“Lumpenproletariat” is exactly the kind of idea an educated German theorist would come up with in the wreckage of the industrial revolution and it’s ridiculous to try to carry that notion forward to the age of cell phones and heavily armed maoist prostitutes and if anyone can’t understand that you should throw grass at them until they stop being dorks because they’re too far gone to touch it themselves.
Like ffs read even one anthro text about black market and grey market economies and stop treating The Man’s legal system like anything but a criminal organization.
redefining prostitution as something other than and separate from sex work
I’m “redefining” prostitution? What percentage of prostitutes across history do you believe fit into a definition that isn’t characterized by exploitation? Do you believe a statistically significant percentage of prostitutes are independently wealthy self-employed hobbyists? I would argue that’s redefining prostitution.
I’ve seen people in these spaces carry a bunch of weird moralizing stigma about the “sex” part of sex work rather than the “work” part into these conversations, and I promise that’s not where I’m coming from. As far as I’m concerned, sex between consenting adults is a morally neutral act, and people who engage in sex work under capitalism aren’t guilty of anything more than any other proletarian commodifying their labor to survive.
Under communism (a classless, stateless, moneyless society), the economic and class relations that force people to perform sexual labor as a means of subsistence won’t be present. People will still have sex, but nobody will be coerced into having sex in exchange for food, shelter, or medical care. When people choose to have sex, it will be between mutually consenting adults for its own sake. Prostitution won’t be an occupational category under communism because the purpose of labor under communism is about fulfilling social need. A society where jobs are assigned based on fulfilling social need isn’t going to be assigning people whose primary contribution to society will be having sex with strangers and not being able to say “no”, because coerced sex isn’t beneficial to society. I would say that a person living under communism who has their needs of subsistence met, works a socially productive job, and chooses to have sex with any and every consenting adult they want outside of that job isn’t definitionally a prostitute. Prostitution as a “job” is inseparable from economic and class relations that must be abolished in order for communism to come about.
What percentage of prostitutes across history do you believe fit into a definition that isn’t characterized by exploitation?
What percentage of plumbers across history do you believe fit into a definition that isn’t characterized by exploitation? Sex work is work. Period. Just like other work, it can be done because a person enjoys it, but under capitalism (or other modes of production that exploit workers) it will always involve exploitation. If you want to define prostitution as something that always involves exploitation, ok fine, but then you also have to separate that out from sex work, which absolutely does not inherently require exploitation and most certainly would still exist even if all economic coercion were eradicated (that is, under communism rather than capitalism).
Under communism (a classless, stateless, moneyless society), the economic and class relations that force people to perform sexual labor as a means of subsistence won’t be present.
(Emphasis above is mine). Under communism, the economic and class relations that force people to perform any labor as a means of subsistence won’t be present.
People will still have sex, but nobody will be coerced into having sex in exchange for food, shelter, or medical care.
No shit. There will still be plumbers too, but they won’t be coerced into it in exchange for food, shelter, or medical care. Almost all of your arguments so far can be applied exactly the same to any number of other forms of labor.
Prostitution won’t be an occupational category under communism because the purpose of labor under communism is about fulfilling social need.
So finally we get to some reasoning (flawed though it is) for why sex work would be different than any other work. You think that sex work doesn’t fulfill a social need. Sexual fulfillment is a social need. There will always be people who find it difficult to find partners due to all kinds of possible scenarios (including having no time to build a relationship due to dedicating all of it to other interests or necessary labor). And there will similarly always be people willing to provide that, people who have dedicated their time to become skilled at providing that. Refusing to recognize them as fulfilling a social need is simply being sex-negative and it’s always shocking to me that there are still leftists who don’t understand this.
Under a communist society, social labour is socially planned.
Possibly, there will not be any allocation of labour into sex work. But if 2 consenting adults exchange favours for sex, then there is also no reason for the government to get involved.
Another possibility is that the government does allocate labour to brothels, but this is a political question of priorities whose answer depends entirely on the citizens of this hypothetical state.
There are some arguments as to why any communist state that is created today shouldn’t allocate labour into state-run brothels. Any existing communist state would face massive challenges that it should prioritise.
What percentage of plumbers across history do you believe fit into a definition that isn’t characterized by exploitation? Sex work is work. Period.
I don’t disagree. That’s part of the point I’m trying to make. I believe it’s idealistic, however, to insist that removing the profit motive from plumbing will convert the occupation to purely passion-driven volunteers. Work is, more often than not, unpleasant. People will still be required to clean up shit, pick dead animals off of streets, lay shingles on roofs, and mass produce textiles. People will need to do those things because industrial society requires them to function. The universe of people that would do that work purely out of a sense of personal gratification will always be hilariously smaller than the universe of people who will be required to do that work to keep society functioning. If you’re envisioning a society where “work” is only ever performed on a purely voluntary basis for the joy that people get from the task itself whenever they feel up to doing it, I’m sorry to say that’s not communism. “From each according to their ability” does actually require people that are able to perform socially necessary labor to do so even if they don’t always love it or feel like doing it. Marx was not a utopian or an anarcho-primitivist.
Refusing to recognize them as fulfilling a social need is simply being sex-negative
Explain to me how you believe prostitution works as an occupational category where you believe society is owed sex by prostitutes, but prostitutes are not obligated to provide it indiscriminately to society? I believe a just society prioritizes one person’s bodily autonomy over another person’s “entitlement” to be sexually stimulated by another. Sex is important to individual well being, but you personally being sexually serviced by a stranger is not an essential building block of society. I know this is a tightly controlled secret that you don’t see much on the internet, but people actually are capable of sexually stimulating themselves. People are equally capable of independently negotiating mutually fulfilling sexual relationships that meet the sexual needs of all parties without reducing one party to a commodity being bought and sold. People will find it much easier to do that when they’re not struggling for subsistence.
I’m not categorically ruling out the possibility that there are some people that will just love the abstract depersonalized concept of sex so much that they would willingly fuck anyone indiscriminately. I say good for them, and as long as they stay safe and get consent, they should follow their bliss. I’m pretty confident they’ll still need to have another job that keeps the lights on, the trains running, or the people fed, and they’ll be free to follow their bliss on their personal time. I’d say the same thing about real estate agents, advertising models, and YouTubers who get Patreon subscribers to pay for livestreams of them sleeping. These are all things you can turn into a job under capitalism, and they’re all things you could broadly still do, under communism, but I think it’s fair to say they wouldn’t still be jobs under communism.
