why did the ruling class do this? i have vague ideas but not sure what is the actually correct analysis

  1. jesus

republican people with power actually believe the crap they say and/or know their voters do, so they genuinely just dont want abortions to happen because jesus

  1. class warfare

millennials arent having enough babies to support the labour pool + people with children make for better cogs, since they are less likely to stir shit and cause problems for their employers/landlords as they will feel they have more to risk

  1. fascist state

hearing stories from people reporting on their neighbours in texas, its about creating a fascist panopticon with people increasingly policing themselves and everyone they interact with across the country, with more things to police about each other to be added in the future

is it one of these, or a mix, or something else, or is it pointless to even search for the "correct" analysis here?

  • CheGueBeara [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    The ruling class doesn't need to explicitly scheme decades-long stratagems of that nature. They sometimes try to, but they are also, themselves, influenced by material forces and the societal monsters they have created. The ruling class is full of chucklefucks and cynical strategists and true believers committed to the cause.

    A good way to understand their influence is as creating conditions in which certain things are probable, certain things possible, certain things improbable, and the rest impossible. They make some things a sure bet through bribery, but for the most part their true power is in, for example, making it literally impossible for a city to properly shut down to deal with COVID, as their budgets are dependent on businesses being open and therefore for us all to breathe into each others' mouths. They created those conditions by financializing the fuck out of the country and preventing any coherent capital investment strategies to deal with a months-to-years long crisis, as that money instead goes to their neoliberalized shit.

    Others have good examples of cultural and material interest cases, where the American ruling class is embedded in patriarchal and racist interests. This is true, and the ruling class is full of racist people, but they don't even need to personally be so, nor do they need to cynically plan out a racist strategy on purpose: they just need to create the conditions in which racist and patriarchical policies can survive, where they can be promote to serve their own interests, even though it creates monsters and violence and death.

    To give an individualized example, the factory owner telling white people that "Mexicans" are taking their jobs is surely racist, but the reason they are doing that is because the white people are pissed at getting fired and laid off by the company, and the company needs a scapegoat. Racism just provides a useful context in which that scapegoating can succeed. Without it, they would need to find another or succumb to the workers' demands, and the ruling class is constantly fighting battles to avoid doing so, as it means cutting into their profits and control. The ruling class doesn't have to get together in a meeting every month to discuss how their 27-layer scapegoating strategy is working, they just pay people to make these "problems" go away based on their bottom lines and understanding of the world.

    Ending Roe isn't coherently in the interest of the ruling class, but it's allowable by it under the conditions they have created.