Prop K Helps Unite Prostitutes with other Wage Slaves

I am in favor of proposition K. At the same time I oppose prostitution. How can that be? Personally, I think sex and love, just like society, the workplace etc. should be free i.e. I prefer a society where people don't live under authoritarian rule or where their choices are limited to the ones pushed by people with power and privilege. In that sense, my argument goes beyond the arguments about the improvements seen in New Zealand or Amsterdam with the de-criminalization of prostitution, or the arguments of K-proponents about San Francisco's money savings and the the increased safety for sex workers, or the arguments about the reduction of sexually transmitted disease and coerced police sex with prostitutes, or the argument about how prop. K will result in more pimp, rather than prostitute arrests.

There are many studies showing how our perceptions of prostitution in the US are way off. For example, we never see them as women with a family to feed, and we incorrectly believe that a majority of them have pimps, are drug addicts, minors etc. I think these misperceptions are not an accident. Our competitive, hierarchical order erodes solidarity and we want to look down on prostitutes because of what prostitution reveals about ourselves. We don't want to admit how much we have in common with them, so we exaggerate the differences.

It's true that for the money, prostitutes rent their bodies and take this to an extreme by selling one of our most intimate acts. Nevertheless, wikipedia describes wage slavery as "a coerced set of choices...a condition under which a person must sell his or her labor power, submitting to the authority of an employer in order to prosper or merely to subsist." This, the article continues, implies among other things "the absence of unconditional access to non-exploitative property and a fair share of the basic necessities of life" and the absence of "non-hierarchical workers' control of the workplace and the economy as a whole."

In other words, in the absence of such conditions, many people will become "wage slaves" who have to rent themselves-- selling their smiles, time, bodies etc not only as blue collar workers, but also as

"professionals [who] are trusted to run organisations in the interests of their employers. The key word is ’trust’. Because employers cannot be on hand to manage every decision, professionals are trained to 'ensure that each and every detail of their work favours the right interests – or skewers the disfavoured ones' in the absence of overt control. [Thus] "[t]he resulting professional is an obedient thinker, an intellectual property whom employers can trust to experiment, theorize, innovate and create safely within the confines of an assigned ideology."

In fact, in some ways prostitutes degrade themselves less that other wage slaves who get married for money or reshape their whole personality, intellect or behavior as an act of subordination to external power. And in sharp contrast with the alarmist attention to the problems of prostitution, pimps and measure K, there is very little attention paid to the consequences of such (legally protected) hierarchy of wage slavery and boss-rule, which results in unspeakable destruction and suffering (in fact, most of the evil in the world). Given that this destruction and suffering, and the underlying causes of prostitution are so closely related, perhaps there are ways to strive toward a solution with an approach that unites all of us wage slaves.

By decriminalizing prostitution, we allow prostitutes to approach the same rights as other wage slaves--including the right to unionize and struggle toward a more decent future. In that more decent future, if it ever comes, I would love to write, as George Orwell did describing the anarchist-dominated streets of Barcelona, of how "in the streets were colored posters, appealing to prostitutes to stop being prostitutes."