Working-class unity will defeat sexism with communist revolution here ♦ ICWP pamphlet: “The Communist Fight Against Sexism” here ♦
US Supreme Court Ruling: Defeat Fascist Attacks with Working-Class Unity for Communist Revolution
USA, July 10—People in the US woke up on June 25 to the reality that our class siblings already experience in El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Honduras: women will die because abortion has been criminalized.
That’s when the US Supreme Court reversed the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling which had granted the right to abortion to US women.
In the US, the legal situation now differs from state to state. And no US state has as strict a law as those Central American countries. Abortion is still permitted to save the life of the mother. But many states define that very narrowly. Already women have been forced to travel to another state or seek an unsafe and illegal termination of pregnancy. Women will also be placed in jeopardy because doctors will postpone emergency surgery until they get a legal opinion.
The US medical system is a patchwork of public and private for-profit institutions. US capitalism has prioritized its imperialist military and failed to provide a basic social safety net. This is not new, but capitalist decline and a deeply racist system has meant worsening health outcomes for workers, rising maternal death rates, unsafe working conditions, cutbacks in school lunches, a shortage of baby formula, increasing student debt, and millions of unhoused people. All while a few billionaires increase their wealth.
From Rage to Revolution
Abortion is just one of many recent attacks. The whole system is deeply racist, sexist, and anti-working class. We need a communist revolution. That’s the message we’re taking to the angry people in protests across the US.
More fascist attacks will follow the decision to allow states to criminalize abortion. Justice Clarence Thomas stated openly that in his sights, and those of the growing US fascist movement, are other privacy-based decisions: the availability of birth control, the decriminalization of homosexuality, and gay marriage. Transgender youth and their parents are already under attack.
The attack on abortion has been an organizing tool for a racist and fascist movement that has also targeted Jews, Blacks, Asians, Haitian and Latinx immigrants at the border. Capitalists use this to lower the living standards of all workers while a very few capitalists become super-rich.
Fighting Revolutionary Working-Class Unity Must Defeat “Divide and Conquer”
Many of our friends believe that electing Democratic Party politicians is all we can do to protect ourselves from increasing fascist attacks. Some agree that capitalism is no good, but “in the meantime” we should elect Democrats.
President Biden’s lukewarm executive order, supposedly protecting women’s ability to access health services, including abortion, has made that argument less convincing. Calls for electoral action seem to be based more on desperation than on a reasonable expectation that Democrats will do anything at all.
Biden and the Democrats are perfectly capable of carrying out a program that they believe in. The millions of dollars they committed to the proxy war in Ukraine make that clear.
It’s not just that we can’t count on the Democrats. It’s that we can’t count on capitalism to meet our most basic needs. Any reforms the working class has fought for can and will be wiped out when it’s politically expedient.
Capitalism is an inhumane system in which the suffering of the masses is the engine of riches and power for the few. It got its start kicking European peasants off the land they held in common and denying the humanity of enslaved Africans and Indigenous people. Enslavers used enslaved women as baby incubators. Sexual assault has long been a weapon of war.
The communist system we fight for, in contrast, will organize society to meet our human needs. It will end exploitation and the market. In communist society, we will collectively decide what we need and work together to produce it. That will lay the material basis for abolishing the sexist and racist divisions that have kept us in chains for so long.
Capitalism in crisis is becoming more and more fascist around the world. In the US and elsewhere, there are sharpening divisions between fascists and anti-fascists. We can convince anti-fascists of a communist vision and organize them into a fighting force.
The only way forward is to defeat the divisive fascist ideologies of racism and sexism and build the fighting unity of the working class. Only revolution can bring us the communist society we need.
Read the ICWP Pamphlet:
“The Communist Fight Against Sexism”
Available here
Front page of this issue
