Sex Work & its Discontents
By: Dale Gutierrez
Tags: Sex Work, History, Marxism, Politics, Rosa Luxemburg

Sex Work & its Discontents

What is to be Done?

A Slightly More Marxist Analysis

There is a particular fallacy in the denial of sex work as work (for all practical purposes, for this piece, I define sex work as direct prostitution and not other contemporary forms). It is labor, and therefore work. However, it is non-productive labor. The material aspect of various forms of labor cannot be denied. There is a myriad amount of labor that by design is non-productive due to the contradictions of capitalism. The common belief is that when we as society pass through the stages of communist society development is that the idea of prostitution as a necessity to avert poverty and need would no longer be necessary.

However, in the current incarnation of the economic model of oppression which we exist, what are the options when the various political manifestations of liberal and left thought lack the dedication, or material ability or perhaps even the common care as directed by the maxim, “From each according to their ability to each according to their need”? Seemingly, the idea of decriminalization, rather than expanded mutual aid programs even within the smallest measurement of community is a convenient excuse for those who would rather wash their hands of social responsibility and indeed would not need to dedicate any part of their income to assist their fellow human in need. However, that is a moral question, and not a synopsis of the material conditions I originally started to explore in my search for one particular work by Rosa Luxemburg. The idea of it as a moral question of individual autonomy has led to the liberal, revisionist position, but of course there is a material position within that as well, but it demands a different approach as the liberal material position admits the factor to which economic exploitation and related oppressions factor into necessity, rather than the liberal position which declares personal autonomy rather than the collectivity of Communism. The orthodox Marxist approach, and by proxy the Socialist approach is what I am exploring, not the moral objection, but the material objection.

There is an oft referenced story about how Rosa Luxemburg wrote and participated in the organizing of into a revolutionary force.

Except, the only source of this source is from a conversation between Clara Zetkin & Lenin, in which Lenin states that he had head of this from “some Russian and German comrades.” As stated in “Lenin on the Women’s Question” subtitled, “An Interview with Lenin on the Woman Question.” Lenin states, “I understand that in Hamburg a gifted Communist woman is bringing out a newspaper for prostitutes, and is trying to organize them for the revolutionary struggle.” Lenin continues, Luxemburg, “acted like a human being when she wrote an article in defense of prostitutes who have landed in jail for violating a police regulation concerning their sad trade.”

Searching through archives available to myself, I cannot locate this particular work of Rosa Luxemburg’s, nor statements urging for a revolutionary front within the world of sex workers.

The reality is, at that time prostitution was nominally legal (dependent on locale) albeit heavily regulated and existed in a legal grey area in many places. Lenin reveals that this incident took place in Hamburg. More than likely if this story is correct, the probably took place in the Reeperbahn district more than likely Herbertstraße, with the arrestees taken to the station on Davidstraße.

The Hamburg Bürgerschaft embarked on a program of regularization after 1879, or “Reglementierung” in an effort to regulate and register prostitutes. This regularization program also regulated where they could live, work, and when and where they could travel. Needless to say, the Sittenpolizei, or loosely translated as moral police, but used in the same vein as a “vice squad” had wide reign over workers. The Sittenpolizei as an agency initially under Dept II Politische Polizei, Kriminal- und Sittenpolizei (Political Police, Criminal and Moral Police).

The mission of the Sittenpolizei according to Meyers Großem Konversations-Lexikon of 1909, was “to counteract certain external incentives to immorality…” and depending upon district or locality, “the police supervision of prostitutes.”

With this context, what was Rosa Luxemburg’s particular opinion of prostitution as a form of labor? Luxemburg classified them in “The Accumulation of Capital”, as being members of the “non-productive classes”, and therefore “hanger-ons of the capitalist classes”, stating, the “king, parson, professor, prostitute, mercenary…the representatives of a derivative purchasing power, and thus the parasitic joint consumers of the surplus value or of the wage of labour.” In Luxemburg’s model, labor is specific, “Production will be carried on not for the enrichment of the individual but solely for the creation of a supply of commodities sufficient to supply the wants and needs of the working class. Accordingly factories, mills and farms must be operated upon an entirely new basis, from a wholly different point of view.” She furthers in “why Bolshevism?” “The manufacture of useless and costly foolishness for the edification of wealthy idlers will stop. Personal service will be prohibited, and the labor power thus released will find more useful and more worthy employment.”

Much of what Luxemburg corresponds with what Alexandra Kollontai believed and wrote about, Kollontai took a more militant line and believed that prostitution was simply “labor desertion”, and stated that “from the point of view of the national economy the professional prostitute is a labour deserter. For this reason we must ruthlessly oppose prostitution.” Kollontai furthers, “We can therefore list as factors responsible for prostitution: low wages, social inequalities, the economic dependence of women upon men, and the unhealthy custom by which women expect to he supported in return for sexual favours instead of in return for their labour.”

Further, the prostitute as considered at that time was considered to be a member of the Lumpenproletariat, as defined in the Encyclopedia of Marxism, includes “beggars, prostitutes, gangsters, racketeers, swindlers, petty criminals, tramps, chronic unemployed or unemployables, persons who have been cast out by industry, and all sorts of declassed, degraded or degenerated elements.” As such, this particular class was considered by the German and Soviet Marxists as being more open to reactionary and therefore opportunistic tendencies, which is what we often see in terms of fascist and reactionary recruiting swelling at times of depression, struggle, or social breakdown. Luxemburg would have been well aware of this tendency, citing the Czar’s and imperial classes’ “favorite method of fighting the revolutionary movement. It stirs up the dregs of society, or lumpenproletariat, trying to drown the vanguard of the working class in a sea of blood.” Trotsky as Luxemburg’s contemporary stated, “By means of the fascist agency, capitalism sets into motion the masses of the crazed petite bourgeoisie along with bands of the declassed and demoralized lumpenproletariat.” Kautsky stated, “Politically the lumpenproletarian ideal is a communism of consumption, not of production.” Which supports Luxemburg’s thesis of the prostitute as a member of the lumpenproletariat and therefore a member of the non-productive class.

So what was Luxemburg hoping to achieve? Marx and Engels stated that that the lumpenproletariat “may, here and there, be swept into the movement by a proletarian revolution,” however, adding “its conditions of life prepare it far more for the part of bribed tool of reactionary intrigue.” So, the ability exists to radicalize this element for the worker’s revolution, which at this time in Germany was on the horizon. Perhaps, Luxemburg was embarking on the mission that would be furthered by the Mujeres Libres.

The Anarchist association founded in 1935 by Lucia Sanchez Saornil and Mercedes Composada as a strictly anarcho-feminist movement within the context of Revolutionary Spain. At their peak of 30,000 strong they began a protracted campaign via education to bring about the end of prostitution in Spain via education and opening centers to retrain former prostitutes into what they believed to be productive work that would prove beneficial to the collective as well as dismantling what they believed to be a system of oppression whose causation of economic and social. Some however, participated in the summary execution of pimps.

The theory was that the idea of prostitution was the low hanging fruit in the patriarchal feudal system of male and female relationships, therefore the eradication of prostitution could also bring about the end of the system of bourgeois marriage and thus the start of the eradication of traditional gender roles. They believed that “Prostitution expressed most clearly the connections between economic and sexual subordination, contributing to the degradation both of the women who engaged in it, and of sexuality more generally. Ideally, sex ought not to be viewed as a commodity; both women and men should be able to experience their sexuality fully and freely.” Maria Lacerda de Moura went further, believing that “plural love would eliminate most problems of jealousy, allow women to be truly free to choose their mate (or mates), and end prostitution and the sexual exploitation of women (since unmarried, sexually active women would no longer be stigmatized and vulnerable). Perhaps the opinion of the Mujeres Libres was in line with what Marx stated, “Bourgeois marriage is, in reality, a system of wives in common and thus, at the most, what the Communists might possibly be reproached with is that they desire to introduce, in substitution for a hypocritically concealed, an openly legalised community of women. For the rest, it is self-evident that the abolition of the present system of production must bring with it the abolition of the community of women springing from that system, i.e., of prostitution both public and private.”

The goal was to set up centers called, “Liberatorios de Prostitución”, however, due to the constraints of the war, official centers were never established however, two aspects of the program, “professional orientation and capacitacion, and moral and material assistance whenever they need it, even after they have left the liberatorios” are aspects that should be adopted through the theory of mutual aid but contemporary Marxist organizations that support either abolishment, or the Nordic Model (of note, the Anarcho-Feminist YPJ in Rojava have loosely adopted and utilize the liberatorio program).

The Mujeres Libres did not consider prostitution to be simply the problem of the prostitute, but rather, it was “but ours, that all of women and all men.” And the program included education for the men reminding them that patronizing prostitutes continued the models of exploitation and oppression that they were fighting against.

The Mujeres Libres viewed their struggle against prostitution as mostly a moral obligation, whereas the German and Soviet Communists viewed it from a material position, perhaps the differences lay in the ideological difference between the anarchist and the Marxist? The subjective nature of morality has also led to to competing liberal positions.

Additionally this leads to more questions.

Is the western liberal idea regarding sex work if applied internationally essentially a form of cultural chauvinism that predicates feminism on a western liberal model as opposed to feminism (in this case as the majority of sex workers are women) in an internationalist context?

Does this mean variant cultural folkways & norms or aspects of personal morality that happen to intersect or clash with capital should be left off of the table for the sake of internationalism?

As a model, are western ideas of sex work chiefly a liberal idea even when presented by “leftists” in contrast to an applied leftist society such as Anarcho-Feminism in Rojava where it is illegal?

The ultimate question is, do the liberal proponents of sex work aim to have decriminalization and/or legalization of sex work built into the framework of a future theoretical communist society?

If we negate the idea that non-productive labor is compatible with communism, then we are indulging in liberal revisionism. If non-productive labor is able to co-exist with the labor necessary to provide to each according to their needs, then we are only aiming to create another privileged class, and thus negating the class struggle.