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Abolish the Capitalist Supreme Court – Editorial

Trump poses a real danger by nominating an extreme conservative and open white supremacist woman to the Supreme Court. The tyrannical decisions made by the Supreme Court and federal judges result in immense harm to the people. However, in the panic over the nomination, people overlook the most fundamental aspects of the court—that it is a capitalist tool of the billionaire ruling class and that only mass struggle against the capitalists can beat back reactionary court rulings.

The lifetime-appointed judges of the Supreme Court and the Federal courts uphold the undemocratic right of the capitalists to own and control all of society to the detriment of millions of workers and oppressed people. There are no workers who are judges. When an occasional woman or non-white person is nominated they are carefully vetted to make sure they uphold the capitalist order.

This author worked on a massive rent control referendum in Baltimore that was voted for overwhelmingly by thousands. One federal judge overturned the people’s decision by deciding that the referendum illegally interfered with the rights of landlords. Some democracy!

Respect for Ruth Bader Ginsburg must be acknowledged for stubbornly trying, while coping with a painful disease, to outlive a Trump administration. But to attribute gains made for women or LGBT people to her rulings alone rather than the mass action of women or the LGBTQ movement is false and deceptive.

Crediting a capitalist court or Congress for progress plays into the same mythology that attributes hero status to Franklin D. Roosevelt for the New Deal laws. In reality, it was the militant struggle of millions of workers to challenge the capitalist system that won social security, unemployment insurance, and more. When corporate lobbyists voiced their objections to these reforms, Roosevelt revealingly said, “Do you want me to wait until workers march on the White House with machine guns?”

MASS INDEPENDENT MOVEMENT AND POLITICAL ORGANIZATION CAN PUSH THEM BACK

The struggle can push the right wing back. In fact, it is the struggle alone that succeeds in winning new laws or repealing others. The Supreme Court, federal courts and the constitution upheld slavery and racist Jim Crow laws until the movement was too powerful to ignore. No Supreme Court judge, congressperson, or senator was responsible. The Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the Civil Rights Act while three of the justices had affiliations with the KKK. The capitalists let the court know they considered it better to grant some temporary concessions on paper rather than fan the flames of revolt which might threaten the system as a whole.

The real tragedy of 4 years of Trumpism is that for all the damage his regime did on behalf of the capitalist class, no liberal or social democratic politician saw fit to answer these attacks by calling for a powerful mass movement in the streets. Workers could have mounted the people power to unseat Trump at any point over the last 4 years; instead, liberals preached that a vote for the Democratic party was the answer. Instead of arousing the rage of workers based on the real harms done to us, the Democrats trotted out a doomed impeachment campaign on behalf of the Pentagon and the CIA.

If Biden is elected, will he march up to the Supreme or Federal Court and handcuff judges for their crimes against the people? No. If a federal judge rules that we have no right to protest police terror or a pipeline and that the Justice department can charge us with sedition, will Biden defy these judges? Of course not! Because above all else, Biden will reverently obey the institutions of capitalist society. If he didn’t, he’d run the risk of lifting the veil of deception from the eyes of the working masses. Biden supported the illegal coup against the democratically elected Evo Morales in Bolivia so that Elon Musk and the Tesla corporation could obtain lithium for their cars. Will he not do the same here?

Trump has nominated the reactionary Amy Coney Barrett. If the masses block him by taking to the streets, that would at least serve to show the power of the people. But at the same time, we need to expose that the Supreme Court, and all U.S. courts serve the interests of the capitalist class and will never deliver real justice to the people.

We need to sweep away the illusion of checks and balances. We need courts made up of and for the workers and oppressed. We need to mount movements and struggles to lift us all up from oppression and exploitation, but ultimately, we must exercise the greatest democracy of all and claim our right to revolution.

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Supreme Court Will Not Stop LGBTQ Struggle

By Sally Jane Black

Nearly a year ago, a leaked memo revealed that the Trump administration was trying to reinterpret Title VII in order to allow discrimination against LGBTQ people. The flimsy policy that included LGBTQ people under “sex” in Title VII (the law that protects against job discrimination on basis of gender, race, etc.) was established under the Obama administration as an effort to buy LGBTQ votes without effecting any change. With no real protections in place, it has taken almost no effort for the current administration to reverse almost every gain LGBTQ people have made.

The unelected, notoriously bigoted Supreme Court will be deciding on three cases this October that will determine whether this legalization of discrimination will be upheld, endangering millions of people’s jobs, insurance, and well being. Trump’s Department of “Justice” has aggressively fought for the reinterpretation, often using the argument of “religious freedom” to mask their dangerous homophobia and transphobia.

“RELIGIOUS FREEDOM”
The use of “religious freedom” as justification for these policies is not an attempt to protect anyone but to divide the working class against LGBTQ people. The capitalist class knows that if they claim that this is a matter of religion, LGBTQ people and allies will blame religion for these attacks instead of the real enemy: the rich, powerful capitalists that benefit from our oppression. Meanwhile, the capitalists are pandering to workers who are religious, hoping to incite them against the cause for LGBTQ equality.

RISE IN VIOLENCE
It is no coincidence that Louisiana candidates for governor are insulting trans people in campaign ads, or that celebrities like Drew Brees are avoiding consequences for working with anti-LGBTQ hate groups like Focus on the Family; the capitalist class is funding the complete reversal of every right won by LGBTQ people. This has also served as an open call to violence against queer and trans people. Hate crimes are at a record high. So far this year, 20 trans people—almost all black trans women—have been murdered, including one killed in an ICE concentration camp. As with every marginalized group, when our rights are under attack, our safety is threatened as well.

SECOND CLASS CITIZENS
The past year has seen attacks on LGBTQ people on every front: housing, healthcare, emergency shelter, education, and more. The attack on Title VII is at the heart of this. Allowing job discrimination against queer and trans people would effectively cut us off from everything needed to survive. By legalizing job discrimination and ramping up anti-queer and anti-trans bigotry, the ruling class is making sure that unemployment remains high enough to weaken the working class.

FIGHTING BACK
Resistance is growing. Although the mainstream LGBTQ rights movement has been co-opted by corporate interests and nonprofits, in June people around the country honored the 50th anniversary of Stonewall with militant, anti-corporate, anti-cop actions at Pride events, often opposing the nonprofit boards that erased the militant politics of the original Pride marches. LGBTQ people have won victories for trans healthcare in Wisconsin, and an immigrant trans woman, Alejandra Barrera, has won her freedom from an ICE concentration camp. In September, activists in New Orleans held a march protesting the anti-trans Crimes Against Nature in Solicitation law during the corporate-funded Southern Decadence.

LGBTQ people should be protected against discrimination and violence, not forced to be second class citizens. Only militant action will win us our rights and protect us from these attacks. We must resist every attempt by the capitalist class to divide us against one another. It is only through unity and working class solidarity that we will liberate ourselves from the oppressive rule of the capitalists.

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Ruling Class Targets LGBT Workers

By Sally Jane Black

Cases before the Supreme Court are threatening to roll back gains won by the LGBT liberation struggle. With the decision to send the Texas case Turner v. Pidgeon back to the lower courts, the Supreme Court has opened the gate for businesses to refuse to pay for insurance and other benefits for same-sex partners, and with Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission currently pending, soon businesses might be allowed to legally discriminate against same-sex couples on the basis of “religious freedom.” What was won through decades of struggle, culminating in Obergefell v. Hodges in 2015, is now being overturned in pieces.

The fact that the right to marry is being ignored by these laws in favor of revoking the more tangible economic benefits that came with it is telling: the objections being made to same-sex marriage are rooted in greed, not a desire to protect anyone’s freedoms. These cases are blatant attacks on workers. As has been seen before, companies will take every opportunity to push back against workers’ gains. If the courts allow them to deny same-sex couples the same benefits as heterosexual couples, it’s only a matter of time before this is attempted to be used as precedent to make those same benefits inaccessible to heterosexual couples. If a loophole can be found, it will be taken advantage of. The goal is not to protect the freedoms of the religious—who mostly support same-sex marriage in this country—but the owners and bosses who want to squeeze every last penny out of their workers.

What these threats show is how easily concessions won from the ruling class can be lost. Unless the working class stands up to the ruling class and fights in unison against the divisive, manipulative attempts to economically punish queer and trans people, real change will never happen.

In December, the Louisiana courts declared that the state could not extend legal protections to queer and trans state workers as another step in a continuing fight between the governor and the state’s attorney general Jeff Landry, who has used trans people as nothing more than a political victim. Previously, the Democrats had offered to remove trans people from these protections in exchange for keeping them for queer people. This is a repetition of the same failed tactics that have been used for decades, from the fight for the Employment Non-Discrimination Act at the federal level to the recent “bathroom bills” which have been used to rile supporters and divide the opposition.