One positive aspect of Britain today is the widespread public antipathy towards the two on-going wars that Blair bequeathed Brown. The Iraqi war is being fought for control of Iraqi oil and for continued US dominance in the Middle East. The Afghan war, which we are told will last another thirty years, is essentially pointless: a war being fought so that the West does not lose face.
As an enthusiastic author of these wars, New Labour cannot get off the tiger it is riding; yet it suffers from the deep public antipathy that these wars engender. Its recent solution has been to attempt to promote militarism in Britain: first, by the policy of having the military wear their uniforms in public (when safe to do so!), and second, by floating the idea of having an armed forces day with military parades and the like.
New Labour’s militarism is nothing for anybody to be proud of. Apart from the murder and destruction wrought abroad, already hundreds of young mostly working class young people have been killed or maimed – and thousands have been traumatised, the effects of which will plague Britain for years to come. Some, moreover, have been involved in brutality and the torture of prisoners in custody.
While the intellectual case against these wars may have been won even in bourgeois circles, socialists need to demand a total withdrawal of British forces and a total opposition to the glorification of the criminality of which the New Labour government and the British military is part.
12 March 2008
12 February 2008
TRUDGILL, Peter - Sociolinguistics
Penguin 1983
Re-read December 2007
The aim of this book, as its title suggests, is to place language in its social context. While Chomsky is undoubtedly correct in arguing that humans have an in-built ‘Language Acquisition Device’, which is hard wired to structure in any language (thus displacing B. F. Skinner’s behaviouralism), it is nonetheless true that that language is tied to social context in several ways.
Trudgill has written a clear and very readable book on his subject, which retains one’s interest in the same way as a novel. The book does not shun technical vocabulary, but nonetheless is written for the layman.
The type of language we speak is tied to the social groups of which we are members; be it our social class, our region, our ethnic group or our sex. Though language may change according to these categories, and different language use may be awarded a higher or lower status, it does not mean that any language is less intricate or less able to express reality and ideas than any other. This point is especially relevant for rejecting the view prominent in the US that Black American English is merely a corrupted and less sophisticated form of Standard English.
While language and language use reflect the social environment, it does not mean than any particular language leads to any particular behaviour pattern. In other words, Romanians, for instance, don’t behave like Spaniards because they both speak a Latin language. The view that there is any connection other than socialisation between an ethnic group and a language is also shown to be false.
While literary languages are distinct, the boundaries between two colloquial languages may not be. For instance in places on the border between the Netherlands and Germany the language spoken either side of the border may resemble each other more than either do to literary Dutch or German. Any number of situations may exist with bi- or multilingualism in countries and with different literary languages functioning as state languages.
Trudgill also considers pidgins, a language created when a lingua franca (e.g. English, French or Portuguese), used by slaves or primitive people, has moved so far from the literary language that it is no longer comprehensible to native speakers. Pidgins become creoles when they acquire native speakers.
This book is beautifully and interestingly written, and Trudgill, with no axe to grind, gives a interesting introduction to his subject.
LeBOR, Adam - City of Oranges
Bloombury 2006
Read December 2007
LeBor has chosen to write about the sharpest issues of international politics, the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. To do so he has chosen a precise focus, namely the family history of several Jewish and Arab families from the town of Jaffa. Interlaced with the personal histories is an outline of the key historical moments and facts. Throughout the book is well written and gripping.
What makes LeBor’s topic heart rendering are the issues thrown up by the Middle East’s most entrenched conflict. On the one side is a mostly Western people subject to historical discrimination and genocide who established an ethnic-supremacist state, Israel, largely by means of land appropriation. On the other stands expropriated Palestinians living either as second class citizens in Israel itself or as part of a displaced diaspora. Yet it is true, although perhaps irrelevant, that Israel has done nothing to its Arab minority which the surrounding Arab states (themselves dictatorial nightmares compared with Israel) have not done to their Jewish minorities.
LeBor wisely tells his story though personal lives and in addition to historical narrative paints a picture of Israeli society in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Clearly LeBor himself stands at the liberal end of the political debate, and his views are very much of ‘if only’ type; i.e. if only Israel were itself more liberal and accommodating, and if only the Palestinians were better led, more realistic and more moderate…
Taking everything together, though, LeBor has written an excellent book which is well worth reading.
GESSEN, Masha - Two Babushkas
Bloomsbury 2005
Read October 2007
This book focusing on the lives of the author’s two Jewish grandmothers is a clever and intriguing choice of topic. Both grandmothers spent the majority of their lives in the Soviet Union and encounter first hand the twists and turns of the twentieth century. Gessen, herself, was born in the Soviet Union, but emigrated with her immediate family to the United States in the 1970s. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, she retuned to Moscow to live and now works there as a journalist.
The book is well written and has a novel-like appeal. Yet however gripping it is, it nonetheless suffers from all the weakness of second-hand testimony. There appears to be one domiant source for nearly all that is said, i.e. what her grandmothers told her, and Gessen's attempt to present the book as a third person account written by her cannot hide the single source of information. At times her background research appears weak, for instance when referring to Hungarian uprising of 1956 she says that its leaders were immediately executed. In fact Nagy was only executed for political reasons some two years later. A small mistake it may be, but it led me to wonder whether the rest of the book contained similar errors.
The book also provides another first hand account of anti-Semitism in interwar Poland and in the Soviet Union itself.
The book is well written and provides and fascinating documentation of two lives which stretch backwards into the key moments of the twentieth century.
Miliband and Benn
Memories are like photo snaps, not film sequences. From twenty-nine years ago in 1979 I can remember a warm spring day and the gate post at the end of our garden path. I recall that I had just returned after spending my newspaper round money on Ralph Miliband’s ‘The State in Capitalist Society.’ Today, Miliband’s book still has a prominent position on my bookshelf.
Perhaps I remember the incident because Professor Miliband was such a good writer and therefore a good teacher of politics and of Marxism. I admired him up until his early death in 1994. The first time I heard him speak – in the most articulate English with the strongest of French accents – was in 1987 at the Chesterfield Conference. Even now I remember what he said with the utmost clarify.
The star of the 1987 Chesterfield Conference, the then MP for Chesterfield, the neighbour and friend of Ralph Miliband was Tony Benn. Benn’s campaign inside the Labour party for what amounted to left-wing social democracy in answer to the debacle of the Wilson-Callaghan Labour government fired my imagination. It seemed to be the politics of the possible in the first half decade of Thatcherism.
So Tony Benn and Ralph Miliband formed my intellectual and political coordinates and held out a flag of hope for the next generation of which I was part. But any such hope was cruelly misplaced. Today Miliband’s son, David, is British foreign secretary and sits in the cabinet with Benn’s son Hilary. Together they have travelled along the New Labour road, embracing Bush, the Iraq War, further capitalist inequality in Britain and the attack on civil rights.
I can never hear the names of either of these two New Labour ministers without unfavourably comparing them with what their fathers achieved.
Perhaps I remember the incident because Professor Miliband was such a good writer and therefore a good teacher of politics and of Marxism. I admired him up until his early death in 1994. The first time I heard him speak – in the most articulate English with the strongest of French accents – was in 1987 at the Chesterfield Conference. Even now I remember what he said with the utmost clarify.
The star of the 1987 Chesterfield Conference, the then MP for Chesterfield, the neighbour and friend of Ralph Miliband was Tony Benn. Benn’s campaign inside the Labour party for what amounted to left-wing social democracy in answer to the debacle of the Wilson-Callaghan Labour government fired my imagination. It seemed to be the politics of the possible in the first half decade of Thatcherism.
So Tony Benn and Ralph Miliband formed my intellectual and political coordinates and held out a flag of hope for the next generation of which I was part. But any such hope was cruelly misplaced. Today Miliband’s son, David, is British foreign secretary and sits in the cabinet with Benn’s son Hilary. Together they have travelled along the New Labour road, embracing Bush, the Iraq War, further capitalist inequality in Britain and the attack on civil rights.
I can never hear the names of either of these two New Labour ministers without unfavourably comparing them with what their fathers achieved.
6 February 2008
Caroline Flit & Public Housing in Britain
Caroline Flint, Labour Member of Parliament for the Don Valley and Housing Minister, is certainly pretty, but her right-wing New Labour politics are not. What she now proposes is that the residents of Britain’s dwindling public housing ghettos sign ‘contracts’ agreeing that they will look for work before getting the keys to their hovel; the implied threat being that if they fail, she will make them homeless. Like all good propaganda there is an element of common sense: of course the residents of junk estates should not remain impoverished and idle. The action of government, though, should be to take measures to secure the jobs, not farm out work to bailiffs and thereby add to the stock of human misery.
30 January 2008
Tony Blair's Stain
I tended to believe that within months of resigning both as Prime Minister and from the House of Commons, Tony Blair would be transformed into Lord Sedgefield and would be showering us with his right wing platitudes. How wrong I was.
Instead Blair has fully prostituted himself to the institutions of world financial capital; and is now raking in the millions to enjoy the lifestyle of the vane super-rich, which is the strata of society he has always sought to endear himself to. The one public role he has acquired is as a part time Middle East mediator on behalf of the so-called Quartet, but with his extreme pro-Israeli bias a more inappropriate figure would be hard to find.
Watching the last Labour conference giving Blair a standing ovation was like seeing a beaten and humiliated woman applauding her unfaithful husband. Not only has Blair disgraced the Labour Party and everything progressive that Labour ever stood for from social reform to civil rights, but the rank and file’s sycophantic crawling to this scumbag has fatally stained everything connected to the Labour Party.
Instead Blair has fully prostituted himself to the institutions of world financial capital; and is now raking in the millions to enjoy the lifestyle of the vane super-rich, which is the strata of society he has always sought to endear himself to. The one public role he has acquired is as a part time Middle East mediator on behalf of the so-called Quartet, but with his extreme pro-Israeli bias a more inappropriate figure would be hard to find.
Watching the last Labour conference giving Blair a standing ovation was like seeing a beaten and humiliated woman applauding her unfaithful husband. Not only has Blair disgraced the Labour Party and everything progressive that Labour ever stood for from social reform to civil rights, but the rank and file’s sycophantic crawling to this scumbag has fatally stained everything connected to the Labour Party.
25 January 2008
FINE, Ben - Marx's Capital
Macmillan 1984
Read November 2007
No academic subject is so divided into separate disciplines as is economics. On the one hand there is orthodox or bourgeois economics which seeks to explain prices, incomes, interest rates, etc. by using mathematical models. While it is often supposed that traditional economics is an ‘empirical science’, it is in fact largely based on the assumption of rational (i.e. income maximising) behaviour of ‘de-socialised’ individuals. This approach is not wrong – in fact it gives powerful tools for understanding economics – but it fails to explain the fundamental social relationships generated by production, distribution and exchange, which fuel human history of which economics is a part. Thus bourgeois economics can be said to have a confined and falsely isolated un-historical explanation concentrating on the relationship between things, rather than the producers and users of those things.
Ben Fine’s book is a short, but by no means simple, introduction and overview of the other economics, that developed by Karl Marx. Though published two decades ago, the majority of the information in the book has retained its relevance even if its intended audience of economic students would now ignore it.
For the most part, the book follows a faithful account of Volume I of Das Kapital, after giving an outline of Marx’s materialistic conception of history and the methodology thrown up by it. Fine introduces the labour theory of value, exploitation, accumulation, the transition to capitalism, theories of capitalist crisis and the theories of distribution. Readers can see the force of this powerful explanatory system which is as valid today as it was twenty years ago, or indeed in late nineteenth century when Marx was writing. The question it seems to me is not whether Marx was correct or not, but how far and in what ways these theories can be used today to explain the manifestations of twenty-first century capitalism.
Obviously Ben Fine’s conclusions relating to the worker’s struggles in response to Britain’s economic crisis in the early 1980s are no longer as relevant today. Furthermore the book cannot comment on twenty-first century problems: the collapse of the labour movement or on the impact of intensified globalisation. Yet, nonetheless, the contents of Fine’s book continue to contribute to an understanding of the economic system today.
Read November 2007
No academic subject is so divided into separate disciplines as is economics. On the one hand there is orthodox or bourgeois economics which seeks to explain prices, incomes, interest rates, etc. by using mathematical models. While it is often supposed that traditional economics is an ‘empirical science’, it is in fact largely based on the assumption of rational (i.e. income maximising) behaviour of ‘de-socialised’ individuals. This approach is not wrong – in fact it gives powerful tools for understanding economics – but it fails to explain the fundamental social relationships generated by production, distribution and exchange, which fuel human history of which economics is a part. Thus bourgeois economics can be said to have a confined and falsely isolated un-historical explanation concentrating on the relationship between things, rather than the producers and users of those things.
Ben Fine’s book is a short, but by no means simple, introduction and overview of the other economics, that developed by Karl Marx. Though published two decades ago, the majority of the information in the book has retained its relevance even if its intended audience of economic students would now ignore it.
For the most part, the book follows a faithful account of Volume I of Das Kapital, after giving an outline of Marx’s materialistic conception of history and the methodology thrown up by it. Fine introduces the labour theory of value, exploitation, accumulation, the transition to capitalism, theories of capitalist crisis and the theories of distribution. Readers can see the force of this powerful explanatory system which is as valid today as it was twenty years ago, or indeed in late nineteenth century when Marx was writing. The question it seems to me is not whether Marx was correct or not, but how far and in what ways these theories can be used today to explain the manifestations of twenty-first century capitalism.
Obviously Ben Fine’s conclusions relating to the worker’s struggles in response to Britain’s economic crisis in the early 1980s are no longer as relevant today. Furthermore the book cannot comment on twenty-first century problems: the collapse of the labour movement or on the impact of intensified globalisation. Yet, nonetheless, the contents of Fine’s book continue to contribute to an understanding of the economic system today.
22 January 2008
Dialectical materialism: its meaning and scope
Dialectical materialism as a philosophical term is often abbreviated for convenience to diamat. In the history of Marxism from Engels onwards – particularly in the official communist movement – a great deal of mystical mumbo-jumbo has been written about this subject. I will argue here, however, that the key tenets of diamat are easy to elucidate, and - as far as they go - they are probably correct. While they are arguably true, I will argue that they provide a world conception of material existence, and not a magic wand for understanding all and sundry.
Introductory Points
Prior to the exposition, three things need to be clarified. The first is the distinction in metaphysics between ontology and epistemology. Ontology investigates existence; i.e. what exists in the universe and what are the conditions of and for existence. Epistemology, in contrast, examines the question of how we can know something to be true. This simple distinction, however, gives rise to a problem. While we can assume that there is material world external to our senses and to ourselves, what we know about it is dependent on our methodology of investigation. In other words, ontological questions can be seen as subordinate to epistemological ones. Diamat, though, is in the first instance an ontological theory (it says things about existence) and only secondarily addresses issues of ‘how we know things.’ For that reason diamat is based entirely on chains of reasoning (as is logic and mathematics) and can only provide at best the ontological preconditions for knowledge of the external world, not knowledge itself.
Second, having stressed the predominance of reason in diamat, it is helpful to throw light on the mode of back-chaining reasoning through which much of the analysis develops. The logic is often of this kind:
If P is the case, then Q must be the case, (i.e. P cannot exist without Q)
Therefore, if we assume the existence or truth of P, then we assume the same of Q.
Third, diamat claims to be a universal philosophy. Roughly speaking, we can divide philosophy into three levels: (i) questions concerning the cosmos and the existence of things, (ii) the social world, and (iii) the individual. Diamat operates at a cosmic level with the other levels as instances of its general operation. In Marxism it is traditionally said that dialectical materialism is the philosophy standing behind historical materialism, with historical materialism being understood as the philosophy and sociology of human society and social existence. Nonetheless, readers will be able to see that diamat, given its abstract quality, has to be compatible with just about any kind of sociology or political theory, and conversely that historical materialism has to be justified by arguments over and above those provided by diamat.
An Exposition of Dialectical Materialism
Let us start by assuming a single object in the universe, e.g. a stone. The existence of the object pre-supposes the existence of space and time. In other words, if an object, (or objects) exists, then so does space and time. Why? An object cannot exist unless it has three dimensions; if that is so, a three-dimensional space must also exist. For analogous reasoning, time must also exist. Unless an object exists in time, it cannot exist at all.
With space, however, we can deduce not only the existence of space, but also its gradation or measurement by degree. The dimensions of the object (e.g. a stone) must be limited. If any of its three dimensions were unlimited then the stone would be coterminous with the universe itself because there would be no part of the universe outside the stone.
The measurement or gradation of time can only be proved through introducing the notion of movement. For movement to exist, we need at least a second object. The movement of object A has to be understood relative to the movement of object B. If the distance between the two objects changes that change has to be within a specific time period.
So far we have seen from some very simple common sense observations of the cosmic material world the connection between objects, space, time, and movement/change. Of all these concepts only one (i.e. the object) refers to something that has material existence.
We know (or at least can pre-suppose) that the universe consists of two or more objects. In fact we can suppose it consists of many billions of interconnected things. The ‘di’ in dialectical materialism, however, refers to the notion of two things. This needs to be explained. Let us take any one thing ‘X’ then everything else can be referred to as ‘not-X’ By this means we can divide the totality of the universe (which we will call ‘T’) into two parts X and not-X. X can be anything we want it to be. We can represent this idea in the following formula:
X + not-X = T
Let us now return to the idea of movement or change. Assuming for this purpose X to be an undifferentiated thing merely existing in time it is incapable of changing itself. Therefore, its partner in change has to be not-X and cannot be anything else because X and not-X together is all that exists. In the process of change, not only will X be changed, but X will inevitably cause a change to not-X. X may change so radically that it ceases to be the original X. An example will help clarify this argument. Imagine that all that exists in the universe are a green and a blue bottle. The only thing that can change the green bottle is the blue bottle, but the latter cannot change the former without being changed itself. After the change one or both of the bottles may become something else entirely; e.g. broken pieces of glass.
Implications of diamat
Diamat allows us to conceptualise a system in the universe in the following terms.
• All change comes from inside the system.
• The system consists of two parts X and not-X
• X could not exist without not-X and vice versa.
• Change is the result of the interaction between X and not-X.
• Change can transform and even destroy the original X and not-X
When applied to the whole universe, diamat gives a non-theistic world view. God and purpose-in-existence are abandoned and instead we have a picture of interacting things moving through time, some of which we know about already and some we do not. The division of the universe (or a self contained sub-system of activity within it) into Xs and non-Xs is of course not arbitrary, but rather the division is chosen on the basis of our reasoning and existing knowledge. Thus in historical materialism, for example, the division is: X = human beings and not-X = the rest of the material universe. Over history, historical materialism maintains, humans by means of their labour and by using their technology change their material surrounding while their material surrounding change them.
Though diamat is an ontological theory, it nonetheless has epistemological implications. X can be seen as our mind (either one particular mind or the mind of humans in general; the important thing is that it is ‘the knower’) and not-X is the external material universe which is to be known. To know something we must bring our brain and its reasoning power through the senses and apply it to what we sense; i.e. the external material world. As a result we have knowledge, which changes both our sense of our material world (e.g. it’s round not flat) and also the ideas we have in our heads.
Conclusion
The great fault in the history of Marxism (and Marxism-Leninism in particular) has been the reduction of these observations to dogma and the insistence that the adoption of a particular politics flows as the result of a logical chain from dialectical materialism to a particular policy. This is hardly sensible. The real power of dialectical materialism is twofold (i) it gives us a world view of things, if we need one, and (ii) it gives us the word dialectical which, if not thrown around like confetti and is deployed correctly, can assist in our understanding of things.
Introductory Points
Prior to the exposition, three things need to be clarified. The first is the distinction in metaphysics between ontology and epistemology. Ontology investigates existence; i.e. what exists in the universe and what are the conditions of and for existence. Epistemology, in contrast, examines the question of how we can know something to be true. This simple distinction, however, gives rise to a problem. While we can assume that there is material world external to our senses and to ourselves, what we know about it is dependent on our methodology of investigation. In other words, ontological questions can be seen as subordinate to epistemological ones. Diamat, though, is in the first instance an ontological theory (it says things about existence) and only secondarily addresses issues of ‘how we know things.’ For that reason diamat is based entirely on chains of reasoning (as is logic and mathematics) and can only provide at best the ontological preconditions for knowledge of the external world, not knowledge itself.
Second, having stressed the predominance of reason in diamat, it is helpful to throw light on the mode of back-chaining reasoning through which much of the analysis develops. The logic is often of this kind:
If P is the case, then Q must be the case, (i.e. P cannot exist without Q)
Therefore, if we assume the existence or truth of P, then we assume the same of Q.
Third, diamat claims to be a universal philosophy. Roughly speaking, we can divide philosophy into three levels: (i) questions concerning the cosmos and the existence of things, (ii) the social world, and (iii) the individual. Diamat operates at a cosmic level with the other levels as instances of its general operation. In Marxism it is traditionally said that dialectical materialism is the philosophy standing behind historical materialism, with historical materialism being understood as the philosophy and sociology of human society and social existence. Nonetheless, readers will be able to see that diamat, given its abstract quality, has to be compatible with just about any kind of sociology or political theory, and conversely that historical materialism has to be justified by arguments over and above those provided by diamat.
An Exposition of Dialectical Materialism
Let us start by assuming a single object in the universe, e.g. a stone. The existence of the object pre-supposes the existence of space and time. In other words, if an object, (or objects) exists, then so does space and time. Why? An object cannot exist unless it has three dimensions; if that is so, a three-dimensional space must also exist. For analogous reasoning, time must also exist. Unless an object exists in time, it cannot exist at all.
With space, however, we can deduce not only the existence of space, but also its gradation or measurement by degree. The dimensions of the object (e.g. a stone) must be limited. If any of its three dimensions were unlimited then the stone would be coterminous with the universe itself because there would be no part of the universe outside the stone.
The measurement or gradation of time can only be proved through introducing the notion of movement. For movement to exist, we need at least a second object. The movement of object A has to be understood relative to the movement of object B. If the distance between the two objects changes that change has to be within a specific time period.
So far we have seen from some very simple common sense observations of the cosmic material world the connection between objects, space, time, and movement/change. Of all these concepts only one (i.e. the object) refers to something that has material existence.
We know (or at least can pre-suppose) that the universe consists of two or more objects. In fact we can suppose it consists of many billions of interconnected things. The ‘di’ in dialectical materialism, however, refers to the notion of two things. This needs to be explained. Let us take any one thing ‘X’ then everything else can be referred to as ‘not-X’ By this means we can divide the totality of the universe (which we will call ‘T’) into two parts X and not-X. X can be anything we want it to be. We can represent this idea in the following formula:
X + not-X = T
Let us now return to the idea of movement or change. Assuming for this purpose X to be an undifferentiated thing merely existing in time it is incapable of changing itself. Therefore, its partner in change has to be not-X and cannot be anything else because X and not-X together is all that exists. In the process of change, not only will X be changed, but X will inevitably cause a change to not-X. X may change so radically that it ceases to be the original X. An example will help clarify this argument. Imagine that all that exists in the universe are a green and a blue bottle. The only thing that can change the green bottle is the blue bottle, but the latter cannot change the former without being changed itself. After the change one or both of the bottles may become something else entirely; e.g. broken pieces of glass.
Implications of diamat
Diamat allows us to conceptualise a system in the universe in the following terms.
• All change comes from inside the system.
• The system consists of two parts X and not-X
• X could not exist without not-X and vice versa.
• Change is the result of the interaction between X and not-X.
• Change can transform and even destroy the original X and not-X
When applied to the whole universe, diamat gives a non-theistic world view. God and purpose-in-existence are abandoned and instead we have a picture of interacting things moving through time, some of which we know about already and some we do not. The division of the universe (or a self contained sub-system of activity within it) into Xs and non-Xs is of course not arbitrary, but rather the division is chosen on the basis of our reasoning and existing knowledge. Thus in historical materialism, for example, the division is: X = human beings and not-X = the rest of the material universe. Over history, historical materialism maintains, humans by means of their labour and by using their technology change their material surrounding while their material surrounding change them.
Though diamat is an ontological theory, it nonetheless has epistemological implications. X can be seen as our mind (either one particular mind or the mind of humans in general; the important thing is that it is ‘the knower’) and not-X is the external material universe which is to be known. To know something we must bring our brain and its reasoning power through the senses and apply it to what we sense; i.e. the external material world. As a result we have knowledge, which changes both our sense of our material world (e.g. it’s round not flat) and also the ideas we have in our heads.
Conclusion
The great fault in the history of Marxism (and Marxism-Leninism in particular) has been the reduction of these observations to dogma and the insistence that the adoption of a particular politics flows as the result of a logical chain from dialectical materialism to a particular policy. This is hardly sensible. The real power of dialectical materialism is twofold (i) it gives us a world view of things, if we need one, and (ii) it gives us the word dialectical which, if not thrown around like confetti and is deployed correctly, can assist in our understanding of things.
8 January 2008
Prostitution
I can easily see why people trafficking, violence and the public nuisance of street prostitution are wrong and are, therefore, matters of legitimate government concern. I cannot see, though, why it is wrong when A and B could lawfully have sex for it to become a crime only for the reason that A agreed because B offered payment.
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