On Prostitution

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by Comrade Kiwi
Published: 2025-10-17 (last update: 2025-10-20)
25-45 minutes

Is prostitution just another job? Or is it fundamentally coercive i.e. commodified intimacy extracted through economic desperation that cannot be reformed, only abolished? Can consent exist under threat of destitution? Does calling it "sex work" liberate anyone, or does it naturalize existing structures and social relations? If revolutionary violence against structures is justified, what becomes of systems built on gendered commodification? These aren't moral questions but material ones, demanding answers grounded in class struggle rather than liberal platitudes about "choice" and "empowerment". This text attempts to rigorously face the various questions directly.

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Is prostitution just another job? Or is it fundamentally coercive i.e. commodified intimacy extracted through economic desperation that cannot be reformed, only abolished? Can consent exist under threat of destitution? Does calling it "sex work" liberate anyone, or does it naturalize existing structures and social relations? If revolutionary violence against structures is justified, what becomes of systems built on gendered commodification? These aren't moral questions but material ones, demanding answers grounded in class struggle rather than liberal platitudes about "choice" and "empowerment". This text attempts to rigorously face the various questions directly.

ON PROSTITUTION

My notes and request:

Every theses statement asserted first is explained deeply in later sections, everything I assert will be throughly discussed with thorough sections, section - I, makes several bold theses statements and theoretical claims which are investigated in later sections. I recognize the contentious nature of the topic I discuss here, and acknowledge the complexity and nuance, I concede that each section topic is itself worthy of a book-length discussion, but constrained by accessebility, I present them in the following manner. I only ask if you see something you disagree with, you read through the whole before disengaging. Every question is worthy of deliberation and discussion. The essay clarifies not only what it speaks on, but what it does not speak on. My request is for you, the reader, to go through it all charitably.

Key (The essay is chronological, to be read in order):

I. The question of labor and productivity

Within socialist society, all labor must serve the totality of society. This is not a moral prescription but a material necessity grounded in the transformation of production relations. We distinguish between productive labor, which augments value and yields surplus value, and unproductive labor. Within unproductive labor exists a critical distinction: labor that maintains the conditions for productive labor (transport, logistics, management, education) and labor that neither produces value nor maintains the productive apparatus.

The Zhadnov doctrine establishes that cultural and artistic labor, while unproductive in the strict sense of value creation, serves a necessary function when it advances socialist consciousness and reinforces the ideological superstructure required for socialist construction. The writer, the artist, the educator etc. these engage in what we might call socially necessary unproductive labor. Their work reproduces the conditions for continued socialist development by shaping consciousness, transmitting knowledge, and reinforcing socialist realism.

Here we must be precise about what "maintains productive labor" actually means materially. The educator trains the next generation of workers, reproducing labor power with expanded capacities. The artist who produces socialist realist work combats bourgeois ideology that would otherwise undermine worker solidarity and revolutionary consciousness. The transportation worker moves commodities necessary for production to continue. Each performs a function without which the productive apparatus would degrade or collapse.

Prostitution occupies a categorically different position. It neither produces value, nor maintains productive labor, nor advances socialist construction. The prostitute lives off the wage of the productive worker without contributing to the collective whole. Some might object: doesn't the prostitute provide a "service" that maintains the worker's mental health or satisfies biological needs? This is incorrect analysis. Sexual satisfaction is not analogous to medical care or education. The worker who lacks sexual access does not become incapable of labor the next day. The bourgeoisie itself recognizes this reality, capitalism does not provide prostitution as a necessary input to labor reproduction the way it must provide food, shelter, and basic healthcare.

More fundamentally, if we accept that sexual satisfaction is a legitimate need requiring social provisioning, the question becomes: why through monetary exchange under coercion rather than through free association? The very framing reveals the problem. Prostitution exists not because human sexuality requires commodification but because capitalism commodifies everything, including intimate bodily access.

This is not a moral condemnation but a material observation: prostitution represents a form of labor desertion analogous to speculation. Just as we rally against the speculator who accumulates wealth through non-productive circulation, we recognize prostitution as labor desertion i.e. the withdrawal from socially necessary labor to survive through the productive efforts of others.

But why does labor desertion matter? Not because we morally condemn those who live off others' labor, the prostitute, again, is not morally culpable for surviving under wretched conditions.

Labor desertion matters because socialism is constructed through collective labor. Every person who withdraws from that construction while benefiting from it creates a material drain. The speculator extracts value created by others. The labor deserter consumes value created by others. Both undermine the principle that socialist construction requires universal participation according to ability.

Kollontai articulates this with clarity: "We do not condemn prostitution and fight against it as a special category but as an aspect of labour desertion. To us in the workers' republic it is not important whether a woman sells herself to one man or to many... All women who avoid work and do not take part in production or in caring for children are liable, on the same basis as prostitutes, to be forced to work."

The principle "from each according to their ability, to each according to their need" is not a utopian slogan but a material requirement of socialist construction.

Socialism cannot be built by a fraction of society laboring while others withdraw into labor desertion. The collective provides for individual needs, but this requires that individuals contribute to the collective according to capacity. Prostitution violates this reciprocity not through moral failing but through material structure.

II. The material basis of coercion

The fundamental character of prostitution under capitalism, and this extends into socialist transition where bourgeois relations persist, is coercion. This requires careful articulation to avoid sliding into moralism while maintaining analytical rigor.

When we say prostitution is coercive, we do not mean it in the liberal sense of individual violation of consent. Liberals treat consent as a binary: yes or no, present or absent, reducible to the moment of individual choice abstracted from all material context. This is idealism. Marxist analysis rejects this framework entirely. Consent under conditions of coercion is not consent but compulsion wearing the mask of choice. If I hold a gun to your head and demand sexual favors, you would rightly recognize this as rape through coercion. The monetary relation in prostitution operates identically in form, though mediated through capitalist relations. Without the client's money, the prostitute lacks means of subsistence. The choice between prostitution and destitution is a false binary that reveals not freedom but compulsion.

However we must go deeper. The coercion is not merely economic but ideological. Under capitalism, individuals internalize market relations as natural and inevitable. The prostitute may articulate her choice as "empowering" or "autonomous." This is false consciousness produced by capitalist ideology that presents all market exchanges as expressions of free will. The fact that someone experiences their compulsion as choice does not negate the compulsion, it reveals how thoroughly ideology mediates our understanding of our own conditions. Consider the parallel to wage labor. The worker does not "freely choose" to sell their labor power to the capitalist. They are compelled by the monopolization of the means of production. The choice is work or starve, which is to say, no choice at all. Yet the worker, through the wage form, experiences this coercion as a voluntary contract. Marx spent considerable effort analyzing how the wage obscures exploitation, making it appear as fair exchange. The same ideological mystification operates in prostitution, but more intensely because the commodity being sold is not abstract labor power but intimate bodily access.

This is structurally identical to wage labor in its coercive character, but there is a critical difference in its potential for transformation. Wage labor, while coercive under capitalism, becomes transformed under socialism into genuinely free labor serving the collective. The coercion stems from private ownership of the means of production, which socialism abolishes. The worker in a socialist factory is still producing, still transforming nature through labor, but now for the collective benefit rather than capitalist profit. The activity itself i.e. labor, is liberated from exploitation while remaining labor.

Prostitution, however, cannot be similarly transformed because its essence is the commodification of the body itself through monetary exchange for sexual access under conditions that make refusal materially impossible. Remove the coercion (guarantee housing, food, healthcare), and prostitution ceases to exist as a category. What remains is simply sexual activity pursued for its own sake, say casual sex, relationships, mutual pleasure. The transaction form vanishes because the material basis for the transaction vanishes.

This is not semantic but reveals something fundamental: prostitution's defining characteristic is coerced commodification of sexual access. Strip away the coercion and you no longer have prostitution. You have sexuality liberated from market relations. This is why we can speak of liberating labor under socialism but not liberating prostitution. Labor freed from exploitation remains labor. Prostitution freed from coercion ceases to be prostitution.

The prostitute, particularly women under patriarchal capitalism, is not morally culpable. She does what anyone would under wretched material conditions. The structural violence that produces prostitution is systematic, not individual. In India, transgender people are expelled from families at ages 8-12, denied education and employment, and left with prostitution as the only means of survival. This is not choice but social murder disguised as individual decision-making. The prostitute deserves not condemnation but protection, shelter, integration into productive society, and ultimately the transformation of conditions that made prostitution appear necessary.

III. Prostitution and patriarchal relations

The reduction of women to sexual utility, which is the ontological core of prostitution regardless of the client's individual behavior, reinforces patriarchal relations that exist in symbiosis with the capitalist base. Even if we imagine a "humane" prostitution where clients treat sex workers with respect, the fundamental relation remains: a woman's body is made available for sexual use in exchange for means of subsistence. This is not incidental to prostitution but constitutive of it. The process of prostitution reduces human beings to their sexual function within a market relation. Under capitalism, everything tends toward commodification, but the commodification of intimate bodily access for sexual use represents a particularly acute form of this general tendency. It takes the patriarchal objectification of women, their reduction to sexual objects for male consumption, and gives it explicit market form.

This matters materially, not just ideologically. Patriarchy under capitalism serves a specific economic function: it secures the unpaid reproductive labor necessary for capitalism to function. Women's unpaid domestic labor, emotional labor, and reproductive labor subsidizes capital accumulation by reproducing labor power at no cost to capital. The family form under capitalism channels this unpaid labor while maintaining ideological control through gendered norms about women's "natural" roles.

Prostitution sits at the intersection of this patriarchal-capitalist structure. It takes the patriarchal reduction of women to sexual utility and marketizes it directly. The prostitute is not primarily a worker selling labor power (which could be transformed under socialism) but a woman whose gendered body is made available for sexual use through monetary coercion. The transaction reinforces both the capitalist principle that everything has a price and the patriarchal principle that women's bodies exist for male sexual access.

Some argue that prostitution could exist without patriarchy, that men could be prostitutes serving women or other men, that the gendered character is historically contingent. This mistakes the part for the whole. Yes, men engage in prostitution, and this too is labor desertion but the overwhelming majority of prostitution involves the purchase of sexual access to women's bodies by men. This is not accidental but reflects the material reality of patriarchal capitalism: women are systematically immiserated, denied economic autonomy, and socialized to view their bodies as commodities. The demand for prostitution flows from patriarchal ideology that constructs male sexual entitlement as natural.

Moreover, even in cases where men are prostitutes, the structure remains patriarchal. Gay male prostitution often involves younger, economically desperate men serving wealthier men, essentially replicating the power differential that characterizes heterosexual prostitution. The gendered form may vary, but the underlying dynamic of economic coercion for sexual access persists, and this dynamic is inseparable from the broader patriarchal structure that normalizes such relations.

The demand for prostitution does not arise from abstract male sexuality but from specific material and ideological conditions. Patriarchal ideology constructs male sexual entitlement, the patriarchally constructed notion that men have a right to sexual satisfaction and that women's bodies exist to provide it. Capitalist relations provide the mechanism (monetary exchange) to actualize that entitlement. And the systematic immiseration of women creates the supply. These cannot be separated without doing violence to materialist analysis.

To analyze prostitution in isolation, man offers money, woman accepts money, man receives sexual relief, is undialectical. It severs the part from the whole, treating prostitution as a voluntary transaction rather than the culmination of interlocking systems of coercion. Where did the man get the money? From wage labor in capitalist production. Why does the woman need the money desperately enough to sell sexual access? Because capitalism has denied her other means of subsistence. Why is this transaction socially acceptable while other forms of intimate coercion are condemned? Because patriarchal ideology normalizes the commodification of women's sexuality.

Every element of prostitution is socially produced. There is nothing natural or inevitable about it. It emerges from specific historical conditions and will be superseded when those conditions are transformed.

IV. The question of consent and coercion

Liberal frameworks treat consent as binary and individual: if someone says "yes," consent exists, regardless of material context. This is not only insufficient but actively mystifying. It transforms a material relation of coercion into a philosophical problem about individual will.

Marxist analysis rejects this idealism. Consent under conditions of coercion is not consent but compulsion wearing the mask of choice. But we must be precise about what this means. The prostitute may subjectively experience herself as consenting. She may assert her autonomy, claim empowerment, reject the label of victim. Does this negate the coercion?

No, because coercion is not primarily a subjective psychological state but an objective material relation. The prostitute "consents" to sell sexual access in the same sense that the worker "consents" to wage labor: under threat of destitution. The subjective experience of that coercion varies. Some workers love their jobs; this does not make wage labor non-exploitative. Some prostitutes feel empowered by their work; this does not make prostitution non-coercive. The social murder and coercion exist at the level of social relations, not just individual psychology, although it often reflects it.

But here we must avoid the liberal trap of erasing the prostitute's agency entirely. She is not a passive victim with no capacity for thought or action. She navigates her conditions as best she can, sometimes with remarkable creativity and resistance. Acknowledging structural coercion does not require denying individual agency. Rather, it means recognizing that agency is always exercised within material constraints that shape what choices are available and what costs attach to each choice.

The prostitute faces a choice: sell sexual access or face destitution. This is a real choice in the sense that she must decide. But it is not a free choice in any meaningful sense because the alternatives have been structured by forces beyond her control i.e. capitalist immiseration, patriarchal exclusion from well-paying employment, social stigma that forecloses other options. Her decision-making capacity is real, but the menu of options from which she chooses has been coercively constrained.

Some reformists argue that prostitution can be destigmatized and regulated, making it "safer" and "more consensual." This mistakes the symptom for the disease. Yes, prostitutes face violence, disease, and wretched conditions that regulation might mitigate. Unions of sex workers, when they emerge, represent a legitimate form of organizing to improve immediate conditions. We do not oppose this any more than we oppose workers unions under capitalism. But regulation cannot address the fundamental coercion at the heart of prostitution. It is analogous to arguing for "fair wages" under capitalism while leaving capitalist relations intact. The improvement is real but superficial; the underlying coercion persists. A "well-regulated" prostitution regime where sex workers have health benefits and legal protections is still a regime where people sell intimate bodily access under economic coercion. The coercion is made more bearable, not eliminated.

Moreover, in practice, regulation often intensifies the conditions for coercion. In countries like India where prostitution is functionally legalized through non-enforcement, the result is not liberation but abandonment. "Kothas" operate as hubs for trafficking and dehumanization precisely because the law provides no protection and police refuse to intervene. In Bangladesh where prostitution is privately legal (basically don't solicit publicly) there are entire villages which are soul hubs for prostitution with utterly wretched conditions (Eg: Daulatdia) The libertarian fantasy that deregulation produces freedom collapses when confronted with material reality. Without robust social support and economic alternatives, legal tolerance of prostitution simply means legal tolerance of coercion.

The ontology of prostitution, the monetary exchange for sexual access under conditions of economic desperation, brings coercion into its very equation. You cannot have prostitution without this coercive structure. If sexual activity occurs without economic compulsion, without monetary exchange mediating the encounter, it is not prostitution. It is sex. The defining feature is the transaction, and the transaction only exists where one party is economically compelled to offer what they would not otherwise offer.

V. The health of the collective

There is a material dimension to prostitution that liberals find uncomfortable to discuss: its effects on public health and the collective whole. This is not Christian moralism about sexual purity but sober assessment of disease transmission and social costs.

Prostitution serves as a vector for sexually transmitted infections at rates dramatically higher than the general population. In India, a significant proportion of HIV and other STI transmission occurs through prostitution networks. This is not because prostitutes are "dirty" or morally degraded but because the material conditions of prostitution, high numbers of partners, economic pressure to accept clients who refuse protection, inability to access consistent healthcare, that create ideal conditions for disease spread.

The liberal response is to advocate for better healthcare access for sex workers, more condom distribution, destigmatization to encourage testing. These are pragmatic short-term measures we do not oppose. But they do not address the structural problem: prostitution creates conditions for disease transmission that harm not only prostitutes and clients but the broader community. The wife of a client who contracts an infection; the child born to a mother who was infected through prostitution; the public health system's resources devoted to managing epidemics facilitated by prostitution networks, these are real material costs borne by the collective.

From a socialist perspective, we evaluate social practices by their utility to the collective whole. Does prostitution serve the health and development of socialist society? Obviously not. It spreads disease, reinforces patriarchal ideology, represents withdrawal from productive labor, and exists entirely through coercion that socialism aims to abolish. There is no argument from collective welfare that supports prostitution's continuation.

This is separate from the moral status of prostitutes themselves. They are not responsible for the public health consequences of prostitution any more than workers are responsible for the environmental destruction caused by capitalist production. The prostitute is caught in a structure not of her making. But recognizing her lack of culpability does not require us to defend the structure itself as somehow beneficial or neutral.

VI. Prostitution under socialism

What becomes of prostitution under socialism? Not through moral prohibition but through material transformation. This is not prophecy but dialectical reasoning about what must necessarily change when the material basis for prostitution is eliminated.

First, the guarantees of socialist society i.e. housing, food, healthcare, education, employment, these eliminate the material basis for survival prostitution. The person who previously sold sexual access to avoid homelessness now has housing as a right. The person who engaged in prostitution to feed their children now has food security guaranteed. The transgender youth expelled from their family and pushed into prostitution now has social support, education, and employment opportunities. The desperation that drove prostitution is abolished through the transformation of production relations and social guarantees.

This is not immediate. Socialist construction is a protracted process, and the transition from capitalism involves periods where bourgeois relations persist alongside emerging socialist relations. During this transition, prostitution may continue to exist where material desperation persists. The response is not criminalization, which only drives prostitution underground and intensifies violence against prostitutes, but rather accelerated construction of the material guarantees that eliminate the need for prostitution.

Second, as patriarchal ideology is combated through socialist construction (this too is protracted, not immediate), the demand side transforms. Male sexual entitlement rooted in patriarchal socialization diminishes as gender relations are restructured. The cultural expectation that male sexual satisfaction can be purchased evaporates alongside the material conditions that made such purchase possible. This requires active ideological struggle, cultural revolution against patriarchal norms, education that challenges gendered socialization, restructuring of domestic relations to eliminate the unpaid reproductive labor that secures women's subordination.

Some object: but won't men still want sex? Won't there still be demand? This confuses biological drives with socially constructed entitlement. Yes, humans have sexual desires. No, these desires do not naturally take the form of monetary purchase of sexual access. The demand for prostitution is not reducible to male sexuality but emerges from patriarchal ideology that teaches men they have a right to sexual satisfaction regardless of women's autonomous desire. Transform that ideology, and the demand for prostitution specifically (as opposed to mutual sexual activity) dissolves.

Third, sexual activity becomes truly voluntary, pursued for mutual pleasure rather than economic necessity. This is not puritanism but its opposite: the liberation of sexuality from market relations. Under capitalism, even non-commercial sexuality is colonized by market logic and patriarchal norms. Dating becomes a transaction, relationships become contracts, bodies become assets to be managed. The commodification of sexuality in prostitution is only the most explicit form of a general tendency.

Under socialism, as market relations are superseded and patriarchal ideology is combated, sexuality can become genuinely free. People can and will engage in whatever consensual sexual activity they desire, be it casual encounters, committed relationships, experimentation, whatever. The point is not to regulate sexuality but to liberate it from economic compulsion and patriarchal control. Hook up with whoever you want, however you want, as much as you want. What you will not do is exchange sexual access for means of subsistence, because means of subsistence are guaranteed and therefore cannot function as leverage to secure sexual access. The essence of prostitution, the coercive monetary exchange for sexual access, cannot survive the transformation of material conditions that produced it. What emerges is not the elimination of sexuality but its liberation from commodification. The rational kernel within prostitution's shell (human sexual desire and the desire for intimate connection) is preserved; the coercive husk (monetary compulsion under threat of destitution) is negated; and the result is transcendence into qualitatively new relations where sexuality serves human flourishing rather than economic survival.

This is not prophecy but dialectical reasoning. We cannot specify every detail of sexual relations under communism, that would be idealism, trying to blueprint the future from abstract principles. But we can identify what will necessarily be absent: the commodification of bodies through monetary exchange under threat of destitution. Remove that, and you do not have prostitution. You have liberated sexuality.

VII. The comparative question: Prostitution and other forms of labor

Some argue that prostitution is simply another form of labor that should be respected like any other, that sex work is work and therefore deserves the same protections and recognition as other labor. This conflates fundamentally different relations and deserves systematic refutation.

Labor under capitalism is coercive because workers do not control the means of production and must sell labor power to survive. The coercion is real and we do not minimize it. But labor under capitalism still performs a social function: it produces value, transforms nature, creates goods, reproduces society. The factory worker exploited by the capitalist is still producing commodities that meet human needs (even if irrationally distributed). The teacher in wretched conditions through low wages is still educating the next generation. The nurse overworked through understaffing is still providing healthcare.

This matters because wage labor's coercive character stems from class relations (private ownership of means of production), not from the activity of labor itself. Under socialism, the same activities, building houses, growing food, manufacturing goods, teaching children continue but are transformed in their social character. They become genuinely voluntary contributions to the collective rather than coerced exchanges with capital. The activity itself, labor, is liberated from exploitation while remaining labor.

Prostitution cannot undergo this transformation because it is not fundamentally about labor in this sense. It does not produce value, does not transform nature, does not create goods that reproduce society. The service being sold is intimate bodily access for sexual use. There is no product, no transformation of material reality, no contribution to social reproduction (except in the narrow sense that some men may be less violent if they have access to prostitution, which is hardly a positive argument).

More fundamentally, prostitution's essence is the commodification of bodily access under economic coercion. This is not like selling labor power, where the worker retains their body and personhood while selling their capacity to labor. The prostitute must provide intimate physical access to their body for sexual use. The transaction cannot be meaningfully separated from the person in the way labor power is abstracted from the worker's body.

Consider: a factory worker may hate their job but once they clock out, their body is their own. The capitalist purchased labor power, not the body itself. The prostitute provides the body directly for sexual use. There is no abstraction, no separation of labor power from embodied person. This is why prostitution is experienced as more invasive, more violating, than other forms of exploited labor because the boundary between person and commodity collapses entirely.

This is also why discussions of "consent" in prostitution are more fraught than in other labor contexts. You can hate your job while maintaining your dignity because the job is not your body. The prostitute selling intimate bodily access for sexual use cannot make that separation. The violation is direct and personal in a way that even the worst wage labor is not.

Some sex work advocates argue this distinction stigmatizes prostitution, that claiming prostitution is qualitatively different from other labor reinforces harmful norms. This is backwards. The distinction exists materially, not because of stigma but because the relations are actually different. Pretending prostitution is just another job does not liberate prostitutes; it naturalizes their coercive conditions by treating the commodification of intimate bodily access as equivalent to selling labor power.

We can recognize this distinction while also recognizing that prostitutes deserve protection, support, and integration into productive society. The material difference between prostitution and other labor does not justify stigmatizing prostitutes as people. They are workers trapped in particularly acute forms of coercion and deserve solidarity, not condemnation. But that solidarity requires honest analysis of their conditions, not liberal platitudes about sex work being work.

VIII. The question of desire and need

A common objection: isn't sex a biological need? Don't humans require sexual satisfaction for psychological health? If so, doesn't prostitution serve a legitimate social function by meeting this need?

This argument requires careful dissection because it contains both a kernel of truth and profound mystifications.

First, is sex a biological need in the same sense as food, water, shelter? Obviously not. You will die without food. You will not die without sex. Asexual people exist and live fulfilling lives without sexual activity. The claim that sex is a "need" in the sense of material survival is simply false.

But sex is clearly important for many people's psychological wellbeing, and sexual desire is a biological drive for most humans. So in a looser sense, we might say sexual satisfaction is a human need, meaning something that contributes to flourishing rather than bare survival. Does this justify prostitution as a social provision?

No, for several reasons.

First, even if we accept that sexual satisfaction is a legitimate need, the question becomes: how should that need be met? Under capitalism, needs are met through market relations in that you pay for what you need. Under socialism, needs are met through social provision and free association. Food is a need, so socialism provides food through collective planning, not by commodifying it. Healthcare is a need, so socialism provides healthcare as a right, not by making people purchase access to doctors' bodies. If sexual satisfaction is a need, the socialist response is not to commodify sexual access through prostitution but to create social conditions where people can freely satisfy their desires through mutual association. Remove the economic barriers, patriarchal norms, and social alienation that prevent people from forming fulfilling sexual and romantic connections. The solution to people lacking sexual satisfaction is not to create a class of economically desperate people who can be coerced into providing sexual access. That "solution" merely displaces the problem while introducing new forms of coercion.

Second, the framing of sex as a need that must be met by others is itself patriarchal. It assumes that some people (disproportionately men) have a right to sexual satisfaction that creates an obligation for others (disproportionately women) to provide it. This is sexual entitlement dressed up as biological necessity. No one has a right to sexual access to another person's body simply because they experience desire. Desire does not create obligation.

Under socialism, sexual desire is satisfied through mutual attraction and free association, not through economic coercion. If someone cannot find willing partners, the response is not to create economic conditions that force others to feign willingness. The response is to address the social alienation and psychological problems that prevent genuine connection.

Third, the argument that prostitution meets a need ignores the question of whose need. The client's need for sexual satisfaction is supposedly met. What about the prostitute's needs? She needs money to survive, that need is temporarily met through selling sexual access, but at the cost of subjecting herself to intimate violation. Her need for dignified labor, for bodily autonomy, for sexual activity on her own terms, these needs are trampled. Privileging the client's desire for sexual satisfaction over the prostitute's need for dignity and autonomy reveals the patriarchal assumptions underlying the argument.

Finally, even if we accepted that some people have legitimate difficulty accessing sexual connection (severe disabilities, for instance), the solution is not prostitution but rather social support that facilitates consensual connections. Some disabled people require assistance with intimate care, this is categorically different from prostitution because the framework is care and support, not market exchange under economic coercion. A care worker helping a disabled person with intimacy as part of comprehensive support is not selling sexual access for survival. They are providing care that is socially valued and properly compensated as labor serving the collective.

The distinction matters: care labor serves the collective by supporting those who need assistance. Prostitution serves individual male sexual entitlement (which came to be through bourgeois ideology and is distinct from the innate sexual drive) at the expense of the coerced prostitute. These are not materially equivalent.

IX. The practical question: Transition

Even if we accept that prostitution must be abolished under socialism, what happens during the transition? This is not an abstract question but has immediate practical implications for how socialists relate to prostitutes and prostitution under existing conditions.

First and most importantly: the prostitute is not the enemy. She is a worker (though engaged in labor desertion), often a victim of severe conditions, and always operating under coercive conditions not of her making. Socialists do not condemn prostitutes or advocate for their criminalization. Criminalization drives prostitution underground, makes prostitutes more vulnerable to violence, and accomplishes nothing toward eliminating the material conditions that produce prostitution.

Second: prostitutes' immediate material needs must be addressed. This means supporting decriminalization where it protects prostitutes from state violence, supporting sex worker organizing where it improves immediate conditions, and providing exit pathways for those who want to leave prostitution. Socialist construction requires creating alternative employment, housing, healthcare, and social support that make prostitution unnecessary. You cannot eliminate prostitution by moral condemnation; you eliminate it by making survival through other means possible and accessible.

Third: we combat the demand side through ideological struggle. This means confronting male sexual entitlement rooted in bourgeois-patriarchal culture, challenging patriarchal socialization, and building alternative models of sexuality and intimacy. Men who purchase sexual access are not necessarily individual villains, but they are participating in a system and relation of coercion. Part of building socialist consciousness is recognizing that purchasing access to someone's body under economic coercion is not a neutral consumer choice but complicity in the relation of coercion.

Fourth: we recognize that during transition, some prostitution will persist, and this requires pragmatic harm reduction. Health services, legal protections from violence, support systems, these are necessary not because prostitution is legitimate but because prostitutes are human beings deserving protection. The socialist state does not criminalize the prostitute while allowing the client to operate freely (this is the standard bourgeois approach that punishes women while protecting male demand). Nor does it celebrate prostitution as "empowering" (this is the liberal approach that mystifies prostitution). Instead, it works systematically to eliminate the material conditions that produce prostitution while supporting those trapped in it during the transition.

Fifth: we are honest about the contradictions. During socialist construction, particularly in countries that begin from conditions of severe underdevelopment and immiseration, the material basis for prostitution may persist longer than we would like. Simply declaring prostitution abolished does not make it so. What matters is the trajectory: are we systematically reducing the economic desperation that drives prostitution? Are we transforming gender relations? Are we providing real alternatives? If yes, prostitution will wither as its material basis is eliminated.

If no, it will persist and our moral proclamations will be empty.

The Zhadnov doctrine is instructive here: you may paint or write in your free time, but to be supported by the collective, your art must advance socialism. Similarly, you may fuck whoever you want in your free time, but you cannot live off the wage of others without contributing to socialist construction. The prostitute who wants to continue engaging in sexual activity freely, wonderful, no restrictions. But living off payment for sexual access while withdrawing from productive labor? That cannot be accommodated under socialism precisely because it is incompatible with the principle of universal participation in building the new society.

X. Against mystified moralism, for materialism

Throughout this analysis, we have resisted moralistic framing, but this requires emphasis because the topic of prostitution is so thoroughly saturated with bourgeois moralism.

The prostitute is not immoral. She is not a sinner, not degraded, not ruined. She is a human being navigating brutal material conditions as best she can. Often she displays remarkable resilience, creativity, and even resistance within her constraints. Our analysis condemns the structure of prostitution, not the prostitute as a person.

The client is not necessarily morally depraved, though he participates in the coercive relation. Many clients are themselves alienated, lonely, unable to form genuine connections due to capitalism's destruction of social bonds. This does not justify their purchase of sexual access, but it contextualizes it. They are human beings shaped by patriarchal ideology and capitalist alienation, not monsters.

Prostitution is not a sin requiring punishment. It is a social relation produced by specific material conditions: capitalism's immiseration of large populations, particularly women; patriarchal ideology that constructs women as sexual commodities; and the monetization of all social relations under capitalism. Our opposition flows not from moral disgust but from material analysis of whose interests are served. This is not moral relativism or liberal tolerance. We do not say "prostitution is fine, who are we to judge?" We say prostitution is coercion, harmful to the collective, incompatible with socialism, and must be abolished. But the path to abolition is not moral condemnation and criminalization but material transformation of the conditions that produce it.

The bourgeoisie is moralistic about prostitution because moralism serves their interests. They can condemn prostitutes as immoral while maintaining the economic system that produces prostitution. They can criminalize sex workers while protecting clients (who are often men of their own class). They can wring their hands about the "social problem" of prostitution while opposing every material solution (housing, healthcare, employment, gender equality). Bourgeois moralism is ideological smokescreen that allows coercion to continue while claiming to oppose it.

Socialist materialism cuts through this. We identify the material conditions that produce prostitution. We recognize those conditions as products of capitalism and patriarchy, not eternal features of human nature. We commit to transforming those conditions through socialist construction. And we judge success not by moral purity but by material outcomes: are fewer people forced into prostitution? Are alternatives expanding? Is economic desperation declining? These are questions answerable through investigation, not moral sentiment.

XI. Conclusion

Prostitution under capitalism is a form of labor desertion that represents withdrawal from productive society. While the prostitute herself is not morally condemnable, she operates under wretched conditions not of her making i.e. the structure of prostitution is incompatible with socialist construction. Prostitution's essence is coercive, a monetized exchange of sexual access under threat of destitution. This coercion is structural, not individual, and flows from the intersection of capitalist immiseration and patriarchal objectification of women. The prostitute "chooses" to sell sexual access in the same sense the worker "chooses" wage labor, under compulsion, with alternatives foreclosed by forces beyond her control.

Unlike wage labor, which can be transformed under socialism into genuinely free labor serving the collective, prostitution cannot be liberated while remaining prostitution. Remove the economic coercion, and you no longer have prostitution, you have liberated sexuality pursued for mutual pleasure. The monetary transaction, which defines prostitution, exists only where economic desperation compels one party to provide what they would not otherwise provide. Prostitution serves no proletarian class interest. It does not advance socialist construction. It reinforces patriarchal relations that divide and weaken the working class. It represents a form of labor desertion, living off productive labor without contributing to it. It spreads disease and harms the collective whole. And it exists entirely through coercion that socialism aims to abolish.

Under socialism, the material basis for prostitution is annihilated through three interconnected transformations:

First, material guarantees (housing, food, healthcare, employment) eliminate survival desperation. The person who previously sold sexual access to avoid destitution now has means of subsistence guaranteed. The economic compulsion that drove prostitution disappears.

Second, patriarchal ideology is combated through cultural revolution and restructuring of gender relations. Male sexual entitlement diminishes as gendered socialization is transformed. The demand for prostitution, which stems not from biology but from patriarchal ideology essentially evaporates.

Third, sexual activity becomes genuinely voluntary, pursued for mutual pleasure rather than economic necessity. People can and will engage in whatever consensual sexual activities they desire, but these activities will not be mediated by monetary exchange or economic coercion. The rational kernel of human sexuality is preserved; the coercive husk of prostitution is negated; and the result is sublation into qualitatively new relations. This is not utopian speculation but materialist analysis. We cannot blueprint every detail of sexual relations under communism, but we can identify what will necessarily be absent: commodification of bodies through monetary exchange under threat of destitution.

Remove that, and prostitution ceases to exist. What remains is sexuality liberated from market relations, free to serve human flourishing rather than economic survival.

During transition, socialists support prostitutes materially and politically while working systematically to eliminate the conditions that produce prostitution. We do not criminalize prostitutes or morally condemn them. We recognize them as workers trapped in acute coercion who deserve protection, support, and integration into productive society. Simultaneously, we combat the demand side through ideological struggle against patriarchy and male sexual entitlement.

The question before us is not "should we allow prostitution?" but "what material conditions produce prostitution, and how do we transform those conditions?" The answer is socialist construction: socialized ownership of means of production, universal guarantee of material needs, transformation of gender relations, and cultural revolution against patriarchal ideology.

Prostitution will not be legislated away. It will be made obsolete through the construction of material conditions where selling sexual access for survival is no longer necessary, possible, or intelligible as a social practice. This is neither moral condemnation nor libertine celebration, but materialist analysis of prostitution's place within class society and its necessary abolition through socialist transformation.

The working class builds a new world where human needs, including sexual desire, are met through free association and mutual satisfaction rather than economic coercion and patriarchal coercion.

Prostitution belongs to the old world of class society. It has no place in the future we seek to construct.