The ideology of Sex Worker Exclusionary Radical Feminists (SWERFs) strongly overlaps with that of Transgender Exclusionary Radical Feminists (TERFs) however, is arguably a longer term phenomenon and one that predates radical feminism. Josephine Butler, who in the 1860s built a coalition of religious groups, purity campaigners, and working men’s organisations to end the Contagious Diseases Acts which persecuted sex workers with forced medical examinations, would go on to campaign for the end of sex work. The premise behind this campaign was that sex work represented white slavery while also encouraging men’s uncontrollable sex drives. This awkward comparison with chattel slavery of Black Africans is specifically where the phrase “abolitionist” comes from.
Since then, it existed in parallel to more explicit forms of anti-sex worker sentiment, but during the development of the ‘second wave’ radical feminist movement of the 1960s-80s, it found a particular kind of renewal. Obviously, TERFs generally have a fixation upon sex work – you only need glance at the work of Janice Raymond, Sheila Jeffreys, or Julie Bindel – and the high number of transgender people in sex work further feeds this obsession.
But not all SWERFs are TERFs as we would understand the term. Catharine McKinnon and Andrea Dworkin’s efforts during the feminist sex wars of the late 1970s to the early 1980s are an example of radical feminists campaigning for forms of criminalisation of pornography and sex work generally without any personal hatred for transgender people – even if their campaigning encouraged the harassment of transgender women by police and was done in coalition with religious fundamentalists who hated queers.
The basis of the SWERF take was essentially that sex work is not work, but is coercive and should be understood as rape. SWERFs believed that sex work was one of the key reasons why all men felt entitled to the bodies of all women. Further extrapolating on this idea leads to a radical argument whereby abolishing the industry under capitalism is understood as one of a number of silver bullets against sexual violence, and any “normalisation” of the industry – such as decriminalisation or anti-discrimination reforms – is seen as undermining women as a class.
It’s an attractive theory for middle class activists, appearing to be a simple way out of having to fight the terribly sexist regime that is capitalism. However, it has been proven again and again to only undermine the safety and conditions of sex workers in practice, while feeding moral panic campaigns by the right. In contrast, there is no evidence that decriminalisation in New South Wales, the Northern Territory, or New Zealand has resulted in any marked increase in the prevalence of sexism generally.
The white slavery trope is being resurrected in our context, with prominent SWERFs conflating sex work with human trafficking, positioning themselves as ‘rescuers’ of sex workers, and calling for forms of legalisation and regulation intended to ‘save’ them. Not only is this view patronising and stigmatising, most sex worker-led groups refer to it as “criminalisation by stealth”. The most egregious of these legalisation methods is the Nordic Model, which criminalises the client rather than the worker, but in doing so forces the worker to practise underground in order to maintain an income.
Current zoning restrictions imposed by local councils in Australia have seen private investigators hired to have sex with sex workers to “gather evidence” to shut down brothels in the suburbs. In practice, this and other forms of regulation shift control of a sex worker’s labour to the police, and there is no possible left-wing justification for aligning with the police against sex workers.
SWERFs have also strategically oriented toward developing the “rescue industry” – an array of small community organisations that either receive backing from religious groups or compete with sex worker-run organisations for government funding. These organisations then generally use these funds to lobby against full decriminalisation of sex work and publish propaganda that conflates sex work with human trafficking and argues against any de-stigmatisation of the industry. For example, Project Respect, which was founded by high profile SWERF and Greens Councillor Kathleen Maltzahn, is a small NGO funded by her local council that under her leadership implied 50% of sex workers in Melbourne were trafficked and argued for the Nordic Model as a solution.
As revolutionaries it is important to accept that fixating on abolishing the sex industry under capitalism only builds the right – be it in the form of heightened police powers, or politicians playing on moral panic – and harms workers. The only reasonable way forward is to accept that sex work is work, support the fight for full decriminalisation and anti-discrimination reforms, and back workers in the pathway to unionisation to set their own workplace standards from below. There is no silver bullet to be found against sexism by throwing sex workers under the bus with pro-cop reforms.
Why shouldn’t revolutionaries be indulging this nonsense?
In the past year, talks, conferences and workshops on sex work amongst some leftist groups have shown how revolutionaries can err on this question. One particular workshop presented by Socialist Alternative in April 2022 was critical of the “normalisation of the sex industry” and made arguments for why socialists should not support sex work. Socialist Alternative are not SWERFs, as they explicitly disagree with feminism and are not particularly obsessed with sex work in the way that SWERFs tend to be.
Their mistake seems to be in confusing radical feminist discourses of abolishing sex work with communist discourse of abolishing all forms of exploitation, including sex work, by overthrowing the capitalist system entirely. This leads to a moralistic analysis where sex work abolition is a goal to achieve under capitalism, similar to the ways in which we might campaign for the end of the fossil fuel industry. Without an analytical perspective rooted in the principles of worker-led liberation from below, you end up with SWERF-like theoretical talks that moralise about the ills of the sex industry, courting controversy and encouraging abstention from campaigning in any direction.
While Socialist Alternative itself has made no official statements to date on what happened at the workshop, independents and members of Victorian Socialists report that speakers compared the sex industry with working in fossil fuels, refugee concentration camps and pokies. They argued that the existence of sex work gave legitimacy to men’s entitlement to women’s bodies more broadly (an argument reminiscent of the early sex work abolitionists of the late 19th Century).
They allegedly argued that while criminalisation wasn’t supportable, recent decriminalisation reforms constituted a form of deregulation in favour of the free market. They proposed that regulating sex work would improve worker conditions, suggesting that this is supportable for the same reasons regulations are supportable in aged care. It seems this line is a questionable fudge at best and was proposed for the purpose of being controversial.
Practically, the confused debate within Socialist Alternative on this question has led to their abstention from sex worker-led campaigns and initiatives. They were notably absent from the International Working Girls Day protest on March 8, which platformed the campaign for true decriminalisation and anti-discrimination rights for sex workers as well as highlighting the unionisation efforts of workers in various workplaces. Their sizeable voting bloc in the University of Sydney Student Representative Council also abstained from motions supporting this rally due to their organisation’s failure to adopt a clear position.
Historically, socialists have had a range of personal views on sex work, many of which were a product of the morals of their time. We should be clear that the abolition of sex work as we currently understand it is something that only occurs as a by-product of a truly classless communist society where wage slavery does not exist. The abolition of sex work is an impossible reform in class society, as it has never withered away despite the provision of social goods won in social democratic states, such as liveable welfare, universal early childhood education and aged care. Nor has policing and forced job reallocation been successful at doing anything but driving workers underground. This makes it both farcical and violent to support any form of criminalisation, and we should reject any fudged positions that come from pretending regulation and legalisation models can be anything but carceral.
We should also be ruthlessly scientific in what a reform is expected to achieve and why comparisons are made. It is vexatious for socialists to compare sex work to sectors like coal mining, pokies or detention centres, not only because there are live debates about how to shut each of these institutions down, but also because the social outcomes of their abolition, such as the halting of global warming, letting people out of concentration camps, and the cessation of problem gambling that drives working class people into poverty are self-evident. The expected broader social good that is to come from shutting down sex work is unfalsifiable, and the only demonstrated pathways toward a shut-down under capitalism are inextricably linked with policing, which has always been harmful to workers.