Interestingly, this piece stems from a lengthy discussion I had with some comrades recently over a Facebook post by the controversial feminist, Naledi Chirwa. The 5 worded Facebook post read as follows: 

“Sex work is real work.”

Instinctively the post sparked a heated engagement, giving effect to contrasting views, with some views petty and reinforcing negative generalized stereotypes of sex workers, while others were really interesting and engaging. Therefore, as is common practice, there developed in me an interest to add discourse and content and deepen this ideological-political discussion, which resulted in me penning this article. 

The varying reactions to Naledi’s post are not the focus of this piece, but what I will do in the piece, since the topic has generated discursive interest, is to relay to the readers how my theoretical grasp of working class struggles and phenomena, and general interest on the question under discussion has organized my overall thinking on this topic. 

Having said that, I should from the onset state the objective reasoning of this piece which is twofold: 

1. To argue that the conflation of sex work as real work is a fallacy and an idea whose ideological lineage is drawn from a petty-bourgeois mode of situation-analysis and relies on projecting a liberal logic and social order which centers individual rights, body agency and decision-making with unquestionable assumptions. 

2. More substantively, I further argue that Africa, and indeed the entire socialist Global South has no conception, socially, culturally and otherwise of sex work as real work, or of sex as a commodity that can be exchanged to the capitalists for monetary gains. The idea of commodifying sex is one rooted in a bourgeois cultural socialization and economic imagination of society, and is a wrong debate to have. 

Therefore, with this conceptual framework in mind, I now have a burden to disprove the hazy idea of sex work as real work, and instead, to locate it as a phenomenon which emerged as a social contradiction in the sweeping disruptive social development of bourgeois epochs that has engulfed society, and as not necessarily part of the day-by-day life of the working masses who are involved in production. 

But firstly, let us deal with the definitive question of what constitute a “worker” and/or what the assumptive logic of worker-ism entails. Borrowing from Marxist parlance, a worker is said to be a Marxist subaltern who is scientifically accepted to be exploited by variable capital – its class enemy! In other words, someone who, in their day-to-day activity, is forced to sell his or her labour power to the highest bidder in the plantation, in exchange for a wage. Lo and behold, that I am deliberately using the term “plantation” to expose the backwardness of the modern day factory framework and the position of the worker in the prevailing power dynamics of the factory space. Consequently, it is in this instance of selling the labour power does Marx uses the theory of social surplus value to explain the real sources of worker exploitation inside the factory itself as institutionalized exploitation that gives the worker a sociopolitical identity of being a working class person, commonly known as a proletariat – a Marxist subaltern! 

Furthermore, Marxism, as a weapon of theory in the hands of the working class people, ideologically defines the fundamental contradiction in a bourgeois society to be based on the social product which is privately appropriated by the boss giving rise to the irreconcilable material interests between the non-owners of the means of production (majority working class people whose robbed of the social product) and the owners of the means of production (the national bourgeoisie who appropriate the social product). 

The non-owners of the means of production consists of the factory workers or proletariats as the locomotive forces of history, and ipso facto, the group leading the socialist revolution as a result of its sheer numbers. What is also located in the non-owners of the means of production category are rural and urban peasants, the petit bourgeois class of students, professionals and small scale traders and ultimately a class that Marx called the “lumpen-proletariats”. This lumpen-proletariat  group consists of what Marx calls the “social rejects” in the social development of bourgeois epochs, in other words, the physical and mental breakdown of a section of society owing to mass poverty, malnutrition, mental illness, social decline due to deprivation of educational opportunities plunges people deeper into a crises and forces them to engage in dubious means of earning a living; means which include, but not limited to, robbing people, stealing things, developing gambling addiction, selling your body for sex (prostitution) or resorting to substance abuse and being a permanent resident of the street. All of these social contradictions are intensified by the failures of the bourgeois economy and its liberal belief that it is the individual’s volition to hustle for themselves, through embodied agency. Such a view is precisely aimed to remain oblivious to the structural impediments imposed on the people by the existing mode of production. 

It is in this context I argue that the idea that sex work is real work or the conditions of sex workers can be improved is but a pipe dream! It is a dishonest account of social contradictions in class society and their forms of expression. Bourgeois statistics and opinions will speak ad infinitum about the increasing number of sex workers in the major cities and the related call for legal protection of sex work under the misleading mantra of “sex work is real work” but will not explain the main disjuncture between sex work and a Marxist revolutionary subject, the worker. Marx called on the working class to unite and organize itself as a class for itself, because he had a scientific understanding of their shared interest to end themselves as a class through a revolutionary war that liberates the national productive forces and changes the relations of production in the factory context.  

In real concrete terms, the worker fights with the capitalist establishment over the social surplus that the bourgeoisie appropriates from the worker as profit. And that’s the basic contradiction between the worker and the capitalist; the question of who owns this social surplus. But because capitalism is an evil system of exploitation we know that the social surplus together with the worker’s labour power are both commodities and the collective property belonging to the national bourgeoisie and cannot be resolved outside the total defeat of capitalism as a mode and a relation of production and thus ending the two classes in conflict with each other. 

And then let me hasten to ask; if sex work is to be real work, or put differently, if the labour of the women or men giving sex is thought of as a commodity payable in equal monetary terms who is the exploiter and who is the exploited in this case? In other words, how do we explain that a sex worker is being exploited by boss, or using a Marxist scientific tool to explain the logic of worker exploitation? 

In a graphic sense, in the event where X, who lives across the street, after pay day from work gives Y a T amount of money for an S amount of sex rounds, both these people are exploited under capitalism and have a common enemy which is capital, although exploited in nuanced ways; one directly involved in production and another thrown in the streets and left to fend for herself. But both are exploited and oppressed. One is a worker and the other a lumpen-proletariat! Anyone seeking to abolish the capitalist crises must not tinker around its symptoms, but should direct all efforts at destroying capitalism as a mode of production and thought logic. Sex work is a symptom reflecting a structural fault in the capitalist establishment. 

This is why prostitution is not explainable as a scientific phenomenon, because sex work is not real work in the normative and descriptive sense of the word “work” and as underpinned by the logic of social surplus as an organizing idea of worker exploitation; instead, it is a social contradiction, just like crime, substance abuse, and gambling addiction etc. All are social vices that have emerged with the development of bourgeois modernity.

Moreover, the idea that sex work is real work is at variance with African modes of being and existing in the world. African culture, across all its recorded histories and archives does not have a conception of sex as work, or sex as an exchangeable endowment. 

This notion of “I give you sex, I work as a sex slave” therefore you must pay me money is un-African and only locatable in bourgeois logic of a money-making scheme. African sociality has always been a matrifocal society, placing women at the forefront, wired around shared values of respect of the body, love for mankind and striving for collective prosperity. Sex work, in this case, is but only an expression of the moral decadence resulting from the degeneration of western capitalist modernity and socialization. The eclectic method – picking out from the teachings of Marx only what is acceptable to bourgeois logic organized as “Sex work is work, defend all work” is a shamefaced expression of the defense of a world outlook into which petit bourgeois ideologists hold on to as a pipe-dream vs. true Marxian logic which locates sex work outside the constructs of the social surplus contradiction.