The rebellion of working class people against the rotten conditions they live and work under is an inevitable outgrowth of capitalism. Low pay, long hours, increasing unemployment, rising food prices, speed-up in factories and rotten housing all are the targets of the increasingly militant working class movements around the world.
Equally inevitable, however, are capitalism’s schemes to divert workers’ anger, to get people to view themselves (rather than the system) as the source of their problems. All sorts of “scientific” theories have been conjured up by “eminent” academics who justify oppression and repression of the working class. Contrary to what the media, the ruling class, and many left groups would have us believe, the programs for population control and free abortion are among these pseudo-scientific theories. They are the “scientific killers” the ruling classes have summoned to do their dirty work for them.
The Canadian Party of Labour as outlined in this pamphlet, says that the movements for abortion and population control, if viewed from a class perspective, show themselves to be nothing more than justification and in some cases the vehicle for genocide.
In 1935 Hitler passed the German Sterilization Law. After one year 56,000 people had been involuntarily sterilized. In 1973, 2 black teenage girls were involuntarily sterilized in Montgomery, Alabama; the Ohio State Legislature passed a law calling for sterilization of all people on state assistance and welfare; 200,000 people, mostly black and working class were sterilized in the U.S. All this under the guise of “helping people who cannot provide for their offspring.” All the racist justifications that were used in Nazi Germany are being dredged up now.
FOR EXAMPLE:
There are intelligence genes, which are found in populations in different proportions, somewhat like the distribution of blood types. The number of intelligence genes seems lower, overall, in the black population than in the white. Arthur Jensen.
Making abortions readily available to people who feel or might feel that they cannot afford families is just one step removed from the genocide described above. Under capitalism, free abortion equals forced abortion. When we are looking out for the interests of our class, the demand for free abortion becomes a reactionary one.
Similarly, the population experts (or the doomsday theorists, by their right name) provide nothing but a cover for racist genocide. Their predictions of famine, disaster etc. are all based on research done by the Ford Foundation, the Club of Rome, the Rockefellers and similar institutes and all assume capitalism’s rotten system of allocation of resources.
Communists have always led the fight against racist attacks like the one now being waged. It was the Red Army that put Hitler and his theories where they belong – six feet under. In the U.S. in 1931 8 black teenagers were arrested and framed on charges of raping 2 white women. Under the leadership of Communists, the famous Scottsboro case became one of the biggest mass anti-racist fights in history.
Marx, Engels, Stalin, Lenin and his wife Krupskaya all fought for real changes in the lives of working women. We have re-printed here some of their writings on population control and abortion because working class women will benefit more from the writings of life-long revolutionaries like N.K. Krupskaya than from listening to all the Trotskyites in the world. While many pseudo-Marxists claim that the 1936 anti-abortion law in the Soviet Union was proof of the “degeneration of socialism,” Krupskaya makes it perfectly clear that the change in law was a reflection of the successes of socialism in doing away with misery and poverty.
The changes in line on population control and abortion in China and the Soviet Union turn out, in fact, to be a real indicator of the development of revisionism.
The modern Trotskyite and revisionist CP’s alliance with the ruling class on the side of abortion – for liberal reasons – end to “butchery” and “right to control our bodies” looks pretty feeble beside the writings of these great proletarian fighters on the subject. These sellouts see abortion as liberation rather than as an evil harmful to health which women are driven to by capitalism.
Their hero Dr. Morgentaler of Montreal, the abortionist, is proof of the way the current movement plays into the hands of the ruling class. While they’re misleading people into his defense committees, he’s got half a million $ in a Swiss and is evading income taxes. He’s not in the business because of his “concern for women”. He also supports population control in “poor countries” and pushes euthanasia.
Communists must oppose abortion and population control as genocide being forced on working class people – blacks and immigrants in particular. The real way to end the oppression of women is to fight for a better world. To build that world the working class needs all its offspring!
We are fighting better than our fathers, and our children will fight still better, and they will win. V. I. Lenin.
Under socialism overpopulation will not be an issue. The solution to the “population problem” is to overthrow capitalism and establish the dictatorship of the working class, for if production is geared to the needs of the people and not to filling a few greedy pockets there will be no population problem.
As Engels says,
There is of course the abstract possibility that the number of people will become so great that the limits will have to be set to their increase. But if at some stage communist society finds itself obliged to regulate the production of human beings, just as it has already to come to regulate the production of things, it will precisely be this society, and this society alone, which can carry this out without difficulty. At any rate, it is for the people in the communist society themselves to decide whether, when and how this is to be done, and what means they wish to employ for the purpose. I do not feel called upon to make proposals or give them advice about it. These people, in any case, will surely not be any less intelligent than we are.