The heart of the midterm election battles of 2022 is the struggle of the American people to survive this era of climate disaster, pandemic, inflation, rent gouging, police violence, denial of reproductive rights and economic uncertainty. Because so many of these issues are at stake, the elections are also a battleground over our most basic rights and freedoms, including the right to vote itself.
A recent Quinnipiac University poll showed that 69 percent of people surveyed felt that American democracy is in danger and they are right. The technological revolution in the economy is polarizing society and driving the ruling class to embrace the politics of corporate fascist dictatorship. As automation and artificial intelligence push workers out of the economy, the ruling class is no longer willing to fund housing and health care. As a result, it has no more need for the democracy that people use to fight for these programs, and it is moving to dismantle it.
People sense the danger, but many have been slow to understand it deeply and take action. As Ohio Democratic Party operative David Pepper said, “There are two sides in America, but they are fighting different battles. The blue side thinks their views are largely popular and democracy is relatively stable – and they just need better outcomes in federal elections. The focus is on winning swing states in national elections. The other side, though, knows that our democracy isn’t stable – that it can be subverted through the statehouses. Blue America needs to reshape everything it does for that much deeper battle.”
FASCISTS SUBVERTING STATES’ DEMOCRACY
The battle is deeper than that. Statehouse subversion includes gerrymandering and passing court packing and abortion banning laws. It includes passing anti-immigration, pro-pollution and “Don’t Say Gay” laws. It includes passing election denialism, voter suppression and anti-unionism laws. At its most extreme, it involves the “independent state legislature” doctrine giving state legislatures dictatorial power over courts, constitutions and voters – a doctrine the U.S. Supreme Court is expected to rule on during this term.
State-level repression goes with an assault on democracy and civil rights. A movement is growing for an “Article V” convention to replace the U.S. Constitution with a Pinochet-like document enthroning corporate power. It accompanies legal and extralegal threats to elections and to the safety of election workers and their families. Election officials suffer a mass of Freedom of Information records requests to disrupt and discredit the elections they administer.
While it is critical to point out the dangers, revolutionaries also identify the opportunities that light the way forward and provide hope for the future. Conditions now are more favorable to us than under Reconstruction. The expanding capitalism of the 19th century no longer exists. As today’s automation reduces labor, it reduces the overall rate of profit and restricts the system’s ability to attract investment in new production It causes the economic decline we have experienced since 2008. In the 19th and 20th centuries, the South could isolate Black workers and the country could isolate the South because the economy grew rapidly.
The ruling class today is on the defensive. It cannot pass laws to protect its profits – i.e., environmental deregulation, anti-unionism, welfare and health care elimination – without also attacking democracy itself because the people rise up to resist. To attack democracy, the ruling class has had to ally with every anti-democratic social force it could find. Through organizations like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and the Heritage Foundation, corporations have lined up with the anti-abortion movement, the gun lobby, white supremacist and anti-immigrant groups and armed militias like the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys. When these connections get exposed, most corporations disavow them publicly then quietly reconnect.
To splinter and paralyze the working class, the ruling class has relied on white supremacy, male supremacy and what we now call hetero patriarchy. This strategy worked as long as the system met the needs of most workers, and people could envision better lives. Today’s sputtering economy put an end to that. As the George Floyd rebellion proved, the American people are uniting.
REPRODUCTIVE FREEDOM AND TWO CLASS STRATEGIES
Nothing illustrates this like reproductive freedom. The ruling class in the 1970s elevated the call to ban abortion as a strategy to build a base in the evangelical and Catholic churches and create a “wedge issue” preventing the working class from uniting around its economic interests. The reversal of Roe v. Wade upset this strategy. Instead of dividing workers, it tended to unite them against the ruling class, its Congress and its Court. The leaked draft opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito contained a footnote referring to “the domestic supply of infants” and brought back memories of forced pregnancies under chattel slavery. While it is inappropriate to question the loving intentions of most adoptive families, there is clearly a section of the ruling class that is essentially trying to force working-class women and pregnant people, especially people of color, to give birth to satisfy the demands of wealthy people for babies for adoption. It is as grotesque and violent a violation of bodily autonomy as can be imagined.”
The defeat of the Kansas anti-abortion amendment in the election of August 2 stunned the ruling class special interests. The pro-choice movement paid close attention to the audience it spoke to as it fought to take back the narrative from right-wing Christian Nationalist/fascists. The movement understood that the rise of national and state abortion bans is tied to the rise of violent dictatorship and demolition of electoral democracy. It understood that the ruling class’s punishment of single moms in poverty would result in undercutting income and protections for all workers while pitting one section of the poor against the others.
The movement did not accept the enemy’s framing of the abortion issue. Instead, it recast the workers’ demands in ways that reached the broadest audience. To continue championing reproductive freedom means a strategy that fights for health care access for all women and for everyone. It is not about abortion or day care; it is about abortion and day care, as well as the rest of people’s economic needs.
Defeating the ruling class strategy of state-by-state subversion offers a vision of giving sanctuary states real protection against criminalization of women, providers, and anyone who might face felony first-degree murder charges for defending them. It envisions public funding for abortions as well as every other form of health care, without the waiting period that only further oppresses and criminalizes women and pregnant people. It envisions that contraceptive care and procedures to protect the lives of the women should be routine in all ER protocols.
November/December 2022 vol.32. Ed6
Published: October 18, 2022
This article originated in Rally, Comrades!
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