“Scratch a Communist, and find a Philistine. Of course, you must scratch the sensitive spot, their mentality as regards women.” - V. I. Lenin
In this I will be clarifying the essential nature of solidarity with sex workers to any serious leftist movement, especially in regards to migrant rights, women’s rights, queer rights and anti-racism.
I am not interested in any discussions about personal feelings in regards to the sex trade, nor do I care about any utopian conversations about a society in which sex work does not exist. The fact is that sex work does exist, and any discussion therefor must focus on ways to protect the lives, rights and dignity of sex workers right now.
I acknowledge that there are cis men who engage in prostitution, and I have no desire to erase or ignore their experiences and marginalisation. However, statistically speaking the overwhelming number of sex workers are women, particularly migrants and people of colour, and queer people, especially trans people, are over-represented. This is due to the economic marginalisation and enforced precarity of women, racialised people, and trans people who are excluded from employment, education and institutional access to social services, especially for migrants in a border regime that creates a tiered system of access to rights and criminalises entire populations based upon their location of birth.
Firstly I will address the term “sex work” itself. There is an oft propagated notion that defining sex work as work is somehow indicative of a glamorization of the sex trade, apologia for sexual violence and exploitation, or a desire to expand and increase the amount of sex work that happens. There is, at the same time, an argument that all sex work is inherently assault, and as such to term it work is to ignore the reality of the sex trade’s exploitative nature.
"Part of believing me when I say I have been raped is believing me when I say I haven’t been." - Nikita, 2017 Annual General Meeting of Amnesty International UK.
Radically online leftists are defending pornography again—what a surprise!
After examining all viewpoints of all parties involved, the online leftist chose to side with the counterrevolutionary lumpen over the proletariat, i.e., the current sex worker over the former sex worker.
Between the current sex worker and the ex-sex worker, the ex-sex worker is the growing force that constitutes the majority; they are objectively more revolutionary and class conscious.
The task of the communist parties everywhere is to proletarianize the lumpen, which all socialist projects have done with guaranteed employment and employment training programs.
The party that I have worked with has also done this, using state power and party organization power to mobilize women from all levels of society and guarantee them jobs either through state-sponsored work or by providing them capital to start cooperatives.
What is the best way to protect current sex workers? - steer them as far away as possible from sex work; criminalization plays a very important role in that; criminalization alone wouldn’t be enough, but it is better than normalizing sex work by decriminalizing it and feeding young women into the rape machine that cycles through thousands of them every year. Almost 99% of porn actors quit within a year, and the 1% who stay keep their sanity with substance abuse. Many of them die from drug overdoses. This is the professional, consent-based work environment that porn consumers defend.
How can a revolutionary advocate misery of the current sex worker to continue when the former sex worker clearly demonstrates their improved material conditions and renewed revolutionary consciousness? How desperate are you to align with the lumpen against the class with more revolutionary potential?
Let’s examine what communist parties all around the world do when they have state power: they criminalize all forms of sex work, provide easy access to education and employment opportunities for women, and when that is not enough, targeted work is done especially in rural areas to free women from other forms of sexual slavery like forced marriages.
Without state power, communist parties do targeted work to rehabilitate sex workers and provide assistance to find better jobs and education. The organizational capacity of the party in all it’s strongholds areas are used to assist young women in finding dignified work and education ensuring that they don’t have to resort to prostitution.
In both cases, political capital is used to prevent sex work, not encourage or normalize it. They all want to eliminate sex work completely. Criminalization of sex work is not a hostile act toward any individual sex worker but against the class of lumpenproletariat, whose elimination is necessary for the success of socialism.
The only people advocating against this are the ones who don’t have the political capital to do any real work that impact women in their society. online leftists and western leftists who have zero leverage on bourgeois legislation and minimal support from the masses will always try to spin bourgeois victories as their own.
I would read this and respond to this (even though there’s something interestingly sad about making an entire account just to respond to this one post, as though you were worried about letting us know what your main account is), but you clearly haven’t read what you are here to angrily react to.
I can tell you haven’t read it (no surprise really, no one likes to read things before getting angry) because your very first sentence is that I am “defending pornography.” If you had bothered to read this before reacting then you would see two things: firstly, that I very specifically mentioned that my essay is only about survival street sex work, as it is the most vulnerable and precarious form of work, and that other sex work isn’t included in this analysis.
Secondly you would see that my essay is literally about organizing alongside sex workers to eliminate the economic need that drives people into sex work. Since you clearly have no idea what you’re even upset about, then I doubt it’s worth my time to read your response and reply in good faith, as you’re clearly uninterested in doing the same and would likely ignore this response as well :)
It seems like we have started this conversation very antagonistically. First, let me apologize if the tone of my reply came off as snarky. I rarely participate in online debates; I’m mostly a lurker. I never had an account on this platform. But I understand why you would be skeptical of a new account.
I don’t think so; you haven’t made this clear at all. Can you show me which section you are talking about? Even though I stressed pornography, I didn’t mean to single it out; it’s just that pornography defenders are a special kind of trigger for me. I have had many fierce debates with fellow comrades because of their views on porn. Nevertheless, everything I said applies equally to all sex work and sex workers. so that shouldn’t be a problem.
This is exactly what I’m upset about: you don’t organize alongside the lumpen; you can’t organize alongside a reactionary class without any revolutionary potential.
“While sex work is a large and diverse category that spans countless different occupations, in this I am focused on survival sex work: sex work carried out on the streets or in brothels in order to earn the money needed to live. The most precarious and vulnerable sex workers deserve to be the primary consideration in this discussion; as such, throughout this essay I employ the term prostitute as well as sex worker to ensure that it is understood that this conversation is about the trade of sex for money, and not other forms of sex work such as camwork or stripping, as those experiences are different and requiring of separate analyses in order to ensure an accurate account of the material conditions therein. These varied sex work occupations may overlap, but this essay seeks only to explore the ways in which solidarity with one of the most undervalued class of workers, who live on the margins of society and often in extreme precarity legally, socially, and economically, is essential to a forward-thinking and ethical leftist movement.”
This is the part where I said I was explicitly addressing survival street work. I can’t begin to wrap my head around how outdated your thoughts about the lumpen are though. Every Third World Socialist movement has written extensively about the radical and revolutionary potential of the lumpen, as they have the least to lose as the most disenfranchised. Angela Y. Davis, Huey P. Newton, Franz Fannon, Mao Zedong all wrote about working and mobilizing alongside the lumpenproletariat. The Black Panthers specifically believed the lumpen to be foundational to their revolutionary movement. Even Castro specifically said that “lumpen well prepared, well trained can be good. I don’t want to use that word pejoratively.”
The reason being: we have a hundred years of studying prisons post-Marx. Criminalisation is a racialised process whereby human beings are assigned the status of criminal not through any inherent properties, but through the application of the bourgeois capitalist state. 2.2 million people in the US alone are currently in prison and thus have been lumpenized through the process of criminalisation. With militarized borders, a relatively new phenomenon that didn’t play a role in Marx’s original (cruel) dismissal of the lumpen, we can see that entire populations are criminalised and thus lumpenised by virtue of their place of birth. This is a gendered and racialised system of marginalisation.
In Border and Rule Harsha Walia explores the exact ways that this regime of securitised borders is leveraged to create hyper-exploitable populations by controlling the movement of people. As climate crisis worsens, we will only see an exponential increase of the criminalised migrant populations seeking to escape economic deprivation.
In another comment I see that you say “it’s not important who does the enforcing.”
This is antithetical to a leftist organizing. In the bourgeois capitalist society, to say it is “unimportant” who does the enforcing is to ignore the ways in which the law and its application are the primary sources of sexual violence and exploitation. To support the criminalisation of people in bourgeois capitalist societies is to funnel money and increased policing powers into the violent state apparatus, thus defeating your own ambitions to organise against that very state.
Anti-trafficking and anti-sex work laws increase the amount of trafficking and sex work, not to mention domestic and state violence, by increasing the powers and budgets of police and border controls.
Countries that have criminalised sex work show that there is no reduction in sex work, there is only an increase in the harm experienced by sex workers. Meanwhile in New Zealand, with access to social programmes and assistance, domestic sex workers are more quickly integrated into society and there is a trend downwards in the amount of domestic sex workers, as well as a reduction in the sexual violence they experience.
Your position is an ideological and dogmatic appeal to “values” that devalues the very lives of the exploited sex workers. To say that it doesn’t matter what state violence or what state powers are to be used to control their lives is disgustingly callous. These are real human beings. As long as the economic factors that lead people into sex work exist, to criminalise sex work serves only to create more violent and economically precarious positions for the sex workers.
Why would you assume that she’s “radically online”?
I don’t know if this is true, but either way, it’s your opinion, which is not objective by definition
Who would be enacting this? The police, or some other agency of a bourgeois government? I don’t see why anyone would trust them to be able to handle something like this, especially not in Amerika. Unless you’re talking about criminalizing trafficking (which I certainly agree with) and/or procuring/pimping, this sounds to me like you want to punish the victims
Well one look at her post history disproves that notion. I make more posts in a day than she did in a month. Though this thread is full of some serious walls.
Unfortunately this is a topic that requires a lot of analysis; I promise this is a fraction of the length that I wanted to write to cover more fully all of my thoughts regarding this very complex issue.
However, is it really a socialist thread if there aren’t some deep theory text walls?
Well we do engage in a lot of shitposting here. And i mean A LOT.
Serious theory? Walls are absolutely inevitable.
Please don’t take it too literally or personally; I’m only assuming that those who post incorrect walls of text like this confidently have never worked within a communist party. The position on sex work is pretty much unanimous across all major influential communist parties around the world; only certain online and western leftists have problems grasping an issue well settled in the days of Marx. The term radically online leftist is used only to contrast online presence with real-world praxis.
a sex worker is classified as lumpen-proletariat -> Not my opinion.
A former sex worker who does any other wage labor today must now be classified as proletariat -> Not my opinion
The proletariat is more revolutionary and class conscious than the lumpen-proletariat, -> Also not my opinion
It’s not important who does the enforcement; the goal of criminalization is to add an additional legal and cultural barrier to entry into such a trade so that we can reduce the number of victims. This is the material result that we should strive for: "a lower number of women in sex work’. Remember that the lumpen proletariat is a reactionary class that is helpful for the bourgeois, i.e., criminalization is against their class’s interests and ultimately favors us.
Wtf are you talking about. “Muh lumpenproletariat is enemies” Bullshit. I am lumpenproletariat. I am also proletariat. You are a wrecker.
Dats true, we can’t make a revolution with only the purest of people, we would be dogmatic and adventurist at best and shot at worst, after the fall of the social democracies in the 90s, an undeniable section of the 1rst world working class started to become lumpen, they lost their house, they lost their (legal) job, and had to make due, they hate the system, they hate the current state of things that threw them under the bus, they’re extremely revolutionary, even if they may be uneducated in Marxism (n let’s face it, 99% of people are not Marxists, in all od the classes.)
Is this what passes for an agent in the CIA nowadays? Sheesh, they’ve really let themselves go.
Wtf
Are you a fed?
I don’t appreciate the tone both you and OP chose to begin this discussion in. Both are offensive, taking or inferring the position that the left is against your position and so you begin attacking as opposed to conversing. This actually does a disservice to your objective. If we were not open minded we would not be Marxists. Surely in the post “end of history” declaration you can recognize this tendency?
I don’t have a dog in this race, but I prefer us have a civilized conversation on the matter.
Well true, many self proclaimed Marxists are closed minded, ignorant, and aggressively obtuse when it comes to taking others opinions and ideas into consideration. Especially around this topic in particular.
I haven’t seen many, thankfully. If that has been your experience I wish it wasn’t.
By criminalization, do you mean that of the laws would target the users of sex work, or the sex workers themselves?
Even in highly policed countries with strong policing of sex work and drugs, you still have highly developed black markets. Obviously you are very much correct in that providing good jobs and opportunities to people , in conjunction with a strong social safety net and support, we could radically reduce the amount of people in sex work over a period of time.