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	Workers Vanguard No. 1085	11 March 2016

Lutte Ouvrière and Prostitution

Socialist Priests of LO and the Holy Family

We reprint below an article translated from Le Bolchévik No. 215 (March 2016), newspaper of the Ligue Trotskyste de France, section of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist).

Last fall, the Orsay Museum in Paris presented an interesting exhibition titled “Splendor and Misery: Images of Prostitution 1850-1910.” Through paintings and photographs—and even some of the earliest pornographic films—it gave a picture of the prevalence of prostitution at that time in all layers of society, specifically in Paris. This ranged from women workers, who in order to survive were forced to sell their bodies after a long day at the factory (not to mention during working hours to satisfy their foreman or boss), to high-end prostitutes like La Belle Otero in the highest circles of the bourgeoisie. (There was even a section—closed to minors!—which discretely mentioned homosexual male prostitution.)

It is not surprising that the Orsay Museum, one of the main cultural showcases of French imperialism, has “forgotten” what is at the heart of prostitution, its necessary corollary, namely the institution of the family and bourgeois marriage. At this exhibition, marriage was the elephant in the room.

The institution of the family is the main source of women’s oppression. The family is crucial to the propertied class, giving it the ability to transmit its property to “legitimate” heirs and teaching working-class children to know their place. The family is the arena for and instrument of oppression of youth, both girls and boys, particularly in terms of sexual repression.

Women’s liberation will only become a reality when the entire human species is freed from exploitation and class oppression. Marx and Engels explained that the perspective of building a communist society—that is, a classless society based on material abundance—first requires a series of socialist revolutions internationally. That would lay the material basis to begin replacing the family by socializing housework and truly collectivizing children’s education.

That is the perspective that the Bolsheviks sought to implement after the 1917 October Revolution despite conditions of extreme scarcity in a backward society devastated by years of imperialist war followed by civil war. They took steps to establish full social and political equality for women: legalizing divorce, abortion and homosexuality. But they did not stop there. They began to develop the necessary infrastructure (day-care centers, cafeterias, laundries, etc.) to socialize housework and childcare, and thus enable women to participate fully in social, political and cultural life.

The difference between this Marxist understanding and that of Lutte Ouvrière (LO) [who are linked to the U.S. group Spark] was starkly apparent at their January 8 “Cercle Léon Trotsky” educational in Paris devoted to the question of women’s liberation. The main speaker spoke at length about the oppression of women throughout history. Of course, she did emphasize the role that women played in working-class struggles, and she described some aspects of the measures taken by Lenin’s Bolsheviks after the Russian Revolution. However, she avoided addressing the bourgeois family head-on. Basically, the presentation remained within the framework of feminism. She actually claimed to be a feminist, concluding that “to be a consistent feminist...you have to be a communist.” But feminism is incompatible with Marxism because it uses the division between sexes to obscure the division between social classes.

One of our comrades spoke during the brief discussion period at this meeting to reassert basic Marxism on the question of the family. She concluded:

“Prostitution is the flip side of the institution of the family. As Engels wrote, ‘Monogamy and prostitution in the modern world, although opposites, are nevertheless inseparable opposites, poles of the same social conditions.’ He added that in bourgeois marriage a woman ‘does not hire out her body, like a wage worker, on piecework, but sells it into slavery once and for all.’ Thus, the liberation of prostitutes cannot be separated from the liberation of women as a whole, and prostitution will die only as the institution of the family is replaced.

“But LO, far from explaining this, believes that one can and must fight against prostitution using the bourgeois cops. Indeed, LO supported [President François] Hollande’s anti-prostitution law. This prettifies not only the capitalist police but also the institution of the family itself, as if there could be a bourgeois family free from its outgrowth, prostitution. In this, LO is no different from the slimiest priests and other hypocrites.

“We are for the decriminalization of prostitution—to pay or get paid for having sex is not a crime! We are against all government interference in people’s sex lives. More fundamentally, we are for women’s liberation through socialist revolution!”

In her reply, the LO speaker, Anne Lhommier, displayed remarkable duplicity. After baselessly implying that the LTF regards “commercial sex as the ultimate freedom,” she claimed that LO has “no confidence in the bourgeois state to legislate on this question” and that LO “never supported Hollande’s law, as you claimed.”

However, the relevant article in Lutte Ouvrière (6 December 2013) is still available on LO’s website. In that article, LO declared, in regard to the criminalization of prostitutes’ clients under the Hollande law, “It is the least one can expect in terms of legal action!” LO added: “Nevertheless, it is not enough to take steps to discourage clients; the law must clearly address how prostitutes will then be able to continue to live.... That going to prostitutes should be considered a crime and that the crime of soliciting by prostitutes should be abolished is the least one can expect from the law of a country that calls itself civilized[!].”

If that does not mean that LO supports the repressive measures against clients of prostitutes that the law specifies (including a fine of 3,750 euros for repeat offenses), how else can one characterize LO’s position? As we wrote in Spartacist [(English-language edition) No. 58, Spring 2004]:

“It is the institution of the family that brings money into sexual relations. Whether it’s renting a prostitute by the hour or a wife by the lifetime, the family and the oppression of women are founded on private property, and the religious codes of morality and capitalist law are all that distinguish the wife from the prostitute in this fundamental sense.”

Of course, LO is not about to declare that “the least one can expect from the law of a country that calls itself civilized” is also to prohibit marriage, with a fine of 3,750 euros for repeat offenses (namely remarriage)! If LO treats prostitution completely differently from marriage, it is because, whether they like it or not, they approach this issue from the standpoint of puritanical bourgeois morality. Cops and judges out of the bedroom! Lutte Ouvrière too! Prostitution was not illegal in Soviet Russia under Lenin and Trotsky. The Bolsheviks explicitly refused to interfere in people’s sex lives; rather, their policy for combating prostitution was to give prostitutes productive jobs and reintegrate them into the economy.

The consequence of Lutte Ouvrière’s economism is that, beyond the necessary daily struggle of workers at the point of production to defend their jobs and their salaries, LO concedes the terrain of political struggle against oppression to bourgeois ideologues, in this case the feminists. As we wrote in “Communism and the Family” [WV Nos. 1068 and 1069, 15 and 29 May 2015]:

“Replacing the family with collective institutions is the most radical aspect of the communist program and will bring about the deepest, most sweeping changes in daily life, not least for children....

“A fundamental difference between Marxists and feminists, whether liberal or professed socialist, is that our ultimate goal is not gender equality as such but rather the progressive development of the human species as a whole. The communal raising of children under conditions of material abundance and cultural richness will produce human beings whose mental capacities as well as psychological well-being will be vastly superior to people in this impoverished, oppressive and class-divided society.”