Kamala Harris and the Future of America
by Caleb Maupin, Centre for Political Innovation £7.49

In this short but thought-provoking book, centred on the person of Vice-Presidential nominee Kamala Harris, Caleb Maupin dissects the current ruptures within the US ruling class around which the current election revolves, and the cultural developments influencing and, by implication, disarming their leftist critics. It is not written to endorse either candidate and the book’s interest will endure whoever wins on November 3.

Harris was born into the Berkeley new left of the 1960s (her father was a Marxian economist), yet the book is centred on the contrast between that background and her unedifying and disturbing political record.

As attorney general of California from 2010 to 2017 she did nothing for the poor, black constituencies she claims to represent, and has been characterised as the “Queen of mass incarceration.”

She has advocated “serious and swift and severe consequences for crime” and mocked those who would reduce crime through building more schools and fewer jails. Her office is accused of covering up sex abuse and stopping the prosecution of Steve Mnuchin, the current Treasury Secretary.

On foreign policy she is close to Israeli lobbyists, bellicose towards Russia and North Korea and opposed Trump’s proposed troop withdrawals from Afghanistan and Syria.

Maupin’s purpose is to explain Kamala Harris’s surprising rise to her current position in relation to the conflicts between different sectors of US capital.

Maupin characterises Biden and Harris as representatives of “the Eastern Establishment, the Rockefeller faction who are positioned as being ‘progressive’ and ‘globalist’ minded.”

He identifies the specific corporate interests backing them as “the biggest banks, the four super-major oil companies and the silicon-valley tech giants.” In contrast Maupin sees Trump heading a coalition including fracking companies (competing with the older established oil companies), and individuals “tied to military contractors and weapons manufacturers” as well as real estate.

Trump’s faction are interested in short-term profits and they are rooted in US-based manufacturing, hence “America First.”

Biden’s backers seek stability at home (which presumably would include punitive prison regimes) and further integration of the US economy with world markets, while implementing longer-term imperialist goals.

These divisions have also created fissures running through both main parties. Maupin shows that Harris has been groomed since 2017 by the Clintonite wing of the Democratic Party, and had to be manoeuvred into being Biden’s running mate. Hillary Clinton’s State Department, he argues, pursued a more hawkish foreign policy than the Obama/Biden White House liked.

The characterisation of the fractures within the ruling class needs further clarification as it leaves many questions hanging, but it provides a useful working hypothesis to explain the intensity of rhetoric this US election has aroused.
 
Maupin’s view is that Harris’s liberal posture and reactionary policies are “the logical conclusion of distorting leftist politics,” which he traces from 1945.

While McCarthyism wreaked havoc on the CPUSA, the role of the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) through its various magazines was “to highlight the work of anti-communist leftists.”  Its founders’ avowed aim was to undermine communist influence among intellectuals and it promoted writers, artists and musicians, many from a left-wing background, who distanced themselves from “real existing socialism.”

The CIA covertly funded the CCF, something already revealed in the work of Frances Stonor Saunders and others. Among its writers were Hannah Arendt and Susan Sontag who developed the idea of communism as a variant of fascism.

Maupin concludes that the New Left was “fake” or “synthetic” – the child of the CIA. This is an explanation which in itself appears too easy, although the fact of CIA involvement is a stubborn one.

Maupin, however, adds to the schema by beginning an analysis of the more diffuse role of Herbert Marcuse and the Frankfurt School of critical social theory, which provided the philosophical leverage through which class struggle was marginalised and emancipation was seen to come through student, women’s and black activism. These ideas informed Eurocommunism, blind-siding communist parties – the rest being history.
 
The book has weaknesses: for instance, it could do with some more references, and it has a curious diversion on Hitlerism. Nevertheless, as an outline analysis of the balance of class forces in the US it is full of illuminating insights.