Attempting to discuss the opposition to prostitution as a Marxist-Leninist with “sex-positive” socialists results, more often than not, in baseless and preconceived accusations of moral puritanism from these against us. This speech from Kollontai however proves that this is far from the case, and that there is a solid base and defense supporting a Marxist position against prostitution in a society where labor has triumphed over capital. To this day I have found no sex-positive socialist able to refute the arguments that Kollontai presents here, more often than not finding instead an absurd attempt to expand the concept of unproductive labor exposed in this speech to professional athletes, actors and actresses, painters and so on, finally rendering any discussion useless and in a stalemate, or in other occasions, simply sticking to their guns on the concept that in a socialist society everyone must be able to do as they please in their life as if we were anarchists and as if socialism was not about the good of the many above the will of the individual.

Despite this, and despite the fact that most of the pillars presented in this speech still stand strong, the text is old, and it shows. Most of the reasons given by Kollontai against prostitution in the worker’s republic – mainly its classification as unproductive labor and as a form of labor desertion equal to the one of the stay-at-home wife on one hand and the incompatibility with socialist values that deem men and women equal due to the inherent inequality that supposes that one can simply buy the other one’s body on the other – still stand to this day, but when we move to the aspect of public health you can already see that Kollontai lives in a time and place where medical science still has a long way to go until our days, and while it is true that prostitution to this day still supposes a severe source of venereal diseases, bringing up eugenics in a good light as a tool to promote public health is now rightfully seen as unacceptable. While not pertaining to this text, the backwardness of the medical science at the time and the support that Kollontai gives to it (and that we can easily condemn in the current age in retrospection) can be seen better in other texts by her such as “Theses on Communist Morality in the Sphere of Marital Relations” or others that I hope we can analyze soon. Moreover and probably most importantly, the antiquity of the text can be seen by the way in which Kollontai explains the form that prostitution takes in the bourgeois societies of her era and the behaviours around it in comparison to our days in which prostitution, once condemned by the bourgeois morality as she explains, has now instead become a gigantic industry embraced by such and even promoted as a tool of women’s liberation, once capitalism has expanded to all fields where there is a profit to find.

In conclusion, and while most of the text still stands strong, I think we would greatly benefit from seeing it be revisited and updated by another author that can take the torch from her in order to both include a study of the effects of prostitution on public health through the lenses of modern science as well as a study of the new forms that prostitution has taken in the 103 years that have passed since Kollontai pronounced these words.

This is important and needs to be discussed currently

Prostitution is terrible because it is an act of violence by the woman upon herself in the name of material gain. Prostitution is I naked act of material calculation which leaves no room for considerations of love and passion. Where passion and attraction begin, prostitution ends. Under communism, prostitution and the contemporary family will disappear. Healthy, joyful and free relationships between the sexes will develop.

Really powerful.

The text itself as someone else suggested is dated, we could really use an update that engages with the 21st century updates and problems, shifts in the way this problem exists in our era (in particular I think the level and normalcy of degradation being expected in this line of work is noteworthy as is the increasingly alienated versions of this using electronic mediums such as webcams and the internet). I’d suggest that most of the pro-prostitution western left are not interested in being moved by texts like this due to their interests however. Many of them see the liberal idea of sexual liberation as a treat, a nice thing they want, they enjoy and they wish to defend it and keep this liberalism alongside their leftism.

They fall into I think three camps:

1. Men and perhaps some amount of bi and lesbian women, and others who patronize sex work in some way or form or seek to do so in future, enjoy it as an option the “right” to buy a woman’s favors and have ready access to such a supply of women. These include those who delude themselves into thinking that paying a sex worker for her trade is a form of solidarity.
2. Those falsely convinced of the correctness of liberal feminism, liberal notions of sexual liberation under capitalism (much like liberal notions of girl-bosses being liberation and advancement of women’s rights but which are only a perpetuation and furthering of capitalism)
3. The group themselves of prostitutes and sex workers, of which in some amount exist a kind of labor aristocracy which has changed in nature from Kollontai’s day (the parallel with the privately kept woman of domesticity is of course there and all the more appropriate when one considers the kept mistresses of the bourgeoisie kept in splendor) to one of shared rented women who like successful music artists may break out of the pack into wealth. Your pink-haired, anime-sex-face only-fans super-earners who pull in anywhere from several hundred thousand to millions of dollars a year and those who do not fit that group but aspire to, but believe they too can be part of it (or else believe like good indoctrinated proles might believe that those earning such money as CEOs and billionaires deserve it and they believe they are better than them and are ‘happy’ for them) and so like the member of the proletariat who favors the interests of small business owners of petite bourgeoisie because they too hope to be one in future and believe as such those interests are theirs. As well of course as those who have convinced themselves as a way to escape the trauma and degradation of their experiences that they were not traumatic but positive. Much as many victims of sexual assault at first convince themselves that it was consensual or refuse to use the word “rape” because it seems less painful to avoid the confrontation, to deny the trauma happened, to engage in revisionism of events and realities so as to not experience the dis-empowering sensation of victimization. Add in that many of these same of course adopt 2 (liberal feminism) to further justify it to themselves and construct a framework for its justification and you have a situation where they never really realize it and liberal society empowers them to do the same.

There is a moral valuation lying beneath of women’s sexual power through risk. The labor she subscribes to in 1. chance of pregnancy and raising a child 2. disease risk 3. social risk. Patriarchy starts with the implicit ownership that has men paying upfront with bridal treasure and ornaments. Following that women raise children for free while the husband says prime earner.