Porn Free

In my blog, Thinking Outside the Box , I referred to the fact that I had seen that in the San Fernando Valley a group of porn actors had established their own co-operative so that they could control their own work, and the profits that flowed from it.

As I pointed out there, this is no frivolous matter. The Porn industry in the US alone is a multi-billion dollar industry. Without Porn its unlikely that Video machines would have taken off so quickly. Its likely that it was the large number of porn titles on VHS as opposed to Betamax that made the former dominant, and ultimately the only format, even though the latter was technically superior. Similarly, porn has driven new media forms such as DVD and Internet. In America’s San Fernando Valley the Porn Industry sits alongside the mainstream film industry, and increasingly the two have been coming together – again no pun intended.

Like the mainstream industry porn has its own equivalent events and journals. Mainstream has “Variety”, Porn has Adult Video News (AVN). Hollywood has the Oscars, Porn has the AVN Awards. Oscars are awarded for “Best Director” and so on, while the AVN Awards has “Best Anal”, or “Best DP”.

But, a recent article in the Financial Times Rude Awakening also demonstates another aspect of what I was talking about in that blog. It appears that this multi-billion dollar industry is being put under threat by the very cultural and technological changes it has helped to bring about. In short, the YouTube generation has learned that they can do it for themselves. Like Hollywood, the big bucks in Porn come ffrom the fact that a large audience is prepared to pay a relatively small number of performers large amounts of money to see their performances. But, the FT points out that there are now a large number of people prepared to film their own performances and share them with the world.

The FT, points to YouPorn , PornTube , and RedTube (Warning These Links show scenes of an explicit sexual nature) as examples free sites where individuals upload their own videos. Worse for the porn industry some people upload clips of porn videos too, undermining the whole basis of the industry’s profits.

Yet, as I pointed out before this is just a very distinct example of the transformation in the new types of consumption, and production that technology has brought about. The mainstream music industry now uses similar methods for distributing music, and new bands and other types of artists use the Net to get themselves known, to distribute their material etc.

In a recent edition of the BBC’s “Click” programme, an item referred to a new site, which allows Computer Programmers to obtain work by effectively bidding for it online. In place of them being Wage Workers, they become self-employed sellers of a commodity in the form of a piece of work, rather than the commodity “Labour-Power”. But, there is no reason that this type of set-up should be confined just to people like Computer programmers. As I said already, artists of various kinds are using the Internet to distribute their work. The Porntube etc. format as YouTube itself has demonstrated provides the basis for everyone to be a reporter, to have a view, to be an artist, or whatever they want to be. Of course, as is the case with the Internet in general quantity does not mean you get quality. But, on a wider basis than that the same kind of set-up used for programmers could equally well be used for book-keepers, wage clerks, or almost any other type of clerical or administrative job you can think of. In other words, as I described such a process some years ago, it is a process of transforming wage workers back into peasants, but now technological peasants who sell the commodity they produce in cyber space rather than physical space, and pay a rent to a Landlord that owns that cyber space.

In America, there is already at least one small community where this kind of set-up applies. Everyone there works on this kind of basis over the Internet, and never or very, very rarely has to go to what could be described as a conventional workplace. For Marxists, whose ideas about revolutionary change were largely predicated on the kind of social change, and shared values that arise when huge numbers of workers in increasingly large factories are thrown together, this has important consequences. Yet, as social networking sites such as Facebook, as well as sites like YouTube show, at the same time as atomising workers at the level of the factory or workplace, the Internet, and new forms of ICT are creating an even larger community, an even more rapid and open transmission of ideas than could arise within the confines of the workplace. Moreover, that small community in the US had created new forms of social interaction. At home all day, its members found themselves talking to their neighbours far more, forming community organisations to deal with the problems in the community in a way they might not have so readily done if they had been at work all day.

The nature of Capitalism is changing rapidly. Marxists have to adapt their ideas and strategies accordingly.