Trump has been regularly calling Kamala Harris a “communist”.  He recently said she was both a “communist” and a “fascist”.  Kind of bizarre when one considers that fascism was created in Italy as a right wing response to a labor movement advocating for worker rights.  Long and short, Trump’s use of the words suggest that he has no idea what they really mean, only that they provoke a negative response in the American body politic.  First, an aside.

About a year ago I was standing out holding an antiracism sign that included the hashtag “#BLM”.  A woman stopped in front of me at a red light.  She opened her window and said “They’re all communists”.  I replied, “Who are”?  Her response?  “Black Lives Matter”.  I feigned an interested look and asked, “What’s a communist”?  Her reply was quite interesting.  It was “You tell me”.  Seriously?  Changing my look to puzzled I responded “Shouldn’t you know what a word means before you use it”?  The beauty of these conversations is that they are generally short.  The light changes to green and they end.  But it does beg the question: “what is a communist”?

I need to start with some “nots”.  The former Soviet Union called themself “communist”.  They were not.  The same is true of China, North Korea, Yugoslavia under Tito, and of every one of the countries in the former Warsaw Pact / Eastern Europe Block.  We’ll get to why soon.

I studied Marxian Economics when I was in college with Sam Bowles.    Sam taught at UMass Amherst and was considered the leading Marxian economic thought leader in the United States in the mid-1980s.  One of the first things he taught us was that “Das Kapital” was not about building a communist economic system, but rather a critique of capitalism.  Traditional economics, starting with Adam Smith, talks about value being created by scarcity and that the owners of the factory, putting their capital (cash) at risk, are the ones who should benefit from any profits generated.  The theory is that value is created through scarcity and a balance happens between supply and demand when production and consumption find an equilibrium at a market driven price.  Marx, on the other hand, believed that value was created by workers.  His theory was that value is created when a group of workers take raw materials and turn them into a finished product.  In the view of Marx it is the work itself that creates value.  In his view, because it’s the work that creates value, the profits of an enterprise should go to the workers for adding value, not to the owners for taking on risk.  In “The Communist Manifesto” Marx and Engels wrote exactly about this: that workers would rise up and take over the “means of productions”.  Fed up with substandard wages and horrible working conditions workers would say enough is enough and rebel.  And this new system is EXACTLY what Marx and Engels called communism: workers owning the factories, the means of production and receiving the profits generated through the value added by their work.

Let’s get back to my earlier statement, that in spite of using the term “communist”, no country has really met the ideals of Marx and Engels.  In every one of the aforementioned countries the government, the state, owned the factories.  Now they would have claimed that the state, the government, is the people.  One only needs to look at the way dissent was handled in every one these countries to know that’s not true.  Estimates are that 20 million people were killed in Stalin’s USSR because their views didn’t align with what Stalin said they should be.  Whether it be the NKVD, the Stasi, or the KGB, every one of these of these self-named “communist” countries had a secret police force to spy on and control its citizens.

Is Kamala Harris a communist?  Not even close.  She has never said nor alluded to a belief that we need to change the ownership structure in the United States.  She believes that workers should be paid a fair wage for their work.  That healthcare is a human right.  That people shouldn’t go hungry because they can’t afford food.  That education matters and everyone should have access to a high quality education system.  She believes in the dignity of work and that things like affordable daycare matter.  That billionaires should pay their fair share in taxes, that the way to make our country stronger is not to make the rich richer, but rather to strengthen and expand the middle class.  None of these beliefs are about workers owning factories.  Now some would say that some of these things fit under the banner of “socialism”, but that’s a discussion for another time.  I’ll let Bernie take the lead on that one.

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