Sex work: Not real work, not real sex (Part 1)
The idea that "sex work is work" is capitalist propaganda.
This essay is the first part of a two-part essay. The second deals with whether sex work is sex (it's not). This article uses the terms "sex work" and "prostitution" interchangeably. This article was republished (with some modifications) on The Bellows
A few months ago, Canadian Conservative Party MP Arnold Viersen had to apologize after asking sex work proponent and New Democratic Party (NDP) MP Laurel Collins if she had ever considered sex work as a career path. Collins was visibly offended, and shouts of "shame on you" came from other House members. Collins then tweeted:
"I'm glad @ArnoldViersen apologized to me, but I invite him to extend his apology to all women. Denigrating sex work & criminalizing the very things that would keep sex workers safe contribute to increased violence."
Other prominent members of the Canadian Left joined her in denouncing the interchange while affirming that "sex work IS work." Blinded by righteous indignation, the Left missed the irony of the whole affair. The visceral reaction that many, including Leftists, have to the idea of themselves or their loved ones engaging in sex work suggests that the Left dogma "sex work is work" is not intuitively correct for most people. Nonetheless, the modern-day Left has joined hands with liberal feminists, capitalists, pimps, adulterers, and bourgeois academics in insisting that sex work is wage labour like any other.
Photo by Artem Labunsky on Unsplash
But is sex work really like any other wage labour? If we look at the sex trade and compare it to other jobs on the basis of violence alone, it would seem that prostitution differs in an important material sense — harm to the physical body. Rates of violence are meteoric amongst sex workers compared to the general population, with between 45-75% of all sex workers experiencing "workplace" violence over their lifetimes. In one study conducted in the UK, 81% of outdoor-based prostitutes and 48% of indoor-based prostitutes had experienced violence at their clients' hands, including a high proportion reporting attempted or perpetuated vaginal and anal rape. Rates of violence and sexual assault faced by prostitutes are not comparable to any other type of civilian work and are much higher than the rates experienced by women-at-large.
But sex work proponents will counter that these ill-effects are due criminalization and stigmatization. They interpret the high rates of violence as evidence of the need for further “de-stigmatization” and extending labour rights and protections to sex workers. There is no amount of empirical data that can convince Leftists that sex work is not work like any other. Theirs is a normative position — that sex work counts as work because people are being hired and paid — and a utopian outlook — that through unionization and destigmatization, sex work can be made safe. We must address the argument on its own normative and utopian premises.
My normative argument centers around whether sex work is “work” within the context of the philosophy of freedom which undergirds Marxism. My utopian argument centers around whether sex work can be used as a part of an emancipatory socialist project.
Sex Work is Unnecessary Labour and Contributes to Unfreedom
That sexual services are sold as a commodity is nothing new. Commoditization is what capitalism does. But just because something can be commoditized, and a worker may gain a "job" by selling this commodity, does not make it legitimate "work" in the Marxist sense. That is the capitalists’ propaganda, who rationalize their ever-increasing commodification of life by claiming that this creates legitimate "work." Of course, capitalists' interest is to create more venues for exploitation and profit; human betterment is beside the point.
For most socialists historically, prostitution was never considered a form of labour that could rightfully be accepted as "work" in a society working towards human betterment and freedom. From Krupskaya, to Kollontai, to Lenin, to Eleanor Marx, —when the socialists of the past asked themselves whether prostitution was labour that they wanted to offer up as “work” in a socialist society, the answer was an emphatic NO.
As Alexandra Kollontai explained in 1921:
"And what, after all, is the professional prostitute? She is a person whose energy is not used for the collective; a person who lives off others, by taking from the rations of others [. . .] It cannot be allowed, because it reduces the reserves of energy and the number of working hands that are creating the national wealth and the general welfare, from the point of view of the national economy the professional prostitute is a labour deserter."
And except for the most extremist liberal feminists who claim that sex is a "right" for disabled persons, few serious people claim that sexual services are socially necessary. Instead of accepting capitalist logic that sex work is a legitimate venue for workers, Marxists should demand and fight for socially valuable jobs for all, for a reduction of the working week, and democratizing workplaces. Whatever human time is invested into work should meet human needs and enable human flourishment.
The Left was successful in fights for better work earlier on its history. It was a vibrant labour movement infused with socialist politics that successfully eliminated child labour and limited the working day. While capitalists remain dismayed, any working person would agree that the world is better for not having child labour and 14-hour workdays. These were never necessary to make society run and diminished human freedom.
Of course, what work constitutes “necessary labour” is to some extent debatable. After we’ve fulfilled our needs for nutrition, health care, shelter, and the like, what is next? In a democratic society, the “what is next” would be up for discussion and collective decision-making. Nonetheless, the inherent uncertainty of the term “unnecessary labour” shouldn’t dissuade socialists from pushing back against clear cases of misused human time and life, and demand good, meaningful jobs instead.
Sex Work is Unproductive Labour
Marxists recognize that not all wage-labour is created equal from the point of view of Capital, as Marx distinguished between productive and unproductive labour. These are not value judgements; instead, these categories speak strictly on the use of the final product of labour and the relation to the labourer to Capital. Productive labour is that which is transformed back into a source of profit for capitalists. Unproductive labour produces a final commodity directly for consumption.
For example, an independent gardener who produces a mowed lawn as a final product for a buyer is an unproductive worker. The factory worker who assembled the pieces of the lawnmower is a productive worker due to the profit that selling the lawnmower produces for a capitalist. Marx further identifies unproductive work as labour which is inseparable from the labourer himself or herself. Examples include some kinds of doctors or prostitutes, who can only render their services through direct contact. Because the product cannot be completely detached from the labourer, it is difficult or impossible to apply capitalist production techniques to increase productivity and surplus value extraction.
Unproductive labourers do not have the same relationships to Capital and are not exploited in the same way as productive workers. As Marx explains,
"A schoolmaster who instructs others is not a productive worker. But a schoolmaster who works for wages in an institution along with others, using his own labour to increase the money of the entrepreneur who owns the knowledge-mongering institution, is a productive worker. But for the most part, work of this sort has scarcely reached the stage of being subsumed even formally under Capital, and belongs essentially to a transitional stage".
Sex work belongs to the same transitional stage as the schoolmaster in Marx's example. The majority of sex workers work either for themselves, for individual pimps, or small brothels. For those that work for themselves, this is a clear case of unproductive work: their commodity is consumed directly as a service in exchange for money and not used to generate more Capital. For the prostitutes that work for pimps or independent brothels, theirs is still unproductive work. In these situations, sex workers pay a portion of their wages to access clients, protection, and/or a workplace. This arrangement is better characterized as rent-seeking, like a landlord and tenant, rather than as capitalist social relations. A capitalist business generates capital which is reinvested into better technology, more labourers, a rationalized productive line, etc. This is done in order to generate more of the commodity in question in less time and/or for fewer resources, in order to then generate more capital. Prostitution in the above-cited cases is not and cannot be conducted in this way.
Nonetheless, as legalization, decriminalization and "normalization" spread throughout the developed world, sex work is increasingly being subsumed into capitalist social relations. This means that sex work will be carried out in more and more exploitative conditions. Sex factories, in the form of monstrous mega-brothels, sex drive-throughs, outdoor sex box chains are emerging throughout Germany, Netherlands, and New Zealand, generating billions. Prostitution is openly advertised on buses and other public spaces.
Brothel advertised on a bus in Germany (source: Nordic Model Now)
Competition puts downward pressure on sex worker wages. But like our schoolmaster, this subsumption must remain at a transitional stage. The service rendered by a sex worker cannot be separated from the worker, and into a commodity independent of him or her. This puts physical limits to the amount of profit that can be extracted from a sex worker since efficiency through technological innovation is limited. Sex rent-seekers are left only with the option of increasing the length of the working day, increasing work intensity or diminishing wages in order to increase profit at an ever-increasing rate. However, there is a physical limit to how many clients a prostitute can service an hour, how much sex her/his body can physically take, and minimum wage floors exist in most countries. As Marx said of other such services which are not separable from the labourer:
"On the whole, types of work that are consumed as services and not in products separable from the worker and hence not capable of existing as commodities independently of him, but which are yet capable of being directly exploited in capitalist terms, are microscopic significance when compared with the mass of capitalist production. They may be entirely neglected, therefore, and can be dealt with under the category of wage-labour that is not at the same time productive labour"
Sex Workers Cannot Improve The World
Socialism is a political movement. Thus, socialist analysis and prescriptions should serve the empowerment of the working class. Although it may be controversial, socialists should not shy away from assessing which work is and is not productive, and therefore politically useful, in this current day. Which work holds the levers of power in capitalism? Which workers, when organized, can deal a lasting blow against capitalist social relations? In the past, when socialists asked themselves whether prostitution had a place in the future that we are building, the answer was an emphatic "no". As Lenin said: "Take them back to productive work, bring them into the social economy."
Sex workers cannot apply meaningful force against capitalism as such. The effects of a sex worker's work stoppage could be compared to the effects of a rent strike. Rent strikes can certainly reduce the amount of rent extracted by landlords, and even reduce the amount to zero. However, rent strikes, whether by tenants or prostitutes, do not challenge capitalist social relations.
Indeed, it is debatable that such sex worker organization to conduct sex rent-strike could ever occur. Unionization of sex workers is almost non-existent. Germany, where prostitution has been legal since 2002, has seen a minuscule number of prostitutes join unions. A mere 300-600 prostitutes out of the 400,000 that work in the country (fewer than 0.15%) have joined Ver.di, a public-sector union that actively recruits workers in the sex trade. Nearly 20 years later, the legalized regime of Germany has failed to materialize the fantasy of the union sex worker that so many Leftists conjure up in the pages of Jacobin and the like.
Many Leftists claim that promoting the idea that "sex work is work" empowers women and validates their choices. But clearly, sex work is extremely disempowering. Where a woman worker could gain gainful employment in another domain, join a union, and fight for improved conditions and for herself and her whole class, she is instead relegated to a highly dangerous and violent line of work, where her ability to improve her working conditions and wages diminishes with her age.
Socialists should argue against sex work in the same way that the Left promotes it: with one eye on the present, and one eye towards the future. The political utility of sex work is nil, and valorizing and cementing the position of working-class women in the trade weakens the working class. At best, a few women may make a great living while they are young and considered valuable on the sex trade market. At worse, sex work provides a convenient release valve for governments to funnel unemployment and poverty, further enabling states to shed their responsibilities. Socialists should not be satisfied with the former, and should actively fight the latter.
One other thing: hourly wages in sex work are significantly higher than in unskilled workforces in Canada. The mother of one of my nieces was a sex-trade worker on and off for at least 20 years, and I remember when she got a job at a MacDonald's restaurant around 1995 and I was so happy for her to finally get a regular job; she worked there for only a few weeks because she said, "I quit - it was exhausting - FOUR HOURS! - and I can make in 20 minutes on the street what took me FOUR HOURS to make in that shitty restaurant for losers." She added that it was more humiliating to work at MacDonald's with all the "losers" than be working the streets on her own. She also mentioned that she typically was better treated by her "johns" than by her co-workers, customers and bosses at MacDonald's. I'll never forget it.
She gave me a whole different perspective on why she, as a high school drop-out with no interest in ever going back to school, would always return to hooking. I don't know if she ever suffered violence, but she did tell me about others who did, though she suggested they sometimes "had it coming" because they were trying to rip people off in the form of promising to get drugs that they didn't actually have, or taking money upfront for sex/drugs and then just disappearing out the back door.
If working conditions, and basic living standards, were better, and guaranteed, and more meaningful, I'm guessing that she would not have kept returning to prostitution.
Every argument about the unproductive nature of sex work could apply to other forms of entertainment or personal services. A personal trainer, a nail artist, a hair cutter, a stand up comic or a live musician all have similar issues. Also, sex work can scale - a person who performs in porn, or exchanges dirty text messages with clients, or runs an OnlyFans account - they are also doing sex work and their earning potential isn't limited by the hours in their day. Those forms of sex work are subject to the same analysis and relationship with work as someone who performs in non-pornographic films, or works as a counselor or concierge, or runs a Patreon.