It is now an accepted cliche of television crime drama - the fight against organized sex-slavery and sex-trafficking, the heroic compassion of cops rescuing (almost always) women from their captors. Often these victims are portrayed as having been literally kidnapped, occasionally sold by parents; certainly they end up in the hands of evil men. The tales, whether marketed on CSI-type shows or television newsmedia or by anti-trafficking NGOs, are usually lurid, moralizing, often exaggerated, frequently racist, and don’t often suggest a serious attempt to understand what is really happening and why. Which isn’t to say that terrible things are not happening, obviously and banally.

But right at the moment, I’m not talking about DynCorp. The following comments are based upon personal observation and involvements, and certainly don’t amount to some definitive account of the phenomena being discussed. They also relate to events a few years ago, and I am hardly an expert. But of the instances of which I am directly aware, the following seems to me a reasonable account, and a set of reasonable assertions as to how policy and practice can act.

Put simply, there are people in Australia, or have been very recently, without the legal right to work in the sex-industries (or any other economies), sometimes without the legal right to be in Australia at all, and yet working in legal brothels - where these exist. The number in Melbourne has increased in my adult life, though not to enormous numbers - again, so far as I can tell. And economies, profitable activities, are based around this fact. But to understand why and how it is necessary to consider where the imperative is for such economies.

Some would say these are ‘contract workers’, some ‘trafficked women’ - the truth, insofar as it has been accessible to me, seems different from and/or somewhere between what is usually taken to be meant by either term, whether normalising or luridly outraged. (I’ve only seen women, which I suppose doesn’t prove that there are not others around.)

At least in the cases I’ve seen, the central imperatives and conditions of possibility of this particular kind of market - that of getting people into Australia for informal sex-work - really doesn’t seem to have been coming from brothel owners per se. While there have been periods of labour shortage - ie. times where it has been more difficult for brothel-owners to recruit enough of the workers they want to have - this market isn’t primarily driven by the need for more workers, or even for particular kinds of workers (by which I mean nationalities/ethnicities). Though I suppose a profit squeeze - owners are always claiming that there is one, not always plausibly - might increase the tendency of owners to take certain kinds of risk, in general there are already people here who are just as easy to hire, including non-white people for various racialized niche-markets; multiculturalism, immigration, remember?

Plus, now, an enormous labour market of international students with limited work rights and limited employment possibilities, required to not fail at full-time study on penalty of deportation or, at best, an extremely expensive repeating of subjects.

So entrepreneurs seeking to profit from sex-work economies know that there are certainly people available for work.

And I’m not aware of evidence that it is really that much cheaper or easier for the legal establishments involved to have these people working. Whatever benefits may exist for most of these may be real, but hardly overwhelming enough in themselves to motor some global conspiracy of criminals. The middle men taking people to and from the brothels seemed formally separate from the brothel itself, in any case.

For related reasons, I assume, in these cases the imperatives of this particular market mostly aren’t derived from clients either.

And so I’m suggesting that the driving imperatives of this market are from those who come to work. Not least because sex-work, like many other industries globally, is integrated into the global remittance economies. People in first world countries are often still not truly aware of the shift in the forms of both cross-border and labour mobility, of the emerging intersections of border regulation and economy, and of the parallel rise of remittance economies in ‘third world’ countries. It is now common in many places for families to survive on money sent back by relatives and spouses working overseas, for years at a time in many cases: a brother in oil-fields in the Middle East, a daughter working as a nanny in any first-world economy, a mother working as a sex-worker in Australia. This currency sent back to home is not only the basis of life of enormous numbers of people, whose conditions of existence and even odds for survival would very often be significantly altered downwards without such income; this money is now the largest source of foreign currency in many nations. When the US started pressuring countries to shut down the organized sending back of cash to the Philippines, on the basis that some of this money might conceivably be being used to help fund leftist guerrillas or other groups, this seriously threatened the Philippines’ economy, the basis of life of a big chunk of the population, even the stability of the state.

Anti-trafficking groups now sometimes address issues of border control, at least to the extent of suggesting that people rescued from traffickers (or arrested for visa-violating sex-work, the difference is often rhetorical) should not be deported. And police are sometimes happy enough to agree, at least until they have given evidence against the traffickers and sex-slavers. Politicians often want to take a strong stand against (sex-)slavery: the issue is a good one for push-button moralizing law’n'order talk. Which might at least mean better treatment for some of those concerned. As long as they are victims of trafficking and not criminals conspiring to falsify a basis of entry and illegally work in Australia.

So if I am faced with police asking me what I am doing working in a brothel with false papers and no legal right to work at all, I can either: (a) say I entered into a contract with someone to supply me with false papers and get me into the country and get me a job, so I could send money back home in many cases, or (b) say I was tricked into being a sex-slave by evil traffickers. The differences in how I get treated, based upon what I choose, can be enormous. Help and support, sympathy and victim-status, residency at least for a while, versus being criminalized, charged with being a whore, jailed or caged in a a detention center, deported. (Of course, even if I say I was knowingly entering into agreements to do these things, I could still get myself some better treatment possibly if I provided evidence against those who I paid for these services - they can still be arrested and can still receive very serious sentences. Which is one reason why costs have gone up for such services.)

I’m not saying people are lying, though these differences and the agendas of cops and social workers and NGOs gives a bunch of reason why I might make those choices. But many campaigns against sex-slavery are really campaigns against ‘trafficking’, often equated with the organized, profitable arrangement of illegal border crossing, especially if such crossing and related ’services’ are to be paid for, by the person doing the crossing, from income generated in the work performed at the destination. Any campaign along these lines which wants sympathy for victims of trafficking, but which doesn’t address what should happen to people who knew what they were doing and had very good reasons (emotive eg: the survival of entire families in dire poverty in insert-Third-World-country), is objectively seeking to institutionalize the conditions under which people will be faced with the choices noted above.

The cliches of anti-trafficking will both circulate and continue to have an objective basis. Harsh border control regimes, strong anti-trafficking law, means that those organizing these activities have strong reasons to want to control those they bring in while they are here and working. This itself is a kind of abuse, and isolation and control opens up the space for further abuse, further disempowering those coming in. And the costs those who work here pay, the contract which says money comes back for getting into the country and being able to work, goes up on the basis of risk - even apart from the difficulty isolated and disempowered individuals in a foreign country have in asserting themselves.

Sex-work is a key industry for this activity in large part because it is a relatively high-income, often informal if not illegal economy for which no particular or recognized skills or credentials are required. Because of the potential size of the income, especially relative to those in the most common countries of origin, it is possible for someone working here to support a number of people through remittances - sometimes a large number of people. Etcetera.

Refugees and asylum-seekers. Economic refugees. Illegals.

Victims of trafficking. International students.

‘Pro-refugee’ politics in Australia, in its dominant articulation, centred and still centres on the endless circulation of stereotypes of noble political refugees, or ‘humanitarian’ cliches of the suffering of worthy victims. Essentially re-capitulating a version of the state’s criteria of acceptability but claiming an implicit, privileged pipeline to the truth of those (for example) in the camps, as if ‘pro-refugee’ activists had undertaken their own ‘determination process’ and found people worthy, ‘genuine’.

The point: Never have these categories been less useful in understanding the current moment.

In Clara Zetkin’s My Memorandum Book, Lenin is quoted at some length about his own “ascetic” qualities - which he sometimes discusses in a somewhat self-deprecating way, as an ‘old man’ talking to youth. She also has Lenin bemoaning the ways of radical youth, with their sexual “hypertrophy” and such. Lenin comments that

Dissoluteness in sexual life is bourgeois, is a phenomenon of decay. The proletariat is a rising class. It doesn’t need intoxication as a narcotic or a stimulus. Intoxication as little by sexual exaggeration as by alcohol.

And in the same text, Lenin is quoted saying this:

“I was told that a talented woman communist in Hamburg is publishing a paper for prostitutes and that she wants to organise them for the revolutionary fight. Rosa acted and felt as a communist when in an article she championed the cause of the prostitutes who were imprisoned for any transgression of police regulations in carrying on their dreary trade. They are, unfortunately, doubly sacrificed by bourgeois society. First, by its accursed property system, and, secondly, by its accursed moral hypocrisy. That is obvious. Only he who is brutal or short-sighted can forget it. But still, that is not at all the same thing as considering prostitutes – how shall I put it? – to be a special revolutionary militant section, as organising them and publishing a factory paper for them. Aren’t there really any other working women in Germany to organise, for whom a paper can be issued, who must be drawn into your struggles? The other is only a diseased excrescence. […]

“Besides, the question of prostitutes will give rise to many serious problems here. Take them back to productive work, bring them into the social economy. That is what we must do. […] The Party must not in any circumstances calmly stand by and watch such mischievous conduct on the part of its members. It creates confusion and divides the forces. And you yourself, what have you done against it?”

The party cannot stand idly by and allow someone to be involved in the political organisation of prostitutes, or even to produce a paper for or with prostitutes. Lenin doesn’t say exactly what kind of confusion and division he thinks that such activity must create, so I can only really make guesses as to these concerns about such involvement - involvement with those who embody a “diseased excrescence”.

Of course, during the civil war Lenin ordered that prostitutes be shot.

So someone got killed yesterday. A young guy from India, who came here on a student visa, paid a lot of money to get an accounting degree, worked crappy jobs, applied for permanent residency and got it, and was stabbed to death.

He was stabbed on his way to work at a Hungry Jacks, and staggered in bleeding heavily, was taken to hospital and died.

The coverage usually mentioned that he was Indian, and sometimes that he had been an international student, though given the scale of the issue in the public sphere in recent times one wouldn’t exactly say that this aspect was given a great deal of prominence in most media outlets.

Now let’s compare how this was reported. ABC News said that:

Senior Sergeant Dave Snare says there is no indication so far that the attack was racially motivated.

“I think to jump to any conclusion like that is presumptions and may well interfere with the investigations,” he said.

Whereas the Herald-Sun stated that:

Sen-Sgt Dave Snare said police did not believe the attack was race-driven and were unware [sic] of the attacker’s motive.

“I think to draw any conclusion as to the motive might interfere with the investigation and would be presumptuous at this stage,’’ he said.

Can you spot the difference? While the former says, essentially, we don’t know, the latter says, essentially, we think it wasn’t. Given that what police don’t know appears to be substantial at this stage, they both smack of minimisation. The latter, however, smacks of the Herald-Sun doing a little extra effort to dismiss, beyond what everyone else seemed to think the police were saying. Which seems presumptuous.

Almost all media, in Australia and in India, reported the stated views of the police in terms more-or-less identical to those of the ABC, with slight differences of emphasis: “at this stage there was no known motive and there was no evidence the man was targeted because of his race“, “at this stage there was no known motive and there was no evidence the youth was targeted because of his race. “I think to draw any conclusion as to the motive may interfere with the investigation and would be presumptuous at this stage,” he said.“, etcetera.

Particularly in relation to Indian international students - ie. people whose protests and resistance could conceivably and massively impact upon multi-billion dollar economies - I don’t trust the police, or the state government, or the media. Not that I think everyone is in some homogeneous, coherent, organized conspiracy. I just think that it would be naive to imagine than interests this substantial, based in economies which have been shown to be fragile, would not get the attention of what passes for powerful people in this state, who would want any possibility of further damage to the delicate integration of Australia’s international education industry in world markets to be managed away. And parts of all of these institutions - the ones I’m saying I don’t trust - would thus start to share in such a goal, to varying extents, in various ways, as institutions or individuals within institutions.

Though in this case, perhaps, maybe the Herald-Sun was just having a very rare bad day. Or maybe everyone else got it wrong. There are also other possibilities. Who knows?

As usual, public policy is the continuation of class war by other means.
I’m not saying there is some kind of conspiracy against Indian students, but nonetheless some people are conspiring, and the people they are conspiring against are students from India.

Call it policy, the drive to expand, the imperatives of risk management in the politics of accumulation, whatever: this state is pursuing an agenda to minimize and disappear the problems of the international education economies without directly changing the underlying conditions through access to or eligibility for ‘welfare’ or similar resources or services, let alone any shift in the social role of what I’m suddenly going to start calling these ‘guest consumers’ - and while attempting to generate a wider base amongst elites across nations so it won’t be so disruptive if they squeeze out a big chunk of the least wealthy people here on student visas. The least wealthy being, currently, a very significant proportion of students who are objectively struggling with poverty and indebtedness as highly-obligated moments of transnational social systems.

If all goes well, the resistance or struggles of these Indian students will no longer be able to have such massive consequences on Victoria’s largest source of ‘export’ cash. Current policies seek to reduce the fragility of the integration of these economies in world markets - Austrade at work, etcetera - which it is hoped might generate a new round of accumulation on a new basis while undermining the evident source of power of any troublesome people who might take action on the basis of views concerning their emerging roles in the global divisions of labor and wealth, the circulation of commodities of which they are more than one.