TEXAS CHANGES ITS NAME TO GILEAD: REALITY IMITATING ART
Women won the right to abortion in the US in 1973 after years of self induced abortions, some deadly, women’s networks connected to underground clinics, while enraged women developed feminist consciousness during the confluence of the civil rights and anti-war movements in the 1960’s. Women took to the streets, some arguing for socialist demands, but most making the basic democratic demand that “Abortion is a Woman’s Right to Choose. This democratic slogan won out in the mass movement with the socialist and transitional demands pushed to the side, not without the connivance of reformist socialism.
The socialist demands were and remain for: Free Abortion on Demand, Free Medical Care for All, sex education and access to birth control, safe spaces for youth, free pre-school and 24 hour child care and jobs for all at livable wages, working class independence, and a workers government. Women’s Liberation through Socialist Revolution was not advocated for, and was even eschewed as ultra leftism by the major left groups. Mothers are still driven to extremes finding appropriate child care sufficient to allow them to work. When they can’t, kids die locked in cars or are left at home alone.
The reformists won the leadership of the women’s movement and the trade union leadership found their feminist side in association with these activists in the Democratic Party (such as in NOW). The attempt to form a working class women’s movement politically independent of the Democrats in the Coalition of Labor Union Women (CLUW) was overtaken in time by Democratic Party activists. Had the Labor Party Advocates been successful in organizing the labor party, the CLUW likely would have broken large sections of the unionized women from the Democrats and to a worker’s party. Instead, the trade union bureaucracy has become bourgeois feminist, ever more tightly integrated into the state. For Labor leaders who are nothing but Democrats, so removed from a class struggle perspective, any progress on womens’ rights (and nowadays any economic or social justice advance) is continuously subordinated to Capitalism’s next domestic priority or imperialist adventure.
Today the reformist controlled coalition, in practice a cross-class “People’s Front,” has raised up layers of middle class women to the heights of corporate and political leadership based on their commitment to the rule of the capitalist class and its imperialist projects (Pelosi, Clinton, Harris, RBG, AOC). Periodic rhetorical sideswipes by the likes of the Squad at “the man” are tolerated as long as they continue to do their part to keep the left flank and working class trapped in the capitalist Democratic Party and stand as a bulwark against class struggle methods and political independence from the capitalist class. Liz Shuler is no different!
THEN, SUDDENLY…! (though no surprise to us!)
Almost at once, beginning in 1973, the right wing started pushing back and chipped away at the gains of women for years until quantitative erosion became qualitative obliteration. Texas is now reaction’s template. We should say ‘for the moment.’ The Administration pretends it is pulling out all the stops, but notwithstanding Biden’s declaration that he’s putting his best man on it, in the person of the White House Counsel, and the subsequent lawsuit brought by his Attorney General, the truth is it is the Supreme Court that has the power to rule on or overrule state laws. If the rightist court so decides, the reactionary Mississippi anti-abortion law can become the next template, the next misogynist hobbyhorse.
Nut case Abbott thinks he’s made it all make sense
In many states abortion clinics were bombed, doctors were shot and killed and restrictive laws were put in place because states have the ability to enact their own laws as long as they are not deemed unconstitutional and in violation of federal law. In 1985 Margaret Atwood wrote The Handmaiden’s Tale, a story about when a section of the east coast of the United States won a theocratic counter-revolution under conditions where many women were no longer capable of becoming pregnant. So a class of women were turned into handmaidens who could become pregnant and were impregnated in a religious rape ceremony. Entire theological and social structures were put in place and maintained by misogynist patriarchal “commanders” who controlled society with violence, public hanging of women and armed military police everywhere.
Texas has just passed a law that women who want abortions must get the abortion by 6 weeks or the doctor who does the procedure can be arrested and imprisoned. ANYONE who assists the women who succeed in circumventing the law can be prosecuted and the RATS can win $10,000 for ratting the woman OR her ‘accomplices’! So now zealotry for profit turns busybodies into a U.S. Gestapo, exactly a ‘secret state police’!
The Texas social scene envisioned under the rule of this year’s law is less structured than Gilead. Women will carry rapists’ babies to term or rat vigilantes will see them and anyone helping them prosecuted and win ten grand a head. Texas Governor Abbott did not speak to or explain what would be different in incest pregnancy cases, but we note that its the woman who is criminalized, as always! That is the meaning of our reference to Gilead.
The liberal feminists appeal to the Supreme Court to overturn the Texas law, but the Supreme Court has been cultivated into a right-wing body. The Constitution is bourgeois and always was. Such concessions as were made to mass movements, such as upholding the Amendment permitting women to vote or to the Roe v. Wade decision, are not guaranteed, as Texas shows.
“Christian/Evangelical/Reactionary/Conservative-Republicans”. Fascists in Embryo, Robes (SHEETS!) Ready.
The Supreme Court is nominated by the President, but approved by the Senate. During the Obama presidency the Republicans controlled the Senate and blocked Obama’s liberal/corporatist Merrick Garland (now attorney general) from getting an approval hearing or even a committee vote. This kept the seat on the Court open when Trump got elected. Trump had his first pick, Neil Gorsuch, in whose opinion you should freeze to death in your boss’s truck, then he put up Brett Kavanaugh, a masher of his own ilk, then Ruth Bader Ginsberg died and Trump had his third pick, Amy Coney Barrett whose ticket was punched for claiming she was not a partisan hack, even though she’d held the position of “Handmaid“ (!!!) in the Christian “People of Praise” group. We don’t make this sort of thing up. We can’t.
The court shifted to a majority far right wing and it was only a matter of time for the reactionary states to test women’s rights. THIS TEST WILL ARRIVE IN OCTOBER with their review of the Mississippi law. It is less likely that they will be too chicken to write opinions and sign them, like they did in the Texas law case, making a “shadow docket” ruling not to review it! These are the same gaslighters who told us in their confirmation hearings that they were “unlikely” to abandon established legal precedent (read Roe V. Wade!)
It will take mass mobilizations and organizing by the Trade Union movement for political independence and class struggle to secure women’s health care and rights….such a democratic struggle will not necessarily go over to a fight for a workers government and socialism but it needs to. Because what the bosses’ government ‘gives’ when under mass pressure, they sure as hell take away when the masses are demobilized!
Revolutionary workers must develop and challenge the trade union bureaucracy for the leadership of the working class with a class struggle Transitional Program for women’s liberation that is brought to the unions and working class women’s organizations. Such a program must address women’s immediate needs and show the steps needed to win their demands and those steps march right through the halls of power to a workers’ government. Working class women’s demands are special in that they address issues of the unpaid labor power extracted in domestic servitude for the reproduction of a labor force for exploitation by capital. The contamination of our communities by the ideologies and psychology of male supremacy, patriarchy, women’s subservience, and woman’s worthlessness poison our lives no less than the industrial toxins polluting the water and air. Women’s most basic economic and democratic needs cut to the core of capitalist decay and the need for socialist revolution to free the resources from the non-productive class of speculators and hoarders.
Womens’ demands for liberation break through the limits of capitalism. To be effective and sustain won gains, a workers government is needed to ensure no one falls through the social safety net. A net that has been shredded; a remnant of what was never adequate but only a road sign depicting a vision of a world working women and all women deserve. Revolutionary Marxism will never quit fighting for that world. Workers of the world unite!
We Demand:
Free Abortion, Plan B and Contriception and medical support on Demand, No parental or spousal consent required! No forced sterilization.
Protect women’s spaces such as women’s sports, women’s lockers and toilet facilities.
Defend gender choice: provide transgender sports divisions, locker rooms, baths and toilet facilities.
Organize the unorganized!
Safe quality housing is a right. With access to potable water, sanitation, heating and cooling. No guaranteed rate of profits for utility authorities! Make public power public under workers’ control!
Accessible public bath houses and toilet facilities to ensure public health and accommodate all. For a massive home construction public works program paid for by Capitalists, by expropriation of the building industry, developer giants, and by actual progressive taxation. We do not care how they howl poverty! We’ve seen their Rolls Royces and we step over the homeless on the way to work!
Basic self care, human physiology, nutrition, first aid and health care training for all.
Free quality Health Care for all. Universal access to clinics, hospitals and medications. Nationalization of Big Pharma, for-profit hospital chains, medical clinics, and the medical insurance industry. No indemnification of the big shareholders and all run under workers/community control!
Protect our children with:
Clean water, clean lakes, rivers and oceans. Clean Air! Access to forests, mountains, lakes, rivers and oceans.
Organic Pesticide free and GMO free foods! Nationalize big Agra under workers control without indemnification of big shareholders
Education for all from preschool to college, university and vocational training.
Safe spaces for youth sexuality.
Stipends for students.
Wages for domestic work and free community laundry, grocery delivery and restaurants.
Jobs for all! 25 hours work for 40 hours pay!
Nationalization of the commanding heights of the economy without indemnification to the big shareholders and run industries under workers control.
Workers self defense, beginning with womens’ health care facilities and clinics!
Build a revolutionary workers party, a section of a new revolutionary workers international to win world socialism and the liberation of women.
