“The sale of women’s labour…is closely and inseparably connected with the sale of the female body … This is the horror and hopelessness that results from the exploitation of labour by capital. When a woman’s wages are insufficient to keep her alive, the sale of favours seems a possible subsidiary occupation. The hypocritical morality of bourgeois society encourages prostitution by the structure of its exploitative economy, while at the same time mercilessly covering with contempt any girl or woman who is forced to take this path.” – Alexandra Kollontai, 1921
If someone obtains sexual consent without freedom, it cannot truly be considered as consent. It is rape. This is not only when there is use of force or physical coercion. This article challenges the validity of sexual consent paid for through a revolutionary lens. It is a socioeconomic examination of sex work as labour in capitalist society. Without moralising, we argue that the sex work industry is an institutionalised rape industry which is often sanctioned by the state, and in its entirety, it represents a dark section of human relations which will be transcended with the socialist transformation of human society. We also highlight short term and long-term goals in the interest of, and for protecting, sex workers, who are victims of capitalism’s systemic dehumanisation.
Before delving into the flesh of this argument, just as an aside, I would like to debunk the baseless claim that “prostitution” is the oldest profession in the world. This is untrue. The job of hunter/gatherer in earliest human communities outdates the job of a sex worker. Humans have always had the need to find and provide food for survival, but only since the emergence of private property in human society did prostitution come about.
It is important that we strive to answer the question “what precisely constitutes sex work?” for this discussion. Put simply, sex work refers to the exchange of sexual services, performances, or intimacy for compensation, such as money, gifts, or other forms of payment.
To begin with, it is significant that we retrace our steps to a considerable point, from which a clear view of the origins of the sexual exploitation, now known as the sex industry, began. And, to do so, we must analyse the origin of “the family”, as we know it to be, today.
Friedrich Engels traces the roots of the modern patriarchal family to the disintegration of communal family structures and the emergence of private property in his book titled The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. In primitive societies, families lived communally, sharing resources and lacking the concept of paternity in the sense which it exists today.
However, with the rise of private property, men sought to secure their wealth and power for their biological heirs, leading to the establishment of patriarchal authority, monogamy and the nuclear family, or where polygamy was rife; polygyny (i.e. polygamy where a man can have several wives) but not polyandry (i.e., polygamy, where one woman could marry several men). The decline of communal living and the development of class society further reinforced patriarchal authority, concentrating wealth and power in the hands of men, perpetuating male dominance and the oppression of women. According to Engels, the modern patriarchal family is a product of historical development, shaped by the rise of private property and class society.
With the advent of private property, and the transition of human society into patriarchal formations, the burden of chastity was imposed on women. Men put norms and laws in place against promiscuity by women, in order to ensure that their property be passed to their legitimate heirs. But men had no such duty to maintain fidelity imposed on them. This created a situation where the man, in a union with a woman, could frolic as he wished, while restricting his wife. Man’s dominance in society backed and sanctioned the hypocritical and unfair nature of patriarchal authority over the woman, as he became the custodian of inherited private property.
Kollontai distinguished between two types of prostitution:
The “licensed” or “legal” prostitution of wives, who are bound by marriage and societal expectations to provide sexual and domestic services to their husbands for financial support and social standing.
The “unlicensed” or “illegal” prostitution of women who are forced to sell their bodies on the streets due to economic necessity or lack of alternatives.
Kollontai argued that both forms of prostitution are the result of a capitalist patriarchal system that commodifies women’s bodies and sexuality. As working-class and youth activists, we must be critical of the sex industry. We must combat any stigmatisation or discrimination against sex workers. They are victims of the degenerate social systems of class exploitation. As Kollontai further affirms “We do not, therefore, condemn prostitution and fight against it as a special category but as an aspect of labour desertion.”
At the heart of capitalism are forms of labour that generate value. These cover labour exerted to produce goods and services, for which the worker is paid a wage that falls short of the actual value she or he has produced. The capitalist employer thus pockets the surplus value from this exploitation. We see this process most directly in such economic sectors as manufacturing and industry. But the social reproduction process is not limited to this critical economic heartbeat of society. For example, the unpaid care work done by women in families, such as cooking and taking care of the wellbeing of other members of the family subsidises the capitalists.
Sex work does not involve productive labour, as it does not result in the generation of surplus value. But it entails the commodification of the bodies of prostitutes, to the greater benefit of pimps, brothel madams, and an ever-increasing number of traffickers and other forces involved in the sex industry.
Sex workers are confronted with abuse and violence of all sorts. The sex trade is fuelled and moved by a forceful and manipulative market of slavers, who buy, sell and transport young peasant or working class girls and women away from their rural or impoverished urban communities into areas where their bodies can be sold for sex to a brooding market of delinquent men.
For the supply of prostitutes to be able to meet the teeming demands of men ready to exploit the bodies of women for their own satisfaction, there has to be a market that transports and traffics these young women and girls away from their families into servitude and modern-day slavery, where they often have to sleep with multiple men a day to be able to cover the cost of their transportation away from their hometowns, and also to cover the cost of clothing and feeding and housing, often taken care of by their parasitic pimps. Prostitution creates a safe space for human trafficking and traffickers, and upholds the institution of slavery, in today’s world.
Also, on the analytical journey the topic of sex work brings us to an issue which threatens the entire fabric of human society–the relations between men and women.
The relations between men and women, cannot be normalised or regularised in a society where one group, with disproportionate access to wealth and property, continues to exploit and buy the bodies of the other. Under such conditions there can exist no true form of camaraderie between them. Just as there can exist no true form of camaraderie between the bourgeois and the worker. One remains a slave to the gratification of the other. Where can respect grow when the autonomy of a person’s body can simply be bought?
If our new society must be one that is to be built on the foundations of equality for all, then we must abolish all forms of labour that renders a human being to be nothing more than chattel, and this includes prostitution. Where another human can obtain, through economic coercion, the consent to perform sexual acts on another by means of monetary purchase, there can be nothing which resembles equality. This sexual consent obtained by means of economic coercion is one which we, as a genuine change-seeking working-class activists, must put under the microscope of examination.
According to Section 357 of the Criminal Code Act of Nigeria, ‘Any person who has unlawful carnal knowledge of a woman or girl, without her consent, or with her consent, if the consent is obtained by force or by means of threats or intimidation of any kind, or by fear of harm…’ is said to be liable for the offence of rape. The Criminal Laws of Nigeria on the issue of rape, bear semblance with that of most countries of the world today.
If laws prescribe that whatever consent derived by means of threat or force be classified as rape, then there must be an extent to which we can hold market forces responsible for creating the socioeconomic climate that enables this coercion. If the state, with its laws, reinforces an environment where men can exert financial force on women, to a point where they can, through their privileged economic position, buy the sexual consent of working women who are faced with the hopelessness of their economic realities, why then should the state enjoy immunity from any culpability for the sinister crime of subjecting working women and girls to sexual exploitation?
Flowing from our earlier submission in the opening paragraph of this article, that consent can only be gotten freely, we may also agree that any sexual interaction which involves the purchase of consent is illegitimate, and as such, enters the realm of rape as it is not freely given. By creating the economic milieu which breeds exploitation, and forcing working-class women into having to sell their consent and bodies to be able to afford basic amenities under capitalist society like housing and access to dignified human living, the capitalist state acts as an accessory to this crime of rape against working women. This must be stopped!
WHAT IS TO BE DONE?
On sex work, we have to set two categories of goals as revolutionaries;
- Long term goals
- Short term goals
Short terms goals will include aims and objectives such as decriminalisation of sex work, unionisation of sex workers and the legislation of better laws regarding sex work.
In the long term we must fight to completely eradicate all factors which compel people to sell their intimacy for survival such as hunger, unemployment and homelessness, from society. And these can be done only through the overthrow of capitalism and building socialism, a new society based on our self-emancipation.
We must take concrete steps to “cut out the roots that feed prostitution” such as poverty and poor life opportunities. Criminalisation of prostitution is not only ineffective, it is also discriminatory and creates avenues for oppression as we have seen with the police arresting and locking up women for real or imagined involvement in sex work in Abuja and other cities, so as to extort them. Rather, we must demand social protection measures. The processes of unionisation of sex workers must be strengthened and supported by socialists and the radical civil society movement. No group of people, including sex workers, in this capitalist society should be denied their right to come together and protect their collective interests. Duly recognised unions for sex workers just as unions for Road Transport workers or any other labour union will go a long way in helping sex workers have a stronger voice and stake in protecting them and their labour.
We must also advocate for better laws on sex work that don’t criminalise it, as that will only lead to more underground activities that creates room for even more exploitation of sex workers by pimps and madams. We need to campaign for the creation of a framework for the protection of sex workers as is done in some other climes.
As we battle prostitution now, we must have no illusion that it can be eradicated without eradicating class exploitation. Over the decades, within feminist circles and the larger socialist movement, there have been debates on the issue whether or not sex work is any different from any other form of labour under capitalist society where the individual is forced to sell themselves in the form of wage labour. Whether or not there exists any fundamental distinguishing factors between the job of a sex worker or that of a domestic cleaner, or a therapist in capitalist society, is a debate that will keep on rolling-over with well nuanced arguments on all sides. But, what is most important to us as advocates of societal transformation looking towards the advancement of human society and the transition from capitalism into a classless society, is that we must reflect towards redefining our relations with each other as human beings. It remains our fundamental goal in transforming society to transform labour and inter-personal relations.
It is noteworthy that it is not only commercial sex workers that have had to surrender their consent to men for survival. Even wives who have married not out of love, but for their survival and the survival of their families, have been subtly coerced by the system into domesticated prostitution. They too are victims of a societal disorder that has forced them to sell their hearts and their bodies to the highest bidder. We must be ready to struggle for the death of the old patriarchal institutions of the family and marriage built on oppression and exploitation of the husband over the wife and parents over children.
For us, as fighters for a new world, we yearn to see a day when intimacy and sex are no longer economically coerced out of women by men through the institutionalisation of poverty. It is crucial that we create a world where poor working women do not have to choose between death, starvation, and homelessness, or giving their bodies to the cold touch of a randy consumer, whether that be an unloved husband or a customer scanning the streets. We know, for that day to come, the whole capitalist system must be brought down! We know that the working women of the world cannot liberate themselves from the chains of forced intimacy, without destroying the exploitation machine that is capitalism. We know that this state sanctioned rape will never be defeated if we continue to live under a system based on brutal exploitation of humanity.
It is for us, on this point, to keep up our struggle against the domination of humanity by capital and the exploiting class of capitalists who personify it, and use their state power to repress and oppress us. The fall of capitalism and the ultimate realisation of a socialist society will move human relations from one based on exploitation of one class of people over the other into one where control over the means of production is collectively owned by the working people, and no one group of people can claim divine or political right over the means of production, or the bodies of others. The flavour of love and sex free from all forms of financial and economic coercion from the exploiter class and the state which acts on its behalf, is the flavour that will be on the lips of all women and men, when we have toppled this system that commodifies intimacy.
In organisation and struggle lie our greatest hopes, comrades. We must organise ourselves as working-class people to fight and overthrow the capitalist system and establish a government of the working people, that doesn’t commodify people and force them to sell their sexual intimacy and parts of their persons.
by Oghenero ABU
