General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: When ideals collide... porn vs. feminism [View all]BainsBane
(54,052 posts)In a state run system, like Cuba before the fall of the USSR, there was very little private enterprise, so not much space for porn. Porn is a commerce. It yields profit. If a society is not built around profit, there would likely be some underground porn passed around between people but not the massive for-profit industry that results in tremendous labor exploitation and even slavery.
If on the other hand you are imagining a European social democratic system, the principal difference would be that a guarantee of a basic fair wage for work likely reduce the numbers of those who would choose to work in porn.
Neither of these scenarios, of course, account for the international commerce of porn and the internet.
My point, however, was not to imagine different forms of government that would eliminate porn but rather to point out that the emphasis on individual liberty that is the justification for porn--along with much else in American society--comes to us courtesy of capitalism. Our notion of rights as resting in the individual rather than the people as a whole is itself a capitalist notion. Our constitution is a liberal document--representing liberalism in its classical sense, in keeping with Adam Smith, John Locke, etc. . . Liberalism emerged as the political ideology underlying and justifying capitalism, which came to displace mercantilism.
Not only are notions of liberty tied to the emphasis on the individual essential to capitalism, but in reconciling competing rights, the marketplace--meaning corporate profit--becomes the determining factor. Money is defined as free speech because the ruling class benefits from such a notion. The Second Amendment emerges as inviolate because that conception guarantees profits for gun manufacturers, while porn is justified according to free speech and liberty because it yields profits for pornographers. Whenever rights come into conflict, as they very often do, they tend to be reconciled in ways that further the accumulation of capital (corporate profit).