I recently made a post about this topic but it caused a lot of controversy. I did not specify and used the broad term of sex work which probably made the interpretations so varied. For the purposes of this conversation, I want to focus on work that is consensual because obviously human trafficking or coercive sex is inherently wrong and exploitative. Some people even said that sex work is not valid labor which I personally found strange. I’m personally not a fanboy of the sex industry at all, but most people involved would say that the illegality of it exacerbates the bad situation that they find themselves in, and I cannot personally find a reason to be going against what the people involved are saying. And yeah it probably wouldn’t exist under socialism but at the same time, I think it is a huge mistake to go in with an iron fist and just say “I’m going to make everyone stop sex work right this instant because it’s not socialist” because this does not treat the underlying causes of it, which will only make it spring back up anyway.
And I’m not just expecting one type of answer but if I am making an error in applying dialectical materialism or Marxism-Leninism please let me know.
this is something i’m quite convinced you’ll never produce a consensus on except in the most particular of crowds.
“work in nonconsensual, sexwork cannot be consensual” is a fairly impenetrable logic, and people decide from that from sexwork must be illegal because nonconsensual sex is wrong.
or you can separate an economic imperative a bit from sexual consent and concede that reality doesn’t align perfectly with what we’d like. i’d never tell someone who believes their sexwork to be consensual that it actually wasn’t because of the abstract construction of the economy, myself. i also won’t advocate for hounding people selling sex with cops, even if they’re Good Socialist Cops. if things are ever so good that sexwork need not exist, i don’t think there’d be any reason to criminalize it, because nobody would partake. it was an exercise in obscene idealism for the Soviet Union to pretend prostitution couldn’t exist so long as deficiencies existed in the economy, and it will continue to be until a socialist economy makes the fulfillment of everyone’s needs a reality