nothingness-and-names:

I have in the past criticized some marxist “takes” on sex work for reducing it entirely to a labor issue and ignoring the ways in which sex/gender manifests in sex work (…duh) that are not simply class matters.

However these days i think a more prominent tendency among self-proclaimed “marxists” with regard to sex work is to completely jettison everything they know about labor in general as well. In other words they don’t even criticize prostitution and pornography as forms of labor anymore. I swear, if you mention something about sex, most “marxists” will happily let their brains fall out and just repeat liberal platitudes.

To make things clear, let’s talk about the shortcomings of liberal theory here and how a genuinely Marxist analysis responds to it.

Liberals like to treat pornography and prostitution as matters of “choosing” and “agency,” “sexual liberation” and “empowerment.” Often, the primary explanation from liberals for why sex workers are oppressed is that sex work is not considered a “real job,” i.e. there’s a stigma. The implication here is obviously that if sex work were legitimized and treated like a “respectable” line of work then the problems would start to go away.

From a communist perspective, it is certainly true that the stigma surrounding sex work makes it harder for sex workers to leave the industry and causes broader problems in sex workers’ lives. However, in our view there are more fundamental problems that would persist even if sex work were considered a “real job.” This is analogous to how, no matter how much “legitimacy” jobs have in capitalism, capitalism remains founded in the exploitation of labor. And there are textile workers in South Asia who make $0.20/hr despite having “real jobs.”

In the first place, there are good reasons to think that sex work is, at least for the vast majority of sex workers, not at all about “choosing” or “agency.” There remain the simple facts that most sex workers are poor and wouldn’t be there if they didn’t feel they had to be, and that the overwhelming majority of sex workers say they would leave the industry but can’t or don’t know how. But at an even deeper level than that, the very foundation of selling sex makes “agency” impossible.

What’s really happening when sex is being sold? It means that access to one’s body can be purchased. One’s body becomes a thing, which is now effectively under the control of the highest bidder. Sex workers can, to some extent, be selective in who they offer services to or what sorts of jobs they take (this ability to choose increases with wealth). But there are limits to this, especially for the poorest sex workers. People have to eat, after all. This means that there is a point, for every sex worker, where giving another person access to her body becomes a business decision at best, and at worst a matter of life and death, which is the reality in the long run for most sex workers (especially globally speaking). An individual may feel like they are choosing in the moment. But how did they end up in that situation to begin with? Why is she the one selling and the other person the one buying? Why does the buyer have the money to buy? Could the worker really refuse and get away with it? What if she refused all customers?

The bottom line is, there are sexual acts these workers would not perform, and people these workers would not have sex with, if their lives did not depend on it. The pathway through which sex workers end up in their position in the first place, the clients they take, the acts they are “willing” to perform, are all structured by an entire economic and political system that sex workers are not at all in control of and which does not work in their benefit. There’s no other way to say it: prostitution and pornography is coerced sex, i.e. rape, no matter how any individual might feel about it. The reality of the situation is that “agency” is severely limited by the threat of starvation, and by the commodification of the body itself (which, in conjunction with capitalist labor relations, places the body out of one’s own control). And this is all central to the labor relation at a basic level. No matter how “respectable” sex work is this will still be true.

Note also that all of what i have just said is true to one extent or another of capitalist labor relations in general. So in the dominant forms of “marxist” discourse on this subject, where “marxists” simply adopt the liberal framework, they have to forget basic tenets of their supposed standpoint. Wage labor is source of the emiseration of the majority of the world and should be abolished, except for sex work. Got it.

Then on top of all of this there’s the role that pornography and prostitution play in constructing women specifically as sexual objects whose purpose is to be accessed. This is the gendered aspect of the relation and it has implications throughout society. That is worth talking about as well, and at one time that’s where i wanted to place focus. I’d assumed that a critique of sex work within the framework of capitalist labor relations in general was already taken for granted among communists but i think i was wrong about that. To a large degree i think it is necessary to go back to step 1 and really spell this out for liberal “marxists.”

On that point, why is it that many on the supposed “left” have so much trouble with this? Is it because they want to keep buying access to women’s bodies in communism? Or better yet, have free communal access to women?