Corruption: The Supreme Court’s Soft Coup
The Supreme Court’s Soft Coup
Changing the Power of the State
Revolutionary Perspectives
The fascist political offensive in the US took a big step forward in June with an unprecedented series of Supreme Court decisions. This step comes on top of organized and systematic dismantling of voter rights, plus a coup on January 6, 2021.
The most striking of these decisions was the Dobbs decision which ended federal protection for abortion rights, the first time in US history that a human right was eliminated. More than half the people in this country must now directly face coercive reproduction control and the criminalization of motherhood. And every single person is menaced by this attack.
This offensive is part of an organized effort to reverse everything that the George Floyd Rebellion stood for. Capitalists always turn to fascism to counter the objective rising political surge of the people.
The United States is now in a new and dangerous political period as we gear up for the Mid-Term elections in November.
These Supreme Court decisions represent a soft-coup that echoes January 6. Every single ruling opposed the popular will of the people.
The Supreme Court, unlike any other court, chooses the cases that it wants to rule on. With this court, suddenly we see their fascist buddies in the states filing all sorts of precedent-setting cases, if passed. This is the inside-outside strategy that we also saw on January 6, when a group of Senators and Representatives played the inside role to aid and abet the coup. This is also the states’ rights strategy pursued by slaveowners and Jim Crow fascists.
US law is based on setting precedents which are then routinely extended throughout society. So these decisions, as we see so clearly with abortion, are only the beginning. The court all but declared that it will now go after the rights of LGBTQ+ people, terminate contraception, legalize private bounty hunters, and go after the law that declared that segregated schools are not equal.
In a mere 10 days in June, the Supreme Court also:
Curtailed the rights of states to enact gun safety laws, only a month after the Uvalde and Buffalo massacres
Gutted the 60-year-old Miranda decision that allows prisoners to sue police under the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871. This decision also renders that law ineffective. (1)
Refused to consider evidence of innocence in death penalty cases.
Obliterated tribal sovereignty over law enforcement on Indian lands.
Approved racial gerrymandering in North Carolina.
Legalized prayers in schools and set the precedent for states to fund racially- segregated religious schools.
Destroyed the federal government’s power to use the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate carbon emissions, thereby heightening the Climate Crisis which threatens every living thing on the planet. The implication is that the government cannot exert police powers over corporations. This precedent may mean that the government has no power to limit corporate profits
In discussing the legal implications of the EPA decision, legal scholar, Marjorie Cohn wrote, that the decision:
could restrict the ability of federal agencies to regulate workplace safety, health care, product safety, water protection, vehicle safety, telecommunications, and the financial sector. (2)
Every one of these decisions strengthens the power of the State while reducing the power of the government. The reality is that the State has always controlled the government. Now this motion is shifting into overdrive. So we get small government and Big State!
Stripping such power of the State goes far beyond simply regulating private profit. This is what a corporate dictatorship looks like! It openly seeks to abolish the power of the public to control corporate-state power in every way. And it is unleashing state-sanctioned social violence, including vigilante violence, to do so.
The “Big Government” Scam
Capitalists are the class that rules society today in the name of private profit. So why are they allowing this? What is their advantage here? How can they exploit this? And why must they resort to fascism which drives the entire population, except of course the very rich, back towards slavery? The Dobbs decision opens up some bigger questions.
Fascism rises today to take the form of an aggressive “social movement” which seeks to justify changing laws and criminalizing everything from motherhood to controlling corporations.
Fascism craftily plays on the vast popular distrust of government that has systematically worked to reduce the rights of people. Here fascists play a trick: they deliberately confuse the role of government and the role of the State. The government’s role is to spend tax money and organize civil society. The State, on the other hand, suppresses most of us with legal force invested in armed groups of men: police, courts, the military, National Guard, ICE, etc. That is the State apparatus.
The very real popular anger is actually against the State, which uses force to impose the will of the ruling class. California, for example, has more than 1000 laws that criminalize poverty. When you are sleeping in a park and the cops beat you up, you are dealing with the long arm of the law, not the government. That’s not Big Government. That’s the State in action. It is the naked expression of ruling class power. And in the US, the ruling class most certainly is the capitalist class which works 24-7 to guarantee profits to corporations but not to support people.
The government’s job is to expand the interests of the public and support the basic needs of every human being. The State today has evolved into a corporate dictatorship which is recrafting the State to serve the merger of corporations and the government. Therefore, the State denies police control over Big Parma corporations that planned and instituted the opioid crisis that murders thousands a year.
The State not only protects and secures the legal privileges of private property. It also aggressively strives to enforce the control of corporations by aggressively privatizing everything, even as it expands the Carceral State around the world.
By private property, we do not mean our personal property, the things we all use every day. Private property is the privilege that corporations claim to own all the tools and technologies of society, the ideas of humanity, the infrastructure, etc, all to increase their personal wealth. The fundamental question is this: why should all the things we need and use together be owned privately? Why shouldn’t we publicly own the things we use in common?
So the fascists deliberately focus the popular ire against the government instead of the State. This is part of the capitalist strategy of “drowning government in the bathtub” that fascists like Steve Bannon have long articulated.
Supreme Court decisions determine the authority and scope of the State. Thus we see the Supreme Court ending the specific police controls over corporations (the EPA decision, the gun decision, and the tribal sovereignty decision) while extending this power to control the people’s bodies of women, and personal privacy.
Slavery, Religion, Schools, and Controlling Bodies
It is no accident that these Supreme Court decisions run the gamut from slavery to religion to schools to abortion. In the history of the United States, these issues are intimately connected.
Michelle Goodwin, Founding Director of the Center for Biotechnology and Global Health Policy a chancellor’s professor at the University of California, Irvine:
The George Floyd Rebellion revealed to the world that the US is still crippled by its history of slavery and white supremacy. This is the historical cornerstone of the rule of the capitalist class. Twenty-six million people demonstrated against the systematic institution of racism in the police. They called for a new day, moving forward to abolish police abuse in any form. Countering this rebellion, the ruling class has no choice but to move backward to embrace slavery’s legacy.
Ending the forced sexual and reproductive servitude of Black girls and women was a critical part of the passage of the 13th and 14th Amendments. The overturning of Roe v. Wade reveals the Supreme Court’s neglectful reading of the amendments that abolished slavery and guaranteed all people equal protection under the law. It means the erasure of Black women from the Constitution.
Mandated, forced, or compulsory pregnancy contravenes enumerated rights in the Constitution, namely the 13th Amendment’s prohibition against involuntary servitude and protection of bodily autonomy, as well as the 14th Amendment’s defense of privacy and freedom.
This Supreme Court demonstrates a selective and opportunistic interpretation of the Constitution and legal history, which ignores the intent of the 13th and 14th Amendments, especially as related to Black women’s bodily autonomy, liberty, and privacy which extended beyond freeing them from labor in cotton fields to shielding them from rape and forced reproduction. The horrors inflicted on Black women during slavery, especially sexual violations and forced pregnancies, have been all but wiped from cultural and legal memory. Ultimately, this failure disserves all women. (3)
The control of the bodies of slaves was the key to capitalist development and production in the United States in the 19th Century. The control of the bodies of black women at the time was the key to capitalist reproduction. In Sojourner Truth’s famous statement, “Ain’t I A Woman?”, she told how almost all of her 13 children were ripped out of her arms to be groomed as slaves.
Today, this country, which must root out the entire legacy of slavery if it is to advance, is instead extending that legacy. Judge Alito worried about the “domestic supply of infants” in his writings. Shortly after that, the Buffalo shooter wrote about ‘weakening’ the existing white race by promoting sexual and gender diversity, which would discourage white people from settling into a family structure that is focused on producing children. After the Dobbs decision, Judge Clarence Thomas publicly proclaimed that laws about gay marriage and protecting LGBTQIA rights are next.
The Supreme Court Dobbs decision criminalizes reproduction and re-establishes the long historical tradition of controlling women’s bodies in the United States. As we will see now the expansion of the application of police techniques that regulate pregnancies to all women. As is common in US history, techniques of coercive reproduction have been developed and perfected in recent years against Black and Brown women in particular.
Michelle Goodwin describes how the New Jane Crow laws model Jim Crow Era laws:
… (Jim Crow laws) are not rational, they’re quite illogical, and, even more, they’re punitive, they’re cruel, they’re absolutely excessive. You know, if you think about the work of Pauli Murray, she was in many ways the godmother of the civil rights movement. Thurgood Marshall said that the book that she wrote on race laws was the Bible of the civil rights movement. And it’s about 800 pages, single-spaced, all of these crazy, really crazy Jim Crow laws, such as, you know, Black people can’t play checkers in the park — that ridiculous, that you think, “Who in the world thought of that?” — and would connect a fine and also criminal punishment if Black people are caught playing checkers in the park.
Well, in the New Jane Crow, we see laws such as propositions such as what you’ve just described. They make absolutely no sense, but they’re absolutely cruel. And they’re meant to cause fear and to chill behavior. And their reach is beyond what we could grasp or even imagine. (4)
Goodwin then predicts the outcomes we are looking at:
But, yes, what we will begin to see is that there will be states where people will not be free, where they will in fact be policed. And that kind of policing will also be connected to sex profiling, just like racial profiling — right? — this hyper-intensive look at what are girls and women doing with their bodies. There will be a turn to and pressure on nurses, on doctors, on medical staff to breach millennia-old practices of confidentiality between themselves and their patients. And they will breach that and will share that information, just as we saw in that case, with law enforcement. And then the next step will be arrest. (5)
Furthermore, the abortion issue that was concocted to attack the rights of women was next
politicized precisely to divert people and the government from abolishing private religious segregated schools. Katherine Stewart details these historical connections in The Guardian:
At the core of the Dobbs decision lies the conviction that the power of government can and should be used to impose a certain moral and religious vision – a supposedly biblical and regressive understanding of the Christian religion – on the population at large….
Among their core concerns was the fear that the Supreme Court might end tax exemptions for segregated Christian schools. Jerry Falwell and many of his fellow southern, white, conservative pastors were closely involved with segregated schools and universities – Jones went so far as to call segregation “God’s established order” and referred to desegregationists as “Satanic propagandists” who were “leading colored Christians astray”. As far as these pastors were concerned, they had the right not just to separate people on the basis of race but to also receive federal money for the purpose.
They knew, however, that “Stop the tax on segregation!” wasn’t going to be an effective rallying cry for their new movement. As the historian and author Randall Balmer wrote, “It wasn’t until 1979 – a full six years after Roe – that evangelical leaders, at the behest of conservative activist Paul Weyrich, seized on abortion not for moral reasons, but as a rallying cry to deny President Jimmy Carter a second term. Why? Because the anti-abortion crusade was more palatable than the religious right’s real motive: protecting segregated schools.” (6)
These issues of blocking abortion, segregation, and schools are completely connected in the June Supreme Court decisions. The specific decisions that break the wall separating church and state potentially force the state to fund religious schools no matter how discriminatory their practices and sectarian their teachings.
Privacy and Surveillance
The Dobbs decision directly raises the issue of privacy, an issue that the Court majority states is not in the Constitution.
The anti-abortion Dobbs decision puts at risk any rights that were not already in place more than 150 years ago when the 14th Amendment was ratified. Justice Clarence Thomas, leading the fascist charge, called for getting rid of all rights that were not originally written into the Constitution. This includes the right to privacy and even to travel.
The fundamental, and very flawed, legal theory that overturned Roe is based on the idea that the only human rights that should be legally protected are those that existed at the time the Constitution was written… by rich, white, Christian men. Slaves were private property until
1865. Women were the private property of their husbands until 1920. While the rights of private property were consecrated in the Constitution, except for the few paltry rights of the so-called Bill of Rights, no other human rights were legal.
The 13th and 14th Amendments to the Constitution were put in place to abolish slavery. They have been extended as the basis for the recognition of human rights, mostly included under the most narrow view of privacy and are an extremely narrow and possibly fragile legal basis for the recognition of rights to personal privacy and all human rights, which should be codified into laws. Let us remember that Roe was decided as the Equal Rights Amendment, that guarantees women equal rights with men, was defeated.
But privacy issues are huge in today’s society. We all know that digital platforms have completely eroded the right to privacy. Every platform from Amazon and Google to Uber and DoorDash makes vast private profits by seizing your data, monetizing it, and commercializing it.
Though your physical body today may not be someone else’s private property, your digital body – the digital persona harvested and formed from your data – most certainly is! There are already massive public protests against this usurpation of privacy. If the human right to privacy is ended, corporations can have free reign to seize personal data. This application of technology is already being worked on by the Surveillance State, growing in the shadows for more than a decade.
Body autonomy – the right of every human to control their own personal body – runs from police terror and the control of pregnancy. This human right must be consecrated in law.
Dobbs, States, Rights, and The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850
The court’s decisions doubles down on the legal justification for slavery, Jim Crow, and white supremacy. This legal justification is the notion of “states’ rights”, which is aggressively opposed to a system of government where the federal government has the authority to institute reforms on a national scale and actually help people. States’ Rights, of course, are fundamental to US fascist thinking, and it is one way the fascists attack “Big Government”.
So today, we see that the Texas anti-abortion law authorizes private individuals to enforce the law through so-called “civil suits”, now augmented with modern digital surveillance! The law empowers any person in the state (and potentially anywhere in the US) to claim that another person is assisting with an abortion. This includes things like driving them somewhere, giving them advice, or providing abortion pills.
The law incentivizes modern-day vigilantes with $10,000 and court costs if they win. The vigilante can even pick the legal venue to file the case in! This law takes the essence of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and extends it under today’s conditions.
With the Fugitive Slave Act, the State empowered slave owners to deputize private bodies of armed men, who went into the North to find escaped slaves. The law further stipulated that these private militias had the power to call on any male in the North and compel them to render assistance. In other words, they could force a person to drop what they are doing and join the hunt, or go to jail for violating the law! The result was a massive popular rebellion in the North against this fascist law.
Historically, the states of the Confederacy responded to the abolition of slavery with the world’s first fascist state, consecrated in Jim Crow laws, lynchings, and vigilante terror. Today the Southern form of the state and Southern justice is being extended across the country.
The Southern political program – states’ rights, low taxes, anti-labor, little or no regulation of the corporations, small government (which translates as slashing social benefits for the working class, including health care, shelter, and education) – this is the core of the political program that has come to dominate the political scene of America. (Rally Comrades! — 7)
Now these states are considering laws making it illegal for women to travel out of state without forced scrutiny! Personal data of women are not just in danger of being seized; they have already been seized. So now self-appointed vigilantes can track and surveil their intended targets across the country. White supremacist, patriarchal rule in this country has always relied on the coalition of government forces, official police, and state-endorsed vigilantism. However, as we see, the issue is far greater than one of women’s rights. It is changing the State apparatus in ways that threaten everyone.
Taking the Offensive Against Fascism
The turn to fascism, a tactically powerful capitalist tactic, is an expression of the strategic weakness of capitalism. Steadily increasing the naked force of the State means the capitalists have little left to fall back on. Everything it tries to do to magnify the power of private property over humanity and the globe creates new problems beyond its capacity to solve.
In the Industrial Era, capitalism controlled society through the control of jobs and splitting the working class with white supremacy. The social contract allowed white workers into higher-paid jobs. This was an economic bribe that was designed to reinforce the social privileges of white supremacy. With no economic bribe, the only way they can maintain social cohesion is through social privilege justified by white supremacy. It is striking how the Supreme Court reverted to undoing the progressive laws after slavery was abolished. just this in their recent coup against democracy.
The Industrial Era has gone the way of the mechanical cash register. The digital economy is spreading through every sector of the economy and applying automation that capitalism configures to eliminate jobs. The working class is not the same as 50 years ago. A new class of workers is developing, who are constantly imperiled by unstable working conditions, as labor is being systematically reduced across the economy. The ruling class understands that this objectively revolutionary force must be put under State control.
It is also true that capitalism is increasingly struggling and foundering with its own internal contradictions. In the 19th Century, slaves and women were private personal property. A master or husband could treat them as he saw fit, even allowing them a modicum of decency. This was all on an individual basis. But the Fascist Offensive can only reverse existing rights by denying them to entire social classes of human beings. It is no coincidence that we are seeing the State intruding into motherhood precisely as the leadership of women around the world is a powerful anti-capitalist force.
The ruling class will never pay for anything they cannot exploit for private profit. Thus we see the systematic elimination or privatization of programs that help people: health care, child care, public education, etc. For these Oligarchs, human life today has little or no value.
Capitalists demonstrated this for the world to see with COVID-19 as both Trump and Biden put the market in charge. These policies created billionaires on top of billionaires, even as the government allowed more than a million people to die unnecessarily. The government and the State coordinated to sacrifice public safety so that private profit could be made.
In the 1850s and up to the Civil War, the slavers (the richest capitalists on the planet at that time!) controlled all 3 branches of government – Congress, the Presidency, and the Supreme Court. The control of these branches by slave-owning capitalists was abolished. And we see today that corporations, the richest Oligarchs on the planet once again control all 3 branches of government.
The question of class political power is at hand. We are certainly seeing how the ruling applies to this every day. But let us all consider how we can apply social coercion to secure the basic needs of every human being and secure as well the health of the planet.
The only solution is for the public to seize control of what private property asserts is theirs by right: the tools and technologies of society, the ideas of humanity, and everything we need to heal humanity and the planet.
As we the people take on the Fascist Offensive, we will counter, expose, and obliterate the ideas of fascism. Revolutionaries recognize that by defeating the fascist offensive, the movement can pass over to the offensive, and overthrow private property, which is the seedbed of fascism.
The people of the United States have twice overthrown the domination of private property. The Revolution of 1776 and beyond overthrew and abolished the property rights of kings. The Civil War overthrew and abolished the property rights of slaveowners to own human beings. The third time is the charm – all property is owned in common for our collective public good. There is no other option for the survival of human society.
Steven Miller & Joyce Mills – 4 July, 2022
……………. References:
1) Hassan Kanu. “U.S. Supreme Court’s ‘Miranda’ Decision Guts 150-Year-Old Civil Rights Law”, June 27, 2022. https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/us-supreme-courts-miranda-decision-further-guts-150-year-old-civil-rights-law-2022-06-27/
2). Marjorie Cohn. “SCOTUS EPA Ruling Signals Court Will Strike Down Rules Limiting Corporate Profit.” July 1, 2022. Truthout
3) Michelle Goodwin. “No, Justice Alito, Reproductive Justice Is in the Constitution”
June 26, 2022. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/26/opinion/justice-alito-reproductive-justice-constitution-abortion.html
4) “I Was Raped by My Father. Abortion Saved My Life”: Prof. Michele Goodwin on SCOTUS & the New Jane Crow. Democracy Now, July 4, 2022
5) Katherine Stewart. “It’s the Christian Right’s Court. They Want More.” June 25, 2022
The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jun/25/roe-v-wade-abortion-christian-right-america
6) Katherine Stewart. “It’s the Christian Right’s Court. They Want More.” June 25, 2022
The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jun/25/roe-v-wade-abortion-christian-right-america
7). “Strategy and Political Power in America: The Role of the South”. Rally, Comrades! November/December 2015. https://rallycomrades.org/2015/11/strategy-and-political-power-in-america-the-role-of-the-south/