Preliminary critique of the work has focused primarily on the erasure of transmisogyny, a particularly glaring omission given the author’s supposed inclusion of “marginalized genders”. This omission, coupled with an essentialist theoretical framework pulled from a radical feminist tradition, lead to the necessity of the piece’s retraction. The Red Clarion seeks to lead the communist movement towards the best path of sexual liberation, which necessitates a dialectical and scientific approach to understanding and combating sexual oppression. The conclusions reached in the article rely on a haphazard array of correlated data that are then assumed to be set phenomena across the breadth of patriarchal societies. The following criticism looks through these major flaws, and opposes the conclusions reached thereafter; as USU struggles towards unified clarity on these vital theoretical positions, we will move towards the publishing of a definitive piece regarding where the movement must take the issues of sexual liberation.

We will first begin with the author’s failure to conduct adequate research on the subject at hand, exemplified by the following passage:

Regardless of if you watch porn, you experience the effects of porn. You are punished by the existence of porn. A study of over four thousand young people in Melbourne found that 59% of men had reported strangling their partner during sex, with 61% of women reporting being strangled, and 78% of trans or gender-diverse individuals experiencing strangulation. Importantly, 61% reported that they had learned about strangulation via pornography.

This passage mistakes shadow for substance. Sex work is not the base economic relationship from which patriarchal violence emerges, but rather the result of patriarchal economic and social relations that reinforce and reproduce patriarchal relations. In other words, sex work does not create the social exploitation of women, nor lie at its foundation. Sex work is the result of divided labor regime. The scientific study cited by the author directs us to this very same conclusion: “Pornography was the most common avenue by which people reported first hearing about choking during sex (34.8%), followed by discussions with friends (11.5%).”¹ In other words, pornography does not create sexual violence, but rather reinforces it; it is not the cause of sexual violence, but rather its result. Failure to recognize this dialectical relationship that makes sex-divided labor the primary aspect puts us off immediately on the wrong track.

Here we must also make plain a glaring error in our comrade’s citation. The author warns that “61% [of young people in Melbourne participating in the study] reported that they had learned about strangulation via pornography.” This statement is false. A vast majority (65.2%) of the study’s subjects learned about choking during sex via means other than pornography. This suggests that even if pornography was banned, this ostensibly violent sexual practice would still exist and propagate through other means of social reproduction. With 61% of subjects exposed to but not learning about sexual strangulation via pornography, the study does demonstrate pornography’s role in reinforcing risky sexual practices amongst the general population through repeated exposure. However, with subjects also being exposed to the practice via “…movies (40.3%), friends (31.9%), social media (31.3%), and discussions with potential partners (29.2%),” we cannot give serious credence to the notion that pornography itself is the (or even one of many) progenitor of sexual violence.² At the very least, the failure of the article’s author to catch such a misrepresentation of the study at hand is demonstrative of a methodological sloppiness that cannot be considered Marxist for its lack of an adequately scientific approach to analyzing these social phenomena. The study actually shows that those who “first learned/heard” about strangulation through pornography constitute a mere 34.8% of respondents. The 61.3% number is representative of those who were “ever exposed to strangulation in pornography.” Failing to distinguish these incident rates is a critical error. Despite this sloppiness, our comrade further digs her heels in:

Studies vary on how much of pornography is degrading, verbally and physically, to women and marginalized genders, but as we see rates of strangulation rising, we can rest assured that it is a significant portion. Moreover, a meta-analysis of studies has found that porn consumption is linked with an increased likelihood to commit an act of sexual aggression, even if the pornography was considered non-aggressive.

This passage demonstrates another significant error in the author’s manner of conducting research. When analyzing any phenomenon, particularly social phenomenon where variables cannot be controlled and holistically observed, the correlation of data does not mean there is a relationship of causality. While the research in question does demonstrate that those who consume pornography more frequently “are more likely to hold attitudes conducive to sexual aggression and engage in actual acts of sexual aggression” than those who consume it less frequently, or not at all,³ it does not prove that pornography is the source of these behaviors. Given that not everyone who consumes pornography is sexually aggressive, we can just as easily assume that pornography lends itself to reinforcing pre-developed behaviors.⁴ Only one of these positions lends itself to a Marxist framework of socio-behavioral analysis.

Pornography, just as any tool of bourgeois social reproduction, functions by providing moral licensing for individuals’ self-interested and exploitative behaviors. To argue otherwise would be to deny personal autonomy, and thus, moral responsibility for one’s actions as an individual. People do not enact sexual violence as a result of consuming pornography, nor even because they are raised in a patriarchal society. Every action one takes in committing sexual violence is of their own volition, even if these social phenomenon may prime them to view such behaviors as permissible. Despite her previous claims in the piece, the author demonstrates a clear lack of satisfaction with treating pornography as a systematic tool that “…emboldens preexisting attitudes towards women, towards sexuality.” For our comrade is not interested in dissecting the material base of sex work.⁵ Even one unfamiliar with feminist analysis can pick up on this from the author’s incessant focus on sexual anatomy; she uses the word “cunt” 14 times throughout the work. The author does not define this term beyond its vernacular usage until its sixth appearance in the piece, and then the definition she provides is the following: “Anyone, not just the prostitute, can be penetrated, anyone can be turned into a cunt, anyone can be dehumanized and alienated from their sexuality and their body.”

Given such an apt definition, we can indeed state that nearly everyone within bourgeois society has been turned into a cunt. Proletarian and lumpenprole alike are alienated from their bodies as they expend their brain and muscles to labor for those with capital to spend. Settler-colonial and imperialist societies alienate the masses from their sexuality by using the violence of the state to coerce them into cis-heterosexual social-reproduction, as seen through the violent criminalization of access to birth control, abortions, hormone replacement therapy, mastectomies, gender reassignment surgery, etc.

Rather than developing a theoretical framework that naturally includes all those who are subjected to the violence and exploitation of patriarchal society, the author vulgarizes patriarchal power into a class struggle of the penetrated vs the penetrators. Everyone, no matter their class or social position, is flattened to the supposed power imbued within their sexual behaviors. Even gay men are not free to be men, for “The receiver, the gay man, is therefore reduced to a cunt as well, an object made for penetration and degradation.” In this absurd calculus, one is either an all powerful cis-heterosexual man (the phallus) or the weak and wretched cis-heterosexual woman (the cunt), a theoretical framework so fragile that even a pebble could shatter it into a million pieces.

If “power” is indeed based on one’s relationship to Penetration, then what are we to make of the men penetrated by women?⁶ When presented without reference to social reproduction theory, this argument simply cannot be reconciled with Marxism. Does this simple act truly turn the system of patriarchy on its head, turning men from exploiters to the exploited? This is no idle question. With the study on strangulation reporting approximately 50% of straight male subjects having been strangled during sex,⁷ and if we accept the notion that this supposed sexual “degradation” is an extension of real material power, we can indeed state that, “The war on women has expanded and mutated once more; it’s recruited our fellow women…” For now men must be on the defensive from this supposed wave of woman-led sexual violence! With 60% of lesbians ever being strangled and 54% ever strangling a partner, and bisexual women respectively reporting 80% and 51%,⁸ Cde. Reed’s struggle against sexual domination would have to extend its front to combat this degeneracy amongst sapphic women. In our comrade’s struggle against supposedly anti-social sexual behaviors we must not forget the worst offenders, transgender people, among whom we witness the highest rates of sexual strangulation, 78% and 74% respectively.

Using the framework presented, one could argue that women who strangle men or women who strangle women are adopting the mechanisms of patriarchy for their own benefit; however, the question then would become “why are men overwhelmingly the oppressors, if acting out sexual violence is in-itself sufficient enough to make one an oppressor?” The article’s theory fails to provide any answer to this question.

Had the author given any thought to the conclusions readers would draw from her prescriptive moral stance on such sexual behaviors, she would have read the publicly accessible scientific paper she cited and come to a vastly different conclusion. From this clear negligence we can conclude that our comrade’s goal was not to provide a proper investigation of these systems, but to find data useful in propping up her positions. The framework provided by this article can only function under the bold assumption that every sexual relationship is either patriarchal heterosexuality, or an imitation of it. The author appears to use the high rate of sexual strangulation amongst transgender people as a means to spark readers’ rage against an imagined wave of cis-men strangling poor defenseless transgender women. This assertion completely disregards transgender people’s actual dynamics and conditions as a population. This essentialist framework gets transgender people killed.

Amidst the ongoing war against transgender people, in which transgender people’s presumed sexual behaviors are used to justify mass waves of social violence and murder, a prescriptive framework adds fuel to the fire by proclaiming non-violent and non-coercive sexual acts as inherently oppressive. When transgender people engage in these sexual behaviors, who is being oppressed?⁹ Transgender people are most likely to be in relationships with other transgender people. With studies on sexual orientation demonstrating that only 19% of transgender women, 2% of non-binary people, and 23% of transgender men are reported to be heterosexual in the United States.¹⁰ If we made use of the framework presented, the movement would have no choice but to condemn a majority of transgender people as irredeemable oppressors. Are we to take such an absurd system, that would make an enemy of a hyperexploited population for acts we have no business meddling in, and take it to practice within our movement? Our comrade may take moral opposition to sexual strangulation, but that in-itself is not a basis upon which a Marxist theoretical framework can be built. Such a framework must be based on an analysis of the material conditions at play, not idealist and puritanical notions on proper sexual relations. 

Sexual behaviors are reflections of social and cultural phenomena, but in isolation they tell us very little about contemporary material conditions. We must constantly go deeper. For example, the social root of something such as a leather fetish is likely a result of the materials’ historical use in military and police uniforms, providing the objects a socially constructed aesthetic of power and authority. So what are we to make of its prevalence in gay and lesbian communities? Due to extreme levels of state repression and violence, the social authority imbued within leather provides an outlet for participants to be humanized through symbolic access to authority and/or resistance to it. The fetish provides an emotional outlet for the constant pressure of social restraint. As a reflection of material conditions, sexual behaviors can act as a tool to reinforce exploitative social relationships. With heterosexual relationships requiring a particularly high level of internal analysis of relationship dynamics, given men being socially conditioned to engage in more aggressive and high-risk sexual behaviors. However, power is not determined in the bedroom. Power is determined by one’s relation to property. 

Historically women have been denied the right to property, actively excluded from economic production so as to be coerced into the labor of social reproduction. With the development of class society, the role of women was largely relegated first as an economic and diplomatic asset in their youth, to later be sold into domestic servitude as a wife and mother. It is only recently that western women have gained the “right” to be workers and not the property of men, a concession made in part to constrain the spread of achievements that resulted from the dauntless and bloody struggles of communist women across the globe and in part as a result of capital’s drive to proletarianize everyone — to dissolve all social relations. Despite patriarchal systems losing ground in this age of collapse for the capitalist system,¹¹ women have not yet been liberated from traditional socially reproductive roles, particularly those of marriage and prostitution. These roles have changed in kind with the economic basis of society. The marriage and legalized prostitution of Ancient Greece are far different in their structure than marriage and prostitution within the capitalist age.  

The piece posits that, within bourgeois society, prostitutes make up “… a class that is designed to be difficult to get out of, as a ruined proletariat, and is slated to be accessible to all men. The state may punish different classes of men more commonly than others, but she is still available to all men.” Further, the author denies these workers their position as laborers, arguing that instead of being members of the proletarian or subproletarian classes they are instead ‘public property,’ — hyper-exploited subjects forced into ‘a form of slavery that is distinctly female.’ If these laborers are truly turned into property or commodities to be bought and consumed, then why haven’t sex dolls and sex toys replaced their existence entirely? It is the same reason humans can never fully be replaced by tools or machines in the production process. What is being valued here is not the mere production of a commodity or the provision of a service, but human labor power. This is why prostitutes sell their labor in the form of timeslots, and clarify the kinds of specialized sexual labor they are willing to perform within specified time-frames. When one buys this form of labor they engage in a form of petit-bourgosie labor exploitation, and like any member of this class the buyer seeks to take as much from the laborer as possible for as low as the wages can go. 

Within the article this claim of prostitute as public property is justified by the argument that sex work cannot be comparable to other forms of labor, as “The prostitute is alienated not just from her profits or her work, but from her body and the most intimate parts of her mind” and that “She is often forced to remain in the prostituted class via coercive forces…” Is the woman working 16 hours sewing with docked wages for every mistake not also alienated from “the most intimate parts of her mind”? What of the railway conductors coerced by contract and federal law to be on call 24/7 while working at minimum 12 hours a day? Is not the denial of sleep and a home life alienating one from their own mental wellbeing? When it comes to coercion, what worker cannot claim the same? Many women in the workplace are sexually assaulted but are forced to either stay quiet or risk homelessness and starvation of both themselves and their families. Other workers are coerced into their labor through the seizure of passports or the pointed guns of the police and hired mercenaries. The bourgeoisie will always seek the maximal level of exploitation. When they buy your labor-power, they buy the contractual right to ruin your body, break your mind, and kill you if it’ll make them even a penny more in profit. The only limit to the bourgeois drive to create profit at the expense of the worker is the level of class struggle. The relative conditions of the working classes are a symptom of class struggle.¹² Whether you are a sex worker, manual laborer, service worker, etc. the capitalist system runs on the rule that you are disposable to the bourgeoisie.

But with its blind drive, its bottomless werewolf-hunger for surplus-labor, capital doesn’t merely push past the moral limits of the working day. It does the same with the physical limits, too. Capital usurps the time that the body needs to grow and develop, and also the time for maintaining the body in a healthy condition. It steals the time it takes to get fresh air and sun. It chips away at mealtimes, incorporating them into the production process wherever it can; as a result, food is added to workers as though they were merely so many means of production, or the same way a boiler is fed coal, machines are fed grease and oil, and so on. Sound sleep destroys and refreshes a person’s vital powers, enabling him to build up his strength, but capital reduces it to only as many hours as it takes to revive a totally exhausted organism […] Only one thing interests capital: the maximum amount of labor-power that can be activated in the workday. It achieves this goal by shortening the lives of labor-power’s bearers, just like a greedy farmer gets the most out of the land by rendering it barren.¹³

[…]

So from society’s standpoint, the members of the working class—including when they aren’t participating in the immediate labor process—belong to capital just as much as the dead instruments of labor do. Even their individual consumption is simply an aspect of capital. It is hard for the worker, that instrument of production endowed with consciousness, to simply run away, since it constantly sends his product from his pole to the opposite pole—i.e., capital’s. Individual consumption is the means through which workers maintain and reproduce themselves, but as it occurs, it constantly destroys their means of subsistence, ensuring that they will keep reappearing in the labor markets. The Roman slave was fettered with chains. Invisible ties bind the wage laborer to his owner: he merely seems to be independent. The constant turnover among the worker’s individual wage masters and the fictio juris of his contract keep this semblance in place. 

In the past, capital enacted compulsory laws whenever it felt that it had to assert its proprietary rights over free workers. Until 1815, for example, it was illegal for England’s machine workers to emigrate, and people committed this crime at their peril, since the penalties it carried were severe.¹⁴

If sex work does not constitute a special super-class, then how do we as communists position ourselves against this particular form of exploitation? To answer this we must first understand the socio-economic nature of prostitution. Alexandra Kollontai, a prominent feminist within the CPSU, provided a clear analysis on the subject: “Prostitution arose with the first states as the inevitable shadow of the official institution of marriage, which was designed to preserve the rights of private property and to guarantee property inheritance through a line of lawful heirs.” Further outlining its emergence within the capitalist age:

The sale of women’s labor, which is closely and inseparably connected with the sale of the female body, steadily increases, leading to a situation where the respected wife of a worker, and not just the abandoned and ‘dishonoured’ girl, joins the ranks of the prostitutes: a mother for the sake of her children, or a young girl like Sonya Marmeladova for the sake of her family. This is the horror and hopelessness that results from the exploitation of labor by capital. When a woman’s wages are insufficient to keep her alive, the sale of favors seems a possible subsidiary occupation. The hypocritical morality of bourgeois society encourages prostitution by the structure of its exploitative economy, while at the same time mercilessly covering with contempt any girl or woman who is forced to take this path.

Prostitution is a form of socially reproductive labor. Just as maids are hired to clean houses, nannies to raise children, and nurses to care for the old, prostitutes are hired to satisfy personal needs without the buyer being obligated to provide for the care of the worker until the grave. Prostitutes are domestic laborers. If they are in a waged relation which is exploited for profit, they are proletarian. If they are not, they are nevertheless subproletarian, as those excluded from social production.¹⁵ The nature of their work, that of socially reproductive labor, does not alter their basic relation of production.

It is here that class divisions make themselves the most evident. A white cis woman is far more likely to gain access to legal, or at least institutionally protected forms, of sexual labor than a Black and/or trans woman. With white supremacy and cis normativity further providing enough class mobility to allow her escape into the membership of the labor aristocratic and petit-bourgeois classes. This was the purpose of western nations’ struggle against so-called “white slavery” in the early 20th century. White slavery was a nationalistic tool used to secure white womanhood from the exploitation of lumpen and proletarian sexual labor. It was never about protecting women from sexual labor, it was rather a “common fixation on protecting the purity of white womanhood, constituting an image of white women’s precarity that was only tangentially connected to the realities of women’s lives.”¹⁶ Reed’s reintroduction of the term is yet another example of her gender reductionist framework, which excludes all other forms of class, national, and disabled oppression. By systematically denying nationally oppressed, transgender, and disabled people from the benefits and wages of the upper classes, the necessity of survival coerces them to flood the market of sexual labor. The resulting reduction of wages and working conditions, alongside a crackdown on legal sexual labor, pushed members of privileged social classes from the streets and into domestic servitude as wives and mothers.

The consumption of sexual labor, particularly in the form of pornography, is so widespread in society that even moral condemnation will do nothing but harm the most marginal of sexual laborers. Laws seeking to limit public access to “sexually explicit materials” have been used to actively suppress access to resources for sexual education, birth control, and transition related medical care.¹⁷

While we could dive further in this historical and materialist analysis of sex work, the breadth of the theory’s deviation from Marxist analysis should now be abundantly clear. Despite her condemnation of liberal feminists for flattening the experiences of sex workers, the author actively chose to disregard the autonomy and humanity of sex workers so that their idealized forms could serve as a prop for her radical feminist analysis. By using the theoretical framework of Andrea Dworkin, a zionist and arguably transmisogynistic theorist,¹⁸ to position men as a cabal seeking the sexual slavery of all women (i.e., people of penetration), the author — in one masterful stroke — both eschews class analysis and creates a false solidarity with sex workers by flattening their varied conditions into one of a universal metaphysical precarity.  Instead of seriously studying the scientific nature of these classes and the material conditions that bring them about so we might properly dedicate ourselves to uprooting these systems of oppression, we are instead given a world that has been wholly abstracted into a totalizing struggle between “men” and women. 

In its conclusion, the piece proclaims that “Our war is not against sex workers but against johns, sex buyers, and consumers of pornography.” This statement serves no theoretical purpose. We can make whatever proclamations we like, but what matters is the rhetoric behind them. The rhetoric of the piece gives ample justifications to the reader for hunting down these progenitors of patriarchal violence while at the same time excusing class collaboration between women (penetrated, the subjects of violence) of all classes:

These commodified individuals are surviving under patriarchy, under capitalism, and under oppressive forces. Until they engage in traitorous behaviors such as, but not limited to; promoting an OnlyFans referral code to 18 year olds to make money off of their content, dressing in children’s clothing, dressing in ways that contribute to the sexual violence minority women and those in the global south face, and/or glamorizing the industry, they are our comrades in the struggle.

This supposed “marxist feminism” tails the utopian organizational strategy of anarchists and radical feminists, wherein the supposed abolition of the state, or relationships with men, will instantly bring about heaven on earth where power and patriarchy are no more. We have only to unite all sex-workers (except those that promote OnlyFans referral codes to 18 year olds, dress in children’s clothing, dress in ways that contribute to sexual violence, and/or glamorize the industry of course) with all women! This super-class of sex-workers-and-women will then… well, what? Rather than building a serious strategy to bring about socialism, these adventurous radicals seek moral salvation by cleansing the world in a purifying flood. As Anuradha Ghandy writes: 

To assert that gender based division of labor is the basis of women’s oppression rather than class still begs the question. If we do not find some social, material reasons for the inequality we are forced into accepting the argument that men have an innate drive for power and domination. Such an argument is self-defeating because it means there is no point in struggling for equality. It can never be realized.

The liberation of prostitutes – and of all those from whom domestic labor is forcibly extracted – comes from the organization of their numbers into a body capable of battling their oppression and all work toward that organization, not from the repeated imprecations to divide the world into sexual abusers and the sexually abused. As Marxists it is our duty to organize, to bring together those who have an interest in fighting for total liberation. The patriarchal state is surely our enemy, as is the concept of masculinity itself insofar as it stands for the theft of labor, but we must be ever wary of the liberalizing drive to universalize victimhood and create a universal victimizer. No matter how strenuously the piece demands the reader to understand that “cunt” is shorthand for being raped, that does not make it so, nor does it make the central division along which society is divided into the raped and the rapists.

1. Sharman, Leah S., Robin Fitzgerald, and Heather Douglas. 2025. “Prevalence of Sexual Strangulation/Choking Among Australian 18–35 Year-Olds.” Archives of Sexual Behavior 54 (2): 465–80. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-024-02937-y.  Pg. 470. ︎
2. Ibidem. ︎
3. Wright, Paul J., Robert S. Tokunaga, and Ashley Kraus. 2016. “A Meta-Analysis of Pornography Consumption and Actual Acts of Sexual Aggression in General Population Studies: Pornography and Sexual Aggression.” Journal of Communication 66 (1): 183–205. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcom.12201.
   Pg. 201. ︎
4. The correlation between the consumption of pornography and sexual violence lies in the dehumanizing of the sexual laborers. Even if the viewer were to construct subjectivity for the participants, one that they must construct themselves, as pornography commodifies the alienated images of these workers as they perform sexual labor. The consumer of pornography is a beneficiary of the patriarchal violence that produces this commodity as it only exists for consumption as a byproduct of systematic patriarchal violence. ︎
5. “For the cultural feminists, heterosexuality is about male domination and female subordination and so it sets the stage for pornography, prostitution, sexual harassment, and woman-battering…. In their understanding of material conditions, they have taken the physical fact of reproduction and women’s biological role as the central point for their analysis and concluded that this is the main reason for women’s oppression…. Reproduction means both the reproduction of the person on a day to day basis and the reproduction of the human species. But in fact, reproduction of the species is something humans share with the animal kingdom. That could not be the basis for women’s oppression. For in all the thousands of years that people lived in the first stages of human existence, women were not subordinated to men.” Ghandy, Anarhuda, Philosophical Trends in the Feminist Movement, 54-5. ︎
6. Obviously, the Marxist analysis is that all real power is founded somewhere in property relations, and that other forms of power are all ultimately mediated property relations. ︎
7. Sharman, et al. Pg. 472 ︎
8. Ibid., Pgs. 472-473. ︎
9. On a case by case basis, it is, of course, possible for transgender people to reproduce patriarchal oppression. Domestic abuse is one form this takes. However, this is far from as simple a proposition as the mechanical oppressor/oppressed relation presented by the article at hand. Indeed, is it not possible that the penetrator in a relationship can be abused? Is it not possible that the penetrating partner can change from one to the other? ︎
10. James, Sandy E., Jody L. Herman, Susan Rankin, Mara Keisling, Lisa Mottet, and Ma’ayan Anafi. 2016. “The Report of the 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey.” National Center for Transgender Equality. https://transequality.org/sites/default/files/docs/usts/USTS-Full-Report-Dec17.pdf. Pg. 59 ︎
11. Marx makes note of this phenomenon in Capital, that the family loses its material foundation in the capitalist age as children become the collective property of bourgeois society and women are a constant reserve army of labor ever ready to replace men in the workplace. It is through latter socialist social revolutions that women’s liberation has since unfolded. ︎
12. This struggle can itself be enervating to class consciousness, as is the case in the imperialist centers where class struggle has produced not revolution, but an entrenched labor aristocracy. ︎
13. Marx, Karl. (1872) 2024. Capital. Edited by Paul North. Translated by Paul Reitter. Princeton University Press, pgs. 235-236. ︎
14. Id. at 528. ︎
15. In a waged relation, a prostitute is paid a wage by an employer, who keeps the amount that is paid for the sex work. In a slave or semi-slave relation, the prostitute is essentially kept in bondage to a pimp or madam, and receives instead whatever goods they need directly from their keeper, rather than a wage. Those thrust into illegal positions are excluded from legal production. We here incorporate slave and semi-slave relations as subproletarian, for in the age of “free” labor, these are all classes that must sell their labor-power. ︎
16. Harris, Leslie J. “Conclusion.” In The Rhetoric of White Slavery and the Making of National Identity, 149–60. Michigan State University Press, 2023. https://doi.org/10.14321/jj.2990357.11. ︎
17. These and related “internet safety” politics have a long history of particularly targeting transgender and queer people, making both digital and physical spaces more dangerous for these communities. This is a result of queerness and transness being ideologically labeled as sexually explicit, or otherwise as a harmful social disease (Brooke and Turner, 2025; Kayyali & Mithani, 2025). Lawmakers in the UK have sought to expand such existing laws to further require websites to keep track of users sex assigned at birth, a tool that will be used to heavily monitor and further suppress the transgender population in the country if it comes to pass (Santi, 2025). 
    Kayyali, Dia, and Jasmine Mithani. 2025. “Age Verification Is Locking Trans People out of the Internet.” Tech Policy Press. December 8, 2025. https://www.techpolicy.press/age-verification-is-locking-trans-people-out-of-the-internet/.
    Santi, Mariano. 2025. “Data Bill: First They Came for Trans People.” Open Rights Group. 2025. https://www.openrightsgroup.org/blog/data-bill-first-they-came-for-trans-people/.
    Tanner, Brooke, and Nicol Turner Lee. 2025. “Children’s Online Safety Laws Are Failing LGBTQ+ Youth.” Brookings. July 9, 2025. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/childrens-online-safety-laws-are-failing-lgbtq-youth/.
    https://www.openrightsgroup.org/blog/data-bill-first-they-came-for-trans-people/  ︎
18. Dworkin actively proclaimed women’s struggle for liberation as resembling the struggle of the Zionists for a state in which they could finally find safety from the hoards seeking their death and sexual violation. (Lewis, 2025). Her early theoretical positions on the subjects of transsexuality and criticism of bioessentialism — despite holding a contradictory stance that “One might argue for a liberalization of sex-based roles, but one cannot justifiably argue for their total redefinition.” (Dworkin, 1974, pg. 175) — has left a wide range of room for an ongoing ideological struggle on whether Dworkin would be supportive of trans liberation today. In Woman Hating Dworkin stated “it would be premature and not very intelligent to accept the psychiatric judgment that transsexuality is caused by faulty socialization. More probably transsexuality is caused by a faulty society.” and “…transsexuality is a disaster for the individual transsexual. Every transsexual, white, black, man, woman, rich, poor, is in a state of primary emergency (see p. 185) as a transsexual.” (Ibid., 186). With her short term solution to this so-called emergency being that “…every transsexual is entitled to a sex-change operation, and it should be provided by the community as one of its functions.” (Ibid., 187), with the end goal being the construction of an androgynous human community that would bring transsexuality to an end by subsuming it into “…new modes of sexual identity and behavior.” (Ibid., 188). Dworkin later gave considerable praise to and actively promoted Transsexual Empire, a violently transphobic work which targeted transition related medical care, and specific transgender women who were subsequently harassed by Janice Raymond’s followers out of public life. While later expressing her distaste of the work’s treatment of transgender people in a personal letter to Raymond (Duberman, 2020, Pg. 161), her lack of public retraction has allowed figures such as Raymond to continually lay claim to Dworkin as an essential figure in the theoretical framework of modern Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminism (Janice, 2021, pp. 41-47). 
    Duberman, Martin B. 2020. Andrea Dworkin : The Feminist as Revolutionary. New York: The New Press.
    Lewis, Sophia. “Are Women Weak Jews? On Andrea Dworkin’s Zionism.” Spectre Journal.  May 27th 2025. https://spectrejournal.com/are-women-weak-jews/
    Raymond, Janice. 2021. Doublethink: A Feminist Challenge to Transgenderism. ︎

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.

[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:

1. Adjudicating inter-bourgeois disputes (contract law, election law);
2. 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);
3. Protection of private property, productive relations, class barriers, and cisheteronormative patriarchal white supremacy (criminal law);
4. Organizing retreats in the class struggle by recognizing changes being forced by the working class (any expansion of proletarian “rights”); and,
5. 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.