A foul wind is blowing over the English-speaking world. It drifts in from North America, but it can now be sensed by all freedom-loving workers. It is the foul wind of reaction, whipped up by the most backwards and atavistic plutocrats of the United States, and it seeks to undo much of the relative freedom gained by women and queers over the past 50 years. A reactionary bloc, with its roots in the fascistic petit-bourgeoisie and middle capitalists, has spent the last decades growing both in power and in capacity for organisation. Through the years of the Reagan Revolution and the rise of the New Right, through the Tea Party, and into the current epoch - the Epoch of Trump and QAnon. This bloc has slowly captured the Republican Party, the historic party of Industrial and Financial Capital, now declining in much the same way that the American Empire itself is declining. The result of this capture, and the long term strategy to transform the United States of America into a one-party reactionary state dominated by a fascist-theocratic minority, is the current offensive. With the Supreme Court filled out with compliant reactionary jurists, the conservative state governments have begun a general attack on the rights of queer people, especially queer youth, and the rights of women - showing in the process the foul, anti-democratic animus that drives the American so-called Republic. The overturning of Roe vs. Wade, the suppression of trans youth in Texas, and the "Don't Say Gay" bill in Florida are only the tip of this reactionary spear. This attack must be understood as an attack on the entire class - for this attack is nothing short of an attempt to drive working class women and queers back into chains of domestic slavery, illegality, and social marginalisation. It is an attempt to undo the progress made in the last great revolutionary upsurge and in the years since - progress that has established limited freedom and formal equality for women and queers. The foul wind that blows in from the United States is already energizing reactionaries in Australia, in Britain, in Canada, and in other advanced capitalist countries. In the face of the world-historic crisis of capitalism, increasingly atavistic and reactionary sectors of the petit-bourgeois and bourgeois proper are clawing at political power, hoping to secure for themselves control of the state, and remake society in their image. This cannot be allowed to come to pass. The working class must fall in behind a staunch program of women's and queer liberation, and fight in the streets and on the picket lines for the overturning of all reactionary laws. All attempts to arrest and incarcerate proletarian women and queers should be frustrated, through illegal means and force if necessary. In every country now threatened by this tide of reaction, let us take up the positive slogans of the proletarian revolution, against the vicious cruelty of reaction. Only the proletariat, organised as a class and aware of its historical task, can smash the power of the theocrats and the sectors of capital that back them. No alliance is possible with the weak and compromising quisling liberals - they must step aside or prepare to be swept away by the proletarian movement. Only the destruction of the entire edifice of capitalism and its states can free us from conditions that breeds these chauvinists, fascists, and capitalist running-dogs. Proletarian women, proletarian queers, proletarians of the world - let us inscribe upon our barricades the final argument of the revolution: Death to Reaction, Victory to the Class.
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