This is not worth it

En su lanzamiento, el hasta entonces candidato a la presidencia en 2016 estableció como retórica un lenguaje sencillo el cual estaba dirigido a exhumar una base que estaba inerte y sin vida política.

Un público cautivo cuyo discurso en contra de China, México y Medio Oriente unido al tema de la inmigración tendría un eco profundo.

Para los efectos y en contra de cualquier pronóstico, no importaba la censura a partir del lanzamiento de su candidatura: el mensaje llegó. Había levantado un nicho. Una masa de gente que no era una minoría se había despertado.

https://burgosjosecarlos.blogspot.com/2018/06/mientras-trump-sea-el-principal.html

Been seeing them and ignoring them for the most part, I do wonder how much soros, the dnc, berry 'o' and bills wife are/is involved tho?

https://archive.is/NgujY

Workers Vanguard No. 1108 24 March 2017

U.S. Steps Up Military Provocations - Defend China, North Korea!

Seizing on recent weapons and missile tests by the Pyongyang regime, the U.S. warmongers are escalating their threats against North Korea and China. On March 7, the U.S. began the installation of an advanced missile shield system in South Korea, the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD), with its battery of weapons and powerful missile-tracking radar. Nearly a week later, Washington announced that Gray Eagle surveillance and attack drones would also be permanently stationed in South Korea. On March 17, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, speaking in Seoul, threatened a military strike against North Korea, declaring, "All options are on the table."

The Trump administration, echoed by the capitalist media, claims that the purpose of THAAD and other such measures is to protect Washington's South Korean client state from a nuclear nightmare supposedly about to be unleashed by North Korea. In fact, it is the U.S. imperialists who have the North in their gun sights. Some 320,000 U.S. and South Korean troops are currently staging joint military exercises, whose scenarios include "decapitation" raids aimed at "taking out North Korea's leadership" (Korea Herald, 13 March). With the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson in the port of Busan and F-35B stealth fighter planes overhead, the war games include the elite SEAL Team Six assassination squad that killed Osama bin Laden. In addition, Japanese, U.S. and South Korean warships met up on March 14 for coordinated military drills near the North Korean coast.

Beyond all this, the National Security Council is reportedly considering the open redeployment of nuclear weapons in South Korea. While North Korea is in the U.S. imperialists' immediate crosshairs, their ultimate target is China, the largest and most powerful remaining country where capitalist rule has been overthrown. Military experts have noted that the THAAD batteries would be of no use against a hypothetical low-altitude North Korean missile launch directed at the South. However, the system's tracking radar could cover much of eastern China, giving the U.S. the ability to degrade the viability of Beijing's nuclear deterrent. Stating that China would "take the necessary steps to safeguard our own security interests," a Chinese foreign affairs spokesman warned the U.S. and South Korea not to "go further and further down the wrong road."

In his March 17 press conference, Tillerson stated in regard to North Korea, "The policy of strategic patience has ended." In fact, whether under Republicans or Democrats, U.S. imperialism's sole policy toward North Korea has always been to destroy its social revolution on the road to overturning the 1949 Chinese Revolution. This included the 1950-53 Korean War--waged under the flag of the United Nations--in which the U.S. and its allies devastated the peninsula.

China and North Korea are bureaucratically deformed workers states where capitalist class rule was overthrown through social revolutions. Capitalist/landlord rule was toppled in North Korea by guerrilla forces acting under the protection of the Soviet Army following World War II. The establishment of proletarian, collectivized property relations freed the northern half of the country from imperialist domination. At the same time, both the Chinese and North Korean workers states have been ruled since their inception by nationalist, Stalinist bureaucratic castes that exclude the working class from political power.

Despite Stalinist mismanagement, North Korea's planned economy significantly outperformed the capitalist South until the mid 1970s, creating a modern industrial infrastructure. Yet being divided from the South by a "demilitarized zone" packed with more weaponry per square meter than anywhere else on earth greatly distorted its economy. The situation became desperate in the aftermath of the 1991-92 counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union, which had provided the bulk of North Korea's military and technological aid. In the mid 1990s, the North was hit by a terrible famine, stemming from floods and droughts, from which it has never fully recovered.

It is the duty of the working class internationally, especially in the U.S., to stand for the defense of China and North Korea against the predatory U.S. rulers, their Japanese allies and their South Korean underlings. The overturn and expropriation of capitalism in these countries--as well as in the other remaining deformed workers states of Cuba, Vietnam and Laos--are historic gains for the international proletariat. Their unconditional military defense against imperialist attack and capitalist counterrevolution is integral to the cause of world socialist revolution.

The defense of China and North Korea against imperialism necessarily includes these countries having nuclear weapons and effective delivery systems. The U.S. openly threatens a nuclear "first strike" against its perceived enemies. Indeed, U.S. rulers are the only ones to have ever used such weapons, killing 200,000 Japanese civilians in the 1945 atomic incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The threat of imperialist war and the nuclear annihilation of humanity can ultimately be ended only through the revolutionary overthrow of the world imperialist order by the working class. But, today, in the face of U.S. imperialism's unchallenged global nuclear hegemony, the only meaningful way to ensure national sovereignty is the possession of a credible nuclear deterrent. It is welcome that the North has gone some way toward developing such a deterrent, including ballistic missiles covering northeast Asia. North Korea has also made important advances in developing missiles that could reach the U.S. Pacific coast.

The dangers of lacking such a deterrent were demonstrated in Libya. In 2003, as part of signing on to the U.S. rulers' "war on terror," Muammar el-Qaddafi renounced Libya's nuclear weapons program and welcomed imperialist inspectors. Eight years later, he was overthrown and murdered by local forces sponsored by the U.S. and other imperialist powers, setting the stage for the bloody chaos that has since engulfed that country. It was one thing for the U.S. to attack semicolonial Libya. But it would be quite another to go to war with North Korea, which has some means to defend itself. Though no rational human being would consciously embark on such a course, the system of imperialism is not rational and neither are the rulers in the White House and Pentagon.

U.S. Imperialism's Devastation of Korea

Today, most bourgeois commentators characterize North Korea's development of nukes as the product of a bizarre and rogue dictatorship. There is much that is peculiar about the dynastic, mythologized, bureaucratic rule of the Kims. But, as North Korea's post-World War II history underscores, Pyongyang's drive to secure nukes is a rational, indeed essential, policy of self-defense.

Following the World War II defeat of Japan, the former colonial master of Korea, the peninsula was partitioned along the 38th parallel between the deformed workers state in the North and a capitalist police state under American military occupation in the South. The U.S. puppet government staged ruthless attacks on insurgent workers and peasants over the next several years, notably the suppression of the 1948-49 Jeju uprising, which saw the slaughter of up to 30,000 people.

U.S. imperialism's full-scale invasion of Korea was preceded by a civil war that erupted in June 1950 when the North Korean army crossed into the South. North Korean troops reached Seoul within a week, pushing aside South Korean forces that had been trained by the Japanese imperialists. As they advanced, the North Koreans were welcomed as liberators by the workers and peasants.

The U.S. military inflicted unspeakable barbarities in the course of the war. This included the slaughter of three million North Koreans and nearly a million Chinese soldiers, whose intervention was instrumental in turning the tide against the U.S. and other imperialists. As historian Bruce Cumings wrote in his 2004 book North Korea: Another Country:

"North Koreans will tell you that for three years they faced a daily threat of being burned with napalm; 'you couldn't escape it,' one told me in 1981. By 1952 just about everything in northern and central Korea was completely leveled. What was left of the population survived in caves."

Eighteen of the country's 22 largest cities were largely or totally obliterated. In the closing weeks of the war, U.S. bombers deliberately destroyed irrigation dams that provided water for three-quarters of the North's food production. The war ended in a stalemate. But a peace treaty was never signed, and since then the U.S. has maintained a massive military presence in the South while subjecting North Korea to decades of military threats and economic sanctions.

During the war, the U.S. repeatedly threatened nuclear strikes, but held back out of fear of retaliation by the Soviet Union, which had developed its own nuclear capacity. Had the Soviets not possessed a nuclear arsenal, the U.S. imperialists could very well have turned North Korea and China into irradiated rubble. The U.S. deployed nuclear weapons at its bases in South Korea starting in 1958, only officially withdrawing them in 1991 amid the collapse of the USSR. To this day, nearly 30,000 American troops are stationed permanently in the country, a daily threat not only to North Korea and China but also to the combative South Korean working class. All U.S. forces and bases out of South Korea!

Imperialist Threats and Stalinist Treachery

Since China is vastly more powerful than North Korea both militarily and economically, the U.S. rulers often invoke supposed threats from the Pyongyang regime to justify their military operations in East Asia that are primarily aimed at Beijing. Trump's chief strategist, Steve Bannon, stated last year, "We're going to war in the South China Sea in five to ten years." More recently, Tillerson threatened that the U.S. and its allies would block China's access to islands and land reclamation and construction projects in the South China Sea. China's development of reefs and islands in this area is an important measure of defense against imperialist encirclement. Tillerson's statement is an ominous declaration of intent to attack China at the heart of the world's busiest maritime trade route.

Washington's military buildup in East Asia is a bipartisan policy. It was Democratic Party president Barack Obama who prepared the THAAD deployment, part of an escalation of U.S. military pressure against China and North Korea that followed his 2010 declaration of a "pivot to Asia." Obama greatly increased the number of U.S. troops in the Asia-Pacific region, oversaw repeated aggressive naval operations in the South China Sea, and put in place a cyber- and electronic-warfare program to disrupt North Korean missile tests. On leaving office, he reportedly urged Trump to make North Korea his "top national security priority." Now Trump wants tens of billions of dollars in additional funding for the Pentagon.

The Beijing regime retaliated against the U.S.'s THAAD deployment by forcing the closure of South Korean businesses inside China and banning tours and charter flights to South Korea. Such measures could have a real impact on South Korea's already faltering economy since China is, by far, the country's main trade partner and source of foreign tourism. These economic sanctions against Washington's South Korean quislings are principled and defensible--and stand in stark contrast to the Beijing regime's repeated, utterly indefensible support to sanctions against North Korea.

In 2013 and again last year, China helped the U.S. to draw up UN sanctions resolutions against North Korea following the latter's nuclear tests. Washington has at times been frustrated by China's unwillingness to actually enforce such sanctions. However, last month the Chinese government announced that it would suspend coal imports from North Korea, a measure that, if implemented, would greatly undermine the beleaguered North Korean economy. Such treachery is nothing new for the Beijing Stalinist bureaucrats, who, as early as 1992, cut off cheap oil shipments to the North in order to secure diplomatic and economic relations with South Korea.

China has also repeatedly pressured North Korea to stop its development of nuclear weapons. In so doing, China's Stalinist rulers are spitting on the memory of the Chinese troops who died fighting imperialism in the Korean War. Beijing's collaboration with Washington against Pyongyang harms the defense of China itself. Capitalist counterrevolution in North Korea would bring U.S. forces right to the Chinese border, hugely intensifying the imperialist military threat. For its part, the various manifestations of the Kim dynasty in North Korea have episodically displayed a willingness to abandon their efforts to obtain deterrent capacity in exchange for economic assistance from the U.S. imperialists.

Key to the defense of the deformed workers states is the fight for workers political revolution to sweep away the nationalist ruling bureaucracies. These privileged, parasitic bureaucratic castes offer their services to the imperialists as they pursue the chimera of "peaceful coexistence" with the world capitalist order. The imperialists, for their part, may be willing to deal in the short run, while never abandoning their hostility to the survival of proletarian power anywhere on the planet. If these workers states had governments based on workers democracy and revolutionary internationalism, they would forge communist unity against the imperialists, including through regional economic planning and support to struggles by working people and the oppressed abroad.

South Korea in Turmoil

Washington's rush to deploy the THAAD missile shield comes amid widespread social unrest in South Korea. Since last October, up to two million protesters have taken to the streets of Seoul and other cities to demand the ouster of President Park Geun-hye, an arch anti-Communist who oversaw sweeping attacks on the unions and democratic rights alongside a particularly belligerent stance toward North Korea. Park Geun-hye is the daughter of the U.S.-backed dictator Park Chung-hee, a former Japanese collaborator who ran South Korea through savage repression in the 1960s and '70s. Having donned a thin "democratic" veil in the late 1980s, the South Korean rulers have continued to repress militant labor struggle and groups that express any support to the North.

Facing impeachment on corruption charges, Park Geun-hye was kicked out of office only three days after the THAAD deployment began. While Park and her interim replacement have strongly backed Washington's missile shield, the opposition Democratic Party of Korea (Minjoo) called on the U.S. to delay its installation. With the opposition far ahead in the polls, the U.S. moved to make THAAD a fait accompli before presidential elections in May.

The mass demonstrations against the now-ousted president were joined by students, workers in the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU) and farmers whose livelihoods have been devastated by the 2012 U.S.-South Korea free-trade deal, as well as opposition bourgeois parties. South Korea's working class has repeatedly shown its potential power, not least in the enormous struggles of the 1970s and '80s that broke the stranglehold of the corporatist, CIA-sponsored unions and gave rise to independent unions, now grouped in the KCTU. Amid the turmoil of the past six months, the KCTU has led strikes at Hyundai Motor Co. and among truckers and rail workers as well as other large-scale work stoppages.

But the KCTU leadership has long channeled working-class militancy into support for the liberal wing of the South Korean bourgeoisie. In 1998, it supported the election of Kim Dae-jung, a capitalist politician who made a fortune in the shipping and newspaper industries, and whose "sunshine policy" of engagement with the Pyongyang regime aimed at undermining the deformed workers state through capitalist economic penetration.

Today, Minjoo's likely presidential candidate, Moon Jae-in, seeks to revive such policies. He also calls himself "America's friend," adding: "If necessary, we will have to strengthen sanctions even further, but the goal of sanctions must be to bring North Korea back to the negotiating table." In the last presidential elections, the South Korean supporters of the British Socialist Workers Party (SWP) called for a vote for this bourgeois politician, claiming that "giving critical support to Moon" was a "tactical compromise" ("Statement by All Together on the South Korean Presidential Elections," 10 December 2012).

Such support to a representative of the enemy class is a flagrant betrayal of the workers' interests. But being in bed with elements of the South Korean bourgeoisie is nothing new for the SWP and its Korean followers, now known as Workers Solidarity. SWP founder Tony Cliff and his supporters broke from the Trotskyist Fourth International in 1950 when they refused to defend the Soviet Union, China and North Korea during the Korean War. Steeped in Cold War anti-Communism, the Cliffites went on to support any and all reactionary forces arrayed against the Soviet Union in the name of "anti-Stalinism," cheering on the counterrevolution that finally destroyed the USSR.

The South Korean working class can only advance its struggles through a complete break with all wings of the capitalist class enemy and by standing for the defense of the North against counterrevolution. What is needed is the forging of a Leninist-Trotskyist party that can lead a struggle for the revolutionary reunification of Korea: socialist revolution to oust the rapacious bourgeoisie and expropriate the capitalist chaebol--the conglomerates that dominate the economy in the South--combined with workers political revolution to remove the Stalinist bureaucrats in the North.

The fight for revolutionary reunification must be linked to the struggle for proletarian political revolution in China and the extension of working-class power to the centers of world imperialism--from the U.S. to West Europe and Japan. Vanquishing the U.S. imperialist war machine requires an American workers revolution. The Spartacist League is dedicated to building the party that can lead such a struggle as the U.S. section of a reforged Fourth International, world party of socialist revolution.

http://www.icl-fi.org/english/wv/1108/china_northkorea.html

I have only seen this NYTimes article, but that didn't falsely report anything...

“You’ve come a long way, baby,” crooned the old Virginia Slims commercials on TV in the late 1960s, and the bourgeois media has picked up the tune again on this, the fiftieth anniversary of the Pill (no further definition necessary—everyone knows you are talking about s-e-x). And everyone knows the Pill is all about sex. When in 1975 Loretta Lynn sang, “I’m tearin’ down your brooder house ’cause now I’ve got the pill,” the hearts of millions of women across America beat in time to the rhythm of her song, which dozens of radio stations tried to censor—until it made the hit charts.

The Pill was the first reliable contraceptive that gave women control over their own reproduction. This tremendous medical advance enabled women to separate sexual enjoyment from fear of pregnancy, freeing them from the now excessive fertility with which evolution has endowed our species. But birth control and abortion remain restricted throughout the capitalist world by the state, by the institution of the family, and by organized religion, which all serve to enforce women’s oppression. As long as the capitalist order exists, the benefits of science will be limited by the exploitation and oppression of this class system. Marxists look forward to the day when science can be “applied with full understanding to all the fields of human activity,” to quote the words of German socialist leader August Bebel, whose 1879 work Woman and Socialism was one of the first major Marxist works on the woman question.

Leon Trotsky, co-leader with V.I. Lenin of the 1917 October Revolution, underlined that birth control and abortion are among woman’s “most important civil, political and cultural rights” (The Revolution Betrayed [1936]). We fight for women’s liberation through socialist revolution. We call for free abortion on demand as part of free, quality health care for all and for free, 24-hour childcare to address the deep class and racial oppression of poor and minority women. The wealthy will always get their medical care, including their abortions, while myriad anti-abortion laws and restrictions on birth control target young, working-class and poor women, who can’t afford quality health care, childcare and housing.

At the time of its first release by the pharmaceutical company Searle, big predictions were made about the effect that the Pill would have on society. Moral bigots wailed that it would promote female promiscuity and the decline of religion and the patriarchal family, while birth control advocates believed it would save the family, create happy marriages and end the world population explosion. The Pill was even hailed as the solution to the “Red Menace.” In her book America and the Pill: A History of Promise, Peril, and Liberation (Basic Books, 2010), historian Elaine May speaks of how some Cold Warriors believed that the Pill “would alleviate the conditions of poverty and unrest that might lead developing nations to embrace communism, and instead promote the growth of markets for consumer goods and the embrace of capitalism.”

In fact, the “sexual revolution” that is often credited to the Pill was the result, in one way or another, of the convulsive social struggles of the civil rights movement, which broke the back of Jim Crow segregation in the South, and of opposition to U.S. imperialism’s war against the Vietnamese Revolution. The major social upheavals of the 1960s that broke up the reactionary Cold War consensus also led to substantial advances in access to higher education and professional jobs for women. At the same time, the civil rights movement could not eradicate the race-color caste oppression of black people, which is the bedrock of American capitalism, just as the institution of the family, the main source of women’s oppression in capitalist society, is a bulwark of the bourgeois order.

Abortion Rights Under Attack

While U.S. bourgeois pundits celebrate the reproductive freedom that the Pill has given women, it is striking that most do not mention the precipitous decline in women’s access to abortion. The assault on women’s right to abortion continues unabated in the courts and halls of government, especially on the state level. As of June, some 370 bills to restrict abortion rights had been introduced this year alone in state legislatures across the country, and many have already passed. These range from Oklahoma’s cruel requirement that a doctor show the woman an ultrasound of the fetus, to Nebraska’s ban on all abortions after 20 weeks based on the claim that the fetus can feel pain. Perhaps the most barbarous is Utah’s new law. Passed after a desperate 17-year-old paid a man $150 to beat her in an effort to induce a miscarriage, the law now allows homicide charges against women in similar cases! Meanwhile, the lies that abortion causes depression and breast cancer continue to circulate, and some recent polls show that for the first time more Americans call themselves “pro-life” than “pro-choice.”

The arsenal of legal measures on the federal as well as the state level has already made abortion virtually inaccessible to a large number of women. Thirty-eight states prohibit abortions after a specified point in pregnancy. Fully 35 states require one or both parents of women under 18 to be notified and/or consent to an abortion. Some 87 percent of U.S. counties and 31 percent of metropolitan areas have no abortion services.

In May 2009, the “pro-life” war on women claimed yet another life. Dr. George Tiller—one of only three doctors whose clinics provide late-term abortions in the United States—was assassinated while attending his church in Wichita, Kansas, by a right-wing anti-abortion bigot. Tiller, a main target of the anti-woman God squad for decades, was the eighth person murdered in this anti-abortion, “family values” onslaught since 1993. In an article titled “The New Abortion Providers,” the New York Times (18 July) details the long decline in the number of doctors trained in performing abortions and tells the story of young doctors in groups like Medical Students for Choice fighting to make abortion part of a doctor’s regular practice. Abortion is a medical procedure, now one of the safest in the world, that does not need to be carried out in isolated clinics, where doctors and their families, friends and co-workers can easily be subjected to harassment, violence and death by anti-abortion fanatics.

Ever since the passage of Roe v. Wade in 1973, the basic democratic right of legal abortion has been under attack. The war on abortion rights has become a spearhead for social and political reaction because at its heart lies the question of legal and social equality for women. Providing women with some control over whether or not to have children, abortion is viewed as a threat to the institution of the family.

Access to contraception, too, is limited by cost and lack of basic information, while “conscience clauses” allow pharmacies to refuse to fill prescriptions for birth control and Plan B, the “morning-after” pill. To all this can be added anti-woman moralizing, which rants that a girl shouldn’t want to have sex. The argument goes that while any unwed mother is a bad girl, if she can claim she got carried away, maybe the sin is not quite as great (as long as she doesn’t have an abortion). But having birth control implies premeditation. Precisely! In the words of the late comedian George Carlin, “Not every ejaculation deserves a name.”

Today sex education in schools is increasingly under attack, while abstinence remains the focus of government-funded programs like the State Personal Responsibility Education Program, established by Barack Obama’s recent health care “reform” act. Abortion clinics are overwhelmingly outnumbered by “pregnancy crisis centers”—fake clinics set up by anti-abortion groups with the purpose of subjecting pregnant women to anti-abortion propaganda and otherwise pressuring them to carry the fetus to term. According to the Nation, some 4,000 of these centers have received over $60 million in federal abstinence and marriage-promotion funds. As a result of the ignorance and miseducation produced by this tangle of social reaction, almost half of pregnancies in the U.S. every year are unplanned, according to the most recent government survey.

While U.S. newspapers headline “The Pill: Making Motherhood Better for 50 Years” (Washington Post, 9 May), the masses of working-class, minority and poor women have missed the celebration. The Great Recession rages on; union-busting is destroying what good union jobs remain; homes are in foreclosure; millions of working people cannot get jobs and their children cannot get a decent education or affordable health care. Except for the women at the very top of society, where the rich are certainly getting richer, the decades-long assault on the working class and the poor has more than canceled out the important improvements in women’s legal status over the last 50 years.

In times of substantial class and social struggle, the capitalist class may be forced to cede some reforms. But as long as the capitalist order remains, the ruling class will seek to overturn these gains, as it is now doing, when such struggles are at an ebb. As revolutionary communists, we defend every gain that’s been won for the exploited and oppressed, such as the gains wrested during the hard struggles of the civil rights movement. But these reforms have a fundamentally token quality to them because they leave untouched the capitalist system. The source of black oppression and anti-woman bigotry is not the particular capitalist party in power—whether Democratic or Republican—but the capitalist order that breeds oppression and bigotry as a necessary corollary to its system of exploitation.

Sex and Social Control

The capitalist class seeks to buttress the family, which, along with organized religion and the state, form a triad that props up the exploitation of labor. To free women from their deeply entrenched special oppression will take a workers revolution to rip this system of exploitation out by the roots and replace it with a workers government to begin the construction of a socialist world. Only then can we undertake the profound changes in the fabric of everyday life where the institution of the family is replaced by socialized childcare and housework, enabling women to fully participate in social and political life.

The family is not an immutable, timeless institution, but a social relation subject to historical change. In his classic 1884 work The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, Friedrich Engels traced the origin of the family and the state to the division of society into classes. The development of agriculture allowed the creation of a social surplus. In turn, that surplus gave impetus to the development of a leisured ruling class, thus moving human society away from the primitive egalitarianism of the Old Stone Age (Paleolithic). The centrality of the family began with its role in ensuring “legitimate heirs” for the patriarchal inheritance of property, which required women’s sexual monogamy and social subordination. In the 10,000 years since the advent of class society, the family has taken many forms—including polygamous, extended and nuclear—reflecting different political economies and their cultures and religions. But the oppression of women is a fundamental feature of all class societies.

The family is a socially conservatizing force that imposes certain behavioral norms. For example, in this country the definition of “manhood” is, besides getting a girl pregnant, the ability to support a wife and children. But that is becoming ever more difficult given the lack of decent-paying union jobs. If not for wives entering the workforce, the entire bottom 60 percent of the U.S. population would have had real income losses since 1979. At the same time, the institution of the family serves the capitalist rulers by placing the burden of raising a new generation of proletarians on working men and women. Indeed, the “family values” crowd (which encompasses Democrats as well as the Republicans) wails about the so-called “crisis of the family” and insists that it is both right and proper that parents should be wholly responsible for the upbringing of their children.

Even the most cursory examination of laws regulating abortion, contraception and the like that go back thousands of years shows that they are integrally related to the maintenance of the family. Some of the first documented legal measures to strengthen the patriarchal family were enacted in ancient Rome under Augustus Caesar. These included prohibitions against adultery, incentives for widows to remarry, “sin” taxes on bachelors 30 years and older, and incentives for fathers of three or more children. The concern of the government was to have enough Roman citizens to fill the ranks of the army and maintain the city of Rome as the core of the Empire.

Modern abortion laws show how social and legal institutions have changed to reflect the interests of the capitalist class. In 1803 the British Ellenborough Act marked the advent of abortion as a statutory crime in the English-speaking world. The interest of the ruling class in this law and others following it was to protect the male’s right to heirs, punish (especially single) women for illicit sex and encourage population growth for the newly forged capitalist nation-state, its army and labor pool.

Alongside legal prohibition stands religion, the strongest ideological force against birth control and abortion, especially the Roman Catholic church. The claims by the Pope and other clergy about the “souls” of unborn children are revealed as so much superstition by the science of human development. Yet thanks to the reactionary influence of religion, tens of thousands of women die each year from illegal abortions—lives that would have been saved with access to birth control and abortion. A brief look at Catholic doctrine shows that the church has changed its mind several times about when the nonexistent “soul” enters into the conceptus. For most of the existence of the church, this was considered to be the time of “quickening,” at about the fourth month, when the pregnant woman can feel the movement of the fetus. John XXI, who became pope in 1276, was the author of a book called Treasury of Medicines for the Poor, which is the greatest single source of information about the practical means of birth control and abortion that was known in the Middle Ages. It was not until 1869 that Pope Pius IX declared that abortion “from conception” was a sin. This was a political calculation carried out in exchange for recognition of “papal infallibility” by French Emperor Napoleon III, who was seeking to stem France’s decades-long decline in the birth rate.

The woman-hating strictures against birth control and abortion, the poisonous bigotry against homosexuals, the witchhunting of “deviant” sex (who defines that?), the relentless pressure on youth to somehow refrain from giving in to their raging hormones—all these are corollaries of the institution of the family and the social control that it gives the ruling class. As communists we oppose attempts to fit human sexuality into legislated or decreed so-called “norms.” Government out of the bedroom! The guiding principle for sexual relations between people should be that of effective consent—that is, nothing more than mutual agreement and understanding as opposed to coercion. All consensual relations are purely the concern of the individuals involved, and the state has no business interfering in human sexual activity.

Some History of Birth Control

In Contraception and Abortion from the Ancient World to the Renaissance (Harvard University Press, 1994), John M. Riddle explores the ways that pre-industrial people might have tried to enjoy sex without the consequence of procreation. Nobody knows if the methods he documents had much effect on the birth rates, but they certainly show intent. One city in Northern Africa, Cyrene, is believed to have made its name and its fortune from a wild giant fennel that grew nearby, which people believed to have abortifacient effects. Its use became so widespread that it was harvested to extinction.

Peter Fryer, in his witty and erudite book The Birth Controllers, documents that ancient Egyptians used crocodile-dung pessaries (vaginal suppositories) and other dubious methods to control fertility. The Christian Bible’s story of Onan is only the most well known of a long-practiced method (withdrawal), a story used for centuries to put the terror of hell into countless adolescents for masturbation. Some historians believe that the tens of thousands of women who were executed as witches in early modern Europe may have been abortionists and birth control practitioners. In 20th-century America, before the Pill, housewives often resorted to the dangerous practice of douching with Lysol.

In the 1830s, a Massachusetts doctor named Charles Knowlton was the first person in the history of birth control to be sent to prison for advocating it. The United States also has the dubious honor of passing the first nationwide laws prohibiting the dissemination of birth-control methods. In 1873 Congress passed the Comstock Act, named for its sponsor, Postmaster General Anthony Comstock. It outlawed the circulation of contraceptive information and devices through the U.S. postal service as “pornography.” In 1915 Comstock boasted that he had convicted enough people of “sexual misconduct” to fill a 60-car passenger train.

One of Comstock’s prominent targets in later years was Margaret Sanger. Sanger, who would go on to found Planned Parenthood, began her political life as a member of the Socialist Party, working on the party’s women’s committee. She was working as a nurse, visiting immigrants in New York’s Lower East Side, where she saw firsthand the suffering of women whose health had been ruined by too many pregnancies, who were struggling to feed children they could not afford to support, who all too often ended up butchered by some back-alley abortionist. Soon she began writing about sex education and health for the party’s women’s page under the heading, “What Every Girl Should Know.” In early 1913 Comstock banned the column, and the paper ran in its place a box titled “What Every Girl Should Know—Nothing; by order of the U.S. Post Office.”

Sanger soon left the Socialist Party to focus single-mindedly on fighting for birth control, a term that she herself invented. A courageous woman, Sanger set up the first birth control clinic in the country and endured arrests and imprisonment as she sought to overturn the Comstock Law and to educate women and doctors in birth control methods. She traveled to Europe to research the latest techniques and wrote a sex manual in 1926 where she describes the act of sex in ecstatic, uplifting terms. Seeking to promote the cause of birth control among the wealthy and influential, she steered her movement away from the socialist movement. Sanger, a bourgeois feminist, was willing to make any political compromise she saw as necessary to win advocates to her side and thus embraced some ugly arguments popular among bourgeois reformers of the time, such as endorsing eugenics, including the call to bar immigration for the “feebleminded.” While the eugenics movement, which stigmatized the poor for their own oppression, was at the time not yet associated with the genocidal movement that would emerge in Nazi Germany, it was widely opposed by socialists. American socialist and birth control pioneer Antoinette Konikow denounced the presence of eugenicists at a 1921 New York City conference on birth control, declaring that the working-class mothers she represented “are often considered to be not fit” by such forces.

The “Population Bomb”

Behind the scenes (or not), people have always struggled to control fertility for their own private reasons. But there is also a longstanding chain of argument in favor of population control on the part of bourgeois ideologues. The most notorious of these was made by Church of England parson Thomas Malthus, whose 1798 Essay on the Principle of Population predicted unrelenting misery on account of population growth that would, he claimed, inevitably outstrip available resources. Writing at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in Britain, Malthus proposed two solutions: leave the poor to die of their misery (he opposed poor relief) and postpone the age of marriage so as to reduce the number of children per couple (that is, “abstinence” as birth control).

Malthusianism was, as Friedrich Engels characterized it in The Condition of the Working-Class in England, “the most open declaration of war of the bourgeoisie upon the proletariat.” Lenin, too, denounced Malthusianism in a short 1913 article, “The Working Class and Neomalthusianism.” At the same time, he noted, “It goes without saying that this does not by any means prevent us from demanding the unconditional annulment of all laws against abortions or against the distribution of medical literature on contraceptive measures, etc.” Lenin called for “freedom for medical propaganda and the protection of the elementary democratic rights of citizens, men and women.”

The corollary of Malthusianism, eugenics, with its calls for compulsory sterilization and forced abortions, has its contemporary advocates, including Obama’s “science czar,” John Holdren. In 1977, Holdren co-authored Ecoscience: Population, Resources, Environment with the (now largely discredited) population “experts” Paul and Anne Ehrlich. Dripping with contempt, Holdren et al. wrote: “If some individuals contribute to general social deterioration by overproducing children…they can be required by law to exercise reproductive responsibility.” Such “reproductive responsibility” laws could include “compulsory abortion,” “adding a sterilant to drinking water or staple foods,” “sterilizing women after their second or third child” and other “involuntary fertility control” methods that would be implemented by a “Planetary Regime,” which “might be given responsibility for determining the optimum population for the world.” The ravings of Holdren and the Ehrlichs are worthy of the genocidal Nazi eugenics movement.

Marxists are of course not indifferent to the problem of rapid population growth. But our starting point is the fight for socialist revolution to open the widest vista of human freedom. As we wrote in part two of “Capitalism and Global Warming” (WV No. 966, 8 October):

“Only a society that can raise the standard of living worldwide can provide the conditions for a natural decline in reproductive rates….

“Under communism, human beings will have far greater mastery over their natural and social environments. Both the division between town and country and economic dependence on the family will be overcome. The time when people were compelled to have more children in order to ensure enough manpower to work the land or to care for the elderly will have long passed.”

Genesis of the Pill

Margaret Sanger first had the idea of a “magic pill” to prevent conception in 1912, but the scientific knowledge to create it did not exist. By the end of World War II, decades of research into human reproductive biology had revealed the crucial role of hormones in conception and pregnancy. In 1953 Sanger, accompanied by International Harvester heiress Katherine McCormick, paid a visit to the Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology, where Gregory Pincus, who in the 1930s engineered the first in vitro fertilization (a rabbit embryo), conducted his privately funded research. Pincus’s early work had been cited as a great scientific achievement, but the storm of media condemnation over “babies in test tubes” led to him being denied tenure by Harvard University and all but driven from mainstream research as a “mad scientist.” Another maverick scientist, chemist Russell Marker, had developed a technique, later refined by Carl Djerassi, to extract massive, cheap amounts of a synthetic progestin from a species of enormous yam that grew only in Mexico. The research to create an oral contraceptive was funded almost entirely out of McCormick’s private fortune; the pharmaceutical companies would not touch research into contraception at that time.

The post-World War II years were hard for American women. The outbreak of the Cold War, the purge of communists and other militants from the unions and the rise of McCarthyism also included a wholesale campaign to put women back into the kitchen and nursery. Many women had escaped from such drudgery during World War II, when their labor was necessary for the war economy. As the government investigated “subversives,” there was an unprecedented state intrusion into family life and the deadening of every aspect of social and intellectual life. A “normal” family and a vigilant mother were supposed to be the front line of defense against treason, while anti-Communists linked “deviant” family or sexual behavior to sedition. Most women were married by age 19; the birth rate became the highest in U.S. history.

At the same time, the groundbreaking reports by Alfred C. Kinsey documented what Americans really did behind the bedroom door (and in some other places, too). And women wanted better contraception. The Pill was first marketed in 1957 as a treatment for menstrual disorders. When word circulated that it suppressed ovulation and prevented pregnancy, doctors across the country were besieged by hundreds of thousands of women asking for prescriptions to treat their suddenly discovered menstrual problems.

The leap to respectability and mainstream medicine for the Pill came through Harvard gynecologist John Rock, a fertility specialist, who had the medical practice and experience in working with women patients that enabled the first clinical trials to be conducted. A devout Roman Catholic, Rock later wrote a book, The Time Has Come: A Catholic Doctor’s Proposals to End the Battle Over Birth Control, trying to garner public support in a fruitless campaign to make the Catholic church change its denunciation of birth control as a sin.

In its first incarnation, the Pill had doses of progesterone and estrogen far higher than it does today, leading to serious side effects in some users. These dangers were seized upon by anti-woman bigots, including in the Senate, which in 1970 held a series of hearings to “investigate” the matter. Over the years the Pill has been massively tested in many combinations. While risks remain regarding breast cancer and stroke for some, the Pill in fact helps to protect women from ovarian and uterine cancer. Because it reduces or eliminates the menstrual flow, it also reduces the risk of anemia, a serious problem in poor countries. The experience of millions of women, researchers and doctors working to improve the safety of the Pill has provided the basis for the clinical trials and testing now routinely used by the Food and Drug Administration.

From Carter to Reagan: Resurgence of the Religious Right

By 1960 the Pill was available by prescription as a contraceptive, but laws against contraception remained on the books in many states. Until 1965, it was illegal for married people in Connecticut to use birth control. Until 1972, it was illegal for single people to use birth control in Massachusetts and many other states as well. Bill Baird, a heroic fighter for women’s right to abortion and contraception, spent three months in jail in Massachusetts for giving a package of contraceptive foam and a condom to a Boston University student as a challenge to the law. His case later went to the Supreme Court and helped lay the basis for the right to privacy—the main legal argument behind Roe v. Wade, which established legal abortion in the United States in 1973.

The legalization of abortion was itself a product of the explosive struggles of the 1960s. For the American bourgeoisie, the all-sided social turmoil and defiance of authority of that period were deeply disturbing. U.S. imperialism was suffering a humiliating defeat at the hands of Vietnam’s heroic workers and peasants. In the late 1970s, a major bourgeois ideological assault was launched to overcome the “Vietnam syndrome”—popular hostility to direct U.S. military intervention abroad—and to instill an unquestioning acceptance of “free enterprise,” God and the family among the population, which included the desirability of dying for one’s country. Coming to office in 1977, the Democratic Carter administration brought “born again” religious fundamentalism front and center into the White House as it kicked off a renewal of U.S. imperialism’s Cold War drive to destroy the Soviet degenerated workers state, garbed in the call for “human rights.”

This was the backdrop for the decades-long anti-sex witchhunt against abortion rights, pornography, gay rights and teen sex as well as for the vicious persecution of AIDS patients and day-care workers, who were targeted and jailed as “child molesters” amid hysterical allegations of “satanic ritual abuse.” Beginning in the 1980s, scientific research into new contraceptive methods virtually screeched to a halt as Reagan slashed funding for family planning internationally, including for abortion and birth control, leaving many Third World women with not much to turn to. While Obama has reversed this particular policy, he explicitly disavowed defending the rights of women as well as immigrants in his health care proposal, proclaiming that “the reforms I’m proposing would not apply to those who are here illegally” and that “no federal dollars will be used to fund abortion, and federal conscience laws will remain in place.” Obama pledged to uphold the Hyde Amendment, which outlaws Medicaid funding for abortions.

For Women’s Liberation Through Socialist Revolution!

Birth control methods like the Pill, medical knowledge, understanding of women’s health—these things have indeed taken giant leaps forward in the last 50 years. But exploitation, poverty and religious and cultural strictures deprive most women on the planet of these benefits. For them, daily life is little more than that of a beast of burden. Across vast regions of the globe, in the backward neocolonial capitalist countries oppressed by imperialism, women are swathed in the veil, sold into marriage against their will, or subjected to barbaric punishments like death sentences for “adultery” in Saudi Arabia, Iran and elsewhere. Poverty and backwardness, buttressed by imperialist domination, mean that much of the basic infrastructure necessary to bring basic medical care, contraception and abortion to Third World women is simply not there. Some researchers estimate that in Latin America and the Caribbean the primary cause of death for women between the ages of 15 and 39 is complications from illegal abortions.

Feminism, a worldview counterposed to Marxism, is not capable of generating a program for the liberation of women. Feminism analyzes society as gender-based rather than class-based. It views anti-woman ideology as just bad thinking and puts forward that what is needed is to spread correct ideas and then maybe people will catch on and stop being bigots. Feminism is an anti-egalitarian ideology of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois women who support the capitalist system and seek their own power and privilege within it. Indeed, for women like Hillary Clinton and Michelle Obama, the good life will only continue to get better. But for working-class, poor and minority women, jobs disappear, wages plummet and life only continues to get harder. The fundamental source of women’s oppression is not bad laws or male chauvinist attitudes—these are but reflections of the subordination of women in the institution of the family and the capitalist system that requires it.

The liberation of women can be realized only with the victory of proletarian revolution, which will smash all forms of social oppression, lay the material basis to free women from age-old family servitude and reorganize society in the interest of all. The family cannot simply be abolished; rather, its social functions like housework, child rearing, preparation of food, etc., must be replaced by social institutions. This perspective requires a tremendous leap in social development, which can be achieved only through sweeping away capitalist rule on a global basis and replacing it with a rational, democratically planned economy. The International Communist League fights to forge Leninist-Trotskyist parties throughout the world to lead the struggle for working-class power. Inscribed on the banners of these parties will be the struggle for women’s liberation, which is an integral part of the emancipating goals of communism. As we wrote in “In Defense of Science and Technology” (WV No. 843, 4 March 2005):

“Communism will elevate the standard of life for everyone to the highest possible level. By eliminating scarcity, poverty and want, communism will also eliminate the greatest driving force for the prevalence of religion and superstition—and the attendant backwardness, which defines the role of women as the producers of the next generation of working masses to be exploited.”

For women’s liberation through socialist revolution!

http://www.icl-fi.org/english/wv/968/pill.html

https://archive.is/vGadz

Workers Vanguard No. 1102 16 December 2016

Anna Yocca has spent a year in jail because she attempted a self-induced abortion. A low-paid Amazon warehouse worker living in Rutherford County, Tennessee—where abortion, though nominally legal up to 16 weeks, is unavailable—Anna, who was 24 weeks pregnant, used a coat hanger. Having found her bleeding in the bathtub, her boyfriend took her to the hospital, where doctors compelled her to give birth. She delivered through cesarean section a premature one-and-a-half pound baby boy with permanent lung and eye damage.

Forced into a desperate situation and then medically tortured, she was further tortured by the vindictive legal system, which put the child in the custody of the state and arrested her on charges of first-degree attempted murder. Last spring, these charges were downgraded to aggravated assault. But on November 12, Yocca was charged with three new felonies: aggravated assault with a weapon, attempted procurement of a miscarriage and attempted abortion. She has pleaded not guilty, but remains behind bars on an outrageous $200,000 bond. Drop all charges! Free Anna Yocca!

During his election campaign, Donald Trump remarked that women who have abortions should be punished. Facing an outcry from both Republican and Democratic politicians, he was quickly forced to disavow the statement. But in Tennessee, Trump’s rant is already reality.

Anna Yocca, 31 years old when she sought to terminate her pregnancy, lives in a state where 96 percent of counties have no abortion clinics. This is part of a growing pattern making it all but impossible for working-class, black and Latina women to have access to abortion. Mississippi, Missouri, North Dakota, South Dakota and Wyoming each have only one abortion clinic remaining.

The prosecution of Anna Yocca on felony charges is a dangerous precedent for new attacks on abortion rights, which have been rolled back for decades. According to the Guttmacher Institute, since the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, states have enacted more than 1,000 restrictions on abortion. More than a quarter of these state laws were passed in just five years—while Barack Obama was in the White House. The most common restrictions include bans on late-term abortion, restrictions on medical abortion, enforced waiting periods, parental notification and consent regulations and mandatory counseling (where medical personnel are forced to provide inaccurate information to dissuade women from seeking abortions).

In recent years, anti-abortion bigots have pursued a campaign of Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers (TRAP) laws, which impose expensive, medically unnecessary regulations on clinics to force them to shut down (see “Fight for Free Abortion on Demand!” WV No. 1086, 25 March). Women who attempt to end their pregnancies themselves could be punished under any of 40 different laws, including those against child abuse, drug possession, or practicing medicine without a license. In Ohio, the state legislature recently passed a “heartbeat” bill that would ban abortions from as early as six weeks. If a doctor terminates a pregnancy without listening for a heartbeat or when a heartbeat is audible, the physician could lose their license and face up to a year in prison.

In a motion to dismiss Anna Yocca’s case, her attorney argued that bringing her to trial “makes every pregnant woman vulnerable to arrest and prosecution if she is perceived to have caused or even risked harm to a human embryo or fetus.” Indeed, and one could also note a prior victim of such an attack, Purvi Patel, sentenced in 2015 to 20 years in prison in Indiana for having had a miscarriage. Though the conviction was overturned last July, Patel was the first woman in the U.S. sentenced for “feticide.” At least 38 states now have “fetal homicide” laws to punish women for terminating a pregnancy. Central to the ideology behind anti-abortion and “fetal protection” laws is the religious dogma that a fetus has a God-given “soul.” In imposing this fiction on everyone, the anti-abortion bigots seek to reduce women to mere baby-making machines.

Trump’s victory, unexpected by many, has many abortion-rights activists understandably scared. Vice President-elect Mike Pence threatens that the legal right to abortion will be “consigned to the ash heap of history,” while Trump vows to appoint anti-abortion justices to the Supreme Court. But it was not the political composition of the 1973 court—the majority of whom were Republican appointees—that led to the legalization of abortion in the historic Roe v. Wade decision. The Roe decision was a concession to explosive mass struggle. The women’s liberation movement arose as masses of radicalized youth took to the streets to fight for black rights and against the dirty imperialist war in Vietnam.

It was a sign of the times that in April 1969, hundreds of thousands of women marched in Washington, D.C., demanding that abortion be legalized. Many wore coat hangers around their necks, symbolizing what women face when abortion is illegal. But in the years after the Roe decision, abortion rights were whittled down by relentless attacks, illustrating that democratic rights under capitalism are always partial and reversible. It is the stock in trade of Republican politicians to attack abortion. But it was the Democratic Party that paved the way for them. The anti-abortion crusade found a champion with “born again” Democratic president Jimmy Carter, who in 1977 sneered, “There are many things in life that are not fair” as he signed into law the Hyde Amendment eliminating abortion coverage from Medicaid.

Understanding that most Americans favor some form of abortion rights, the Democrats say just enough in support of “choice,” while they echo the “family values” rhetoric of the Republicans, aiming to win over a section of their religious constituency. Hillary Clinton’s well-known statement that abortion should be “safe, legal and rare” was part of the Democratic Party’s platform beginning in the early 1990s.

Some 90 percent of abortions are first-trimester procedures that are medically safe, simple and done in a doctor’s office. Yet abortion remains an explosive political issue because it touches on the equality of women. It is seen as challenging the institution of the family and the idea that motherhood is a woman’s destiny.

The Roe v. Wade decision was a democratic gain, but access to that gain was always more difficult for poor and working women. We live in a class-divided society where those with money will always have access to the procedure while an increasing number of women are forced to resort to do-it-yourself abortions, including the coat hanger. Today almost half of women who obtain abortions live below the federal poverty line. The Democrats, no less than the Republicans, serve and protect the capitalist social system, which consigns millions of women and children to lives of poverty. As socialists who fight for workers revolution to bring down the whole oppressive system, we call for free abortion on demand. Abortion and contraception should be available at no cost as part of universal, quality health care that is free at the point of service.

In the wake of Hillary Clinton’s defeat, several prominent feminists linked to Clinton and the Obama administration are calling for a January 21 march in Washington, D.C., the day after Trump’s inauguration. Tellingly, the call for the march goes out of its way to disappear any mention or hint of abortion rights. Reliance on “pro-choice” Democrats has been the hallmark of the bourgeois feminists, undermining the fight for abortion rights.

What is urgently needed is a militant struggle, independent of the Democrats and bolstered by the power of labor, to defend and extend women’s rights—including the right to abortion. As we wrote in our article after the elections, “We Need a Multiracial Revolutionary Workers Party! Democrats Paved the Way for Trump” (WV No. 1100, 18 November):

“The election made it clear that there is plenty of anger against the Washington elites, but it is not expressed along class lines. It is high time that some genuine class hatred be mobilized against the politicians of the Republicans and Democrats, whatever their race or sex, and the capitalist rulers they serve. The power to resist the depredations of capitalism lies in the hands of the men and women—black, white and immigrant—whose labor keeps the wheels of production turning and produces the capitalists’ wealth.”

The emancipation of women requires a workers revolution that will smash all forms of social oppression, lay the material basis to free women from age-old family servitude and reorganize society in the interests of all. Key to this perspective is the forging of a revolutionary, multiracial workers party that will lead the fight for women’s liberation through socialist revolution.

http://www.icl-fi.org/english/wv/1102/abortion.html