October 2—Thousands of antisexist workers and youth rallied and marched in dozens of cities across the U.S. today to confront the capitalist bosses’ sexist assault on women’s reproductive health. Millions of workers are rightly outraged at Senate Bill 8 (SB8) passed last month in Texas. This law bans abortions once fetal heart activity can be detected (approximately six weeks in gestation). Backed by isolationist Small Fascist (see Glossary, page 6) bosses like Texas Governor Greg Abbott, similar restrictive laws could soon spread across many southern states.
As was certainly the case today, the struggle for access to abortion gets framed as a tug-of-war between progressive “pro-choice” liberal leaders and reactionary “pro-life” conservatives. However, this framing seeks to conceal past and present racist, obstacles to life-saving health care for working class women and conveniently minimizes the threat posed by the dominant Big Fascist bosses in viciously destroying working-class lives both in the U.S. and around the world.
As economic crisis and inter-imperialist rivalry intensify, the capitalist bosses and their politician servants are driven to further attack workers’ standard of living and push a dehumanized fascist culture. Restricting access to basic medical procedures like abortions under the guise of being “pro-life” or denying needed medical care to working class women via a health care system that serves the insurance bosses are just a couple of the many ways the bosses can shore up their profits and attack the working class.
Communists in the international Progressive Labor Party (PLP) seek to win our class to understand the capitalist profit system as fundamentally incompatible with our health and development as working people. Truly equitable access to health care and other essential services will only be won by uniting our class on an international level through a mass PLP to destroy the profit system with communist revolution.
Capitalism profits off sexism
Deadly restrictive laws such as SB8 are only the latest sexist attacks by the capitalists against the working class. From its inception, capitalism has always relied on sexist wage differentials in order to garner billions in profits. While the liberal bosses fawn over a tiny percentage of female executives as proof that capitalism “can work for everyone,” the sexist reality persists of women workers making 84 cents for every dollar their male worker counterparts make (Pew Research, 5/21). Even more insidious is capitalism’s continued disregard for unpaid domestic labor, such as child rearing, which remains primarily shouldered by women workers.
The notion that any worker under capitalism has a significant degree of “autonomy” over their own self gets contradicted by the exploitative nature of capitalism. As workers under the profit system, we have no option but to undersell our labor power to the bosses in exchange for a wage. Women workers, and in particular Black women workers, are attacked the hardest by capitalism. Sexist violence and discrimination affect women workers most acutely. These sexist attacks and divisions are used to weaken our class and can only be overcome by uniting as an entire class against capitalism.
Big Fascist liberals have more blood on their hands
The dozens of reformist mass organizations responsible for today's rallies are by and large in lockstep politically with the finance capital Big Fascist wing of the U.S. ruling class, currently fronted by President Joe Biden. On the heels of the Afghanistan withdrawal debacle and the ruthless anti-Black racism on full display at the U.S.-Mexico border, these Big Fascists desperately need some means to paint themselves as defenders of the working class while attacking their Small Fascist rivals.
But even a casual glance at their “women’s rights” events show how drastically they fall short. By and large, such events are filled with relatively affluent white professionals. Black, Latin, Asian, indigenous, and lower-income white women workers—those most threatened by the implementation of abortion restrictions—are those least represented in the liberal-led arena.
This exclusion points to the racist and class character of abortion and reproductive health access under capitalism. For women bosses and wealthy families, reproductive care has always been relatively easy to obtain. For the working class, Black women in the U.S.—millions of whom live in states or cities headed by liberals—are three to four times more likely to die a maternal-related death compared to white women (Health Affairs, 2/4/19).
The Big Fascists’ dedication to maintaining capitalism above everything else—to the tune of cutting welfare benefits, closing hospitals, and poisoning the air and water—is what condemns millions of workers every year to poor health and premature death. It’s what drives the bosses to deport pregnant women workers from Haiti or Honduras to die in the desert. It’s what drives them to launch drone strikes in Afghanistan or Somalia that massacre children. What was these workers’ “choice” on the matter?
Workers’ power is key
As workers, we must hold no illusions about who is endangering our health, safety, and development. In order to truly guarantee a healthy existence for our class, we need to overthrow capitalism, a political and economic system based on the profits and privileges of a few in favor of a communist system that prioritizes workers’ well being above all else.
After workers took power in the October Revolution, all abortions were made legal in the Soviet Union by 1920. As we build the fight to beat back sexist and racist laws like SB8 we can never lose sight that the most radical social advances occur when working people violently seize state power from the bosses. Join the PLP today and help build this revolutionary struggle.