Above photo: Thousands marched in Sydney on July 2 in protest at the U.S. Supreme Court’s overturning of abortion rights in America and to demand free, safe, legal, abortion on demand in Australia. The vigour and determination of the protesters reflected their understanding that those attacking abortion rights were not only opposing an absolutely crucial right for women but were attacking women’s very right to decide what they do with their own bodies and how they lives their own lives.
Photo Credit: Reuters
FOLLOWING MASSIVE U.S. ATTACK ON WOMEN’S RIGHTS,
MOBILISE THE WORKERS MOVEMENT TO FIGHTBACK
FROM THE U.S. TO AUSTRALIA:
FOR FREE, EASILY ACCESSIBLE,
ABORTION ON DEMAND!
1 July 2022: The U.S. regime struck a savage blow against women when its Supreme Court overturned its nearly 50 year old Roe vs Wade ruling that had tenuously given American women a degree of abortion rights. Now, 26 of America’s 52 states are set to deny women those rights or to severely restrict them. It will be low-income women – and because of intense racist discrimination that often means black women as well as other women of colour – who will be hit hardest. Since a women’s decision to seek an abortion is often an economic one, the majority of women who had been getting abortions in the U.S. were those below or just above the poverty line. Yet this is precisely the same group who will now find it extremely difficult to pay for the travel and accommodation – often while suffering loss of income from taking time off work – to travel to states where abortion is legal.
To make matters worse, the majority of black women, the women most hurt by the Supreme Court overturn ruling, live in the very same southern states that are now outlawing abortion. For many such black and low-income women, the stripping of abortion rights will mean that they will either be forced to continue with pregnancies that they do not want, which could well consign them and their children to further immiseration, or will be compelled to seek dangerous backyard abortions that could result in their death, or if they get caught, imprisonment. Trotskyist Platform insists that women must have the right to safe, free and widely accessible abortion on demand. We also say that there must not be any restriction on women accessing abortion care in even the later stages of pregnancy. Moreover, women must not be forced to undergo compulsory “counseling” which only adds to the stress of what can often already be an anxious time for her, when she may have to deal with pressure from husbands, boyfriends and family as well as ignorant stigma from broader society. We demand the right to abortion that is completely on demand for women in the U.S. and for women everywhere, including here in Australia.
Right now in Australia, women generally have more of the right to choose than in the United States. In recent years, important victories have been won here. In October 2019, a law came into force that finally decriminalised abortion in NSW. This is not the result of the benevolence of its pro-capitalist parliament but a product of a decades-long struggle by abortion rights activists and supporters of women’s rights, including from sections of the trade union movement. However, women are far from having the full right to abortion on demand in Australia. For example, if a woman wants a later term abortion in NSW, that is after 22 weeks of gestation, whether they will be able to go ahead is out of their hands. That decision lies with two medical practitioners who must decide whether the practice is “appropriate”. In Tasmania, such restrictions come into force after just 16 weeks of gestation. Meanwhile, Western Australia has this country’s most draconian laws. After 20 weeks gestation, abortion is basically banned, with a women only able to access services if two doctors out of a panel of six find that she or the foetus has a severe medical condition. Before this period, women can only access abortion care after first going through a “counseling” session with a doctor different to the one providing the services. We need to fight here to remove all these serious curtailments to the right to abortion in Australia. There needs to be a major struggle to ensure that whatever rights to abortion that do exist are actually accessible for working class and rural women – and especially for Aboriginal women who are often forced to live in poverty in rural areas. Many of the abortion services that are currently available are privately run and thus the procedure is often out of reach of lower income women. Thus, ensuring women’s true right to choose means not only winning the full right to abortion on demand but also requires ensuring that the procedure is a free and widely available service provided by the public health system; and it also means ensuring that lower-income women are lifted out of poverty.
Photo Credit: WFTS
Women’s Rights Are Workers Rights
The abortion rights in the U.S. provided by Roe vs Wade had always been partial. Indeed, Texas and Oklahoma had effectively banned abortion even before the recent court ruling by passing laws enabling civil lawsuits against women getting abortions. A notorious late 1970s law passed in the time of Democrat president, Jimmy Carter, called the Hyde Amendment, prevents federal funding for abortion. Therefore, many low-income women simply could not afford an abortion even in the time when Roe vs Wade stood. Nevertheless, the recent court decision is a huge setback for women’s rights. In response, women in the U.S., joined by men who support women’s rights, have held huge protests. Trotskyist Platform stands in urgent solidarity with those fighting on the streets of America for women’s right to choose what they do with their own bodies.
The Supreme Court decision was condemned by senior U.S. Democrat Party members including president, Joe Biden. The Democrats have been, with success, taking control of the mass protests and saying that people need to vote for them in order to push back against the attacks on abortion rights spearheaded by the reactionary Republicans. However, the Democrats’ commitment to abortion rights is at best half-hearted. Biden himself has for decades been a strong supporter of the notorious Hyde Amendment that denied women access to federal funding to pay for abortion care. He only changed his position before the 2020 presidential elections after being attacked for his stance. Meanwhile, there have been many times where there has been a Democrat president and a Democrat controlled congress, yet the party has stubbornly refused to legislate the right to abortion on demand, despite this right long being supported by a sizable majority of Americans. Although most of those on American streets marching for abortion that have illusions in the Democrats or are rank-and-file Democrat members are sincere in their support for abortion rights, many rightly suspect that many a Democrat leader is half happy at the court ruling since it enables them to win votes from the right-wing Republicans on the promise of upholding abortion rights.
The very partial nature of the Democrats’ commitment to abortion rights flows from the fact that no less than the conservative Republicans, the Democrats are a party dominated by capitalists. The capitalist system in turn is tied up with an obsession on insisting that everyone conforms to the traditional family structure, in particular as a family economic unit. The wealthy capitalists have an attachment to this structure because they are fixated with passing on their property to, usually male, heirs. However, so as to be sure that their wealth isn’t claimed by the patriarch of another family, they want their property to be passed on to heirs who are indisputably theirs. This obsession with handing down their property to their own heirs and, thus, with ensuring that their wives do not bear children to other men drive rich propertied males’ compulsion to socially – and, thus, economically – isolate their wives. Yet the capitalists want everyone else to also adhere to the same structure that serves their needs, even the working class who own no commodity-producing property. This is because capitalists see the division of the masses into separate family economic units as being useful to, on the one hand, preventing workers from uniting against them and on the other hand with helping them to instill discipline and conservative values in the next generation. Moreover, greedy capitalist ruling classes do not want to actually pay people to conduct the essential tasks of housework and child rearing. And so it is held incumbent upon women to, without any pay, conduct these important social functions; work that in original human civilisations – including those of most of Australia’s Aboriginal nations – had humanely and quite rightly been carried out as the collective responsibility of whole communities. Given that the capitalists’ interests are in forcing everyone into economic units based on the traditional family structure, they view with hostility anything that deviates or challenges this, whether it be independent women empowered by the right to decide what to do with their own bodies, lesbian and gay relationships or trans people. Thus, women in leading positions in the Democrat party, which given the nature of the party means that they are either directly from the ruling class or are otherwise pro-capitalist in their politics, are torn between wanting their own personal freedoms and rights as female human beings on the one hand and, on the other, as capitalists, wanting to do everything possible to herd everyone into nuclear family units through measures that necessarily oppress women.
Yet for the same reasons that even progressive-minded women from the capitalist class are limited in their ability to stand for women’s rights, it is the united working class – in which history has destined working class women to play the lead role – that has a strong interest in spearheading the struggle for women’s emancipation. The workers movement needs working class women to have the right to control their bodies so that they will be feisty and independent and can, thus, play a leading role in uniting all their class to struggle for workers rights against the capitalist exploiters. Or as the peak trade union body in the north-eastern U.S. state of Vermont, the Vermont State Labor Council AFL-CIO, put it: Women’s Rights Are Workers Rights! Moreover, through their power to turn on and off production, the workers movement has not only the interests to stand up for women’s rights but the power to force the ruling class to concede rights to women through strike action and other mass actions. However, industrial action necessarily hurts the profits of all the capitalists, whether they are open right-wing reactionaries or supposed “progressives.” That is why the struggle to mobilise working class power in support of the struggle for women’s liberation will be a struggle that must be waged against all wings of the capitalist class – even its most progressive members. The extent to which working class power in the U.S. can today be unleashed in the urgent fight for abortion rights depends on the extent to which the workers movement can be unchained from its present subordination to the capitalist Democratic Party.
Here, mobilising the workers movement to support women’s full right to choose and to support the broader struggle for women’s emancipation requires breaking the stranglehold of the Labor Party – and pro-ALP and pro-Greens agendas – on the workers movement. Although most individuals in the ALP support abortion rights, the party’s stance is half-hearted given that it includes staunch anti-abortion elements within its leading layers. As a party that seeks to reconcile workers’ interests with those of the capitalist exploiters, the ALP parliamentary and union tops seek to restrict industrial action to being a supplementary add-on to their main parliamentary game rather than fighting for a program that fully unleashes the power of our unions in an all out struggle for workers’ and women’s rights. Meanwhile, although more progressive on social questions than the ALP, like the ALP the Greens are also congenitally opposed to a program of militant class struggle. For unlike even the ALP, whose ranks are largely workers, the Greens actually include significant numbers of actual capitalist exploiters in their ranks and this party is politically dominated by upper-middle class elements loyal to capitalism.
Photo Credit: South Australia ALP website
What Do You Mean That America is a “Liberal Democracy”?
The overturning of the already limited abortion rights in the U.S. has made a mockery of the U.S. ruling class’ claim to be the bastion of “liberal democratic values.” Of course, this was always a lie. Both the U.S. and Australia are neither truly “democratic” nor “liberal.” Their “democracies” are dominated by capitalist oligarchs who own and control the media, use their wealth and ownership of the economy to control state institutions by thousands of threads and use their billions to dominate political narratives by disproportionately funding political parties, paying for political advertising, establishing think tanks and “independent” NGOs and hiring lobbyists. As for “liberal values”, the U.S. has the world’s largest prison population and jails its people at a rate six time higher than in China. Moreover, both the anti-abortion Republicans and the more “progressive” Democrats supported the U.S. training and arming – and now hailing as valiant war heroes – of Ukraine’s ultra-right wing Azov Regiment, which along with other violent fascist groups there, have not only attacked Roma, leftists, Jews and pro-Russia activists over the last eight years but have conducted violent assaults on Ukraine’s LGBTIQ+ community and women’s rights activists; including simultaneously attacking, in several cities of Ukraine, participants in the 2018 International Women’s Day rallies. Meanwhile, here, the capitalist regime kills Aboriginal people in state custody, imprisons refugees in hell-hole camps and in Afghanistan committed horrific racist war crimes.
The claims of Washington and Canberra to be champions of “liberal democracy” are mainly used to justify their meddling in countries around the world and especially to sell their intensifying Cold War drive against socialistic China. However, undermining the mantras of Western governments is the fact that China has one of the most liberal abortion laws in the world. Article 19 of the Population and Family Planning Law of the People’s Republic of China grants the unrestricted right to contraception and abortion and Article 21 stipulates that these rights should be enjoyed for free.
Anti-communist propagandists have long sought to denigrate China’s liberal anti-abortion laws as merely a means to enforce a one-child policy. However, that policy was long ago abandoned and China is now actively trying to increase the country’s birth rate. Yet the liberal abortion laws remain. China’s liberal abortion laws were, indeed, confirmed in an amended version of her Population and Family Planning Law that was passed just ten months ago. There are, however, two small autonomous parts of China where abortion on demand does not exist: that is in Macau and in Hong Kong (as well as in the rogue capitalist Chinese region of Taiwan). This is a legacy of laws brought in by the former Western “liberal, democratic” colonial rulers of these territories. In both these regions, abortion is considered a crime which is only allowed as an exception when two doctors determine that there is a serious risk to the physical or mental health of a woman (the Macau law is stricter than the Hong Kong one). As a result of lingering influence of Christian churches and Christian schools from the British colonial times, there is often a terrible stigma against Hong Kong women obtaining abortion care. Furthermore, in Hong Kong it is hard to access abortion services from public providers,
meaning that the right to choose is out of reach for lower-income women. For these reasons, many Hong Kong women travel to Mainland China to access abortion services. Unfortunately, because the Beijing government has accommodated the Western imperialists and the local capitalists dominating Hong Kong and Macau by granting these regions a high degree of autonomy under a “one country, two systems” formula, it has not thus far moved to overturn the colonial-era restrictions on abortion in these regions. We call on the Chinese government not to bend to the sensibilities of those demanding the “two systems” part of “one country, two systems” and to instead move to bring the right to free abortion on demand overwhelmingly enjoyed by women in the socialistic mainland of China to the regions of Macau and Hong Kong.
It is telling too that the biggest ever blow to a women’s right to choose – even greater in scale than what has just happened in the U.S. – occurred as a result of a triumph of “liberal democracy”, by which the Western powers really mean capitalism. In her socialistic days, women in Poland had enjoyed the right to abortion on demand. However, soon after Poland became the first country in the former Soviet bloc to be swept away by capitalist counterrevolution, women’s right to choose became severely restricted in 1990. Today, women in Poland can only obtain abortion care if their physical health is seriously endangered by continuing the pregnancy or if she is raped – and even in the latter case she can only have the abortion up to 13 weeks’ gestation.
Photo credit: Arturo Mari/AFP
The Terrifying Rise of Far-Right Reaction in the Capitalist World
Right-wing forces wildly celebrated the court decision overturning Roe vs Wade. The momentum that these forces have been given could threaten women’s right to choose in even those American states that currently allow abortion. This terrible setback to women’s right to choose is indeed closely related to the growth of hard-right forces. The Supreme Court ruling that overturned Roe vs Wade had been stacked with hardline conservative judges by racist former Republican Party president, Donald Trump. Trump celebrated the court ruling as did his estranged ex-vice president, Mike Pence. Now with the Democrat administration overseeing plummeting workers’ real wages and rampant inflation, the increasingly right-wing Republican Party is leading in polls for November’s mid-term congressional elections. Here too in Australia, far-right forces have been gaining ground. Along with the ever clearer right-wing trajectory of the Liberal Party, signified by the ascendancy of racist hardliner, Peter Dutton, to its leadership, forces even further to the right have increased their influence. At the recent federal elections, such far-right parties increased their votes by almost 60%, allowing them to gain almost one in eight votes. As well as the senate seats retained by One Nation, the United Australia Party, led by greedy billionaire Clive Palmer and rabid right-wing former Liberal Parry politician, Craig Kelly, was able to win a senate seat in Victoria after having won no seats in the previous elections.
Moreover, the growth of parliamentary based far-right parties has inevitably been associated with the strengthening of violent fascist gangs on the streets. Let’s remember, that it was less than a year and a half ago when far-right mobs incited by Trump tried to stage a right-wing coup in America. Then, just six weeks ago, a white supremacist, shouting racial slurs, shot dead ten black people in a mass shooting at a supermarket frequented by predominantly black people in New York state’s Buffalo. In March 2019, an Australian neo-Nazi, raised in Australia’s racist environment, murdered 51 Muslim people in a shooting rampage at two mosques in New Zealand’s Christchurch. Meanwhile, every day in Australia, violent bigots and those incited by them harass, abuse and physically attack Aboriginal people and people of Chinese background, as well as other people of colour and those from LGBTIQ+ communities. Emboldened by the recent U.S. court ruling, the growing Australian right-wing extremist forces are now likely to unleash more intense harassment and violence against women entering abortion clinics.
So why, in the 21st century, is all this bigotry rising in places like the U.S., Australia, France and Germany? In short it is because of the increasing decay of the capitalist order. To understand how capitalist decay spawns right-wing reaction, one needs to examine the social base of the Far Right. The stronghold of extreme right-wing forces is amongst economically insecure layers of the self-employed middle class – which includes farmers, self-employed tradies and contractors, owner truck drivers and small business owners (in short the class that we Marxists refer to as the petit bourgeoisie) – as well as smaller-scale members of the actual capitalist exploiting class. Now when the working class moves powerfully to challenge the capitalist exploiters, the best of the petit bourgeoisie will identify their interests with those of the workers movement. However, when the workers movement is on the back foot, the most insecure and reactionary members of the self-employed middle class, the petit bourgeois, will be manipulated by capitalist demagogues to turn their frustrations against those doing it harder than them. Instead of seeking to join with the working class to jointly seize the best parts of the cake stolen by the big end of town they will be mobilised to fight against the rest of the masses for the crumbs. In this way, sections of the self-employed middle class are being manipulated to obsess about maintaining their social position one or two rungs above the working class by seeking to push down those from the working class seeking to expand their rights – especially if they are from its most downtrodden layers like Aboriginal people, women workers seeking equal pay, unemployed workers and people of colour. Since the self-employed are essentially small businessmen, divided by the reality that everyone else operating in their market is an economic rival, they can easily fall prey to divisive racist rhetoric. Since they share the capitalists’ same pre-occupation with passing on productive property to male heirs – and sometimes they are even more obsessive about this than the big capitalists given that their businesses are much smaller and, thus, all the more precious and precarious – the insecure self-employed can easily fall for extreme “family values” agendas and, consequently, anti-abortion ones. Moreover, not brought together with others at the point of production like wage workers and hopelessly dependent on both the elements (the weather in the case of farmers) and big capitalist-generated market forces beyond their control, the isolated and precariously operating petit bourgeoise is especially susceptible to the influence of rabid religious forces.
So why then is middle class reaction becoming ever stronger. There are three closely related reasons. For one, the size of the self-employed layer has actually increased in countries like the U.S. and Australia over the last few decades. Theoretically, this should not be happening. Smaller scale production of goods and services is usually less efficient than large-scale production. However, the capitalists artificially propped up the size of this class by laying off workers from maintenance, courier, trucking, cleaning and other jobs and rehiring these workers as contractors. The corporate bosses made these moves because, although the new arrangement led to a loss of technical efficiency, it undercut union organising. So the social class on which right-wing reaction is based has actually grown in the U.S., Australia and other capitalist countries.
However, this would not have automatically led to such a rise in right-wing reaction if the workers movement had been active and determined enough to fight for its rights so decisively that it drew in the self-employed behind it. That this has not thus far happened is the fault of the social democratic current leaders of the workers movement, which in Australia means the ALP. Meanwhile, the reason that sections of the insecure middle class have moved from supporting traditional conservative politics to backing aggressive far-right agendas, is that the decay of the capitalist system and its repeated economic crises have increased economic insecurity. Today, it is surging fuel and other raw material prices that are buffeting the self-employed layers as they are all the masses. Furthermore, the more that the capitalists need to exploit to keep their system afloat, the more that its representatives promote racism, bigotry and extreme religion to divide the masses that they exploit.
What all this means is that even though the U.S. Democrats and the Australian ALP – and still more strongly the Greens – reject the agendas of the Hard Right, their loyalty to the capitalist order means that they uphold the very system that is spawning right-wing reaction. That is why one cannot resist the Far Right by supporting the Democrats in the U.S. or the ALP and Greens in Australia. After all, it was eight years of the relatively liberal Obama administration which, incapable of providing economic security to the masses, created the conditions for the rise of right-wing reaction that led to Trump’s ascendancy. Similarly, if Albanese’s ALP is allowed to carry out its pro-capitalist agenda, it will allow Dutton or others even more extreme to eventually gain the ascendancy. This is doubly so since right now the masses’ living standards are plummeting and there are even signs that we are headed towards yet another deep global capitalist economic crisis.
The force that can resist right-wing reaction and the socio-economic conditions which breed it is the multi-racial working class. However, it can only do this by opposing all the representatives of the capitalist class in unleashing struggles for secure jobs for all through forcing bosses to increase hiring at the expense of their profits and by stopping rampant inflation through winning the confiscation of the greedy oil, gas and power corporations and their transfer into public ownership. At the same time the workers movement must oppose the turning of its ranks into self-employed contractors by fighting for contractors and gig workers to be hired – and often rehired – by companies into jobs with high wages and all the rights of permanency. When the working class decisively challenges the capitalists in this way and fights for additional measures that are both in the interests of themselves and those of the middle class – like nationalising the banks and lowering power prices – then it can draw in the self-employed middle class behind them and make the latter realise that it is possible to fight against the exploiters above them rather than cowardly kicking those in a social position below them. Recent strike action by NSW nurses, rail and bus workers and teachers give a small taste of the potential for working-class resistance. However, to unleash the power of the workers movement requires replacing the pro-ALP social democratic leadership dominating the working class and its unions with one that stands for uncompromising opposition to the capitalist order.
The revolutionary party of the working class that we need, in which women and people of colour will necessarily play a dominant role, would champion the cause of all the oppressed. It would unite with all the oppressed in mobilising mass action to physically defend Aboriginal people, targeted ethnic communities, LGBTIQ+ people and abortion clinics from violent right-wing forces. It would also struggle for the complete liberation of women through fighting for women’s complete economic independence. This means standing for equal pay for equal work, guaranteed permanent jobs for all, a massive increase in low-rent public housing and free around the clock childcare. We also fight for a system that will deliver free pre-school education, free school lunches at all schools and after-school sports, music and cultural activities provided for free by the state alongside free transport from school to and from these activities. The struggle to implement and provide the resources for all these measures poses the need to strip the economy away from the filthy rich capitalist exploiters and place it into socialist, public ownership under a workers government. When such socialist revolutions place economies into the collective hands of the masses on a global scale, the capitalist decay and economic insecurity that breeds far-right forces will be done away with and racist, male chauvinist and homophobic bigotry will finally be consigned to the dustbin of history.
