Kamala is a Kapitalist – Just International

By Ellen Isaacs

“She’s a capitalist at heart — she wants businesses to do well,” said Yasmin Nelson, a former senior Harris adviser.¹ This is what we must keep in mind as millions flock to Harris with the false hope of solving our nation’s woes. No matter she is a woman of color, her differences from Trump or Biden, or her long history of opportunism, she does not waiver in her commitment to capitalism and US world supremacy.

Harris may wish to stabilize the middle class, by which she means professional and managerial workers and small business owners, but she does not talk about the working class that depends on wages from capitalists, who may or may not supply them with jobs. She may allude to suffering in Gaza, but she does not forswear Israel or other murderous regimes. She may rely on her immigrant identity, but she says to immigrants “Do not come.’’ She may rely on being a person of color, but she does not have a history of fighting racism. She is a woman and she does support reproductive rights, at least getting back to where we were 51 years ago when Roe v. Wade passed.

Millions of Americans, who are terrified at the specter of fascism were Trump to be re-elected, must realize that fascism is not the whim of a few individual leaders but a stage of capitalism when the ruling class can no longer rule in the old way. If the economy cannot provide enough jobs with living wages or basic needs like housing and health care to most citizens, then unrest occurs. If foreign wars require the young to be drafted or resources deflected to the military, unrest occurs. If police respond to labor actions or workers’ protests with violence and racism, unrest occurs. And if the system cannot respond by mitigating those conditions, that’s when fascism is needed: an increase of exploitation, nationalism, racism, sexism, and repression to divide and suppress us.

To be sure, the US capitalist class has important internal tactical differences. To be overly simplistic, the Republicans, wedded to Trump, represent an isolationist group of primarily US-centered interests who see the need to divide unhappy workers now by introducing overtly racist and sexist ideas. Overall, liberal Democrats wish to maintain international alliances such as NATO, promote the wellbeing of at least some workers, such as the higher paid home-owning middle class, and promote small measures versus climate change.

Kamala has old and deep ties to the liberal branch of the corporate class. Her sister is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the main Wall Street think tank, and she has long been supported by the Clinton and Obama machines. When the going gets rough, all of these politicians will say and do what they must to protect the profits of capitalists, because thats the underlying necessity of capitalism, not a flexible principle that could ever take second place. Voting may allow us to choose between different tactics of capitalist control – if we live in the few “swing” states where one’s vote counts. But voting can only distract us from directly organizing for what workers need, which has nothing to do with capitalists keeping up their profits.

Kamala’s California Ascent

Always able and ambitious, Kamala got her first big career boost by being in a relationship with the powerful black California politician Wille Brown, then speaker of State Assembly and later Mayor of San Francisco. He got her appointed to well-paid state boards and introduced her to wealthy Democratic establishment figures such as Nancy Pelosi, Dianne Feinstein and other backers. They helped her successfully run for San Francisco City Attorney in 2004, State Attorney General in 2011 and the US Senate in 2017.²

Although in her memoir she says “America has a deep and dark history of people using the power of the prosecutor as an instrument of injustice,” she was often exactly the prosecutor she describes. Among her achievements as DA and AG were

· Opposed an anti- death penalty ruling for California from an appeals court, although claiming to be opposed to the death penalty³

· Opposed body cams for cops

· Opposed legislation requiring independent AG investigations of deadly shootings by police

· Supported reporting arrested undocumented juveniles to ICE

· Supported an illegal jail informant program in Orange County⁴

· Refused to reduce Supreme Court ordered overcrowding in California prisons which were at double capacity and expressed fears pf losing prisoners used as fire fighters⁵

· Made it a crime to be the parent of chronically truant children, which disproportionately affected poor non-white parents

· Fought to uphold wrongful convictions secured through misconduct on technicalities like late filing⁴

Domestic Policies

Like Biden, Harris has supported some reforms of economic and social policies and has also shown her willingness to change her positions when it was opportune to do so. She does support an increase in the corporate tax rate, although only to 28% (she once had said 35%), universal pre-kindergarten and affordable child care. However, although in 2017 she supported Medicare for All, by her 2019 presidential run she was for keeping private insurance and supporting privatized Medicare Advantage Plans.⁶ In the primary debates in 2019, she memorably confronted Biden with her own busing as a child to integrate schools. But she later said busing was just one tool that should be decided on a district by district basis.⁴

As a presidential primary candidate in 2020, Harris called for a $1 trillion increase in climate spending over 10 years. However, her actual policies have been much more limited. She created an environmental justice unit as DA, which filed a few lawsuits against small companies and as AG sued Volkswagen and Conoco Phillips for environmental violations. As Senator in 2020 she called for a fracking ban and supported the Green New Deal. However, when tapped by Biden she reversed this position and she still opposes a ban. She came to support Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act. which may help reduce greenhouse gas emissions up to a maximum of 42 percent below 2005 levels by 2030.⁷ None of this comes close, however, to actually stopping or reversing climate change, which an economy dependent on competitive quarterly profits can never do.

Kamala on the World Stage

The Vice President’s big overseas assignment was to do something about the root causes of immigration across the southern border. In the white paper her office published, Root Causes Strategy, she made the extraordinary statement: ”For decades, our nation has engaged in Central America. Often well intentioned…”⁸ She then went on to propose an Anticorruption Task Force for Guatemala which will include U.S. prosecutors and law enforcement experts.

Harris chose to ignore that Guatemala’s long downhill slide began in 1954 when the US overthrew elected President Arbenz in order to protect the fortunes of the United Fruit Company. It has remained a nation with an over 50% poverty rate. In recent times, the importation of subsidized corn, the staple of the diet, has depressed local production and raised prices. The biofuels industry also has made it profitable for local businesses to export corn and for large landowners to lease to large companies rather than rent to subsistence farmers or ranch cattle. But Harris ignores it all and simply says to desperate people considering emigration, “Do not come.”⁹

Although she has uttered a few words of sympathy for Gazan suffering and urged a ceasefire, she is not in any way threatening to decrease support for Israel.¹⁰ In fact, as we have written about on this blog, Israel is of overwhelming importance to the US as its only well-armed reliable Mid-East ally in area still vital for fossil fuel resources and world trade. Many politicians would prefer that Israel mitigate its brutal tactics towards Palestinians so as not to cause worldwide condemnation and threaten carefully crafted alliances between Israel and Arab countries via the Abraham accords. But there is no possibility of an actual split between the US and Israel.

Nor will there be a rift with Ukraine under Harris, with which the US has been closely allied since 2014 when it engineered a pro-Western coup in order to lessen the influence of Russia. Nor will there be any deflection from the current US emphasis on trying to limit the growing power of China, such as the newly announced expanded military presence in Japan.

Lessons to be Learned

It is no surprise that a lot of billionaires are backing Harris, including George Soros, higher ups in Blackstone, former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin who hailed from Goldman Sachs, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, Reid Hoffman of Linkedin, Sheryl Dandberg, and many others.¹¹ Unfortunately, a lot of workers are too. Many are excited just because she’s not Biden or Trump, that she’s attractive and energetic, that she is not a white man. But that is precisely the danger. She represents the interests of finance capital, of US supremacy, and she knows how to appeal to a broad audience. She may even keep a few of the promises she makes to support workers or children or the environment, if they are affordable, but she is willing to discard any platform if it becomes too costly, in dollars or influence.

There is no chance that the US capitalist system, supported by a massive military and hundreds of thousands of police, will ever prioritize the needs of the working class. There is no possibility that the electoral system would ever allow an opponent of capitalism to be elected, let alone have media exposure. There are a few politicians, like Democratic Socialist Bernie Sanders, who wish that capitalism was a little more generous to workers, but they are not anti-capitalism. The tragedy of elections for us is that so much popular energy is devoted to them as opposed to organizing mass struggles by workers, students and soldiers that might win reforms and be used to expose capitalism’s true workings.

Ever since the end of the civil rights struggles, identity politics has been used to quiet anti-racist demands. Black and Latin politicians were promoted for many major positions since the 1960s, and in recent years the mayor of almost every major city has been black. It was extraordinary that Obama became president, but that only ushered in a continuation of the Afghan war, mass deportations, and no action against racist police killings. In fact, for several years mass protests dramatically abated as people waited for government action. We have not had a woman head of state, but around the world women have carried on killing, like the Bangladeshi Prime Minister Hasina, who has killed hundred and jailed thousands of students protesting for jobs.

Kamala Harris poses a great danger to the world’s workers, as great as any other capitalist politician. Let us be wary. Let us keep fighting back. Don’t vote. Organize.

Ellen Isaacs is an MD, an anti-racist and anti-capitalist activist, and co-editor of multiracialunity.org. She can be reached at eisaacs66@gmail.com

For deeper discussions of some of the issues raised here, see these blog articles:

https://multiracialunity.org/2024/04/21/israel-and-the-us-ironclad/

https://multiracialunity.org/2020/09/15/lest-we-forget-the-deadly-democrats/

https://multiracialunity.org/2020/11/02/voting-social-change-or-hoax/

1. https://apnews.com/article/kamala-harris-economy-trump-vance-inflation-biden-f52edb07e4bd4adf01b484744fc7d387

2. https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/09/06/kamala-harris-another-establishment-candidate/

3. https://www.themarshallproject.org/2024/07/27/kamala-harris-prosecutor-california-police-election-crime

4. https://consortiumnews.com/2024/07/22/kamala-harriss-distinguished-career-of-serving-injustice-2/

5. https://prospect.org/justice/how-kamala-harris-fought-to-keep-nonviolent-prisoners-locked-up/

6. https://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2024/07/25/if-you-like-your-health-care-plan-will-kamala-harris-let-you-keep-it/

7. https://www.dcreport.org/2024/07/26/what-would-a-kamala-harris-presidency-mean-for-the-climate/

8. https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Root-Causes-Strategy.pdf