“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.
Yes. It is essential to organize alongside sex workers and include them in socialist movements. One of the main reasons I wrote this is because I have seen a lot of organisations refuse to allow sex workers, and have seen people decry sex worker unions as being a bad thing. But of course, as socialists, the point of what we do is to uplift the most vulnerable and exploited. When people in some of the worst positions of society are organizing, then we are doing a disservice to the people in not joining with them in coalition to improve everyone’s lives.
edit: and I also wanted to make it clear that in a capitalist society, calls to criminalise sex work (or sex purchase) did nothing to help people, and served only to reinforce a narrative that society should be giving police and border security more money/power under the pretense of “protecting” people