The second distinguishing characteristic [of the state] is the institution of a public force which is no longer immediately identical with the people’s own organization of themselves as an armed power. This special public force is needed because a self-acting armed organization of the people has become impossible since their cleavage into classes… This public force exists in every state; it consists not merely of armed men, but also of material appendages, prisons and coercive institutions of all kinds, of which [pre-state] society knew nothing. It may be very insignificant, practically negligible, in societies with still undeveloped class antagonisms… [but] it becomes stronger in proportion as the class antagonisms within the state become sharper and as adjoining states grow larger and more populous.
—Friedrich Engels, Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State, 1884.
[We] have often seen the capitalist class invoke the aid of the Supreme Court in order to save it some petty annoyance by declaring unconstitutional some so-called labor or other legislation. Now I can conceive of no reason why this same Supreme Court cannot be invoked to declare unconstitutional any or all electoral victories of the socialist party. Some may consider this farfetched. I do not consider it nearly as far-fetched as the decision which applied the antitrust laws solely to trade unions, or used the Inter-State Commerce Acts to prevent strikes upon railways.
—James Connolly, Irish Marxist and founding member of the IWW, Ballots, Bullets, or –?, 1909.
The Supreme Court of the United States grants nine rich, unelected, effectively unrecallable, Ivy-League-educated lawyers ultimate judicial power over the entire country, as well as the power to nullify laws it deems unconstitutional. Liberals uphold the Court, one of the most anti-democratic state institutions in the U.S., as the crown jewel of “American democracy” and the “rule of law.” Yet, for all their proclamations, this elitist, anti-democratic institution primarily exists to work out disputes among members of the ruling classes, not to uphold “liberty and justice.”
In a nutshell, the Supreme Court, and the legal system it sits atop, works like this: The justices who sit on the Supreme Court, like all judges in the federal courts, are nominated by the president and approved by the Senate. The U.S. federal court system has jurisdiction over federal law, crimes and civil offenses that cross state lines, and, critically, the authority to interpret the U.S. Constitution. If an issue of constitutional magnitude arises in a state court, that issue can be argued in a federal district court. The parties involved can petition a decision of the district court, further elevating it to a federal circuit court. Lastly, circuit court decisions can be petitioned to the Supreme Court, whose decisions are theoretically final.
Liberals almost always frame these issues as disputes between differing political and legal “philosophies” on issues of human and civil rights — for instance, the right to healthcare, the right to be housed, the right to well-paying and safe employment, the right to own and carry a gun, the right to freedom of religion, the right to equal treatment before the law, and so on. Public discourse focuses almost exclusively on these rights, treating them as though they were real, tangible things that can be given and taken away, and that can take up three-dimensional space. (Think of the common refrain, “Your rights end where mine begin.”) In this discourse, the Supreme Court is upheld as an almost sacred institution, vested with a divine inspiration that empowers it to resolve questions about the very nature of justice; to decide, with a sort of historical finality, which rights are the most important, and which rights trump other rights; and to guide us toward the “ideal” social order, as laid out in the U.S. Constitution.
This is a fantasy version of the Supreme Court — the version taught in elementary schools to indoctrinate our children into the cult of the “American dream.” Regardless of whether the ruling-class propagandists who peddle this fantasy in the capitalist media and academia actually believe it, the fact remains that what they’re selling is a fantasy. The Supreme Court is not a forum for debate between competing legal “philosophies” (say, “conservative” versus “liberal”) of “rights,” “justice,” and the ideal social order, but rather a hall of compromises. The true purpose of the Supreme Court is the same as the purpose of all the machinery of the State generally: to maintain and reinforce the existing class dictatorship. To this end, the Court serves to mediate and resolve “normal” legal disputes that arise among members of the ruling class — in our time, the monopoly capitalists; in earlier centuries, the Northern merchants and new bourgeoisie and the Southern planter-aristocracy — in order to maintain a cordial “peace” among the rulers and to thereby avert potential crises. Furthermore, the Court serves to mediate and suppress the continuous struggle between the ruling class and the working and dispossessed classes. By handing down occasional “just” decisions, and by occasionally upholding basic human and civil rights, the Court effectuates legal compromises made to placate the masses, who would otherwise rise up in rage against all the daily injustices we face. In this way, the Court pacifies the class struggle, in order to protect the rule of the capitalists and the privileges of the other propertied classes (for example, small business owners and landlords) from the oppressed masses. On the other hand, when the struggle of the oppressed masses stagnates, withers, and fades, and the existing class dictatorship is no longer threatened, the Court is always ready to rescind every protection it previously granted, to “take away” even the most basic civil rights, and to reassert every legal privilege enjoyed by the capitalists. In sum, from time to time, the Supreme Court may “force” the ruling classes to make concessions to the poor and oppressed masses — but only when it has no other choice. On the other hand, as soon as the ruling classes get the opportunity, as soon as the masses no longer pose an immediate threat to the established order, the Court is there to snatch away every concession, and to enforce the absolute rule of our capitalist oppressors.
Historical Origins of the Court
The Supreme Court originated in the conflicting class interests that arose in the early U.S. settler-republic’s politics. The federal government was, by design, relatively weak when it was first created. The federal court system was likewise comically weak when it came to imposing rules on the newly created “states.” The planter-aristocrats, the ruling class in the U.S. South, whose entire lives and livelihoods were based on the regime of chattel slavery, and who therefore relied on a captive human workforce, favored recourse to their own state and local courts — courts staffed and bought by, and beholden to, the interests of the planter-aristocrat dictatorship.
The newly forming Northern U.S. bourgeoisie had a fundamental interest in destroying the slave system and its mode of production. From the bourgeois perspective, slavery impeded the development of capitalism, the nascent mode of production. Wage-labor, the productive mode growing in the North, was far more productive. On average, wage labor was more skilled and much less deadly to the laborer. (Life expectancy for slaves, upon landing in the U.S., was, variously, only around seven years.) However, merchant and bourgeois capital had other reasons to push for a strong central court system: standardization of contracts and law, the evening-out of unequal legal regimes, so that shipping companies could anticipate the outcome of suits and so forth in all the regions they had to travel, and the establishment of rules concerning investment and exchange, among other things, were all powerful incentives.
As the drive to abolish the slave trade and the slave-plantation system gained traction, both internationally and in the early U.S., the Southern planters were increasingly driven into class conflict with the liberal-democratic merchants, lawyers, small artisans, and bankers of the “free state” North, where capitalism was beginning to develop, and where slavery was, slowly but surely, one reform at a time, nearing abolition. The planters were correct to anticipate their own demise. John Marshall, the first chief justice of the Supreme Court, was a wealthy Virginia lawyer whose interests were represented by the Federalists, the party of the Northern merchants and developing bourgeoisie. In the landmark 1803 decision, Marbury v. Madison, Marshall transformed the relatively weak Supreme Court into the ultimate instrument of class rule. The Marshall Court determined, in that decision, that the Supreme Court had the authority to rule on the constitutionality of every single action of every branch of the United States government. By this measure, the Supreme Court transformed itself from a relatively ordinary court of appeals, tasked with handling mundane matters like contract disputes, into a body of ultimate judicial power, which could unilaterally strike down laws, overturn elections, and unseat sitting Presidents.
Class Characteristics of the Justices
The U.S. Supreme Court is a panel of “justices” who serve for as long as they wish, accountable only to articles of impeachment in the United States Congress. Historically, these justices have been drawn exclusively from a small, insular social elite: they’ve all been graduates of top-ranking law schools, they’ve all held partnerships in top-earning law firms, and they are almost always elevated to the Supreme Court from existing positions in the federal court systems. Justices are appointed by the President, the nominal head of one of the two bourgeois political parties that are permitted to run candidates in the U.S. Empire; this is the only sense in which the Court could be called “democratic.” Finally, the justices are confirmed by the Senate, the upper house of Congress that has historically represented the interests of the most powerful capitalists (and, prior to that, planter-aristocrats) in each U.S. state.
All current justices sitting on the Supreme Court are, of course, lawyers, and all past justices have been lawyers. It behooves us, then, to look at the class forces at play in the practice of the law.
In 2019, the average cost of law school was just under $50,000 per year, and a juris doctor (professional law degree) course takes, at minimum, three years to complete. But, of course, Supreme Court justices don’t come from just any law schools. Since 1900, sixteen (16) justices have graduated from Harvard, eight (8) from Yale, and five (5) from Columbia University. That alone accounts for 51% of all justices who have been sworn in since 1900. The current court graduated from Yale (Alito, Kavanaugh, Sotomayor, and Thomas), Harvard (Jackson, Gorsuch, Kagan, and Roberts), and Notre Dame (Barrett).
Harvard Law School costs $70,430 per year — nearly six times the total income of someone at the federal poverty line. Columbia Law, meanwhile, costs $75,572 for each year. This puts the price tag on an Ivy League law degree at $211,290 for Harvard and $226,716 for Colombia. Furthermore, as a professional degree, JD programs require students to have earned a bachelor’s degree, which means that those who graduate from Harvard and Columbia must be able to afford to be removed from the workforce for 4 years and to pay for undergraduate before spending over two-hundred thousand dollars and three more years on law school. These costs increase every year, and the gap between “public” law schools and the “Ivy League” continues to widen. Even after law students graduate, most take additional time to prepare for the bar examination, which certifies them to practice law in a given jurisdiction.
Many of these schools also reserve so-called “legacy” seats. “Legacies” are students, typically at an elite university, whose parents also attended the school, and often stand out among its graduates as wealthy private donors. The Wall Street Journal calculated that “[sons] and daughters of graduates make up 10% to 15% of students at most Ivy League schools,” and it is common knowledge that even the most elite universities frequently overlook subpar grades and standardized test scores if an applicant can fill a “legacy” seat.
In sum, the vast majority of people in the U.S. could never hope to afford law school, let alone a degree from an elite university. This means that all justices on the Supreme Court, as well as most judges and attorneys active within the U.S. judicial system, are inevitably drawn from wealthy backgrounds — i.e., from the property-owning and ruling classes.
But we have only discussed the class background of law students and graduates. What about practicing attorneys?
Most lawyers are petit-bourgeois — that is, they both work upon and substantially own their instruments and conditions of production: the licensing, schooling requirements, examinations, and bar admissions. These are a holdover from the old medieval guild system, and they ensure that every lawyer who has been licensed to practice law has the capacity to immediately raise capital in the form of a loan, and to strike out on their own and open a law firm. When working in a firm, a lawyer expects that their own work will be rewarded with equity in the firm (“partnership”) and that they will then be given a share in the profits generated by all the other lawyers. Those lawyers who do become partners are transformed fully into members of the bourgeois capitalist class: owners of the licenses, premises, computers, social connections, and so forth which make up the means of production of legal services.
It should be no surprise that those lawyers who make it all the way through the many, increasingly restrictive tests and requirements, have come up with the money to go to college, to law school, used their personal relationships and worked as a clerk for a judge, become a judge themselves and received judicial salary for working as an agent of the bourgeois state, and at last been selected by a sitting president and cleared through the confirmation proceedings in the Senate, those who become Supreme Court justices have become fully and completely permeated with petit-bourgeois and bourgeois ideology; they have become themselves legal agents of a class or fractional class-interest. They serve, in other words, a class function.
The Legal Function of the Court
Usually, only cases which contain nominally unresolved legal questions are heard by the Supreme Court. In order to appeal the decisions of a lower court, that court must grant certiorari (certification) for the case to advance. Aggrieved parties may appeal to the next higher court if “cert” is not granted at the lower level, or if the court of appeals rules against them. However, the Supreme Court chooses not to take most of the cases which are presented to it. The Supreme Court Justices purposefully accept cert only on cases where there is confusion in lower courts (because Circuit Courts responsible for different parts of the U.S. have ruled differently on the same issue) or where they believe they can make a landmark change that will affect the entire U.S. socio-political system.
The current Supreme Court is dominated by a right-fascist supermajority — a situation that will most likely last for decades to come. In effect, this means that this supermajority has the power to reinterpret virtually every area of U.S. law. It has already taken full advantage of its position: throughout the U.S. court system, from the state to the federal level, the right-fascist camp in American politics is purposefully initiating challenges to long-held legal precedents, including past Supreme Court decisions, that uphold basic civil rights, with the intention of having the current Court eliminate these protections.
For instance, although the Supreme Court’s 1973 ruling in Roe v. Wade established that state laws criminalizing abortion prior to the end of the first trimester (in that instance, a Texas law) are unconstitutional, in September of 2021, the state of Texas enacted a new statute penalizing abortion after six weeks of pregnancy. The Texas legislature enacted this law knowing it would be challenged. This year, the super-right Supreme Court overturned Roe altogether in a decision that lays the legal groundwork for attacking the “rights” to contraception, legal gay sex, “inter-racial” marriage, and gay marriage (Griswold v. Connecticut, Lawrence v. Texas, Loving v. Virginia, and Obergefell v. Hodges, respectively).
Thus, under the current super-right composition of the court, many cases that would otherwise have been decided according to the more mainstream liberal consensus that has prevailed in the country since the 1930s will now never be heard. Other challenges to prior, more liberal, Supreme Court rulings are being set up to provide the super-majority with the cases it requires in order to overrule prior decisions of the court, and therefore revoke many of the so-called “rights” that had been recognized by the Supreme Court in the 60s and 70s in response to intensifications of the class struggle in the middle of the last century.
When the Supreme Court makes a decision it becomes the binding law of the land. Federal courts must follow the rulings of the Supreme Court. However, there is considerable leeway in the way in which federal courts interpret Supreme Court rulings and the pay of many a lawyer hinges on parsing and splitting precise language, determining what is a “holding,” that is binding and therefore controlling, and what is mere “dicta,” essentially extra words that don’t have any legal force. This is of particular moment when the Supreme Court interprets the U.S. constitution, since that document is considered to guarantee the bedrock minimum rights and how they must be applied.
The nine justices of the Supreme Court decide cases by reaching a common consensus about the outcome. They gather together and talk about what they agree on and what they disagree on. They consult one another and construct a set of minimum points of agreement. These are drafted into what is called a majority opinion. Those justices who agree with the majority may also write concurrences, which expand upon the majority points in ways that were not agreed-upon by all the justices. The justices who disagree may write dissents.
This means that the position which garners the most “votes” among the justices is the one which prevails. The super-majority of right fascists currently on the court guarantees that they will collectively decide the outcome of any and all cases that come before it. In the past, this has meant that justices have sometimes sat on the court for many years before becoming active as their power-bloc changes with the death or retirement of the elder justices.
It is worth noting the ages of the currently serving justices and their political affiliations:
- Clarence Thomas, 73 – generally ultra-right;
- Samuel Alito, 72 – rightist;
- John Roberts, 67 – rightist;
- Sonia Sotomayor, 67 – progressive left;
- Elena Kagan, 61 – progressive left;
- Brett Kavanaugh, 57 – ultra-rightist;
- Neil Gorsuch, 54 – ultra-rightist;
- Ketanji Jackson, 51 – progressive left;
- Amy Barrett, 50 – ultra-rightist.
The eldest justices are two rightists (Alito, Roberts), an ultra-rightist (Thomas), and two “progressives” (Sotomayor, Kagan). The outgoing center-leftist Stephen Breyer retired at the age of 83 and the average age that a justice leaves the court is 81. The current court makeup has presumably at least a decade before the next judges retire (Thomas and Alito, 73 and 72 respectively). At 6 rightists to 3 progressives, even the departure of Thomas and Alito, given that they’re replaced by progressives or even moderates (not a guarantee in any world), would not significantly rebalance the court, for it would leave the count at 4-5. Such court compositions generally grant the most power to the justices with the most moderate, centrist views, as they become a decisive “swing vote.” The most “centrist” of the current court are, by a long shot, John Roberts and Neil Gorsuch — they represent the leftmost flank of the ultra-right bloc.
The Class Function of the Court
Now, to the question: what is the class function of the court? How does it manifest? What are its specific features? The capitalist media and education system is not equipped to answer these questions; capitalist education lacks the basic analytical tools and framework to make sense of how the court behaves, and instead, as we mentioned above, frames every issue as a “battle” between various rights. The closest that bourgeois-capitalist scholars have come to an actual understanding of how and why the court system functions is the often-derided school of legal analysis known as “legal realism” which refuses to take at face value the long documents issued by the justices called “decisions” and instead seeks to understand why the decision was made, ignoring the high-flown legal language about precedent, Anglo-American common law, and so on. Still, even legal realism often grounds itself in individual psychoanalysis of the judge, or at most in the ideological issues of a movement.
As we have seen, the Supreme Court is a class-captured instrument. It should come as no surprise to Marxists that it is also a tool of class rule. It fulfills several functions:
- Adjudicating inter-bourgeois disputes (contract law, election law);
- Presenting a shield of legitimacy to disputes between the bourgeoisie and other classes (contract law, tort law) or bringing the most excessive and open abuses of the bourgeoisie to heel (contract law, tort law, criminal law);
- Protection of private property, productive relations, class barriers, and cisheteronormative patriarchal white supremacy (criminal law);
- Organizing retreats in the class struggle by recognizing changes being forced by the working class (any expansion of proletarian “rights”); and,
- Pressing home victories in the class struggle by rolling back rights, attacking the organizational capacity of the working classes, and permitting intensification of exploitation.
Because the court has been captured by right-fascist interests, its most visible decisions of late fall under the fifth and first criteria, that is, the intensification of fascism and capitalist exploitation. The current Supreme Court is attacking the left-fascist faction of the bourgeoisie by degrading the powers and authority of the federal government and elevating state governments which are easier to capture and less subject to the stabilizing influence of the entire U.S. bourgeoisie, and at the same time by attacking one of the perceived power-bases of the left-fascist alliance: the U.S. working classes.
At the same time, the court attacks the working classes, particularly the racialized nationally oppressed groups, and permits the monopolist bourgeoisie to intensify their exploitation of U.S. workers. This is an aggressive strategy in the new COVID-wracked world where unionization drives and the social murder of one million U.S. workers and counting have given labor a new power. The court is attempting to counteract this power even as U.S. prominence abroad slips, its neocolonies suffer invasions, its allies begin to reconsider their priorities, and the market wobbles on the verge of a worldwide depression.
I. Inter-Bourgeois Disputes
The court system, like the bourgeois state itself, serves a dual purpose. The first and most basic is suppression of the working classes by the ruling class. The second, however, is to sort out its own affairs without disturbing its security over the other classes. Should fighting between individuals or factions within the capitalist class get out of hand, become too violent, vigorous, or open, it is possible for the state apparatus to break down or for the laboring classes to take advantage of the opening to overthrow their rulers.
When the rich fight among themselves, they normally rely on the courts. After all, the courts were originally fashioned to settle their disputes over property rights, contracts, and so on. In the European middle ages, petty feudal lords sometimes waged small-scale wars against each other, but this only served to weaken either lord and, critically, to sow discontent among their serfs, free subjects, and vassals; a much better option for the petty lords was to appeal to regional Church authorities to settle their disputes on amicable terms, above the heads of the laboring classes. In our modern capitalist society, where such petty warfare is impractical, the bourgeoisie has various other extralegal means of settling disputes among themselves: committing industrial espionage, employing the mob to intimidate or murder their opponents, bribing police officials, etc., but all of these things tend to destabilize the established order, to invoke public outrage, and consequently to loosen bourgeois control over the workers. Thus, the legal system — the courts, as well as the bought-and-paid-for legislature — is, from the bourgeois perspective, the preferable way to handle “normal” day-to-day disputes between competing capitalists on more or less amicable terms.
Importantly, the courts are also tasked with overseeing the manner in which elections are run. Politicians in the U.S. serve the interests of the bourgeoisie and the other propertied classes (small business owners, landlords, etc.): Local and municipal politicians serve local interests, state politicians serve regional interests, and federal politicians serve the interests of the monopoly capitalists, who rule the entire U.S. Empire. But among the dominant classes in a given locality or region, differing interests exist, leading to conflicts. Maintaining a balance in local and state governments between the sometimes competing interests of the various dominant classes is yet another way the courts serve as mediators in the existing class dictatorship. At the federal level, in its current iteration, the right-fascist Supreme Court and right-fascist federal courts have gradually shifted the balance of power in favor of the right-fascist bourgeois party, the Republican Party, through legal maneuvering. For example, in the Black-plurality region of the south commonly called the Black Belt, the courts have helped entrenched GOP dominance by repealing the Voting Rights Act and approving gerrymandered districts designed to severely curb the Black vote. This exceptionally fertile area is where the highest concentration of slave plantations were located in the United States, and remains to this day as the region where the Black population of the U.S. remains most concentrated.
II. Legitimizing Class Rule
The courts also legitimize the class rule of the bourgeoisie. First and foremost, by acting as an “independent” agent that pretends to be above the petty concerns of financiers and tycoons, the courts can give the appearance that it is not, in fact, the ruling capitalist class that is waging a war on the poor, on the Black, Indigenous, Chicanx, Puerto Rican, and other nations; it is not the capitalists who are doing the oppressing but the “legal system.” Capitalist-aligned legal reformers can then get on the rostrum and give heartfelt speeches about “criminal justice reform” to further confuse the issue.
When exploitation is too intolerably naked, or when extreme injustices arise, the court system gives an avenue for those from other classes to attempt to vent their anger. Tort cases can be brought against the businessman in his Mercedes who drunkenly damages property; in theory, it is possible to bring a lawsuit against an employer who commits wage theft. Although it is more often than not the case that the party with the larger pocketbook wins the court case, the court system permits the capitalists to pretend that a general sense of “justice” prevails in the U.S.
Open and flagrant violations of the social compact and the law are punished by offering up sacrificial members of the ruling class — take, for example, Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, who procured children for abuse by the members of the ruling class. None of their clients have been indicted, and it is likely none will. They have become sacrifices for the sins of the ruling class.
To a certain extent, the courts also appear as a kind of public service to the other classes, allowing petit-bourgeois businesspeople, craftspeople, smallholders, and even laborers, to bring suits against one another before what purports to be a neutral arbiter.
III. Protecting Property and Property Relations
The primary purpose of the criminal law system is to protect the social, economic, and property relations of the ruling class. It works in conjunction with the police to act as the enforcement arm of the state. Property crimes account for roughly 7/8ths of all prosecutions in the United States in 2019 according to the F.B.I.’s own statistics — 6,925,776 property crime offenses against 1,203,808 violent offenses. This number is even higher when one takes into account that some of these “violent offenses” also constitute the policing of property — for example, charges that arise when someone is physically stopped by loss prevention, or for attempting to prevent police from slamming their head into the curb. Some of these violent crimes result from the enforcing of social relations, and so on.
Without the power of the police and the court to prevent the working class from rising up and taking what they need to live, without the threat of hoses, rubber bullets, police tanks, live ammunition, police terror, and the accompanying complex of courts and prisons that then levy punishment, incarceration, and judicial slavery, the mansions of the rich would soon be torn down and their wealth given to those they kept it from.
For instance, the Supreme Court, in its 1896 decision Plessy v. Ferguson defended the “right” of states (Louisiana in Plessy) to establish laws that required “equal, but separate” racial segregation to protect the property interest and social relation of whiteness.
IV. Making Strategic Retreats and Class Concessions
Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court case which ruled that racial segregation in public school was unconstitutional, was decided in 1954. In 1950, Justice William O. Douglas traveled to India and the first question he was asked was “Why does America tolerate the lynching of Negros?” In 1952, the Regional Council of Negro Leadership (“RCNL”) led a successful boycott of gas stations in Mississippi that refused to provide bathrooms for Black persons. The RCNL then led campaigns against the state highway patrol and a segregated Nashville bank. By 1953, Soviet media began a full-on assault against this racism and colorism — it has come down to us as the alleged (but not actual) tu quoque fallacy “and you are lynching Negroes.”
When the imperialists are flush with plunder, when the imperialist wars were at their height, when the organized power of the U.S. working class threatens either through its own internal strength or the borrowed strength of lands where the revolution triumphed, then U.S. Supreme Court is prepared to give up concessions, sometimes quite large; to allay the intensity of class struggle, it extends crumbs to the working classes, oppressed genders, and the nationally oppressed. These were the conditions when the Supreme Court granted the “rights” to interracial marriage, to contraception and birth control, to abortion, to gender equality, to equal treatment before the law.
Those conditions will likely never return. Now, the U.S. empire is contracting. The rate of profit continues to fall. The only way such concessions will be won again is in the teeth of organized, working class power — the kind that threatens the homes of senators and the existence of the U.S. state itself.
V. Engaging in Class Warfare
And what does the court do when the rate of profit is falling, when the organized, class-conscious members of the ruling class need to intensify exploitation? We have witnessed it. The Supreme Court acts as both the sword and shield of capital. Now, as the U.S. monopolists falter on the world stage and at home, besieged by the contradictions which cannot be suppressed, the most reactionary element rises to the fore and demands outright domination and rule. So, the court strips away all protections, little by little, and subjects the working classes to the unmasked brutality of the U.S. terror-dictatorship; the same brutality that has been, for nearly two centuries, visited on other nations now returns home, a thin and wretched vulture, to pick at the domestic carcass.
The U.S. Supreme Court is not the last, best, hope of the left-leaning bourgeoisie or their dying class-collaborationist alliance. It is a lance that has been tempered and fire-hardened by fascists to drive into the heart of the working class.
