https://old.reddit.com/r/FriendsofthePod/comments/1g2nbe6/discussion_offline_with_jon_favreau_hasan_piker/?sort=top&limit=500
https://old.reddit.com/r/FriendsofthePod/comments/1g2nbe6/discussion_offline_with_jon_favreau_hasan_piker/?sort=top&limit=500
Are you sure that you understand the quote that you posted? The quote is saying that prostitution is comparable to patriarchal marriage. The phrase "an openly legalised community of women", is saying that marriage is a legalized form of prostitution. That is to say that marriage under a capitalist society, where a women raises children at home while the man goes to work for a wage, is equal to prostitution, because the woman is financially dependent on the man and is required to have sex with the man. I don't see you condemning every marriage that exists under capitalism. You are in fact saying that engaging in prostitution is worse than marriage, when this quote that you posted is saying that prostitution is equal to marriage. It is not saying that prostitution is worse than marriage. So if you condemn the practice of sex work for exchanging sex for money, you must also equally condemn every marriage under capitalism because that is also an exchanging sex for money.
Isn't the passage also saying, however, that with the "abolition of the present system of production", that public prostitution, the prostitution we are all familiar with, will also be abolished? I can see how someone would read this and conclude that "Prostitution should be abolished under socialism." or even "All forms of Sex Work should be abolished under socialism". Since, it seems, that what is being argued in the passages, is that these forms of prostitution only exist as a result of the social relations of capital. That because people are not provided a means of subsistence, and must labor for those means (food, shelter, etc.), some have or are forced to, exchange sex for those means, placing them in the most exploitative situation. In that way, the argument about the "Family" is the same argument about "Prostitution", especially considering that sexual assault within the marriage was exempted from sexual assault laws (and in some places still is).
It would seem that the Bolsheviks believed this position, which was, prostitution exists only because of the social and economic inequalities between men and women.
From Selling Sex in the City: A Global History of Prostitution, 1600s-2000s
It's hard to say how effective they really were in my limited research. Following that paragraph, we have:
I've read some and skimmed other parts of this chapter. The chapter isn't specifically about the soviet era and prostitution, it is about the history of prostitution in Russia going back as far as the 1700s. Several times it is noted that there is limited data on prostitution during the soviet era, as the position officially was that it was eliminated as a result of the high employment of women.
I should note that I have not investigated the sources here. It could be a reasonable assumption that prostitution had gone up as they suggest here. Especially if the argument is that social and economic inequality drives prostitution rates (which is a theme throughout the chapter). This next excerpt from the section entitled "Society and Prostitutes" I think gets to the core of what you're objection is to this framing, and I think it makes a strong case:
So this really I think signals the dangers of not thinking materially about the nature of Prostitution. On its face, the assertions that poverty and inequality drive up the number of women (and at times men, be they heterosexual or queer) performing sex work is I think statistically true. However, this does not mean that with a change in social structures naturally will eliminate Prostitution. What it would appear, based on what I've read here, that the Soviet leadership started off with an honest attempt at putting this piece of theory into practice, and over time, due to the many external and internal pressures they were dealing with as the first socialist state, they fell into dogmatism.
That is the risk of this assessment by Marx and Engels. Let us say we have our revolution and implement a dictatorship of the proletariat, we attempt to reshape the social relations within our nation, we have to ask ourselves the question: How do we make social changes that align with the theory that sex work is only an outgrowth of the social relations of capital? What if this part of the theory doesn't actually hold up, and even with new social relations, ones that are far less exploitative than the ones under capitalism, there still remains a population of sex workers.
The Soviets appear to have not accepted this idea, and turned on the women practicing sex work as a moral failing.
There is a whole chapter on Shanghai and Havana in this book as well, Chapter 22: Prostitution in Shanghai, Chapter 16: Prostitution in Havana, that I have not looked at yet, but I'm curious to do so.
I think the takeaway for myself here is this: Being ridged about the idea that, under Socialism, given enough time, all sex workers will have found new roles in new industries, is dogmatism at best. I think the realistic outlook is that in the near term, within my lifetime, even just beyond my lifetime, even if great social change will happen here in the Imperial Core, ushering in a socialist reconstruction of society, it will not be enough to dissuade people from Sex Work, and that it very likely is incorrect to even attempt to dissuade people. Presented with the opportunity, there might be a whole host of people willing to turn away from sex work for something different, but I can't say for sure that there wouldn't also be people interested in continuing Sex Work under new and very likely less oppressive and exploitive conditions.