2015 protests against Death Squads in Honduras
September 7—The capitalist rulers of Texas (USA) have intensified their fascist attack on the working class with some deadly new laws.
One allows any random person to sue anyone who helps someone get an abortion. This kicks in at six weeks, when an embryo isn’t even a fetus yet. The aim is to bankrupt women’s health clinics so that desperate pregnant people are once again driven to dangerous bloody back-alley abortions.
The broader aim is to mobilize a mass fascist movement that can work hand-in-hand with the capitalist state.
Another piece of the strategy is a new voting law that encourage “partisan poll watchers” to threaten and intimidate BIPOC voters. This in a state that just legalized carrying handguns with no training or licensing requirements.
“It’s vigilantism,” said a Texas friend. “They’re the US Taliban,” commented another friend. “This is like the Fugitive Slave Act, where they deputized any white person to kidnap any Black person and turn them in for a bounty,” said another.
The anti-abortion law is racist. Indigenous, Latina and Black women already have the least access to health care of any kind, including reproductive health. It mainly attacks working-class women who don’t have the means to get an abortion out of state or to support a larger family. It treats women as little more than a means to produce wage-slaves and cannon-fodder for the capitalist class.
Many are denouncing the Texas law, marching angrily, or trying to take down anti-abortion vigilante websites. They know that a society that truly values human life would provide health care and everything else that babies, children and adults need to live.
Such a society will have to be communist, not a “kinder and gentler” capitalism. It will have to replace wages, money, and markets with voluntary work to produce and share what everyone needs. Communism will finally end class society and, with it, the foundations of sexism and racism.
In communism, kids will be raised in community, not in isolation. The work and joy will be shared. Nobody will be prevented from bearing a child or forced to bear an unwanted one. We expect that reproductive decisions, like all others, will be made with the help of a collective.
Communism will have no state institutions (like cops and jails) to repress the masses. Instead, the Party will organize everyone we can into a unified network of communist collectives. That’s how we’ll make decisions and solve social problems. We will support our neighbors and comrades, not snitch on them.
This is the message we need to bring to those mobilizing against fascism, to industrial workers and to soldiers: Mobilize masses for communism!
It’s what we need to share with those who rely on the US Supreme Court to declare the “citizen enforcement” part of the Texas law unconstitutional. Or on Biden and the Democratic Party to “save abortion rights” with a federal law. They are not on the side of the working class! The enemy of your enemy isn’t always your friend.
Liberals bemoan the rise of fascist vigilantes like the Texas anti-abortionists and the so-called “Proud Boys.” But too many wait vainly and suicidally for the capitalists’ politicians, laws and courts to stop them.
We need to learn from the long history of collusion between the capitalist state and civilian fascists.
Our friend mentioned the bounty hunters unleashed on fugitives from slavery. After slavery, police would arrest Black people and hold them in jail while alerting the Ku Klux Klan to organize lynch mobs. Death squads in Central America, Indonesia and many other places were/are civilian fascists (often trained by US imperialism) doing the dirty work of the state.
The Texas capitalists’ law was written precisely to mobilize civilian fascists. The purpose was to prevent lawsuits against the state government and its official agents.
The capitalists and their state are the main enemies of the working-class masses. They use free-lance fascist vigilantes when it serves their purpose.
Our class must prepare to take on all of them with communist revolution.