With all the charm of a viper, Donald Trump hissed during his September 10 debate with Kamala Harris, “Everybody knows she’s a Marxist.”
Everybody, perhaps, with the exception of the 200 Republicans whose endorsements Harris flaunted at the debate—including war criminal Dick Cheney, who could serve as a stand-in for Rich Uncle Pennybags, the mascot for the game of Monopoly.
Everybody, except maybe the fossil fuel industry for which Harris doubled down on her support. She proudly declared during the debate, “I will not ban fracking,” and bragged, “We have had the largest increase in domestic oil production in history”—despite the current year being on track to be the hottest ever recorded, with fossil fuel-driven climate disasters wreaking havoc around the globe.
Everybody except investment banks, from which Harris beamed about receiving an endorsement when she argued at the debate, “What Goldman Sachs has said is that Donald Trump’s plan would make the economy worse. Mine would strengthen the economy,”—a bizarre endorsement to highlight given the bank’s role in triggering the Great Recession in 2008.
Everybody except the state of Israel, which has appreciated Harris’s vocal support for its settler colonial project. Harris even went so far as to outdo Trump’s rhetoric on the matter, saying, “I have my entire career and life supported Israel,” a commitment backed by billions of dollars in military aid from the Biden Administration to Israel, enabling its ongoing genocide of the people of Palestine.
Harris didn’t exactly champion the Marxist axiom, “Workers of the world unite,” when she argued during the debate, “The United States Congress, including some of the most conservative members of the United States Senate, came up with a border security bill which I supported."
Fearing Harris’s political savvy and surge in the polls, Trump has resorted to despicable and dishonest race-baiting and red-baiting to discredit her. But “Comrade Kamala,” as Trump derisively calls her, is nowhere near as radical as he claims.
Rather than challenging corporate greed, or the scapegoating of immigrants, or war profiteering, Harris has consistently supported policies that protect the tycoon class throughout her political career. As California’s Attorney General, she declined to prosecute OneWest Bank, owned by Steven Mnuchin, after it wrongfully foreclosed on thousands of homes during the 2008 financial crisis—even though her own investigators declared the bank had engaged in “widespread misconduct” in state foreclosure cases.
Harris, while serving as Attorney General, openly defied U.S. Supreme Court orders to reduce overcrowding in the prison population, fighting to keep people behind bars who were incarcerated on non-violent charges. Her office even went so far as to argue that releasing these people could reduce the prison system’s supply of cheap labor.
There is a long and powerful tradition of Black women Marxists who have reimagined how to achieve social justice in the face of systemic oppression: Harris is not one of them. Their impact has largely been underappreciated and in many states today, the Republican Party has made it illegal to learn about their contributions to the understanding of the overlapping structures of capitalism, systemic racism, sexism, and heterosexism.
By erasing these histories, the rightwing hopes to keep future generations from studying some of the most important struggles for human liberation that young people could apply to challenge the systems that exploit them. Black women Marxists such as Grace Campbell, Vicki Garvin, Claudia Jones, Louise Thompson Patterson, Angela Davis, Barbara Smith, and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor have made invaluable contributions to struggles for liberation that must be studied; and these are just a few of the many Black women who have fought relentlessly for systemic change in ways that Harris’s policies have consistently failed to do.
“Black Women in and around the CPUSA [Communist Party of the United States of America] saw the party as an alternative to the Republicans and Democrats,” Charisse Burden-Stelly and Jodi Dean wrote in the introduction to their essential book, Organize, Fight, Win: Black Communist Women’s Political Writing. They go on to explain that these Black women in the Communist Party of the 1920s through the 1950s “redefined who counted as a worker, shed light on the intersections of oppression and exploitation that needed to be addressed by the labor movement, and presented the necessary action for launching a truly representative labor struggle.”
Dayo Gore, in Radicalism at the Crossroads: African American Women Activists in the Cold War, wrote, “Black women radicals found themselves among a vital group of Black leftists invested in building the Black freedom struggle and open to Black women’s efforts to develop a radical politics that centered both race and gender.”
Grace Campbell, born in 1883, was one of the first Black women to join the CPUSA and was the first African American woman to run for public office in the state of New York. In 1928, she championed the rights of Black women and explained the racist divide-and-conquer tactics Trump is still using today when he talks about “Black jobs” and immigrants stealing jobs. Burden-Stelly and Dean included her words in their book:
Negro women workers are the most abused, exploited and discriminated against of all American workers, not only by the capitalist system . . . but by the unenlightened race prejudice which is found even within the working class and is used by the employers to drive a wedge between Black and white workers and thus destroy their unity and fighting power.
Louise Thompson Patterson, born in 1901, was a significant figure during the Harlem Renaissance and later in global Black radical politics. Patterson worked closely with people such as Langston Hughes while fighting for labor rights, women’s rights, and racial justice. Throughout her life, she was committed to Marxist ideals, and wrote an essay in 1936 called “Toward a Brighter Dawn,” where she developed an early understanding of what we would now call intersectionality. Writing in the CPUSA journal Woman Today, she argued that Black women faced, “triple exploitation—as workers, as women, and as Negroes.”
Claudia Jones, born in Trinidad in 1915 and emigrating to the United States as a child, further developed intersectional analysis—what she called “triple oppression”—in her groundbreaking 1949 essay, “An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman!” In it she wrote, “For the progressive women’s movement, the Negro woman, who combines in her status the worker, the Negro, and the woman, is the vital link to this heightened political consciousness.”
As a committed member of the CPUSA, she left an indelible mark on global Marxist and anti-colonial movements and fought for the rights of Black women, workers, and the oppressed. Her activism led to her imprisonment and eventual deportation from the United States in 1955, as a consequence of the Red Scare during the era of McCarthyism. After being deported to the United Kingdom, Jones continued her revolutionary work, founding and editing The West Indian Gazette, one of the first major newspapers for the Caribbean diaspora in Britain. Her activism laid the groundwork for the global fight against racial capitalism, making her a vital figure in the Pan-African movement and a prominent voice in the struggle for Black women’s liberation.
Angela Y. Davis built on that legacy and emerged as one of the most prominent Marxist, feminist, and revolutionary figures of the twentieth century. Born in 1944 in Birmingham, Alabama, and raised during the Jim Crow era, Davis’s experiences of racial segregation have deeply shaped her activism. She became a leading voice in the Black Power movement and the fight against mass incarceration. Davis became recognized internationally in the 1970s after being placed on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list and accused of providing firearms used in a courtroom takeover in which a judge was killed during an attempt to free Black activists. Though Davis was not present and had no direct involvement, she was charged due to her connection to the activists involved. After a highly publicized trial, she was acquitted of all charges.
A scholar and activist, Davis’s work has focused on the intersections of race, class, and gender. Her 1981 book, Women, Race, & Class, became a foundational text in understanding the struggles of Black women through a Marxist feminist lens. In addition to her work on prison abolition, Davis has been a leading voice for Palestinian liberation and global solidarity in the fight against imperialism, consistently emphasizing the interconnectedness of struggles for justice across the world.
Barbara Smith, born in 1946 in Cleveland, Ohio, is a trailblazing Black feminist, socialist, and activist. She is perhaps best known as one of the co-founders of the Combahee River Collective, a Marxist Black feminist organization active in the 1970s. Her work with the collective helped coin the term “identity politics” and led to a deeper understanding of how systemic oppression could only be dismantled by addressing the specific ways it impacts marginalized identities.
The arguments advanced in “The Combahee River Collective Statement,” written in 1977, remain some of the most important insights for achieving freedom. The statement declares, “We are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression, and see as our particular task the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking.”
The College Board, a billion-dollar-a-year organization that creates the Advanced Placement (AP) courses for high schools, recently deleted this statement from their required reading for the AP African American Studies program—succumbing to pressure by conservatives who feared what could happen if students read the part of the statement that reads, “If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression.” Smith is still contributing to movements for social justice and is active in the group Black for Palestine, which is organizing for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and an arms embargo on Israel.
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, a Black Marxist scholar and organizer, has continued this powerful tradition. Taylor edited the influential book How We Get Free, which centers the significance of the Combahee River Collective and its radical vision for liberation, emphasizing the importance of understanding the interlocking systems of oppression that affect Black women and marginalized communities. Taylor’s scholarship critiques the limitations of representation, calling instead for transformative, systemic change—standing in stark contrast to Harris who offers symbolic representation, but a continuation of neoliberal policies and little in the way of a radical restructuring of power.
Trump’s chiding that Harris is preparing to turn over the means of production to working people is just more of his blathering buffoonery. However, Trump did manage to get one fact right during the debate when he asserted, “Her father is a Marxist professor in economics . . .”—but then he had to spoil it with a lie: “. . . and he taught her well.” It’s true that Kamala Harris’s father, Donald J. Harris, studied Marxism and has been described as a Marxist economist. Unfortunately, he obviously didn’t teach her well enough.