[3] Marxist theory affirms the commodification of informal laborers by othering them from the proletariat- understanding the role of informal laborers is key to rejecting “productivist” ideals
(Annie McClanahan and Jon-David Settell ’21McClanahan is Assistant Professor of English at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee where she teaches contemporary American literature and culture, Marxist theory, and interdisciplinary approaches to economic crisis. Mahindra Humanities Center Postdoctoral Fellow in 2010-11, and a Fellow at the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University in 2012-13. Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Center for 21st Century Studies in 2013-14. Humanities Center, Harvard University, Postdoctoral Fellow, 2010-2011 B.A. in English and World Literature, Pitzer College, M.S.W. in Clinical Social Work3, Columbia University, M.A. in Comparative Literature, San Francisco State University EG)
The sex worker is a figure at once blessed and burdened with an excessive signifying power. Years after her appearance in Marx’s Economic and Philo- sophical Manuscripts as both metaphor for and example of wage labor, she surfaces again in a footnote to Capital as le femme de leur, her feminized vulnerability a sign of the coercion of ownership and private property. At first, she is the inanimate (if also “very delicate”) commodity, but her chiasmatic transition into a subject also marks a key turn in the argument, as Marx ([1867] 1990: 178) moves from the commodity-object that cannot take itself to market (the dancing table) to the commodity-subject who can (the worker who must sell her own labor power).
In the opening of his highly influential essay “The Pedestal and the Veil: Rethinking the Capitalism/Slavery Question,” Walter Johnson (2004: 299) begins by asking, “What does it mean to say that a person has been commodified? Is this about slavery? Prostitution? Wage labor?” Johnson’s essay largely concerns the tension between the first and third of those possibilities: between a historical claim that capitalist wage labor replaces slave labor and a more rhetorical claim that slavery persists under capital as “wage slavery.” Johnson argues that this “metaphorical promiscuity” (306) allows Marx to imply that slavery is both the opposite of wage labor and a metaphor for it. But what of Johnson’s brief invocation of the prostitute, who also appears both as commodity object and as commodity subject in Marx’s account? While there is no doubt that the history of slavery and the discourse of the slave’s unfreedom are more central to Capital (and to capital), we suggest that the sex worker also does “promiscuous” work across political economy. Like the figure of the slave, the sex worker appears both as the other of the wage worker (because she is a mere commodity object rather than vivified labor power) and as wage work’s violent generalization (as when to prostitute becomes a metaphor for selling one’s abilities or capacities). Whereas the figure of the slave constructs and deconstructs the distinction between freedom and unfreedom, the sex worker complicates the difference between productive and nonproductive work. In this sense, understanding the rhetorical work done by the figure of the sex worker is crucial both to understanding and to resisting what Moishe Postone (1993: 17) terms a “productivist” ideology—one which would “affirm [wage] labor and industrial production” instead of seeking to abolish them.