Prostitution

Prostitution is the coerced exchange of sexual access for monetary compensation or material goods under conditions of economic compulsion. Within Marxist-Leninist analysis, prostitution is examined as a material relation produced by the intersection of capitalist immiseration and patriarchal social structures.

Definition and scope

Prostitution involves the provision of sexual services in exchange for payment. The transaction is characterized by economic compulsion rather than mutual desire, distinguishing it from consensual sexual activity. The Marxist-Leninist framework analyzes prostitution not as a moral question but as a social relation shaped by class society and patriarchy.

Material basis

Structural coercion

The fundamental character of prostitution is economic coercion and commodification of sexual activity. This coercion is structural rather than reducible to individual circumstances. The coercion exists at the level of social relations. The prostitute "consents" to sell sexual access in the structural sense that the worker "consents" to wage labor, under threat of destitution.

Commodification

Prostitution reduces the prostitute to an object of only sexual utility. Unlike wage labor there is no abstract labor power sold here, but direct and intimate bodily access. Sexual access through monetary exchange under conditions making refusal materially impossible. Removing the economic coercion by guaranteeing housing, food, healthcare, and employment, and prostitution does not exist as a social category as the monetary relation (and thus coercion) would cease to exist.

Prostitution represents the explicit marketization of patriarchal reduction of women to sexual utility.

Classification within socialist political economy

Labor withdrawal

Within socialist political economy, prostitution is classified as a form of labor withdrawal from socially necessary labor while depending on the productive work of others for necessary survival. In order to survive, the prostitute must live off the wage of productive workers without contributing to production or social reproduction.

Alexandra Kollontai stated:

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.

This classification is materially distinct from bourgeois speculation. The prostitute owns no capital and participates in no valorization process. The speculator, while parasitic, functions as a mystified capitalist participating in surplus value extraction through the M-C-M' circuit, the capital injected into stock purchases becomes productive capital (purchasing machinery, raw materials, labor power) that yields surplus value, which returns as stock dividends. The speculator thus remains within the circuit of capital accumulation, however mystified.

The prostitute, by contrast, has does not have an input within the process of augmenting value. She possesses nothing to sell but access to her body for sexual utility.

Distinction from socially necessary unproductive labor

Socialist society distinguishes between productive labor (which valorizes value itself) and unproductive labor. Within unproductive labor exists a critical distinction: labor that maintains conditions for productive labor (transportation, logistics, education, healthcare) and labor that neither produces value nor maintains the productive apparatus.

Cultural and artistic labor, while unproductive in the strict sense, serves a necessary social function when it advances socialist consciousness. The educator reproduces labor power with expanded capacities. The healthcare worker maintains the health of the productive population. The artist producing socialist realist work combats bourgeois ideology.

Prostitution performs none of these functions. Sexual satisfaction through prostitution is not analogous to medical care or education.

Consent

Historical materialism does not abstract a moment from the continous whole, and recognizes that consent cannot be abstracted from the social totality it exists within. Consent for sexual activities under coercive material conditions is not consent but coercion.

Within socialism where coercive material conditions are combatted, prostitution ceases to exist as a social category because the prostitute need not engage in sexual activity for survival. Prostitution's material base itself is combatted through eliminating the conditions which create a stratum of working class women who must sell intimate sexual access in order to avoid homelessness, starvation and death.

Support for prostitutes

The prostitute operates under coercive conditions not of her making. Criminalization drives prostitution underground, increases vulnerability to violence, and fails to address material conditions producing prostitution.

Prostitutes' immediate material needs require addressing through: supporting decriminalization protecting prostitutes from state violence; supporting sex worker organizing improving immediate conditions; providing exit pathways for those wanting to leave prostitution. Socialist construction creates alternative employment, housing, healthcare, and social support making prostitution unnecessary.

Further reading

On prostitution

Prostitution and ways of fighting it  (Alexandra Kollontai)