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 danger. 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 5.)

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:

• an outrageously racist maternal death rate! Black women are three times more likely to die in pregnancy and postpartum than their white counterparts (PRB, 12/6/21)
• a racist, sexist prototype for medical research: the single white male (The Hastings Center Report)
• women in the U.S. are more likely to die from preventable causes than in other industrialized countries(Axios, 4/5)
• OB/GYNs in only half of all counties, a fraction that is projected to decline (Medicine.net, 5/8)
• doctors, regardless of gender, who refuse to
• believe women’s pain symptoms (Medical News Today, 10/25/21)

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.

LOS ANGELES, April 30–The 12 months since last May Day have been a hell of a year for the working class worldwide. With COVID-19, imperialist wars, unending police murders and terror , unemployment, and a housing crisis  ravaging working-class communities, especially Black, Latin and Asian, it can be hard to imagine creating a better world for all of us. Yet, May Day reminds us that we have a communist world to win if we can join together with our class brothers and sisters.
Building struggle for a communist future
This year we in Progressive Labor Party (PLP) hosted our own dinner in a local park. A multiracial, multi-generational group of 60 workers gathered to celebrate May Day with food, speeches, songs, and poetry. It was a beautiful, sunny afternoon filled with the collective efforts of PL’ers, friends, and family to bring together nourishment for the mind, body, and soul.
The program was Emceed by a PL’er and an enthusiastic, artistic student who shared her poetry and free-style rap during the program. Another group of students shared an illustrated history of May Day. In between, musician comrades led us in lively renditions of Bella Ciao and Señor Inversionista. There was the ever popular Table Talk and CHALLENGE Quiz where we discussed capitalism vs. communism and whether the working class ever benefits from capitalism.
Another highlight was a sculpture of Helen Jones, the mother of John Horton, who was murdered by LA Sheriffs in Men’s Central Jail. It captures her revolutionary struggle for her son and inspired another comrade to write and perform a poem honoring her and all the families impacted by a system that fails us time and time again. This was followed by a moving performance of Too Many Names. We continue to fight alongside families that have been forever changed by police murders in Los Angeles and link their struggles to the world-wide fight for an antiracist, antisexist, communist future.
Build confidence in the working class
PLP has been involved in struggles against police terror for many years. In LA, we work directly with several families whose loved ones have been murdered by killer kkkops, some in this last year alone. Together, we have led regular rallies and protests in South Los Angeles. Not only do the families speak about their experiences with the racist LAPD and the County Sheriffs, but we build the confidence of our class to take state power by taking over the street and collectively confronting the police.
PL’ers  are also active in a tenants’ union campaign to make needed repairs to apartments where the slumlord refuses to make the workers’ units habitable. Workers always support us.
Leading up to May Day, one worker from the tenants’ union campaign joined our May Day committee and is learning more about the Party. Hundreds of people were exposed to communist, antiracist politics, and more people understand the strength of the working class when we unite. The future here looks bright for the growth of PLP and our movement to rid the earth of the exploiters and their henchmen in “law enforcement.”

From its earliest days capitalism has used its state power in the courts and the law to control the working class’ ability to have children. The brutal enforcement of the bosses’ policies and practices on childbirth have been intertwined with their building of a racist society. The latest move to ban abortion is no isolated attack on women. It is an attack on all workers and a warning of more fascist discipline for the working class on the horizon, with Black, Latin and indigenous women disproportionately bearing the brunt of these sexist, racist attacks (see editorial on page 2).
The foundations of a racist U.S.
In the English colonies the colonial ruling class was focused on controlling how the population grew. The first law relating to population control was passed in 1662 in Virginia which enshrined that slavery would be passed onto the children based on the status, enslaved or free, of the mother. This preserved the rulers’ ability to produce enslaved workers through the rape of enslaved Black women. Around the same time, the first laws were passed that banned the marriage of white and Black workers as equals. This forced the creation of separate groups of workers, white workers as indentured servants or wage labor, and enslaved Black workers (Reproductive Justice, UC Press, 2017).
Genocide of the indigenous
While the early U.S. ruling class was using rape and enacting racist laws to increase the size of the enslaved population, they were using legalized genocide to destroy the indigenous population. The colonial and early U.S. governments authorized over 1,500 wars and legal raids against indigenous people. After 100 years of attacks the Indian Removal Act of 1830 further legalized what had already been the practice of the U.S. rulers: forced death marches as the U.S. rulers expanded their country westward. After forcing indigenous workers onto reservations, a new attack was started where the U.S. ruling class began a campaign of forcibly seizing indigenous children from their families and sending them to government-run boarding schools and then to white families. All to increase the amount of white workers in the west and eliminate the indigenous population. All told, the indigenous population, estimated to be between 5 and 15 million in 1492, was nearly wiped out, leaving only 230,000 by the end of the
19th century (history.com).
Racism and population control
After the Civil War the ruling class maintained the separation of white and non-white workers through a series of laws that enforced segregation and population control. Racist laws were enacted that prevented Black and white workers from integrating. Once Black workers were no longer enslaved, the ruling class began a campaign to stop their reproductive growth. They accomplished this by distributing contraception and using forced sterilization on the Black and immigrant working class. The U.S. sterilization laws targeting anyone the government deemed “unfit” were eventually copied by the Nazis to justify their genocidal policies (Hitler’s American Model, James Whitman).
Birth control became another method against reproduction. Margaret Sanger, the founder of the birth control movement that became Planned Parenthood, was a proponent of eugenics, the racist idea that white people were genetically superior to non-white people. Sanger, supported by the ruling class through donations to her birth control clinics, toured the country speaking about the need to limit the number of children among Black and immigrant workers (NPR, 8/14/2015).
Eventually, as the depression of 1929 created armies of unemployed workers and the ruling class feared that the growing communist movement would overthrow U.S. capitalism, birth control campaigns and forced sterilization were expanded to include the poorest groups of white workers as well (Reproductive Justice, UC Press, 2017).
The bosses’ only interest in the working class is as a tool to make profits. Our lives, our wellbeing and our children mean nothing to the ruling class other than making money. To this day their healthcare policies are limited to the minimal necessities to keep enough workers able to go to work to make money for the bosses. The bosses fight and resist anything beyond that. The fight over control of having children is part of this battle between our class and the bosses. They use the laws and the courts to control as much as they can who has children and what happens to our children after they’re born. The working class will only gain control of our lives and our future by smashing the capitalists and their racist system with communist revolution.

The following are post May Day reflections from workers in Haiti. Look out for an article about their Day celebration in  our next issue of CHALLENGE.

Think like a communist
I first met communist members of Progressive Labor Party (PLP) following the earthquake in my hometown in the summer of 2021. I could see that these people want us to have an egalitarian society, where everyone can get what they need and want. Here in Haiti (and I believe elsewhere too) there is a greedy and a brutal bourgeois minority which monopolizes almost all the wealth of the country. This goes back not only to slavery, but the period after too, when the mixed race children of the French slave masters demanded and gained , through fraudulent maneuvers, property and power. Now workers want a real redistribution of wealth so that everyone can live life as it should be.
A few months after I met PLers, a friendly relationship developed between us. We often talk about how the capitalist system works, why “tout koukouj klere pou je yo” (everything is about looking out for self-interest), and about how we are going to advance to eradicate this rotten system. I can say that through these discussions,
 I see the world in a different way. The world would surely be different if capitalists thought like communists, but of course that’s not possible. Our class interests are in direct opposition to one another. Our membership in the working class makes us think about the world differently from the bosses.
My thinking skills are increasing and I am becoming more and more confident in these ideas and in myself. I helped organize today’s May Day conference at our university and discovered new experiences in leadership, being responsible for carrying out tasks necessary to make the day a success. I really enjoyed doing it and helping bring these ideas to a wider audience.
Being a communist is not an easy thing. If it was, we would have won our final victory already. I realize that the battle is long and we have to fight until the end, and do a lot more. Not only expand our base in the university, but among the working class as a whole. We have to study and we have to engage in class struggle (there is no end to what we are justly angry about!). We have to win young and old alike to the cause of communist revolution and an egalitarian society free from racism and sexism, war and exploitation, kidnappers and brutality.
*
Find motivation in the midst of class struggle
It was really great to have the chance to participate in this May Day conference and learn more about the labor movement and the role of communists. It is a good opportunity to tell our brother and sister comrades not to give up the struggle, because only the working class in this capitalist world can make revolution to change it. I have read elsewhere that imperialism is the final stage of capitalism, which hinders social progress in all forms. We believe this is true and we find our motivation in the struggle of workers. And one day, the working class in our country (and around the world) will no longer be a reserve army of labor and a tax haven for the rulers. Finally, in the same way that we fought and won against being chattel slaves, we will fight and win against being wage slaves: we will decide for ourselves and we will take our destiny in hand where we will all live equal as humans.
*
Revolutionary flavor, a real pleasure
It was a real pleasure for me to participate in the May Day celebration. At first I thought it would be the usual Agricultural Festival that the government organizes every year. But boy, was I wrong. I learned a lot of things about the workers’ movement, why our living conditions are filled with such misery, and how to change that through struggle. I also loved the musical interlude; the musicians really added revolutionary flavor to the day. I expect that the next time we meet will be even more fruitful.
                                 H