...masturbation is obviously the most ethical act short of chastity.




by Lawrence Rockwood

Our society needs to stop selling sexual love, marriage and having children to the general population. Society should go back to encouraging monasticism as in the West one thousand years ago and among some Buddhists societies even today, even for atheists. As socialists, our blindness to material cost to individual members of our society resulting from romanticizing of sexual love leads us to support some of the most socially destructive laws and policies as a social good. Capitalism has everything to do with sex, love, and marriage. It is no coincidence that the most socialist social compacts historically were monasteries, regardless of the religious traditions involved. The greatest crime in the history of human relations was the dereification of sexual love from a physical thing to a romantic plane by mostly men that were not getting enough sex on this plane. As socialists, we do not sufficiently address the fact that the most catastrophic material events in many individuals’ lives is often directly related to falling in love and, therefore, often the most regretted.

In Volume I, Part 1 of Marx's Capital, he discussed the all important concept of “commodity fetishism” as a “mystification” of market stimulated human relations that have become degraded to the point that they are objectified as a material relationship between commodities (things) and capital (money). In his earlier and more humanistic works, Marx related "fetishism" to materialist approaches to origin of religions, especially Ludwig Feuerbach's. Marx would have been much more successful if he focused on the more earthly core focus of commodity fetishism in human affairs – sexual love.

I think the main reason for this was his extremely atypical relationship with his wife Jenny. He loved her dearly, gave her very little of the materialist symbols of the commodification of romantic love, and worked her to an early death. Their relationship would have been completely extraordinary if they had not been extremely poor. The commodification associated with sexual love has always been associated with power and class since the days of the Pharaohs when the women of the highest position wore dearly expensive make-up to give them the appearance of being in heat.

The success of capitalism in increasing the material possessions of even the lower classes in the world’s most exploitive nations until the 1970s enabled billions of less affluent women to be able to buy products to make them look like they are also in heat. Today the entire content of so-called “womens'” magazines and the economies of entire sections of our major cities are fascinatingly and wholeheartedly pure in their commitment to this ancient mission. The imperfect professional social, economic, and professional advancement of women over the last century as done nothing to stem the advancement of this core sector of our economy, quite the reverse.

For a women to appear to be in heat is for the general purpose of increasing the likelihood of sexual contact with a preferred partner or at least for a secondary advantage of appearing to be so preoccupied. It is also said that even males engage in economic behaviors toward similar ends (enough said on that score). But, the intended result, the act of sex itself, is not always the problem. In this I follow Red Emma Goldman and not Andrea Dworkin. In fact, just as a sex act that does not spread disease is a more responsible than unsafe sex, the most ethical kind of sex is sex that is not tied to romantic love, marriage and childbirth. Even in the case of the later, wanted children are much more likely to consume far more the earth’s resources than unwanted children and, therefore, the decision to have them is more irresponsible. Or in more striking Marxian terms, they are more likely to be class enemies. Therefore, in summary, masturbation is obviously the most ethical act short of chastity.

And yes, almost as problematic as the dereification of sexual love is the glorification of parenthood. To provide for one’s natural offspring is not virtuous. If it is, is a virtue characteristic of being a good mammal rather than anything specific to being an ethical human being. What is greed other than desiring the material well being of oneself and one’s own at the expense of others? To expand this desire of material well being from one’s family to any larger group that does not encompass the entire human race is the very essence of fascism. For example, a nationalist is nothing more than the point on the evolutionary scale between a mammal and a human.

How do our romantic and family based sentimentalities lead us, even as socialists, to take the wrong positions on some of the most materially significant issues in our society? Here are just a few examples:

1. The industries associated with providing services to those most affected by the consequences of romantic love and parentage are some of the most rapaciously exploitive institutions in our capitalist society. For example, the divorce and child custody industry gives the prison and war industries a run for their (or our) money in their exploitation of the human condition. If there is the moral civilian equivalent of war criminals, they are to be found in this industry. As socialists, we often defend the former because it its association with public institutions. The same logic should hold for the latter.

In fact, the most common form of violence in our society is not war; it is violence from a sexual partner, a former sexual partner, or a parent. The so-called professionals and institutions who have fiduciary obligations to assist such victims should be most ethical; too often they are the least ethical in our society.

2. Can you imagine living in a society where they pay people thousands of dollars a years to have children for no other reason except that they have reproductive organs? What is worse, socialists often support such policies even when they are not tied to economic need. The least insightful child knows the world does not need more people and only “national socialists” are interested in increasing one human population at the expense of another. It is true that in the early 20th century that socialists like Margaret Sanger were publicly tainted with psuedo-science of eugenics. But to ignore the scientific evidence of the chief source of human suffering on earth is an even more inhuman extreme. The human preoccupation with sex has led the successful increasing generation of the human species as an end in itself, an end that is no longer desirable.

3. As socialists, we fight for the right of every human to socialized medicine. But what kind of medicine? The glory of American “for profit” medicine is the many brands of miracle meds to artificially give a man an erection. The race for an equivalent for women is severe. This is based on the reality that the erection, or sex drive, is the fundamental totem of our capitalist society at large. Conservatives attack socialized medicine because they claim it may provide these meds to certain groups like child abusers or undocumented immigrants. We should dispel them of this worry. On a planet where the poorest billions die in agony for not being properly maintained on pain medications, a technology 10,000 years old, no one should be provided “boner” pills. One area the military was more socially advanced than civilian society at large was in the fact it used taxpayer funds to provide saltpeter, however unwillingly, to its soldiers.

4. As socialists we often fail to defend a woman’s reproductive rights as a social instead of a liberal right. It was once argued that slavery was a necessity, it was not and neither is sex (the technology of the swab and the test tube has arrived). But while slavery could be ended by an act of state, sex cannot. Regrettably, as sex is a somewhat irresistible choice for most, abortion at this point in history is a necessity. Because most people will not take my sage advice and become monks, the human race must live with the consequences of the sexual act and the state must allow people to mitigate those consequences. The state can no more end abortion than it can end sex, it can only make them illicit. The “right of privacy” in Roe v. Wade is misread by liberals as a “personal choice.” If you read the actual text of the decision, abortion is a human right contingent on current technology and access to it provides a social right based on necessity and not a liberal right based on mere personal preference.

The state never has a right to do what it does not have the power to do. This is also true of other human behaviors that the state can only criminalize, but not end, whether drinking, drugs, the sex industry, or suicide. The state can, however, criminalize behavior based on the “intentional” victimization of others, like the sexual exploitation of children and other violence. That is why if it could ever be proved (and it cannot) that the intention of a particular sex act was an abortion, that act should be illegal. In the same way, it should be illegal to intentionally deprive others of the fruits of their labor, which can be proven (and that fact is what makes us socialists). That is why the democratic socialist position to law and government should be based on a socially pragmatic “libertarianism” and not the subjective idealist “libertinism” of liberals.

In conclusion, I am a socialist because I am against war. War is the consumption of 70% of the world’s natural resources on an annual basis by the most materially endowed top 20% of the world’s population while the bottom 50% consumes less than 5%. We need an international democratic socialist revolution. In the mean time, the most revolutionary thing we can do is to keep it in our pants.



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