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:
Books to check out:
"I want liberation from work. There’s nothing revolutionary about this idea and I’m sick and tired of them getting Marxists philosophers who are bigots against sex workers and see us as different and as a problem that has to be “fixed”.
Quoting those people to justify their bigotry… like yeah you know what? You’re right, I didn’t go to college, I didn’t fucking read Karl Marx. I don’t read these academic Marxist people because honestly I don’t give a fuck. I’m a fucking worker, I’m a fucking sex worker, and I don’t need to read their bullshit. Period. End of story. I don’t care.
It’s so weird that [these marxists are] so ignorant that they’ll literally quote them and then make fun of me because I don’t know their names and I don’t know what the fuck they write and I don’t care about what they do.
They’re fucking dead. I’m the fucking worker right now and I’m telling you what I need and I’m telling you to shut up about these issues because they’re not your issues. They are my life, it’s my livelihood. I should be the one leading this revolution.
It should be about the workers not about what some dumbass person who read Marxist theory thinks about my industry and my livelihood, like fuck you, you don’t know what I want.
I should be the one deciding what’s liberating and empowering for me."
“I didn’t fucking read Karl Marx. I don’t read these academic Marxist people because honestly I don’t give a fuck. I’m a fucking worker… I should be the one leading this revolution.”
this ‘apolitical insurrectionary’ attitude is a great way to accomplish exactly 3 things:
- Getting shot by the state
- Infighting over goals and methods
- Getting co-oped by someone who did read “bullshit” political theory
am I supposed to praise someone for being willfully ignorant? what is this anti-intellectualism crap? sure every dumbass on twitter can pretend to be the next Karl Kautsky and spew shit takes all day but pretending that Marxists theorists have no relevance because “they’re fucking dead” is just wrong. We read the old fucks because they have experience with confronting capitalism and identifying the structures that are used to hold us within it, so that we can better destroy them. One of the biggest lessons is that the communist revolution is going to consist of much more organizing than shooting. This blind insurrectionary attitude was tried by every group of pissed off peasants in the middle ages and all of them failed, and we’ve seen “pro-worker” movements in recent times be co-oped to serve capitalist causes, like Solidarity in Poland.
listen she has a right to be angry at every twitter dipshit who uses some random quote from the 18th century to justify their hot take about “the females.” But going into a room full of communists shouting “fuck Karl Marx!” is just provocative, if someone did that in real life everyone would think they were a cop. being a self proclaimed leftist and doing that is just begging to get people fighting, which it seems to have done so pretty well.
I absolutely love this whole quote. reminds me of when leftist swerfs try to point at Kollontai as a figure to read in this regard, as if her writings weren’t highly tailored to the revolutionary moment in the nascent Soviet Union and those material conditions.
Yes! Similarly, pointing to Marx’s opinion on sex work as though he is the final word is also equally bullshit because Marxism has moved past Marx as its sole source.
Perfect example of this is the Lumpenproletariat being valued and respected by Black Marxists. Saw your comment on that earlier today:
one overview w quote https://www.hamptonthink.org/read/an-ideal-blueprint-the-original-black-panther-party-model-and-why-it-should-be-duplicated?rq=lumpenproletariat
Over the years, Marx’s assessment and discarding of the “lumpenproletariat” - a population that he described as “members of the working-class outside of the wage-labor system who gain their livelihoods through crime and other aspects of the underground economy such as prostitutes, thieves, drug dealers, and gamblers” - had been accepted by many on the Left. However, the BPP’s familiarity with Zedong and Guevara led them away from this commonly accepted notion, and their philosophy paralleled that of Frantz Fanon, who in his ongoing analysis of neocolonialism, deemed the lumpen to be “one of the most spontaneous and the most radically revolutionary forces of a colonized people.”
yessssss!! absolutely! to quote fanon on marx:
When you examine at close quarters the colonial context, it is evident that what parcels out the world is to begin with the fact of belonging to or not belonging to a given race, a given species. In the colonies the economic substructure is also a superstructure. The cause is the consequence; you are rich because you are white, yon are white because you are rich. This is why Marxist analysis should always be slightly stretched every time we have to do with the colonial problem.
We as leftists can’t just take marx at face value, the material world marx observed is not the exact same material world we currently live under, and we need to adjust our analysis and internalize the lessons of the revolutionary struggles from the past century
