Our essays reflect only their author's point of view. We ask only that they respect our Principles.

← Back to all essays | Author's essays In defense of Aileen Wuornos: Dialectical materialism vs. Criminal law

by Comrade Kiwi
Published: 2025-10-26 (last update: 2025-10-26)
25-45 minutes

This was not individual tragedy but structural violence made visible, the routine operation of capitalist patriarchy proceeding through its normal channels toward its normal outcome. She is dead. The structure that killed her remains. It is producing others like her at this moment, subjecting them to the same conditions, offering them the same impossible choices, preparing them for the same destruction. Our task is to identify with precision what must be abolished and to organize the collective force necessary to abolish it.

This requires dialectical materialist analysis capable of grasping totality without losing sight of individuals, structural determination without eliminating agency, historical necessity without accepting the inevitability of any particular outcome. It requires rage disciplined by theory and compassion disciplined by materialism.

Read more

“If women’s liberation is unthinkable without communism, then communism is unthinkable without women’s liberation.”

- Inessa Armand

In defense of Aileen Wuornos: Dialectical materialism vs. Criminal law

The following text is fundamentally and utterly biased in favor of Aileen Wuornos.

I. The isolation of the part

On October 9, 2002, the State of Florida executed Aileen Carol Wuornos by lethal injection. She was 46 years old. The state called this justice. We call it murder compounding murder, the final act in a decades-long process of social annihilation that began when she was a child and concluded when the apparatus of bourgeois law, having first abandoned her to conditions designed to destroy her, punished her for the predictable consequences of that destruction.

To understand what occurred in that execution chamber, and in the seven killings that preceded it, requires rejecting entirely the framework through which bourgeois criminal law apprehends such cases. That framework operates through fragmentation: it isolates discrete acts from their social genesis, abstracts moments from their historical development, separates the individual from the totality of relations that produced her, and then judges the fragment as if it were the whole. This is not merely analytical inadequacy but active falsification, the violent imposition of categories that cannot contain the reality they claim to explain.

The trial of Aileen Wuornos proceeded through systematic fragmentation. Each killing was tried separately, as if seven distinct acts of violence emerged from seven discrete choices made by an autonomous rational agent exercising free will in a vacuum of social determination. The prosecution presented timelines, ballistics evidence, witness testimony about her movements, her contradictions, her affect. What they could not present, because the structure of criminal law forbids it, was the totality: the continuous process through which a human being was constructed through violence from childhood, shaped through decades of coercion into someone for whom killing appeared not as transgression but as refusal, as the only available response to conditions that made continued submission indistinguishable from slow death. To fragment her life into discrete moments, to separate the woman who killed in 1989 from the child raped in 1964, to analyze the act apart from the totality that produced the actor, is to engage in a category error so fundamental that every conclusion derived from it is worthless.

It is like trying to understand the heart by examining it outside the body, cut off from the circulation of blood, the rhythm of breathing, the network of vessels that make the heart what it is. Isolated, the heart is just meat. Contextualized within the living organism, it is the center of a system.

So too with human action: isolated, Wuornos's killings appear as inexplicable violence, the acts of a monster. Contextualized within the totality of her existence, they become intelligible as responses to sustained structural violence, as moments within a continuous process of being acted upon that finally reversed direction.

This is not mitigation. We are not arguing that her terrible circumstances excuse her actions, that we should feel sorry for her and therefore reduce her sentence, that trauma makes murder understandable and thus pardonable. That framework, the liberal framework of individual responsibility modified by sympathetic consideration of background factors, remains trapped within the same fragmentation it claims to overcome. It still treats the act as primary and context as secondary, still assumes an autonomous individual making choices that are then explained (or explained away) by reference to unfortunate experiences. We reject this entirely.

There is no act that then requires excusing. There is only the totality: a human being produced through specific social relations, acting from within those relations in ways that are determined not mechanically but dialectically, where determination does not mean the absence of agency but rather agency that unfolds within material constraints that shape what appears possible, what appears necessary, what appears as choice at all.

Wuornos exercised agency throughout her life, she made decisions, she acted in the world, but her agency operated within a horizon of possibility that had been catastrophically narrowed by forces entirely beyond her control, and to judge her acts as if she stood in the position of someone whose horizon had not been so constrained is not compassion modified by circumstance but a fundamental misrecognition of what human action is and how it emerges from material social existence.

Dialectical materialism demands analysis adequate to this totality. It refuses the bourgeois separation between individual and society, between act and context, between the part and the whole. It recognizes that the individual is not a pre-social atom who then enters into social relations, but is rather constituted through those relations, exists only as a moment within the social totality, and acts in ways that can only be understood by grasping how the totality shapes the possibilities available to the individual. This is not eliminating individual responsibility but relocating it: the question becomes not "did this individual choose this act?" but rather "what were the material conditions that produced this individual, what possibilities appeared available from her position within those conditions, and how do her acts reveal the nature of the system that structured her choices?"

Bourgeois law cannot ask these questions because the answers would indict the system itself. Better to fragment, to isolate the act, to present the individual as freely choosing monster, to execute her and move on.

Dialectical materialism asks the questions bourgeois law must suppress, and in answering them, arrives at conclusions that are juridically inadmissible but materially necessary: Aileen Wuornos should have been acquitted of all charges, provided with comprehensive material and psychological support, and integrated into a society that no longer produces the conditions that destroyed her.

That this conclusion appears utopian or naive or dangerous reveals not our lack of realism but the bankruptcy of legal categories that can only respond to systematic violence with more violence while calling it justice.

II. Social murder as baseline for existence

Aileen Carol Wuornos was born February 29, 1956, in Rochester, Michigan, to Diane Wuornos, who was fifteen years old, and Leo Dale Pittman, a diagnosed schizophrenic and convicted child rapist who would hang himself in prison when Aileen was thirteen. She never met him. Her mother abandoned her and her brother Keith to her own parents when Aileen was four years old, unable or unwilling to care for children she had not chosen to bear, children fathered by a man whose violence had marked them before birth. Aileen was raised by her maternal grandparents, Lauri and Britta Wuornos, in a household characterized by alcoholism, violence, and chaos. Lauri beat the children regularly. Britta was passive, helpless, or complicit. By age six, possibly earlier, Aileen was being sexually abused, most likely by her grandfather, possibly by his friends, certainly by men who understood that a small child in a violent household is vulnerable in ways that can be abused without consequence.

The abuse was not a single incident but continuous, part of the structure of daily life, so that her earliest experiences of her own body were experiences of violation, of being used, of existing as object for others' gratification.

By age eleven, she and her brother were performing sexual acts in exchange for cigarettes, food, small amounts of money, in what was already a kind of prostitution though not yet formalized through explicit monetary exchange. At fourteen she became pregnant through rape by an adult man, a friend of her grandfather. The family's response was to send her to a home for unwed mothers, not to protect her but to hide the evidence of their failure to protect her. She gave birth in 1971. The child was immediately taken from her and placed for adoption. She never saw the baby, never had the opportunity to make any choice about what happened, experienced motherhood as another form of violation, her body producing something that was then extracted without her consent.

These are not discrete incidents of misfortune, not a series of bad things that happened to someone who remained essentially separate from them. This was the production of a subject through violence, the construction of a self through systematic negation of autonomy, dignity, and bodily integrity. Every experience taught the same lesson: your body is not your own, you exist for others' use, refusal is impossible, protection will not come, the adults who should care for you are either perpetrators or passive witnesses to your destruction, and survival requires accepting violation as the permanent condition of your existence. By fourteen, every element of her future was already determined not in the sense of mechanical causation but in the sense that the structure of possibilities available to her had been narrowed to a point where prostitution appeared not as choice among alternatives but as the continuation of what had always already been true about her relation to her own body and to the social world. She had been in prostitution since childhood, simply without the explicit monetary transaction that would later formalize the exchange. The only question was how long she would survive within it and what form her eventual destruction would take.

After the birth, she returned briefly to her grandparents' household, but the situation had deteriorated further. Her grandmother Britta died when Aileen was fifteen, likely through suicide disguised as alcoholic liver failure, and shortly after, her grandfather expelled her from the house.

She became homeless in a Michigan winter at fifteen years old with no money, no support, no family, no place to go. The alternative to prostitution was death by exposure or starvation. This is not rhetorical exaggeration but material fact: a fifteen-year-old girl alone in winter without resources survives by trading sex for rides, for money for food, for temporary shelter, or she does not survive. The men who picked her up, who purchased access to a homeless child's body, understood this perfectly well. The transaction was structured by her absolute desperation and their capacity to abuse it. To call this choice, to suggest that she freely entered into prostitution, to frame this as labor like any other, is obscene. This was social murder proceeding through slow violence, the systematic destruction of a human being through conditions that made survival contingent on accepting one's own continuous violation.

For the next twenty years, from age fifteen to age thirty-five, Aileen Wuornos survived through street prostitution. Not "sex work" as the liberal euphemism would have it, not a career, not a freely chosen occupation, but survival prostitution characterized by homelessness or precarious housing, by constant movement between Michigan and Florida, by violence from clients that was not exceptional but routine, by arrests that added legal coercion to economic coercion, by alcoholism as self-medication for unbearable trauma, by brief failed attempts at straight employment that collapsed because someone living in a car with untreated complex PTSD cannot maintain the performance of normalcy that wage labor requires, and by the continuous accumulation of violence that over thousands of transactions with hundreds or thousands of men taught her that every client contained the possibility of rape, beating, murder, and that her survival depended on calculating probabilities, on trying to distinguish the client who would merely use her from the client who would destroy her, a distinction that proved increasingly impossible to make because the structure of prostitution itself is violence and the additional physical violence is simply the explicit expression of the violation inherent in every transaction.

We do not know exactly how many times she was raped, beaten, robbed, threatened with murder. She was raped by clients who did not pay, who refused to acknowledge that even the prostitute retains some minimal claim to the terms of the transaction. She was beaten by clients who enjoyed inflicting pain, who understood that a prostitute has no recourse to protection, that police do not care when prostitutes are brutalized, that violence against her carries no social cost. She was at least twice gang-raped by multiple men who picked her up together. At least once she was strangled until she lost consciousness and woke to find herself alive only because her attacker had been interrupted.

These are the incidents we know about because she spoke of them or because they left marks visible enough to be documented. The totality of violence is beyond reconstruction because most of it left no archive, no evidence, no trace except in the accumulating damage to her psychological capacity to conceive of herself as something other than object for use and disposal. By her thirties, she had been raped more times than most people have consensual sexual encounters in a lifetime. She had experienced violence so routinely that it no longer appeared as aberration but as the normal condition of existence. She developed the hypervigilance characteristic of complex trauma, the dissociation that allows survival through experiences that would otherwise shatter the psyche, the inability to trust that is not paranoia but rational adaptation to conditions where trust leads to further harm, and the growing certainty that she would die in prostitution, probably soon, probably violently, and that no alternative was available because the system that had abandoned her at fifteen had no interest in her survival past the point where she could still be utilized like an object.

At age thirty she met Tyria Moore, and for the first time in her adult life, experienced something like a stable relationship. Tyria knew Aileen was prostituting and accepted it because how else would they survive? Aileen fell deeply in love, not in the romanticized sense of finding completion in another but in the material sense of finally having someone who cared whether she lived or died, someone to protect and be protected by, someone whose existence made her own existence slightly more bearable.

Even this relationship was structured by the coercion that shaped everything else in her life: now she was not just surviving for herself but providing for Tyria, which meant accepting more clients, enduring more violence, working through conditions that were increasingly unendurable because the alternative was losing the one person who mattered. Love under conditions of total coercion does not liberate; it becomes another form of necessity, another pressure driving her deeper into the structure that was destroying her. This is not Tyria's fault any more than it was Aileen's fault; both were caught within relations neither had created and both navigated as best they could, but the fact remains that by her mid-thirties, Aileen Wuornos had been subjected to continuous violence for thirty years, had absorbed thousands of violations, had no exit from prostitution visible to her, and was approaching the point where continued survival through submission would mean her complete psychic annihilation even before the statistical certainty of physical death arrived.

III. To kill

On November 30, 1989, Richard Mallory, age 51, picked up Aileen Wuornos for prostitution. He drove her to a remote location. What happened next is contested in the sense that there were no witnesses and the only surviving account is Wuornos's own testimony, but it is uncontested that Mallory had a prior conviction for violent rape, that he had served ten years in prison for brutally raping a woman, and that this fact was ruled inadmissible at trial on the grounds that it might prejudice the jury in Wuornos's favor. She shot him multiple times, took his car and belongings, and left him dead. Over the next eleven months she killed six more men, all of whom had picked her up for prostitution: David Spears, Charles Carskaddon, Peter Siems, Troy Burress, Charles Humphreys, and Walter Antonio. Each killing followed a similar pattern: man picks up prostitute, drives to isolated area, she shoots him, takes vehicle and possessions, leaves. To the police and prosecutors, this pattern indicated premeditated robbery-murder, a serial killer who lured victims through the pretense of prostitution in order to rob and kill them. To bourgeois law, the pattern was evidence of intent, of planning, of cold calculation that justified first-degree murder charges and death sentences.

The question the law asked was: did she plan these killings? And because she carried a gun after the first killing, because she continued to engage in prostitution knowing she might kill again, because she took the men's belongings after shooting them, the answer was yes, she planned it, she is guilty of premeditated murder, she deserves to die.

This question is not wrong because it reaches the wrong answer; it is wrong because it asks the wrong question.

It fragments the totality into discrete moments of decision, treats each killing as a separate choice that can be evaluated on its own terms, assumes an autonomous agent freely selecting from available options, and thereby obscures everything that matters. The question dialectical materialism asks is different: what was the totality of conditions within which these killings occurred, how did those conditions produce the person who killed, what possibilities appeared available from her position within those conditions, and what do her acts reveal about the structure that constrained her choices?

Approached this way, the killings become intelligible not as inexplicable violence or cold calculation but as the moment when sustained structural violence reversed direction, when the person who had been acted upon for thirty years finally acted back, when refusal became not transgression but survival, not aberration but necessity.

After twenty years of absorbing violence, something broke. Mallory was not unique, he was typical, one more client in a series of thousands, but he was also all of them, every client who had ever hurt her, every man who had treated her body as object for use, every transaction that had required her to perform consent while experiencing violation. When she shot him, she was not defending herself against this particular man in this particular moment, she was defending herself against the totality of violence that prostitution had inflicted on her, against the structure itself as it appeared in embodied form sitting next to her in a car driving to another isolated location where she would be expected to provide sexual access under conditions that made refusal materially impossible. From her phenomenological position, every client was Schrodinger's rapist-murderer: she could not know in advance which ones would add physical violence to the structural violence inherent in the transaction, and the cumulative probability that continuing prostitution would result in her murder or severe injury approached certainty. To kill clients was not to transgress against innocent people but to refuse the violence that had defined her existence, to finally say no in the only way that appeared possible from within her catastrophically constrained horizon of action.

After Mallory, she had crossed a threshold. She now knew she was capable of killing, knew she might do it again, and continued to carry a gun and engage in prostitution. The prosecution called this premeditation. We call it the recognition that she had entered a state where every transaction contained the potential for lethal refusal, where the line between defensive violence and offensive violence had collapsed because she was always already in a defensive position against a structure that had been attacking her since childhood.

To ask whether she planned each subsequent killing is to ask the wrong question; the question is whether someone living under continuous threat, having finally refused that threat through violence once, can meaningfully be said to "plan" subsequent refusals or whether the refusal has simply become part of the structure of her engagement with the system that is destroying her. She did not become a serial killer in the sense of someone who kills for pleasure or psychological satisfaction; she became someone who would no longer passively accept being killed, and in a structure where prostitution is slow murder, the refusal to be murdered takes the form of killing those who embody that murderous structure.

None of the men she killed were innocent. This is not to claim that each one was personally violent in that specific transaction, though Mallory certainly was and the others likely were given the demographics of men who purchase street prostitution. It is to claim that every client participates in the structural violence of prostitution, that purchasing coerced sexual access from a desperately poor woman is itself violence regardless of how politely it is conducted, and that the men who picked up Aileen Wuornos were engaging in a transaction that is definitionally coercive, predicated on her lack of alternatives, structured by the intersection of patriarchal sexual entitlement and capitalist immiseration. To call them victims, to present them in court as innocent men who merely wanted sex and instead encountered a murderous predator, is to erase the violence inherent in what they were doing. They were not innocent bystanders struck down by random violence; they were participants in a system of organized sexual violence against women, and the fact that this violence is legal and socially normalized does not make it less real.

The murders were an act of refusal that finally said: I will not be used anymore, I will not absorb infinite violence, I will defend myself against the structure even if the only defense available is individual violence against its agents. This refusal had no strategic efficacy, it did not abolish prostitution or meaningfully challenge patriarchal capitalism, it led directly to her arrest and execution, and in that sense it was tragic, a doomed gesture that cost her life and the lives of seven men while changing nothing about the system. However the lack of strategic efficacy does not diminish the legitimacy of the refusal. We honor slave rebellions even when they were brutally suppressed and did not end slavery. We honor anti-colonial uprisings even when they were drowned in blood and delayed liberation by decades.

We honor these acts because they represent the refusal to accept one's own destruction passively, the insistence on dignity even in conditions designed to eliminate dignity, the fight back that says even if I lose, even if I die, I will not die quietly.

Aileen Wuornos fought back.

She lost.

The system executed her but her fight back was not wrong; what was wrong was the system that made fighting back necessary and then punished it as crime.

IV. The quiet and prolonged murder of Aileen Wuornos

The trial of Aileen Wuornos was not a search for truth but a ritual enactment of bourgeois legality's incapacity to comprehend totality. She was tried separately for multiple murders, each trial treating one killing as a discrete event analyzable in isolation from her life history and from the pattern across killings. The first trial, for the murder of Richard Mallory, established the framework that would govern all subsequent proceedings: the prosecution presented her as a predatory serial killer who lured victims through prostitution in order to rob them, the defense attempted to argue self-defense and present mitigating evidence about her history of abuse, the court systematically excluded evidence that might contextualize her actions, and the jury convicted her of first-degree premeditated murder. The exclusion of Mallory's rape conviction is particularly instructive: here was direct evidence that the man she killed was a convicted violent rapist, that her claim of being attacked was entirely plausible given his documented history, that from her position the threat he posed was not speculative but real.

The court ruled this inadmissible because it might bias the jury. But that is precisely the point: the jury should have known they were judging a case where a woman with thirty years of client violence shot a man with a conviction for violently raping women. That knowledge would not determine the verdict but it would contextualize it, would make visible the totality that the prosecution's narrative of predatory robbery obscured.

The exclusion reveals the court's commitment to fragmentation: we will consider this moment, this act, but not the historical and social totality within which it occurred.

Throughout the trials, Aileen's behavior was erratic, confrontational, seemingly self-destructive. She fired her lawyers multiple times, represented herself chaotically, gave contradictory statements, oscillated between claiming self-defense and appearing to embrace guilt, and eventually demanded that appeals be dropped and her execution proceed immediately. The media and prosecution presented this as evidence of her instability, her manipulative nature, her fundamental incapacity for remorse or redemption.

But what else could she do? She was participating in a procedure that could not see her, that had already determined her unreality through the categories it imposed. To claim self-defense in a framework that defines self-defense as response to immediate threat is to accept a definition that cannot encompass her reality of living under permanent threat. To present mitigating evidence of abuse is to accept the framework where abuse explains but does not justify, where her suffering becomes a factor in sentencing rather than an indictment of the system. To cooperate with lawyers who were operating within bourgeois legal categories meant accepting those categories as adequate to her experience when they were precisely what falsified it. Her resistance to the trial process was not irrationality but rage at being continuously told that her life did not mean what she knew it meant, that her acts of survival and refusal were being rewritten as predatory criminality, that the system judging her was the same system that had abandoned her to the conditions that made her killings appear necessary.

The verdict was first-degree murder. The sentence was death. She spent more than ten years on death row at Broward Correctional Institution, during which time she exhausted appeals, increasingly withdrew from the fight, and eventually demanded her own execution. In her final years she made statements about police torturing her with sonic weapons, about conspiracies against her, statements the media eagerly reported as evidence of insanity and which provided posthumous vindication of the narrative that she had always been crazy, always been a monster beyond redemption. However consider what it means to spend more than a decade knowing the state will kill you for refusing to continue being raped, knowing that the system that first destroyed you through abandonment will now destroy you through execution, knowing that you will be remembered not as someone who fought back against unbearable conditions but as a serial killer, a cautionary tale, a monster.

Is it really paranoia to believe the system is torturing you when that is literally what is happening? The sonic weapons may have been delusion but the torture was material: more than ten years of death row waiting for the state to complete the murder it began when she was a child.

On October 9, 2002, they executed her. Her final words were bizarre, something about sailing with Jesus and returning like Independence Day with a big mothership. The media mocked this as final proof of her derangement.

But perhaps what she was saying was this: fuck you, I will come back, this is not over, you cannot kill what I represent because what I represent is the refusal itself, the no that you cannot extinguish by killing me because it will emerge again from the same conditions that produced me until those conditions are destroyed.

Or perhaps she was just exhausted, traumatized beyond coherence, saying whatever came to mind because nothing mattered anymore.

Either way, they killed her, called it justice, and moved on.

V. Death upon the basis of struggle

Aileen Wuornos acted alone and lost. Her killings did not abolish prostitution, did not meaningfully challenge patriarchal capitalism, did not inspire a movement, did not save anyone. They resulted in her arrest, conviction, and execution while the structure that destroyed her continues to destroy others. In this sense her resistance was tragic, a doomed individual refusal that changed nothing. But we do not honor her for her strategic efficacy; we honor her for her refusal itself, for finally saying no, for fighting back even when fighting back meant dying. The task for those of us who survive, who were not subjected to her conditions, who retain the capacity for collective action that she was denied, is to transform her individual refusal into collective struggle against the structure. We channel the rage that drove her killings not toward more individual violence but toward the systematic abolition of prostitution through socialist construction. This is not betraying her resistance by sublimating it into reformist politics; it is recognizing that individual resistance to structural violence, while morally legitimate and often necessary for survival, is strategically insufficient, and that the real vindication of her life comes through creating conditions where no one else faces the choice she faced between continued violation and violent refusal.

The abolition of prostitution requires material transformation on multiple levels proceeding simultaneously. First, the guarantees of socialist society eliminate the economic basis for survival prostitution: when housing, food, healthcare, education, and employment are guaranteed as social rights rather than commodities to be purchased, the desperation that drives people into prostitution vanishes. The fifteen-year-old homeless girl has shelter. The thirty-year-old woman has alternatives to selling sexual access.

Second, the dismantling of patriarchal ideology through cultural revolution attacks the demand side: when male sexual entitlement is combated, when gendered socialization that constructs women as sexual objects for male consumption is systematically challenged, when the commodification of intimate life is recognized as distortion rather than natural, the desire to purchase sexual access loses its social normalization.

Third, the transformation of legal and state structures so that they protect rather than abandon the vulnerable: police who currently ignore violence against prostitutes, social services that currently turn away those seeking exit from prostitution, courts that currently punish survival crimes while protecting patriarchal property, all must be restructured to serve collective welfare rather than bourgeois order.

This transformation is not immediate and does not proceed through voluntarist declaration. Socialist construction is protracted, uneven, and marked by contradictions where old relations persist alongside emergent new relations. During transition, prostitution may continue where material conditions of desperation remain. The response is not criminalization, which drives prostitution underground and intensifies violence against prostitutes, but rather the accelerated construction of alternatives combined with support for those still trapped in prostitution. We do not condemn prostitutes; we organize with them, support their immediate struggles for safety and dignity, and work collectively to eliminate the conditions that make prostitution appear necessary.

We do condemn clients, not as individual moral monsters but as participants in structural violence who must be confronted with the reality of what they are doing, and we organize to make the purchase of sexual access socially illegitimate, not through moral condemnation but through materialist education about the coercion inherent in the transaction.

For Aileen Wuornos specifically, the just response within a socialist framework would have been absolute acquittal from all murder charges on the grounds that the legal categories of premeditation and intent cannot adequately grasp acts that emerged from sustained structural violence, combined with comprehensive material and psychological support: housing, healthcare, community integration, recognition of what was done to her not as mitigation but as the substance of the case. She needed what any human being needs to flourish i.e. safety, dignity, connection, the material basis for life, and she needed specific support for the profound trauma she had endured. The goal is not rehabilitation, which implies she was defective and needs fixing, but rather reintegration into social life after decades of being systematically excluded from it, and the collective acknowledgment that her destruction was not her fault but the fault of the system that abandoned her.

This will strike most readers as utopian, as impossible within existing legal structures, as dangerously radical. It is all of these things. It is utopian in the sense that it names a condition that does not yet exist but which becomes possible through struggle. It is impossible within existing structures because those structures are precisely what must be transformed. It is radical because anything less than radical transformation perpetuates the violence.

VI. Comrade Wuornos

We call her Comrade not because she was a communist in any formal sense, not because she articulated revolutionary politics, not because her actions advanced socialist construction. We call her Comrade because she occupied a specific position in the structure of class struggle, because she was a proletarian woman destroyed by the intersection of capitalist immiseration and patriarchal violence, because she fought back against that destruction even when fighting back was doomed, and because her life and death teach us what must be abolished and why. Comrade is recognition of structural position and solidarity with resistance, not endorsement of every individual act or claim that she was perfect or heroic in conventional sense. She was a human being shaped by conditions not of her making, she navigated those conditions with whatever agency was available to her, she survived longer than anyone could reasonably expect under her circumstances, and she finally refused through the only means that appeared available.

That refusal deserves honor even though it was strategically limited, even though it resulted in her death, even though we advocate collective transformation rather than individual violence.

Solidarity with Comrade Wuornos means several things concretely. It means defending her memory against those who would use her as a symbol of why prostitutes are dangerous, why women who resist are crazy, why the system was right to execute her. It means confronting liberal recuperation that wants to make her a feminist icon while maintaining that sex work is work, that wants to celebrate her resistance while defending the structure she was resisting. It means using her case as education about the violence of prostitution and the bankruptcy of bourgeois legal categories.

It means supporting current prostitutes materially and politically, recognizing that thousands of women are right now in conditions similar to what she faced, that the urgency is immediate not abstract. And it means channeling the rage her case provokes into organized struggle for the systematic transformation of conditions, not into moral condemnation or individualized violence or reformist tinkering with a structure that must be abolished root and branch.

She is dead and we cannot save her.

What we can do is, ensure that her life is understood in its totality rather than fragmented into the monster narrative that served her executioners. We can fight to create the world she needed and never got, where teenagers are not abandoned to prostitution, where adults are not forced to choose between violation and violent refusal, where human bodies are not commodified, where sexuality is liberated from coercion.

This is not redemptive, her suffering does not become meaningful through our politics, her death does not serve some higher purpose. What was done to her was wrong and nothing can make it right but we who struggle on have the responsibility to learn from her destruction and commit ourselves to destroying what destroyed her. That is what comrade means: not that we knew her, not that we can speak for her, but that we stand in material solidarity with her position in the struggle and commit to the abolition of the system that murdered her slowly through abandonment and quickly through execution.

VII. Dialectics of refusal

The execution of Aileen Wuornos was the final act in a process of social murder that spanned forty-six years, beginning with childhood sexual abuse and concluding with state execution for refusing to accept her own destruction. Every institution of bourgeois society participated: the family that abused and abandoned her, the economic system that offered her only prostitution as means of survival, the clients who purchased access to her body under conditions of coercion, the police who ignored violence against her, the courts that fragmented her life into discrete criminal acts, the prison system that warehoused her for more than a decade, and finally the executioners who injected poison into her veins.

This was not individual tragedy but structural violence made visible, the routine operation of capitalist patriarchy proceeding through its normal channels toward its normal outcome. She is dead. The structure that killed her remains. It is producing others like her at this moment, subjecting them to the same conditions, offering them the same impossible choices, preparing them for the same destruction. Our task is to identify with precision what must be abolished and to organize the collective force necessary to abolish it.

This requires dialectical materialist analysis capable of grasping totality without losing sight of individuals, structural determination without eliminating agency, historical necessity without accepting the inevitability of any particular outcome. It requires rage disciplined by theory and compassion disciplined by materialism.

It requires us to honor Comrade Wuornos by ensuring that her destruction was not meaningless, not because meaning can be extracted from horror but because we transform the horror into knowledge that enables transformation. She fought alone and lost. We fight collectively to win. Not for her, she is beyond help, but for everyone the system is currently destroying and for the possibility of a world where prostitution, along with all the conditions that produce it, has been abolished and is remembered only as evidence of the barbarism we overcame. This is what dialectical materialism enables and what her life demands: analysis adequate to the totality of violence and commitment to the totality of transformation.

Anything less betrays both the method and the memory.

Death to all our enemies!

Death to the bourgeois state!

Long live the human!

Long live the fight for a better world!

Long live Marxism-Leninism!

Death upon all struggle through struggle!