One week into her campaign, Kamala Harris is trying to play both sides of the political street. Or rather, she is definitely gung-ho on the Zionist side of the street, but also making noises about how Palestinians deserve their freedom and dignity, as reflected in her spokespeople’s mumbling about the two-state delusion. This is the bone she throws to the pro-Palestian anti-genocide movement, hoping to repair some of the damage done by Biden to the Democrats’ chances in November.

But if you read and carefully parse a typical mainstream media report such as https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/25/politics/kamala-harris-israel-policy/index.html, it is obvious: she is poison.

She is not one bit better than Biden. If Genocide Joe Biden was so morally repugnant that you could not stomach a vote for him no matter how catastrophic the alternative, Killer Kamala is no different. I urge you not to be deceived. Some may be tempted to think that she must be better because a relatively young and smart woman of color is not a senile white man. This is a dangerous trap. I submit that we should judge people based on what they do and say, rather than what they are. Martin Luther King said the same thing in different words when he spoke of judging people by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin. The context was different, but the logic is the same.

Some may say, well, she skipped Crime Minister Netanhayu’s address to Congress. But she met with him privately, and her post-meeting remarks were laden with the usual lies and distortions. So what if she emerged from that meeting paying lip service to the idea that too many Palestinians have been killed. The platform of the Democratic Party is still what it is, swearing fealty to Israel’s security — code for brutal oppression against Palestinians. 

There is some good news for those who live in blue states, and whose wholly legitimate fear of Trump makes it excruciatingly painful to withhold a vote from his opponent, now matter how horrible she is. If you’re a voter in Massachussets, for example, your abstention (or protest vote, or third party vote) very probably won’t matter (https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/president-general/2024/massachusetts/).

A couple of further “good news” points are more in the manner of gallows humor. Thanks to our archaic and anti-democratic electoral college system, you can win the popular vote and still lose the election, as happened in 2016. So your vote truly might not matter no matter what. Finally, if Trump wins, he wins; if he loses, we can expect a bloodbath. I see no reason not to expect another January 6, or worse. So again, your vote might not matter. Therefore, we have nothing to lose by adhering to our principles and refusing to vote for genocide.

In fact, it’s a no-brainer. Both capitalist parties stand for war, austerity, inequality and repression. Don’t cry too hard about the fascist psychopath Trump. He is not a catastrophe that came out of nowhere, but a symptom of the terminal decay of bourgeois democracy for which the Democrats offer no solution. It should be self-evident by now that the global capitalist system, with its irrational division of the world into rival nation-states, has no sane response to the global problems confronting humankind. The one social force capable of overthrowing capitalism, establishing socialism, and getting us off the collision course with catastrophe is the international working class — the vast majority of the world’s population.

You can read more about all that at the World Socialist Web Site.