On the Basis of Sex

2018 – Starring Felicity Jones as Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Reviewed by Steven Halpern

The other evening, I viewed the film, On the Basis of Sex about the early career of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The film is about Ginsburg’s life confronting the rampant sexual discrimination at Harvard University and in the world of the legal profession.

The film culminates in a trial of an unmarried man who cared for his disabled mother and was denied a tax deduction for giving that care. Had he been a woman, the tax deduction would have been automatic. The case was important because if sexual discrimination could be proven against a man, then there was a legal basis for proving sexual discrimination against women.

The lawyer who argued against Ginsburg’s client gave evidence showing that there was a long record of legal history showing that women were different from men, and that they have different legal protections. He argued that to ignore those differences would undermine the family.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg gave an eloquent speech where she documented about 100 years of systematic sexual discrimination against women. She successfully appealed to the court to change the interpretation of the law and begin to give women equal rights.

Clearly, women deserve the same rights as men, and many have been inspired by Ginsburg’s story. In fact, advances have been made with respect to women’s rights and these advances benefit the working class in the world.

We might add that the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution is supposed to guarantee, “equal protection under the law.” If that is the case, then why did the courts rule against equal rights for women for over 100 years? Why did the Supreme Court rule in several cases that Jim Crow segregation was legal? The Jim Crow laws effectively denied Black people citizenship rights in this country.

Well, today women and Black people have more rights than they did in the past. However, on average, both women and African Americans receive less in terms of wages than Caucasian men. Black people are disproportionately represented in the prisons and their education is funded significantly less, than in school systems that are predominantly Caucasian. How is all of this “equal protection under the law”?

Frederick Engels and Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

Frederick Engels wrote a pamphlet Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin quoted Engels pamphlet in his The State and Revolution. Both Engels and Lenin argued that the state, as we know it, was invented with the birth of capitalism. There was a reason for this.

In the feudal epoch royal families ruled, and they had absolute power. With capitalism, workers began to demand individual rights. However, Engels and Lenin argued that the interests of capitalists are “antagonistic” to the interests of workers. For this reason, they both argued that the state was invented with capitalism to serve as a “special coercive force.” In other words, the state, or the government, routinely works to repress the interests of workers in order to benefit the capitalists who have control of the political economy.

Understanding this point of view, we can look at the film On the Basis of Sex from a different perspective. Clearly Ruth Bader Ginsburg told the truth when she argued that sexual discrimination was written into the law in the United States for about 100 years. However, she could have also argued that the government has been used as a “special coercive force” against the entire working class. This coercive nature of the government was briefly interrupted with the Civil War when workers, famers, and capitalists formed a united front to remove slave owners from political power in this country.

We can trace the history of the special coercive force of the government with the genocide against Native Americans, chattel slavery, Jim Crow segregation, the exploitation of Chinese, Latino, and immigrant laborers, as well as women and children. Today we see this special coercive force at work by making the United States the nation with the largest number of human beings living in prison.

The family

In Frederick Engels Origin of the Family Private Property and the State, he also argued that the family, as we know it, is a product of the capitalist system. For most of human history people lived in communal tribal societies. In those societies, the idea that sexual relations were the reason for the birth of children was unknown.

For perhaps thousands of years, the people who lived in those tribal societies didn’t believe that fathers were related to their children. The mother’s extended family were the ones who raised children. The primary male caregiver was the uncle.

In the capitalist system, the family and the educational system work to teach children to adapt to a system where a tiny minority gouges out obscene profits. Thinking about this reality, we can see why highly educated judges were completely ignorant of the routine 100-year sexual discrimination Ruth Bader Ginsburg spoke about.

We can also argue that Ginsburg’s words were not the only reason why the courts changed many laws. The labor, civil rights, women’s and anti-war movements all changed the political consciousness in this country.

Today, as we face the current crisis, I believe new mass movements will erupt. The logic of those movements will demand and end to the “special coercive force” of the government. Instead of organizing the world for the benefit of capitalists, a new political movement will make the needs of humanity the top priority.