Jockeying to Lead the Empire
On September 10th Kamala Harris and Donald Trump held their first presidential debate. An analysis of the content of their statements and responses shows how both candidates were verbally jockeying to present and position themselves as the better candidate to direct the course of genocide in Palestine and unfolding global imperialist war. They also sparred over who could better guarantee that capitalist accumulation continues to stack the fortunes of the billionaire class that backs and funds the two-party capitalist electoral regime. Neither of capital’s two preferred candidates spoke to the multiple and overlapping crises that are deteriorating the lives of working-class people.
Below, Izzy Tellin and Michelle Rundquist share some analysis of the debate.
Throughout the debate Trump repeatedly referred to his opponent as being Joe Biden, not Kamala Harris. He continued calling out the current president, alleging conspiracies of a disappearance, and largely refusing to address Harris as his opponent. This is a plain and simple, racist and disrespectful attack on the legitimacy of Harris as a Black woman. Biden’s declining state has been well documented for some time now. It is likely the 81-year-old president is no longer capable of performing his duties due to severe decline, no doubt on account of his age and a possible cognitive disease. Harris is surely acting as president. Instead of declaring Harris as the current President and having her take over the presidential duties, the Democratic party is using Harris’ identity ‘credentials’ to get voters excited about the possibility of the US electing their “first Black woman President”.
This is like when Barack Obama was selected by the Democratic establishment for the presidency in 2008.
In 2008, the prospect for a Black President raised expectations that substantive changes and strides could be made towards racial justice and equality. It also inspired hope in liberals that this could show progress towards their interpretation of the US as becoming a “post-racial” society, while counterposing their “progressive enlightenment” to the racists and reactionaries (like Trump) who scrambled to delegitimize Obama’s candidacy through false claims questioning his “citizenship”. Obama was also popular because he promised universal healthcare, immigrant legalization, and to defend abortion rights. In office, those inspirations quickly dissipated as Obama fell in line, and quickly became a loyal partisan and steward of US empire and capitalism, walking back or reversing his campaign promises, and instead working vigorously in defense of the status quo. He even recognized that his policies once in power were essentially Republican in nature.
The Democratic Party is attempting to recreate this “Obama effect” in propping up Harris, although this time without even the pretense of progressive campaign policy promises to back up efforts to create the Harris “buzz”.
Trump continued to disrespect Harris as a Black woman, from questioning the validity of her Black heritage, and by making her a target for his followers and acolytes. When asked, “Why do you believe it’s appropriate to weigh in on the racial identity of your opponent?”, he simply responded—as most all avoidant racists do: “I don’t, and I don’t care. I don’t care what she is… Whatever she wants to be is okay with me.” This type of complete disregard is a tactic used to absolve oneself from the responsibility of their own racism. By stating “whatever she wants to be”, is also condescending and belittling. Does Trump want to be a white man? Or is he just a white man?
Harris’s rebuttals to Trumps attacks were tepid at best, but recalls Trump’s extremely racist and sexist history, a long and ongoing destructiveness that continues to toxify US politics. Trump refused to rent properties to Black families, openly spews hatred and racism towards Haitians, Mexicans, and Central Americans. He is also a violent and misogynistic predator who is accused by 26 women of committing, rape, sexual assault, and other types of abuse. Most recently, he was found guilty of sexual abuse in 2023, when he had to pay a victim five million dollars after that person went public in a personal memoir with her allegation that Trump raped her in the dressing room of a posh Manhattan department store in 1996.
Trump also openly aligns with fascist groups like the “Proud Boys,” whom he addressed like a general commanding his army to “stand back and stand by” during a 2020 election debate.
Trump’s only rebuttal to any questioning of his violence-inducing racism and sexism? That these examples “are in the past”. And yet, Harris was not the only target of Trump’s continued racism throughout the night, as he absurdly and baselessly claimed Haitian immigrants, “In Springfield [Ohio], they’re eating the dogs. The people that came in. They’re eating the cats”. Despite there being no backing for these claims, and the city of Springfield themselves confirming they have no credible evidence of this having taken place, Trump and his running mate JD Vance have only doubled down on these assertions, even after Vance admitted that these racist assertions were fabricated.
Regurgitating “All-American” Racism
Those who are serious about the state of the United States today know how it was founded: through genocide, slavery, segregation, and racism. Trump and Vance represent a long and regurgitative history of racism and sexism being deployed as an underlying ruling class ideology during times of capitalist crisis, war, and class polarization. In openly and proudly asserting a politics of racist and sexist dehumanization to appeal to and mobilize sections of the population to direct hate and violence towards the oppressed, Trump and Vance are following a generational phenomenon in US politics going back to the first slave-owners and settler-colonialists. To assert their self-entitled sense of superiority, they do not need to be creative thinkers or even modestly intelligent, but rather, it emotes through their own mediocrity and need to victim-blame in absence of substantive political thought or vision. It is to re-assert the dominance of bourgeois white supremacy and white nationalist manhood at a time of social decline by regrouping, reactivating, and giving direction to a noxious pathology of hate.
In the first of several attempted inflammatory remarks that were be made by Trump throughout the night, he called Harris a “Marxist” as a dangerous and purposefully confusing tactic. The idea that Harris could be a Marxist is abhorrent. A true Marxist believes that under capitalism, workers are the sole creator of profit through their labor. And because of that, they believe that, workers, and not the business owners, should own the means of production and be responsible for democratically distributing the wealth to meet the needs of society as a whole.
It was a McCarthy-era attempt to reinvoke the still lingering fear associated with the recurring epochs of “Red Scare” engineered by the ruling class to repress and bury socialist and communist movements. Make no mistake, Kamala Harris is a bona fide capitalist. While she makes statements about her plans “to give a $50,000 tax deduction to start-up small businesses, knowing they are part of the backbone of America’s economy” and promises to “create an opportunity economy”, she continues to uphold and benefit from a system that small businesses inherently cannot survive under. Under capitalism, small businesses simply do not have the financial means to compete with big corporations. Large businesses like Walmart and Amazon can afford to sell products at prices below the profit margin and can even operate at a loss to starve off the competition because of the immense amount of capital they own and can leverage to drive their smaller competitors out of business.
Capitalism is about winning, and Harris is fighting for her place at the podium, specifically via immigration crackdowns, fracking, and speaking directly to the precarity of the “middle class,” which is an unstable and declining class increasingly in fear of being pushed into the working class.
The Middle-Class Façade
The first words spoken by newly nominated Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris claimed, “I was raised as a middle-class kid”. She claimed to understand and share the struggles that millions of working-class people face, stating: “We know that we have a shortage of homes and housing, and the cost of housing is too expensive for far too many people.” The thing is, there is no shortage of housing in the United States. In fact, it's estimated that 10.5% of homes in the US, which roughly equals out to 15.1 million residences, are vacant. Kamala Harris might have grown-up “middle class”, but her current estimated net worth, according to Forbes, is $8 million dollars. A fortune that has increased since assuming office in 2021 during a global pandemic that left millions of people in the US reeling financially, with no support from her government. So, why believe her when she claims she’s talking to you and on your behalf?
Despite the lukewarm effort to address social inequality, Harris wanted to demonstrate in this debate that she can prove to be the more reasonable champion of the capitalist class. Foremost to this is defending the right of big capital to continue accumulating capital and profit on an expanding scale. She also presents that she, like Joe Biden before her, are the best for the job for ensuring victory for US empire at a time of great challenges by regional rivals and in all current and future theaters of war in Europe, the Middle East, and in Asia. In her address to the Democratic National Committee in August, she positioned herself as a pro-war hawk by proclaiming: “As commander-in-chief, I will ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world.” In this statement, she was speaking directly to the ruling class, and not the “middle class,” or working folks.
The “middle class” that Harris addresses is not those who are facing extreme crises relating to the ever-increasing cost of living in the United States. It is not the millions being forced to work multiple jobs just to make ends meet because everything has gone up except the minimum wage. In 2019 it was reported that 14.8 million immigrant workers in the United States languished in deep poverty, earning less than 200 percent of the federal poverty level. In 2022 it was reported 37.9 million total people were living and working in poverty.
Make no mistake, Harris is not talking to the more than 70% of the US population that form the broad ranks of the working class who experience a precarious, collapsing, or collapsed standard of living. Even less so is Donald Trump.
Harris directs part of her rhetoric towards the liberal middle classes, while Trump also speaks at the most reactionary sections of the middle class. These middle classes are the small capitalists and real estate investors and landlords, landowners, managers and technicians, professionals, and others whose class position under capitalism situate them “above” and outside the direct lived experiences of the working class. Beyond the political rhetoric deployed to harvest votes from middle- and working-class people, they are both competing to show that they have a better plan to advance the main prerogatives for billionaires. This is to show that they can better carry the sword and shield for those who own the economy and who direct the empire through their campaign funding mechanisms and anti-democratic control and influence over the capitalist and imperial bureaucracies.
Class War Economy
It should be no surprise that the number one question concerning voters is the economy and the cost of living in this country. The debate moderators asked: “When it comes to the economy, do you believe Americans are better off than they were four years ago?” In response, Harris went on the offensive, claiming
My opponent, on the other hand, his plan is to do what he has done before, which is to provide a tax cut for billionaires and big corporations, which will result in $5 trillion to America's deficit. My opponent has a plan that I call the Trump sales tax, which would be a 20% tax on everyday goods that you rely on to get through the month. Economists have said that Trump's sales tax would actually result for middle-class families in about $4,000 more a year because of his policies and his ideas about what should be the backs of middle-class people paying for tax cuts for billionaires.
In his rebuttal Trump lays out his economic plan, one that would heavily depend on tariffs. Simply defined, a tariff is a tax imposed by a government on the import or export of specific goods, in this case, mainly those coming from China. Trump has been at the forefront of using tariffs as a weapon of economic warfare to limit access of its capitalist rivals to US markets to protect and bolster US profits. So too have Biden (and Harris) copied Trump’s protectionist “America First” policies, and have expanded the tariff regime against China, blocking the sale of a range of Chinese products from cell phones to electric cars and solar panels.
In defense of tariff war, Trump proclaimed: “We’re doing [imposing] tariffs on other countries. Other countries are going to finally, after 75 years, pay us back for all that we’ve done for the world.” But what exactly has the United States “done for the world” in the last 75 years?
One thing was waging war on Vietnam, a bloody invasion and occupation that lasted over two decades (1955-1975). The war on the Vietnamese people was genocidal and devastating, with at least 1.3 million (some estimates are as high as 2 million) Vietnamese men, women, and children killed between 1965 and 1974 through carpet bombing, ground combat operations, “search and destroy” missions and extermination campaigns, biological warfare, targeted assassinations, and other means. An estimated 5.3 million Vietnamese civilians were maimed or wounded, and 11 million more were made refugees. Furthermore, the Johnson and Nixon Administrations (especially through Nixon’s) Secretary of State Henry Kissinger vastly expanded the war into neighboring Cambodia on the basis of targeting Vietnamese “camps” and “secret bases” in that country.
…From October 4, 1965, to August 15, 1973, the United States dropped far more ordnance on Cambodia than was previously believed: 2,756,941 tons’ worth, dropped in 230,516 sorties on 113,716 sites. Just over 10 percent of this bombing was indiscriminate, with 3,580 of the sites listed as having “unknown” targets and another 8,238 sites having no target listed at all. The database also shows that the bombing began four years earlier than is widely believed—not under Nixon, but under Lyndon Johnson.
No comprehensive death toll was accurately completed, but researchers estimate that at least hundreds of thousands to over a million Cambodians were killed, with most being civilians bombed in their homes and communities. Vietnam and Cambodia are just two of the countries whose people were made victims of US imperial violence. Other countries like Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Grenada, Iraq, Libya, and dozens more, have also been devastated by US imperialist violence, with most victim nations still wracked or in the long process of trying to recover and rebuilding decades later. This ghastly and genocidal scale of violence no doubt serves as a model for the current US-Israeli war on Arab and Middle Eastern peoples today.
So, what exactly should the United States be owed from countries around the world that they had a hand in destroying?
Unwavering Support for Zionism and Genocide
Bu the US government’s genocidal and destructive past hasn’t concluded—only continues in chapters. Turning the focus now to potentially one of the biggest deciding factors—especially for young voters—is Israel’s on-going, US-funded and backed genocide in Gaza. Both Trump and Harris are staunch supporters of Israel, and their supposed “right to defend themselves” using genocidal slaughter and settler-colonial replacement. As front-runners to steer the ship of US empire, they have both shown that their support is unconditional and unwavering, regardless of what the people in the US and across the world think or want.
Harris herself said, “I don’t hate Israel, my entire career and life I have supported Israel and the Israeli people”. Harris repeated the Zionist trope of “Israeli victimhood”, claiming this war began only on October 7th, 2023, when the Palestinian resistance movement revolted against decades of increasing violence by Israeli occupation forces and settler movements. The occupation of Palestine and the US and Great Britain’s creation of the apartheid state of Israel started 76 years ago in 1948. The imperialist invention of Israel was followed immediately by the first Israeli war against the Palestinian people within a year, in which Zionist militias killed of over 15,000 Palestinians and systematically dispossessed over 750,000 others from their homes.
This first phase of genocide allowed for the resettling of mostly European Zionists into what is now called “Israel” (a historical process referred to as the “Nakba”, or “catastrophe” in Arabic). Most of the Palestinians in Gaza are refugees (and their descendants) from the settler-colonial wars and violence of the Nakba, and from subsequent attacks and removals carried out by the Zionist military and settler militias to expand their territory at the expense of the indigenous Palestinian population. The on-going Nakba has been funded, armed, and enabled by the US state ever since.
This is because Israel functions as a military extension of US imperial objectives across the Middle East, whose goal since the end of European colonial rule (in the period after World War I) has been to maintain US predominance in the region. The objectives of US hegemony (and subsequently for its European junior partners in the colonial project) has been to weaken and defeat Arab nationalist, socialist, and revolutionary movements that threaten US-aligned reactionary regimes, and therefore its hegemony, to increase access and maintain control over the region’s vast oil sources, to contain and eventually topple Iran, and to keep out its imperial competitors so it alone can exert unchallenged dominance to enrich its capitalist classes. This is also why Israel is essentially an expansive colonial project, seeking to perpetually extend its control over more land and resources across the region to build a “Greater Israel” through endless war, occupation, and genocide underwritten and paid for by US and Western European governments.
Occupied Palestine is a goldmine for US empire, sitting on the equivalent of an estimated $524 Billion dollars’ worth of crude oil and natural gas reserves. Iran also has the fourth largest oil reserves and second largest natural gas reserves in the world, with a combined estimated value of 14 trillion dollars ($10 trillion for oil, and $4 trillion for gas, based on $75 dollar a barrel value).
Both Harris and Trump are vigorously competing to lead the US empire through the next phase of genocide and imperialist war to expand US power and build the next generation of colonially extracted wealth for its billionaire investors and multinational corporations. This is why they both are “staunch” and “unwavering” in their support for Israel, as it is the executioner of US imperial military objectives in the region.
The US empire’s insatiable appetite for the domination of energy resources globally can also explain why Harris reversed her former position to ban fracking, a process that involves injecting liquid at high pressures into the ground to force the extraction of oil. It is a process that is damaging the environment by releasing harmful and toxic chemicals into the air that contributes significantly to climate change. Fracking also causes further destruction by inducing earthquakes. Harris now claims she supports fracking as part of a strategy to “relieve US dependency on foreign oil”. In other words, her domestic policy shift in favor of fracking is part and parcel of the current foreign policy strategy to increase imperial control over strategic energy reserves in the Middle East. Harris and Trump are in alignment in their unapologetic drive for imperial primacy and new smash and grab approaches to capitalist accumulation. They are not operating under any pretenses, and have made it clear that global war, genocide, and cascading climate catastrophes are necessary and acceptable byproducts of the pursuit of power and profit.
While Harris, like Biden, says she supports a “ceasefire” and a “two-state solution” for Palestine, this is gaslighting of the highest order. The Biden-Harris Administration is carrying out the destruction and efforts at genocidal erasure of Palestine and now Lebanon, even if it is the Israeli military dropping the 2,000 pound bombs that flatten apartment complexes, it is Israeli operatives that are torturing, maiming, and murdering doctors in Zionist dungeons, and Israeli agents are the ones that are booby-trapping devices that mangle men, women, and children; and Israeli snipers are the ones shooting journalists in the head and children in the legs. Biden, Harris, Trump, and the whole apparatus of the US state are in the driver’s seat of this on-going Nakba.
Moving Right on Abortion and Immigration
In the debate Kamala Harris also said she supports Roe v. Wade being reinstated in response to flagrantly fabricated lies and outlandish claims by Trump that states now allow for “post-birth abortions” and that Democrats have “legalized the executions of babies.” When Harris spoke on abortion, she claimed to fully support the reinstatement of Roe v. Wade and the protections it ensures. Nevertheless, when baited by Trump, she curtly affirmed she opposes allowing for late-term abortions, which was a legal norm under Roe v. Wade, although now fewer states permit it.
Even when Roe was the law of the land, there have always been barriers preventing the most in need of an abortion from being able to access one, barriers that specifically affect poor people of color and immigrants who have trouble accessing healthcare already. From 1973 to 2021, a year before Roe was officially overturned, rightwing anti-abortion movements operating through the federal courts and state governments were able to secure over 1,300 legal restrictions and types of bans on access to abortion. A significant restriction was the Hyde Amendment, passed in 1977, which banned the use of federal funds to be used to pay for an abortion. Prior to this amendment taking effect, around 300,000 federally subsidized abortions were performed on low-income women. Neither Harris nor Trump addressed the Hyde Amendment or any of the other restrictions that occurred even under Roe.
Harris’s talk about preserving abortion rights rings hollow, when her party and she herself have abdicated on the issue and have failed to fight to defend abortion rights over the decades that they have been under attack—except to make appeals for votes during election time—and does not support providing free access to abortion on demand for people who need them; yet continues to fund a genocide with US tax dollars “with no strings attached”.
Furthermore, Harris also showed how much she has moved to the right on immigration in accepting Trump and the Congressional Far Right’s racist tropes and falsehoods, and punitive and repressive frameworks that would end asylum, greatly increase armed agents, deportations and detention infrastructure, and that would enable border “shutdowns” to block the entrance of refugees. She positioned herself as “more Trumpian than Trump” in her willingness to criminalize and repress migrants and refugees if elected:
So, I'm the only person on this stage who has prosecuted transnational criminal organizations for the trafficking of guns, drugs, and human beings. And let me say that 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. And that bill would have put 1,500 more border agents on the border to help those folks who are working there right now over time trying to do their job. It would have allowed us to stem the flow of fentanyl coming into the United States…
She even touted that rightwing Republican imperialists and neoconservatives have more faith in her than in Trump to carry out their agenda: “this is I think one of the reasons why in this election I actually have the endorsement of 200 Republicans who have formally worked with President Bush, Mitt Romney, and John McCain including the endorsement of former Vice President Dick Cheney and Congressmember Liz Cheney.”
Shortly after the debate, Harris made a campaign stop in Arizona to announce her “border policy” which she claimed was even more stringent than both Biden and Trump’s policies, and would enshrine a crackdown at the border.
Ms. Harris vowed to carry on President Biden’s crackdown on asylum and to impose order on the southern border, demonstrating how much the politics of immigration have shifted for Democrats. Just one presidential cycle ago, Ms. Harris and most other candidates in the party’s primary race had promised to decriminalize illegal border crossings…
She announced she would toughen Biden’s current executive order that allows for automatic border shutdowns if more than 1,500 refugees approach ports of entry in one day. She pledged to make the policy permanent and maintain the shutdowns even if the number of attempted entries drops below Biden’s threshold.
As representatives of the interests of capital, neither Harris and the Democrats nor Trump and the Republicans can or will speak to the interests and needs of the vast majority of working-class people in this country. The US state is functioning with only purpose: obtaining profit, obtaining more resources to obtain more profit, and exploiting the workers who create the goods and services being sold for profit.
Most of us want the same things: an end to the perpetual war and on-going genocide, freedom, clean air to breathe, clean water to drink, and healthy food to eat. We need free and accessible housing, education, and healthcare. We want to feel safe and welcomed in our communities despite differences we may have in our race, gender, national origin, sexual orientation, religion, disabilities, language, culture, goals, and so much more. We want bodily autonomy. We want to be able to control our lives how we each see fit for ourselves. We want full equality for immigrants and the right to migrate. We want to have jobs we enjoy working while still being able to spend the most part of our lives with loved ones and following passions. The path towards this set of politics radically diverges away from that of voting for, or supporting the representative parties of capitalism and imperialism. We have to build socialist organizations of and for the working class—and we will have to fight against the system generating war, genocide, poverty, exploitation, and oppression—regardless of who wins in November. And because one of them will win.
Izzy Tellin is a worker, activist, writer, and artist based in Madison, Wisconsin. Michelle Rundquist is a student at UMass Amherst pursuing a Master's degree in Labor Studies.
