The Not So Supreme Court is Overconfident. Women Will Not Go Backwards

AP has removed the above video.

Richard Mellor
Afscme Local 444, retired
GED/HEO

This is the first thing I see as I rise rather early this Tuesday morning which is my garbage collection day and it seems there is more garbage afoot from the US body politic. Let us hope that this explodes in to a national protest against this gang of judges that is a front line of defense in legitimizing capitalist society and patriarchy. There is nothing "supreme"about this body as far as workers' rights are concerned and workers rights are women's rights and the right to decide whether or not they have children is a right that is important to millions upon millions of working class women.

In the neo-liberal period, the US body politic and its judicial arm has shifted further and further to the right and the possibility of scrapping Roe v Wade comes as no surprise, after all, there are accused rapists and sexual deviants on it. It was women that undermined the centuries old power of the Catholic Church in Ireland and hopefully young women will lead a new struggle for their sex and their emancipation from patriarchy. 

It is my view that the US population is not as conservative as the big business media would have us believe. Starbucks wouldn't have closed all of its stores for one day to hold phony education classes about racism and diversity if there was such a strong mood of racial hatred out there. Just the opposite, millions of US workers and middle class people simply want a decent life, want what everyone does, educations, health care, a place to live and so on.  They just do see how that can happen, what they can do about it. Both political parties are hated.

We have experienced an unprecedented (in my time anyway) multi-racial  movement against police brutality sparked off by the Black Lives Matter movement, that, as is so common with movements that arise very rapidly in response to social repression, has been infiltrated and influenced by opportunists, middle class liberals and courted by powerful corporate entities and the overwhelmingly white men that own them. 

It is important to stress in the face of the massive propaganda from the capitalist mass media that it is not so much that white people in general are killing black folks, it is the state security forces, the police, that are.  And most of the repressive state security forces are white, quite expected in a settler state where racial superiority based on color has been the prime social. division. In my half century living in the US, the "privileged"white working class has been savaged by capitalism which undermines the centuries old white skin privilege argument. 

The more poverty, and we have plenty of it, the more working class and poor women will suffer when an abortion is a crime. The reality is, that the refusal of the two political parties that dominate the US body politic to provide basic services and social needs from health care to housing and education, kills hundreds of thousands of people daily. The mentally ill wander the streets of the US like zombies in a horror flick.

This week, amidst this craziness, the representatives of Wall Street in the two political parties that dominate the US body politic, a dictatorship of capital if you like, will send $30bn to win the war in Ukraine against Russia. A war that the Ukrainians can't win but the US/NATO military alliance can.

Surprisingly enough, despite social media and the propaganda from the newsrooms of the corporations, millions of us from many different communities, interact and work together every day; we treat each other civily.  The police kill a lot of people in the US from all backgrounds and when it comes to repression and the history of violence by the sate in this country, the Native Americans are first on the list.

There has been a mood among the US working class  to fight back for a long time. There was a resurgence among organized labor in the 1980's with some strikes that took on a national character, some lasting as long as a year or more. This upsurge was crushed by a powerful combination of the bosses and the heads of organized labor nationally. 

The teachers/educators strikes and protests ushered in a new wave of opposition in 2018-19 and now we see young workers at Amazon and Starbucks demanding unionization. Even the vote against unionization at another Amazon warehouse this week is not against unionization, it is a result of fear. In the US if you have no money, no resources you are worthless.

This assault on women's rights will add fuel to the fire cannot be separated from the general offensive of capital on workers' rights and all that we have won over a century or more. The cowardly silence of the trade union hierarchy and their refusal to fight is a dam that will be breached at some point as more and more workers will be inspired by recent events and driven to act even more ferociously by this assault on women's right to control their own bodies.

The US bourgeois is overconfident and the explosive nature of the US working class will be front and center here at some point in the not too distant future and all the collaborationist trash that is present in the workers' movement, that dominates the leadership and has more influence than numbers would imply today will be swept aside.

It's important to remember that it was a march on International Women's Day in 1917 that sparked off the Russian Revolution.

"An employee of the Nobel Engineering works recalled, “We could hear women’s voices in the lane overlooked by the windows of our department: ‘Down with high prices!  Down with hunger! Bread for the workers!’ I and several comrades rushed to the windows…Masses of women workers in a militant frame of mind filled the lane. Those who caught sight of us began to wave their arms, shouting ‘Come out! Stop work!’ Snowballs flew through the windows. We decided to join the demonstration.” Smithsonian Magazine.  More here.

We are not at that point but today but it has been women and other specially oppressed sectors of the working class that have gone on the offensive against the bosses, especially in the factories of the underdeveloped world where much industry has relocated in search of cheaper labor and profits.  Many of the leading figures in the struggle to unionize at Amazon have been members of what we cal the LGBQT community. We are in a new era.

The anger that is festering beneath the surface of US society and so often is expressed through self harm in one way or another will burst through and shake the very foundations of the state and the violent thugs that run it.