Leaflet distributed by the IWG and sympathisers during protests in response to the Supreme Court's decision to overturn Roe v. Wade.

The overturning of Roe v Wade is the latest assault in the capitalist class’ war on the reproductive freedom of working women. It comes now because of capitalism’s crisis and the global march to war, where the US capitalist class increasingly sees women workers as baby-making machines to create new workers to exploit, and if necessary, new cannon fodder to throw at their imperialist rivals. It is an attempt by capitalism to reintroduce so-called ‘traditional’ values to further subjugate working class women into their condition of being oppressed wage-slaves.

While ruling-class liberals try to portray the ruling as an attack against all women, this ruling primarily affects working-class women, not bourgeois women. Even in the state with the most reactionary anti-abortion laws, a bourgeois woman will still be able to fly out and get an abortion. That’s not an option for proletarian women, who struggle to survive on meager wages and are oppressed by rising costs of basic goods like gas and groceries.

It wasn’t a question of if but when the Supreme Court would overturn Roe, thanks to an anonymous leaker. Despite nearly two months passing since then, the Democrats chose to do nothing but send out meaningless, empty tweets of fake solidarity as usual. The Democratic Party is happy that Roe is overturned, because now it’s another issue that they get to use to corral workers into voting for them in November! And once Democrats are voted in, they can get back to their usual game of doing nothing. Because the Democratic Party doesn’t actually care about the struggle of working women for reproductive freedom. They only care about managing the capitalist system which strangles working women, and using these issues to grift themselves into power.

We can’t let the outrage of working women, and all workers, get funneled back into the Democratic Party’s cooptation machine. We can’t let them do now what they did in 2020 with the racist police murder of George Floyd. Our fight isn’t just against the Republicans, or with one branch of the government. Our fight is against all parties of the ruling class, all parties that uphold this sexist capitalist system which lives thanks to the exploited labor and oppressed lives of proletarian women around the world! Our global class, men, women, and proletarians of all genders and sexual identifications, has to wage an organized, principled struggle against these parasites off of the lives and labor of proletarian women!

Struggle in the workplace and in the streets, not at the ballot box! STRIKE the sexist capitalist system where it hurts them the hardest, their profits! Without the exploited and unpaid labor of working women, the system would grind to a halt!

More than just halt the system, we have to overthrow it, and seize power for all workers to put an end to this nightmare of working women’s oppression! Only in a world in which capitalism has been overthrown will women workers live without the fear of having the most basic freedom of all, freedom of their own bodies, stripped from them. The working class of all genders must struggle together against the ruling class, going on the offense with the aim of seizing power for itself and smashing the capitalist state globally. It is up to the most class-conscious workers to create an international revolutionary political organization to provide the entire class with leadership.

The Internationalist Workers’ Group is the US affiliate of the Internationalist Communist Tendency, a revolutionary working-class political organization dedicated to building the future party of the working class & overthrowing capitalism for a world system of workers’ councils.