On Abortion Article

(Letter)

Mexico City

18 March 2006

Dear Spartacists:

It is with delight that I have read the article on “Free Abortion on Demand!” in the 17th of March issue of Workers Vanguard [No. 866]. I wanted to write this short letter to congratulate you on a clear and concise presentation of the sexist and reactionary onslaught on women’s rights. What started as a strong critique of the Capitalist State’s continued attack on individual rights hard won through social struggles became a sharp presentation of the role of the family under capitalism and ended with the unambiguous argument favouring the need to forge a workers’ vanguard party to fight for Socialist Revolution.

As Lenin stated in What is to be done? the role of the Revolutionary Party is to elevate spontaneous social struggle against absolutism to political grounds and this article does just that. I found the entire exposé had been well researched, presenting data from various sources which clearly revealed the parallel directions of the policies of both bourgeois parties, fighting hard against the illusions which other ostensibly revolutionary parties or leftist organizations try to instill on the Democrats. One critique I have had of revolutionary propaganda is that it sometimes lacks clarity in the arguments especially when it comes to explaining the theory behind Socialism, a critique which Lenin also presents in What is to be done? However, your article in Workers Vanguard profited from the State’s attack on abortion rights to present in a succinct and crystal clear manner the basic thesis in Engels’ book The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.

I look forward to reading more from Workers Vanguard and take advantage of this short letter to urge you to write an article linking quasi-fascist and hypocritically contradictory US international politics, with its attack against Evolutionary theory, against abortion, the rights of homosexuals, the enforcement of age of consent laws, the influence of reactionary religious beliefs, the relentless degradation of the environment in the defense of the capitalists’ profit margins, etc., as a way of showing how numerous and diverse a Capitalist State’s attacks can be and how these end up having devastating effects on all levels of society.

Sincerely,
A.V.