By the Austin Revolutionary Organizing Collective (AROC)

Women’s oppression transcends capitalism but has a particular character under it. It has to do with the political/social colonization of women’s bodies for the purpose of uncompensated social reproduction. Control of reproductive functions is obviously central to that. There are men, non-binary, and genderqueer people who can reproduce as well, and the core of their oppression is an attempt to force them back into the social categories of colonization established by patriarchy, i.e. the gender binary.

The so-called Religious Right has been the primary organizing movement of the most reactionary elements of the white propertied classes since the 1970s. The movement arose when right-wing activists organized white, petit bourgeois families affiliated with private evangelical schools that had sprung up after the last gasp of the education desegregation movement. The civil rights movement briefly succeeded in compelling integration through busing students into integrated schools. The reactionary elements — which by definition had excess income to send their children to private schools — used fundamentalist Christianity as an alibi for their white-supremacist politics, exploiting liberal “religious freedom” concepts to actually wage war against liberalism itself.

The founders of the Religious Right used anti-abortion politics as a unifying narrative for coalescing them into powerful political institutions. These institutions took over the Republican Party and now govern the United States. Prior to this gambit, opposition to abortion had never been a Protestant priority. It worked, however, because their underlying objective was a patriarchal rejection of the progressive advances earned at the peak of class struggle in the 1960s.

(Maintaining “racial integrity” requires superstructural sexual controls historically rooted in patriarchal religion in the West — white supremacy is inherently patriarchal).

Value is produced globally, and the class struggle is therefore global as well. That peak of class struggle was possible because of the success of Third World resistance in that era, which in turn was possible because the Soviet Union, Cuba, the People’s Republic of China, and other revolutionary governments actively assisted colonized countries in resisting imperialist oppression. Now that the USSR is long gone and the others have been isolated or taken a capitalist road, the conditions that allowed for progress in the class struggle are much weaker, and the foundations of social progress in this country have been removed.

Following the 2008 crisis it became clear that the ruling class was going to rapidly dismantle the remaining legacies of 20th century class struggle and liberal politics altogether. As the vanguard of white imperialist capitalism in the United States, the Religious Right is leading the political charge against liberal governance and they are accomplishing this by imposing strict new reproductive controls and aggressively reversing abortion rights — both legislatively and ultimately through the courts.

Attempting to solve this through liberal response is doomed — the material conditions for liberal governance are gone, as class collaboration is no longer necessary for the imperialist ruling class. The only hope is to rebuild the forces capable of threatening and ultimately defeating their power and refusing compromise this time.

If we only set our sights on defeating the Religious Right at the polls they will win. We must instead focus on taking power in such a way that we can destroy them once and for all. This means dismantling their political institutions, holding their leaders accountable for the devastation they have caused, prohibiting their dissemination of reactionary ideology, and educating their children about the value of sexual autonomy.

Such a society is one where we can ensure universal and free access to abortion on demand and without apology, universal birth control, the eradication of HIV and HPV, free condoms and STI treatment/prevention, free gender affirming care, universal sex education, active and effective social resistance to rape and sexual abuse, and full acceptance of all family and relationship types between consenting partners. It’s a society of true human freedom, and only revolutionary organizing can bring it about.

Only communists have successfully dismantled ruling classes anywhere in the world in the last 100 years. We will do it again, with your help.