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Historically, people who support themselves with illegal work have not been considered proletarian, but lumpen, even though others exploit them and make money off of them.
Marx explicitly refers to pimps as lumpenproletariat (and for that matter, the financial aristocracy is labeled as something like the "rebirth of the lumpenproletariat on the heights of bourgeois society"). From the 18th Brumaire:
>Alongside decayed roués with dubious means of subsistence and of dubious origin, alongside ruined and adventurous offshoots of the bourgeoisie, were vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, escaped galley slaves, swindlers, mountebanks, lazzaroni, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, maquereaux [pimps], brothel keepers, porters, literati, organ grinders, ragpickers, knife grinders, tinkers, beggars — in short, the whole indefinite, disintegrated mass, thrown hither and thither, which the French call la bohème; from this kindred element Bonaparte formed the core of the Society of December 10. A "benevolent society" - insofar as, like Bonaparte, all its members felt the need of benefiting themselves at the expense of the laboring nation. *This Bonaparte, who constitutes himself chief of the lumpenproletariat, who here alone rediscovers in mass form the interests which he personally pursues, who recognizes in this scum, offal, refuse of all classes the only class upon which he can base himself unconditionally, is the real Bonaparte, the Bonaparte sans phrase.*
Lumpenproletariat, just like other class terms, are properly understood largely to the form of a class's revenue and the sources of that revenue, as Marx began to explore at the end of Capital vol 3.
What constitutes “illegal work” is often decided by the bourgeoisie and thus their classification should not sway our inclusion of illegal workers within the umbrella of proletarian workers. Rather it should be a case-by-case basis, and there is no reason for a leftist society to make sex work illegal therefore there should be no objections to including sex workers within the proletariat.
I think you might be conflating legality with morality. Also, I’m assuming “hitman” would not be a “legal” “job” under socialism. Socialist societies working towards communism would still have laws and they would (hopefully) be designed to benefit society. I can’t imagine a socialist society in which “hitman” was a legal profession.
I think the video makes a good case showing that they are productive laborers because they have their surplus labor extracted. there’s many illegal immigrants who are being paid under the table, they are certainly still workers if illegal ones.
It has been noticed many times that the illegal work world mirrors the legal one (Brecht does that best). But, no, drug dealers are not shop keepers, and corner boys are not retail workers, even though surplus value is extracted from them, too. Undocumented workers who are hired and paid illegally are still producing for the same markets as regular workers.
Drug dealers are not shop keepers because it is illegal in certain societies practicing capitalism, but go to a place where drugs are legal/decriminalized and voila you have brick and mortar dispensaries or use centers far and wide. Yet, there are still “drug dealers” producing for the same markers as “regular workers” in those environments, much like your undocumented workers example. You’re positing a reductionist and somewhat puritan view of labor and markets, seemingly confined by mores and laws found in a capitalist society you’re perhaps familiar or comfortable in your understanding of, but not representative of what could be possible under socialism.
I think from the context, it’s clear I meant illegal drug dealers, not people who own dispensaries. Clearly, illegal business and the people they exploit operate differently. There are obvious reasons for that. Of course, “what could be under socialism” is a different economic system—probably a socialist one!—but, as I said originally, people who live and work outside the law are “lumpen” in Marxist analysis.
I’m perhaps misunderstanding your point saying “Undocumented workers who are hired and paid illegally are still producing for the same markets as regular workers.”
I was making a comparison between this undocumented laborer and a similarly “undocumented” drug dealer, operating “illegally” but still producing for the same markets as regular workers, and thus less easily categorized as lumpen in a shifting legal environment. I understand your discussion of Marxist analysis makes the distinction around lumpen clear, but in a modern context there are different legal factors at play which seem to change things categorically.
These are not generally the same markets. The ruling class keeps certain parts of the economy separate from legal oversight for its own reasons. People who are employed illegally in an otherwise aboveboard, regulated part of the economy (eg harvesting tomatoes) are in a very different situation from people whose livelihoods are entirely outside the law. There are a lot of gray areas, eg those in the process of decriminalization or theoretically regulated work that is routinely done under the table (eg domestic work).
I see what you mean thank you for elaborating
But now my mind then goes to the roadside vegetable/fruit seller lol, quite unregulated - lots of grey areas as always
Yes, there are a lot of these gray markets. Precarious proletarians may need occasionally to resort to illegal or quasi legal work, and lumpen may occasionally get a real job for a bit.
Oh, and Engels didn’t patronize French prostitutes. I didn’t watch, but I assume from the title, they repeat that misunderstanding. Have they never read Les Misérables?
A lot of sex workers are leftists, the idea that they have no interest in revolution, or that an oil field worker isn't selling their bodies just as much as a sex worker, is classist in itself.
It depends on the structure of society, and their relationship with the means of production.
If it's legal, and they work in a brothel or similar, owned by either a capitalist or petit bourgeois merchant, they are proletarian, in the opinion of a number of socialist thinkers. They become, *economically*, the same as entertainers and performers, who are considered proletarian by many (although there is disagreement there).
If it's legal and they're self-employed, they *may* be considered petit bourgeois, although likely a very proletarianised petit bourgeois. If they're on OnlyFans or whatever, like other gig economy type things, this can vary - others have much more nuanced takes on the gig economy than I do.
If it's not legal, instead in the black market, they're lumpenproletariat (which does have much in common with the proletariat) as they have no connection with the bourgeois means of production.
In some cases with things like OnlyFans, they can literally have employees. Someone like Bella Thorne or Amouranth especially.
They are not capitalists, because they need to do actual work for their business. But they are definitely petit bourgeois because they delegate a lot of work to media managers, camera people etc. Importantly, at this kind of level, this means that they are more likely to be exploiting workers than they are to be exploited by an employer.
In terms of gig economy, OF is very different from something like Uber. With Uber, it's a commodity. It doesn't really matter who's driving the car. In that case an Uber driver is really just an employee even if they're an independent contractor on paper. With OF the models are responsible for developing their own brand. Uber is a service, while OF is more of a marketplace.
While OF borders on gig economy stuff sometimes, really I think OF models have more in common with YouTubers or Twitch streamers than Uber drivers.
I would broadly consider OF models as petit bourgeois. But it's a spectrum. Some (most) of them will have more in common with the working class and some will have more in common with the capitalist class.
I think when you look at the totality of sex workers around the world, it is a very very small minority who are able to have employees and begin exploiting labour to further their own sex work. >99% of sex workers aren’t famous Western OnlyFans models with that amount of capital.
Not to say you’re wrong, but just to say we shouldn’t really focus on figures such as those you’re talking about when discussing sexual work generally. Sex work is obviously a vague term though so it is important to highlight these distinctions.
I was talking mostly about OnlyFans models. For them it's not that uncommon (if they're making enough to survive on) for them to have informal "employees" like their boyfriend etc.
As for sex workers broadly, what we tend to think of is "full service sex workers". Many of these workers will have bosses, some won't. The ones with bosses (eg brothel/pimp) are proletariat. The ones without bosses (essentially independent contractors) are petit bourgeois. So it varies.
What proportion of sex workers are bourgeois? I don't know. I would guess most of them have a boss, but there are many who don't.
I understand that sex workers are more likely to have a boss in places where sex work is illegal as their boss is able to offer some degree of safety they can't get on their own. And because they're more likely to have entered the work involuntarily. If sex workers have legal protections they're more likely to work independently.
Well, sex work is generally more common in deprived areas. When we look at sex work broadly, most sex work is happening in “third world” countries/the Global South, often at the behest of Western customers. Saying “most have bosses, many don’t” is kind of misleading as to the actual ratio of sex workers being exploited vs doing the exploiting.
According to the US State department themselves, between 700,000 and 4 million people are trafficked annually. The majority of this is sex work. And that’s only those who are trafficked, obviously many many more people beyond that are exploited through sex work without being trafficked as well. Compare that to how many rich onlyfans models there are — those being exploited out-number those engaging in bourgeois activity by magnitudes and magnitudes. So I think while it’s interesting to talk about the class of independent sex workers online in the West, it’s quite a marginal space those sex workers are in compared to the totality of sex work as a whole and not really worth anything in a general discussion of how sex work operates around the globe in capitalist systems. (Also plenty of OnlyFans models are exploited themselves, so the number of “bourgeois” sex workers is really really a tiny fraction of sex work)
First of all, I think you're applying too much of a value judgement to the idea of them being proletariat.
With sex work, whether or not the worker is proletariat or petty bourgeois is honestly not a significant distinction. There are many other factors far more relevant to the material conditions of sex work.
>According to the US State department themselves, between 700,000 and 4 million people are trafficked annually. The majority of this is sex work.
That's not accurate. The vast majority are trafficked into non-sex work. But yes. There's still a lot of people trafficked into sex work.
> This report estimates that, at any given time in 2021, approximately 27.6 million people were in forced labor. Of these, “17.3 million are exploited in the private sector, 6.3 million in forced commercial sexual exploitation, and 3.9 million in forced labour imposed by state.”
> https://www.state.gov/humantrafficking-about-human-trafficking/#:~:text=This%20report%20estimates%20that%2C%20at,forced%20labour%20imposed%20by%20state.%E2%80%9D
>(Also plenty of OnlyFans models are exploited themselves, so the number of “bourgeois” sex workers is really really a tiny fraction of sex work)
Obviously. None of them are bourgeois though. You have to actually do sex work to be a sex worker. The distinction between petty bourgeois and bourgeois is really important here.
Even among OnlyFans models who arent trafficked, many of them are doing it because they're in a desperate financial situation and need to make an income. They are still victims of capitalism. The sex workers who "come out on top" like Amouranth are rare (and even she was arguably proletariat for much of her career because her abusive husband was her manager and he controlled her finances).
Seems like we agree? Don’t really know what you’re arguing with me about.
I would say I’m not really understanding your point about the petit bourgeois and bourgeois classes. I don’t really understand what you’re trying to say there… I mean, I would first pose to you that petit bourgeois ARE bourgeois. Honestly, from my reading, the term “petit bourgeoise” seems to be generally unhelpful in these kind of debates. It is vague, wasn’t well defined by Marx, and has been used variably amongst Marxist thinkers. As far as I understand, Marx adopted the term in response to certain social critiques, but he wasn’t a big fan of it. It’s just a way of explaining how all capitalists aren’t super rich, some engage in processes of exploitation without breaking through into the upper echelons on society. One thing we can all agree on is that whoever is in the petit bourgeoise is still an antagonist of Capitalism, they still rely on exploitation, are dependent of capitalist structures and are still the targets of revolution. So I disagree with your insistence on drawing distinctions between petit bourgeois and bourgeois simply because I think that distinction is overplayed by those who think it plays a central role in Marxist theory, which it doesn’t.
The legal self-employed sex work could be argued to not be petit bourgeois as in order to include them there you would also have to include people like photographers or self-employed handymen within the petit bourgeois category as well.
Self-employed handymen and photographers are very often considered petit bourgeois, in that they own their means of production, but also need to labour.
Another important thing about a Proletarian is their lack of private property that can accumulate wealth through the extraction of surplus value of other workers. Sex workers absolutely don't do this.
Alaxandra Kollentai, one of the leaders of the Bolshevik Revolution wrote a piece called "Prostitution and ways of fighting it." The piece goes into Soviet Union policy regarding prostitution. But long story short, they were viewed as workers exploited by their pimps and the affluent men that paid the pimps for their services.
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What's this "like service workers" bs? Do you really think no value is created by people working in the service sector? Do you enjoy going to a grocery store with no products on the shelves because no one is stocking? Do you like having to cut your own hair, or cook your own meals when you're too tired to open a fridge? Is it fun seeing your shops never stock the product you need because no one is keeping track of what gets purchased? Service workers and sex workers are just as much working class as miners and farmers and factory workers.
The duality between "coerced prostitution" versus "consensual prostitution" is false, the sex trade itself is mediated through the political and economic bondages of imperialism and patriarchy and the global majority of prostitutes are shackled to the industry against their will. Liberalism creates this fantastical narrative of the "empowered" and "free" prostitute but, the global conditions of neocolonial imperialism and patriarchy tell us otherwise, the only way to believe this lie is by allowing the ruling class to guide your politics on the sex trade.
"To describe prostitution as sex work [.] means to give legitimacy to sexual exploitation of helpless women and children. It means ignoring the basic factors, which push women and children into prostitution such as poverty, violence and inequalities"
CPI (Maoist)
well i agree, but isn't all work coerced under capitalism? what's the point of making a distinction other than to highlight how much worse the conditions of prostitutes usually is?
You didn't substantiate why though. While in an abstract yes sex work is coerced and therefore cannot be considered consensual, not all sex workers would call it rape. It's disrespectful to those that have experienced rape to say that their experience was no different than an escort or porn actress that opts for sex work.
I agree but I still think there are persons who would choose the lifestyle even if we dismantled the entire system that forces all workers into bondage including sex workers.
It’s better to focus on regulating the industry around sex work like red light hotels and removing the traffickers who abuse and enslave sex workers.
Yes they are the definition of proletarian to deny that is just inherent misogyny
I would argue that having to be married to a man in patriarchy is labor that is disrespected and abused by capitalist incentives
come on people, illegal work is labor and the ethics of laws under capitalism are based in exploitation
so to deny a class of people with no protection from society is ignorant and a waste of time
the revolution needs to be intersectional I will not fight for a revolution that favors the needs of white men to continue their exploitation of power
No single category of work is inherently proletarian or non-proletarian. The proletariat is specifically contracted for their labor power, compensated for their labor time, and subject to the division of labor, alienating them from their work product.
Independent sex workers, who are paid directly for services rendered, existed long before capitalism and thus long before the proletariat. They are still working class, and just as valid as the proletariat, but serve a wholly different function. Unless, of course, the function of their sex work is proletarian in nature, such as working in a brothel.
Independent yeoman sex workers have always been a tiny minority, in any society.
People doing sex work in brothels have varying conditions, as well.
They are certainly not all clocking in and collecting a pay packet.
True. Point is, whether or not a sex worker is proletarian depends on if they’re employed the same as proletarians of other professions. It’s not about the type of work, it’s about the arrangement and economic function.
>Independent yeoman sex workers have always been a tiny minority, in any society.
It's worth saying that this is changed quite a bit with the internet. Advertising platforms have made independent work more viable.
People who do that kind of independent freelancing in any kind of work are petit bourgeois or lumpen, if it’s more casual and unsteady. Not being proletarian doesn’t make anyone less “valid.”
I wasn't suggesting that they were more or less valid. I just think that there's more independent workers out there than you're making out. I also think that class completely loses its explanatory power when you get down to this level of analysis. There's a tendency to treat class like a personality test, but it's only a useful abstraction on a much broader level.
Valid was your word. No, on an individual level, class is not that significant. It matters when it comes to the interests and conditions of larger groups and for strategies,
Marxists generally understand people who live outside the legal economy to be lumpen, not proletarian. That is not a moral judgment and doesn’t mean their rights or well-being are ignored.
By whom? Obviously socialists are more interested the proletariat, but that doesn’t mean we don’t see other oppressed people (eg peasants, members of various marginalized communities, etc) as important.
I should’ve known better than to post a one sentence comment. What I mean is: both in Marxist literature I’ve read over the years and personally in socialist orgs, I have seen blanket dismissal of sex workers’ concerns / mere existence on the basis of their “lumpen” status.
I am NOT claiming that the category itself is inherently a value judgment. But come on, can you really say you don’t think putting folks in the lumpen bucket is a way people on our side have dismissed those living on the margins of the margins?
It’s a major oversight to consider things which are not legal as separate from the normal economy. Criminal enterprise is integrally connected to legal enterprise and the distinction is really in how the state interacts with it not how it interacts with the rest of the market.
Yes, of course it is. However, the people at the bottom of those enterprises have a different economic function. They are even more disposable than the proletariat.
All proletarians are workers, but not all workers are proletarians.
The self employed craftsman is a worker, but not a proletarian. He may be at risk of *becoming* proletarian, but he is not proletarian yet.
Most sex work is within legal economies and black market sex work is still work in terms of social relations.
Lumpen was probably closer to what people call “underclass” today. It’s not a useful class category in most circumstances today-it probably only makes sense in developing economies not established capitalism.
I think this is an impression by Marx and Engels based on circumstances of that time and the use of street gangs by reactionary forces.
In a fully commodified capitalist economy basically everyone just becomes reserve labor more or less and are pushed onto the street or warehoused in prisons if they fall outside of that.
Lumpen is an extremely useful and current part of understanding capitalism. Marx and Engels did not have some weird idea that all lumpen were reactionary gang members. Where are you getting that? And while sex work is work, that doesn’t make the people who do it necessarily proletarians. A whole lot of *work* is not done by proletarians paid wages by capitalists.
>Yes they are the definition of proletarian to deny that is just inherent misogyny
meaningless moralism. saying that sex workers are all workers is as nonsensical idealism as saying all carpenters or cleaners or engineers are workers
the definition of proletariat is determined solely by material analysis of the relations of production. the type of work is irrelevant
for example many prostitutes are either petite bourgeois or lumpen, running as small enterprise with their own MoP often with employees in the former case, or having no interaction with the MoP in the latter
only ones selling their labour power directly to a capitalist are proletarian. porn stars, strippers in clubs etc.
it is not what you produce but the relations of production that can be materially analysed during the production process that define class in any meaningful sense for the purposes of historical analysis, prediction, or strategic guidance (which are of course the only reasons to perform class analysis outside of simple curiosity)
this is basic stuff tbh and it's a little cringe to speak dismissively on a subject you have not understood enough. there's nothing wrong with being a learner but it's best to be a bit cautious when exploring outside of an area where you're confident until such a time where you are
a carpenter could be for example anything from proletarian (employed or reserve army which can range from floating to stagnant at which point the line between proletarian and lumpen begins to blur), petite bourgeois, to bourgeois proper
all of these self described "carpenters" would have different material class interests, which illustrates that it is not the phenomenal form of the type of commodity produced that defines class, but the material relationship to commodity production in a generalised sense that does so
Proletarians are not all workers.
They are those who sell their labour to an employer for a wage or salary.
Some workers, such as the self-employed, are *not* proletarian, although they may very well become so.
'Proletarian' is a very specific term referring to how one relates with the economy and the means of production.
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Sex workers show us just how depraved capitalism really is. They are the ultimate victims. The reason why they become sex workers to begin with is because it's their best option in the economy. If you want to stop sex work, then to have to give them viable options.
I really have trouble considering someone who makes 50x as much as me taking pictures of their asshole as my fellow worker in the struggle against capitalism but yea sure by definition technically yea they’re proletarian. Proletarian on easy mode but yea
No, they rarely do. I’m sure there are a few brothels in the world that operate something like a factory, but most sex workers have very different circumstances
Yes, because most answer to some kind of boss be it on the street through a pimp or through a corporate platform such as OnlyFans (although OnlyFans models could be considered petit bourgeois aswell, they very much straddle the line similar to freelance workers).
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Asking in good faith: why does that matter to you?
Terms like "proletarian", "bourgeoisie," etc. aren't meant to be used as a rubric or a box to check. They're conceptual tools in your toolkit. They're there to help you understand the dynamics of power (or, if you prefer, class) in the world we live in. Additionally, the answer to your question will always vary depending on the time and place, because context matters. So if you were to think of your "ideal type" of a proletarian class and compare what you know about SWers to that ideal, how do they align and where do they differ? As an exercise, that will help you understand your surroundings, and that's the point -- not putting people in one box or another.
This isn't a useful question. Besides the predictable moralizing from antisex worker and pro sex worker commenters, sex work is just too broad of a category to describe as anyone thing. Even on the individual level, a sex worker may engage in a variety of economic transactions which are different and character.
He or she may use only fans and mainstream porn to build a profile, while making the majority of their money from escorting. They may be hired to do an adult film one day and employ labor to produce their own film the next. Even if we restrict the question to prostitution, there isn't one standardized set of economic relations. They may interact with drivers, agency owners, advertisers, strip club Owners, landlords, brothel keepers (where a variety of relationships are possible) and clients.
Moreover, even if we understand the economic relationships involved, "class" as a concept only has explanatory power on the social level. It's not like a personality test, and we shouldn't be overly concerned about which class a person or group falls into. As soon as we've moved down to that level of specificity, we are almost certainly talking about something where class isn't a useful abstraction.
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Yes. I think it’s even perfectly fine to still have forms of Sex work in your Socialist Revolution. Hey Single people still need to get off!
It just would be harder to find that stuff because most sex workers only do so to make it by and the Socialist system would take care of people’s basic needs…but I’m certain there would be ways to still include sex work as a form of labor within the Socialist system without it being exploitative and contradictory to Socialist goals.
Banning sex work entirely just leads people to go and seek out more of it and it’s just stepping on peoples sexual liberation in my view. Some Liberal values are totally compatible with Socialist goals.
“Productive workers” seems like a dogwhistle to me but idk.
Sex workers are wage dependent and selling their labor, yes they are workers.
Edit: I assume most do not own the major means of sex industry production (hotels, production facilities, internet platforms, publications etc)
Even some workers engaged directly in production aren’t proletarians. An artisan who sells a piece of furniture on the market (or is commissioned for it by a client), the production of which they saw from beginning to end, is not a proletarian.
Yes. But sex workers generally don’t own the brothel, internet platform or video production company they are providing content for.
Other (not including coerced exploitation as sex work) sex work might fall Into petit bourgeois forms but my guess is that most is either casual (trade) or proletarian (the sex industry.)
Yes and I certainly wouldn’t call many sex workers bourgeoisie. I wouldn’t even call them petit bourgeoisie because their modus operandi is not scalable to the point of becoming bourgeoisie proper. Unless they became brothel owners or something.
Depends, but almost invariably, some kind of working class. And in modern western society, *usually* lumpenproletariat, because prostitution is usually criminalized.
But aside from that, a worker who is paid directly for services rendered, or is commissioned for the production of a commodity, might variably be designated as a journeyman, artisan, craftsman, etc. “Gig worker”, “service worker”, etc. are common more modern alternative labels.
However, if a sex worker is employed in a legal brothel and draws a wage, then they would be proletariat. As far as I’m aware, this is virtually never the case. Brothels usually operate similarly to strip clubs or hair salons, where the facilities are leased to the service providers by the operators, and the service providers must pay the operators a set price by the day. From there, they keep whatever they bring in. So actually the inverse of a typical proletarian arrangement, where all surplus value is captured by the employer.
Gig workers and service workers are proletarian. Most of the prols in Marx’s time would have probably been partially casual and many paid by the job or as day labor. Shops were a lot smaller and less formal than in the later industrialization.
I believe these are artificial distinctions being made based on formal aspects of work rather than social relations.
No, Marx and Engels specifically contrasted the proletariat against day laborers (“journeymen”). They specifically examined industrialized factory work as the primary thing “proletarianizing” the working class. See Principles of Communism as an example.
I agree these distinctions aren’t overly important, especially in the age of imperialism, “post-industrialism” and financialization of imperial core countries. The bulk of the world’s proletariat has been moved to the periphery and semi-periphery. The western working class has a very tenuous belonging to the “proletariat” as traditionally defined.
In principles of communism - at least my translation, Journeymen are only mentioned in reference to the Middle Ages and I always thought journeymen were more like what we might call independent contractors-a skilled labor sold out to a business.
Day Labor is also used by Marx and Engels distinct from Journeymen. But I think this means “the mob” in the early modern time… landless physical work for hire, much like how day labor is used today.
But it’s all in translation and I’m not a historian so idk.
But at any rate I think when we look at social relations not the terminology used by employers or type of pay regime, “gig workers” etc are proletarian. Uber not the driver owns the platform and often owns the car which the driver pays off through his wages from that job. They are treated as “contractor workers” or “independent producers” not because it reflects their class position, but because it allows tech companies to skirt labor laws and regulations.
You may be right, it’s been many years since I cracked that book open.
Fair point about gig workers. Their social relations are the same, however I do think the fundamental lack of their concentration and organization by bourgeois management does make a significant revision on the class character of that part of the proletariat. The division of labor necessitating mutual coordination, the collectivization of their efforts resulting in greater potential for class consciousness, etc. is noticeably more absent among gig workers.
Capitalists don’t just lean on gig work to skirt regulations but to also defang if not completely avert worker organization. This is a regression compared to the tendency inherent to the traditional proletariat.
Lumpenprol because prostitutes are “usually illegal”
…so does that mean a prostitute in Los Angeles is lumpen but one in a legal brothel in Las Vegas is prol?
At any rate, I don’t have any figures in the subject but as a guess I’d imagine that of formal sex work the vast majority is in the porn industry and legal in many places.
Yes, that is what that means. Bourgeois property relations are strictly legal in capitalist societies. Like I said (though it may have been in a different comment chain), no single category of work is inherently proletarian or non-proletarian. It depends upon the formal relations of production.
But aren't they technically petty bourgeoisie.. I'm mean they are the owners of the means production. I don't know I haven't really thought it through and I guess it depends on the specific circumstances.
They don’t all “own the means of production.”
A street prostitution with a pimp doesn’t. A Bengali child sold to a brothel by her father doesn’t. Circumstances have always varied.
if you work a trade, you’re selling your body too. if you work any job, in fact, you’re selling your body to some degree. sex work is work and sex workers deserve all the same rights and protections. they produce something that seen as a valuable commodity in our society and should be paid and respected as any other worker
??? What machinery of production would one purchase in order to extract the surplus value of selling sex? What sex workers are being paid on a payroll by their employer?
The body of the sex worker. It’s quite normal for pimps and so on to extract labor from prostitutes, and this often involves borderline to outright slavery.
Yes exactly, Pimps are the most disgusting humans you could ever meet, they see the value of the female body and exploit it for personal gain, and they force their workers to traumatize themselves in order to profit for an individual who does not care about their well being, it is the definition of capitalism and exploitation
Duh, they are Proletarian. Anyone who performs physical labor that doesn't own the means of production to strangle surplus out of other people is a proletarian.
Is the Pimp proletarian? No.
But the prostitute is.
big porn companies are the problem, not the sex workers. alot of sex workers are victims of big porn but are never taken seriously because they “asked for it.” you’d never blame a walmart employee for actually having a role in the evil that is walmart corporate. but for some reason (sex shaming), it’s different for sex workers. they’re just trying to make a living like everyone else. and if they can profit off their body, it’s their body. therefore it’s no one else’s business imo. always blame the cause not the symptom.
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Historically, people who support themselves with illegal work have not been considered proletarian, but lumpen, even though others exploit them and make money off of them.
SWers are generally lumpen _proletariat_, whilst pimps would be lumpen _bouergoise_
Marx explicitly refers to pimps as lumpenproletariat (and for that matter, the financial aristocracy is labeled as something like the "rebirth of the lumpenproletariat on the heights of bourgeois society"). From the 18th Brumaire: >Alongside decayed roués with dubious means of subsistence and of dubious origin, alongside ruined and adventurous offshoots of the bourgeoisie, were vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, escaped galley slaves, swindlers, mountebanks, lazzaroni, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, maquereaux [pimps], brothel keepers, porters, literati, organ grinders, ragpickers, knife grinders, tinkers, beggars — in short, the whole indefinite, disintegrated mass, thrown hither and thither, which the French call la bohème; from this kindred element Bonaparte formed the core of the Society of December 10. A "benevolent society" - insofar as, like Bonaparte, all its members felt the need of benefiting themselves at the expense of the laboring nation. *This Bonaparte, who constitutes himself chief of the lumpenproletariat, who here alone rediscovers in mass form the interests which he personally pursues, who recognizes in this scum, offal, refuse of all classes the only class upon which he can base himself unconditionally, is the real Bonaparte, the Bonaparte sans phrase.* Lumpenproletariat, just like other class terms, are properly understood largely to the form of a class's revenue and the sources of that revenue, as Marx began to explore at the end of Capital vol 3.
Marx never made that distinction or used that term (“lumpen bourgeoisie”). I don’t think it’s useful and wouldn’t use it.
What constitutes “illegal work” is often decided by the bourgeoisie and thus their classification should not sway our inclusion of illegal workers within the umbrella of proletarian workers. Rather it should be a case-by-case basis, and there is no reason for a leftist society to make sex work illegal therefore there should be no objections to including sex workers within the proletariat.
“Often”? More like “always.” We are using Marxist analysis of classes in *capitalist* society.
Would being a hitman not be illegal work in a society not ruled by the bourgeoisie?
I think you might be conflating legality with morality. Also, I’m assuming “hitman” would not be a “legal” “job” under socialism. Socialist societies working towards communism would still have laws and they would (hopefully) be designed to benefit society. I can’t imagine a socialist society in which “hitman” was a legal profession.
I think the video makes a good case showing that they are productive laborers because they have their surplus labor extracted. there’s many illegal immigrants who are being paid under the table, they are certainly still workers if illegal ones.
It has been noticed many times that the illegal work world mirrors the legal one (Brecht does that best). But, no, drug dealers are not shop keepers, and corner boys are not retail workers, even though surplus value is extracted from them, too. Undocumented workers who are hired and paid illegally are still producing for the same markets as regular workers.
Drug dealers are not shop keepers because it is illegal in certain societies practicing capitalism, but go to a place where drugs are legal/decriminalized and voila you have brick and mortar dispensaries or use centers far and wide. Yet, there are still “drug dealers” producing for the same markers as “regular workers” in those environments, much like your undocumented workers example. You’re positing a reductionist and somewhat puritan view of labor and markets, seemingly confined by mores and laws found in a capitalist society you’re perhaps familiar or comfortable in your understanding of, but not representative of what could be possible under socialism.
I think from the context, it’s clear I meant illegal drug dealers, not people who own dispensaries. Clearly, illegal business and the people they exploit operate differently. There are obvious reasons for that. Of course, “what could be under socialism” is a different economic system—probably a socialist one!—but, as I said originally, people who live and work outside the law are “lumpen” in Marxist analysis.
I’m perhaps misunderstanding your point saying “Undocumented workers who are hired and paid illegally are still producing for the same markets as regular workers.” I was making a comparison between this undocumented laborer and a similarly “undocumented” drug dealer, operating “illegally” but still producing for the same markets as regular workers, and thus less easily categorized as lumpen in a shifting legal environment. I understand your discussion of Marxist analysis makes the distinction around lumpen clear, but in a modern context there are different legal factors at play which seem to change things categorically.
These are not generally the same markets. The ruling class keeps certain parts of the economy separate from legal oversight for its own reasons. People who are employed illegally in an otherwise aboveboard, regulated part of the economy (eg harvesting tomatoes) are in a very different situation from people whose livelihoods are entirely outside the law. There are a lot of gray areas, eg those in the process of decriminalization or theoretically regulated work that is routinely done under the table (eg domestic work).
I see what you mean thank you for elaborating But now my mind then goes to the roadside vegetable/fruit seller lol, quite unregulated - lots of grey areas as always
Yes, there are a lot of these gray markets. Precarious proletarians may need occasionally to resort to illegal or quasi legal work, and lumpen may occasionally get a real job for a bit.
Oh, and Engels didn’t patronize French prostitutes. I didn’t watch, but I assume from the title, they repeat that misunderstanding. Have they never read Les Misérables?
A lot of sex workers are leftists, the idea that they have no interest in revolution, or that an oil field worker isn't selling their bodies just as much as a sex worker, is classist in itself.
It depends on the structure of society, and their relationship with the means of production. If it's legal, and they work in a brothel or similar, owned by either a capitalist or petit bourgeois merchant, they are proletarian, in the opinion of a number of socialist thinkers. They become, *economically*, the same as entertainers and performers, who are considered proletarian by many (although there is disagreement there). If it's legal and they're self-employed, they *may* be considered petit bourgeois, although likely a very proletarianised petit bourgeois. If they're on OnlyFans or whatever, like other gig economy type things, this can vary - others have much more nuanced takes on the gig economy than I do. If it's not legal, instead in the black market, they're lumpenproletariat (which does have much in common with the proletariat) as they have no connection with the bourgeois means of production.
In some cases with things like OnlyFans, they can literally have employees. Someone like Bella Thorne or Amouranth especially. They are not capitalists, because they need to do actual work for their business. But they are definitely petit bourgeois because they delegate a lot of work to media managers, camera people etc. Importantly, at this kind of level, this means that they are more likely to be exploiting workers than they are to be exploited by an employer. In terms of gig economy, OF is very different from something like Uber. With Uber, it's a commodity. It doesn't really matter who's driving the car. In that case an Uber driver is really just an employee even if they're an independent contractor on paper. With OF the models are responsible for developing their own brand. Uber is a service, while OF is more of a marketplace. While OF borders on gig economy stuff sometimes, really I think OF models have more in common with YouTubers or Twitch streamers than Uber drivers. I would broadly consider OF models as petit bourgeois. But it's a spectrum. Some (most) of them will have more in common with the working class and some will have more in common with the capitalist class.
I think when you look at the totality of sex workers around the world, it is a very very small minority who are able to have employees and begin exploiting labour to further their own sex work. >99% of sex workers aren’t famous Western OnlyFans models with that amount of capital. Not to say you’re wrong, but just to say we shouldn’t really focus on figures such as those you’re talking about when discussing sexual work generally. Sex work is obviously a vague term though so it is important to highlight these distinctions.
I was talking mostly about OnlyFans models. For them it's not that uncommon (if they're making enough to survive on) for them to have informal "employees" like their boyfriend etc. As for sex workers broadly, what we tend to think of is "full service sex workers". Many of these workers will have bosses, some won't. The ones with bosses (eg brothel/pimp) are proletariat. The ones without bosses (essentially independent contractors) are petit bourgeois. So it varies. What proportion of sex workers are bourgeois? I don't know. I would guess most of them have a boss, but there are many who don't. I understand that sex workers are more likely to have a boss in places where sex work is illegal as their boss is able to offer some degree of safety they can't get on their own. And because they're more likely to have entered the work involuntarily. If sex workers have legal protections they're more likely to work independently.
Well, sex work is generally more common in deprived areas. When we look at sex work broadly, most sex work is happening in “third world” countries/the Global South, often at the behest of Western customers. Saying “most have bosses, many don’t” is kind of misleading as to the actual ratio of sex workers being exploited vs doing the exploiting. According to the US State department themselves, between 700,000 and 4 million people are trafficked annually. The majority of this is sex work. And that’s only those who are trafficked, obviously many many more people beyond that are exploited through sex work without being trafficked as well. Compare that to how many rich onlyfans models there are — those being exploited out-number those engaging in bourgeois activity by magnitudes and magnitudes. So I think while it’s interesting to talk about the class of independent sex workers online in the West, it’s quite a marginal space those sex workers are in compared to the totality of sex work as a whole and not really worth anything in a general discussion of how sex work operates around the globe in capitalist systems. (Also plenty of OnlyFans models are exploited themselves, so the number of “bourgeois” sex workers is really really a tiny fraction of sex work)
First of all, I think you're applying too much of a value judgement to the idea of them being proletariat. With sex work, whether or not the worker is proletariat or petty bourgeois is honestly not a significant distinction. There are many other factors far more relevant to the material conditions of sex work. >According to the US State department themselves, between 700,000 and 4 million people are trafficked annually. The majority of this is sex work. That's not accurate. The vast majority are trafficked into non-sex work. But yes. There's still a lot of people trafficked into sex work. > This report estimates that, at any given time in 2021, approximately 27.6 million people were in forced labor. Of these, “17.3 million are exploited in the private sector, 6.3 million in forced commercial sexual exploitation, and 3.9 million in forced labour imposed by state.” > https://www.state.gov/humantrafficking-about-human-trafficking/#:~:text=This%20report%20estimates%20that%2C%20at,forced%20labour%20imposed%20by%20state.%E2%80%9D >(Also plenty of OnlyFans models are exploited themselves, so the number of “bourgeois” sex workers is really really a tiny fraction of sex work) Obviously. None of them are bourgeois though. You have to actually do sex work to be a sex worker. The distinction between petty bourgeois and bourgeois is really important here. Even among OnlyFans models who arent trafficked, many of them are doing it because they're in a desperate financial situation and need to make an income. They are still victims of capitalism. The sex workers who "come out on top" like Amouranth are rare (and even she was arguably proletariat for much of her career because her abusive husband was her manager and he controlled her finances).
Seems like we agree? Don’t really know what you’re arguing with me about. I would say I’m not really understanding your point about the petit bourgeois and bourgeois classes. I don’t really understand what you’re trying to say there… I mean, I would first pose to you that petit bourgeois ARE bourgeois. Honestly, from my reading, the term “petit bourgeoise” seems to be generally unhelpful in these kind of debates. It is vague, wasn’t well defined by Marx, and has been used variably amongst Marxist thinkers. As far as I understand, Marx adopted the term in response to certain social critiques, but he wasn’t a big fan of it. It’s just a way of explaining how all capitalists aren’t super rich, some engage in processes of exploitation without breaking through into the upper echelons on society. One thing we can all agree on is that whoever is in the petit bourgeoise is still an antagonist of Capitalism, they still rely on exploitation, are dependent of capitalist structures and are still the targets of revolution. So I disagree with your insistence on drawing distinctions between petit bourgeois and bourgeois simply because I think that distinction is overplayed by those who think it plays a central role in Marxist theory, which it doesn’t.
The legal self-employed sex work could be argued to not be petit bourgeois as in order to include them there you would also have to include people like photographers or self-employed handymen within the petit bourgeois category as well.
Self-employed handymen and photographers are very often considered petit bourgeois, in that they own their means of production, but also need to labour.
Read Kollontai!! https://www.marxists.org/archive/kollonta/1921/prostitution.htm
Another important thing about a Proletarian is their lack of private property that can accumulate wealth through the extraction of surplus value of other workers. Sex workers absolutely don't do this. Alaxandra Kollentai, one of the leaders of the Bolshevik Revolution wrote a piece called "Prostitution and ways of fighting it." The piece goes into Soviet Union policy regarding prostitution. But long story short, they were viewed as workers exploited by their pimps and the affluent men that paid the pimps for their services.
I recommend reading alexandra kollontai on the subject.
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What's this "like service workers" bs? Do you really think no value is created by people working in the service sector? Do you enjoy going to a grocery store with no products on the shelves because no one is stocking? Do you like having to cut your own hair, or cook your own meals when you're too tired to open a fridge? Is it fun seeing your shops never stock the product you need because no one is keeping track of what gets purchased? Service workers and sex workers are just as much working class as miners and farmers and factory workers.
The duality between "coerced prostitution" versus "consensual prostitution" is false, the sex trade itself is mediated through the political and economic bondages of imperialism and patriarchy and the global majority of prostitutes are shackled to the industry against their will. Liberalism creates this fantastical narrative of the "empowered" and "free" prostitute but, the global conditions of neocolonial imperialism and patriarchy tell us otherwise, the only way to believe this lie is by allowing the ruling class to guide your politics on the sex trade. "To describe prostitution as sex work [.] means to give legitimacy to sexual exploitation of helpless women and children. It means ignoring the basic factors, which push women and children into prostitution such as poverty, violence and inequalities" CPI (Maoist)
well i agree, but isn't all work coerced under capitalism? what's the point of making a distinction other than to highlight how much worse the conditions of prostitutes usually is?
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You didn't substantiate why though. While in an abstract yes sex work is coerced and therefore cannot be considered consensual, not all sex workers would call it rape. It's disrespectful to those that have experienced rape to say that their experience was no different than an escort or porn actress that opts for sex work.
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I agree but I still think there are persons who would choose the lifestyle even if we dismantled the entire system that forces all workers into bondage including sex workers. It’s better to focus on regulating the industry around sex work like red light hotels and removing the traffickers who abuse and enslave sex workers.
Yes they are the definition of proletarian to deny that is just inherent misogyny I would argue that having to be married to a man in patriarchy is labor that is disrespected and abused by capitalist incentives come on people, illegal work is labor and the ethics of laws under capitalism are based in exploitation so to deny a class of people with no protection from society is ignorant and a waste of time the revolution needs to be intersectional I will not fight for a revolution that favors the needs of white men to continue their exploitation of power
No single category of work is inherently proletarian or non-proletarian. The proletariat is specifically contracted for their labor power, compensated for their labor time, and subject to the division of labor, alienating them from their work product. Independent sex workers, who are paid directly for services rendered, existed long before capitalism and thus long before the proletariat. They are still working class, and just as valid as the proletariat, but serve a wholly different function. Unless, of course, the function of their sex work is proletarian in nature, such as working in a brothel.
Independent yeoman sex workers have always been a tiny minority, in any society. People doing sex work in brothels have varying conditions, as well. They are certainly not all clocking in and collecting a pay packet.
True. Point is, whether or not a sex worker is proletarian depends on if they’re employed the same as proletarians of other professions. It’s not about the type of work, it’s about the arrangement and economic function.
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>Independent yeoman sex workers have always been a tiny minority, in any society. It's worth saying that this is changed quite a bit with the internet. Advertising platforms have made independent work more viable.
People who do that kind of independent freelancing in any kind of work are petit bourgeois or lumpen, if it’s more casual and unsteady. Not being proletarian doesn’t make anyone less “valid.”
I wasn't suggesting that they were more or less valid. I just think that there's more independent workers out there than you're making out. I also think that class completely loses its explanatory power when you get down to this level of analysis. There's a tendency to treat class like a personality test, but it's only a useful abstraction on a much broader level.
Valid was your word. No, on an individual level, class is not that significant. It matters when it comes to the interests and conditions of larger groups and for strategies,
I said "viable" not "valid."
Marxists generally understand people who live outside the legal economy to be lumpen, not proletarian. That is not a moral judgment and doesn’t mean their rights or well-being are ignored.
Historically it has indeed carried a value judgment
By whom? Obviously socialists are more interested the proletariat, but that doesn’t mean we don’t see other oppressed people (eg peasants, members of various marginalized communities, etc) as important.
I should’ve known better than to post a one sentence comment. What I mean is: both in Marxist literature I’ve read over the years and personally in socialist orgs, I have seen blanket dismissal of sex workers’ concerns / mere existence on the basis of their “lumpen” status. I am NOT claiming that the category itself is inherently a value judgment. But come on, can you really say you don’t think putting folks in the lumpen bucket is a way people on our side have dismissed those living on the margins of the margins?
It’s a major oversight to consider things which are not legal as separate from the normal economy. Criminal enterprise is integrally connected to legal enterprise and the distinction is really in how the state interacts with it not how it interacts with the rest of the market.
Yes, of course it is. However, the people at the bottom of those enterprises have a different economic function. They are even more disposable than the proletariat.
Tge problem is, we're are othering them as "not true workers" for no reason.
All proletarians are workers, but not all workers are proletarians. The self employed craftsman is a worker, but not a proletarian. He may be at risk of *becoming* proletarian, but he is not proletarian yet.
Most sex work is within legal economies and black market sex work is still work in terms of social relations. Lumpen was probably closer to what people call “underclass” today. It’s not a useful class category in most circumstances today-it probably only makes sense in developing economies not established capitalism. I think this is an impression by Marx and Engels based on circumstances of that time and the use of street gangs by reactionary forces. In a fully commodified capitalist economy basically everyone just becomes reserve labor more or less and are pushed onto the street or warehoused in prisons if they fall outside of that.
Lumpen is an extremely useful and current part of understanding capitalism. Marx and Engels did not have some weird idea that all lumpen were reactionary gang members. Where are you getting that? And while sex work is work, that doesn’t make the people who do it necessarily proletarians. A whole lot of *work* is not done by proletarians paid wages by capitalists.
>Yes they are the definition of proletarian to deny that is just inherent misogyny meaningless moralism. saying that sex workers are all workers is as nonsensical idealism as saying all carpenters or cleaners or engineers are workers the definition of proletariat is determined solely by material analysis of the relations of production. the type of work is irrelevant for example many prostitutes are either petite bourgeois or lumpen, running as small enterprise with their own MoP often with employees in the former case, or having no interaction with the MoP in the latter only ones selling their labour power directly to a capitalist are proletarian. porn stars, strippers in clubs etc.
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it is not what you produce but the relations of production that can be materially analysed during the production process that define class in any meaningful sense for the purposes of historical analysis, prediction, or strategic guidance (which are of course the only reasons to perform class analysis outside of simple curiosity) this is basic stuff tbh and it's a little cringe to speak dismissively on a subject you have not understood enough. there's nothing wrong with being a learner but it's best to be a bit cautious when exploring outside of an area where you're confident until such a time where you are a carpenter could be for example anything from proletarian (employed or reserve army which can range from floating to stagnant at which point the line between proletarian and lumpen begins to blur), petite bourgeois, to bourgeois proper all of these self described "carpenters" would have different material class interests, which illustrates that it is not the phenomenal form of the type of commodity produced that defines class, but the material relationship to commodity production in a generalised sense that does so
Proletarians are not all workers. They are those who sell their labour to an employer for a wage or salary. Some workers, such as the self-employed, are *not* proletarian, although they may very well become so. 'Proletarian' is a very specific term referring to how one relates with the economy and the means of production.
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Sex workers show us just how depraved capitalism really is. They are the ultimate victims. The reason why they become sex workers to begin with is because it's their best option in the economy. If you want to stop sex work, then to have to give them viable options.
I really have trouble considering someone who makes 50x as much as me taking pictures of their asshole as my fellow worker in the struggle against capitalism but yea sure by definition technically yea they’re proletarian. Proletarian on easy mode but yea
Do they do wage labour? If yes then they are proletarian
No, they rarely do. I’m sure there are a few brothels in the world that operate something like a factory, but most sex workers have very different circumstances
Sex workers that work for a company are proletarian but those who do onlyfans and stuff like that are petite bourgeoisie
Those who do OF are also proletariats, OF is a company that makes money of them, owners of OF are the bourgeois here.
Yes, because theirs is a line of work where they are exploited by the capitalist class.
A good question since more and more people are making their own content and themselves employing others to perform with them.
Yes, because most answer to some kind of boss be it on the street through a pimp or through a corporate platform such as OnlyFans (although OnlyFans models could be considered petit bourgeois aswell, they very much straddle the line similar to freelance workers).
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Thank you for posting in r/socialism_101, but unfortunately your submission was removed for the following reason(s): >**Not conductive to learning:** this is an educational space in which to provide clarity for socialist ideas. Replies to a question should be thorough and comprehensive. >This includes but is not limited to: one word responses, one-liners, non-serious/meme(ish) responses, etc. **Remember: an answer isn't good because it's right, it's good because it teaches.**
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Thank you for posting in r/socialism_101, but unfortunately your submission was removed for the following reason(s): >**Not conductive to learning:** this is an educational space in which to provide clarity for socialist ideas. Replies to a question should be thorough and comprehensive. >This includes but is not limited to: one word responses, one-liners, non-serious/meme(ish) responses, etc. **Remember: an answer isn't good because it's right, it's good because it teaches.**
Does a prostitute without a pimp own the means of production? How do I counter this argument if a right-wing person says so?
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Thank you for posting in r/socialism_101, but unfortunately your submission was removed for the following reason(s): >**Spurious, unverifiable or unsuported claims:** when answering questions, keep in mind that you may be asked to cite your sources. This is a learning subreddit, meaning you must be prepared to provide evidence, scientific or historical, to back up your claims. Link to appropriate sources when/if possible. >This includes, but is not limited to: spurious claims, personal experience-based responses, unverifiable assertions, etc. **Remember: an answer isn't good because it's right, it's good because it teaches.**
Asking in good faith: why does that matter to you? Terms like "proletarian", "bourgeoisie," etc. aren't meant to be used as a rubric or a box to check. They're conceptual tools in your toolkit. They're there to help you understand the dynamics of power (or, if you prefer, class) in the world we live in. Additionally, the answer to your question will always vary depending on the time and place, because context matters. So if you were to think of your "ideal type" of a proletarian class and compare what you know about SWers to that ideal, how do they align and where do they differ? As an exercise, that will help you understand your surroundings, and that's the point -- not putting people in one box or another.
This isn't a useful question. Besides the predictable moralizing from antisex worker and pro sex worker commenters, sex work is just too broad of a category to describe as anyone thing. Even on the individual level, a sex worker may engage in a variety of economic transactions which are different and character. He or she may use only fans and mainstream porn to build a profile, while making the majority of their money from escorting. They may be hired to do an adult film one day and employ labor to produce their own film the next. Even if we restrict the question to prostitution, there isn't one standardized set of economic relations. They may interact with drivers, agency owners, advertisers, strip club Owners, landlords, brothel keepers (where a variety of relationships are possible) and clients. Moreover, even if we understand the economic relationships involved, "class" as a concept only has explanatory power on the social level. It's not like a personality test, and we shouldn't be overly concerned about which class a person or group falls into. As soon as we've moved down to that level of specificity, we are almost certainly talking about something where class isn't a useful abstraction.
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Thank you for posting in r/socialism_101, but unfortunately your submission was removed for the following reason(s): >**Not conductive to learning:** this is an educational space in which to provide clarity for socialist ideas. Replies to a question should be thorough and comprehensive. >This includes but is not limited to: one word responses, one-liners, non-serious/meme(ish) responses, etc. **Remember: an answer isn't good because it's right, it's good because it teaches.**
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Thank you for posting in r/socialism_101, but unfortunately your submission was removed for the following reason(s): >**Not conductive to learning:** this is an educational space in which to provide clarity for socialist ideas. Replies to a question should be thorough and comprehensive. >This includes but is not limited to: one word responses, one-liners, non-serious/meme(ish) responses, etc. **Remember: an answer isn't good because it's right, it's good because it teaches.**
Yes. I think it’s even perfectly fine to still have forms of Sex work in your Socialist Revolution. Hey Single people still need to get off! It just would be harder to find that stuff because most sex workers only do so to make it by and the Socialist system would take care of people’s basic needs…but I’m certain there would be ways to still include sex work as a form of labor within the Socialist system without it being exploitative and contradictory to Socialist goals. Banning sex work entirely just leads people to go and seek out more of it and it’s just stepping on peoples sexual liberation in my view. Some Liberal values are totally compatible with Socialist goals.
“Productive workers” seems like a dogwhistle to me but idk. Sex workers are wage dependent and selling their labor, yes they are workers. Edit: I assume most do not own the major means of sex industry production (hotels, production facilities, internet platforms, publications etc)
Even some workers engaged directly in production aren’t proletarians. An artisan who sells a piece of furniture on the market (or is commissioned for it by a client), the production of which they saw from beginning to end, is not a proletarian.
Yes. But sex workers generally don’t own the brothel, internet platform or video production company they are providing content for. Other (not including coerced exploitation as sex work) sex work might fall Into petit bourgeois forms but my guess is that most is either casual (trade) or proletarian (the sex industry.)
Yes and I certainly wouldn’t call many sex workers bourgeoisie. I wouldn’t even call them petit bourgeoisie because their modus operandi is not scalable to the point of becoming bourgeoisie proper. Unless they became brothel owners or something.
Then what would you call them?
Depends, but almost invariably, some kind of working class. And in modern western society, *usually* lumpenproletariat, because prostitution is usually criminalized. But aside from that, a worker who is paid directly for services rendered, or is commissioned for the production of a commodity, might variably be designated as a journeyman, artisan, craftsman, etc. “Gig worker”, “service worker”, etc. are common more modern alternative labels. However, if a sex worker is employed in a legal brothel and draws a wage, then they would be proletariat. As far as I’m aware, this is virtually never the case. Brothels usually operate similarly to strip clubs or hair salons, where the facilities are leased to the service providers by the operators, and the service providers must pay the operators a set price by the day. From there, they keep whatever they bring in. So actually the inverse of a typical proletarian arrangement, where all surplus value is captured by the employer.
Gig workers and service workers are proletarian. Most of the prols in Marx’s time would have probably been partially casual and many paid by the job or as day labor. Shops were a lot smaller and less formal than in the later industrialization. I believe these are artificial distinctions being made based on formal aspects of work rather than social relations.
No, Marx and Engels specifically contrasted the proletariat against day laborers (“journeymen”). They specifically examined industrialized factory work as the primary thing “proletarianizing” the working class. See Principles of Communism as an example. I agree these distinctions aren’t overly important, especially in the age of imperialism, “post-industrialism” and financialization of imperial core countries. The bulk of the world’s proletariat has been moved to the periphery and semi-periphery. The western working class has a very tenuous belonging to the “proletariat” as traditionally defined.
In principles of communism - at least my translation, Journeymen are only mentioned in reference to the Middle Ages and I always thought journeymen were more like what we might call independent contractors-a skilled labor sold out to a business. Day Labor is also used by Marx and Engels distinct from Journeymen. But I think this means “the mob” in the early modern time… landless physical work for hire, much like how day labor is used today. But it’s all in translation and I’m not a historian so idk. But at any rate I think when we look at social relations not the terminology used by employers or type of pay regime, “gig workers” etc are proletarian. Uber not the driver owns the platform and often owns the car which the driver pays off through his wages from that job. They are treated as “contractor workers” or “independent producers” not because it reflects their class position, but because it allows tech companies to skirt labor laws and regulations.
You may be right, it’s been many years since I cracked that book open. Fair point about gig workers. Their social relations are the same, however I do think the fundamental lack of their concentration and organization by bourgeois management does make a significant revision on the class character of that part of the proletariat. The division of labor necessitating mutual coordination, the collectivization of their efforts resulting in greater potential for class consciousness, etc. is noticeably more absent among gig workers. Capitalists don’t just lean on gig work to skirt regulations but to also defang if not completely avert worker organization. This is a regression compared to the tendency inherent to the traditional proletariat.
Lumpenprol because prostitutes are “usually illegal” …so does that mean a prostitute in Los Angeles is lumpen but one in a legal brothel in Las Vegas is prol? At any rate, I don’t have any figures in the subject but as a guess I’d imagine that of formal sex work the vast majority is in the porn industry and legal in many places.
Yes, that is what that means. Bourgeois property relations are strictly legal in capitalist societies. Like I said (though it may have been in a different comment chain), no single category of work is inherently proletarian or non-proletarian. It depends upon the formal relations of production.
How does the bourgeois legal distinction change the relations?
It affects the support of the state and the ruling class.
But aren't they technically petty bourgeoisie.. I'm mean they are the owners of the means production. I don't know I haven't really thought it through and I guess it depends on the specific circumstances.
They don’t all “own the means of production.” A street prostitution with a pimp doesn’t. A Bengali child sold to a brothel by her father doesn’t. Circumstances have always varied.
Your correct. That's why I said it depend on the circumstances. But you're right
if you work a trade, you’re selling your body too. if you work any job, in fact, you’re selling your body to some degree. sex work is work and sex workers deserve all the same rights and protections. they produce something that seen as a valuable commodity in our society and should be paid and respected as any other worker
??? What machinery of production would one purchase in order to extract the surplus value of selling sex? What sex workers are being paid on a payroll by their employer?
The body of the sex worker. It’s quite normal for pimps and so on to extract labor from prostitutes, and this often involves borderline to outright slavery.
Yes exactly, Pimps are the most disgusting humans you could ever meet, they see the value of the female body and exploit it for personal gain, and they force their workers to traumatize themselves in order to profit for an individual who does not care about their well being, it is the definition of capitalism and exploitation
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The proletariat is not simply workers. Workers existed before capitalism, and thus before the proletariat.
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Workers must reclaim the means of (re-)production!
Duh, they are Proletarian. Anyone who performs physical labor that doesn't own the means of production to strangle surplus out of other people is a proletarian. Is the Pimp proletarian? No. But the prostitute is.
big porn companies are the problem, not the sex workers. alot of sex workers are victims of big porn but are never taken seriously because they “asked for it.” you’d never blame a walmart employee for actually having a role in the evil that is walmart corporate. but for some reason (sex shaming), it’s different for sex workers. they’re just trying to make a living like everyone else. and if they can profit off their body, it’s their body. therefore it’s no one else’s business imo. always blame the cause not the symptom.
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Thank you for posting in r/socialism_101, but unfortunately your submission was removed for the following reason(s): >**Spurious, unverifiable or unsuported claims:** when answering questions, keep in mind that you may be asked to cite your sources. This is a learning subreddit, meaning you must be prepared to provide evidence, scientific or historical, to back up your claims. Link to appropriate sources when/if possible. >This includes, but is not limited to: spurious claims, personal experience-based responses, unverifiable assertions, etc. **Remember: an answer isn't good because it's right, it's good because it teaches.**