The recent Supreme Court ruling paves the way for the abolition of the right to abortion in all US states. This is an extremely damaging attack on the condition and rights of women from the popular strata of the majority of the population, and a slap in the face to the women of the American bourgeoisie, who had deluded themselves into thinking that they could avail themselves of such a right, thanks to their own condition of privilege and power. Little by little, even the last edicts of what, at the end of the 19th century, was one of the most ‘free’ and ‘civilised’ countries in the world are falling away.
Since that time, American imperialism has developed and transformed. Up to a certain point, the system was able to rest on an effective industrial, as well as financial, preponderance. This had enabled the USA, with the end of World War II, to take the place of Germany in the hierarchy of the world’s leading imperialist countries. The USA had thus been able to lead the so-called resurgence of the world economy, pulling the other western imperialist countries along and putting a temporary brake on the deepening of the general crisis of imperialism. With the surplus profits extorted from the peoples and countries halfway around the world, they expanded their financial system, established a regime of political and military oppression over entire parts of the planet, fomented coups all over, fuelled fascism and promoted reactionary wars of aggression, operating alone or together with the other western imperialist powers.
For several decades now, the industrial system has been losing its footing and slipping more and more into crisis. More and more the USA has become above all a financial imperialism and a reactionary war machine. On a domestic scale, the living conditions of the population have deteriorated tremendously. Racism, a problem that was never solved in the USA, has intensified, highlighting how the very nature of the American state is permeated with discrimination against minorities. American democracy, which had already turned into a corporate oligarchy in the 1930s, is increasingly heading down the road to fascism even within itself.
The USA is piling up contradictions of all kinds. In addition to the oppression of peoples halfway around the world, the various imperialist wars and now the beginning of the inter-imperialist war on a global scale (with Russian imperialism, but further down the road also with Chinese imperialism), as well as the conditions of increasing poverty in which the US population is deprived of public social services, the State is accentuating contradictions internally with the black, Mexican, Latin American and Asian population. Now, in a further leap forward along the road that leads ever more directly to fascism, women are being hit.
The Supreme Court’s ruling is devastating because it lays bare, so to speak at its core, the everyday social relations that characterise the life of the American people. It mercilessly sweeps away illusions, hopes, expectations, which still persist despite the daily evidence of fascism and police racism. It strikes at the very heart of the same movementist illusions of those who have mobilised in recent years and months against racism and those who are now mobilising in defence of abortion. Obviously, these are useful and important struggles, but characterised by the illusion of being able to obtain partial changes from American governments by kind concession or wrested away by less gentle methods deemed more effective, through the simple radicalisation of the struggle.
The Supreme Court ruling was concerned with educating women, particularly those in the broad proletarian and working class groups. In the US, women’s movements have always been quite broad, and these movements had deluded themselves into believing that they had achieved once and for all such elementary gains as the right to abortion. The Supreme Court is teaching these women what the government and the police apparatus had been busy teaching tens of millions of oppressed and exploited blacks and Hispanics over the past years and months. What is being taught to the mass movements is that without a proletarian party, a guiding revolutionary theory and ideology, a scientific conception of reality and a determined and irreducible perspective aimed at the revolutionary establishment of popular power, there is no real defence, no advancement, no conquest, not even the most relative and so to speak secondary, that can be guaranteed.
Obviously, the problem does not lie in the initiative of the mass sectors that take the field with determination and the will to fight, that spontaneously seek a way forward and then sometimes decide that perhaps it is better to clash all-out rather than continue to suffer. These mass sectors in the US were, are and will be the best reserves and the best forces of the revolution, of the building of popular power in that country.
The problem lies in the groups, the circles, the associations that theorise movementism and reformism, albeit sometimes ‘antagonistic’ and ‘anarchist’. The problem is that these forces of the intellectual petty bourgeoisie are inconsistent and very often consciously and deliberately opposed to the struggle for popular power and the building of the party of the working class capable of directing that struggle.
This is why the support, backing and solidarity with the struggle of women, who are taking to the streets in the USA in these hours, cannot be disconnected from the critique and opposition against bourgeois and petty-bourgeois movementism and feminism. Only communist ideology, Marxism-Leninism or, better, Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, provides the women of the popular masses with a complete explanation of their oppression, of its most ancient and deep-seated causes that are still at work today. Only the political line of the proletariat shows women the path to their liberation, inseparable from the construction of popular power and the prospect of the establishment of classless society. Not anarchist-liberal movementism, but the construction of the revolutionary organisation of the women and men of the proletariat and the popular masses can provide an answer to what is taking place in the USA today.
The question on the other hand is much closer to Italy, much more dramatically current on the political terrain, than one might think. What is happening today in the US will also happen in Italy in a few months or years at most. Therefore, drawing useful lessons from what is happening and preparing oneself to avoid continuing to fall back into the endless circle of inconclusive movementism is today an absolute political necessity for the most advanced and conscious women in our country and for the most conscious sectors of the proletariat and the popular masses.
Nuova Egemonia blog
CONTRIBUTI TEORICO-POLITICI PER LA COSTITUZIONE DEL PARTITO MARXISTA-LENINISTA-MAOISTA 