Mila Volkova gave the following talk at the 2026 Marxism Fringe conference in Melbourne on the 6th of April. We publish it for the benefit of our readers and the broader socialist movement.
Introducing the Debate
The socialist movement’s most recent major debate on the topic of sexual politics has been the exchange between Socialist Alternative and the Revolutionary Communist Organisation, beginning on May 19, 2025, with the publication of There is Nothing Edgy About Turning Violence Against Women into Art, written by Sarah Garnham and published in Red Flag. An exchange followed, with the publication of Eros Bound: Sexuality and Class Struggle by Edith Fischer in Partisan Magazine; implicitly responded to by Anneke Demanuele in Posing as a Dog ‘For the Girls’: What in God’s Name is Going on with Pop Culture? In Red Flag; and temporarily concluding with the publication of Emma Norton’s essay Why Socialists Should Oppose the Sex Industry in number 29 of Marxist Left Review – though I’m not sure when this essay was written in relation to the other pieces, as MLR is published quarterly. Of course, the debate has continued further – implicitly, again – at Marxism conference this weekend just passed. Considering the relative length of this public exchange between our organisations compared to previous debates, it is a topic that is of clear significance to the membership of both groups. Not to mention the disagreement between the Spartacist Tendency and other members of the RCO on how the movement should relate to feminism – either repudiation for the former or critical acceptance for myself and others.
On the one hand, the authors from Socialist Alternative argued that socialists and the workers movement should struggle against the objectification and commodification of women’s bodies, which is perpetuated primarily by the sex industry – pornography, prostitution, advertising, and so on. Therefore, we should struggle against the sex industry and for women’s inclusion into less sexually exploitative industries. This argument included a certain agnosticism towards the regulation of the sex industry by the capitalist state. Norton criticised all four of the regulatory models as insufficient (criminalisation, the ‘Scandinavian model’, decriminalisation, and legalisation – though the Scandinavian model was the least criticised). Norton pointed to the social democratic movements of the 19th and early 20th centuries as models for successful struggles within the class against the sex industry. On the other hand, Edith Fischer argued the RCO’s position that sex workers should be included into the wider workers movement to the greatest extent possible, organised as one would any other proletarian.
There was little opportunity to go beyond practical conclusions and basic theoretical principles in this debate. This topic is one that will, in fact, only grow in importance as the porn industry expands and replaces traditional school-based sex education to a greater and greater extent. A more fleshed-out theoretical understanding of the world’s oldest profession and its relationship with capital is necessary to set us on a proper footing going forward. Before I make my attempt to sketch such an understanding, I would like to thank comrade Edith her help with brainstorming this talk.
Porn and Prostitution
The problem with Socialist Alternative’s theoretical approach to this topic is that it is basically Polanyian. By this, I mean that it resembles the work of Hungarian sociologist Karl Polanyi, who claimed that it was the expansion of financial capitalism into the natural or cultural or non-economic regions of life that spawned fascism as a backlash against this trend. The resemblance is that both Polanyi and Socialist Alternative agree that the issue at stake is the entrance of the market into certain relations which were previously, according to this view, non-alienated. There is no other way to understand their analysis, which focuses so heavily on ‘commodification of objectification’ as the source of sexism in the working class and of women’s oppression in capitalism rather than the family, which is the mode of (re)production which working women have been enslaved to since the beginning of civilisation. According to their view, the sex industry essentially brainwashes male workers to see their female comrades as objects rather than as full human beings, and brainwashes female workers into accepting – and even enjoying – this relationship.
The notion that women, and perhaps men also, are ‘brainwashed’ into objectifying and subjugating women through consumption of pornography does not address the enormous market of romance fiction which erotically depicts female submission, and which is written by women for women’s consumption. Women are not simply the passive recipients of propaganda, but proactive participants in patriarchy’s ideological reproduction. Without a theorisation of the connection between the sex industry, patriarchy in general, and working-class men and women’s material conditions; the brainwashing notion falls into hopeless moralising in the same manner that radical feminism does. There is nothing scientific about claims regarding the inherent immorality of acts such as choking, slapping, and rope bondage, even if all partners are consenting. This view is essentially the same as the Christian right – violent movies make people more violent. Therefore, they should be repressed for the social good. Or, rather, this view is essentially the same as the Muslim right; because of the historical legacy of Cliffism’s coalition with Alliance in the UK.
Pornographic depictions of male dominance and female submission appeal to both men and women because it speaks to something true about our lives. The patriarchal narrative – in the form of tales of the princess in danger, the dark marauder who captures her, and the knight in shining armour who rescues her and is rewarded – are told to us in various forms from the day of our births and throughout our lifespan. Pornography should not be considered separately to this and does not make sense as the primary generator of these narratives. Rather, Pornography (and the sex industry in general) is a reflection and concrete realisation of these narratives in a simple, satisfying, and often vulgar and taboo – and therefore erotic – form.
This claim – that watching pornography makes people objectify women – which has been scientifically disproven by bourgeois research, is a simplistic approach to ideology which fails to answer several important questions: why has women’s exploitation been endemic to all class societies, not just capitalism? What is the history of capitalist sexual ideology? What is the relevance of the expansion of the sex industry now, in relation to that history and in relation to the rest of society? Why does sex work continue to pop up despite the efforts of certain moral crusaders, including the SPD of the 1800s?
In attempting to answer these questions and understand the role of the sex industry, we are raising the question of ideology and thus raising the question of politics in general. So, we have arrived at the question which is at the heart of sociology – why is it that humans fight for their domination as if they were fighting for their freedom?
The History of Capitalist Sexuality
The capitalists’ approach to sexuality first developed inside the Dutch and Italian city-states of feudal Europe. In these cities, we have the first real development of laws against sodomy and the extreme enforcement of such laws. The initial motivation for these laws was the regulation of inter- rather than intra-class relationships, as the predatory behaviour of patriarchs and guild leaders could often be the inciting incident for a riot by younger, and more proletarianized, male artisans. As capitalist society developed throughout the 17th and 18th centuries and as urban centres expanded, the emphasis shifted towards using laws regulating sexuality – especially, though not exclusively, male homosexuality – to repress working class social life and impose work discipline. This came in the context of quite commonplace homosexual relationships between the sans culottes or proletarianized men and a general disdain in the working class for bourgeois decorum including public displays of sex to crowds, urinating in public, and so on.
What is important to note here is that the first ‘stage’ of bourgeois sexual morality is a very prudish one, and that this corresponded to the stage of the class struggle as well as to the accumulatory regime. The proletariat had not yet been disciplined by a hegemonic capitalist state, the primary mode of accumulation remained primitive, and the forces of production had not yet developed to the stage where the capitalist was able to divorce the working class completely of control over the means of production. So, in the cities, we get an aggressively conservative sexual regime imposed by the capitalists on a vulgar and (somewhat) cosmopolitan proletarian sexuality. By accumulatory regime, I refer to this period of capitalist development which prevailed until the 1960s, in which saving and re-investment in the productive forces by the capitalist class was paramount. This necessity was reflected in capitalist economic ideology, which made a virtue of frugality and thrift, and thus in capitalist sexual ideology, which made a virtue of self-denial and repression. As a result, we have an ideology of sexual repression whose hegemony over the proletariat is cemented in around the mid-19th century and which lasts until around the 1950s.
However, we transition to a dominant ideology of manipulatively incorporating sexuality through the 50s, 60s, and 70s. To some extent, this shift was a brought about by a popular movement against the previous sexual ideology, which I will get to a bit later. But it was also brought about the broader crisis in monopoly capitalism during the 60s and 70s, which neoliberalism resolved. The dominant strategy of accumulation shifted from focusing on the expansion of the productive forces and proletarian wages in tandem, to a double attack on wages and the expansion of consumer spending. It is from this that the modern advertising industry really emerges. Today in the imperial core, capitalists earn profits primarily through their own consumption, rather than through re-investment. This consumption presents itself as pure speculation but is really a method for materialising the surplus value extracted from the super-exploited proletariat in the periphery in core economies. Regardless, ‘by-now-save-later’ became the dominant capitalist ideology, and thus its dominant sexual ideology. It is this ideology which we live under in Australia today.
Understanding Patriarchy
I believe the problem here begins with Socialist Alternative’s rejection of any theoretical articulation of a material basis to women’s exploitation beyond the capitalist class’s propaganda efforts to split the proletariat. This position is, in my view, backwards justified from conclusions made in advance by Socialist Alternative’s leadership. The conclusions I mean are the strategy of spontaneity, itself drawn from a certain reading of Lukasz early work, which assumes as an axiom that the proletariat has no fundamental internal stratifications, that it is always united in its interests, and that workers are already politically conscious of this on some deep level. I have criticised before the notion that sexism, racism, and so on are just schemes perpetuated by the capitalists. This perspective constitutes a washing of one’s hands with regards to the struggle for class unity in material and ideological terms.
I reiterate here what I have claimed before in my writing and most recently at the RCO’s theoretical conference Crisis & Critique regarding the material basis of the patriarchal mode of reproduction. Capital requires that the supply of labour power conform to its interests without assuming direct control over the production of labour power – which must be left to the workers themselves and seem like a natural process. it is impossible for capital to take direct responsibility of the reproduction of the working-class portion of our species in an absolute sense, and of reproductive labour in a broad sense. Were it to do so, labour power would not enter the marketplace freely, and the extraction of the surplus value between the value of labour power and the value of commodities would be impossible. If sex, love, and baby-making were totally commodified it would confuse the question of who owns, dispenses with, and claims the value of labour power. Also, with a handful of exceptions, reproductive labour is labour-intensive by nature. It is difficult for capital to intensify the reproductive labour process to the extent necessary to make it profitable to sell as a commodity to the working-class. It is no surprise that only the labour aristocracy and bourgeoisie can pay for reproductive labour commodities on their own, with subsidised access to childcare for the working-class being a matter of state policy in Australia for strategic reasons.
Nonetheless, the capitalist class must keep a grip on the size of the reserve army of labour – to increase it when labour must be disciplined and decrease it during periods of intense accumulation.
From this emerges the objective tendency in the capitalist mode of production towards the patriarchal mode of reproduction, as well as the form which that mode of reproduction takes and capital’s particular historical relationship with it. By this, I mean capitalism’s historic economic division between productive and reproductive labour; with male wage workers performing productive labour tasks outside of the home and unpaid female workers performing reproductive labour tasks inside the home. This situation is enforced by the patriarchy of the wage, or the gender pay gap, and discrimination in employment. These work to enforce dependence on men and confine women to reproductive labour in return for the means of subsistence. This ensures that women lack reproductive autonomy, and that we can be disciplined by husbands, fathers, capital, and the state in the quest for higher or lower birth rates, whichever is demanded by the moment. This, plus the combined and uneven development of capitalist relations, forces women into a contradictory position under capitalism. Capitalism trends not towards the equalisation of men and women’s wages, but towards increasing exploitation of both waged and unwaged labour as a contradictory synthesis of two further trends: a need the cheapest labour possible right now, and a need for the long-term reproduction of the working-class.
I use the term patriarchal mode of reproduction, or patriarchy for short, not to draw on an ‘intersectionalist’ framework – which would argue that patriarchy and capital are separate but interconnected systems of power – but to point out that this mode of reproduction exists inside the capitalist mode of production as a necessity to it, but which presents itself as sitting outside of that mode of production. This is illusory, but important to acknowledge. Contrary to Marx’s words in the Manifesto that capitalism has, or is in the process of abolishing, distinctions in the proletariat based on sex; I claim that capitalism intensified the patriarchal structure of European society in the transition from feudalism to capitalism. The housewife is capital’s creation.
What I describe here is a system of the exploitation of proletarian women, not simply of women’s ‘oppression’. The use of this term ‘so and so’s oppression’ is a term inherited from Trotskyism which I believe relegates stratification within the class to the superstructure rather than the base. Beyond the exploitation of working women’s reproductive labour in the home by capital – it is capital which reaps the surplus value of the labour power produced and reproduced by working women – which creates an objective basis for inequality between male and female proletarians, there is the capacity for the exploitation of proletarian women by proletarian men. This is not a categorically exploitative relationship in the manner of the capital-labour relation, but it would be obtuse to ignore that the patriarchy of the wage grants male workers the opportunity to exploit the surplus labour of their female partners in the form of sex, housework, and so on. An opportunity which we know is often taken. This is quite relevant to Australia’s situation today. Though it may be uncomfortable to acknowledge, especially for working class men, it is ultimately in their class interests to acknowledge it. Part of our struggle as communists must include the struggle for a unity between the conditions of men and women proletarians, which capital itself cannot accomplish.
The Ideology of Pornography
Patriarchy has a material basis and cause, but one which is reinforced through the ideology of the other. This ideology presents humans to one another as men and women, with men occupying the position of the universal and assumed subject, and women occupying the position of the universal other. Women are non-material, spiritual, intuitive, and emotional forces who exist to be passively acted upon in the same manner that a stone or a tree is by the worker. In sexuality as in all spheres of life, the ideology of the other pushes women into the position of a passive receptacle for men’s authority as a subject.
Pornography only serves a role in reproducing the ideology of the other because it is embedded in the material reality of patriarchy. It is not this ideology’s source, and it is the material practice of producing and consuming pornography as well as its content that determines the particular way it reproduces this ideology. We should distinguish here between pornography and sexual or erotic imagery in general. By pornography, we mean a distinct form of sexual commodity that is mass produced, easy to consume, and essentially escapist/fantastical in content. It includes video/audio content, raunchy magazines, as well as written forms like novels or online fiction. These, like other forms of escapist media, provide the consumer a temporary escape from struggling against their social domination. This is their primary effect. Beyond the (generally) positive portrayal of male dominance and female submission, mass consumption of pornography ‘deadens’ its consumers. We can see how this has worsened along with the development of pornography in the completely pacified ‘gooner’ and ‘A.I. girlfriend’ subcultures.
But what Socialist Alternative’s analysis of pornography misses, and what Dworkin and MacKinnon missed in their efforts to ban pornography, is a full understanding of human sexuality. The interplay between objectification and subjectification is inherent to sexuality. Though patriarchy confines women to a pure realm of objectification and men to a pure realm of subjectification, this is an unstable situation that the reality of human bodies and sexuality constantly ruptures. Not only do most women proactively pursue their objectification – as opposed to accepting it passively – most women also objectify men. Men, similarly, cannot help but seek their objectification. This is what it means to arouse or be loved by someone else.
This is mirrored in the content and form of pornography itself. While most, though not all, pornography may aim to positively depict female submission and male dominance, as this is what most consumers of pornography seeks out as I described earlier, it cannot help but objectify men in this position in the same way it objectifies women. For consumers of pornography, of both sexes, to get off to it (which we must remember is its simple purpose), it must necessarily portray those involved as ego-ideal extensions of the consumer. The men must be in peak physical form with large penises and endless stamina (or the opposite may be the case in male submissive pornography, though the point stands that this is a projection of the consumer’s self). They must make all the right noises, say all the right things, and do all the right things. Though the pornographic man often takes the active sex role while the women takes the passive role, top is not the same as dominant and bottom is not the same as submissive. We must not fall here into the bioessentialist trap that penises are automatically dominant and vaginas automatically submissive organs. In much the same way that most pornography pushes women to dress, act, and think a certain way via a positive analogy with patriarchy, it does the exact same for men. If the objectified position of the pornographic man and woman reproduces the ideology of the other, this can only be demonstrated by pointing to men and women’s broader social position – it is not a cause of this social position. Pornography’s problem cannot be that it ‘objectifies’ women, because it also objectifies men. The problem is a social system in which that part of the species we label ‘women’ has – due to economic exploitation and ideological domination – little opportunity to express, autonomously, our own desire.
Socialist Alternative’s whole muddled position on the sexual revolution and of women’s sexuality in general is related to their position on objectification. Their position clearly implies that there can exist a form of sexuality that is without objectification, and which perfectly reproduces humanity’s innate creativity and equality. Sexuality is more complex than this: every sexual taboo both sublimates and produces the desire it sanctions against. So, the question becomes this: whose interests does a given taboo serve?
History of Communist Struggles Over Sexuality
The pre-WW1 socialist movement, for the most part, absorbed the hegemonic ideology of sexual repression in its program for women’s liberation. They incorrectly assessed that sexual promiscuity was primarily a bourgeois practice, claiming that it emerged as a reflection of inter-capitalist economic competition but in the sexual sphere over one-another’s wives. Engels famously, or perhaps infamously, claimed that communism would unleash ‘true monogamy’, unrestrained by sexual inequality and competition. Generally, the positions of social democrats on the topic of women’s liberation and sexuality varied within this orthodoxy. Some, especially the right wing of social democracy, were influenced more by the chauvinistic opposition of male trade unionists to the employment of women’s labour in industry – this was an extension of the competition for employment in capitalism. Others were more solid on the need for women to be included in waged employment, but generally still believed that reproductive labour was still ‘women’s work’, even if it should be socialised. A variety of confusing and contradictory positions were adopted by various social democrats that existed between these two poles.
A more genuinely communist approach to the family emerged out of the Bolshevik’s left wing and urban rank-and-file membership following the October revolution. This approach was explicitly theorised in Alexandra Kollontai’s essay Winged Eros. Kollontai claimed that ‘romantic love’ emerged as a bourgeois phenomenon and that monogamy was a construct of class society more broadly. In the transition to communism, she argued they would give way to a polyamorous form of ‘comradely love’, which would enable free and experimental expression of all forms of sexual and romantic desire through freely adopted and free-to-leave relationships based on utter mutual respect which would be completely contingent on the interests of the individuals involved as well as the wider community. These relationships would be as long or as short as those involved desired. To some extent, her claims reflected real changes which were ongoing in Soviet society in the early 1920s, though her push for realising this ideal end-goal in Soviet policy in her contemporary conditions dramatically underestimated the degree of economic and social development in the soviets. As we know, this ideal would fall to the side as Stalinist pro-natalism and conservatism gripped the USSR, and Kollontai herself only escaped the firing line by bending the knee completely and tragically to the counterrevolution. The Soviet and later Chinese communist approach to family policy, essentially the same as that of the right wing of the social democratic parties, would prevail in the communist movement until the emergence of the New Left.
What is often missed in pop-histories of the New Left, including in Socialist Alternative’s, is that it was even more sexually chauvinistic than the Old Left, especially in the United States. The Old Left were, in many cases, the first groups ‘on the scene’ to stand against various forms of (in their minds) non-class oppressions such as of women, queer people, and black/indigenous people. However, the New Left was driven towards armed militancy and adventurist violence by the popularity of the voluntaristic approach of Maoism, as well as the pressing feeling that the United States was locked in existential imperialist wars and that, therefore, the time to act was now. This created an incredibly macho culture in the New Left, which was quite oppressive for women, which was epitomised by the Black Panthers and their member Stokely Carmichael’s famous phrase – “the only position for women is ‘prone’”. You simply would not have gotten away with this kind of thing in the Old Left. It is in this context that the sexual revolution emerged from.
Socialist Alternative – alongside the radical feminists – is right that the sexual revolution in some ways produced conditions which made it easier for predatory men to act without consequences in the movement. But this ignores the real material basis for the sexual revolution as well as its positive outcomes. The desire for free love, polyamory, vibrators, women’s porn, and public education on women’s erogenous zones and orgasm emerged inevitably from the intensely repressive and confining situation of the post-war consensus housewife.
On the other hand, we know the positive outcomes of the sexual revolution. Though it often takes the form of consumption of commodities, working women across the globe have greater opportunities to express and satisfy their desires now. Women have much greater access to paid work outside the home than they did in the 1960s. Though this produces the intense ‘double burden’ which working women languish under, I know Socialist Alternative agrees with me when I claim that this is a historically progressive step towards women’s inclusion in the workers’ movements and our liberation. It has also provided many women greater freedom to choose their own sexual and romantic partners. Though this shift coincided with a global economic shift in the accumulatory, and thus sexual, regime as I stated earlier, this does not lead rationally to the simple conclusion that the sexual revolution was a struggle for capitalism even if it concluded as a struggle in capitalism.
A Small Note on Kink and BDSM
As a quick note, Socialist Alternative not acknowledging the material basis for, and positive results of, the sexual revolution resembles their myopic focus on female submission in kink and BDSM. In their writing on the topic, Garnham, Demanuele, and Norton seem to understand little about the relationship between kink and patriarchy more broadly. Portrayal or mimicry is not the same thing as reproducing. They focus on male dominance and female submission, but in doing so leave female dominance and male submission out. This form of kink, where the excitement is drawn from the inverted reinforcement of patriarchal assumption, is just as complicated; yet it remains out of Socialist Alternative’s sights.
Male dominance and female submission in kink, though a hyperextension of patriarchal society, is not a simple extension of this society. In the first instance, kink is taboo, it is not, as Socialist Alternative seems to claim, just another element of sexist society. It is taboo because it is a hyperextended, clarified display of patriarchal norms which is offensive to a patriarchal ideology which thrives on its being out of sight. It is, more often than not, a form of satire. It is this clarified, ritualised, and structured manifestation of patriarchal society that makes it attractive to many men and women. It is worth noting that though kink, like any subculture which exists outside of the immediate vision of society, has plenty of predators; many women are drawn to kink because of its, generally, clearer approach to consent.
In the second instance, Socialist Alternative makes a common mistake in assessing that female submission in kink is a simple extension of women’s passive role in hegemonic sexuality. But society generally remains dismissive of female desire and pleasure as a whole. The pleasure displayed by the pornographic woman is a caricature, but the pleasure of the woman involved in the fantasies of submission and rape is often genuine. The female sexual fantasy of disavowal, which is the most common among women, provides women plausible deniability from expressing their own desire proactively, but in doing so is what allows many women to feel, seek, and express their own desire.
This is a reaction to women’s enforced sexual passivity, and it is liberating for many women oppressed by a lack of sexual agency. By this, I do not mean liberating in the sense that it is revolutionary, no action is innately revolutionary (including any single political act). Rather, I mean that it is often liberating on the personal level. Anyone familiar with the kink scene will be aware that the power dynamic involved is only roleplay, and that the women involved are, for the most part, able to seek out and satisfy their sexual desires proactively, independently, and safely.
Socialism, Sexuality, and Sex Work
Sex work – opposition to which forms the second part of Socialist Alternative’s prudish program – is a problematic category uniting very different forms of labour into one based on the commodity they produce. But as a commodity, the selling of sex by women is a necessary accessory to the maintenance of the family. The ideology of the other, in accomplishing the reduction of women to an object, undermines its own logic, which is the satisfaction of commanding another human subject. It thus creates a necessity for new and regular sexual conquests of women by men which do not violate the restrictions placed on sexuality by marriage. This necessity can be satisfied because of the patriarchy of the wage, allowing men to pay for sex as a commodity.
The flaw of the Polanyian framework as applied to the sex industry is that it creates a warped focus on commodification as the primary source of women’s de-subjectification and exploitation. This is, in fact, something that the patriarchal ideology of the other agrees with. The primary mode of this ideology’s presentation is that the species’ division into the sexes – and the sexual division of labour – is natural, transhistorical, and pre-social/pre-economic. The purpose of this is to conceal the exploitative nature of the family, which is the primary site of women’s exploitation. Though Demanuele tried to give a nod to the family’s role in her article, the intense focus on the sex industry results in an analysis of the family and women’s sexual exploitation as existing outside of capitalism prior to its commodification. This is exactly the opposite of what the socialist movement must be saying on the topic – which is that the commodified and the non-commodified forms of the exploitation of women’s labour are two sides of the same coin. In the war between sex capital and patriarchal capital over proletarian women’s bodies, we must enter on the side of the proletariat.
Socialist Alternative has correctly identified that there is a real trend towards sexual prudishness emerging in youth today. But they incorrectly identify the cause of this trend as a reaction against ‘pornographic culture’ – a deplorable phrase, though this culture is increasingly real in the realm of advertising and social media. Rather, our ‘pornographic culture’ is a symptom that shares a common cause with our prudish youth culture towards sex and alcohol – the destruction of ‘third spaces’ for the working class (indeed, for all classes, in fact) and the crisis of social reproduction brought about by neoliberalism and the COVID-19 pandemic. The prevalence of pornographic consumption and of the ‘A.I. girlfriend’ and ‘gooner’ subcultures has come at the expense of casual sex / ‘hookup culture’, which is declining, not alongside it. The declining capacity for people to meet one another in person and socialise collectively has atomised the social relations necessary for people to sexually experiment, and prudishness is an anxious reaction against this process which is itself an atomised anxiety.
Socialist Alternative’s opportunistic incorporation of this prudishness, which aims to increase recruitment, is theoretically justified by an appeal to a version of the Lukaszian notion of ‘false consciousness’. The notion seems to be that, even if this prudishness is wrong in some sense, it expresses in a limited form the alienation of capitalist society. But in incorporating this approach so intensely and encouraging an anti- ‘raunch culture’ reaction to it, Socialist Alternative is taking a reactionary position. This, in addition to their singular focus on opposing ‘objectification’, puts them alongside the conservative movement in supporting the confinement of sexuality to the marriage home in the name of women’s safety. This is not because their position is implicitly patriarchal – though there is no place for a less ‘raunchy’ sexuality to go right now except back into the patriarchal household – but because it accepts the atomisation of sexuality in its proposals for more a more private, ‘pure’, and ‘genuine’ sexuality premised on monogamy. In doing so, it does not address the source of young people’s anxieties. The sexual revolution, though complex, was a net progressive step forward for the working class. It is difficult to take seriously Socialist Alternative seriously when their members often use terms such as ‘slutty’ and ‘bacchanal’ to describe the sexual behaviour of young women. This is appalling behaviour. We know what these notions produce – beating, marriage rapes, and paedophilic and incestuous predation. It is important for the working class that its members be able to experiment sexually and freely develop sexual and romantic bonds with one another. This is in our class interests. Alternatively, our sexuality will conform instead to the class interests of the capitalists.
Socialist Alternative’s repudiation of patriarchy’s materiality in favour of a theorisation solely focused on sexist prejudice, fits the conditions of professional and bourgeois women more so than proletarian women, when I know the exact opposite is intended. The notion that women’s oppression primarily takes the form of sexism – by which they mean prejudicial ideas – is suited more to the position of professional and bourgeois women than to working women; with the former experiencing the ideology of the other in the form of unfair competition for official positions and violence. This articulates a stronger basis for a cross-class sisterhood alliance than I’m sure some members of Socialist Alternative will be comfortable with.
Sticking with this point, Socialist Alternative’s practical position – which is to use the unions to struggle against employment in the sex industry – is practically like that of the professional class radical/liberal feminist. It is unclear how you organise solidarity with sex workers while also actively organising against their inclusion into the union movement. The efforts of the 19th century social democrats to undermine the sex industry, much like the efforts of the capitalist state today, amounted to little. Rather, they increased chauvinism in the union movement towards women workers. Because the selling of sex is necessitated by the patriarchal mode of reproduction, systematically undermining sex workers’ position in the workers’ movement will only undermine solidarity.
This is likely to produce the same result that radical feminism did – professional women, in coalition with conservative forces, working against working class women to appear more ‘respectable’ to the bourgeoisie, and thus obtain better positions and higher status – but here within the workers’ movement between sex workers and the rest of the class, with the former being seen as ‘scabs’. The radical feminist movement wound up accusing any woman who slept with a man as scabbing on the sex-class. Socialist Alternative itself does not allow anyone who works in a brothel in any capacity to become a member. This is not producing the class unity they imagine it will.
Completing the Sexual Revolution
Though the sex industry is often deeply exploitative and often has terrible working conditions, many women willingly enter the industry – fully aware of the industry’s conditions – as it offers greater freedom to them than marriage and housework. Sometimes this is paired with a desire to enter the petit bourgeois, as many sex ‘workers’ in fact are. Socialist Alternative is right to get at this distinction, and they are right to criticise the petit bourgeois tendency in the sex worker ‘union’ Scarlet Alliance. Though this good criticism gets lost in their attacks on sex workers as a whole. However, it is communists who must organise proletarian sex workers towards their class interests, or else it is the petit bourgeois layers within the sex industry who will do so instead.
Alongside the socialisation of reproductive labour – which is something both Socialist Alternative and the RCO share as a programmatic goal – communists must take up the task of completing the sexual revolution, which was only half completed by the bourgeoisie and according to their interests. We must not abandon it, as Socialist Alternative suggests. That we must stand against assigning anyone to sex work as part of a democratic plan for socialised production does not change that sex work can only be abolished by the abolition of the family. To return to the question I posed earlier – “whose interests does a given taboo serve?” – banning pornography and sex work, rather than releasing those women who work in the sex industry from sexual exploitation, will instead intensify their exploitation in that industry and in the home and produce a divided, sexually chauvinistic workers’ movement i.e. it is in the interests of the bourgeoisie.
Unless communists provide an alternate vision of sexual liberation to capital’s, it will be capital’s vision which triumphs. Love is already fraught enough without a system of social domination sitting on top of it, and with the abolition of class distinctions and internal class stratifications brought about by communism we will free working-class men and women from concerns about it. A communist vision for the sexual revolution should take inspiration from that of Kollontai: women (and thus the class and the species) freed from the confines of the home, reproductive labour (including pregnancy, once technology is advanced enough), and the patriarchy of the wage; members of the human species free to engage in whatever relationships of whatever sort they imagine and desire, free from the assumptions of misogyny and monogamy, while remaining responsible to the collective interests of the community. This does not represent a vision for the complete abolition of social alienation – this vision, promoted by those like Mario Mieli, who foresee see the ending of all regulations of sexuality, is short-sighted and not necessarily productive – but for the collective mediation of alienation by the universal and democratic institutions of the liberated proletarian-human. We must put this front and centre: we will abolish the family, we will abolish monogamy, we will abolish rape as a common practice, we will abolish forced births, and insofar as we will abolish every material basis for the sexual division of labour, we will inevitably and proudly abolish the division of the species into sexes altogether.
PARTISAN! 
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