This sexist system —shut it down!

 The U.S. Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade and demolishing the right to abortion is a brutally sexist attack on women workers, and particularly on Black, Latin and immigrant workers. Backed by gutter sexist Republicans and the domestically oriented faction of the capitalist ruling class, the Small Fascists, the Court is poised to escalate its attacks on workers and erase decades of hard-won reforms within the limits of the profit system.
Meanwhile, the rulers’ long-dominant imperialist wing, the Big Fascist liberals of finance capital, are losing one fight after the next: on abortion and guns, on voting rights and climate action—not to mention the growing debacle in Ukraine. As U.S. capitalism spirals into decline, and the split within the bosses’ ranks deepens, we have entered a period of extreme instability. The Big Fascists will stop at nothing—including full-blown fascism—to hold on to their power and their profits. They will try to use the backlash against the Supreme Court’s decision to mobilize workers and to defend their empire from imperialist rivals China and Russia. They know they can’t fight an imperialist war without women workers committed to their murderous system.
After the reversal of Roe v. Wade, tens of thousands of workers took to the streets in rage. Like the upsurge after George Floyd’s murder, these protests show the potential of an angry and militant working class. These workers and millions like them must break the bounds of reformism to smash the blood-sucking bosses and create a new society run by and for our class—that’s communism! PLP calls for a mass, multiracial, working-class movement to fight for a communist world that will end sexism and racism once and for all.
Chickens come home to roost
Donald Trump and the other hack politicians backed by the Small Fascists are openly sexist and racist; they’re Klanspeople in business suits. But beware of the Democratic Party liberals who swear their commitment to workers’ rights—and then stab us in the back time after time. The liberals’ longtime strategy is to pacify workers by masking the real ugliness of capitalism, which makes them the main danger to the international working class. No less treacherous are the pro-capitalist leaders of the historically racist and segregated feminist movement, led by the likes of admitted CIA agent Gloria Steinem, who pushed the idea that Black men are the enemies of Black women (Moguldom Nation, 6/29/21). The same goes for the “pro-choice” movement, whose founding icon Margaret Sanger was an open advocate of eugenics, a racist ideology (later adopted by the Nazis) that has led to the forced sterilization of hundreds of thousands of Black, Mexican, Puerto Rican, and immigrant women (pbs.org, 1/29/16). The legal foundation for this barbaric practice was laid by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1927 in Buck v. Bell (npr.org, 3/27/16).
The Big Fascists’ lack of unity and discipline has come back to haunt them. As chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1991, Jim Crow Joe Biden dismissed Anita Hill’s testimony of blatant sexual harassment and cleared the way for arch-sexist Clarence Thomas’s confirmation to the Supreme Court. More recently, liberal hero Ruth Bader Ginsburg selfishly refused to retire during Barack Obama’s presidency, when the Democrats could have confirmed a pro-choice successor. (In 2019, a year before she died at 87, Ginsburg praised anti-abortion colleagues Brett Kavanaugh—another sexual predator—and Neil Gorsuch as “very decent and very smart” (cnn.com, 7/26/19), and singled out Kavanaugh for praise for hiring women as his law clerks.)
At this point, the bosses’ state apparatus seems up for grabs. The Small Fascists have a death grip on the Supreme Court and have paralyzed Congress. They have mobilized their base in “red” states to control most of the state legislatures, which are now passing reams of anti-abortion laws while refusing to expand Medicaid or any reform that might benefit working women’s health. The overturning of Roe—despite a large majority of workers who favor abortion rights—is a watershed moment in a volatile time. It undermines the legitimacy of the bosses’ capitalist dictatorship, aka liberal demoracy. It throws a wrench into the Big Fascists’ plans to win women workers to fight in the next world war. The liberal rulers will do their best to use the pro-choice movement to keep women workers inside their dead-end system by voting for Democrats in this fall’s 2022 elections. Communists must be in that movement as well—to steer workers toward the fight for communism, the only way to abort this sexist, racist system.
Capitalist healthcare racist & sexist to the core
Like racism, sexism is essential to capitalism. The bosses use it both to divide workers and to super-exploit them. Internationally, women earn 77 cents for every dollar a man makes, even less if they have children (UN Women). The Big Fascist liars, constantly promoting the U.S. as the “greatest country in the world,” preside over a sexist, racist health care system that is exceptional only for its inability to serve workers’ needs or protect their lives. The U.S. ranks behind 55 other countries for maternal mortality; its rate is four times as high as Japan's and ten times as high as Italy's. Because of racist inequalities, the rate is three times as high for Black women as for white women. Infant mortality rates in the U.S. show similar patterns–so much for the "right to life!” (CDC & CIA World Factbook) A capitalist system that cannot provide decent health care to the working class does not deserve to exist. It must be destroyed by communist revolution.
Communism will liberate all women workers
Over a century ago, a communist-led revolution in Russia revealed the power of the working class to break their chains and remake the history of humanity (see box). While PLP supports abortion on demand under capitalism, the true liberation of working-class women can only be achieved by the violent overthrow of the sexist capitalist ruling class. Under communism, as part of a fundamental commitment to women’s health care, women would have access to abortion. But the conditions that make abortion necessary for so many women workers today—from poverty to a lack of decent child care–will no longer exist. With the elimination of money and wage slavery, free health care will be available to all. Free and collectivized child care will be the norm. That’s the world that all workers need to fight for!