As far as bourgeois capitalist politicians go, you could do infinitely worse than Ruth Bader Ginsburg. I’ll start by saying that, in the abstract, no loss of human life is desirable. Clearly. The passing of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, in a bare human sense, is unfortunate; as it is when anyone passes. However, the love affair with RBG’s tenure on the Supreme Court or the canonization of her in the American pantheon of liberal capitalist deities has been dominating airwaves since Friday night. You’d do well to remember, comrade, that any bourgeois capitlist politician is no friend of a socialist’s no matter their relative barbarity.

Barbarism seems harsh but extreme cruelty sums up late-stage capitalism as well as any other word. RBG’s tenure is celebrated for her fights for women’s rights. Most notable is her continued protection of a woman’s right to choose, as that is now the jurisprudence most in jeopardy by a future 6-3 conservative court. There are a myriad of criticisms I wish liberals and left-leaners would engage in at a time like this instead of directing their attention solely at the Republicans. As ever, Democrats need to convince themselves they are pious in the face of the bastion of evil that are the Republicans, just as the same works vice-versa. Democrats have deified the late Ginsburg in an effort to disparage any attempt to criticize her. After all, the Dems believes they are the party of righteousness and as-such their members are also righteous.

But RBG’s career is far from beyond rebuke. When you peel back the layers, you discover another neoliberal bourgeoisie protectionist as you do with any politician in a bourgeois capitalist party. This is not to say RBG has done no good, but the good done has been dramatically overstated and the purview of goodness is again in the White liberal gaze. Let’s take a quick look at RBG’s career on the bench.

It is true, as mentioned previously, that RBG’s career has been a testament to protecting women’s rights. But the reality of the situation is that RBG’s verdicts have often served only to protect White women’s interests at best, and hardly anyone’s at worst. Black and Hispanic women still face a far higher rate of unintended pregnancy, and thus a higher rate of abortion, than White women. Black and Hispanic women still have far less access to abortion services than White women, despite their higher abortion rate. Black and Hispanic women still die at a far higher rate during pregnancy than White women; the majority of these deaths are preventable. Of course RBG is not responsible for these disparities but the reality is that Roe v. Wade had done far more to secure safe and accessible abortions for White women than it has for women of color. A trend throughout RBG’s jurisprudence shows most of her opinions have been on cases in which White women have benefitted disproportionately compared to non-White women.

Of course, I reiterate, these disparities are not in some way Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s fault. However, the sky-falling panic of liberals is clearly the voice of White feminism. The death of RBG hardly changes the given circumstances of many of these women of color already suffering from poor access to safe abortions. While RBG’s passing will not make it easier, and could make it harder, the presumption that the change is monumental relies entirely on the perspective that abortions were already accessible and safe. For a large number of American women this was not the case. Roe v. Wade and the Supreme Court jurisprudence on abortion are laws for White wombs. Legislators and the courts have rarely deigned to take greater efforts to help non-White women. If the liberals that are engulfed in fear over the revocation of Roe v. Wade spent half the same energy fighting for Black and Brown bodies as they have lamenting RBG’s passing, then perhaps there’d be better protections and enshrinements of reproductive rights for ALL women already in place. But only when it is White women’s wombs that are in danger do the liberals cry out.

It can get worse than that, however. RBG hasn’t just been a complicit factor in a system that rendered her without agency. RBG has not just been a harm reductionist. In City of Sherrill v. Oneida Indian Nation of New York, RBG wrote the majority opinion that the Oneida Indian Nation was not entitled to sovereignty over its ancestral lands even after they had repurchased them on the open market. Ginsburg invoked the ‘right of discovery’ or sometimes also referred to as the ‘doctrine of discovery’ to assert that since the lands had been under control by White people for so long, they simply could not be removed. After all, when Whites arrived in that land there were no land deeds or demarcations, there were no permanent bueraeucratic buildings to signify who owned the land. Since there weren’t any White Judeo-Christians occupying the territory it was simply unoccupied. Over the course of 200 years the White Europeans (later White Americans) brought civilization to the land and therefore held both de jure and de facto ownership of the land. The Oneida Indian Nation’s repurchasing of the land on the open market did not entitle them to the actual rights of their sovereign lands, just to their legal usage within the discretion of the City of Sherrill.

Discovery doctrine is a plain continuation of imperalism and White supremacy. Full stop. It is the logic and the voice of the absolute oppressor. It legitimizes, legalizes and necessitates the seizure of native lands by colonizers and renders the native persons the illegal entity. The protection of this doctrine well over 200 years after it was brought to American soil in 1792 is not only a mistake but an abhorrent legal doctrine that continues to enable the colonizers’ power in America. The Doctrine of Discovery was a series of papal bulls from the 15^th Century, not even some type of explicitly legal process in vaguely-modern politics. It’s the enshrinement of a religious decree to rob Black and Brown people of their ancestral lands. A group of god damn nuns wrote to the Pope to disavow it in 2014.

Ginsburg had more disdain for native communities though. In the United States Forest Service et al v. Cowpasture River Preservation Association et al, Ginsburg wrote the majority opinion on a case that allows for the installation of an oil pipeline below the federally protected Appalachian National Scenic Trail. A decision that undoes 100 years of Supreme Court jurisprudence on resource extraction in National Parks. Additionally while the court stayed the construction of the Keystone XL Pipeline (not barring it entirely) pending environmental reviews, it allowed the continued construction of several other pipelines through native lands in Northern Plains Resource Council et al. v. U.S. Army Corps of Engineers et al.

With all of that in mind, it’s all the more troubling that Ruth Bader Ginsburg spoke out strongly against the NFL kneeling protests started by Colin Kaepernick. RBG called the protests “dumb and disrespectful.” While being gracious enough to say they shouldn’t be locked up for the protests, the compared them to “flag burning” (a form of speech frequently protected as important political speech by the Supreme Court Justices before her). Ginsburg summed up her thoughts about the Kaepernick-led protests by saying, “…if they want to be stupid, there’s no law that should be preventive. If they want to be arrogant, there’s no law that prevents them from that. What I would do is strongly take issue with the point of view that they are expressing when they do that.” Ginsburg’s critiques of behavior against oppression stand at odds with her fiery dissent in Shelby County v. Holder but seem right at home in the White supremacy-laden upholding of the discovery doctrine.

I am not without sadness at Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s passing. I am sad not so much for her absence as I am for the replacement Trump will appoint. There is value in mourning RBG’s death for what it may mean for the many rights of the oppressed in America. But, this is not to say that RBG was a deity beyond criticism. That RBG did not also reify oppressive systems and support oppression while on the bench. She absolutely did. As always, no bourgeois capitalist politician is a friend of a socialist. While at times it may seem unfair to criticize her lack of radicalism from the bench, her moderate tempered steps towards progress over thirty years rings of Martin Luther King Jr.’s critique in the Letter from Birmingham Jail. Sometimes it may feel difficult to demand more of a politician in the face of capitalist constraints but that is ultimately reformist radlib thinking. Politicians, of which judges are a form, are there to serve the interests of the people in theory but serve the interests of capital in practice. For all the good RBG may have done, it is important to realize she is no exception.

It is also important to reflect on the oppressive systems that exist. If our democracy and reproductive rights hinge on the death of an unelected, lifetime appointed, 87 year old three-time cancer survivor then what democracy do we really have? What protected rights do we really have? The Supreme Court itself is an oppressive tool as well as the vast majority of the American political apparatus. This is not a time to mope about the loss of ‘one of the good ones’ but a time to mobilize and organize against the oppressive structure that allows the loss of a liberal like RBG to shake the core of our system. It is the time to lay to ruin the structures of oppression that allow RBG to have been the pinnacle of our dreams of equality and to replace them with structures of true equality. I am saddened because of what worse could be on the way, not for the memory of RBG as what best we have to offer.

-perkins gilman