Reportback from the Men's March Counter
Yesterday the masses of Boston's working women and our allies turned out to tell the Christian fascist "Men's March to Abolish Abortion": no justice for women, no peace in the streets. Any attack on our hard won rights will be met with militant resistance.
In the face of around 100 forced birth reactionaries and their dutiful guard dogs, Mayor Wu's BPD, several hundred demonstrators locked arms and fought back, standing up to defend our rights to reproductive healthcare and to fight fascism. While we fought hard, we were unable to prevent the police from breaking our lines and allowing the "Men's March" to proceed. We pursued them along the length of their march route, hassling them at every turn, but their pathetic "Rally for Personhood" was ultimately allowed to continue thanks entirely to the intervention of the pigs, who arrested at least 15 activists throughout the course of the day.
We are unsurprised by the brutality of the police towards our counter-demonstration. Indeed, despite the flagrant chauvinism of the so-called pro-life demonstrators, we know the truth: the main enemy of working women is not street fascists but the capitalist state, whose agents, whether cops or politicians, Republican or Democrat, will sell us out at their earliest convenience. Creeps like the Men's March organizers may lead the charge to take away our rights, but it's the pigs who enforce abortion bans, and it's the politicians who dangle reproductive rights in front of us each election season to buy our complicity in their reformist sham.
The overturning of Roe v. Wade was no exception: any victory won on the reformist terrain is at risk of being reversed by a change in administration. The "progressive" Democrats never hesitate to remind us of this each time they need to manufacture consent for the election of yet another sell-out politician, or, more recently, for the genocide in Palestine.
The re-election of the rapist Donald Trump earlier this month was only the latest in a series of such reversals, but he is hardly alone: we must not forget that it was under a Biden presidency that Roe v. Wade was overturned and it was a DNC-controlled legislature which refused to codify reproductive rights at the federal level. So long as we allow the fight for our basic democratic rights, from reproductive healthcare to gender affirming care and antidiscrimination protections, to take place within a political system which exists only to defend the interests of the rich, we will never really be safe.
That is why we insist that the women's struggle is a class struggle: the oppression of women did not, as Copmala put it, fall out of a coconut tree, but emerged as a product of centuries of dispossession which began with the birth of private property and its inheritance via the patriarchal family form, and continues today through the unpaid labor performed by women in our homes, the constant precarity of our legal rights, and our unequal pay in the workplace. As our comrades in the proletarian feminist research group put it, "the oppression of women has an economic basis, in the form of the extraction of reproductive labor in the domestic sphere, and an ideological expression (patriarchy) connected to legal and social repression...patriarchy cannot be dismantled until its economic base is smashed and its ideological vestiges thoroughly rooted out." The threat of forced birth and permanent domestic servitude posed by the Christian fascist right is only one more iteration of that ancient trend.
Our fight is in the streets, against the fascists, the bosses, and the pigs. Until the capitalist state is overthrown and an economic system built for the interests of the many is imposed, women will never be free, as the basis of our oppression lies in the rotten heart of capitalist society. In the face of a rising fascist attack on basic rights won through decades of struggle, we say,
Working women, give them hell! It is right to rebel!
Build the revolutionary women's movement!