Is Kamala Harris a Marxist? When Donald Trump called her one at their debate last month, it initially unleashed a wave of censure from the bicoastal bien-pensants. The media soon moved on, but the question remains — and is too important to let pass.
Having authored a book called “NextGen Marxism,” and after examining Harris’ vast public record, our verdict is that she is indeed a follower of Marxist dictums, whether she has stirring posters of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Mao in her living room or not.
Her outlook is Marxist. Donald Trump wasn’t wrong.
Being a Marxist is not a matter of being a card-carrying member of the Communist Party but more about subscribing to a specific set of ideas that form a worldview.
When Richard Nixon said in the 1970s, “We are all Keynesians now,” he did not mean that he had joined the Bloomsbury Group. He meant that he and many other important policymakers had bought in to deficit spending, higher taxes, and other demand-side practices informed by the theories of economist John Maynard Keynes.
Keynesianism was heavy in the air at the time. It was everywhere in the policy swirl of the 1970s. Importantly, one could believe in its prescriptions and implement them without ever having heard of Lord Keynes.
It was Keynes himself who wrote:
The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.
That, we argue, is the state of Marxism today. Its ideas are so heavy in the air that one can be a committed Marxist without ever having read a word of “Das Kapital.”
What Marx said and how 21st-century Marxists echo him
It helps to camouflage Marxism, so many of the old nostrums of the 1848 “Communist Manifesto” have undergone an evolution or are sufficiently hidden. For example, few Marxists now expect the proletariat to rise up in bloody revolution. In fact, most Marxists have abandoned the worker and expect revolutions to be instituted by stealth — by taking over the cultural institutions and changing society’s narrative.
These were changes introduced in the West in the middle of the last century, after bloody revolutions failed in Germany and Italy in the era between the first and second world wars.
Marxism’s most salient features remain, however. Today’s Marxists still need to suppress the views of those who oppose completely transforming society. The family, that great bulwark against instability, must be destroyed outright or see its ability to raise children severely curbed. Marx was clear on these things, calling in the “Manifesto” for “despotic inroads” when people didn’t go along with his plans and for the “abolition of the family.”
Above all, the entirety of human interaction is still to be viewed as an epic struggle between the oppressed and his oppressor, just as Marx wrote in the first page of the “Manifesto”:
The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.
This was the heart of Marxism back then, and it remains so today.
One belief that follows from this worldview is that law enforcement, and especially the police, exist to keep the boot of the ruling class on the neck of the subjugated. So the police must be defunded, or better yet disbanded.
As Marx put it in the first volume of “Das Kapital” in 1867, the state “employs the police to accelerate the accumulation of capital by increasing the degree of exploitation of labor.” Later, in 1875’s “Critique of the Gotha Program,” he wrote that the state was a structure of “police-guarded military despotism.”
All Marxists since then, from Vladimir Lenin to Angela Davis and Patrisse Cullors, have understood that abolishing the police is the fastest way to foster societal chaos and impose their blueprint for revolution.
A second belief that follows from the reduction of all human activity to a Manichean struggle is that the goal is total, structural, systemic change, or “a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large,” as the “Manifesto” itself put it. The proletariat, to Marx, “has to bear all the burdens of society without enjoying its advantages” and therefore had the “consciousness of the necessity of a fundamental revolution, the communist consciousness,” as Marx and Engels wrote in “The German Ideology” in 1845. That was the point of violent revolution — to dismantle everything in place. Thus, the forces of all authority, not just the forces of order, must be sufficiently weakened or overcome.
The only difference today is that now the locus of oppression is placed no longer in economic class but in racial and sexual categories deemed to be marginalized. It is therefore from these racial and sexual subordinate categories that the spark for change will come.
The Marxist founders of Black Lives Matter — Marxists not just because they call themselves “Marxist” but because for years they were given extensive training in Marxism, Leninism, etc. — seek Marx’s systemic or total change in the name of their subjugated groups, because we have “systemic racism.”
A third belief that follows is that citizens should be treated differently depending on their category. Equal rights, enshrined in our founding documents, are anathema. “Equity” is the goal.
Again, this is all undiluted Marxism. Marx was very clear in his “Critique of the Gotha Program” that men of different talents would enjoy different outcomes, so “to avoid all these defects, right, instead of being equal, would have to be unequal.”
Marxists today reject equal rights by shifting focus from class to race. Kimberlé Crenshaw, a leading thinker in the Marxist critical race theory field, argued in a 1988 essay that “belief in color-blindness and equal process would make no sense at all in a society in which identifiable groups had actually been treated differently historically.” Their ultimate goal remains the suppression of equal rights.
What Kamala says
Kamala Harris echoes these core ideas. While Joe Biden adopted wokeness for strategic reasons, often stumbling through its language — George Will once likened Biden’s use of woke terms to “tone-deaf Joe fumbling with a foreign language: progressive-speak” — Harris has a more precise ideological stance, even if she lacks clarity in her policy positions.
In a 2020 video, she explained why she favors the term “equity” over “equality.” We have retained her linguistic tics:
So, there’s a big difference between equality and equity. Equality suggests, “Oh, everybody should get the same amount.” The problem with that — not everybody’s starting out from the same place. If we all get the same amount, but you started out back there, and I started out over here — we could get the same amount, but you’re still going to be that far back behind me. It’s about giving people the resources and the support they need, so that everyone can be on equal footing, and then compete on equal footing. Equitable treatment means we all end up at the same place.
The video showed two men, one white, one black, climbing a mountain, the white one doing so with ease and the black one struggling. This underscores that she wants government and the private sector to give benefits based on racial characteristics. In 2022, she said help after the devastation caused by Hurricane Ian should be needs- and color-based.
“It is our lowest-income communities and our communities of color that are most impacted by these extreme conditions and impacted by issues that are not of their own making. And so we have to address this in a way that is about giving resources based on equity,” she said. Harris has been consistent on all these points, as this video compilation makes clear.
Harris strongly supports Black Lives Matter and its push to change America’s system. “Black Lives Matter has changed the environment in such a substantial and beautiful way,” she told interviewer Ebro Darden on June 9, 2020, as the George Floyd riots enveloped cities. “Their activism has allowed people who are inside the system, who want to change it, to not be alone in trying to change it.”
Harris emphasized that BLM’s value lies in how the organization influenced those in power to agree to systemic change. She praised BLM organizers as “leaders who have forced people to understand from the outside the change that needs to happen on the inside, so that people who are on the inside can actually have more leverage against so many obstacles and status quo within that system that doesn’t want to see any change.”
Her observation was notable, as BLM’s biggest success wasn’t the chaos it caused but its ability to pressure cultural leaders into accepting that America suffers from “systemic racism” and demands change.
Harris, like Marx, sees systemic change as essential — Marx for class struggle, Harris for racial struggle. “Our country has a long history of slavery, Jim Crow, lynchings, segregation, and discrimination. The injustices of the past live on in our institutions today. We need systemic change. Black Americans are fed up,” she tweeted on May 29, 2020, during the height of the violence.
In early June of that same year, she addressed the Senate, expressing strong support for the actions of BLM. She described the movement as one led by “people who might appear from the outside to have little in common, who are marching together to demand an end to the black blood that is staining the sidewalks of our country. They are marching together to move closer, and closer at least to justice, and that gives me hope. It truly gives me hope.”
Unsurprisingly, Harris also asked Americans to contribute money to the Minnesota Freedom Fund, an organization that posted bail for those who tore Minneapolis apart.
“If you’re able to, chip in now to the @MNFreedomFund to help post bail for those protesting on the ground in Minnesota,” she tweeted just days after the death of George Floyd, as the city and many others burned.
The apple rarely falls far
She may deny it now, but Harris also clearly backs defund-the-police efforts. She told an interviewer in 2020, “When you have many cities that have more than one-third of their entire city budget focused on policing, we know that’s not the smart way and the best way or the right way to achieve safety. For too long the status quo thinking has been you get more safety by putting more cops on the streets — well, that’s wrong.”
Kamala Harris has also opposed giving parents the freedom to stop the indoctrination of children on matters of race and sex at school, saying in Houston this year to the American Federation of Teachers, “And while you … teach students about our nation’s past, these extremists attack the freedom to learn and acknowledge our nation’s true and full history, including book bans. … They pass so-called ‘Don’t Say Gay’ laws.” Her administration targeted parents protesting at school boards as “domestic terrorists.”
Harris also wants to restrict the freedom of social media companies to share diverse viewpoints. She told Jake Tapper that these platforms “are directly speaking to millions and millions of people without any level of oversight or regulation, and it has to stop.”
It’s impossible to say for sure if Harris got her views from her parents, Donald Harris and Shyamala Gopalan — so radical that they met in the early 1960s at the same Afro-American Association in Berkeley where Black Panther founders Bobby Seale and Huey Newton met. But the record of “red diaper babies” is that the apple rarely falls far from the tree.
What’s undisputable is that she has soaked in the weltanschauung and absorbed it. It’s now a part of her. Her outlook is Marxist. Donald Trump wasn’t wrong.