juchebot88

This is a valid perspective, and I appreciate you bringing it up, and also the fact that you do not want to argue. But you must realize that -- and let me repeat, the orthodox Marxist position is not, and never has been, against sex workers -- the form of sex work which exists under socialism would be so different from sex work under capitalism as to virtually be an entirely different industry. Indeed, I have a hard time seeing how it could come about under anything but the final stage of communism, where money and class distinctions have been entirely done away with, and labor becomes, in Marx's words, "life's prime want." I recognize, however, that material reality is greater than I am, and perhaps there is a way to square the circle. Though the fact that nearly all, if not all, AES countries are opposed to the sex industry makes me somewhat dubious.

Most people do enjoy giving someone an orgasm, and getting to know their body. It is a valuable part of the human experience. But to be a industry, a non-exploitative industry anyway, it would have to be something like art, or (as you've mentioned) therapy. And neither of these can be the backbone of an economy, since real wealth comes from production. Socialist countries obviously have their artists, like David Oistrakh and the great pianist Yudina; and of course they also have therapists. But they are always a minority, even if what they do benefits many people. This is against the tendency of the sex industry in the in the west, which capital is now pushing into aggressive expansion.

individual women should be making decisions about it and protected by law or like, safe houses, whereas any pimping is imprisonable

I don't think you will find any serious communist who really disagrees with this.

Sorry for the ramble

No worries at all, I thought it was coherent and well-thought out.

just felt like a bad leftist for doing this kind of work

There is absolutely no reason you should be feeling that, and if my post gave off that tone, I apologize. I do admit to having, based on some things I have seen and the experiences of certain acquaintances, a burning hatred of pimps and johns, and I probably express this immoderately at times.

disgusting that bigoted prudes like JucheBot1988

I repent, and denounce the other disgusting bigoted prudes who have wormed their way into the socialist movement! Prudes like

• Xi Jinping
• Kim Jong-Un
• Josif Stalin
• Mao Zedong
• Kim Il-Sung
• Kim Jong-Il

and so on. It is true that most of the leaders on this list have built their countries into economic powerhouses with full worker control, and one of them (Xi Jinping) leads the country that is the economic engine of the entire world. But that nothing, I suppose, compared to what western Marxists have achieved sitting in the comfort of their easy chair. All hail comrade Dirt_Possum, who leads the glorious People's Republic of the West^TM^! (Free Taiwan and Slava Ukraini, and let's put up yet another version of the map showing China as "East Turkmenistan").

And like any other form of work, there is nothing inherently exploitative about sex work itself, but again, only how it operates under the capitalist mode.

While can make an argument this is true, it is at this point in time extremely academic, since the sex trade is not in any sense necessary, and it is hyper-exploitative. Generally the only people I hear making it are out-of-touch liberal college professors, and johns who want to justify their buying of sex: "dude, when I'm paying this homeless transwoman trump change for a bj, I'm really no different from a regular small business owner! It's capitalism, baby, not me! Rad!"

They have some weird fucking issues

And yet you were the one who felt the need to derail a thread about electoralism into a conversation about sex. Nice work, Mr. Freud.

You seem to be arguing in good faith, so I'll provide I detailed breakdown.

I do disagree with the idea that women’s “sexual purity” is something to be owned and protected by men.

I hear this language from a lot of leftists who are pro-sex work, and it always seems to me a little nebulous. There are societies where men "owning and protecting a woman's sexual purity" means something; they are generally pre-industrial societies, or societies ruled by a religious authority, not modern western societies. There is certainly sexism in the modern west, but it expresses itself in a different form: often as women experiencing social pressure to become, as it were, common sexual property. The women who give in are then shamed for not being the ideal autonomous individual of liberalism. This, not religion or any leftovers of religion, is the real root of the modern phenomena of "slut-shaming."

I am suspicious for this reason even of things like OnlyFans. While they provide some agency for sex workers, and some modicum of protection, their long term tendency or goal seems to be turning women into luxury commodities for the wealthy. This is not liberation.

Please note also that, when I spoke of workers' concern that their "wife, girlfriend, mother, sister" fall into the clutches of a predatory industry, I spoke also of the workers concern for themselves -- i.e., I was including female workers. Furthermore, there is nothing inherently patriarchal about a straight male worker being concerned that a female worker is being sexually exploited. It is class solidarity, though it may be expressed in terms that we as Marxists should strictly speaking disagree with -- most workers have not gone to college, and do not know the latest trendy lingo.

You can very easily find “real workers” and “real Marxists” whose hatred of “prostitution and pornography” specifically manifests as a hatred of women that have sex outside of a heterosexual monogamous relationship for the purpose of procreation.

In Marxists, this is the result of bad education; in workers, it is false consciousness. (Though in my experience, the number of Marxists who hold such views is minimal, and dwarfed by the brocialists whose idea of women's liberation is "shut up and suck my dick while I talk to Tyler over here about Trotsky"). But this false consciousness is not totally at odds with reality, in that it reflects, as if in a distorting mirror, certain mechanisms of capitalist oppression. Abortion in capitalist societies is often a tool of eugenics. Western governments often "pinkwash" austerity policies, thus throwing queer people under the bus, but also deliberately presenting to workers the LGBTQ+ movement as something opposed to their interests. And so on.

Just as it wouldn’t be fair of me to assume the worst of you, I don’t think it’s fair of you to assume that anyone sensitive to language that most often precedes a call for more police are straight men that want a Revolutionary People’s Prostitution office.

This is fair criticism, though I have run into a whole lot of pro-prostitution brocialists in real life.

We're talking about American presidents, remember, so the bar is pretty low.

former option: more effective

latter option: way, way more fun

Not a bad response, except you had to throw in some western liberal garbage about SWERFS and SWERFiness. Opposition to the sex trade is the standard line of every Marxist-Leninist country; perhaps anarchists have a different perspective, but since their most successful revolutionary efforts to date have been CHAZ and that one commune in Catalonia that lasted all of two weeks, we can safely disregard their opinion as irrelevant. We Marxists support sex workers, in that we see them as hyper-exploited by capitalism and wish to remove their exploitation. We do not support sex work as such. We aim to do for sex workers what the CPC has done: namely, give them jobs and vocational training, and extend to them the opportunity for a dignified, human life. Orgasms do not increase the productive forces.

The disingenuousness of the liberal defense of sex work lies in the fact that the average woman involved in the trade is not a middle-class kinkster selling videos on OnlyFans. The average sex worker is much more likely to have been trafficked, to have been raped, and if she has actually taken up prostitution of her own free will, to have done so because she had (or felt she had) no other options. Working-class people know the reality of the sex trade, that it is an ugly, horrible thing. I challenge you to defend prostitution to the typical worker. You will not get very far. Liberals know this, which is why they don't even try; rather, they are content to smugly call the average worker "patriarchal," "sexist," "traitor to women," and so on, when all that worker wants is not to be trafficked, or to keep their wife, girlfriend, mother, sister, friend, out of the clutches of a predatory industry.

But seriously, I thought we had left this debate behind on reddit? Fix your attitude toward women, and get a girlfriend, ya horny losers.

"For the past fifty years we've been relentlessly pushing the Democrats left, and now with Joe Biden we have the most progressive administration in US history" (shuts ears and proceeds to ignore FDR, who whatever his faults at least didn't arm Nazis).

'Tis the season, as they say.

This is quality shitposting.

Kind of like Partisan Review, the Trotskyite magazine that was covertly funded by the CIA. (Susan Sontag's horrendous essays on fascism, that basically argue physical fitness + people working together = literally Hitler, were published there). The US government and ruling class has its finger in a lot of the so-called independent media.

I haven't read NK News in a few years, but my sense is it's a western-funded outlet. Basically aligned with US government interests, but tries to be more "academic" and less sensational than, say, Yeonmi Park on any given day. They ran an article once about how some of the more egregious errors in western reporting on the DPRK stem from gross mistranslations of Korean. That should tell you the stance they take: "north Korea is bad, but we need to be professional and avoid needless fearmongering, otherwise people might stop taking American policy re. the Korean peninsula seriously."

Either fearmongering, or (never discount this possibility) Americans just being weird.