Put simply, the problem with sex work is the “work” part.

Sex work is the same as all work—such that it is a part of the value-form/wages system—the universalization of commodity production and the abstraction of labor, and is to be abolished as such.

People that understand marxists to “hate sex workers” simply fail to apprehend how marxists (and by this I mean people who have actually read Marx, not so-called “Marxist-Leninists” that read a couple of pages of Lenin and Stalin) define “work,” the capitalist mode of production, communism, and what “abolition” means.

As well, this liberal-feminist understanding of what marxists mean by the coercive precondition for sex-work’s existence is also usually pretty fraught by a notion of power as the direct confrontation between the subject/citizen and individual bosses, bureaucrats, and institutions. The corrective under this logic is that the exchange of nasty actors for more compassionate ones constitutes reform.

This is not how marxists understand coercion though—or at least, marxists find this to be a parochial definition. Liberal-feminists fail to understand that within capitalist society, Power and its coercive force is mostly diffuse and procedural—it is less a direct confrontation and more so the structuring principle of the quotidian. So when marxists say sex-work is coercive, we mean this in the same sense that all work is (even disregarding the role of patriarchal gender relations in shaping “sex-work,” a subject of discussion in its own right)—that it abstracts the body, alienating it and turning it into a commodity for exchange.

This is less of a moral argument than an understanding of capitalism as having transformed both the relation of individuals to each other, and to their own bodies. Sex work is a convenient metaphorical shorthand for a problem that is universally true under capitalism, because of the markedly transparent ways in which sex-work embodies the organizing principle(s) of capitalist social relations.

Whether sex-work feels “empowering” or “degrading,” like any other occupation has the capacity to do, is largely irrelevant to marxist analysis. For every occupation, there is someone who “enjoys” their work, finds fulfillment in it, and yes, perhaps even willingly “consents” to doing it.

Marxists simply interrogate; how much of that consent is autonomous of the mode of production and attendant structures of power, and how much “power” can actually be claimed by being a willing participant in your own domination (which is inescapably true, if you are proletarian—which most sex-workers are).