The controversy surrounding prostitution continues to polarize strongly. On November 12, different deputies, university professors, writers, journalists or thinkers such as Silvia Federici or Justa Montero launched a manifesto demanding the withdrawal of the complaint against the self-proclaimed "Union" of prostitutes, OTRAS, giving fuel to the campaign to try to present sexual exploitation as a work activity as valid as any other.
Statements such as those of Federici in an interview with the digital newspaper ctxt: “Sex for women has always been a job”, have highlighted two models of feminism that ideologically confront each other in an irreconcilable way: on one side those who try, covering themselves with “feminist” rhetoric, presenting sexual and reproductive slavery as a natural, unquestionable and legitimate way of life for women; On the other side, those of us, from a feminist, class and anti-capitalist position, challenge prostitution as a patriarchal, classist institution and a criminal macro-business that obtains multimillion-dollar profits by taking away poor women's right to control over their bodies and sexuality to turn them into one more commodity with free access, enjoyment and ownership of everyone who can buy it.
Defend the rights of oppressed women or the interests of pimps?
That the debate around prostitution is covered by a supposed defence of the labour rights of women who are prostituted is no coincidence. The objective of focusing the controversy on whether or not prostitutes have the right to unionize is a way of falsifying the debate among public opinion in order to hide the true underlying interests. The legalization of the OTRAS “union” would mean introducing through the back door that the pimp mafia would become legally recognized as employers and its criminal businesses, as legal business activity. In short, de facto legalize prostitution, grant pimping social legitimacy under the cover of defending the rights of prostituted women and convert the supposed union into an organization that covers the relationship between traffickers of women and the apparatus of the State. This is a strategy that criminal networks in the sex industry have already carried out in other parts of the world.
The International Union of Sex Workers (IUSW), founded in 2000 in the United Kingdom, has only 150 members worldwide. The most active member of the IUSW is Douglas Fox, owner of one of the largest prostitution “agencies” in England. It is no coincidence that the IUSW has not filed a complaint with the industry or asked the British Home Office to withdraw a campaign against human trafficking (1). In Germany the Berufsverbands erotische und sexuelle Dienstleistungen (BSD) claims to be an association of professionals that defends the inclusion of the industry within the prostitutes' unions themselves. So much so that one of its founders, Holger Rettig, is the president of the “business group” of brothels. Like Undine de Rivière and Tanja Sommer, two leaders of the organization who are also brothel owners. It is not surprising that this group works hand in hand with employers when developing legislative modifications regarding prostitution, declaring themselves against the mandatory nature of medical tests or the use of condoms (2).
This ideological rearmament of the pimp lobby that has the collaboration of transversal feminism is what explains why behind an alleged union of prostitutes like OTRAS, there are Concha Borrell and Joaquín P. Donaire, owners of Aprosex, an organization-company dedicated to recruiting and training of prostitutes. It is a campaign promoted by the powerful sex business with close ties to the media and other influential sectors, which try to create a climate favourable to prostitution at a time when there are many economic interests at stake.
The sexual exploitation of women is not progressive, nor feminist, nor left-wing
The Spanish State is already among the top 10 sexual tourism destinations in the world, only behind Thailand and Brazil. In fact, on the border with France is the largest brothel in Europe; the clubs of La Jonquera. And, according to police sources, throughout the State there are more than 1,700 hostess clubs that move 5 million euros a day and in which between 400,000 and 600,000 women brought from Romania, Bulgaria, Nigeria or the Dominican Republic are trapped. How can a business of such calibre go unnoticed by the treasury, police and judges? For the sole reason that those who end up benefiting from this economic framework are big businessmen from other influential businesses with connections in the high spheres of politics, the judiciary and the police. That is why legalizing prostitution would be the necessary step for the expansion of the pimp mafia's business, thus getting rid of some obstacles to increase its profits and, above all, to launder its relationship with other economic and financial sectors. The open and legal offer of mega-brothels as part of the low-cost mass tourism that populates the country's coasts, where women are offered in a showcase display or served à la carte as another product to be consumed for a modest price, are images of barbarism that already exist where prostitution is legalized like Germany or Nevada (USA). That is the scenario that the pimp mafias that operate in the Spanish State have wanted to achieve for a long time. It is not possible to decontextualize prostitution from this reality on which the lucrative business of sexual exploitation is built.
The clubs where women become a bargaining chip to close big deals between powerful lords – as witnessed by the conversation between former Commissioner Villarejo and the Minister of Justice – or the promotion, without control, of all types of sexual harassment such as “services”, following the example of the German model, are the only possible face of prostitution. Contrary to what the defenders of regulation want us to think, prostitution is not an individual experience, but rather an institution converted into a business that reproduces and is maintained on social relations of oppression and domination. It is impossible to talk about freedom or consent when a relationship of extreme inequality is established between those who have the power to buy and those who must submit after selling themselves. It is impossible to rid prostitution of misogyny, the stigma against women and their objectification because they are an integral part of the business: making men believe that they have the right to have any woman in exchange for a couple of coins. Or what is perhaps what you are looking for when you pay for sex but to impose with money what has not been achieved with consent? Indeed, what whoremongers buy is the other party's lack of freedom to decide.
In the midst of this whole situation, where are the rights and the supposed dignity that they claim to defend for prostitutes? To maintain that legalization would provide protection for prostituted women is to disguise the very nature of extreme violence and usurpation of rights that prostitution exercises against women by reducing them into an object of use and abuse. Are the same judiciary and laws that forgive traffickers and brothel owners as in the Carioca Case, going to defend prostituted women? And in the world of prostitution, the only rights that always prevail above any consideration are those of pimps to traffic women and that of whoremongers to consume them. The overwhelming idea that trafficking and prostitution are not the same, it is an abstraction very far from reality. They are two sides of the same coin. It is not possible to maintain the demand required by the volume of profits from this entire multi-million dollar business, without networks of traffickers who, through economic coercion and in the face of a galloping increase in the feminization of poverty – 75% of the poor in the world are girls and women - export and import contingents of women in bulk from impoverished countries as if it were any other raw material. 80% of the women who practice prostitution in the Spanish State are immigrants. Legalization would only turn trafficking into publicly traded transnational job placement corporations, as is already the case in Australia.
Legalization or abolitionism: reformism or revolution
That from the ranks of the bourgeoisie it is defended that sexual relations are just another field for predation and obtaining benefits, responds to their vision of the world. For the ruling class, the majority of humanity deserves no more consideration than that of raw material from which to extract profit. However, when these same arguments find a speaker from certain sectors of "feminism" and the "left", - as when Federici states: "it is the same exploitation to sell the brain as the body" or "that it is not up to feminism to establish hierarchies between the exploitation that we may or may not accept”, or when prostitutes who have to sell their bodies are compared to waitresses who depend on tips to achieve the income to make ends meet - we find ourselves facing one of the most degrading expressions of their ideological defeat against the logic of the system. Surely from the university office one theorizes from a friendlier “perspective” than from a road club or a dark roundabout.
Of course, in this society there are hierarchies in wage exploitation. Just as you don't make the same living working as a university professor and giving international conferences as cleaning floors for 400 euros; Nor is selling your workforce to cover a social need the same as nullifying your sexual will in order to hand over your body daily to a group of strangers so that they can penetrate you orally, vaginally and anally as many times as they want. Defending, as Federici so cheerfully does, that since we live under capitalism it is not up to us to set limits on what is or is not acceptable to be an object of exploitation, is nothing more than an abstraction that grants total resignation to what this system does with our lives what it wants. So, do we also have to accept child exploitation or the sale of organs? How is it possible to defend the emancipation of society if one of its most oppressive institutions is given a normal status? Because ultimately, the recognition of “sex work,” trying to humanize a scourge like prostitution, is nothing more than one of the expressions of having been assimilated to the idea that there is no other possible society beyond what the capitalist system offers to us, something that we, from Free and Combative, deny and combat emphatically.
We fight to emancipate ourselves from all oppression and exploitation.
As revolutionaries who aspire to transform this classist, sexist and racist society, we consequently fight to free ourselves from all the ways in which this society tries to assimilate us to the worst of the system. That is why we fight the scourge of prostitution in all its forms. Those of us who hold an abolitionist position do not deny the rights of prostitutes. On the contrary, what we defend is to have the greatest of rights guaranteed. The same right, that this system tramples on a daily basis with its austerity, cuts and privatization, the right to a full, dignified life. First of all, we demand the immediate withdrawal of all municipal ordinances that persecute and marginalize victims. But any social measure in defence of prostituted women requires changing the social conditions on which prostitution arises. The persistence of this form of modern slavery is no accident nor a product of the rotten morals of isolated individuals. It is a reality that hits millions of women around the world for the simple reason that capitalism needs, and more so at this time, to find increasingly lucrative fields of investment.
The crisis that runs through this system, where the majority of circulating capital is speculative and is not invested in the real economy because it is preferable to dedicate it to other more profitable areas, is the cause that causes the increase in mafias, the illicit economy and its relationship with legal businesses. As long as there are millions of women so poor and dispossessed of rights that they are forced to sell themselves and as long as there are people with so much power to be able to put them into circulation as if they were merchandise, prostitution will continue to exist. The only way to guarantee the rights and dignify the living conditions of prostitutes, to remove them from the situation of extreme risk that they live in and their situation of vulnerability to sexist violence or extortion, is to ensure that their material conditions allow them to economic independence that makes it possible that they do not depend on anything or anyone, that makes it possible that they do not have to sell their body to survive and that they do not have to remain silent or endure anything against their will.
Abolitionism is not an idealistic or abstract demand; it is fighting for the genuine independence and freedom of women. This is specifically fighting for prostitutes to have indefinite unemployment benefits until they find work (and thus they would not have to prostitute themselves), universal and free access to healthcare and education, access to housing and of course the repeal of the Immigration Law and the end deportations so that all migrants have their rights recognized. It is also to fight for persecution, exemplary punishment and the expropriation of the pimps' assets to put it at the service of the victims and their families. It means being implacable in the face of those who make a business of trafficking and the suffering of human beings and their accomplices in police forces, courts and governments. Of course, defending this alternative requires a confrontation with the entire capitalist system. The fight against the barbarism and oppression generated by business and the mega industry of sexual slavery is totally linked to the fight for the liberation of all oppressed women. Achieving this liberation is only possible by defending a program that ends the capitalist system and fighting to build a socialist society.
(1) “Thousands of sex workers could be endangered by home secretary's proposed changes in the law” International Union Sex Workers. Np, 2009 Retrieved September 13, 2018 from: https://www.iusw.org/2009/03/thousands-of-sex-workers-could-be-endangered-by-home-secretarys-proposed-changes- in-the-law/
(2) Muller, A. “Der Spiegel revealed. “Dubious associations of sex workers and brothel owners fight together.” Translators for the abolition of prostitution Muller, Np, 2017
