“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.
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.