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Anuja Agrawal Revisiting The Marxist Approach To Sex Work-with-cover-page-V2
Anuja Agrawal Revisiting The Marxist Approach To Sex Work-with-cover-page-V2
Left Politics in South Asia: Reframing the Agenda, Edited by Ravi Kumar, Published by Aakar Books,
2018
Let ’s go out side: Bodies, prost it ut es, slaves and worker-cit izens
Julia O'Connell Davidson
Tensions bet ween feminist principles and t he demand for prost it ut ion in t he neoliberal age: A crit ical …
Rosa M Senent
9
Revisiting the Marxist Approach to Sex Work
Anuja Agrawal
Introduction
For several decades now, the feminist debate on sex work/
prostitution has been extremely polarized. The main lines of this
division are broadly between liberal and radical feminists. The liberal
feminists focus on prostitution as ‘sex work’ and argue that in its
voluntary form it should be treated as legitimate and hence
decriminalized. Radical feminists, on the other hand, see prostitution
as a gross instance of male domination and sexual violence against
women and hence assert that it needs to be dispensed with. The signs
of this polarization giving way to a common ground are not at all
obvious and there are many further divisions and several complex
alliances within these camps. It is however not the purpose of this
paper to deal with these details of the broader scenario. What I seek
to highlight here is that, not very long ago, feminist positions on
the issue of sex work were categorized into three and not two
groups: liberal, Marxist and radical. But this is no longer the case
as, at some point, the Marxist position seems to have collapsed with
radical feminism and the former is no longer very visible in the
contentious debates on this issue.
This shift can, for instance, be illustrated by looking at two pieces
written by Alison Jaggar, a prominent feminist writer from the US.
Jaggar wrote two papers on prostitution in 1980 and 1997
respectively. While she counted the Marxist approach as one of the
major approaches in her earlier piece, in her second piece, she did
not treat it as one among the ‘contemporary’ approaches and her
Revisiting the Marxist Approach to Sex Work 155
and some were even very dismissive of the same. In her summary
of the Marxist position on prostitution, Jaggar (1980) refers primarily
to the works of Marx and Engels (here I will not recount her
philosophical rendering of this position) and it would seem that there
was very little by way of advance in these positions over almost a
century. However one can also refer to some of the contemporaries
of Marx and Engels such as August Bebel (1879) as well as the
writings of Marxists such as Clara Zetkin, Alexandra Kollontai and
Emma Goldman among others, who all together roughly wrote from
the second half of the nineteenth century almost up to around the
Second World War. This broadening of the field will allow for a
somewhat more general perspective when we are trying to formulate
the elements of what may be considered the classical Marxist
position on prostitution.
One may begin such an exercise by pointing out that there are
numerous strands of ideas about prostitution in this body of work.
In what follows, I shall briefly summarize some of these strands.
In the first place, it is not at all surprising to find that most of these
Marxist and Socialist writers treat prostitution as a part and parcel
of historically changing conditions and not as rooted in or deriving
from nature or biology. It is thus treated as an institution which is
invariably found in class-based societies and hence one which, it is
suggested, would and should cease to exist in a truly communist and
socialist society. Engels (1884) also located prostitution within the
changing context of relations between the sexes, which were seen
as undifferentiated to begin with (group marriage) and subsequently
became differentiated (marriage, hetaerism, prostitution). But such
shifts were also seen as linked to the changing materialist foundation
of society.
It is in this vein that Alexandra Kollontai (1977), who is foremost
among those who dealt with women’s issues in the communist
movement, sought to place prostitution within the historical
materialist framework, however, cursorily. She thus saw it as a ‘legal
complement’ to family relations in the ancient world and as
‘something natural and lawful’ in the middle ages when prostitutes
had guilds and guaranteed the chastity of the daughters of propertied
Revisiting the Marxist Approach to Sex Work 157
citizens thereby serving the interest of this class. But despite its
presence in earlier class-based societies, most writers see prostitution
as assuming unprecedented proportions only in a capitalist society
owing to the exploitative character of this economy (see Bebel 1879;
Goldman 1910; Lenin 1913). For Bebel, for example, ‘prostitution
is fostered by the industrial crises that have become inevitable in
bourgeois society, and [which] to hundreds of thousands of families
mean bitter need and desperate poverty’ (see Bebel 1879). What I
wish to emphasize here is that despite this attempt to place
prostitution within a historical materialist frame of reference, no very
detailed attempt to discern the specific forms taken by prostitution
in these different conditions was forthcoming in this sort of
theorization. The same has been attempted in some of the recent
writings on the subject as we will see in the later part of this paper.
Apart from the above historical outline, a second line of Marxist
ideas on this issue draws attention to the similarities between
prostitution and marriage. In an oft-quoted statement, Engels
distinguished a married woman from a prostitute only in so far as
‘she does not let out her body on piece-work as a wage-worker, but
sells it once and for all into slavery’. Thus if prostitution is an
economic exchange, so is marriage. By drawing attention to the
economic basis of all sexual relations in a bourgeois society, Engels
laid the foundation for a critical understanding of a whole range of
relations in which men and women are implicated in such a society.
This can be treated as a radical insight of Marxist and socialist
literature, although one which is no longer very popular. At present
the similarities and commonalities between marriage and prostitution
are more likely to be provided as a justification for prostitution and
as a reminder of the hypocrisy of the critics of prostitution but not
as a criticism of the institution of marriage itself. Moreover, if we
refer to Trotsky’s writings about the post-revolutionary Soviet Union,
a critical economic interpretation of marriage was increasingly diluted
while the same cannot be said about the stance towards prostitution
(see Trotsky 1937).
A third and most important aspect of Marxist thinking on
prostitution is whether and to what extent it was treated as a form
158 Left Politics in South Asia: Reframing the Agenda
work did become one of the key issues in feminist debates in the
1970s and 80s. Than Dam Truong (1990), a Vietnamse scholar and
Luise White (1990) who did a historical study of prostitution in
colonial Nairobi were among the early attempts which departed from
classical Marxism in casting prostitution as a form of sexual labour.
But the feminist critiques of Marxism predominantly focused on
domestic work and also the unpaid dimension of women’s work,
particularly in terms of the capitalist appropriation of such unpaid
labour. They did not give similar attention to the contexts in which
women did get paid for a host of activities which had however not
always been considered work.
Indeed the greatly increased visibility of paid (as opposed to
unpaid) domestic work both within and across international
boundaries has been accompanied by a visible increase in sex work,
reproductive work, care work and even emotional work. That is to
say, a large array of activities in which mostly women routinely
engaged have increasingly become part of market exchanges (see
Delphy and Leonard 1992, Hochschild 1983; Ehrenreich and
Hochschild 2004, for example). In the meantime, anthropologists and
sociologists have also paid attention to activities such as status work
(Papanek 1979) and kin work (di Leonardo 1987) and in doing so
have also significantly broadened the notion of women’s unpaid
labour. The focus on unpaid labour can considerably complicate the
idea that married women or women engaged in prostitution are
simply ‘labour shirkers’, even though it is not sufficient to grasp the
complexities of issues which emerge in contexts in which the
hitherto unpaid activities enter the domain of paid work. But it is
obvious that understanding of women’s work has greatly expanded
in terms of its paid as well as unpaid aspects owing to both Marxist
and feminist theorizations.
Here one can suggest that sex work was one of the earliest to
enter the domain of paid labour although it now belongs to a large
and heterogeneous category of what may be seen as gendered
reproductive and care work which includes domestic work, surrogacy,
child care and elderly care, emotional work, etc.2 Although each of
these have their own distinctive features and carry vastly variable
Revisiting the Marxist Approach to Sex Work 161
also draw on the insights of others who have written on sex work
in India in doing so.
I suggest that van der Veen’s approach draws our attention to
the specificity of what we may call, following Marxist vocabulary,
relations of sex work as a subset of the overarching relations of
production in a society. Although the distinction between slavery,
feudal and capitalist forms may be too close to the Marxist stages
of historical materialism, and there may well be scope for a further
elaboration and refinement of these categories, it serves as a useful
way of distinguishing different conditions in which sex work occurs
or rather it provides us a framework to examine the different modes
of profiting via trading in sexual services.
Thus for instance van der Veen argues that ‘if the prostitute is
kidnapped or sold and becomes the property of another (an agent,
pimp, madame, or trafficker) for an extended period of time, the
relationship could be characterized as one of slavery. The slave owner
may have the prostitute work in a slave class process in which the
slave owner sets the terms of the work, appropriates and distributes
all of the surplus labor, and spends an amount just large enough
to cover the slave’s subsistence’ (2000: 126).
It may be possible to suggest that instances which would
exemplify such a form of prostitution abound all over the world as
well as South Asia. We frequently come across stories of abject
servitude and conditions of slavery in the sex trade as also in many
other trades. However, liberal feminist critics argue that it is such
a picture of prostitution which over-determines our understanding
of the trade and also characterize certain political positions such as
radical feminism who have persistently used the idea of ‘sexual
slavery’ as the paradigm to characterize the relations of sex work
(See Barry 1979, for instance). Some of the state discourses on
prostitution are also framed within this model of prostitution. The
change in the legal definition of prostitution in India from the earlier
one in the Suppression of Immoral Traffic Act 1956 (SITA) which
defined it as ‘the act of a female offering her body for promiscuous
sexual intercourse...whether in money or in kind’ to the later one
in the Immoral Traffic Prevention Act 1986 (ITPA) which saw it as
Revisiting the Marxist Approach to Sex Work 163
less than ten per cent of what they earned and even police, pimps
and the ‘goonda’ were paid more (ibid.: 560). Earlier studies of
women of the low-caste Kolta community of the Jaunsar Bawar
region of Uttarakhand working in brothels of Delhi have also shown
that debt bondage led many women into the sex trade. In fact this
is one of the few instances we know of in which the married women
are engaged in prostitution with the complicity of their husbands.
The reasons suggested for the prostitution of the Kolta women is
the debt which the men incur in the process of acquiring wives in
order to relieve themselves from which they send their young wives
into urban brothels (see Mukherjee and Mukherjee 1982: 3; Gupta
1984; Gupta 1990). In such cases, though debt bondage may be the
initial impetus behind entry into sex work, the sex worker may not
be indebted to the brothel owner. Gupta (1990) has noted the use
of feudal idioms among the Koltas whose women are sent to
brothels under conditions referred to as batai, a clear analogy with
sharecropping. Such systems of income sharing are also described
in the ISS study which describes the ‘Adhiya’ or half share system
in which the women give half their earnings to the brothel owner.6
It is very hard to decide which category such relations of sex
work should be put in and perhaps it might be more suitable to
categorize some of these as a form of slavery. The last two seem
different from Chukri and the example from the Mumbai brothel
which are characterized either by complete or partial bondage to a
brothel owner. The conflation of slavery and debt bondage may in
many contexts arise due to such conditions. The adhiya and the batai
however seem more akin to a feudal system of income sharing. There
is thus a strong case to be made for distinguishing adhiya and batai
from chukri and the latter may be treated as akin to slavery as defined
above. Here it may be pointed out that both chukri and adhiya may
be operating within the same brothel. Indeed yet other systems which
are more akin to a capitalist form may also coexist here as will be
discussed below.
Furthermore, I would also argue that the category of feudal
relations should be applied where the relation with the brothel owner
cannot be severed easily. Otherwise it may not be very different from
166 Left Politics in South Asia: Reframing the Agenda
the means of sex work, in this view, would be prior to control over
one’s sexuality. In this sense we could suggest that the independent
sex worker could very well be a part of a capitalist system or any
other society even though she has to be someone poised at a
somewhat advantageous position within the system in which she
commands a control over the means of her work. Moreover, there
could be degrees of independence and lack of independence that
is available to a sex worker, comparable to other categories of
workers in a society.
In a broader sense, it may even be possible to argue that in the
very first instance, the differential access to property brings forth
a set of people for whom there is nothing to sell except their sexual labour,
to use a Marxist phraseology. However, even if we do not wish to
reduce all sex work as an outcome of such destitution, the above
discussion would lead us to expect that a capitalist society is bound
to offer very differential possibilities of deriving an income from
prostitution and the ability to derive substantial income from
prostitution would rest on either a sex worker having a very
economically privileged position within the existing social order
which enables her to directly own and control the means of sex work
or of being one who is in control of such means and therefore only
needs to somehow get hold of the workers themselves to realize
the actual use of the means of sex work.
It is true that women in prostitution do sometimes seem to
graduate from ‘working’ women to owners and controllers of means
of sex work. The NGO Sangram even suggests referring to ‘women
in prostitution and sex work’ as ‘business women’. However, there
is no data which would allow us to see this as a regular and even
common occurrence. It is obvious that in either case the property
relations are critical to the workings of the trade.
Concluding Remarks
On the whole the argument which is being put forward here is that
in order to make sense of the varieties of conditions under which
sex work occurs, it is critical to take into consideration the nature
of control that is exercised over the means of prostitution and then
assess how the same are deployed in the derivation of income from
Revisiting the Marxist Approach to Sex Work 171