On June 24th, the US Supreme Court finally did what we had all suspected it would do since the appointment of Justice Amy Coney Barrett in September 2020. With Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organisation, the court ruled by a 5-4 vote that the right to an abortion was not protected by the US Constitution, ending federal protections that prohibit states from criminalising aboriton. Immediately after the court's verdict, 13 states implemented so-called "trigger bans", laws which ban abortion within 30 days of Roe being abolished, with several more states likely to implement outright bans in the near future.
Needless to say, this has been a devastating defeat for women not only in America but all over the world. As terrible and brutal as it is, this is only just the beginning. Justice Clarence Thomas argued in a concurring opinion that the Supreme Court "should reconsider all of this Court's substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell", which upheld the right to contraception, consensual gay sex and gay marriage respectively. Many of us on the left had been warning that this was exactly what anti-abortion activists were going to come after next when they were done with Roe v. Wade, and the hard-right Supreme Court has confirmed precisely this, because as the dissenting liberal justices noted, "nothing but everything would be enough".
The gravity of the situation cannot really be understated. The abolition of Roe v. Wade represents the world-historical defeat of the sexual revolution, and the triumph of a new theocratic biofascism. Already this decision has opened the floodgates for a slew of other rulings both actual and potential. As I write this, the Supreme Court has recently ruled that public school teachers can lead students in prayer, that state funds could be used to fund explicitly religious schools, and that flags flying a cross could be flown on public property, with all of these rulings being part of a brazen assault on the separation of church and state.
Recognising that the Supreme Court may now be a vehicle through which their agenda may be imposed, the reactionary right has been calling for all manner of verdicts. John Cornyn, Republican Senator from Texas, posted a tweet which implied that Brown v. Board of Education, the ruling which abolished racial segregation in schools, should be reconsidered. Ken Paxton, the Attorney-General of Texas, has stated that he would push for the court to overturn Lawrence v. Texas by defending a law that criminalises "sodomy", and that he intends to prosecute any companies that cover travel costs for employees seeking an abortion. America First Legal, a far-right legal group whose membership includes former Trump administration officials, called for the court to abolish the 1st amendment's establishment clause in order to allow states to establish an official religion. That in particular would be dangerous because if states can establish an official religion, then you no longer have seperation of church and state.
It is now incontrovertibly clear that the US is headed down the road to some form of theocratic fascism, and to understand how, we need to understand the abolition of Roe v. Wade as not just the outcome of a handful of Trump-appointed judges, but a decades-long right-wing plot to take control of an unduly empowered Supreme Court. As I explained in a post from last year where I talked about a draconian law from Texas, the right's quest to abolish Roe v. Wade has been part of a broader plan to overturn the sexual revolution of the 1970s, which brought with it not only the legalisation of abortion but also the legalisation of pornography, the legalisation of homosexuality and eventually gay marriage, the legalisation of gender affirming surgery, and equal rights for women, among other things. While the right would prefer complete control of all institutions, it's become clear to them that this will be a difficult task for as long as they are no longer capable of winning popular consent, and thus they have become increasingly dependant on the irresistable political power of the Supreme Court.
At the heart of this scheme is the Federalist Society, a reactionary legal organisation formed in 1982 by a collection of conservative students and professors at Yale University with the ostensible goal of upholding the textualist and originalist interpretation of the US Constitution. In practice, the Federalist Society is a vehicle through which the conservative wing of the bourgeoisie may churn out far-right lawyers and judges like a factory, who then go on to serve in prominent legal positions and even become justices in the Supreme Court. Five of the six current Republican justices are members of the Federalist Society, as were such conservative legal heavyweights as former SCOTUS justice Antonin Scalia, former SCOTUS nominee Robert Bork, former Attorneys General Edwin Meese and John Ashcroft, and at least three Republican Senators are still members. Another notable member, John Eastman, was a major figure in the campaign to overturn the 2020 election, and collaborated with Trump in coming up with a plan to convince Vice President Mike Pence to nullify the election results. The Federalist Society is also financially supported by many of the usual right-wing donors, such as the Koch Brothers, the John M. Olin Foundation, The Bradley Foundation, and various dark money groups connected to Leonard Leo, who helped select Trump's nominees.
The reason why the conservative section of the ruling class supports these efforts is because they want to completely roll back all of the gains of the progressive movements of the 20th century, with the ultimate prize being the undoing of every last New Deal programme. They know that right-wing Federalist Society judges will also be imbued with a libertarian view of the market, and thus will rule in favour of corporations at any given opportunity. But they also support the conservative moral agenda for two major reasons: (1) it builds a political coalition by splitting the working class vote (particularly from Christian backgrounds) along cultural lines, and (2) it sanctifies the existing capitalist system by framing it not simply as the established social order, but God's order, and thus those who challenge the existing social order can now be framed as violating "God's law", and thus it becomes acceptable to mete out authoritarian violence against them. For all the talk of "woke" or "progressive" capitalism we've been hearing about, Christian fascism remains very functional for the ruling class.
While we talk of how quickly all of these reactionary rulings are coming in, it's worth noting why it took so long for the far-right to get the court it wanted. After all, the court always had a significant conservative presence even during the liberal days, and indeed by the end of the Rehnquist court there were only two Democrats on the bench, and Clarence Thomas had been on there for over a decade by the time Rehnquist died. Part of why repealing Roe took so long was that in the preceding decades, Democrats and progressive groups were successful in fighting off more hardline reactionaries, such as during Reagan's failed bid to nominate the extreme reactionary Robert Bork. Another factor is that until the court became stuffed with Federalist Society goons, even Republican judges such as David Souter and Sandra Day O'Connor showed a willingness to uphold Roe v. Wade, ostensibly in defence of the rule of law but in practice because they were concerned about preserving the legitimacy of the Supreme Court as an institution. They knew that if the court was too eager to overturn precedent for ideological reasons, it would expose the court as a nakedly partisan institution, and that is precisely the effect that Dobbs v. Jackson has had.
Of course, we shouldn't be tempted to blame only the Republicans. There is much to say about the fecklessness of the opposition. In an earlier post I predicted that Democrats would do nothing to stop Roe v. Wade from being abolished, and sure enough that has come to pass, not that they were remotely capable of it. But even before then, Democrats have had plenty of opportunities over the past 50 years to codify the protections of Roe v. Wade into federal law, including in the decades where they had uninterrupted control of Congress, and have failed to act. Recent attempts by Congress to do so will likely fail in the Senate because of Biden's refusal to abolish the filibuster. Even after Roe has been abolished, Democratic leaders have proven themselves to be incapable of doing anything except issuing tepid condemnations and fundraising emails. So obvious is this fact that even establishment liberal papers are finally criticising it.
Perhaps one explanation is that Democrats expect that voters will line up behind them when Republicans do something awful, which in theory delivers election victories. Writing for The New Republic, Jason Linkins proposes that this is the Democrats' theory of change, whereby Democrats assume that change comes mainly as a reaction to the realities of Republican rule:
Thanks to the Supreme Court's June docket, this is a boom time for coordinated multiyear strategies, so much so that you wonder: Do the Democrats have any of their own up their sleeve? Alas, for Democrats the flowers of such labors seem unlikely to bloom anytime soon. But what is sprouting from the roughly tilled soil of our politics is a clear distinction between the two parties' theories of change. For the GOP, change comes after long periods of hard work, steady funding, and maintaining enthusiasm and momentum through periods of setback. For Democrats, change is reactive, coming only after the GOP's ambitions have hurt just enough people to make Republican rule untenable. It's clear that the first approach is proving more successful and more durable than the other.
Jason Linkins (2022), The Democrats' Theory of Change: Wait for the Republicans to Screw Up, The New Republic
Linkins also notes that Democrats have been actively helping far-right GOP candidates win their respective primaries under the assumption that these candidates will make their party uncompetitive. All of this is accurate, but the mean problem is that it only ascribes the failures of Democratic leadership to foolishness and idiocy. As Nathan J. Robinson has pointed out in Current Affairs, Democrats already had the power to thwart Republican advances and even expand on abortion rights, but simply refused to because Democratic leadership could never bring itself to see abortion as an important issue. In fact, current Democratic leadership has a long history of ignoring or outright opposing abortion rights:
Joe Biden made it plain throughout his career that he did not believe in a woman's right to choose, from the moment in 1974 when he said he "didn't think a woman had the sole right to say what happened to her body" to his continued support of the Hyde Amendment in 2019, which the head of the National Organization for Women called a "shocking," "unacceptable," and "unsupportable" position. Barack Obama promised federal legislation to protect abortion rights, then decided this wasn't important. Hillary Clinton presented herself as a champion for women's rights, but then instead of choosing the pro-choice Bernie Sanders as her vice president (which would almost certainly have won her the election) she chose the anti-abortion Tim Kaine. Nobody made her do this. Nancy Pelosi, likewise, could have made supporting women's fundamental rights a litmus test for Democratic politicians: to get the support of the national party, you must publicly support abortion rights. Instead, she defends anti-abortion Democrats. Why? Would we think that other basic rights are negotiable? Would she say that you can be a Democrat and not support women's suffrage? No. Pelosi simply failed to take a stand on an important issue, probably because it's "controversial." But when fundamental rights are controversial, you do not abandon your commitment to them, you make it clear why they're nonnegotiable. Biden, Clinton, Obama, and Pelosi are four of the leading figures in the Democratic Party. They have had, at various points, immense power to set the agenda for the party and the country. They have made a decision to ditch abortion rights.
Nathan J. Robinson (2022), Democratic Leaders Have Made It Clear They Don't Care About Abortion Rights, Current Affairs
The reason for the Democrats' lack of concern for abortion rights is entirely obvious. Their function is similar to that of the Labour Party in Britain, and I understand that it is something of a cliché to compare the two but it is here that you see the precise similarity. Part of the function of the Democratic Party is to reinforce the existing hierachies of American capitalism by socialising the working class into them. To achieve this, they strive to be as much of a big-tent party as possible, catering to liberals, progressives and moderate conservatives for as long as they can help it. Because of this, they don't like to emphasise social issues that are considered "controversial" on the basis that they assume that taking a stance on said issues would alienate potential voters. No clearer proof of this exists than in Hillary Clinton's recent proclamation that Democrats should abandon trans rights in order to win votes.
The difference in this regard, and the reason why I tihnk the Democratic Party has proven comparatively ineffective at socialsing the working class, is that since the 1990s they have been attempting to do so without any trappings of social democracy. For his faults, at least Tony Blair kept those aspects of what was left of British social democracy which Thatcher failed to destroy, and Labour's deep links with the trade unions meant Blair had to at least offer some concessions to unions even if he kept Thatcher's anti-union laws. By contrast, the Democrats have felt little need to make any concessions to the demands of organised labour, and whenever they have won they have gotten by purely on the negative vote. Even with Obama's lofty promises in 2008, much of his success can be atributed either to hype or to disgust towards the Republican ticket, the same party which had presided over the global financial crisis that saw everyone run out of money.
And then there are the individual actions which show how inept and unserious the Democrats were, and I include Democratic justices. For example, Ruth Bader Ginsburg did not need to serve on the bench until her death in 2020. She could have retired at the outset of the 113th Congress, at which point a Democratic-controlled Senate could easily fill her seat with a younger liberal justice. Despite calls from liberal and progressive calls for her to stand down, and despite two bouts with cancer, Ginsburg refused to retire, aiming to serve for as long as 35 years, and then died at the age 87 within months of the 2020 election, leaving her seat open to be filled by the arch-reactionary Amy Coney Barrett. Equally consequential was the time when Barack Obama failed to push the nomination of Merrick Garland to fill Antonin Scalia's vacant seat in 2016. Instead, he and Democratic leadership at large caved into Republican demands to wait until the 2016 presidential election, which ended with Trump's victory and Scalia's seat being filled by the conservative Neil Gorsuch.
I cannot stress enough the scale of the Democrats' failure here. Roe v. Wade was abolished by a narrow vote of 5-4. Even if Ginsburg did not retire, if Obama had only defied the GOP's disingenuous pleas and pushed through Garland's nomination, his one vote could in theory have saved Roe. Had Ginsburg also retired and left a vacancy to be filled by a liberal justice, then her replacement's vote could also have saved Roe even if Merrick's nomination failed. Both Garland and Ginsburg (or her hypothetical replacement) being on the bench would have been sufficient to overturn the Republican majority and at last produce a Democratic one.
All the liberals can really do is scream at the wind, enraged at being outsmarted by people they spent years portraying as simpletons and buffoons. Because they abhor direct action and have no faith in the working class as an agent of historical change, the bulk of what we've seen them say about Roe is that you should vote blue in every election, and that's if they're not entertaining fanciful notions of forcing men to get vasectomies. The vasectomy discourse, driven mostly by men who are clearly compensating for something, is arguably one of the most appalling and pathetic consequences of Roe's abolition. All the liberal bourgeois feminists have gone and done is embrace the patriarchal authoritarianism of their new oppressors and a vain and foolish attempt to turn the logic of patriarchy against it, but that is incapable of actually changing the system and never does. You cannot invert patriarchal norms in the hope of abolishing patriarchy, because all it does instead is reproduce these norms and assimilate women into them. The vasectomy discourse is but one example where liberal feminists have tricked themselves into thinking that biofascism is acceptable if it's inflicted on men, when in reality we should be defending bodily autonomy on principle and frustrate all attempts at abrogating it.
Speaking of feminists who seek to reinforce the patriarchy, I noticed a column on The Guardian by TERF columnist Sonia Sodha, who shamelessly exploited Roe v. Wade by attempting to tie it to the TERF crusade for "sex-based rights" (translation: the right of "women-only" spaces to discriminate against trans women) in an article called "Women must be allowed to defend abortion as a sex-based right". Let me be forthright when I say that it is TERFs who have worked overtime to ensure that the abolition of Roe v. Wade happened! They have been actively collaborating with far-right groups in order to ban trans healthcare, ban trans participation in sports, and marginalise trans people even if they happen to also be fighting for abortion. Many TERFs and TERF groups have even recieved funding from far-right anti-abortion groups such as the Alliance Defending Freedom, the American Center for Law and Justice, and the Heritage Foundation, which hosted members of the transphobic Women's Liberation Front. Alix Aharon, a TERF associated with the GenderMapper organisation, has even gone so far as to accuse Planned Parenthood of being "the apex of the trans lobby", as if to directly link anti-trans feminism with anti-abortion politics.
In this unholy alliance, they helped to normalise reactionary attitudes to gender roles, which has only served to help some of the most openly reactionary elements of society to come out of the woodwork, and those same people inevitably come after abortion. But don't take my word for it. The right is very grateful to the TERFs for their help in advancing their agenda. For example, at the 2017 Family Research Council's Value Voters Summit, Meg Kilgannnon, then the director of the Concerned Parents and Educators of Fairfax County, instructed conservatives to wrap their bigotry in progressive feminist language so as to drive a wedge between the feminist movement. She explicitly states that the aim of a TERF-conservative alliance is to divide and conquer:
For all of its recent success, the LGBT alliance is actually fragile, and the trans activists need the gay rights movement to help legitimize them. Gender identity on its own is just a bridge too far. If you separate the T from the alphabet soup, we'll have more success.
Meg Kilgannon (2017), speaking at the Family Research Council's Value Voters Summit
Other conservatives were much more forward about the role played by TERFs in advancing their own ideology. At a fringe event in last year's Conservative Party Conference, the British conservative writer Ed West stated quite frankly that they're simply using the TERFs to launder their reactionary ideology because they could only spread it through a subsection of feminism:
It's a sign of how bad things are that some of the pushback this kinda madder transgender stuff, which by the way all teenagers are now getting brainwashed with, which is just happening and I can see it now, was by using gender-critical feminists as basically human shields, because you know there's no conservative who will go out there and use the conservative arguments this. We have to use other progressives to fight this.
Ed West (2021), speaking at the 2021 Conservative Party Conference
This could not have been any more explicit. The right-wing bourgeois are quite open about their use of the TERFs to divide the progressive forces, and now that they've done their job in rehabilitating reactionary ideology with feminist clothing, they can now freely attack all the basic human rights that genuine feminists and progressives fought for. It doesn't help that many TERFs have more or less adopted the same bigoted rhetoric as the far-right and sometimes parrot their racist and anti-semitic conspiracy theories, with Alix Aharon claiming that "black youth are not transitioning". Another prominent TERF, Jennifer Bilek, takes this a step further in formulating a bizarre conspiracy theory of her own, wherein somehow the "medical industrial complex" is aiming to put Google chips in all our heads in order to enslave mankind to machines. Many have simply given up on defending the sexual revolution and have turned into moralistic, anti-sex reactionaries. On UnHerd you can find feminists like Louise Perry, who whined about anal sex and praised the reactionary moralist Mary Whitehouse as someone who supposedly "represented a majority whose world was being transformed by a cultural elite out of step with popular opinion", Julie Bindel who has repeatedly written tracts against sex work and demonised a Labour candidate who opposed the closure of a lap-dancing club, and then there's Kate Clanchy who openly calls for reinstating of Section 28 as a solution to the "trans war". With feminists like these, who needs patriarchs?
The global consequences of the abolition of Roe v. Wade are becoming apparent as American-style anti-abortion politics is already beginning to spread across the world. In Britain, the Tory MP for Devizes, Danny Kruger, declared that women do not have the right to bodily autonomy, and dismissed those concerned about reproductive rights as "lecturing" the US. The Deputy Prime Minister Dominic Raab has also refused to include the right to an abortion in a future "British Bill of Rights", signalling that the "sunlit uplands" we were promised will be paved with botched back-alley abortions. In Italy, anti-abortion groups such as the Popolo della Famiglia have stated that they are ready to "ride the wave from the U.S.A.", and regional authorities are increasingly funding anti-abortion groups. Some local officials are even refusing to comply to with national guidelines for facilitating non-surgical abortion procedures. In Poland, a country that already has a near-total ban on abortions, the reactionary Law and Justice government is set to implement a pregnancy register that is blatantly designed to track abortions, making Polish abortion laws the strictest in Europe. Heartbeat International, a US-based anti-abortion group, is already raising money for its "crisis pregnancy centres" (fake abortion clinics which are in reality designed to discourage abortion) in Ukraine, Poland, Hungary and Romania with the explicit aim of conning Ukrainian refugees into carrying unwanted pregnancies.
So what lessons that we must learn from this? First of all - and this is of particular relevance to the American left - the US Supreme Court should be regarded as the biggest obstacle to progressive change. It is a means by which American neofascists aim to outsource their oppressive agenda away from government and to the courts, who then outsource it to the state level, which the right uses to disingenuously argue that "we're not taking your rights away, we're simply letting the states decide", meanwhile prominent Republicans already calling a national abortion ban. They aren't just reactionary when it comes to sex either. Within mere days of Roe being abolished, they ruled that the Environmental Protection Agency cannot set emissions caps in order to curb climate change, basically making the EPA's authority worthless. Even before abolishing Roe they were handing down such dismal rulings as Vega v. Tekoh, which denies you the right to sue a police officer who did not read you the Miranda warnings, and Shinn v. Ramirez, which establishes that even being found innocent is not enough to keep you out of death row or prison, a ruling that may as well have also established that the rule of law is meaningless in America.
How does one deal with the Supreme Court in its current state? Well, allow me to answer this with another question, what good does court packing do when the extra seats will at some point be filled by yet more far-right reactionaries? Even if court packing was a good idea a few years ago, it is now too late for it to prevent the abolition of Roe v. Wade, and so it is worthless. The only reforms to the court that are worth entertaining are term and age limits for serving justices, and for the justices to be directly elected rather than appointed. That would at least in theory weaken the power of the courts, but they remain in the realm of pure fantasy. It would serve a progressive agenda much more easily if the Supreme Court were abolished in its entirety. We are far past the point where reforming it will do anything to stop them from vetoing any kind of reforms a progressive government might try to enact, and the court's ultimate appellate jurisdiction will almost certainly be used to frustrate any socialist government that ascends to power. Of course, because its existence is mandated by the US Constitution, those who call for the abolition of the Supreme Court must acknowledge that this means overturning the entire social order open which it rests, and replacing the old constitution with a new constitution that enshrines a socialist society built for the interests of the proletariat.
The second lesson is that the abolition of Roe v. Wade makes a spectacular mockery of the notion that America and the West more broadly can be called the "free world", let alone juxtaposed as such against the spectre of "communist" authoritarianism, and I believe socialists should be aggressively pointing this out since it remains a banal pastime for liberals and conservatives alike to paint us as ill-willed authoritarian thugs. "Socialism is tyranny", say the people who are enacting clerical fascism. "They hate freedom", say people who want to take away your right to sue police officers. "I will not stand for your authoritarianism", say liberals who are doing nothing to stop the tide of actual fascism in America and discouraging LGBT people from taking up arms to defend themselves against fascist thugs. And then of course there are those special kind of idiots who think socialism and fascism are the same thing, and then go on to support the reactionary right in their quest to turn the US into a Christian Saudi Arabia.
This is not to dismiss the very real authoritarian excesses that happened under countries that called and still call themselves socialist, but I find it utterly incredulous that the very same society that wants to remove a woman's right to bodily autonomy wants to turn my attention away from its abuses and towards the abuses of countries that no longer exist. The most ironic thing about all of this is that a right-wing Supreme Court has officially made it so that American abortion laws are if anything more restrictive than those of China, where abortion (except for sex-selective abortion) is legal and generally accessible no clear gestational limit, although even in China you still need a doctor's there are moves to restrict "non-medical" abortions in response to the usual panic over declining birth rates, and Uyghurs enjoy very little if any reproductive rights. Outside of this, there is little sign that a Texas-style abortion ban will come to China. Meanwhile, come the next Republican adiministration, the US won't even have freedom of religion anymore, making it practically no better than countries which implemented state atheism.
Turning to a more general picture, while they may have been more authoritarian in many other respects, on abortion many "actually existing socialist" countries, with notable exceptions such as Romania under Ceaușescu, are (or were) more liberal than America is now. The USSR, for example, was the first country in the world to legalise on-demand abortion in 1920, and although Stalin would recriminalise it in 1936, that was reversed in 1955. In East Germany, abortion was made legal in 1972, roughly a year before Roe v. Wade, with contraception made freely available for all women aged 16 or over. In Cuba, abortion was legalised as early as 1965, and it remains free and easily accessible, unlike in the "land of the free". In Vietnam, abortion is not only legal but also available for free and on-request, with the state also providing free contraception, and as far as I know this is still in place as of 2022.
What I'm trying to say is that in the "land of free", abortion law actually stands to become more restrictive than literal state socialist countries, and even China which is not even socialist anymore. Despite whatever criticisms we may have of those particular countries, we should be taking every opportunity to point out this contradiction because it is a glaring hole in the narrative that capitalism is the guarantor of freedom while socialism can only lead to authoritarianism, which is still one of the main arguments used against the establishment of any form of socialism, or even a social-democratic reform programme. Without that old Cold War era propaganda hurdle, the path to socialism will surely become much easier.
The third lesson is that moral progress is a myth, and that Martin Luther King Jr. was tragically wrong when he said that there is a moral arc of the universe that bends towards justice. What is always implied when people talk of progress is a faith in human reason, the perfectability of man, the idea that with technological advances comes social progress, and that belief is simply absurd in light of the return of reactionary impulses, and in an age of pogromist violence. It already looked hopelessly absurd in the face of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, which brought with it the return of atrocities not seen in Europe since the 1990s, and is pure fantasy in the regions of the global South which experience conflict with terrible regularity.
As much as I may disagree with Chris Hedges on a range of other points, particularly his insistence that communism and fascism were equally violent, he remains correct in his assessment of the myth of moral progress:
The First World War illustrated that human societies were not only often governed by the irrational, but contained subliminal longings for self-destruction, violence and death. Science and technology not only did nothing to stem these longings but empowered them. Knowledge did not set us free. Knowledge, as the biblical myth about the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden illustrated, is morally neutral. Science, the last century has shown us, has served the darkest and most violent projects of humankind.
Chris Hedges (2009), When Atheism Becomes Religion: America's New Fundamentalists, p.115
In the present day, we can see how technology has been used to aid America's neofascists, yet again serving the violent aims of oppressors. In the wake of the abolition of Roe v. Wade, many women concerned about their reproductive rights discovered in horror that their data, collected by period tracking apps, could be used by governments in states that ban abortion to prosecute their users, leading to calls to delete those apps. There are now worries that data collected through the Uber app may be used in the same way, as some women have used Uber to travel to abortion clinics. Track and trace technology developed during the pandemic has already been used by the Minneapolis police department to surveil protestors in 2020, there's not a doubt in my mind that it will be used on pro-abortion demostrators. While the Internet was supposed to make us all enlightened, many far-right anti-abortion groups have found it easier than ever to spread misinformation and propaganda across social media, particularly Facebook and TikTok.
Many liberals and progressives had, to their detriment, grown comfortable with the status quo because they believed that social attitudes, including towards abortion, could only get better, and indeed most Americans clearly oppose the abolition of Roe v. Wade. But here in lies the problem with liberal naivety. When they scream that some reactionary attack can't possibly happen in the year 2022, what they miss is that it indeed could happen not because it was somehow the democratic "will of the people", but because the reactionaries gained the power to impose their agenda through the Supreme Court, and that these reactionaries had the financial support of powerful corporate donors who wanted the court to gut environmental protections and labour laws. In other words, you cannot talk about progress without first talking about power, because it is precisely the fact our enemies understand power and how to wield it in contrast to the progressive forces that abortion rights are in the dire situation that they are in.
The fourth lesson is that sexual freedom should be defended at all costs, and on the basis that the basic premise of liberty itself rests on the right to bodily autonomy. This point is one that Wilhelm Reich makes repeatedly in his book The Mass Psychology of Fascism, in which he argues, correctly in view of recent events, that the sexual oppression serves to reinforce economic oppression and class society by weakening resistance to it. Thus for Reich freedom and sexual health are inextricably connected:
All precision of our social existence notwithstanding, there is as yet no definition of the word freedom which would be in keeping with natural science. No word is more misused and misunderstood. To define freedom is the same as to define sexual health. But nobody will openly admit this. The advocacy of personal and social freedom is connected with anxiety and guilt feelings. As if to be free were a sin or at least not quite as it should be. Sex-economy makes this guilt feeling comprehensible: freedom without sexual self-determination is in itself a contradiction.
Wilhelm Reich (1933), The Mass Psychology of Fascism, p.346
The most obvious sign of the connection between capitalist domination and sexual repression is quite simply the fact that the parties most directly connected with the interests of the haute bourgeoisie - in America's case the Republican Party - has long sought to control American sexuality, enjoying a partnership with America's so-called "moral majority". We can see this very clearly with abortion, where the right, now that Roe has been abolished, are now emboldened enough to try and claw back the rest of America's civil liberties, with reactionaries such as Charlie Kirk openly describing the LGBT rights movements as enemy combatants. It is also worth noting that the earliest abortion laws were enacthed some time after the start of the bourgeois epoch, with the first American laws criminalising abortion being enacted in 1821 in Connecticut, banning the sale of abortifacients. Prior to the 1800s, common law in America and Britain allowed for abortions up until the quickening, and did not consider abortions beforehand to be murder.
It is also worth noting that capitalism has always required the imposition of rigid patriarchal gender roles, and that the ascent of patriarchal class societies coincidided with the advent of private property and the abolition of the matrilineal line, or the mother-right, which was replaced with a patrilineal system for the purpose of facilitating the acumulation and inheritance of private property, as Engels noted in The Origin of the Family. Another important development that Engels also noted was that as women had now been subjugated, the need to ensure that the children who would inherit the father's property were biologically his led to the development of monogamous marriage. As Engels describes it:
It is based on the supremacy of the man, the express purpose being to produce children of undisputed paternity; such paternity is demanded because these children are later to come into their father's property as his natural heirs. It is distinguished from pairing marriage by the much greater strength of the marriage tie, which can no longer be dissolved at either partner's wish. As a rule, it is now only the man who can dissolve it, and put away his wife. The right of conjugal infidelity also remains secured to him, at any rate by custom (the Code Napoleon explicitly accords it to the husband as long as he does not bring his concubine into the house), and as social life develops he exercises his right more and more; should the wife recall the old form of sexual life and attempt to revive it, she is punished more severely than ever.
Friedrich Engels (1884), The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, p.92-93
It is because patriarchal society regards women as breeding sows for the production of children who are to inherit their fathers private property and because monogamous marriage was designed to ensure patrilineal inheritance, the conservative right as the defenders of capitalism will always oppose abortion because it means giving women the ability to refuse to carry a pregnancy to term, and they will oppose LGBT marriage because it is a form of marriage that is not based on securing the biological inheritance of children, which by the way is what the bigots actually mean when they talk about "redefining marriage". And of course, they oppose the right of trans people to existence because their whole identity qualitatively diverges from the rigid gender roles of bourgeois and patriarchal society.
Recognising the clear link between capitalism, private property and anti-sex moralism, we must reject sex-negativity in all of its forms. This means there can be no more anti-porn politics from the left, no more anti-trans feminism, no more anti-sex work feminism, no more attacks against the pro-choice movement as "bourgeois", and no more "socially conservative socialism". It also means there should be no more advocacy for censorship of nudity and sexual content in art and media, as many liberal feminists have wantonly indulged in. All of it, and I mean all of it, helps to reinforce the oppressive bourgeois moral code which in turn serves to paralyse and defang resistance to the existing social order. The politics of moral purity cannot be made progressive no matter how hard you try. The only thing it does is push nominal socialists, progressives, and feminists over to the right until eventually they become indistinguishable from conservatives and reactionaries. Since much of it seems to come from those who have an entirely economistic view of the primacy of class, we must also dispense with economism and, while recognising the role of class, embrace a holistic analysis which treats sexual puritanism as part and parcel with class society.
The final lesson we must learn is that if the sexual revolution could be undone in the way that is surely coming, then we must accept that the sexual revolution was incomplete. While it has accomplished so much in terms of removing puritanical legislation and normalising relaxed sexual attitudes, it failed to create a society which was no longer alienated, and thus alienated gender relations still persisted, but with the added bonus that feminists encourage said alienation by pitting male and female victims of capitalism against each other. The reason this happened is because the sexual revolution was ultimately conducted on a liberal basis, allowing it to be recuperated by capital which turned it into a vector of bourgeois individualism. The result is that the sexual revolution brought not so much free love as it supporters hoped, but freed market niches which allowed for capitalists to profit off of content that had hitherto been considered taboo.
In the neoliberal age that would follow it, and as capitalism atomised us and hollowed out our relationships and communities, this was expected to be resolved through the market-based solution we called dating sites, which privatise romance itself and dangle the promise that finding a relationship is as easy swiping right. Meanwhile, capital has now distorted our relationships themselves, transforming our connections from emotional ones into transactional ones, and we are told that the key to someone's heart is not meaningful emotional connection, but a five or six-figure salary, a sharp suit, and a diamond ring. Increasingly unrealistic beauty standards continue to be imposed through the culture industry, aided and augmented by new technologies that allow advertisers to compeletly fabricate idealised female and male forms that cannot realistically exist, with predictably catastrophic consequences for the self-esteem for young people.
Part of the success of the new puritanical counter-revolution was in its ability to disingenously frame all of these ills of modern culture as having been caused by feminism and the sexual revolution itself, pretending to be critics of the market while carefully obscuring the part played by capital in distorting the sexual revolution. Thus we have seen men who are alienated and lonely fall prey to reactionary ideology and become incels who, at their worst, develop fantasies of murderous vengeance against women, who they blame for their own status as losers of the new status quo, and to gin up male ressentiment the right has circulated fantasies of a "sexual marketplace" in which they perpetually lose. On the opposite end, some women who have been alienated and suffered the same fate in also becoming losers of modern society may have fallen prey to a reactionary kind of feminism, one which gins up their ressentiment by portraying men as inherently violent and accuses the sexual revolution of having empowered partiarchy by encouraging men to violate women's boundaries. This enterprise has been perpetrated not only by TERFs, but also by liberal feminists who seek to obscure the systemic reality of the abuses women face. The generally poor sexual education that people get in schools only compounds matters.
The problem is that the sexual revolution, whether of a bourgeois or proletarian character, needed much more time to properly transform the culture than it was afforded, and it didn't help that there were those who called themselves feminists who betrayed it at every turn under the guise of protecting women, such as when they collaborated with Republicans in order to ban pornography. But more to the point, how can the impact of a sexual revolution have been meaningful if there is still to be talk of there being winners and losers of it? And yet it is clear that because under capitalism the market regulates and mediates all economic and social relations, love, sex and thereby the sexual revolution itself would also be regulated. So long as the liberalisation of controls on sexual desire does not threaten the rule of the market, capitalism will permit it at least until the time when the ruling class decides it is in their interests to enact a fascist regime. Unaware of this flipside of the sexual revolution under captialism, people were so content to take the sexual liberty for granted that they didn't quite see what was happening alongside it, and couldn't see the threat that was coming until it was too late to do anything about it.
All I'm trying to say is that we need a new sexual revolution, a renewed sexual revolution. In an age of purtanical moralism, a rejuvenated sexual revolution is now more important than ever before, and this time it needs to recognise that liberation of the body and desire is but one step on the road to fully liberation. By now most people know that what you do in the bedroom is none of anyone's business, but at the same time there is more that must be done. We must first take aim at the gender essentialism which undergirds the oppression of women and LGBT people and creates horrible expectations for cis men to live up to in order to be seen as masculine and therefore valid. Another concern is that sexual education is not as comprehensive as it perhaps should be, which is one reason why the first sexual revolution had not accomplished all of its goals. Therefore we must push for a comprehensive sexual education programme that doesn't simply teach you how to do the deed and avoid sexually transmitted diseases, but also about pornography, consent, the nature of relationships and how to recognise abuse. Reactionaries oppose this expansion of sexual education precisely because it empowers people to be able to make their own choices and assert their own agency, and that is something they fear more than anything else when it comes to sex.
Most importantly, we must transform the way society views love. Too often we have grown up with a view of love in which it is viewed as a transaction that you have to advertise. You win a romantic partner first by making yourself as "attractive" as convention demands, then to keep them you need a "good job" (i.e. a bad job but which pays a lot of money) so that you can buy things, and then you strive to satisfy them sexually (and principally ensure that you are yourself satisfied) because sex is also a transaction in capitalist love. You don't love someone, you have the hots for someone and then you bribe them with material possessions, and then try to keep them satisfied for as long as you're young and verile enough to do so and thereby sustain the relationship.
This isn't love at all, but rather an itch which mother Church turns into a relationship through custom and force, the maintainence of which is faciliatated by plying your partner with bribes and keeping your spirits up with viagra and maybe some mutual porn, and our boomer parents found out the hard way that such relationships are unsustainable. The only reason we consider it romance is because the culture industry has successfully conflated love with the fulfuillment of base sexual desire, the fulfilment of which is entirely natural but should not be confused with the deeper connection that genuine love implies and indeed demands.
Genuine love is the union of kindred spirits that cannot be without one another, even if they mat not 100% compatible with each other at the outset (something no dating site can realistically promise anyway). Those who truly seek to love seek to take a chance with something, something that, as Alain Badiou argued in In Praise of Love, the dating site seeks to rob us of as it attempts to pander to our insecurities. True love does not need the lovers to constantly prove they can satisfy each other sexually, though they can do the deed as often as they like, because they already belong to each other. In a true loving relationship two people are able to look at each other as they really are - indeed that is the root word for respect (respicere = to look at) - and can become one with each other without trying to change the other. This is love that lasts, and it love that capitalism works so diligently to prevent from being kindled because it is also a value and a kind of security that is independent of the market.
Thus any new sexual revolution which seeks the liberation of our understanding of love so that it may be regarded in its proper form must be resolutely opposed to the market in a way that the previous sexual revolution couldn't have been. It must seek to defy the market and abolish the society in which the market has become a god. Yes I say resolutely that the new sexual revolution can only be accomplished with abolition of capitalism which is then followed by the world-historical triumph of socialism, which if it really is socialism and not merely an overgrown party bureaucracy will represent the liberation of the body, desire and love in one whole, vanquishing the old puritanical morality, be it in a conservative or "progressive" form, to the pits of Hell where it truly belongs.
For now, the forces of sexual freedom in America may appear to be in retreat, and in the short term they will be, but this should not be interpreted as a sign of the strength of the reactionary forces, but rather their weakness. Without mechanisms such as the Supreme Court, and without the ability to gerrymander themselves into power despite failing to win the popular vote, the reactionary forces truly would be doomed. They know this, which is why they are using the last precious moments of the court's collapsing legitimacy to ram through every ruling they've ever wanted. Meanwhile we have only our chains to lose and a world to win. Only the people will make a renewed sexual revolution come to fruition, for they are all we have, and indeed we are them.
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