Edit:
Here is a list of resources to learn about sex worker from actual sex workers who are engaged in the struggle for worker's rights:
- https://www.nswp.org/resources/types/nswp-briefing-papers-248
- https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/beyond-trafficking-and-slavery/white-mans-burden-revisited/
- https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/beyond-trafficking-and-slavery/from-brothel-to-sweatshop-questions-on-labour-trafficking-in-camb/
- https://titsandsass.com/the-massage-parlor-means-survival-here-red-canary-song-on-robert-kraft/
- https://medium.com/purplerose0666/the-af3irm-agenda-b5ec31216904
- https://medium.com/@katezenjoy/dear-esperanza-5aa7db4d501a
- https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/beyond-trafficking-and-slavery/decriminalising-sex-work-in-new-zealand-its-history-and-impact/
- https://www.mayamorena.com/anti-equality-model-campaign/2021/5/22/pscegcnr680fh4oazlmwe8i5527o9j
Bigger repo of theory / resources:
- https://docs.google.com/document/d/1oWxx3yodCJJGxTmqgCeB6csVAeRkllSQq_VUe78MJA4/view
Books to check out:
- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36224357-sex-lies-statistics
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Sex work will very likely exist under communism to the same extent any other work will.
Sex work will not exist under communism as work will not exist under communism. Sex work becomes merely sex.
Are we talking about a post-scarcity economy? In that scenario, I'll leave it to the material conditions and struggle, otherwise it feels really prescriptive imo
Present society is already post-scarcity, it's just that it's not distributed equally.
That's a fun concept and likely more true than not. Do you have any writing on that I could look at?
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Right, I've read that, but thanks. I was specifically talking about the statement that we've reached a point where we've developed productive forces enough we can fully automate things.
"Fully automate" is a bit of a tricky term.
We clearly have not, and it probably wouldn't be a good thing to, reach the point where all production happened without any human labour, oversight or direction.
One of Marx's core points, and a core tenet of Marxist Communism, is that productive forces had and have developed past the point we needed them to to fulfill all of humanities needs and most of our wants, and despite that, under bourgeois direction not only were increasing numbers of people suffering in abject poverty, productive forces were continuously being developed further, and workers made to labour at them longer and harder but turned only to wasteful overproduction that benefited humanity not at all. Even the bourgeois, taken as a whole making were less and less profit as they unswervingly spent the increasingly developed productive forces racing each other to the bottom. These were Marx's twin "crises of capitalism".
The concepts are developed throughout Capital, and almost all Marxist writers deal with it in some way. Anything involving "the tendency of the rate of profit to fall", "crisis theory" or "developing productive forces" is based on Marx's theories on automation, it's possibilities (the term post scarcity actually came from people talking about Marx's ideas) and the corrupt waste it was instead being turned to under bourgeois direction.
If it's something you can do, Capital is well worth reading. It was the seminal text on overproduction and even if following works don't agree with it they'll at be coming from a place of correcting or expanding on what is outlined in Capital. If 19th century German economics textbooks aren't really your cup of tea, the term you want to google to find out more is "crisis of overproduction".
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State issued gamer gf vibes
I think I take issue here that sex work isn't "necessary labor." Sex work predates pretty much all other forms of labor, which implies to my mind that it's far more necessary than other jobs.
Not as long as seeking or building shelter, finding and preparing food, tending to the sick or injured, making clothes, keeping watch at night for dangerous critters. Y'know necessary labor
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Aww shucks
Which is why we need to be pushing for housing for everyone which is way easier to market to the public and way more effective for treating other problems. If people can't become homeless that's like the most vulnerable people solved right there. It also doesn't require we use liberal rhetoric to justify current wage labour.
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Art is literally more important than agriculture. There are plenty of societies on Earth that have existed and will exist without agriculture. There's not a single instance of any human society existing without art. I think you could probably lump sex work in there as well.
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Ah got it. Yeah did not mean to be so nitpicky! Regardless though I understand what you're saying in that if art stopped like tomorrow society doesn't immediately collapse, but I think in the long run no art definitely leads to societal collapse. And I think the same could be said of sex work.
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Also yeah there were state mandated artists in the USSR. State funds were poured into things like books, art, movies, etc. Proletkult was a massive, state funded artists collective that tried all sorts of experimental art projects.
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We're comrades here, it's assumed. :stalin-heart:
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i'm being a both-sides baby speaking out loud sry