“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.

  • @frippa
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    141 year ago

    Holy shit the downvotes, speaking from a purely cynical point of view, ignoring the brutal exploitation for a second, all theese “communists” are alienating a somewhat huge portion of the proletariat and lumpen proletariat, they’re exploited in even more brutal conditions than other workers, most of them don’t even want to be there, ergo if we don’t include sex workers in the movement we should not include slaves.

    • ⚧️TheConquestOfBed♀️
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      1 year ago

      It seems to me like the general distaste for lumpen is a blindspot in the class consciousness of some marxists, and sex work is at the forefront of that because it’s held as the symbol of moral decay in polite bourgeois society. You can dress it up all you like, but throwing lumpen into the clutches of the bourgeoisie state always harms them and makes them dependent upon it, even when it’s under the guise of liberal harm reduction. Freedom comes from solidarity that’s independent of state actors and involves the support of communities, community orgs, and unions who are meant to lay the groundwork for a revolutionary state in the long term.