The U.S. ruling class is imploding. The leaked draft of a Supreme Court ruling to destroy a fundamental part of women’s healthcare—access to abortion—reveals a deeply divided ruling class. In the desperate battle between the Big Fascists of multinational finance capital and the domestically oriented Small Fascists, the U.S. bosses are ready and willing to destroy trust in their most sacred institution.
The Big Fascist media typically describe the fight over abortion as one between compassionate “pro-choice” liberals and heartless “pro-life” reactionaries. But this framing ignores the longstanding sexism and racism that bars working-class women from life-saving access to healthcare. It also minimizes the threat posed by the dominant Big Fascist bosses as they move toward a bloody global conflict and the vicious destruction of working-class lives around the world.
Antisexists, let’s not fall into the trap of voting for the liberal rulers who oppress us. They are the greatest der, not the lesser evil. The international Progressive Labor Party seeks to win our class to understand that the capitalist profit system is fundamentally incompatible with our health and development as working people. Working women’s access to decent healthcare can be won only when a mass party destroys the profit system with communist revolution.
Supreme Court rooted in slavery, in interest of exploiters
Before we can talk about the intensification of sexism in an already oppressive system, let’s dispel the myth that the Supreme Court—and all the lower courts that follow it--were ever neutral bodies. Far from it! The courts are where the ruling class can resolve its differences and create a legal justification for its racist and sexist oppression—all of it justified by having “the national interest” at heart.
The U.S. Constitution, the bedrock for every Supreme Court ruling, was written by enslavers to protect slavery (news.Berkeley.edu, 9/17/19). Built on the blood and mass murder of our class sisters and brothers, slavery generated huge accumulations of wealth. It was the foundation for U.S. capitalism and, eventually, the U.S. empire. The Constitution was essential in legalizing the exploitation and dehumanization of our class. Consider the Dred Scott decision of 1857, which ruled that Black people were “beings of an inferior order,” or Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which upheld racist Jim Crow laws as “separate but equal.” In the 1900s, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the forced sterilization of disabled workers, the imprisonment of ethnic Japanese families in concentration camps, and the criminalization of same-sex relationships. Under capitalism, there is only one absolute law: the law of profit. (For a look at how the bosses have used their legal apparatus to control reproduction, see page 7.)
Fascist dogs tear down their own myths
As liberal capitalist mouthpiece Jamelle Bouie wrote in the New York Times (5/6), the Supreme Court is “acting on behalf of the Republican Party and its allies. Whatever legitimacy it had retained was sacrificed in the drive to…overturn Roe v. Wade.” But why would the Big Fascists call the Supreme Court an “instrument of oppression” (New York Times, 5/8)? It’s because they need more unity from both bosses and workers as they move toward World War III—and they can’t get it without intensifying their attack on the isolationist Small Fascists. But regardless of which side disclosed the Court’s intention to eliminate Roe v. Wade and abandon nearly 50 years of precedent, it’s a clear sign of weakness for the Big Fascist liberals. When rulers expose their naked infighting, it can only alienate the people they must enlist for the next patriotic war.
The Small Fascists have already destroyed the U.S. Congress by ignoring the “rules” to keep differences within limits. Now the Big Fascists are taking down the Supreme Court. Without trusted institutions that can manage the two factions’ disagreements, the situation becomes increasingly volatile--which spells more attacks on workers. The move to outlaw abortion could be a precursor for attacks on other sections of the working class, from undocumented workers hoping to be legalized to LGBTQ workers planning to get married. Clearly, any reforms won under capitalism can be revoked.
Racist, sexist healthcare kills
Of course, sexist attacks on our class are nothing new. The U.S., which markets itself as a beacon of freedom and civil rights, has no guaranteed paid parental leave or universal childcare or healthcare. But it does have:
In reality, capitalism is the main obstacle to healthy childrearing—and the primary driver of abortion. Most women getting abortions already have at least one child. About 75 percent of abortion patients are “poor or low income” (Romper, 5/3), a big problem in a country where raising just one child costs over a quarter-million dollars (USDA, 2/18). Worldwide, these are the same women who most often get shortchanged on prenatal care and quality maternity and neonatal care (Pubmed, 7/17/19). Since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, this racist, sexist inequality has only grown worse.
For working-class women, capitalism makes pregnancy undesirable by turning a wonderful thing, a new life, into an impoverishing or even fatal development.
Big Fascists are big dangers
During his election campaign, U.S. President Jim Crow Biden tweeted that “as president, I will codify Roe into law” (10/5/19 at 11:35 AM). What Biden failed to mention is that he and his vice president, Top KKKop Kamala Harris. and the rest of the Democrats did nothing to protect working-class women’s access to abortion when they controlled both houses of Congress and the executive branch during the Barack Obama administration. It would be a grave mistake to let the liberal bosses turn abortion into a “vote or die”campaign where they force our class to choose among our exploiters.
Here is how much the Big Fascist liberals care about our health: As they seek to spend $40 billion more on the inter-imperialist war in Ukraine (abcnews, 5/9), they are cutting the measly $3,000 child tax credit to help working-class families withstand Covid-19, which still rages. Workers must reject these rulers who smile in your face and stab you in your back, again and again.
What must be done?
If we want to win the fight for the working class to have access to abortions and other healthcare, we must learn the lessons of the George Floyd movement. Any reform fightback can be co-opted by the bosses and steered toward the dead end of the voting booth., Everymember of the working class needs to make revolution primary over reform and join PLP to burn this capitalist system down. What does that mean today?
We must free class struggles from the grips of the fascists, Big or Small. We must build a large base of fightback where we are deepening relationships with workers, sharing CHALLENGE, and recruiting to PLP. That is how we will lay the foundation for a communist revolution and a new and healthier world for every child who’s brought into it.