BBC investigation into OnlyFans exposes the brutal reality of platform capitalism — and the political forces seeking to conceal it
“What sort of society drives its artists into pornography? One that does not need virtually any of them—is, in fact, ashamed of them, and wishes them to be ashamed too. It wishes the artists had the same view of themselves that it does—as scoundrels capable of any degradation. After all, there is always the danger one of these “scoundrels” may hit a nerve with the public and expose the rottenness of the social order before tens of millions.”[1]
David Walsh
"The community of women is a condition which belongs entirely to bourgeois society and which today finds its complete expression in prostitution. But prostitution is based on private property and falls with it. Thus, communist society, instead of introducing a community of women, in fact abolishes it."
Frederick Engels— The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State
"If you expel prostitution from society, you will unsettle everything on account of lusts."
Saint Augustine
The worst part about prostitution is that you're obliged not to sell sex only, but your humanity. That's the worst part of it: that what you're selling is your human dignity, not really so much in bed, but in accepting the agreement - in becoming a bought person.
Kate Millett
A BBC investigation has inadvertently torn the veil from one of the most profitable and ideologically protected sectors of the platform economy: the sexual content industry centred on OnlyFans. What the documentary reveals — and what it desperately attempts to obscure — is the operation of a system of exploitation inseparable from the social order defended by the British ruling class and its media apparatus.[2]
The investigation documents a world in which women are coerced, threatened, physically assaulted, and financially drained by predatory “managers” who openly describe their method as the “pimp method.” One agent, following a business model discussed in public Telegram forums, threatened to have a woman and her daughter “written off” before sending masked men to strangle her in her own home. As this article notes this is not an aberration but the norm: “he is following a business model that is discussed openly in these forums.”
Yet the BBC’s framing is entirely predictable. It isolates the most grotesque abuses, invokes the language of “modern slavery,” and calls for regulatory tinkering — all to prevent any examination of the capitalist foundations of the industry.
A platform built on the commodification of human intimacy
OnlyFans, owned by Fenix International, generated $684 million in pre-tax profits last year. Its business model is simple: extract a 20 per cent rent from the sale of sexualized images and interactions, while disclaiming responsibility for the conditions under which this content is produced. The platform “takes its 20 per cent cut and washes its hands of everything else.”
This is the purest expression of the rentier logic of platform capitalism. OnlyFans does not produce content; it extracts value from the labour of others. It does not employ creators; it parasitises them. It does not police exploitation; it creates the conditions in which exploitation becomes the norm.
The OFM Empire Telegram group, with 24,000 members, functions as an open training ground for predatory extraction. Agents take 50–70 per cent of creators’ earnings, demand full account access, impose fines for leaving contracts, and enforce compliance through threats and violence. This is not a fringe phenomenon. It is the informal enforcement arm of a platform that relies on the atomization and desperation of its workforce.
The BBC’s ideological function: to contain, not expose
The BBC’s response exemplifies bourgeois journalism confronting the fallout of its social structure. The documentary references the Online Safety Act — a broad censorship tool aimed at suppressing political dissent — and features an interview with the UK’s anti-slavery commissioner, who describes the issue as “modern slavery.”
This framing is politically significant. Calling it “modern slavery” portrays extreme exploitation as a rare crime rather than a fundamental feature of capitalism. This allows the state to target a few offenders while leaving the economic forces that compel women into the industry unchallenged. The BBC’s stance “individualises exploitation, prosecutes the worst offenders, and leaves the economic structure that produces the desperation intact.” In doing so, the BBC isn’t exposing the system; it’s managing public outrage to ensure the system’s continuation.
The pseudo left’s role.
The BBC's probe into OnlyFans has triggered the expected reaction from the pseudo-left circle surrounding the Labour Party, NGOs, and the 'sex-positive' academic industry. Fearing that revelations of coercion, violence, and exploitative middlemen could threaten their rallying cry “sex work is work,” they have swiftly come to the platform economy's defence with fervour often seen among junior allies of capitalism.
Their stance is not just incorrect; it is politically regressive, lacking in theoretical credibility, and socially harmful. The so-called pseudo-left argues that the abuses reported by the BBC — including women being threatened, strangled, extorted, and robbed by “managers” employing the “pimp method” — are caused by too little regulation, not capitalism itself. Their repeated answer is always the same: increased oversight, more NGOs, and expanded “labour rights” for an industry fundamentally based on turning human intimacy into commodities.
This is not Marxism; it represents the ideology of the petty-bourgeois professional class, which sees commodification not as a social disaster but as a career opportunity. The pseudo-left views OnlyFans creators as ‘entrepreneurs’ needing better protections, and uses terms like “choice” and “agency which reflect the upper-middle-class worldview. This reflects the pseudo-left’s class stance: a segment disconnected from the working class and uninterested in challenging the profit-driven system.
“Sex work is work”: the slogan of capitalist realism.
The phrase “sex work is work”, often associated with the pseudo-left, is not an innovative idea; rather, it exemplifies capitalist realism—the notion that all human interactions must become commodities, and opposing this is seen as prudish or anti-sex. However, the women featured in the BBC documentary were not acting out of genuine ‘agency.’ Instead, economic hardship pushed them into an industry designed to profit from their bodies. The platform itself deliberately blurs the line between ‘content creation’ and outright sexual exploitation.”
The pseudo-left’s claim that this is merely another form of labour is comparable to the justification of child labour in the 19th century: “They choose to work. They need the money. Who are we to judge?” This is not liberation but capitulation. Their support for OnlyFans is deliberate, reflecting the material interests of a class that has embedded itself into the commodification of identity, sexuality, and self-presentation.
In this class, commodification is portrayed as empowerment, precarity as flexibility, exploitation as entrepreneurship, and the market as the definitive measure of value. These ideas serve as ideological tools of neoliberalism, framing capitalist relations around concepts such as “consent,” “agency,” and “self-expression.”
The women from the working class featured in the documentary — facing threats, assaults, and financial exploitation — are absent from the pseudo-left’s perspective. They serve as uncomfortable reminders that capitalism is not a space for self-promotion but a system rooted in coercion.
The pseudo left’s political function: to neutralise opposition to capitalism
The pseudo-left is essential in maintaining the stability of the capitalist system. By claiming that exploitation can be defined as “safe,” “ethical,” or “empowering,” they shift blame away from the system itself and onto individual bad actors. This tactic is similar to the BBC’s ideological strategy, which “individualises exploitation, prosecutes the worst offenders, and leaves the economic structure that produces the desperation intact.”
The pseudo-left adopts a progressive veneer, condemning 'pimp managers” but defending the platform that allows them. They criticise violence yet endorse the market that necessitates it. They push for regulation but oppose any challenge to the commodification of the human body. Their politics are not reformist but rather counter-revolutionary.
The Marxist position: abolition, not sanitisation
The Marxist view is straightforward: turning human intimacy into a commodity isn't a problem that rules can fix. It originates from social forces that erode stable jobs, weaken cultural work, and push millions into precarious survival strategies. “No amount of regulation can make the commodification of the human body humane.”
The pseudo-left opposes this stance because it dismisses Marxism, class analysis, and the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism. It also rejects the idea that human relations should be freed from market forces. Instead, it functions as an ideological cover for the very system responsible for the horrors reported by the BBC. The working class must oppose the pseudo-left’s attempt to normalise exploitation. Fighting against the platform economy—such as OnlyFans, Uber, Deliveroo, Amazon, and the broader digital rentier capitalism—requires a revolutionary agenda: expropriating tech monopolies, abolishing the market in human intimacy, reimagining culture and labour as public goods, and building an independent socialist movement.
Predictably, the pseudo-left aligned with the Labour Party and NGOs will claim that “sex work is work,” asserting that the core issue is stigma and insufficient regulation. This stance effectively concedes to capitalism, cloaked in radical rhetoric. It normalises and accepts the commodification of deeply personal human relations as inevitable.
It views the OnlyFans creator as an “entrepreneur” in need of better labour protections, ignoring the fact that most women join the platform due to economic coercion. The document succinctly highlights this: “The language of ‘choice’ and ‘agency’ is the ideology of the upper-middle class, for whom OnlyFans might be a lucrative side hustle. For Rebecca from South Wales, it was a trap. “The pseudo left’s celebration of 'agency' is the moral alibi of the market. It is the same logic that hails Uber drivers as “micro entrepreneurs” while they sleep in their cars.
The BBC investigation should be viewed within the broader decline of sustainable income in the cultural and creative sectors. As highlighted even well-known artists like Kate Nash now incur losses on each performance and resort to platforms like OnlyFans to finance their tours. This is not due to personal shortcomings but results from factors such as streaming services paying just $0.00173 per play, touring expenses increasing by 40% since the pandemic, 80% of music revenue being captured by only 1% of artists, and the monopolisation of cultural production by a few large corporations.
Given these conditions, turning to sexual commodification is not a voluntary choice but a forced response to the collapse of stable, socially supported cultural work. OnlyFans is not an exception; it represents the inevitable outcome of neoliberal cultural production.
Why can't regulation humanise exploitation? The BBC’s suggestion of increasing regulation is deceptive. Regulation assumes that the market is legitimate, but the market for sexualized images isn’t a flawed part of the system; it’s a lucrative and growing sector of capitalism. The violence Rebecca endured isn’t an accident; it’s the way this market enforces itself, demanding continuous content creation even in desperate conditions.
“No regulation can humanise the commodification of the human body." The state cannot eliminate this exploitation because it is inherently designed to uphold the market. The socialist solution: eliminate the conditions that lead to commodification.
The only way forward is to eliminate the social conditions that force women into the platform economy, such as unstable jobs, social isolation, cultural monopolisation, and the reduction of all human interactions to market exchanges. This entails expropriating tech monopolies, socialising digital platforms, transforming cultural labour into a public good, and forming an independent political movement for workers. The violence reported by the BBC is not an isolated incident; it is capitalism laid bare without its ideological mask.
