As a budding anthropologist, Iris had observed that, contrary to Marx’s belief, men of different class backgrounds could, and often did, find common ground. By the 1960s, it was not uncommon for working men to be invited into chambers of commerce and boardrooms – even to Whitehall and Downing Street. How come? Conventional wisdom had it that, once workers were organized in effective trade unions, bosses had an interest in co-opting their leaders so as to establish industrial peace and strike mutually advantageous agreements.
Iris dismissed this explanation as unacceptably incomplete. Humanity’s tragedy, she argued, was that common interests do not guarantee cooperation, even when the stakes are sky high. Something else is needed to bring people together first. A bond of trust and allegiance. Some sort of shared identity. What identity was it that the members of these conflicting social classes shared? What did they have in common as people that allowed them to establish common ground on wages and working conditions, on legislation and matters of state? Iris’s answer caused much consternation among both the men and the women who heard it: it was their shared entitlement as men to use women.
‘Behind every successful man is a surprised woman,’ Iris liked to joke. ‘And behind every successful deal between men from across the class divide there is a sexual contract that gives them joint, though unequal, ownership over women’s labour – often over their bodies.’
Bosses had their trophy wives and an army of secretaries, administrators and support staff, while the male workers they routinely exploited had an even more exploited and downtrodden unpaid domestic labourer to return home to.
‘It may not be much,’ I remember Iris saying to me once, ‘but it is just enough. After all, plenty of people with a 90 per cent mortgage are convinced they own their own homes. So it’s hardly surprising that ownership of their wives’ labour is enough to convince working-class men they have something in common with their bosses.’
War on love
Most women were aghast when Iris shared her conviction that an unspoken contract of female enslavement underpinned even the most progressive social pact. Her women friends, proud of feminism’s advances, were angered when Iris casually dismissed its achievements. While she acknowledged that feminism had succeeded partially, in that millions of women had escaped servitude by claiming positions of authority – Maggie Thatcher being the prime example – they had only managed to do so by becoming honorary males. And only if they first found some other, usually browner, woman to take their place on the domestic front as a marginalized proletarian.
Iris’s audacious theory was that, since at least the French Revolution, every time progressive movements scored a victory, women were pushed ever so slightly deeper into collective bondage, even while individual women flourished. Every time the franchise was extended to include men of smaller means and lower rank, women had paid the price by sinking even lower down the pecking order. So in the 1970s, when most progressives thought women’s place in society was gradually improving, Iris saw a steady deterioration.
And when in the 1980s her friends were celebrating sexual liberation and women’s empowerment, Iris’s analysis turned gloomier still. Good sex was being reimagined, in her view, as but another species of fair trade, while working men, their fortunes waning in proportion to deindustrialization, looked to sex to regain the power they felt rapidly slipping through their fingers. Transactional sex was, of course, better than sex under duress. But it did nothing to enrich, empower or liberate women – or indeed men. Only a readiness to fall in love could do that, because falling in love was, in her opinion, the exact opposite of free-market, transactional sex.
‘Falling in love is one the greatest acts of resistance against Thatcherism’s oeuvre!’ she would declare. ‘In an era when being in control – of one’s stocks, inventories, workers, timetable – is valued above all else, falling in love means surrendering control to an “other”. It threatens the foundational ideology – of exchange value, of individual agency and self-determination – of financialized capitalism.
‘Attaining happiness purely through joyous intimacy, without paying for anything?’ she said, adopting the deep voice and angry tone of a captain of industry. ‘Surrendering unconditionally to another person, expecting nothing in return and becoming genuinely fulfilled in doing so? It is so damned anti-capitalist, so subversive an idea, such a threat to our way of life that if the government had any sense they would immediately start a War on Love as fierce as the War on Drugs.’
By the late 1980s, of course, Thatcher had succeeded: the idea that something could be given away for the joy of it was almost unfathomable, and Iris identified an equivalent triumph in the arena of sexual politics. The young were being groomed into seeing sexuality as naturally selfish and exploitative. It became uncool to admit you had fallen in love. Girls were expected to look sexy all the time but were still scorned when they had sex, indoctrinated with the monopolist’s mindset that to maximize profit they had to restrict supply. And all the while, the same people who were increasingly incapable of conceiving of a sexual dynamic other than he-takes-she-gives adopted a politically correct language of sexual equality entirely at odds with their own thinking and behaviour.
‘Thatcherism robbed sex of its sexiness,’ Iris once told me, ‘turning it into a form of mutual masturbation, tinged with the ever-present threat of violence.’
This was soon after the Iron Lady’s third election victory in 1987, shortly before Iris retreated permanently into her Brighton cocoon.
Love and death after capitalism
As a teenager, Iris had liked to imagine that the demise of capitalism would be a triumph for love, justice and, by extension, women’s emancipation. By the late 1970s, that faith had faded. Now Siris’s dispatches confirmed her fears.
In the early years of the OC rebellion, romance staged a comeback. As in all revolutions, great acts of courage led to great ruptures that yielded great love affairs. Admittedly, many of those relations burned bright but fast and fizzled out. Nevertheless, even as late as 2013, the OC revolution’s most famous daughter, Esmeralda, issued a provocative call for the revolution’s values ‘to penetrate our sexual relations’ in a historic speech that came to be known as her Soho Address.
When I am having sex, I demand to be both an object and a subject.
Just as I refuse to be either a waged worker or a capitalist employer, I refuse to be either a feminized object or a male subject.
Just as I laugh at those who tell me I must only give myself to someone with whom I have a future, I laugh when people say ‘It was just sex’. I refuse to endorse the belittlement of sex in the same way that I refuse to endorse its elevation onto some divine pedestal.
Is it not time that we rejected all these false oppositions – sex versus love, subject versus object?
At last we have done away with the oppressive belief that sex is everything, but must we now replace it with the alienating conviction that it means nothing?
Is it not time to give up on defining sex? To realize that it has to do with everything at once: bodily joy, love, playfulness, but also with power?
Our revolution challenged possessive individualism in all its forms. Our new laws and participatory institutions have put an end to the private ownership of corporations, of land, of credit and money creation. We have succeeded in reuniting the economic with the political, the moral with the efficient, the functional with the fair.
Having struggled so hard to realize our new social arrangements, would it not be a pity to allow sex to remain as a form of market transaction, as a power relationship?
Remember how radically we dealt with market power? We did not simply bolster some competition authority. No, we got rid of the stock exchange and we legislated so that workers have one share each. We replaced the credit ratings of financiers with the socialworthiness indices of the community. Comrades, we must be equally bold an
d radical when it comes to sex.
Take the issue of consent. Will we continue to rely on legal structures and lawyers to define consent? Will we continue to look to the state to enforce it in our bedrooms and our lives? Or should we instead begin anew by looking inside ourselves, as critically as we have looked at our political and financial institutions in recent years?
Speaking personally, I demand the right to consent to sex and not to be touched without it. But I also acknowledge that without desire there is nothing I want to consent to. And I know in my bones that desire can’t help itself. It screams. It beseeches. It begs. If I have to ask, my desire must be weak. And to be honest, comrades, if he has to ask, it’s over for me before it begins.
To have sex with you, I must desire you. And I can only desire you because you desire me because I desire you because – in other words – our desires create and continuously reinforce one another, forming a relationship in which I am both subject and object, giver and recipient. Comrades, make no mistake: this is the opposite of reciprocity, the antithesis of a market exchange.
Think about it: sex cannot be good and thus truly consensual, if I am giving you something in order to take something back. It can only be good and thus truly consensual, if I do it because I can’t help myself. It is only good if I have lost control and I am loving it. Good sex, authentically consensual sex, can never be contractual, with specified terms of exchange. Nor can it be governed by codes of fairness nor confined to certain types of relationship.
Like two mirrors facing one another, two lovers generate an infinite self-reflection. Whatever it is that they are giving one another can never be itemized or quantified.
Comrades, we staged our revolution to replace rivalry with cooperation in all walks of life. Sex is as unquantifiable as an experience as any that people share – whether they are writing a song or glimpsing a comet blaze through the night sky.
Our revolution ended the division of profit and wage so that people can do things together gainfully without exploitation. It ended the division of the political from the economic for the same reason. It brought community into our corporations and embedded corporations in our communities.
Let us now – consciously – exploit the opportunity we have created for ourselves to end the division between sex and love, between subject and object, between desire and consent.
We have nothing to lose and a whole universe of pleasure to gain.
Weeks after reading Esmeralda’s Soho Address, phrases in it still brought tears to Iris’s eyes, It was a reminder that every revolution has its Alexandra Kollontai and its Rosa Luxemburg – magnificent, tragic women determined to use the rare opportunity handed them by history to put a dent in women’s subjugation, while at the same time promoting humanity’s broader interests. Like theirs, Esmeralda’s dreams were also dashed, not least, in Iris’s view, because the majority of women proved unequal to the task.
Siris had sent the Soho Address through the wormhole not as evidence that the sexual revolution she had hoped for had succeeded but as a vision of the glorious path not taken. After the initial burst of radicalism, Siris explained that the Other Now’s economic and political institutions began to produce significant levels of shared prosperity, and with it came a renewed social conservatism.
By 2020, political correctness dominated public discourse to the extent that the language Esmeralda had used in her address was considered inappropriate. A definition of consent was demanded, debated and enshrined in law. Indeed, everything in the Other Now from 2013 onwards that Siris described led Iris to conclude that the end of capitalism had failed to bring to an end the sexual contract on which capitalism had relied.
‘Remember our campaigns back in the days of the Gay Liberation Front?’ Siris asked Iris.
‘Of course I remember,’ she replied.
‘We fought for liberation, not equality,’ said Siris. ‘I wouldn’t have bothered getting out of bed – let alone demonstrating in the streets – for the right to share in the misery of some sexually repressed straight person.’
‘How could I forget?’ Iris replied.
‘Our dream was to change society radically, not just to be accepted by it,’ Siris went on, recounting in detail over the course of several dispatches the vision they had fought for so audaciously.
It became obvious to Iris that, in reliving those times with her, Siris was responding to a deep-rooted but unfulfilled need of some kind. Iris wondered what it was. Did Siris lack friends in the Other Now? Or was it something more sinister: did she perhaps feel unsafe even mentioning these ideas?
‘What has gone wrong?’ Iris thought to herself. ‘What happened to those young lesbians’ commitment to build a broad liberation movement involving feminist, trade union and black organizations? How did we allow a movement intent on emancipation to embrace joyless, oppressive political correctness and, in so doing, to quash the vibrant, indeterminate liberty we were fighting for? How did a vision of freedom degenerate into a pathetic equality narrative that, at its worst, has translated into little more than the commercialization of queerness and the right to have kitsch weddings?’
The more she thought about it, the more convinced Iris was that the stupendous resilience of the sexual contract – the source of the crippling alienation she had railed against for as long as she could remember – was the worst news to have come from the Other Now, eclipsing all the good it had achieved and imperilling her already shaky faith in humanity. Perhaps, Iris thought, it was indeed time to turn to some other failure instead, if only to distract her from such a painful realization.
And so it was that, after days of resisting them, Iris acceded to Eva’s demands and wrote to Siris on a different subject.
‘I gather that 2022 was a year of monetary crisis. Was it serious?’
Siris confirmed that it had been. She described briefly how the Other Now’s payments systems had almost collapsed and how, for the first time since the OC rebellion, there had been shortages and demonstrations in the streets. There had even been organized hacking attacks that revived the spirit and methods of the OC rebellion.
‘Yes, 2022 was an awful year,’ Siris wrote, ‘not least because it was the year we lost Esmeralda.’
‘What do you mean “lost”? What happened?’ Iris asked.
‘She was stabbed to death as she was walking home one night,’ Siris replied.
Shocked, Iris demanded more information, but there was little Siris could offer. The assailant was never caught, she explained, and his identity remained unknown. Siris explained that the scene was caught on a surveillance camera meant to trigger a rapid police response in cases of assault. But the police did not respond fast enough and, after the fact, using the surveillance camera imagery to identify him would have violated his property rights over his data – rights that were cast in stone in the Other Now’s legal system.
Many believed the murder to have been motivated by anger at the Crunch. Having led the rebellion against capitalism’s financial system, Esmeralda was in the eyes of the world the designer of the Other Now’s payments system, which many blamed for the crisis. Others disagreed.
Iris was devastated by the news of Esmeralda’s murder. The night she received it, she turned to her friends for comfort. Eva was preoccupied with her own troubles, her son Thomas to be precise, but Costa proved a good listener, even if it was clear to Iris he could not fully share her pain. After she had unburdened herself, Costa stared forlornly out of the window.
‘In ancient times,’ he said eventually, ‘women were murdered for resisting the absolute authority of the men who owned them. Today’s Antigones and Cassandras are stabbed by random men in dark alleys. I am not sure this constitutes progress.’
The Crunch of 2022
Iris mourned Esmeralda as she would her own sister. The little interest she’d had in the Crunch of 2022 evaporated when she learned
of her death. So when Siris sent through a long dispatch that laid bare the details of the crisis, the manner in which it had infected the entire international economy, and the authorities’ response to the disaster, Iris simply handed it over to Eva.
From the first paragraph, Eva was pleased to see that it was diligently written and as detailed as one could expect from a non-economist. Intriguingly, the problem had started in a familiar fashion. With the end of commercial banking, small community-based credit brokers had emerged offering to match savers with lenders, but as long as all transactions were carried out on Jerome, the central bank’s free digital payments system, a crisis was theoretically impossible: even if some borrowers defaulted and some lenders lost money, the absence of bankers’ loans and markets for debt prevented a systemic failure involving universal losses. But that changed when certain shady brokers managed to shift a significant number of transactions away from Jerome and onto a dark network invisible to the monetary authorities.
Siris explained what happened by describing the experience of a friend of hers, Joyce, who almost lost her entire PerCap savings in this way. One day Joyce had been approached online by one of these nefarious brokers, calling itself Delaware Community Credit Services. DCCS offered to match her with a borrower who would pay, for a five-year loan, more than twice the interest rate she could get from the central bank. Moreover, DCCS told her that all being well she wouldn’t even have to transfer the money out of her PerCap account. All she had to do was sign a contract barring herself from using the lent funds and granting DCCS the right to instruct her to transfer them to any account they specified during the five years of the agreement. What could go wrong? Joyce thought. They’re not even bothering to remove the money from my account. What she did not know was what DCCS was planning to do with the access she was granting them to her money.
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