SIRATYST (Stuff I Read and Thought You Should Too) --
“To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace.”
(Calgacus, as quoted by Tacitus, Agricola 30-31)"
War, whether with Iran or China, provides a means for directing the contradictions of US capitalism outward in an explosion of military violence, while serving as a justification for the forcible imposition of “national unity” at home.
But as he wrote those words, studies to supply such data were in the
works. Chief among them was an initiative to compare women who had
abortions with those who wanted them, but were turned away from clinics
for various reasons, including state restrictions or a lack of doctor
availability. Called the Turnaway Study, the effort followed about 1,000
women in the United States for five years after they sought abortions.
The women were similar in terms of physical, mental and economic
well-being initially, but diverged over time1.
In
more than 40 reports published in peer-reviewed scientific journals,
researchers analysed what happened to the women, adjusting for potential
confounding factors such as age. The overall finding was that, on
average, receiving an abortion didn’t harm women’s mental or physical
health, but being denied an abortion resulted in some negative financial
and health outcomes.
“The science clearly shows that abortion is
incredibly common, and it is important to women living full lives,” says
Diana Greene Foster, leader of the Turnaway Study and a
reproductive-health researcher at the University of California, San
Francisco. Recent years have seen the Turnaway and other studies
referenced in abortion court cases. For example, judges have cited a 2018 National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine report
finding that abortion is safe. This and other reports find that
mortality rates are nearly 4 times as high for colonoscopies — and 14
times as high for childbirth2 — as for legal abortion procedures.
In the October 24 webinar, “How to Stop the Pandemic,” sponsored by the World Socialist Web Site
and the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees
(IWA-RFC), a panel of leading scientists from around the world made a
powerful and overwhelming case for the global elimination of the virus
that causes COVID-19.
Along with an earlier webinar
organized by the WSWS two months ago, Sunday’s event was the only
effort to devote time to allow scientists and public health specialists
to explain to the public the nature of the pandemic and what must be
done. To the extent that there is any discussion of the science of
COVID-19, it is mainly confined to scientific journals with a very small
circulation, not public events to which working people have direct
access.
The webinar was also unique in its international scope.
The eight scientists and doctors spoke from five different countries:
New Zealand, the UK, the United States, Canada and Pakistan. During the
event and in the first 12 hours after it was broadcast, several thousand
people from more than 100 countries throughout the world listened in.
Among the countries with the highest number of viewers were the US,
Canada, the UK, New Zealand, Australia, Germany, Sri Lanka, Ireland,
France, India, Spain, Malaysia and Brazil.
The event was moderated
by WSWS International Editorial Board Chairman David North and WSWS
writer and practicing physician Dr. Benjamin Mateus. In opening the webinar,
North drew attention to the colossal loss of life over the past two
years, with the official global death toll now approaching five million
people. Citing the Economist, North noted that the real number
of deaths is far higher, between 10 and 20 million people. “The world
has already paid a terrible price for the deliberate refusal of
governments to listen to scientists,” he said.
While originally
scheduled for two hours, the webinar lasted for three and a half. Many
of the scientists came prepared with detailed slides presenting factual
information on the impact of different measures to contain the virus,
the health consequences of the disease, and how it is transmitted.
Certain salient facts emerged from the reports that are vital for the public to understand.
Dr.
Malgorzata Gasperowicz,a developmental biologist and researcher at the
University of Calgary in Canada and cofounder of Zero COVID Canada,
presented a report on “The Case for SARS2 Elimination.” She documented
the extreme disparity in cases and deaths between provinces in Canada
that pursued an elimination strategy and those that pursued a
“mitigation” or containment strategy. She also presented mathematical
models showing that vaccines alone are not sufficient to stop the spread
of the virus.
Dr. Gasperowicz said that her models show that in
countries with a high vaccination rate, aggressive measures—including
the shutdown of nonessential production and aggressive testing, tracing
and isolation—could eliminate the virus within two to three months.
While there was some discussion on the length of time that would be
required, all the scientists agreed that such a strategy was both viable
and necessary.
“Some people claim it is too late, that it is not
possible to eliminate now because we have [the Delta variant], because
the virus is everywhere,” Dr. Gasperowicz said, but these claims are
false. “The math works the same. If we can bend the curve, if we can
bring the R value [transmission rate] to a low level, we can eliminate.”
Dr.
Michael Baker, an infectious disease epidemiologist at the University
of Otago in Wellington, New Zealand, who served on the New Zealand
Ministry of Health’s COVID-19 Technical Advisory Group, delivered a
presentation, “Progressive elimination of Covid-19: Is it feasible and
desirable?”
Elimination strategies, he concluded, “definitely,
definitely do work.” He noted that the World Health Organization has
pursued an elimination strategy for many diseases, including polio.
China, New Zealand, Taiwan, and Australia, where elimination strategies
have been pursued for much or all of the pandemic, have succeeded in
limiting deaths to between three and five individuals per million. This
compares to nearly 2,000 per million in the United States, which has led
to a drop in life expectancy at birth by one and a half years.
Asked
by David North whether the recent change in the policy of the New
Zealand government to “transition” from its previous approach, under
immense economic and political pressure, is very likely to lead to a
sharp rise in cases and deaths, Baker stated, “It is, very much so.”
Dr.
Jose-Luis Jimenez, professor of chemistry at the University of
Colorado, Boulder, and an expert in aerosol physics, delivered a
presentation on “The modes of transmission of SARS-CoV-2.” Dr. Jimenez
presented slides that showed how SARS-CoV-2—the virus that causes
Covid-19—is transported within minute aerosol particles from one person
to another. They are emitted whenever people speak or even in the
process of respiration. This accounts for the extremely infectious
character of the disease, particularly in poorly ventilated indoor
locations, such as schools.
Jimenez sharply criticized the World
Health Organization (WHO) for refusing to acknowledge the aerosolization
of the virus for more than a year after the start of the pandemic,
calling it “one of the biggest errors in the entire history of public
health.” He said that one of the reasons for the resistance in
recognizing aerosolization is that it is less “convenient” for
governments, as the denial of aerosolization transfers responsibility
from governments and businesses that do not implement adequate safety
measures to individuals.
Dr. Deepti Gurdasani, a public health
researcher at the Queen Mary University in London, delivered a report on
Long COVID, which she called “the hidden pandemic after the pandemic.”
The report reviewed the alarming data showing that Long COVID symptoms
lasting 12-15 weeks or more can affect between two and 14 percent of all
people who contract COVID-19. She explained that infected individuals
are at higher risk of cardiovascular disease, kidney disease, lung
disease, and brain degeneration in regions associated with sense,
emotional processing and memory.
Governments, she said, do not
want to talk about Long COVID because “if they accept that it is real
and problematic, they would have to do a lot more to prevent
transmission.”
Replying to a question from Lisa Diaz, a UK parent
who has played the leading role in mobilizing opposition to the unsafe
reopening of schools, Dr. Gurdasani called the policy of the UK
government “frankly criminal.” One in 12 secondary school children and
one in 30 primary school children have been infected with COVID-19 in
the UK, she said. “In all respects, our government has completely failed
to protect children, and the impact of that has been not just mass
infection of children but very high rates of Long COVID.”
Dr.
Zayar, a medical doctor in Pakistan who worked with the WHO from 2009 to
2014 on the polio eradication initiative, reviewed the catastrophic
impact of the pandemic throughout South Asia. “There are millions of
more deaths on the subcontinent that are not reported,” he said, noting
that the governments in India and Pakistan have sought to cover up their
failure to protect the population. “Their first priority… was to open
the economy, [even at] the height of the pandemic.”
Dr. Eric
Feigl-Ding, an epidemiologist, health economist and Senior Fellow at the
Federation of American Scientists, delivered a powerful indictment of
the private control of vaccine production and distribution and the
broader policy of governments in response to the pandemic. “The moral
backbone of public health has been completely broken by politics,” he
said.
The days of petitions and op-eds in newspapers are over,
Feigl-Ding said, because “we clearly know that the political powers that
want to reopen, let it spread, let it rip, mass infection, ‘live with
the virus’—clearly they do not care about all the scientific rationale
whatsoever.”
In response to a question from David North about
where he saw the pandemic going in the next three to six months without a
dramatic change in policy, Fiegl-Ding responded: “On a world scale, we
will still be counting bodies in six months’ time. We are going to have a
very bad winter in the Northern hemisphere.” Other scientists on the
panel agreed with this prognosis.
Dr. Howard Ehrman—a retired
family medicine physician, assistant professor at the University of
Illinois Chicago College of Medicine and School of Public Health until
2020, and longtime social activist—delivered a scathing denunciation of
the reopening of schools promoted by the Biden administration. There
have been one million new cases among children in the last five weeks,
he noted, and 588 children have died from the pandemic since it began,
along with thousands of teachers and staff.
Dr.
Ehrman criticized those in the media “who have done everything under
Trump and Biden to make parents, teachers, staff, feel guilty, threaten
them, and now begin to punish them for keeping their kids at home.”
In
addition to the scientists, several workers on the panel discussed the
impact that the pandemic has already had on workers, parents and the
population as a whole. Lisa Diaz spoke on the catastrophic conditions
produced by the reopening of schools in the UK, which she called a
“scorched earth policy.”
David O’Sullivan, a London bus driver
fired for defending his colleagues’ right to a safe workplace, spoke
about the impact on bus drivers of the “herd immunity” policy of the
Johnson administration, describing it as “a war on the working class and
a war on science. The two go hand in hand.”
Donna, a teacher in
the US and member of the Tennessee Educators Rank-and-File Committee,
said that she and other teachers “felt abandoned by our leaders, our
administrators, and worst of all, our unions.” Workers and scientists,
she said, “must join forces against the profit interests of our
governments and business leaders if we are to end the pandemic.”
In
concluding the meeting, North explained: “The case for elimination, a
path that ultimately leads to the eradication of the virus, is so
overwhelming from a scientific standpoint, that it is hard to understand
that it could possibly be argued against.”
There are definite
social interests, however, that have determined policy from the
beginning and are working actively against science—the profit interests
of the ruling class. “We can’t get around the fact,” North said, “that
we live in a society which hails the mindless, ridiculous, useless,
extravagance of a ruling elite that can’t think of any better way to use
its money than to blast itself into space.”
It is for this reason
that the scientific information presented at the webinar has been
completely excluded from the capitalist media. Outside of the WSWS
forum, there has, since the start of the pandemic, been no systematic
effort to educate the population in the science of Long COVID,
aerosolization, the role of schools in the transmission of the virus, or
any of the critical information that workers must know.
There is
also a social force whose interests intersect with scientific truth: the
working class, the great mass of the population.
North noted
that since the last webinar held in August, there has been a significant
growth of class struggle in the US and throughout the world. “The
initiative taken by Lisa Diaz, the efforts made by workers in
rank-and-file committees to take control of their own struggles and also
take control of the fight against unsafe conditions in their factories
and their schools, are an indication of a profound change.”
Paraphrasing
Marx’s famous statement from his Theses on Feuerbach, North concluded:
“The scientists have explained the pandemic. They have shown how it is
transmitted, and how that transmission can be stopped. But the challenge
of the working class is to end it.”
The wealth of information
presented in the October 24 webinar must be studied by every worker in
every country. The scientific information and perspective presented at
this webinar must be brought into the working class. The fight against
the pandemic and the ruling class’s policy of mass death must be fused
with the growing struggles of workers throughout the world against
exploitation, inequality, dictatorship, war and the capitalist system.
On Sunday, workers at the agricultural and construction equipment
maker Deere & Co. voted by 90 percent to reject a tentative
agreement backed by the United Auto Workers (UAW).
A worker inside a Deere plant (John Deere)
The
vote was a stunning rebuke to the UAW, which tried to rush through a
six-year concessions contract for 10,100 workers without giving them
sufficient time to study it. At so-called informational meetings Sunday,
workers angrily confronted union officials trying the sell the deal.
“Deere and the UAW tried to pull a fast one, but the rank and file
fought back,” a worker at the Dubuque, Iowa plant told the WSWS.
Confronting
an incipient revolt, the UAW announced it was setting a strike deadline
for 11:59 p.m. Wednesday night. Behind the scenes, however, the UAW
executives are doing everything to block a strike or isolate and defeat a
walkout if it is forced to call one.
The vote at Deere, the
first defeat of a UAW-backed agreement at the company in 35 years, is
the latest in a series of overwhelming “no” votes by workers in the US
in response to union-supported contracts:
On April 9, 1,100 Warrior Met coal miners
in central Alabama voted 1,006 to 45 (96 percent) to reject the
contract pushed by the United Mine Workers of America, which failed to
recoup the $6 wage cut the UMWA accepted in 2016.
In the late spring and early summer, 3,500 Volvo Trucks
workers in Dublin, Virginia, voted down three consecutive UAW-backed
contracts, including the first two by 90 percent or more. The UAW was
only able to shut down a five-week strike by forcing a revote on the
third rejected deal, which it claimed passed by 17 votes.
In August and early September, 3,500 auto parts workers at Dana Inc.—a
top supplier for Deere—rejected a five-year contract proposed by the
UAW and United Steelworkers by more than 90 percent, with workers at the
Toledo, Ohio, plant voting unanimously against the deal. More than a
month after the defeat of the contract, the UAW and USW are blocking a
strike that would have an immediate impact on the auto industry, keeping
workers on the job and stockpiling parts with a day-by-day contract
extension.
Twelve thousand carpenters in western Washington state
rejected four consecutive agreements pushed by the Northwest Pacific
Carpenters Union (NWCU) by margins as high as 76 percent. The NWCU was
forced to call a strike on September 16, but it kept 10,000 of the
12,000 carpenters working and ultimately pushed through a
fifth contract.
Late last week, McLaren Health nurse aides and other service workers in Flint and other mid-Michigan cities
rejected by a three-to-one margin a deal reached by the American
Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) to block a
strike over dangerously high patient ratios and increased out-of-pocket
health costs.
That massive, nearly unanimous “no” votes are
now becoming the norm gives expression to an enormous anger and desire
to fight among workers. The union bureaucracy’s age-old methods of
ramming through pro-company contracts—lies about winning “substantial
gains” or “the best contract you are going to get” and the use of
threats and economic pressure to browbeat workers—are running up against
a wall of opposition.
This
is part of the emergence of the largest strike movement in the United
States in generations. The first five days of October saw the beginning
of 10 new strikes in the US, including 2,500 nurses at Mercy Hospital in
Buffalo, New York, and 1,400 Kellogg’s food-processing workers in
Michigan and other states. In addition, 60,000 Hollywood film and
television workers and 35,000 Kaiser Permanente health care workers have
voted to strike.
“Thousands of workers have gone on strike across the country, showing their growing power in a tightening economy,” Time
magazine wrote last week. “The leverage US employees have over the
people signing their paychecks was amplified in Friday’s jobs report,
which showed that employers added workers at a much slower-than-expected
pace in September,” Time wrote, adding, “and wages are
continuing to tick up across industries as employers become more
desperate to hire and retain workers.”
The Philadelphia Inquirer
pointed to a “new take-this-job-and-shove-it mentality,” noting that
“the upside-down condition of the job market has fed-up workers more
inclined to fight back and call their bosses on their threats…”
There are certain characteristics of this emerging movement that are particularly significant.
First,
the development of the class struggle is pitting workers in direct
opposition to the corporatist trade unions. The margin of the contract
rejections at Deere, Volvo, Dana and other companies expresses the real
relationship between the so-called “unions” and the working class.
These
organizations, which function as a labor police force for management
and are run by union executives with incomes in the top 5 percent of
income earners, if not higher, are completely disconnected from and
hostile to the needs and aspirations of the workers they falsely claim
to “represent.” Under conditions of explosive social anger, their
primary concern is to prove their usefulness to management and the state
by ramming through pro-company agreements one way or another.
The
Biden administration is aggressively promoting the unions as
instruments to suppress working-class resistance and divert social
opposition behind its plans for trade war and military confrontation
with China. Last week, a White House pro-union “task force” held its
second official meeting, with top military and economic cabinet
members—including Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas and
Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo—discussing final preparations of a
report on steps the administration will take to promote the expansion of
the trade unions.
The
defenders of the authority of the unions among the pseudo-left,
themselves aligned with the Biden administration and the Democratic
Party, refer to the Socialist Equality Party and the World Socialist Web Site
as “sectarian” because of our call for the formation of rank-and-file
committees. Their principal concern, however, is that the campaign led
by the WSWS for the development of independent organizations of
working-class struggle is winning a mass response.
At Deere, WSWS
articles have been read by thousands of workers, who have distributed
them at the plants and shared them on social media. Like the Dana
workers and Volvo Trucks workers before them, the WSWS has been central
in encouraging and assisting Deere workers in developing their own
independent initiative through the formation of a rank-and-file
committee.
Second, the upsurge of working-class struggles in the
US is part of an international process. This includes the strikes by
150,000 metal workers in South Africa; 90,000 healthcare workers in Sri
Lanka; healthcare, train and airport workers in Germany; and the October
1 UK parents strike “global picket line” against the spread of
COVID-19. Global corporations like Deere, which has operations in 70
countries, can only be fought by unifying the working class across all
national borders.
Third, the growth of the class struggle is
inseparably connected to the struggle against the pandemic. The ruling
class is seeking to suppress wages in the face of rising prices for
food, fuel and other necessities. At the same time, it is imposing
ever-longer hours and relentless speedup in its scramble to offset the
global supply chain crisis, as well as labor shortages driven by
millions refusing to labor in COVID-infected workplaces.
Over the
last 20 months of the pandemic, millions of lives have been sacrificed
for corporate profit, while the world’s billionaires have seen their
wealth surge by $5.5 trillion. Far from making any concessions to the
“heroes” and “essential workers” who have endured sickness and death,
the corporate and financial oligarchy is determined to exploit the
pandemic to establish a “new normal” of unrelenting exploitation. But
this is provoking a growing strike wave in the US and internationally,
under conditions in which the efforts to force workers back into unsafe
workplaces by eliminating unemployment benefits and ending eviction
moratoriums has thus far failed to produce the intended results.
On
May 1, the International Committee of the Fourth International
initiated the call for the formation of the International Workers
Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC) to organize a global
response by the working class to save lives. Now the struggle to demand
policies to eradicate the pandemic, including the closure of
nonessential workplaces and schools, is intersecting with a growing
movement against capitalist exploitation.
We call on all
workers at Deere and all sections of the working class, in the US and
internationally, to register and attend the October 24 online webinar
with leading scientists, “How to end the pandemic: The case for eradication,” co-sponsored by the WSWS and the IWA-RFC.
The United States is systematically working to provoke an escalation of tensions with China over Taiwan.
Multiple aircraft fly in formation over the USS Ronald Reagan, a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier [Credit: Kaila V. Peters/U.S. Navy]
On Wednesday, the Wall Street Journal reported that US troops have been stationed in Taiwan, which China considers part of its territory, for over one year. The Journal’s
revelations, which Chinese officials saw as being a semi-official
announcement by the US government, came amid the most dangerous standoff
between the US and China since the 1958 Taiwan Strait Crisis.
The
US Navy has been carrying out major war games near Taiwan, following
the announcement of the alliance between Australia, the UK and the US
(AUKUS), which includes providing Australia with nuclear-powered
submarines.
These developments followed the revelation in March
that the United States is in active discussions to station offensive
missiles on the “first island chain” off the Chinese mainland, including
Okinawa and Taiwan.
In 1962, when the Soviet Union stationed
missiles in Cuba, a sovereign country nearly 100 miles from Florida, the
United States declared that the USSR must either remove the missiles or
face war. Today, Washington is stationing troops, and possibly
offensive weapons, on territory claimed by China just minutes of flight
time from China’s most populous cities.
The response in China gives a sense of the potentially massive consequences of the United States’ actions. The Global Times,
which speaks for dominant sections of the Chinese political
establishment, called America’s actions tantamount to an “invasion” in
an editorial Friday.
It is clear that the Biden administration is
trying to goad China into some sort of response, provoking an incident
that can be seized on to create a de facto state of war. The US may not
want a full-scale conflict involving nuclear weapons, but war has a
logic of its own once provocation turns into an exchange of arms.
What
is behind these extraordinarily reckless actions? There are certainly
the geopolitical imperatives of American imperialism, and China has
become a central target of US war planning over the past decade. The
military considerations, however, are not the only ones dictating the
situation. A major factor is the US domestic political crisis.
Twenty
months into the global COVID-19 pandemic, the United States is a social
powder keg. More than 725,000 Americans have lost their lives to the
pandemic, or one out of 500 people. Prices are rapidly rising amid a
widespread labor shortage. Workers in industries throughout the country
are beginning to demand pay and benefits commensurate with the increased
cost of living.
These demands are coalescing into a nationwide strike movement.
Despite the efforts of the corporatist unions to suppress all
opposition in the working class, there have been strikes in recent weeks
of Kellogg’s cereal workers, nurses in New York, distillery workers in
Kentucky, and carpenters in Seattle. There is seething anger among auto
and auto parts workers, who are rejecting contract after contract
brought back to them by the unions.
Over the past year and a half,
the American ruling class, as it implemented a policy of mass death,
has handed itself trillions of dollars, inflating a massive stock market
bubble that can be sustained only through the relentless increase in
the exploitation of the working class.
Throughout history, and
particularly in the 20th century, governments have seen war as a means
of enforcing “national unity” in the face of mounting political
opposition. In 1967, historian Arno J. Mayer noted, in an article
“Domestic Causes of the First World War”:
During the
decade, including the weeks immediately preceding July-August 1914, the
European nations experienced more than routine political and social
disturbances. Even Britain, that paradigm of ordered change and
constitutionalism, was approaching the threshold of civil war.
This
growth of social tensions, Mayer noted, “inclined the governments to
push [military] preparedness and diplomatic obduracy as part of their
efforts to maintain a precarious domestic status quo.”
So, today,
under conditions of deepening social, political and economic crisis,
dominant sections of the American ruling class see a conflict with China
as a mechanism for enforcing “national unity,” which means, in
practice, suppressing and criminalizing domestic opposition.
This view is spelled out by Financial Times
columnist Janan Ganesh in a February 20201 column titled, “America’s
best hope of hanging together is China.” Ganesh concluded, “Without an
external foe to rail against, the nation turns on itself,” adding, “only
an external foe” can end the “age of discord.”
In June 2019, the
former intelligence officer and current transportation secretary Pete
Buttigieg made clear that a common external enemy would serve as the
basis for “national unity” and the “battle” at home. “The new China
challenge provides us with an opportunity to come together across the
political divide,” he said. “At least half the battle is at home.”
The
First and Second World Wars were accompanied by systematic censorship
in the United States and the imprisonment of left-wing opponents of
capitalism. In 1918, socialist Eugene Debs was sentenced to 10 years in
prison for his opposition to World War I. In 1941, 18 members of the
Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party were sentenced under the Smith Act to
between 12 and 16 months in prison.
More recently, the attacks of
September 11, 2001 were utilized to implement far-reaching attacks on
democratic rights under the framework of the “war on terror”: the
Patriot Act, Guantanamo Bay, domestic spying, and other measures aimed
at erecting the apparatus of a police state. As the WSWS noted at the time,
the ruling elite “seized on the tragic events of September 11 to
realize their political agenda at home, just as they are using them to
launch a US military intervention in oil-rich Central Asia.”
And
what has happened over the past twenty years? Social inequality has
grown to new heights. The American ruling class, in the form of the
plots of Trump, has raised the prospect of a fascistic dictatorship. The
criminality of the oligarchy, under both the Democrats and Republicans,
has led to a level of death from the pandemic that is staggering.
The
working class must be on alert. The pandemic has made clear that the
American ruling class is capable of sacrificing hundreds of thousands of
lives to achieve its goals. If the deaths of millions of people in war
is the “least bad” of several unfavorable options for the ruling class,
these deaths will be tolerated.
All over the world, workers are
entering into struggle to demand the end of decades of falling or
stagnant wages, horrendous and worsening working conditions, and an end
to the pandemic. These struggles must be connected to the fight against
imperialist war, the plots against democratic rights, and opposition to
the entire capitalist system.
Mass protests in support of the right to an abortion took place over
the weekend. An estimated 250,000 people gathered at more than 600
rallies and marches across the country on Saturday to oppose the Texas
abortion ban and the refusal of the Supreme Court to uphold Roe v. Wade.
The
scale of the protests demonstrates the broad support for abortion
rights in the United States. There were an estimated 10,000 or more at
protests in Austin and Houston, Texas, Washington D.C., Los Angeles and
New York City, while thousands more gathered in the San Francisco Bay
Area, Chicago, Boston and dozens of other large cities. There were
protests in hundreds of smaller cities and towns, ranging from college
towns to regional centers.
A portion of Saturday's protest at the state capitol in Austin, Texas (WSWS)
While
the overwhelming majority of those participating were women, there were
substantial numbers of men as well, gathered to voice their support for
abortion rights. College students and other young people made up a huge
proportion of those attending, but there were marchers of all ages,
from children to the elderly.
The marchers took COVID-19 more
seriously than the corporate media and political establishment. Most
were masked and many observed a six-foot social distancing, and appeals
to keep masks on and maintain distance were regularly issued by speakers
and march organizers.
Many marchers targeted the Texas state
government and Governor Greg Abbott for stinging attacks. One
hand-printed sign which hit its target denounced Abbott for combining
the abortion ban and a “let it rip” policy on the COVID-19 pandemic. The
sign read: “Texas: Where a virus has reproductive rights and a woman
doesn’t.”
There were numerous attacks (from marchers, not the
interminable pro-Democratic Party speakers) on the role of organized
religion in the attack on reproductive rights. One mocking sign,
hand-lettered in the style of a Bible verse, read: “Thou shalt not mess
with women’s reproductive rights: Fallopians 10:2.”
The spirited
nature and wide scope of the demonstrations are reflective of the broad
support for abortion rights that exists in the general population.
According to polling data gathered by Pew Research earlier this year, 59
percent of people in the United States believe abortion should be legal
in all or most cases.
Despite this popular support, the size of
the protests was considerably smaller than the millions who showed up
for the inaugural Women’s Marches in 2017, the day after Trump’s
inauguration. This must be attributed to a number of factors, including a
justifiable concern over COVID-19, and an equally justifiable
sentiment, after years of such protests, that pleading with
corporate-controlled politicians to protect democratic rights is a dead
end.
There are likely to be, as well, illusions that with the end
of the Trump administration, the threat to democratic rights, including
abortion rights, has receded. However, the Guttmacher Institute, which
carries out systematic studies on the issue, reported that more state
laws were introduced to restrict abortion rights in the six months since
Biden was inaugurated than in any previous six-month period.
The
severity of the attack in Texas, combined with the upcoming Supreme
Court hearing on a Mississippi law which could provide the vehicle for a
decision to overturn Roe v. Wade outright, might be expected
to garner a larger response. That this was not the case is the result of
the feckless politics of the Democratic Party and its supporters who
organized the rallies.
One particularly disoriented aspect of the
rallies were signs proclaiming that “men” in general, not right-wing or
bigoted men (and women), were the primary threat to abortion rights.
This presents abortion rights as a gender issue rather than a class
issue, in keeping with the Democratic Party’s advocacy of identity
politics.
But restrictions on abortion overwhelmingly impact the
working class and poor. Wealthy women will always have access to safe
abortions. Regardless of the legal status of abortion services, women
from the ruling class may simply use their wealth and power to slip past
the law and avoid the crushing penalties.
The focus on gender
ignores the reality that female governors like Kristi Noem in South
Dakota and Kay Ivey in Alabama are just as fervent in their opposition
to abortion rights as Greg Abbott in Texas.
Pew Research
demonstrates that 56 percent of men support abortion rights, compared to
62 percent of women. Much more influential than gender are factors such
as religious and political sentiments.
Many rallies were
addressed by local and state Democratic officials, along with a host of
Democratic-aligned celebrities, peddling the same electoral posturing
that has achieved nothing for abortion rights in decades.
At the
rally in Austin, Texas, was a slate of Texas Democratic Party
politicians, including US Rep. Lloyd Doggett, Texas State Senator Sarah
Eckhardt, and other local officials. They were joined by a slate of
speakers who doused themselves in identity politics, introducing
themselves as “a woman of color,” “a Latina woman,” and “an
Asian-American ally of the transgender community.”
Following the
rollout of their identity credentials, these speakers proceeded to do
little more than promote the Democratic Party and offer meaningless
displays of disapproval of the fascistic Republican Party.
One
speaker stated, “The Republicans are coming to take away your rights and
only we can stop them.” Another encouraged attendees to “blow your
whistles on three to show the GOP our voices will be heard.”
The
Democratic Party exploits mass opposition to attacks on abortion rights
to further its own electoral fortunes, but once in office, the
Democrats do nothing to defend or expand this democratic right,
accepting such atrocities as the Hyde Amendment, which bars most federal
funding for abortion services.
As recently as 2018, Democratic
House leader Nancy Pelosi denied that there was any “litmus test” on
abortion rights for Democratic Party candidates. In other words,
Democratic congressmen who are anti-choice can still expect the full
support of the party apparatus, as well as anti-choice candidates who
win a party primary.
The ruling on Roe v. Wade was issued
in 1973, nearly 50 years ago. Since then, the Democratic Party has made
no serious effort to codify abortion rights in federal law. When it has
had majorities in the House and Senate, the Democratic Party failed to
pass any federal legislation that would prevent what is occurring in
Texas today. Currently, there is more federal legislation restricting
abortion access than expanding it.
Along with the appeals to
electoral politics were frequent references to late Supreme Court
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. News reports show signs and posters urging
the Supreme Court to intervene on behalf of abortion rights. A Supreme
Court with a 6-3 ultra-right majority can hardly be entrusted with the
defense of fundamental democratic rights.
The fight to protect
abortion rights must be taken out of the hands of the Democratic Party.
It has done nothing to mobilize any meaningful effort to protect
abortion rights beyond using the threat to Roe v. Wade to promote its electoral interests.
But
now there is a Democratic-controlled House, a Democratic-controlled
Senate, and a Democrat in the White House. Yet the Democratic Party has
proven incapable of passing its own voting rights bills, not just
because there is Republican opposition, but because representatives and
senators of its own party do not wish to protect democratic rights.
A
party that is abandoning the most fundamental democratic right of them
all, the right to vote, cannot be relied upon to protect the right of a
woman to get an abortion.
Working people must break with this
dead-end political orientation. The Democratic Party is offering nothing
to defend women’s rights or democratic rights in general. The only
social force capable of defending abortion rights is the working class
itself. It must not put faith in the confused, disoriented and
reactionary political conceptions promoted by the Democratic Party.
The
capitalist system is clawing back every concession made over the past
century of working class struggle. Only through the fight for socialism
can these gains, including the right to an abortion, be protected from
the right-wing politics of the two major capitalist parties.
