The rise of McDonald’s and other low-wage service industries occurred during the so-called “deindustrialization” of the United States in the 1970s-2000s. This process was advanced by globally dominant U.S. capital, which relocated production abroad to access cheaper labor, weaker regulations, and higher rates of exploitation, while simultaneously undercutting the bargaining power and wages of U.S. workers at home. As factories closed from the 1970s onward, capitalism did not replace industrial employment with work that could offer equally stable wages; instead, it expanded sectors requiring minimal fixed capital, rapid labor turnover, and strict managerial control. Franchised service industries like McDonald’s flourished under these conditions by absorbing displaced workers into precarious, low-paid service jobs. Now a similar phenomena occurs across the United States as the capitalist crisis and its associated social crisis continues to plunge the world into complete depravity.

Today, as the tech sector contracts (one of the last to give hope for a stable “middle class”) and speculative industries shed labor, the same dynamic reappears in a more degraded form. Capital once again fails to generate socially productive employment and instead proliferates marginal, informal, and semi-illicit sectors, among them massage parlors. Just as fast food expanded in the wake of factory flight, massage parlors grow in the ruins of collapsing tech and service booms, as predictable outcomes of capitalist crisis, where across the United States the social rot only intensifies by the day.

Across the United States there has been a rapid proliferation of these so-called massage parlors. These businesses increasingly occupy vacant storefronts in declining strip malls, marked by blacked-out windows and neon signs advertising “exotic” services. While this growth might superficially suggest an expansion in demand for massage therapy, the reality is far more brutal. Many of these locations function as thinly veiled brothels trafficking trapped immigrant women, forming part of an organized system of sexual exploitation through which tens of thousands of immigrant women are trafficked each year. Anti-trafficking researchers estimate that between 7,500 and 9,000 illicit massage businesses are currently operating nationwide, making them one of the largest sources of human-trafficking complaints in the country. Closely linked to online advertising for commercial sexual services, this industry is estimated to generate between $2.5 and $2.8 billion annually.

Recent investigations illustrate the speed and scale of this expansion. A 2024 investigation in Portland, Oregon found that illicit massage parlors there had multiplied from an estimated 36 locations in 2019 to at least 114 by 2024. These operations now vastly outnumber fast-food chains in many areas, relying on easily replicable, low-capital models that allow them to evade detection while rapidly relocating workers.

Estimates suggest that between 15,000 and 50,000 women and children are forced into sexual slavery in the United States each year, though academic and government figures may be far lower due to chronic underreporting and the clandestine nature of the trade. By comparison, during the territorial peak of the so-called Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, the number of women and girls abducted and sold into slavery was estimated by researchers to have been up to 7,000. This was considered a primary justification for renewed U.S. intervention in the area. While ISIS sold women in shackles in slave markets, in the United States the same commodity is pilfered only in vastly expanded numbers behind glowing screens and neon signs.

The immigration policies of the bourgeois state play a central role in sustaining this system. Rather than protecting vulnerable populations, these policies produce a vast pool of undocumented and isolated women who can be trafficked from site to site with minimal resistance. Stripped of legal status and access to collective defense, immigrant women are rendered hyper-exploitable. While bourgeois politicians posture over elite scandals and moral outrage, the everyday reality is that tens of thousands of proletarian women are subjected to systematic sexual slavery within the belly of U.S. imperialism. The spectacle of scandal serves to obscure the material conditions that capitalism reproduces daily.

This explosion of sexual exploitation must be understood within the deepening social crisis of U.S. capitalism. Economic decline has intensified unemployment and pushed workers into increasingly precarious and degrading forms of labor. Capital’s demand for expanded exploitation of women has often been masked in the language of bourgeois feminism, celebrating “working women” while concealing the compulsion to sell labor-power under worsening conditions. The breakdown of the traditional family, while historically progressive in dissolving archaic patriarchal social forms, has not liberated women under capitalism nor has it destroyed the patriarchy. Instead, women’s bodies are increasingly commodified, consumed as objects of sexual gratification and turning intimacy into a commodity which can be pilfered to create an endless number of socially cripled addicts paralleling the way opioids and fentanyl ravage working-class communities.

Whether sold directly to an employer or mediated through platforms that disguise exploitation as petit-bourgeosis bodily autonomy, proletarian women are driven into informal sex work, including online sexual content production, as wages stagnate and social reproduction collapses. Sex and reproduction become sites of intensified capital accumulation, even as the bourgeoisie promotes reactionary ideologies of masculinity that fetishize domination, wealth, and control. These ideologies are but byproducts of a system that reduces all human relations to exchange. Only the abolition of capitalist social relations, and with them wage labor itself, can end the conditions that make sexual slavery a structural feature rather than a moral exception.