“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.
“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.