Traditionally, a good place to start would be to examine the candidate’s platform and consider its merits, point by point. The Harris campaign, unfortunately, does not appear to have a platform, at least not one posted to the public, and so we will have to rely mostly upon an analysis of her record as a politician, instead.

Political operatives of the Republican and Democratic parties have written much about Harris’ six-year stint as California’s Attorney General, and her own campaign frequently refers to that period when trying to build the case of her competence for office. Harris herself isn’t shy about discussing her work as California’s top cop, but her characterization of her work during that period the years before, when she worked as the head prosecutor in San Francisco, shifts with the political winds. One year, she describes herself as a progressive and a reformer who bravely took on the worst excesses of the Californian carceral state. When it suits her, however, the story changes, and we find instead that she had always been a hard nosed cop who worked tirelessly to protect California’s pristine suburbs. It is therefore difficult to get the measure of her without investigating this record directly.

Kamala Harris was California’s Attorney General from 2011 until her election to the United States Senate in 2017, and before that was the head prosecutor for San Francisco from 2004 until 2011. Her record during these years reflects the “tough-on-crime” era of the 1990’s and 2000’s — a period which might, arguably, be said to have opened with Joe Biden’s 1994 crime bill, now famous as the racist “superpredators” legislation which saw incarceration rates across the country soar to barbaric new heights. This was a time which, like today, saw Republican and Democratic politicians, from the Clintons to the Presidents Bush, in open competition to determine who could be the toughest on crime, lay down the longest and most draconian sentences for the most minimal offenses, and take the most racist political positions. During Kamala Harris’ tenure as the top prosecutor in California, Black people were incarcerated at a rate 9.5 times higher than their white counterparts. They were far less likely to have positive outcomes at parole hearings, and far more likely to be subject to police violence.

Then, as today, California state law mandated that prisoners do labor for the state and for private companies who contract with the state for that purpose. Refusing to work can result in write-ups, housing changes, stripping of the inmate’s rights to phone access, visitation, and ordering food or supplies. It can also affect parole considerations.   

Involuntary servitude (the term ‘slavery’ apparently having been too on the nose) is legal in California under Article I Section 6 of the state constitution, and under the 13^th Amendment to the federal one. It has been so since 1865, when the 13^th Amendment was written to provide a direct means to reinstate the slave relation that the Civil War had recently abolished. It served the triple purposes of producing a fungible, renewable, and cheap source of labor for the country’s growing economy, codifying a legal avenue for the appropriation of what meager properties Black people were then permitted to own, as well as to shore up a white supremacist hierarchy that had been teetering on the verge of collapse.

Under Attorney General Harris’ oversight, tens, possibly hundreds, of thousands of Californians were shuttled into the carceral system and subject to this “involuntary servitude.” Inmates were paid on average between 8 cents and 32 cents per hour, or between 12 dollars and 56 dollars per month, for their work for the state and the private corporations who contract with it. The jobs they were assigned then as now are menial, physically demanding, and often extremely dangerous. Prisoners are regularly deployed as firefighters during California’s increasingly severe wildfire season, cannon fodder in the capitalist state’s halfhearted fight against climate change.

Not only did Harris fail even to pay lip service to abolishing this abominable practice, she actively defended it from those who worked to curtail its worst excesses. She fought bitterly against a 2011 U.S. Supreme Court order to reduce overcrowding in California’s prisons, filing obstructionist, frivolous motions to delay or derail the order entirely, and flirted with the idea of denying that the Supreme Court even had the authority to order such a thing.

That the Supreme Court, dominated by Republicans in 2011 (and hardly a bastion of progressive or liberatory thought at any time), even ordered such a thing is telling. In the majority opinion written by conservative Justice Kennedy, it was observed that Californian prisons were over 200 percent capacity, that they saw inmate deaths due to inadequate medical facilities and staff on a weekly basis, and that they had an inmate suicide rate nearly 80% higher than the national average for prison populations. Kennedy wrote that “…in one prison, up to 50 sick inmates may be held together in a 12-by-20-foot cage for up to five hours awaiting treatment… A prisoner with severe abdominal pain died after a 5-week delay in referral to a specialist; a prisoner with ‘constant and extreme’ chest pain died after an 8-hour delay in evaluation by a doctor; and a prisoner died of testicular cancer after a ‘failure of MDs to work up for cancer in a young man with 17 months of testicular pain.’”

Harris’ office acted with such intransigence in defying the order that the Court considered finding the State of California in contempt. Observers noted that her behavior may have fallen afoul of Californian legal and ethical standards against filing motions “for an improper purpose, such as to harass or cause unnecessary delay’” The State Government was eventually defeated and forced to reduce the prison population, but not before her office argued in court that extending the proposed inmate release programs “…to all minimum custody inmates at this time would severely impact fire camp participation — a dangerous outcome while California is in the middle of a difficult fire season and severe drought”.

Simply put, the State and its Attorney General were reluctant to release any of their cheap, disposable “involuntary servants.” The regime of slavery was simply too profitable to allow it to be undermined without a fight. It is worth noting that the institution of involuntary servitude persists in California to this day. When, in 2024, she stands on stage and portrays herself as a “tough on crime top cop”, this is the record that she is looking back upon so fondly.

Shifting the focus away from Harris’ violent, racist record inside the United States, we now examine her record and position on the ongoing Palestinian genocide.

Kamala Harris has sat now for three years as the second-in-command to President Biden, during which time the administration has dispatched at least 25 billion dollars to Israel in military aid, and recently authorized at least 20 billion more. Israel has long been, since its inception in 1948, the primary recipient of U.S. military aid, but the pace of this aid has accelerated dramatically in the wake of Israel’s invasion of the Gaza Strip. Between October of 2023 and May of 2024 alone, aid to Israel totaled 12.5 billion dollars, though this data is provisional, and the actual amount is almost certainly higher. This tranche of aid accounts for about half of the total amount sent over the course of Biden’s presidency.

As evidence of Israeli atrocities mounted, as the world watched the undeniable ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Strip in real time via live-stream and reacted with indignation and rage at the inhumanity of it, Harris never broke with her President or changed course.

Rhetorically, Harris has tried to play both sides. She’s commented more than once on the need for a ceasefire. When mounting pressure from student protests across the U.S. threatened to destabilize the country and, horror of horrors, her own political prospects, Harris paid lip service to the notion of establishing a ceasefire, or, more often and more tellingly, a “pause” in the Israeli extermination campaign.

Liberals and optimists alike might have been tempted to find some small shred of hope at that, and perhaps by Israel’s apparent willingness to discuss the possibility, but those fantasies were blown away when, on July 31, Israel assassinated Ismail Haniyeh, political leader of Hamas and the negotiator on their behalf, in his private room in Tehran.

Harris was now caught in a difficult position. Her halfhearted calls for a ceasefire suddenly seemed less convincing when her side had just murdered the very man that ceasefire negotiations might be made with, and therefore foreclosed on the possibility of any negotiations in the most spectacular possible way. Indeed, her refusal to denounce Israel in the aftermath of Haniyeh’s assassination, or for that matter the assassination of senior Hezbollah member Fuad Shukr the day before, reveals the naked cynicism of her words.

She has hardly had a sharp word for Israel since. Not since the clearly terroristic assassination of its negotiating partner, not since the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Bibi Netanyahu and members of his government on war crime charges, not since the release of reports estimating that over 186,000 Palestinians, fully 8 percent of Gaza’s pre-war population, have been shot, starved, beaten, and bombed to death. She didn’t even have anything to say on July 29 when, in a fit of sociopathic rage, mobs of Israeli fascists stormed a prison facility to release a soldier who was being held there on charges of brutally gang raping a Palestinian prisoner.

Since then, the most notable thing the Harris campaign has had to say on the matter of the ongoing genocide is that she is categorically opposed to an arms embargo on Israel. Publicly, she shouted down a group of pro-Palestine protesters at one of her rallies in Michigan on August 7, admonishing them for mentioning the genocide of the Palestinians and telling them that “If you want Donald Trump to win, then say that. Otherwise, I’m speaking,” before security ejected them from the event.

Kamala Harris is guilty of lying about many things, but when she says that her support for the genocidal Zionist project will never waver, she does appear to be speaking the truth. This steadfast and unbreakable support for the blood soaked colonialists occupying Palestine is hardly unique among American politicians, and a particularly generous (or naive) reader might be tempted to point this out. But then, vocal and energetic opposition to racial genocide has rarely been common among politicians who are actively engaged in it. One wonders who among the active politicians in 1940’s Germany might have represented the “lesser of two evils.”

Harris has walked in lockstep with Joe Biden and the right wing of the Democratic party every step of the way. She issued vocal support for Biden when he crushed the nascent rail workers strike in 2022. She’s been actively heading up the administration’s approach to immigration along the U.S. southern border, where ever more draconian tactics dominate. Deportations are on track to be higher under Biden’s administration than they ever were under Trump and, having apparently forgotten that she once pretended to have a problem with “children in cages,” Harris now weaponizes this brutal and racist record to outflank her Republican opponent on the right.

Recently, the Vice President was subject to a substantial amount of pressure from the U.S. working class over her choice of running mate. For a time, there was every indication that Josh Shapiro was her favored candidate, being as how he is the governor of Pennsylvania, a critically important swing state. Shapiro hit immediate opposition from the left, who cried out that he is a fanatical zionist who volunteered for and served six months in the Israeli occupation military earlier in life, and who penned racist tirades against the “battle-minded” and “belligerent” Arab people.

This didn’t seem to change Harris’s calculus on the issue though, and for weeks it seemed she would name him as her running mate at any moment. Shortly before a decision had to be made, however, a story broke about how in 2022, then-Attorney General Josh Shapiro’s office concluded that Ellen Greenberg, a victim who had been found in 2011 dead with 20 stab wounds on her body, had died by “suicide” rather than been murdered by her fiancé. Shapiro later had to refer the case to a different office after it became public that he had connections to Greenberg’s fiancé’s family, and thus had a conflict of interest.

This, apparently, was too much for the Harris campaign, and shortly thereafter they announced that Tim Walz would be her running mate instead. Walz cuts a public persona as an affable, easy-going, white suburban dad. He is the sitting governor of Minnesota, a position that he’s held since 2019. While he hasn’t, as far as this author is aware, covered up any murder cases for family friends, he isn’t free of the zionist charge that marred Shapiro either. On August 6 of this year, Yinam Cohen, a Consul General of Israel to the U.S., publicly thanked Walz for “deepening the Israel-Minnesota partnership” and “…for standing with Israel during our darkest hour.” The Twitter post was accompanied by a photo of the two, shaking hands in front of the United States and Israeli occupation flags.

Tim Walz is likely more recognizable, though, as the governor who called in the U.S. National Guard without hesitation to put down the George Floyd Uprising in 2020 and to occupy the cities of Minneapolis, St. Paul, and the surrounding areas. Thousands of National Guardsmen stormed the streets and fired indiscriminately into protesters and uninvolved onlookers alike. They demonstrated spectacular brutality, beating and arresting hundreds and abandoning even the pretense of acting within legal or proportional bounds.

A recently viral audio recording of then-President Trump from that period is enlightening. In it, Trump recounts how he had been in regular contact with Walz during the protests, how he’d asked the Governor to send in the National Guard, and how deeply impressed he’d been with the way that Walz had handled the events. He said that Walz is an “excellent guy” and that “what they did in Minneapolis was incredible. They went in and dominated, and it happened immediately.” He goes on to explain that Walz is on the phone and, addressing the Governor, says “I was very happy with the last couple of days, Tim, you called up big numbers and the big numbers knocked them out so fast it was like bowling pins.”

Odd Trumpian language notwithstanding, it is very clear that in that acute moment of crisis for American capitalism and class society, Donald Trump and Tim Walz are much more similar than they are different. At that juncture, when the structure of capital itself was at risk — when the colonial capitalist state’s inherent antagonism towards the working and racialized masses was exposed — the party lines disappeared and Walz, and the rest of the Democrats, joined hand in hand with Trump to put down the threat from below. The Harris-Walz campaign intentionally shared that audio clip to make a hypocrite of Trump on the campaign trail, but all it does is show the complete moral bankruptcy of both campaigns, both parties.

Harris claims to be a progressive, but she has the record of a brutal reactionary. She pretends that her campaign is about smashing glass ceilings and empowering women and people of color, but she has made a career of oppressing women and Black people, and is directly involved in the ongoing genocide of the Palestinians. She begs the workers to believe her when she says that she is the sane alternative to another four years of a fascist Donald Trump, but then she positions to the right of his campaign and criticizes him for being weak.

Like a chameleon who never really got the hang of its trade, Harris shifts her colors but never very convincingly, and hopes her audience has forgotten how she appeared a moment before. Unfortunately for her and her ilk, the working class and the oppressed of the world aren’t that gullible.

On the night of February 21st 2022 in Providence, Rhode Island, the Red Ink Community Library’s “Red Book Day,” which gathered anti-capitalist forces from around the state in the form of anarchists, socialists, and Communists for a celebration of the anniversary of the Communist Manifesto, was cut short by shrieked racist slurs and sieg heils. It was only forty-five minutes into the reading when a bloc of fascists, adorned with sonnenrads and SS symbols, arrived to bait the Communists and fellow travelers into a physical confrontation. The assembled leftists showed more bravery and self control than the neo-Nazis had anticipated, and when the incident was said and done everybody walked away unharmed. Even so, the boldness and belligerence of the neo-Nazi attack and the fact that they were were not only prepared for, but hoping to provoke an exchange of street violence, reveals the danger their formations pose to organizers in Rhode Island.

It is critical to understand that this is not an isolated incident. Openly-fascist organizing is not new to Rhode Island, just as it isn’t new to any other state in the U.S. Empire. The attack on Red Ink fits neatly not only into the deeply reactionary, blood-soaked history of this settler-republic, but also tracks with an observed uptick in violent right-wing and paramilitary activity in New England generally, and Rhode Island specifically.

Two organizations, Patriot Front, which is a broad fascist organization headquartered in Texas, and NSC-131, a self declared neo-Nazi organization, are responsible for the bulk of fascist activity in Rhode Island. Both are a product of a milieu of new fascist organization that bubbles up from, and finds fertile soil in, a white suburban petit-bourgeoisie that finds itself increasingly subject to downward pressure and proletarianization. On the national stage, Patriot Front has launched a campaign of violent terror and reactionary propaganda against left-wing organizations and marginalized groups across the country. An accounting of all of Patriot Front’s vile acts is beyond the scope of this piece, but notably the organization recently found national attention after 31 of its masked and uniformed members, armed with bludgeoning weapons, knives, and handguns, were arrested in Washington State on their way to attack a local Pride parade. NSC-131 (“Nationalist Social Club,” an intentional nod to National Socialism, and 131 for ACA: Anti-Communist-Action) has a smaller, more regional footprint, operating in New England and based mainly in New Hampshire.

Between them and their partners the Proud Boys, as well as various presumably unorganized fascist elements in the area, a major intensification of fascist activity is sweeping the state. According to the Anti-Defamation League (a liberal organization with dubious politics which nevertheless offers systemic tracking of certain types of fascist activity), Rhode Island saw an increase of 384% in terms of incidents of white supremacist activity as measured by propaganda actions between 2019 and 2021. Propaganda depicting NSC as a white vanguard defending New England against a Black and Jewish “assault” has been distributed in several Providence suburbs and the city itself. According to the Providence Journal, in July members of NSC-131 were apprehended by East Providence police having just posted their racist flyers at the Gordon School on Maxfield Avenue, an institution that teaches children as young as five and as old as thirteen, and which touts itself as a leader in progressive and inclusive education in the state. It should be noted that the local police did not arrest the fascists because of an objection to the content of their propaganda, but rather because East Providence has a law against stapling paper to light posts and because the fascists refused to identify themselves when asked.

The attack on Red Ink is not alone; the local office of Black Lives Matter Providence was also attacked by fascists in December of 2021.

All the evidence points towards a steady increase in right-fascist numbers, determination, and organizational strength. Their campaign of terror and repression against the nationally oppressed, and against LGBT persons and persons of oppressed genders, in Rhode Island demonstrates conclusively that the most violent reactionaries have entered a new phase in the past few years, one in which their forces strengthen themselves and coalesce with ever increasing ferocity and speed.

As Communists, we understand that fascism is but the most naked, most brutal expression of the bourgeois dictatorship. We understand that American fascism traces its roots back not just to the legacy of Hitler and Mussolini, but back further, through the history of the Ku Klux Klan and the genocidal slave regime of the old south; through the settler militias which raped, murdered, and expropriated their way across an entire continent of indigenous peoples. We know that Patriot Front and NSC-131 and all the rest are the inheritors of the legacy of those who, by force of arms and fire and terror, brought down Reconstruction and foreclosed the possibility of a democratic revolution in the Black Belt, plunging millions of ex-slaves back into the most inhuman living conditions and ensuring that the centuries-old regime of white supremacy would continue to rule over the land unthreatened. These forces, working with the support, sometimes open, sometimes cloaked, of the imperialist ruling class, draw their foot soldiers from among the dissatisfied white male suburbanites and put them to work suppressing any movement which threatens the dictatorship of capital and the reign of white supremacy. The more conditions in North America worsen, the more profits dry up, the more the internal contradictions of capitalist society sharpen, the more emboldened these most reactionary of capital’s defenders will become; and, indeed, the more the capitalist bourgeoisie will rely on them to do their dirty work.

The workers, the nationally oppressed, LGBT persons, non-men, and everyone who stands on the side of progress and liberty must stand firm and stand together in the face of the fascist terror. We must turn to community self-defense and self-organization to turn capital’s foot soldiers away from our neighborhoods, our cities, and our childrens’ schools. We must be clear that antifascist street tactics can and do work when deployed by a determined, organized community. This does not mean seeking out and violently engaging the organized fascist right at the first opportunity. Launching ourselves ill-prepared against Patriot Front or NSC-131, challenging them on an individual basis in the streets, or allowing them to bait us into a confrontation that can only happen on their terms, things might satisfy our sense of justice or our immediate desire to engage in the struggle in a real and visceral way, but a rejection of studied tactics won’t make our communities any safer. Worse, when we are unprepared or unorganized and we engage on the terms set by the right fascists, it merely strengthens their resolve and increases their numbers. It is only through superior organization that we can carry the day.

Obviously, we cannot rely on the police to defend us. They support the American white supremacist status quo and many — a great many — individual officers are sympathetic to (or are actually members of) fascist organizations. We must rely on each other, instead. 

Talk to your neighbors, organize open and frank public conversations among those in your neighborhood who reject the encroachment of white supremacists into their streets. Develop plans for neighborhood watches in areas targeted by the fascists for propagandizing and recruitment. Educate yourself and your neighbors about self-defense and first aid. Prepare to send defenders to the Planned Parenthoods and mosques and synagogues and protests and marches and anywhere else the fascists dare to show their faces. Strengthen your connections with your community so that you can stand up against the enemy and teach them that the oppressed masses of this country will not be cowed by the fascist terror. 

Lake Mead, the largest reservoir in the United States, is drying up. Its destruction threatens the lives of over 20 million people across the southwestern United States and northwestern Mexico, and is a direct consequence of capitalist extractive processes. The lake itself is an artificial reservoir east of Las Vegas, formed by the construction of the Hoover Dam on the Colorado River in 1935. It was intended to supply water and hydroelectricity to the rapidly growing urban areas of the Mojave desert which were developed, in part, to help secure the West against the possibility of reclamation by the region’s Indigenous peoples. For nearly a century it has, but climate change and recklessly irresponsible use of the Colorado’s water now imperils the lake’s, and, therefore, millions of the most vulnerable and oppressed people across the whole region’s, continued existence.

The climate naturally goes through periods of drought. Historically, these droughts have been damaging to those who experience them, but the relatively lower density of population and agriculture in the area meant that the threat was more local and of a smaller scale than the danger posed today. The Las Vegas metropolitan area has grown from a population of 708,000 in 1990 to over 2,800,000 in 2022 according to US Census Bureau data.

The drought currently afflicting the U.S. west began in the year 2000, twenty-two years ago. According to a UCLA research paper analyzing soil moisture, this 22-year period has been the driest of any, going back twelve hundred years. Let’s put that in perspective: this has been the driest period in the southwestern US at least as far back as the year 800 C.E., and possibly even farther. 2021 alone, they say, was probably drier than any other year in the last three centuries, and likely ranks 10th or 11th driest since the year 800. While drought is inevitable in such arid regions as the American southwest, their research demonstrates that fully 42% of the soil moisture anomaly of 2000-2021 was caused by anthropogenic — man-made — climate change.

Local and federal agencies have monitored water levels at Lake Mead very closely since the area was first flooded in 1935. The water has fallen over 170 feet between 1998 and July of this year, threatening to pitch the lake over into “dead pool” status, at which point the levels will be too low to extract power from via the Hoover Dam’s hydroelectric turbines. In fact, had several of those turbines not been retrofitted between 2011 and 2016, the lake would already be a dead pool today. As it stands, a further reduction of 90 feet from levels recorded in August of this year would make it impossible for the dam to function at all.

Lake Mead supplies drinking water to millions across the southwest, but it also serves another function. According to the Bureau of Reclamation, about 75% of the reservoir’s water outflow flows directly from the lake into Nevada’s and Arizona’s farmlands, fueling an agribusiness sector which focuses on the industrial production of highly water-intensive monocrops. None of these are native: lettuce, kale, almonds, and pistachios rely on the water from Lake Mead, as does extensive dairy farming. Yuma County, in fact, is the country’s largest supplier of iceberg lettuce and Arizona as a whole produces almost 30% of the country’s supply of the winter vegetable despite the incongruous-sounding fact that it’s a desert.

Should water levels at Lake Mead fall, the turbines that provide over 300 megawatts of energy to customers primarily in California and Arizona would shut down. People in those states, as well as those in Las Vegas which recently started drawing energy from the dam, would see a significant hike in energy prices, compounding with already historically high costs associated with natural gas fired energy. The power grid won’t fail, but coal and gas will have to be fired to cut the shortfall.

If the water line falls below that minimum level necessary to keep water flowing through the turbines, all of the Colorado River south of the Hoover Dam will be cut off from its headwaters. That would be catastrophic for communities that draw from the river below the dam, especially in California and Arizona which use the river extensively for both residential and agricultural use. Up to a third of Southern California’s water is drawn from the Colorado south of the dam. If the bourgeois authorities permit the Colorado to stop flowing, the entire environment will be destabilized.

The danger to Lake Mead is disproportionately a threat to the Indigenous people who rely on it. The western U.S. states allocate water rights by seniority; those who had the first allocations take priority. This had the, presumably, unintentional side-effect of working in the favor of Indigenous claimants to water resources, as those claims date back to the 19th century. Collectively, members of the Colorado River Basin Ten Tribes Partnership enjoy the rights to 2.8 million acre-feet of water from the river and its tributaries. Yet, these communities lack the funds and infrastructure to make use of the water Non-Indigenous water users often take the “remaining” water that the Indigenous nations cannot use once the year is out. In a period of tightening water supply and increasingly fierce competition for rights to the existing allocations, this provides a dangerous incentive to attack the remaining rights of the Indigenous peoples in the southwest. The quiet expropriation of the waters of the Colorado and its diversion away from Indigenous peoples to sustain unsustainably large settler monocrop farms is a hidden dimension of this struggle; it’s yet another expression of settler-colonial relations within the U.S. Empire.

Agriculture is by far the largest use of Colorado water by Indigenous peoples. While most non-Indigenous farmland in the basin is devoted to the industrial production of high-profit monocrops like almonds, the majority of Indigenous agricultural land consists of subsistence farms and other small agricultural plots. According to the USDA’s 2017 agricultural census, in Arizona nearly 70% of farmland is owned by Indigenous producers, who collectively account for about 2% of the state’s total agricultural revenue and in that year, 73% of Indigenous operated farms grossed under $1,000 in revenue. USDA figures also reflect that between 2007 and 2017, Indigenous owned land was reduced by over 600,000 acres, though that document cannot offer an explanation for this loss. White farm operators, however, held a small minority of the state’s farmland, only 24%, and collected a truly staggering 96% of the state’s agricultural revenue. 

This data paints a picture of an indigenous agricultural sector in Arizona that’s operated primarily by subsistence farmers and people who cultivate the soil to supplement the food they’re able to buy with regular wages. The destruction of the primary agricultural water source would have a distinctly different effect on them than it would for the white petit-bourgeois and bourgeois agricultural operators in other parts of the state. For the Indigenous peoples, already some of the most acutely impoverished in the country, the loss of the waters of the Colorado River represents not just the promise of an unprofitable year or the bankruptcy of individual producers, but an existential threat to their whole communities.

Monopoly capitalists, the engine of the U.S. Empire’s economy, perhaps sensing blood in the water, have descended upon the southwest hoping to collect on the peoples’ increasingly desperate situation. According to the New York Times, such giants of finance as MassMutual, a conglomerate based in Springfield, Massachusetts, are buying up water rights in rural agricultural towns in the region and selling them at a staggering profit to fast-growing urban centers like Phoenix and its suburbs. Panic is setting in among circles in the major cities, and a savvy capitalist can leverage that fear and uncertainty to promote bidding wars between cities for the rights to water allocations appropriated from the poorer, economically and politically weaker, rural communities. In their wake, they leave isolated towns and counties full of workers and petit-bourgeois landholders struggling to pay water bills that have skyrocketed over the span of just a few short years. This is not an unexpected, accidental byproduct of the commodification of water — it’s an intentional decision made by the vultures who nest on Wall Street half a continent away.

Volatility in this newly emerging water market (which the New York Times compares to the energy bubbles of the 1990s, made infamous by the spectacular collapse of Enron in 2001), the steady and uninterrupted escalation of prices, and the vice-like squeeze on the people of the southwest make this a prime target for capitalists looking for profitable opportunities for investment in the face of looming recession and economic crisis. 

As the lake starts to run dry, as the flow of water slows and the power provided by the Hoover Dam falls off, the negotiators for the states that draw from the Colorado River Basin seek to protect agribusiness that produces revenue measured in the tens of billions of dollars annually at the expense of the most vulnerable in the region. In June, the federal Bureau of Reclamation gave seven states – Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Wyoming, and Utah – a deadline to determine how they would draw 15% less water from the river in 2023, or else have a plan drafted and imposed on them. That deadline is fast approaching, and, at the time of writing, negotiators representing the concerned states are locked in increasingly bitter disagreement over who among them should shoulder the brunt of the cuts. States in the upper basin argue that those in the lower basin should suffer the most drastic cuts, owing to the fact that they draw the majority of the water. Lower basin states retort that the upper basin should instead have its ration cut, considering that those states usually don’t make use of all the water they have negotiated for in the past, and because their contention that they need to keep the extra to accommodate future growth is a secondary priority in such a time of crisis.

We need to be absolutely clear on this point: this conflict is among and between the ruling classes of those states, not the workers. The figures they manipulate and throw at each other like hand grenades and the stakes at play during these negotiations are measured not in lives or the peoples’ health, but in future profit estimates for the richest residents and business owners. At the end of the current negotiation cycle, even if the federal government has to step in and impose a rationing plan upon them like a referee separating violent players on the field, whatever plan is agreed upon will still see over 70% of the Colorado’s waters diverted for an unsustainable agricultural industry. It will still see rising costs for the workers and the continued expropriation of Indigenous property (along with the revocation of the few rights the bourgeois state still pretends to recognize), and will still invite the barons of capital to descend with ever-increasing ferocity upon this suffering region.

James Eklund, formerly the head of Colorado’s water management, stands as a shining example of the priorities of the capitalists. Speaking on the developing water crisis, he says “I have seen time and again the wisdom of using incentives that attract private sector investment and innovation. Dealing with the threat of climate change to our water requires all sectors, public and private, working together.” Eklund isn’t unaware of the predatory nature of capital’s creation of, and intervention into, the water market. In declaring that the only solution to this crisis is to open the floodgates to capital and the commodification of water itself, Eklund says, without shame, that he stands on the side of the vultures and robber barons who would sharpen a humanitarian catastrophe for the promise of healthy profits in the futures markets. Here, he speaks not as an individual but as the representative of the entire bourgeois class and the government they’ve erected to defend their class dictatorship. These are the jackals who are negotiating for 40 million people’s access to water. They have every intention of leaving the people of the Colorado River Basin and every community that draws upon it to a slow, choking death; just as the bourgeois government has turned its back on the suffering caused by COVID.

This period, when public awareness of the water crisis is at its peak, when the nature of the ruling class’ nihilistic and reckless disregard for our health and the health of our environment is the most plain for all to see, offers the working class an opportunity to take advantage of the cracks in ruling class unity and to push for a more sustainable, humane solution to the water crisis. We can only make that happen if we act together. Educate yourselves and your neighbors about the destruction being intentionally visited upon us by the extractive policies of the rich. Build bridges with the communities most affected by the new plan for ecocide being negotiated by the State governments, especially the Indigenous peoples of the region and the many, many exploited migrant workers who are forced to toil in inhumane conditions in the southwest’s agricultural fields. March against the unjust and unsustainable deals made between those who’s only conceivable risk in all of this is the loss of profits, and announce to them that the working class rejects as a matter of principle the notion that the richest exploiters have the right to bargain away the peoples’ future in exchange for profits.

It is crucial that the workers take for themselves an independent seat at the negotiating table. Direct organization of the working class, and its exercise of political power, is necessary to protect not only the white working class communities of the southwest, but to help secure the very existence of the Indigenous peoples under attack.

If a deal is agreed upon by the states without the direct input of the working class, or imposed upon them by the federal government, the workers must demand its repeal and replacement by one written entirely by our class, without the input of the exploiters. The working class and the oppressed are the only groups in whose interests it is to build a sustainable, just future. The capitalists are willing to sacrifice every tomorrow for today.

We must seize the opportunity, today, to begin crafting it or else resign ourselves to a future of ever worsening environmental disaster and poverty.