A few days ago – on June 24^th, 2022 – the Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade and hinted that they would “revisit” other rights the people struggled for over decades. Access to abortions, birth control, and reproductive healthcare has dwindled over decades due to the steady work of reactionary forces in the US – conservative and liberal – who practice insider trading rather than defend their constituents’ rights. After hearing the final decision of the court, we donate to abortion funds, take to the streets, or rally behind this or that bourgeois politician hoping to have our rights preserved. We want the freedom to choose – but what choices exist under the death grip capitalism and imperialism has over ounce of our lives, whether it’s how we survive or what we can see and consume or how we’re educated…

 

For the last fifty years, we’ve apparently had the right to choose. Under these circumstances, some people chose to pay hundreds of dollars out of their pockets to have an abortion. Some people chose to travel dozens or hundreds of miles – sometimes out of state – in order to find an abortion provider. Some people chose to carry dangerous or unviable pregnancies to term in states that made the termination of those pregnancies illegal under any circumstances. And while it probably didn’t always feel like a choice, some people chose to have unwanted children that eventually ended up in a starved, inadequate foster care system. Children apparently chose to go to schools that could legally only teach abstinence, and they chose to be raised in families that couldn’t historically access birth control due to the cost of insurance or the pill. This is the “choice” we are defending, whole-heartedly believing that politicians or the court will hear our pleas and somehow “come to their senses” and serve the will of the people, as if the last fifty years – or the last 200+ – have been evidence of their desire to do that.

 

It Was Always Bankrupt

We’ve written before about how the court has never served the people – it serves the interests of capital, and of whatever economic sector of capitalists that has become dominant in the state, its structures and institutions, at any given time. We’ve seen the battle played out over and over again between conservatives and liberals as if our independence and survival are pawns on a chess board. But they still have the gall to tell us that we have freedom of choice – the choice to swallow deep and choose the “lesser of two evils” among two reactionary candidates; to beg for our rights and convince people of our humanity! We’re really supposed to believe that this bourgeois democracy – which is actually a dictatorship of the capitalist class – is the greatest system of “choice” that’s ever existed on earth.

This is certainly why “democracy” has spread across the entire globe. Why the US is the birthplace of eugenics. Why our “right to choose” required that women in Puerto Rico suffered unknowingly through pharmaceutical trials, or were subjected to sterilization. Why people in India were sterilized for being poor and uneducated, instigated by loans from imperialist powers. Why people in prisons and in detention camps are given hysterectomies without their consent and even without their knowledge. The fantasy that the largest imperialist force in history is a “bastion of freedom” has always been part of keeping us complacent in our position to live off of the subjugation and exploitation of people – especially workers – in dominated countries. Even the right of people in imperialist nations to choose what to do with their own bodies has grown out of the poisoned soil of imperialism – whether that involves the unregulated testing of medications on people in dominated nations or the poisoning of land and water from pharmaceutical manufacturing or…

 

This is an arrangement of global societies that we never got to choose and that we are forced into every day. We get an endless array of products to choose from, but not the choice to end the brutal conditions capitalists often necessitate to produce them. We can go to an endless number of places to receive services, but can’t choose to construct conditions that allow most service laborers to be able to pay their own bills. We’re milled into colleges and trade schools to choose a career, while economic conditions continue to deteriorate and drive us into unpayable debt. And when people are struggling through massive rent hikes, soaring food and gas prices, wages that have remained stagnant for years – the response is that they should have chosen better.

 

In reality, the bourgeoisie and their lap dogs do not give a damn about what we get to choose. Ronald Reagan – the “father of the anti-abortion movement” and president who inspired the Federalist Society takeover of the Supreme Court – decriminalized abortion (although he was “deeply troubled”) when it suited him politically. On the opposite side of the spectrum, Margaret Sanger – feminist icon and “mother of birth control” – openly declared that black people and immigrants “breed carelessly and disastrously,” and she contributed to the dangerous trials Puerto Rican women endured. While the lives of people and families are deeply affected by the steep peaks and pitfalls of reproductive struggles, the fact remains that no populist, bourgeois alternatives or solutions have ever or ever will be designed to serve the people who can’t afford birth control OR children, who can’t afford medications they need to survive, who are invisible to the state and thus have no rights… Instead, we’ll continue feeling the whiplash of our rights being at the center of a tug-of-war between two reactionary camps, each of which will forge alliances with people based on the “sanctity of life” or the “right to choose.” But both of these are carrots on a stick leading us toward different flavors of deeper domination.

 

We Can’t Go Back – They Won’t Take Us Forward

Capitalists want to take us back in time, as if imperialism’s past glory will magically re-appear. Liberals hope a 90s-style tech boom will emerge from the sludge of toxic, speculative capital. Conservatives hope that the US will once again become a mid-century-style global powerhouse, ignoring the needs of people and planet in order to become “the greatest nation in the world” again. Chasing any of the mirages of capital that the ruling classes will galvanize us to get behind is a dead-end for the people, who don’t ACTUALLY get a choice using their bankrupt methods. We’ll be forced to defend our rights, told to lobby for the right legislation, or hustle to expand the Supreme Court. Hoping that Biden’s brand of fascism might throw us a few more crumbs is like hoping a stone will shed a tear. What we’ve actually seen is that the candidate we were meant to choose as an alternative to detention camps, family separation, and an expanded, murderous police forces hasn’t kept any of his promises. It’s clear we can’t expect this arrangement to provide us with any real choice.

 

Whether under liberal or conservative regimes, we’re seeing the country, and especially Florida, barreling toward fascism. Instead of gaining rights for those who have been most vulnerable for decades – instead of forcing the rectification of historic wrongs – we are losing our rights and seeing the bigotry and repression we took for granted as relics come roaring back. As long as capitalism and imperialism continue to spread decay through endless cycles of economic crisis, fascism will always lurk in the shadows. The bourgeoisie will continue to force us into submission by retracting the bourgeois democratic rights people fought for, convinced we’ll remain stuck in the quick sand they’ve sunk us in. But we can prove them wrong.

We Bite Back!

In the face of this latest attack on our rights, on this expansion of stealing our ability to take independent action regarding our own bodies, we must fight back. It is correct for us to resist these reactionary forces, but we can’t defend our rights while handing them over to those who only see our humanity as far as they can use it. There is no autonomy, no independence, and no choice as long as we let the ruling classes stand on our backs! Our independence won’t be handed to us by the most benevolent politician or the most helpful NGO or the most radical activist – our independence will be collectively constructed in the practice of our organized resistance. Building our own political alternative means we can struggle to provide abortions by constructing networks of progressive doctors, nurses, and techs; we can resist the prosecution of people who need abortions and those who provide them by calling out the rotten institutions that will enforce these laws and defending ourselves against them; we can fight to transport and care for those who are forced to seek abortions in other states. We don’t do this stuck behind our screens, tweeting petitions and donating to go fund me. We do this by getting organized.

 

Our true choice is in representing our class interests and building organizations that will carry those interests out in the name of progressing history. We believe that progress REQUIRES that we resist all forms of class division and fight for the destruction of class rule and the destruction of all capitalist and imperialist forms and models. We can only do this as a social force, organized in a mass movement, resisting our domination while fighting to give each other what we need. If you want to join us in this fight, reach out!

 

STAND UP

FIGHT BACK

ORGANIZE