Is Communism an Issue in the 2024 Election?
Economic Policies and Socialist and Communist Realities
Donald Trump launched a new attack on Kamala Harris on Saturday August 17. He declared: “In her speech yesterday, Kamala went full communist,” he said. “Comrade Kamala announced that she wants to institute socialist price controls. You saw that never worked before … it will cause rationing, hunger and skyrocketing prices.” In addition to calling Harris a Communist, Trump on August 19, 2024, blasted Harris’s father, as a “Marxist professor.”
Trump’s use of the terms “Communist,” “Comrade,” and “Marxist” against Harris and her father are nothing new. I’ll elaborate on that in a moment, but first let’s look at Harris’s economic ideas and what to make of Trump’s critique of them and of his alternative policies.
Harris’s Economic Proposals and Trump’s Ideas
The Harris campaign is not proposing price controls but rather "the first-ever federal ban on price gouging on food and groceries" and a “crack down on unfair mergers and acquisitions that give big food corporations the power to jack up food and grocery prices and undermine the competition that allows all businesses to thrive while keeping prices low for consumers.”
Democrats have a long history of rhetorical opposition to monopolies. They moved away from that impetus during the Clinton years, a period that saw significant deregulation of corporations. In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, Elizabeth Warren’s vision led to the establishment of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Since its establishment in 2011, according to director Rohit Chopra, the agency “has returned $20.7 billion to consumers through law enforcement activity.” In 2021, President Biden issued an executive order affirming that the policy of his administration was “to enforce the antitrust laws to combat the excessive concentration of industry, the abuses of market power, and the harmful effects of monopoly and monopsony.” Thus far, the administration succeeded in lowering drug prices for Medicare recipients.
In our corporate-dominated economy, government action to provide price relief is popular with consumers. As with so many other issues, Trump is using negative labels and false generalizations to scare voters away from considering his rival’s ideas. In this environment, contemplation of more radical ideas such as nationalizing companies that dominate their industry are off the table.
The Harris campaign is recommending new help to renters and first-time home buyers. It calls for “construction of 3 million new housing units in the next four years, outlines actions for creating a fairer rental market, and proposes $25,000 in downpayment support for first-time homeowners.” Far from being a socialist or communist goal, this is a very modest proposal. According to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, “there is a shortage of more than 7 million affordable homes for our nation's 10.8 million plus extremely low-income families.” Those families are not the only ones in need of affordable homes. What about moderate income workers, the young people living with parents who would like a home of their own, and the new families that will come into being over the next four years? The shortage of affordable housing is a big part of the reason that 580,000 people are homeless “on any given night.” A housing expert I consulted put the current total need for new housing units at 15 million.
What is Trump’s position on housing? Fortune magazine describes his record as president as supporting suburbanites’ NIMBY -- not in my backyard -- preference. His current approach to housing includes another feature from his presidency, the creation of Opportunity Zones with tax incentives to spur investment with little regulation. Few of the past projects assisted low-income individuals’ housing needs.[1]
Although Harris is not proposing price controls, it is worth noting that Trump has it exactly wrong. Price controls are not socialist, but have, in fact, been used several times in U.S. history to address inflation in the capitalist economy. Price controls were especially effective during World War II thanks to the participation of many thousands of consumers in monitoring prices. During that period, near full employment, strong unions, and price controls produced an increase in real wages.
There is a quarter-truth in Trump’s anti-communist rant on price controls. When countries have socialist economies, housing is affordable, subsidized, and rent controlled. In the U.S., the often left-led working-class tenants’ groups have played important roles in campaigns for rent control. In an essay entitled “‘Universal Rent Control’ Is the Left-Wing Dream That’s Actually Happening,” Ankita Rao describes both successes such as the recent passage of legislation in Oregon as well as the challenges tenant activists face.[2]
On issues other than housing and price gouging, the Harris approach offers some benefits for working people. The Democratic platform calls for an increase in the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour, an expanded child tax credit and passage of several pro-union laws including the PRO Act and the Public Service Freedom to Negotiate Act. They also favor increasing taxes on the wealthy and corporations. Whether such measures get implemented will depend on whether Democrats get a working liberal majority in Congress and grass roots mobilization to support such measures.
Trump’s economic policies, on the other hand, emphasize increased tariffs and shifting the tax burden from the rich and corporations to the rest of the population. Project 2025, the plan Trump’s allies have prepared for the new administration, proposes cutting the corporate tax rate, imposing a national consumer tax, gutting National Labor Relations Board enforcement of the country’s labor laws, and abolishing the Consumer Protection Financial Board.
The differences between the domestic policy agendas of the two parties are clearcut. The Republicans’ approach favors more power to the rich and the corporations. The Democrats put forward proposals of benefit to working people. Trump’s authoritarian aspirations, moreover, mean his reelection threatens the limited freedom working people have to make their own decisions about their personal and family lives and to pursue collective action to advance their interests.
Trump’s Red-Baiting
Trump’s name-calling against those who he wishes to disparage is not new nor is his use of the communist label. In a speech in Columbus, Georgia on June 10, 2023, Trump claimed: “We’re right at the tipping point. Now we are leaning toward deep state but [the term] deep state isn’t strong enough. it’s really a Communist, Marxist country.” Apparently forgetting that the U.S. in his view was already a Communist country, Trump declared two weeks later at the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s conference: “We’re going to keep foreign, Christian-hating communists, Marxists and socialists out of America.”
Austin Sarat provides an insightful analysis of how and why Trump came to rely on anti-communism in a 2023 essay in Politico. Trump learned the effectiveness of red-baiting and bulltying tactics from his mentor Roy Cohn, chief counsel on Joseph McCarthy’s Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. Sarat explains that Trump has been labelling opponents as Communists and Socialists since he entered the political arena in 2015 and attacked Senator Bernie Sanders as a ““a socialist-slash-communist ... He’s going to tax you people at 90 percent; he’s going to take everything!” As Sarat explains, “He wants his followers to fear what the people and institutions he calls communist will do to those who don’t share their world view — including to the former president himself.”
Communism and Socialism
There are many varieties of socialism and communism. Trump, of course, is not attempting to provide a critique of any version of either ideology or system but rather to stir fear in a public that continues to see and read anti-communist stories in the mainstream media and in outlets funded by right-wing billionaires. He also relies on the receptivity of two specific groups: Americans brought up during the cold war red scare and immigrants and their descendants who had negative experiences in Communist-led countries.
The most maligned socialists and communists are those in Communist-led countries that brought the biggest changes in the lives of millions of people, providing guaranteed jobs, low-cost housing, comprehensive health care, and free education from the primary grade through college and professional schools.
That there are divisions today within the communist movement and between socialists and communists is a consequence of past debates and an increasingly diverse and complex world with a previously unimagined gap between the rich and the rest of the population. I recently came across a short early work by Frederick Engels, Karl Marx’s partner, that has some worthwhile ideas and advice still relevant today.
In the Principles of Communism, written in October or November 1847, Engels discusses the differences between democratic socialists and communists and the possibility of the two groups working together. Engels notes that:
“democratic socialists . . . favor some of the same measures the communists advocate . . . not as part of the transition to communism, however, but as measures which they believe will be sufficient to abolish the misery and evils of present-day society.
“These democratic socialists are either proletarians who are not yet sufficiently clear about the conditions of the liberation of their class, or they are representatives of the petty bourgeoisie, a class which, prior to the achievement of democracy and the socialist measures to which it gives rise, has many interests in common with the proletariat.
“It follows that, in moments of action, the communists will have to come to an understanding with these democratic socialists, and in general to follow as far as possible a common policy with them – provided that these socialists do not enter into the service of the ruling bourgeoisie and attack the communists.-“It is clear that this form of co-operation in action does not exclude the discussion of differences.”
Engels was here describing a version of what in the 1930s the Communist movement called for: a united front (of working-class parties) and a popular front (an alliance of all democratic groups opposed to fascism).
Once again, today we need a popular front in our country, a front to oppose the threat to individual rights, unions, and democracy represented by the far-right Trumpist Republican Party. At the same time, this popular front needs to represent the humanistic impulses of the majority that opposes imperialism and acts in solidarity with the oppressed of the world. Today, this means especially ending the genocide in Gaza.
Communists and left-wing socialists within the popular front will promote a socialist world view – political power to the working class, nationalization of the commanding heights of the economy, and an economy planned to meet the needs of all, especially poor and working people, those unable to work and retirees, and the children.
Notes
[1]. National Low Income Housing Coaltion, “Harris Campaign Releases Plans to Lower Housing Costs,” august 19, 2024, https://nlihc.org/resource/harris-campaign-releases-plans-lower-housing-costs accessed August 22, 2024;“Trump Rally in North Carolina,” August 15, 2024, < https://www.rev.com/blog/transcripts/trump-rally-in-north-carolina> accessed August 22, 2024; PBS Newshour, “Trump-era Opportunity Zones meant to help low-income communities exploited by investors,” November 11, 2021, <https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/trump-era-opportunity-zones-meant-to-help-low-income-communities-exploited-by-investors> accessed August 22, 2024.
[2]. Ronald Lawson and Mark D. Naison, The Tenant Movement in New York City, 1904-1984 (1986). Available from the Internet Archive; Ankita Rao, “‘Universal Rent Control’ Is the Left-Wing Dream That’s Actually Happening,” March 6, 2019, Vice, <https://www.vice.com/en/article/universal-rent-control-is-the-left-wing-dream-thats-actually-happening/> accessed August 23, 2024.