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A restaurant chain has opened in the united $tates and is now spreading globally--Hooters. It features wimmin servants hired for their looks and insinuating toplessness or at least bustyness. On May 20th, there were 620 news items on Hooters at Google News. By comparison, Britney Spears had 2310. One article is about the spreading of the suggestive Hooters t-shirts. High schools in California are banning them,(1) something we agree with in spirit but see as too little, too late. Working for bans in the united $tates as it exists now only backfires and produces hypocrisy. It usually means that a friend of the banning authority is now making the money in the same business, so selective banning just gets to be a form of business competition under capitalism that yields fascism. Under the joint dictatorship of the proletariat of the oppressed nations, there won't be a Hooters anymore. Another scandal afoot is the pornographic connection where a California man secretly videotaped Hooters job applicants while they changed into scanty uniforms. He's in a West Covina, California jail now.(2) The way pornography and Hooters business works, it will probably benefit Hooters business that this scandal got out. At the same time, there is a whole Hooters Golf Tour in Florida as we write this.(3) That makes good business sense, because Hooters airline started to cater to golfers. In case anyone was wondering, there is even a Hooters Iraq connection reported May 19th. A Bay City waitress recently volunteered to go to Iraq, Afghanistan and other places to entertain troops for three weeks.(4) Unless underage, Hooters waitresses identify with male ideas of pleasure and we consider them to be gender oppressors using their sex appeal for "jobs" and boosting war morale in Iraq. Many of the 620 articles about Hooters are about newly opening franchises in various cities. Here is what Hooters has to say about itself: "Considered by many to be an icon in the food- service business, Mr. Brooks, 66, is the Chairman and majority shareholder of privately held Hooters of America, Inc., which has locations throughout the United States and the world, and revenues approaching $1 billion annually."(5) Proletarian-minded people are always amazed at the things u.$. imperialism comes up with. We could even characterize the whole country as a "Hooters-economy." It would absolutely collapse without pornography at this point. It's not a secret that under capitalism sex sells, but a billion-dollar business like Hooters can only arise if there is something to sell. In the case of Hooters it is the restaurant business which relies on food inputs from super-exploited workers receiving less than u.$. minimum wage. The strength of u.$. imperialism's agricultural sector is legend, but it arises on the backs of oppressed and exploited migrant workers of Aztlán. It's important to understand that without those migrant workers providing cheap food inputs that Hooters restaurants jazz up only slightly for customers, Hooters waitresses would make no money as waitresses and would end up competing with Playboy Magazine and the like instead. The restaurant business would be able to make no profit and people would have to focus on spending their money buying food, not paying for Hooters services. Hooters is especially remarkable to us Marxists, because we are interested in the distinction between hiring butlers and chefs at home and hiring servants who please other customers for profit after the investment of capital. What used to be a luxury service for millionaires is now waitresses for everybody in the imperialist countries. Hooters is the quintessential waitress business, because it is clear that Hooters is gaining advantage from its waitresses and that is really what makes Hooters stand out. To us at MIM, Hooters is not just sexism. After all, it is a huge chain making lots of money. Hooters is a prop of the system, an example why pornography is a system, not a lifestyle. While some preach lifestyle reform, others are making billions producing degraded lifestyles. It's a very uneven battle that only fools will try to win under capitalism. Hooters is also parasitism. Like sales work, advertising is quintessentially unproductive sector labor with no ambiguity. In Hooters above all, but in many other places, waitresses are there as advertising. They are to attract customers, the same as in topless bars which often do well too. What we Marxists call the surplus-value is waiting to be uncovered in the food and drink or the standard aspects of airline transport, but someone has to help sell them first before a profit can be made. The labor went into the food, disproportionately in Aztlán by migrant farmworkers. The people helping to sell it are Hooters waitresses. It's tempting to be "moralizing" and say Hooters waitresses and topless bar matrons are "exploited," but they are not by Marxist definitions. They are "degraded" by their own ideas of pleasure, but in class terms we say people working in advertising like Hooters waitresses are a kind of parasite. It's not that we want Hooters waitresses to have higher wages. We MIM communists want to distribute food to the hungry of this world and we want Hooters-type services abolished. There are important needs to be satisfied and so the zeal in setting up multinational businesses like Hooters is misplaced.
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