Credit: AlinStock
By Ethel Long-Scott (California based anti-poverty and women’s rights community organizer, social issues advocate, political campaign strategist, non-profit director and League strategist and builder)
and Melinda Lavon (midwife and organizer in canvassing and campaign planning for Vote No Kansas with her Lawrence DSA Chapter)
Technology supposedly invented to catch “bad guys” has now created a surveillance state to catch “good women,” as well as make it easier for the techno-fascist oligarchy to dismantle electoral democracy and ruthlessly destroy our Constitutional rights.
This June, the sheriff’s office in Johnson County, Texas, went on a nationwide hunt for a woman accused of self-administered abortion, which is illegal in Texas. The hunt was possible with 83,000 automatic license plate readers reporting to 6,809 different camera networks, monitored by one security company. The data included cameras in states where abortion is legal and protected like Illinois. Around the country, activists are demanding data sharing limits, surveillance limits, and where possible, abortion shield laws like those in New York and Colorado.
Despite the total ban on abortions in Texas, in addition to the diverse forces in this struggle a Black women-centered reproductive justice movement is arising, including mobilizing, refuge, education, and sharing resources. Organized women’s storytelling projects are exposing how abortion bans prevent women from getting other life-saving health care they need. Ongoing community education and organizing, and support for travel for care, are helping to build the working class power we need.
PROJECT 2025
We need stronger mutual aid networks to prevent this Texas situation, and we need to demand more vigorous protection of our communication and location data. Project 2025, the conservative Heritage Foundation blueprint for a fascist takeover of the government, outlines a sweeping plan to create a federal abortion surveillance system. It would monitor abortion and pregnancy nationwide, with the goal of ending medical privacy and reproductive rights altogether.
Project 2025 would direct the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to collect extensive data on every abortion conducted, including personal details about the woman involved. Information would include miscarriages, stillbirths, interstate travel (allegedly to combat so-called abortion tourism), and any “treatments that incidentally result in death” (like chemotherapy). Data would be reported to a centralized federal system, and states which fail to comply could lose federal funding.
CORPORATE DICTATORSHIP
Tech billionaires are trying to create what some are calling technology-based private “startup nations” where women’s bodies will be subject to corporate control without democratic recourse, especially threatening for women of color and the poor who already face criminalization of their bodies. These mini-states would be corporate dictatorships where wealthy executives would be allowed to exit any obligations of citizenship, especially taxes and regulation.
They propose creating a patchwork of “Freedom Cities”, like Singapore or Dubai, with their own all-powerful CEO, where mass political participation and democracy wouldn’t exist. Protecting these hyper-capitalist, democracy-free havens would be terrorist private mercenaries, serviced by AI robots, and financed by the cryptocurrencies favored by billionaires like Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, Sam Altman, and Donald Trump.
The current Big Bad Budget Bill would facilitate these dictatorships by banning any state AI regulation for 10 years, partnering with the Trump administration and its goal of “global AI dominance.” Kevin De Liban, the founder of TechTonic Justice, a nonprofit to protect low-income people from AI, said: “The message is clear. The House Republican proposal is stealing from poor people to give huge handouts to Big Tech, to build technology that is going to perpetuate the president’s authoritarian plans and crackdowns against vulnerable people.”
North Carolina Bishop Dr William J. Barber II is resisting by carrying on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Poor People’s Campaign, featuring “Moral Mondays” events in cities around the country. He noted in June that if Congress passes
d the Administration’s budget, “it would represent the single largest transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich in U.S. history…This budget is not just bad policy, it is sin. It will rob the poor, starve children, and deny care to the sick in order to line the pockets of the wealthy. We will not stand by while it preys on the most vulnerable. Not on our watch.”
COMMUNITY POWER
Winning the fight for reproductive freedom requires building working class power to reject surveillance capitalism and privatized sovereignty, while we fight for basic needs and justice. Successful organizing strategies have included the Vote No Kansas model and similar campaigns in Kentucky, Montana, Ohio, and Missouri. These were based on individual and small group conversations by text, phone, and in person, focusing on fighting ballot measures written to ban or restrict abortion. Their method was to use a disciplined approach: relationship, listen, share, inoculate, ask, support through action, and repeat.
Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the New York City Democratic mayoral primary was based on linking social movement agendas, like reproductive freedom, with economic issues like food, housing, and transportation. “We do not have to give up our freedom in order to be fed”, he said. “There is no reason we cannot have our freedom and also have economic justice.” Mamdani’s eye-catching social media creations brought his “afford to live, afford to dream” message directly to voters in a compelling way.
Mamdani has shown that highlighting racial, gender and rural-urban inequalities, like resisting the attacks on immigrants and ON all people of color, does not detract from our economic message. It points us toward the unity we need to win. While we support leadership by the most impacted, we understand that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. The majority of Americans is not able to afford more than $500 in emergency expenses. We strive to connect reproductive freedom to the broader movements that serve entire families and communities: economic justice, fighting against a surveillance state, and for protection of personal data.
Battles focused on economic security for low wealth, working class, and dispossessed people are the key to defeating technofascism. Corporate dictatorship is threatening the rights of the working class and 99 percent of the population as a whole. The window for resistance is now, before surveillance infrastructure becomes total. Working people are creating a social force powerful enough to defeat the billionaire offensive. While we defend every democratic right we still have, we build the political power we need to create the abundant new society that is possible.
Published on July 3rd, 2025
This article originated in Rally!
P.O. Box 477113 Chicago, IL 60647 rally@lrna.org
Free to reproduce unless otherwise marked.
Please include this message with any reproduction
