two congresses, (see "Against 
lifestyle idealism: the PIRAO and porn," 2000 and "MIM's platform 
on veganism and animal rights" 1999: 
http://www.prisoncensorship.info/archive/etext/wim/pcongres.html) it is fitting 
that we just received a document saying, "By boycotting 
pornography, you are refusing to participate in a spectacle which 
is not only perverted, but is also Satanic, in the same way that 
by becoming vegetarian you are refusing to condone the senseless 
murder of animals for meat when there are so many starving in the 
third world." To MIM, the fact that this statement occurred in a 
major document advocating armed struggle in the imperialist Anglo-
Saxon world is only too typical of what is wrong with would-be 
revolutionary ideologies arising from unconsciously Christian 
places. Even the most righteous-minded people of the imperialist 
countries prove how difficult it is to bring the science of 
revolution to countries of mostly petty-bourgeois people who have 
the illusion of being above the repressiveness of class society 
since they are neither proletarian nor capitalist.

It's not surprising these statements about veganism and 
pornography occur together, because they both focus on consumer 
choices, whereas we Marxists focus on planning of production first 
and distribution secondarily, and consumption only later down the 
road and mostly as a matter of criticizing the bourgeois 
economists and lifestyle anarchists. We ask whether the people 
would plan production the way they do now when it comes to food if 
profit were illegal. How much pornography would be made, we 
wonder, if it were illegal to profit from making it. We also 
condemn vegan outreach which pretends that the quantity of food is 
the problem in Third World starvation, when in fact distribution 
is the problem. Talking about the pounds of grain it takes to make 
a pound of meat is a cover-up of the fact that enough food already 
exists to feed the whole world. The individualists, Christians and 
lifestyle anarchists think about consumption, always their own 
individual consumption, which also fits in in the imperialist 
countries, since the major role is to consume more than produce. 
Yet it is impossible to unite large social groups with individual 
lifestyle-focussed solutions.

One of the reasons this document is so confused like most 
anarchist and libertarian documents, is that it recognizes that 
division occurs from the way society looks at prostitution and 
pornography. Getting the people righteous about prostitutes is one 
way in which the ruling class lets itself off the hook while 
dividing wimmin. In the United $tates, the ruling class succeeds 
in diverting people with the fight against crime across the board, 
with much greater statistical consistency and aim at the oppressed 
nations over-represented in the lumpenproletariat.

"We believe that the worst extreme of this situation are the laws 
that persecute prostitute women whilst allowing capitalist 
pornographers to get away with Satanism that keep them rich," says 
the Guerrilla Press publication. MIM agrees only the most naive 
and anti-scientific would fail to realize that the capitalist 
state profits the most from prostitution through corruption and 
jobs created for management of prostitution (police, jailers, 
bondsmen, judges, lawyers).

C.C.A. holds that prostitutes are the most exploited people and 
that the state and Satanism exist to exploit them. Hence, if 
prostitutes lead the revolution, the revolution will have the most 
far-reaching consequences according to the C.C.A.

It's difficult to take this material too seriously, some of it 
proposing mutual aid in distributing pornography, some of it 
advocating fire-bombing of Satanists who uphold pornography and 
some of it saying there is no way to repress traitors to the 
movement (because of course that would be Marxism or the state 
again)--all in typical anarchist individualist fashion. What we 
find in all of this is the extremes of oscillation that the 
individualist tradition goes to to handle something it just cannot 
handle--oppression of groups of people and the unifying 
connections amongst all people. MIM suggests that to do that, 
people should forget about consumption as long as they can and 
think about planning production and distribution and the 
implications. Otherwise whether Satanist or Christian, whether 
anarchist or conformist, the people involved will risk never 
making a true break with Christian-individualist thinking.

MIM also differs from C.C.A, because except for the undocumented 
immigrants and perhaps the really drug-crazed ones who don't know 
what world they are in, prostitutes do not have to do what they do 
for a living under capitalism in the imperialist countries. Some 
of the umph that C.C.A. is seeking from a union of prostitutes is 
simply not there because people who would bother to organize on 
sex-worker issues have other outs available to them completely 
outside the sex-worker industry. Those outs may not pay as well, 
but the basic needs of the oppressor nation peoples of the 
imperialist countries are largely met, excluding issues such as 
war and pollution. To really find a class of people or group whose 
demands will drag the whole society forward, we need to pick a 
group that will have no way out but revolution. Imperialist 
country prostitutes do generally have a way out, and hence 
organizing for their demands will result in an "oozing away" of 
revolutionary energy. We can address some of their concerns like 
we can address many concerns of the middle-class generally, but we 
cannot make the sex-workers the vanguard of our movement.