Only Workers Power Can Save Reproductive Rights

Credit: Alex Brandon/AP

On May 2nd, a draft Supreme Court opinion written by the right-wing Justice Samuel Alito, was published by Politico. The arguments laid out in the draft majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization suggest that the United State Supreme Court (SCOTUS) will overturn Roe v. Wade in the coming summer, in effect paving the way for the outright abolition of safe abortions.

The Violence of Capitalism

It turns out that a system designed by a clique of unrepentant slaveholders — wherein a handful of judicial kings, appointed for life, who have the power to play with the so-called ‘rights’ of millions — isn’t the most equitable way to govern a country. Of course, it was never meant to be. Rather, it is highly undemocratic by design.

That the Highest Court on Stolen Land is returning us to the policy of forced births is devastating, but very much in line with their class interests. The U.S. economy has long relied on the uncompensated labor of birthing people to function. Since its inception, the U.S. capitalist state has violently enforced reproduction in order to reap profits. From enslaving Black people stolen from the coasts of Africa to similar family separations enacted against peoples Indigenous to this continent, it has been the capitalist class that gets to decide when and where “families” are made. In an era where young people are not having children — yet another crisis for capitalism created by capitalism — the U.S. has a smaller pool of expendable workers from which to extract labor. What we saw this week is the response of the ruling class.

The COVID pandemic exposes the capitalist state’s willingness to murder the masses to chase a dollar — even though the disease itself is a mass disabling event which is shrinking the pool of exploitable workers. The idea that SCOTUS or any member of the ruling class is concerned about human life is laughable.

Worker Power

Howard Zinn in his 2005 essay, ‘Don’t Despair’ about the Supreme Court wrote, “The Constitution gave no rights to working people: no right to work less than twelve hours a day, no right to a living wage, no right to safe working conditions. Workers had to organize, go on strike, defy the law, the courts, the police, create a great movement that won the eight-hour day, and caused such commotion that Congress was forced to pass a minimum wage law, and Social Security, and unemployment insurance.”

Zinn also mentioned that when capitalism needed to be saved from the anger of the poor and hungry and unemployed in the 1930s and the era we now refer to as the Great Depression, the Supreme Court was willing to stretch the constitutional right of Congress to regulate interstate commerce and dictate which crops farmers were to grow.

The only time in the history of the world that the oppressed have been able to win rights — which were stolen from them by the capitalist hoarders of wealth — has been when they banded together in organized droves. Those rights for the oppressed which SCOUTS has allowed only came after long and hard fighting. Members of the working class can and must strike back to survive. The organization of workers, especially into workers councils, is critical for building working class power and leading the fight for worker control.

The Soviet Union, made up of highly democratic, organized workers councils, was the first modern state in the world to legalize abortion on request in 1921 because it was in the class interests of the workers to determine if, when, and how they wanted to reproduce. Working class fighters in Mexico and Argentina have recently pushed to decriminalize abortion thanks in great part to mass protests.

If the capitalists had not spent the last few decades building up their prisons, jails, and detention centers, caging workers by the millions — they would face an even larger force. But the capitalist means of repression are no match for the power of the united working class.

Abortion bans are a matter of life or death. Abortions happen whether or not the law allows them to. If a ban is in effect, it just means people who can become pregnant have less access to safe abortions. Abortion bans kill. Forced pregnancy kills. Capitalism kills. As the working class realizes it increasingly has nothing to lose from fighting back against a state power that cannot provide adequate housing, healthcare, or education, the ruling class ought to be afraid. The collective working class has the power to free itself from the tyranny of the rule of wealth by a few. A united working class will be coming for more than just the right to safe legal abortions on demand, they’ll come for everything that they’re owed.