Indiana Leads Attack on Working Class

After weeks of vocal protest, Indiana Governor Mike Pence has begun to walk back his bigoted “religious freedom” law, which sanctioned refusal of service to customers based on their gender identity or sexual orientation.
Sexist Attacks
Members of the homosexual and transgender population are frequently targeted in sexist campaigns for violating gender norms. Forced to the margins of society, these people make easy targets to enforce the sexist order. Their persecution in Indiana will reinforce the persecution of women while dividing a potentially united working class.
Women are always targeted by the sexist anti-abortion movement. On March 30, under a 2014 amendment to the state criminal code, a judge in Indiana sentenced Indian immigrant Purvi Patel to 20 years in prison for having a miscarriage and abandoning her stillborn fetus (NYT, 4/1). This year to date, 235 bills have been proposed around the country to limit abortion rights. Many seek to criminalize pregnant women as well as doctors and clinics that provide for women’s health (RHRealityCheck, 3/31).
The attack on women is often intertwined with racism. In an atmosphere of surging anti-immigrant racism, Indiana has chosen Purvi Patel and Chinese immigrant Bei Bei Shuai to test the new law’s limits precisely because they are Asian immigrants. Once precedent is set with these prosecutions, the attack will be extended to all women.
New Southern Strategy
Governor Pence’s attack is an extension of the Republican Party’s “Southern Strategy,” a 50-year-old campaign to appeal to the most reactionary elements in capitalist society. The strategy uses racist and sexist attacks on the working class to roll back the social safety net while escalating police violence in poor neighborhoods.
Capitalism needs scapegoats for the misery caused by their system. This is the ultimate goal of the Southern Strategy: white workers fighting Black workers, men fighting women, native-born workers fighting immigrants, straight people fighting gay people.
In 1981, Republican strategist Lee Atwater summed up the strategy:
“You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘n-----, n-----, n-----.’ By 1968 you can’t say ‘n-----’—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct … is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites” (New York Times, 9/25/07).
Democrats quickly joined the game. In 1976, president Jimmy Carter vowed to protect “ethnic purity” in the U.S. and to oppose any mandate to integrate federal housing, a stand that helped him win the presidency. In 1992, Bill Clinton took time off from his campaign to fly back to Arkansas and personally oversee the execution of Ricky Ray Rector, a mentally handicapped Black man. The gambit helped to swing a large portion of the white vote and enabled Clinton to “end welfare as we know it” as president. In 2009, Barack Obama, feeding the myth of a “culture of poverty,” castigated Black working-class youth for “aspiring to be the next LeBron or Lil Wayne” rather than scientists or engineers (Reuters, 7/16/09).
The U.S. bosses’ effort to roll back the gains of the civil rights and labor movements has taken different forms over the last forty years. Black and Latin workers are gunned down in the streets by racist police — 111 people were murdered by police in March alone — or railroaded into a vast system of concentration camps. The U.S. prison and jail system, with more than two million inmates, holds the largest incarcerated population in the world.
During the economic crisis that began in 2008, 90 percent of U.S. workers have seen their income decline (EPI, 2/20/15). As banks were bailed out, workers lost their homes in record numbers. As the business community received record tax breaks and handouts, union membership has continued to decline. As salaries for top university administrators grow at a record pace, tuition hikes have created more than $1 trillion in student debt. Workers are rightfully angry, but it remains an open question as to who they will blame for their troubles.
Mike Pence may have overstepped with his religious freedom law, at least for now. Pence has deferred to his masters in the Indiana business community by demanding revisions to put a humanitarian face on the law. But workers should not be fooled. Only a united working class can hope to challenge the capitalist class. Only a communist analysis can give us the tools workers need for unity.