Sexual Liberation and Cannibalizing Expansion: A Marxist Reframing of J. D. Unwin
A version of this essay was originally written in 2015.
J. D. Unwin’s Sex and Culture (1934) proposed that the vitality of civilizations depends upon the regulation of sexuality. Strict sexual restraint, he argued, produces cultural energy, while sexual permissiveness leads to decline. Conservatives since the 1960s have seized on this thesis as a vindication of moral traditionalism, interpreting divorce rates, collapsing birthrates, and fragmented families as evidence of an impending civilizational fall. Yet Unwin’s schema is both too rigid and too moralistic. To be useful today, it requires recontextualization. A Marxist reading prunes away its deterministic moralism while salvaging its core insight: sexual organization is inseparable from the reproduction of social order. In capitalist modernity, sexual liberation is not simply a symptom of decay, but a moment of expansion—an expansion that is cannibalistic, feeding off the very social cohesion it undermines.
Sexuality, Social Reproduction, and Capital
From a historical materialist perspective, sexuality is never merely private. It is bound to the reproduction of labor power and to the transmission of property. Friedrich Engels emphasized this in The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884), where the monogamous family was shown to be less a natural arrangement than a historical institution designed to regulate inheritance and stabilize patriarchal control. Agrarian societies imposed strict sexual discipline not because of abstract morality, but because stable inheritance and family labor units were indispensable for agricultural production.
Early industrial capitalism inherited this moral economy, reinforcing monogamy and patriarchal family structures as the basic unit of labor reproduction (see Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 2004). In both cases, sexual restraint was functional for surplus creation. But as capitalism matured, its dynamism required a different logic. To expand, it needed more than discipline — it needed consumption.
Sexual Liberation as Capitalist Expansion
The sexual revolution of the 1960s was not an autonomous moral event, but a historical conjuncture. Contraception, mass media, and shifting labor markets enabled the decoupling of sex from reproduction. This decoupling was immediately subsumed by capital:
- The commodification of intimacy: pornography, sex tourism, dating markets, and cosmetic industries became billion-dollar markets (see Linda Williams, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the "Frenzy of the Visible", 1989).
- Advertising and eroticization: liberated bodies were deployed as the primary medium of consumer desire, following the logics Guy Debord traced in The Society of the Spectacle (1967).
- Workforce expansion: by unbinding women from enforced childbearing, capital expanded its labor pool, a process Shulamith Firestone both critiqued and celebrated in The Dialectic of Sex (1970).
In these developments, what appeared as “liberation” was simultaneously capitalist colonization of a new frontier of life. Desire itself became raw material for accumulation. Sexuality was turned inside out and consumed by capital—a process we might name sexual cannibalism.
Cannibalizing Expansion and Civilizational Decline
This expansion, however, is inherently cannibalistic. David Harvey, in The New Imperialism (2003), describes “accumulation by dispossession,” where capital expands by devouring existing forms of life. Sexual liberation fits this pattern: it produces short-term dynamism by hollowing out long-term cohesion.
- Demographic collapse: fertility decline across the developed world is not accidental; it is a structural consequence of decoupling sex from reproduction and prioritizing consumption.
- Fragmentation of households: transient partnerships and precarious individuals create pliable laborers and insatiable consumers, but weaken intergenerational solidarity (cf. Nancy Fraser, Fortunes of Feminism, 2013).
- Paradox of expansion-as-decline: material growth coincides with civilizational fragility. What conservatives misread as “moral failure” is actually capitalism consuming its own reproductive base.
Unwin read this as a universal law of decline. A Marxist reframing sees it instead as a capitalist contradiction: the very process that fuels accumulation undermines the social reproduction upon which accumulation depends.
Sexual Cannibalism and the Exhaustion of Desire
Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality (1976) demonstrated that sexuality, far from being liberated, is constantly managed through discourses of medicine, psychology, and advertising. When every form of intimacy is monetized, desire becomes exhausted. The erotic, severed from transcendence, becomes sheer repetition—a circuit of stimulation and consumption.
What Unwin called “cultural energy” dissipates into commodity form. The energies once sublimated into art, science, and politics are redirected into an endless marketplace of pleasures. Thus the deeper sense of decline is not only demographic but civilizational: a thinning of meaning, an exhaustion of desire, and a collapse of solidarity.
Conclusion: Toward a Marxist Reading of Decline
A nuanced Marxist reading of Unwin thus inverts the conservative appropriation of his work. Sexual liberation does not simply spell decline through loosened morals. It functions as an engine of capitalist expansion, opening new markets and reshaping labor. But this expansion is cannibalistic: it consumes fertility, solidarity, and transcendence, eroding the very conditions of civilization’s survival. What conservatives lament as moral failure and progressives celebrate as liberation are, in truth, moments within capitalism’s contradictory logic—a logic of expansion that devours its own base.
The true task is not to restore a mythic chastity, but to imagine a different ordering of sexuality beyond commodification—one where desire can be rejoined to solidarity and transcendence rather than endlessly consumed.
