July 30, 2024 • 39 mins
Mia and James venture into the depths of Kamala Harris’ Dad’s fusion of Marxian and post-Keynesian economics and root out the truth about Donald Harris' Marxism.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
All Media.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Welcome to kit Appy here a podcast where I Mia
Wong have read Kamala Harris's dad. Donald Harris's book. This
is the podcast that you're listening to now with me
to experience this actually genuinely fairly interesting work of political
economy is James Stout.
Speaker 3 (00:24):
Hi, man, I'm so excited to know what Donald has
for us today. Me too.
Speaker 2 (00:29):
I'm you know, I'm I'm of a bunch of minds
of this book because I think the actual key element
of this book, which is called Capital Accumulation and Income Distribution,
is that it is unbelievably technically dense. You know. Okay,
we're gonna get into the book. First, we sort of
we should talk a bit about who Donald Harris is.
(00:50):
So a lot of the focus around this is Kamala
Harris is the presumptive Democratic nominees dad, so a lot
of the media coverage around him is around him being
a Marxist. This is debatable, obviously, is what I like
conclusion I'm going to come out of this with.
Speaker 3 (01:07):
I am shocked that people in our media today might
misunderstand basic things about Marxism and who is and he's
not a Marxist.
Speaker 2 (01:14):
Yeah, I mean, I think. But so the thing about
this book, so this book is from nineteen seventy eight,
which is actually after he had broken up with Kamala's mom,
and so Kamala doesn't like know him super well.
Speaker 3 (01:27):
Was he like not present in her younger life.
Speaker 2 (01:29):
Kamala's mom and dad divorced when she was like five,
was like four or five. So this is this is
written about a decade after that.
Speaker 3 (01:36):
Yeah, much like the New American Communist Party, like a
lot a lot of divorce guys just love to be communist.
It's a thing about divorce guys.
Speaker 2 (01:43):
Oh god. Yeah. So you know, one of the sort
of the thing everyone kind of cites about, like Tom
Harris's politics, that he was in this sort of like
Black Studies, like I guess proto Black Studies group that
produced a bunch of like black panthers, produced a lot
of very radical people. But you know, the interesting thing
about Donald Harris is that he is not the Marxist
(02:07):
that you would expect to see coming out of sort
of like that Miliu because those people's Marxism, you know,
I mean, he is very interested in sort of underdevelopment
and you know, sort of like imperialism. But he's he's
not well from one of the sort of like Baoist
inflected kinds of Marxism, which are the kinds that tended
to be sort of floating around like that time. He
(02:31):
in fact, he is a very very rare kind of Marxist,
which is to say, well, A, he doesn't call himself
a Marxist. He calls himself a Marxi in the entire time.
But b yeah, intolerable and we don't understand what this is.
So there's a very famous marx quote where he's complaining
about I think it was something the German Social Democratic
Party did or something where he where people are calling
(02:51):
themselves Marxists, and he goes, and this is what if
this is what Marxism is, and I am not a Marxist.
And so for one hundred years since then, one hundred
and fifty years, people have been calling them those Marxians
instead of Marxists. This is all over that book.
Speaker 3 (03:03):
I'm developing a picture of a kind of guy, Oh yeah,
panting maat Rich portrait man.
Speaker 2 (03:09):
Yeah. So but the interesting part is he's what's known
as a post Kanesian. And weirdly, dear listeners, you are
you are some of the only people in this entire country.
You have a prayer of knowing who these people are,
because we've actually had a bunch of them on the show.
If people remember the episodes that I did about inflation
over the last sort of like year, I guess, like
two years. I don't know's it's been a long time,
(03:30):
but the episode's about inflation that we did with with
the folks over at Strange Matters. Those people are the
sort of the int one of one of the groups
that are the intellectual heirs to sort of post Kanesianism.
It's a you know, I guess it's post Kansianism is
kind of it's I guess it's like the largest of
what's called the heterodox economics uh schools. We're going to
(03:51):
get more into what it is later because it's not
just like, you know, so it's post Kanesian after like
John Vader Kines, it's not really Canes and that's gonna
become very important as second. But you know, this this
is sort of an issue because it means that it's
actually it's really really hard for a normal person to
figure out what the fuck is going on with this book.
And this is something that I discovered, you know, partially
(04:11):
just from reading it, and partially also I mean this like,
I have a pretty good background to do this, because
I know a lot of postcinsine economics and I also
have studied a lot of marks, and you need both
of those to be able to write about this. However,
come I discovered two hours before this recording. I discovered
that the economist had set some hack who they refused
to name, to write about this book, and this person managed, okay,
(04:35):
on top of just like straight up, like not literally,
their explanation of what the book is about is simply wrong.
In just four paragraphs, they managed to make an error
so egregious that I if I had turned this shit
into my professor's in college, you would have failed before it.
So okay, okay. So one of the things the author
talks about is this thing called the Cambridge Capital controversy,
(04:56):
and this author claims that this controversy was fought between
the ne and post Kansians. Now, this is probably gibberish
to like ninety nine percent of people listening to this,
but in terms of heterodox economics, this is the equivalent
of not knowing who fought in World War Two, Like
this is the Cambridge Catro controversy. Is it's it's basically
these single moments in which this kind of like, this
(05:17):
kind of heterodox economics appears onto the economic scene in
a way that like they were able to force the
sort of mainstream neoclassical economists to take to pay attention to.
And this battle should, like intellectually should have completely destroyed
all of neoclassical economics. Right, everything you've ever heard about
how price equal supply and demand like so all those curves,
(05:38):
all of that is fucking bullshit. All of it was
destroyed by one single happened about the course of a
decade between the sort of post Kanesians mostly Sarrappha but
also Joe and Robinson I think actually started it. We're
gonna talk about those people more later. This is a
battle between them and there is specifically the neoclassical economists,
and by the end of it, the neoclassical economists were
forced to admit that they couldn't they couldn't figure out
(06:02):
a way to like measure the value of a bundle
of like capital goods. So if you have two different machines,
neoclassical economics cannot tell you the value of machines, and this,
this completely annihilates neoclassical economics. All of it is fucking
fake because you know, they need this for the production function.
Without the production function, like you can't even get to
supply and demand, right, every literally everything, all of their
(06:24):
stuff immediately falls apart. I'm not going to like attempt
to do an explanation of the Cambridge capital controversy what
was what it was actually about here, because it's it's
a little bit it's something that you can understand, but
it's a little bit technical and it's hard to explain
in podcast form if you if you're really curious about this,
the book Capital as Power. Capital as Power has a
really great explanation of it in chapter five that's pretty short.
(06:46):
You can just literally find a PDF of Capital as
Power by just googling it. But this is the level
of sort of like confusion we're getting with here. We're
like the person the economists assigned to write this like
knows so little about it that and you know the
other thing about about this, this whole controversy is that
the Cambridge capital capital controversy is in the book and
in the book Donald Harris very specifically talks about there's
(07:09):
an entire chapter of the book that it's just him
using the products of the Cambridge capital controversy to completely
destroy new classical economics. This is an entire chapter of
the book. And this guy got who was about wrong? Right,
So this is a book that is is very very
easy to misinterpret and very very easy to sort of
not like you know, just to sort of like completely
misunderstand or bounce off of.
Speaker 3 (07:30):
I it was.
Speaker 2 (07:30):
It was hard for me, and like, I'm pretty well
set up to deal with it. So, Okay, what what
the fuck is this book about? The very the shortest
answer I can possibly give is it's an attempt to
build a sort of mathematical model of how of how
of of sort of like that measures the growth of
(07:51):
an economy and can sort of like determine based on
like different sort of inputs of uh, you know, we'll
get to the or the second and like in terms
of like inputs of capital and like parts of labor,
like how you can have an economy that grows stably
over time. But in order to get into really what
this is, we need to do something that actually is
(08:12):
the first part of this book. We need to do
a brief survey of the last two hundred and thirty
two hundred and forty years of economics. But before we
do that, do you know what economics exist to sell you?
Speaker 3 (08:28):
I do. Actually, that is a fantastic transition, mayah. That
is it goods and services.
Speaker 2 (08:33):
It is in fact goods and services, priceless capital goods.
All right, and we are back, so okay, And in
order to understand literally what this fundamental project is, we
(08:54):
have to talk about sort of the three broad categories
of of economists. So the first sort of original and
we're not gonnare there's a couple there's some people before this,
but like the the in terms of like economists whose
work is important to now there's three broad categories, and
we're gonna start with the classical economists broadly. There's also
(09:16):
about three important classical economists. This is This is an argument,
and this is one of the arguments that Donald Harris
makes in the opening of this book is about who
these people are. So his argument is it's Adam Smith, Malthus,
and Ricardo. We don't care about Mauthis for our purposes.
He's most well known for being the like the the
like out of control population growth will kill every one
(09:36):
on earth. We need to like slow populate. Stuff like
that's not super relevant for us. Everyone, I think kind
of has a has a basic familiarity with Adam Smith.
But for our purposes, the important one is Ricardo, who
is not very well known at all. Ricardo is sort
of concerned with basically the distribution of surpluses between the classes.
(09:59):
So for him, that there's there's three major classes, right,
there's landloardsers, capitalists, and there's workers. And he's concerned about
how the sort of the surplus product of a society,
which is like all of the sort of stuff that's
producing in an economy that isn't literally directly necessary for
everyone to survive, how is that sort of surplus like distributed,
and how does this sort of impact economic growth? The
(10:20):
post Kanesian tradition that Donald Harris is in is in
a real sense, there are successors to Ricardo, right, A
lot of I've mentioned Piero Siraffa, who is like probably
the central figure of post Kanesian economics. He's a really
interesting guy. He knows like everyone, like he knew Canes.
He was weirdly friends with Antonio GRAMPSI the former head
(10:41):
of the Italian Communist Party, who's enormously influential work was
like new him. And a lot of what Sarafa's work
is is kind of like getting Ricardo's economics to like
work properly and then turning that into sort of a
new framework for how you model economies. Now, the other
part of this, you know, so, okay, who isn't isn't
(11:03):
a classical economist is also a huge source of debate
because there's a lot of people who throw Marx in
as part of the classical economists, that's a traditional way
to view it. Harris doesn't think that he's a classical economist.
He thinks that he's his own thing. So for our purposes,
you know, it's and and Harris is also I mean,
I think he considers himself a Marxist even in this period,
(11:24):
And a lot of this book is an attempt to
sort of merge Marxian political economy with like the sort
of neo Ricardi and stuff that's Raffa is doing.
Speaker 3 (11:32):
Does he change later? Do you know? Is Harris one
of these guys who goes on like intellectual journey and
becomes oh.
Speaker 2 (11:39):
We'll get there, okay, we'll get we'll get to where
all this ends up at the end of this episode.
But you know, it's interesting because you can actually see
it kind of happening in the middle of this book
in ways that we're going to get to.
Speaker 3 (11:49):
So I love that. I love a book where your
thickerest of a personal journey.
Speaker 2 (11:53):
It's also very funny because the economist guy, I was like,
oh my god, he's so Marxist. He's concerned with the
value for him and like, okay, I to put my
Marxist cards on the table. Maybe six people will understand this.
But like I was like brought up in terms of
learning like Marxist theory, like through the through the value
form school. He is not a value form guy. He
plays really fast and loose. What value is? Uh? It's
(12:16):
it's I was reading this and I was going, oh god,
oh no, what is this. He's so wrong. He's so
bafflingly wrong.
Speaker 3 (12:25):
The What the Economists is subtitled a Combative Marxist Economists
with White House Influence, which like.
Speaker 2 (12:34):
Thanks God, yeah, okay, so so the the the basis
of Marxist Marxian political economy is the labor theory of value.
We're gonna explain this briefly because it actually winds up
mattering a lot to this book. So value is the
product of the labor time socially necessary to produce a commodity. Right,
It's like how long does it take like a specific
place to produce a watch. You know, workers are paid
(12:56):
enough to reproduce themselves, so they're paid enough to sort
of like eat, sleep and like have kids. There are
more workers, but the rest of their labor time is
stolen by capitalists and is thus unremunerated. This unpaid labor
time is called surplus value. And this is what capital
is made out. So this is like a very very
basis of sort of what Marxism is and you know,
in in sort of Marxism, and this is sort of
(13:17):
different than Riccardo, which is like work. Ricardo understands that
there are classes and that they are in conflict to
some extent. But you know, from Marx the central dynamics
of capitalism is, you know, is the conflict between the
bourgeoisie or the capitalists who owned the means of production
and then you know and buy that ownership, like extract
surplus value from the proletariat and the proletariat or the
(13:37):
working class are forced to sell their labor to capitalists,
et cetera, et cetera. Something very interesting two ideas run
into each other very quickly in Harris's work, because you know,
so there is a thing called surplus in the tradition
of sort of Ricardo and in the tradition of like
Serapha and this of the post Kansians, right, and that
(13:58):
surplus is very critically not the same same thing as
Marxian surplus value. So you know what part of part
of what's happening here is that Harris is trying to
square the circle basically between these two approaches to like
to what surplus is and sort of what the nature
of value is. So you know, in the Marxist tradition, right,
(14:19):
surplus value is still in labor time, and the value
of producer sort of flows through the economy and it's
what turned you know, like stealing this labor time is
what turns capital into more capital. Right in the post
in post Cantine economics, surplus is you know, so so
in in sort of like a seraph in work or
in this book too, right, you have basically a production
(14:41):
matrix which is like as a matric that models how
production works, and it's what it's doing is modeling the
entire output of society at one time. And in this model,
so they're there's sort of like, you know, there's all
the commodity and labor inputs that compose the economy and
they come back out and there's a certain amount of commodities.
This is the thing we talk about with a card, right,
There's there's certain amount of commodities you need to produce
(15:02):
so that everyone can the entire system can reproduce itself,
and beyond that is surplus. So what you're dealing with
is this weird mixture because Harris is trying to work
with both of these at the same time. Where Like,
on the one hand, you have surplus as like like
stolen value in a form of like stolen labor time,
and on the other hand, you have it in this
regarded sense of like there's a bunch of commodities that
(15:23):
we've produced that's like access to our like ability to
to like our needs to reproduce ourselves. And he's trying
to square these and it doesn't work. It just sort
of breaks down.
Speaker 3 (15:38):
Does he like, does he like actively address this like
dual meaning and then explain like.
Speaker 2 (15:44):
Ye, yeah, well so his basic issue is that so
the way he does this mostly is by just moving
back and forth between the two systems and not trying
to reconcile them. And then the one time he has
to kind of do it, he has to, oh God,
don't want to try to explain the transformation problem. He
(16:05):
has to do this thing where Okay, so if theoretically,
if you want to convert surplus value, like in the
Marxist Marxian sense, into this sort of like neo Ricardian thing,
you need to turn it into prices. And there's there's
a long running controversy in in Marxism over whether or
not you can actually do that because the math is weird,
(16:27):
it doesn't work very well. I'm not gonna he doesn't
solve it. He just gives up and says that you
can't do it because they're in two separate spheres, which
is the most compound answer I've ever seen in my
entire life.
Speaker 3 (16:39):
It's I love that.
Speaker 2 (16:43):
Yeah, it's it's it's it's wild. But you know, so,
so back to the sort of main arc of what
the fuck is smoke about here, I'm probably probably I problems.
We're reaching the promised lamp. We have to do this
stuff first. Okay, so those are you know, the two
kinds of economics that Donald Harris is trying to work
(17:04):
with are this sort of post Canesian stuff, which is
derived from like Ricardo and classical economists, and then like
Marxian stuff. There's also the third school, which is neoclassical economics,
which this is all the economics that you've learned in school, right,
This is supplied demand. This is like your production functions.
This is your like every time someone starts lecturing you
about how the economy works. This is all this stuff. Yeah,
(17:27):
what's very important for our purposes. This is something that
Harris brings up is the single largest difference between neoclassical
economics and whatever came before. It isn't that like, I
don't know, everything's about marginal utility or whatever the fuck.
It's that. It's that in neoclassical economics there are no classes.
They just pretend that classes don't exist.
Speaker 3 (17:49):
Yeah, and in much of American politics, yeah, Germany politics
sadly well.
Speaker 2 (17:57):
And this is also why like the American conception of
class is so nuts, and why everyone's running around in circles,
trying to measure it by like income levels, because all
the economics they use don't have a thing that establishes
what class is.
Speaker 3 (18:10):
And it's one of the jarring differences between the United
Kingdom and the United States, how like we are hyper
aware of class and like it's something that like arguably,
like Britain is obsessed with to detriment of other Like yes,
but and you go to America and fucking like like
if if you have a job that pays you occasionally,
(18:31):
your middle class and then fucking everyone is apparently and
like it becomes a meaningless term.
Speaker 2 (18:36):
I guess, yeah, this is this is very explicitly for
political reasons, right Neoclassical economics is developed as an attack
on Marxism, Like this is this is this is its
actual sort of origin, and it's originators are like very
explicit about this right now. And this is where we
get back to Sarrafa, because Saraffa's work effectively is an
attack on neoclassical economics, and Sarraffa in ninety nine pages
(18:58):
literally destroy everything they'd ever produced. But you know, the
new classical solution to this is basically to get everyone
who talked about it fired and this actually worked, like
they did, is basically massive social cleansing campaign of like
all of the sort of heterodox economists they got they
got the ball fired and it worked. And Harris actually
weirdly was kind of was like one of the last
holdouts into the nineties. But he just like retires in
(19:21):
like the late nineties and that's like basically every all
of them get rent out. Uh, there's a good we'll
talk about him later. There's there's another Postcanesian economists named
Frederick Lee, who my friends estrange matter really like, who's
an anarchist who's in this school, and he has like
an excruciatingly detailed account of all of these economists getting
run out by the new classical people. And so, you know,
(19:43):
like neoclassical economists like in in some sense they there there.
Their strategy is a strategy of capitalism, which is like,
obviously we're not right here, but we have money and
we have force, so we're going to defeat your ideas
by SI destroying you all rightly actual physical force.
Speaker 3 (20:04):
So incredible, Yeah, the cultural revolution in economics.
Speaker 2 (20:09):
Yeah, but it's interesting because Harris Harris is writing this
in seventy eight, and in seventy eight it's still the
battle hasn't been settled yet, right, there's still kind of
like the fight going on between like who is going
to be like in control of economics. And I mean,
the you know, the answer is to Theokanzian is that
the post Kansians lose. But you know that wasn't necessarily
the case of this time. There's also a really weird
(20:30):
artifact of this that I want to talk about a
little bit, which is that, like, you know, so remember
at the beginning of this, I said that that stupid
economist person has said that it was neo Kandians versus
post Kansians. So those two groups are not the same thing.
The post Kandians are the people who we've been talking
about this whole time, right like they're they're like they're
basically neo Ricardans right there. They're like based on classical economics.
(20:51):
The neo Kansians are just regular Kansians basically, but they
had to change the math to be shittier and make
themselves more right wing to like survive.
Speaker 3 (21:01):
To re explained like John Maynard Keynes and supply side economics.
Speaker 2 (21:04):
Yeah, if you if you want to Yeah, if you
want to give, I mean, go ahead.
Speaker 3 (21:08):
I don't know, I'm fucking I am a historian, but
it's a it differs from classical economics. I guess in
the idea that the state can make interventions am Ukutumbi,
after as I fucked up, the state interventions can beneficial
for the economy. And it emerges like in the I
guess post Great Depression, Like I guess maybe from the
(21:29):
from like you know, the New Deal and these these,
and then post World War two, right, like it's very
influential in the kind of build up after World War Two.
The idea that like the state shouldn't necessarily be like
what's happening Adam hand, the invisible hand, the fucking invisible
hand maybe isn't killing it and we needn't said the
hand of the state.
Speaker 2 (21:46):
Yeah, And I mean, well, you know, it's worth mentioning
that like in Adam Smith, the hand of the state
is explicitly God, sorry, explicitly God. Unfortunately, unfortunately, there was
no God to bail out the markets of the nineteen twenties,
so kids was like shit, yeah, and I'm mean, you know,
his is like in sort of like more detail, like
his thing basically is about like he's he's obsessed with
(22:06):
sort of like like like basically cyclically counteracting crises by
using states of betting to like, you know, like his
things basically is that, like capital will misallocate resources, you
have to use the state to like kick the bastards
into line, like the stable economy. And the problem is
that by by the late seventies, the Kansians are in
crisis because in original like Kansian theory, it wasn't supposed
(22:28):
to be possible for there to be both rising unemployment
and rising inflation, but that was like happening over the
entire world, and so they got kind of annihilated. And
this is the thing that like the neoliberals used to
like take power. And it's interesting because the post Kansians
like they use and you know, and like the beginning
of this book is a bit of of like Kansian stuff.
But then he just like you know, they go off
(22:50):
and do other more interesting things. But it's very funny
because because this is still seventy eight, he Harris calls
himself a neo Kansian, and he called all of his
collaborators Neokansians because the real Neo Kansians hadn't like developed yet.
Speaker 3 (23:05):
Oh so he's just trying to he's just trying to
fucking claim it, like he's trying to get his like
stick in the ground. First.
Speaker 2 (23:12):
Yeah, well, but I mean that's the thing, like at
that point they were the neo like the there. There
wasn't like there. Their school had had as good a
claim to it as anyone. It's just that they got
kicked out later by the sort of board Like, yeah,
makes sense, ones, Yeah, it's also a thing. It's also
important about this, for reasons we're gonna get to in
a second, is that the post Kansian tradition also has
a lot of very eclectic Marxists in it. We're gonna
(23:35):
get the Joe and Robinson who's a very close collaborator
of a very good Marxis philosopher. She's actually the person
who like kicks off the Cambridge Captural capital controversy, and
she's she's a very kind of esoteric Marxist kind of
in a similar way to uh uh, to what Donald
Harris is. But you know, you know what Marxism in
theory isn't supposed to support.
Speaker 3 (23:55):
Would that be the sale of goods? And services.
Speaker 1 (23:57):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (23:58):
Yeahs product and services that support this podcast.
Speaker 3 (24:00):
Distributing them using the price mechanism.
Speaker 2 (24:13):
Yeah, we're back. So yeah, there's there. There's also you know,
there's got a Galecki who's very important to this too,
so that there are Marxists kind of on the ground
of this, and they're they're trying to sort of their
their goal is to try to like explain an economy
that has monopolies in it, because Marxist theory sort of
like assumed that there weren't and that there was like
actual competition in markets and so part of what but
(24:37):
this this comes to the sort of fundamental project of
of what this book is about, which is that it's
it's it's about developing a sort of growth model that
you can sort of you know, that that that that
accounts that that can be modified to account for all
of these things. So the initial thing that they're trying
to produce is is like a model of what they
call a Golden Age, which is a thing that's from
Joe and Robinson. Yeah, that's basically like it's the goal name,
(25:00):
which is a theoretical like economic configuration. You have you
have full employment, you have constant, stable economic growth and
the system can reproduce itself. And you know, I'm going
to read a passage from this book so you can understand.
Partially so you can because it's about this, right, and
partially so you can understand. Like this isn't even a
particularly technical paragraph.
Speaker 3 (25:23):
You're talking about hit.
Speaker 2 (25:24):
Me steady state. Yeah, Golden Age is also kind of
similar thing to a concept called steady state economies he's
writing about. A particular steady state is based on a
given set of conditions and interrelations among them, a given
rate of accumulation of capital, given rates of savings from
the stream of net income, a given state of technological
(25:44):
knowledge or rate of technological innovation, a given rate of
increase of the labor force, and a given set of expectations.
To ask whether such a situation exists is to ask
whether the conditions which define it are mutually compatible or
self consistent. So this, this is basically what he's doing, right,
is you can you can build these like models of
(26:05):
like these sort of Kanzian models that like and I
started post Kansian models that you know, if you if you,
if you set up all the elements right, you can
theoretically generate stable growth. But then you know, obviously his
thing is like this doesn't work, right, Like, no, no,
no economy will ever generate this because there's there's only
really like it's extremely hard to actually get you know,
(26:26):
your sort of like input levels and your technological development
whatever the fuck like at the same rate to do this.
But he's he's using this as basically the model for
as like as like a sort of toy model that
you can then sort of warp to fit the rest
of the sort of the rest of the capitalist economy.
But in order to do this, he has to generate
(26:47):
a crisis theory. And this is where he's just like
suddenly all the marks comes back in and he's like,
so his he's the product he's trying to do is
he's trying to use a post Kanzian model of how
economic growth works and then and then combine that with
Marxist crisis theory to produce basically a model of you know,
what kinds of conditions in an economy will cause like
(27:08):
crisis states. Now, ooka, the every thing is very weird
about this, right, It's like he doesn't do normal Like
there's like an entire school of Marxist crisis theory, and
he doesn't do it. He instead like rewrites a bunch
of Marxist equations and then comes up with his own
like version of crisis theory of like different kinds of crises.
(27:28):
And I like, what, it's so weird, it's so bad.
Speaker 3 (27:33):
Like maybe he wanted to make him make his mock
you know.
Speaker 2 (27:37):
Yeah, I guess it's weird because it's like this whole
thing is interesting, but it's like I don't think anyone
ever followed up on it really.
Speaker 3 (27:43):
Right, It's just like this dead end of academic theory.
Speaker 2 (27:46):
Yeah, well, I think it's also you know, I mean
it's partially like a rudnut travel thing. It's partially because
as as the post Kanesians went on, they got less
and less Marxists. So like a lot of the original
people are like Seraphus on Marxist, but like a lot
of the original like Joan Robinson is definitely a Marxist,
but they get like less and less over time, and
so there's less interest in kind of like folding in
Marxism to it.
Speaker 3 (28:07):
Yeah, so he's lose interest in that.
Speaker 2 (28:10):
Yeah. But this is where we get to the final question,
like is he a Marxist and My answer is I
don't even in even in sixty eight and seventy eight,
which is pretty early, I don't think he's a Marxist.
I don't think he's a Marxist in this book. I
think he's using Marxist theory, but I don't think he's
actually a Marxist like politically. And the reason I don't
think this is because, you know, so we talk about
surplus value, right, So surplus value is supposed to be
(28:32):
this value it's extracted, but it's the magnitude of it.
One of the things, like how much value you extract,
like how many hours of the day you can steal
from a worker, depends on how many hours of the
day you'd need to pay them for in order for
them to survive.
Speaker 3 (28:44):
Right.
Speaker 2 (28:45):
And one of the crucial things about this is that
that Marx is very explicit about this, that rate of
like how much you need to pay them to survive
is determined by social struggle, right, because like you know
what what a worker quote unquote needs to survive in
like a different places in context is different, and you
can fight in order for that rate to be higher.
(29:06):
And this is like an incredibly basic part of Marxism right,
it's the part of Marxism where the economy is also determed,
like the function of the capitalist economy is produced by
class struggle. This is like, this is like this is
even one. This is Marxism zero zero zero like this
this is this is the shit they hand you on
the flo on like your fucking tour of Marxism school
(29:27):
before you holding classes.
Speaker 3 (29:30):
Yeah, so when you get that very you know, there's
very short introductions you can get where it's like like
a tiny little booklet that explains so like the sene
Quan on the little elements of things.
Speaker 2 (29:40):
Yeah, and Harris writes pages and pages and pages of
stuff about like about about like the rate of surplus
value extraction, and do you know how many times he
mentions class fucking once in like and it's it's like
the thirty eight thing he mentions after like the technical
compensation of capital and like it's some other crisis like
(30:01):
this all of this ship and he just doesn't mention it.
And this is this is the thing that like fundamentally
has convinced me that what what he's doing isn't substantively Marxism.
He's using the tools of merchant political economy but he's
he's he's he's viewing capitalism as purely a sort of
(30:24):
like top down thing, right as and not something that's
actually like you know, like he acknowledges there are classes,
but he doesn't see them as actors at all.
Speaker 3 (30:34):
Yeah, so, like the struggle between the classes is is
And it's.
Speaker 2 (30:38):
Funny because he has this thing that he calls the
rate of exploitation, right, which is this calculation of sort
of surplus value extraction. But he's like, well, obviously because
the rate is going to change over time due to
the condition to struggle. But he's like an oscar, I'm
just putting his one number. Like it's just like this, right, Yeah,
I don't kind of interpin it. I'm too lazy to
figure that out. And I'm like, what what are you doing?
(30:58):
Like you this is this is the basis of Marxism.
Speaker 3 (31:00):
Yeah, I mean maybe he was just an economics guy,
but even still, no.
Speaker 2 (31:04):
Yeah, this is this is This is the thing that
I've been sort of realizing because one of the issues
with Sarafa is that, you know, Sarafa is a genius economist, right,
he is genuinely, unbelievably brilliant, but he's also a pure economist.
Like here's here is how the start of his most
influential book, Production of Commodities and Means of Commodities starts.
(31:25):
Let us consider an extremely simple society which produces just
enough to maintain itself. Commodities are produced by separate industries
and are exchanged for one another, et cetera. Cut So, okay,
what is he he? He he just has like created
a mental model. And this is the basis of like
of his major economic theories. Him just creating a mental
model where somehow, out of nowhere has appeared a simple
(31:49):
society that produces like one commodity, which is like just
enough commodities, separduties. And you know, if you think about
sort of like Marx, right, Marx is also a sociologist. Right.
He cares about you know, like like the actual point
of production.
Speaker 1 (32:03):
Right.
Speaker 2 (32:04):
He cares about the production process. He cares about the
sort of like like that there are He cares that
there are workers that are doing the production. He cares
about the sort of historical conditions that created you know,
these these things. Don't like as Kamala Harris's mom, this
is actually very important. The Kamala Harris, you didn't just
follow out of the coconut tree. You exist in the
context of all that came before you. That's Kamala Harris's mom,
(32:24):
who is like, I think a better Marxist than Donel
Harris's and Harris will occasionally, like Donald Harris WI occasionally
gesture to this one. He'd be like, well, yeah, obviously
this is all determined by historical conditions. And then he
just has no interest in ever pursuing any of that.
He's just like, yeah, this is we left a later
book that he never wrote. And what you get to
is is this and this is like a real issue
with sort of post Kansianism is that it doesn't have
(32:46):
like Marxism, at least in theory, has politics embedded into it.
Post Kannsianism kind of doesn't.
Speaker 3 (32:51):
It's just like I have a.
Speaker 2 (32:53):
Lot of friends who I like, I deeply care about
who are post Kansian's right, they are political, like you know,
they're they're leftist because they're right, Like it's it's not
something as an automatic generation of your theory, and you
know you can kind of write it that way, right,
Like this is the thing about Frederick Lee, who's the
sort of the guy. A lot of my like a
lot of the Traine writers, people sort of like learn
economics from like I mean indirectly, but like through his book.
(33:14):
But you know, Lee Lee is a committed anarchist and
that shows up at his work. But he has to
like add that in pure like pure sir rafa. By itself,
you could theoretically like run any form of government you
want with it. Right. And I think I've been vindicated
in this whole process because Donald Harris writes a couple
more books on one of which is a book that
(33:35):
is like commissioned by the Jamaican government.
Speaker 3 (33:38):
Okay, he's Jamaican descent or he was born himself directly
in Jamaica, you.
Speaker 2 (33:44):
Know, Like he's just like he's he's Jamaica and he
lives in Jamaica. Okay, I think I think he currently
lives in Jamaica.
Speaker 3 (33:50):
I'm pretty sure this came to the US for his
graduate like for his academic Yeah.
Speaker 2 (33:55):
One, one he lived in the US for a long
time because he's at Stanford, but then he kind of
like left and one I think back at Jamaica. I'm
going to read. So he wrote a book called a Growth.
This is in twenty eleven a growth inducement strategy for
Jamaica and the shortened medium term. I'm going to read
you the bullet points under a section called guiding Principles. Okay,
(34:16):
unleash entrepreneurial dynamism by unlocking latent wealth, tied up and
idle assets. Infrastructure investments is catalysm for job creation through
strengthening resiliency of the built in natural environments. Build an
innovative and competitive modern economy of big and small firms
by strengthening business networks and removing supply side constraints. Modernize
(34:38):
and improve the efficiency of government. Social inclusion through community renewal,
expand as south agency in equity, and proactive partnership between
government and private sector. Also a giant thing in this
about crime. So what has happened is that these two
people have circled back around and they now have the
same politics, which is like tough on crime, austerity, uh.
Speaker 3 (35:02):
Public private partnership, fucking infrastructure spending.
Speaker 2 (35:06):
Yea, yeah, they circled back around. It's funny because the
person writing the economists was like, oh, yeah, they actually
have circled back around because they're both They're both concerned
about wealth inequality. And this book is not concerned about
wealth inequality at all, Like that's not that's not what
it's about. It's about like capital accumulation, and you know,
it's sort of about distribution of surplus, but it's it
doesn't it's concerned with a distribution of surplus. Is that
(35:29):
seraphan economics like doesn't have a fixed race like way
for it to be distributed. It can be distributed in
an enormous number of ways. And the trick is finding
out how it's actually done.
Speaker 3 (35:41):
Right, Yeah, there's.
Speaker 2 (35:44):
A point in here. There's a point in this book
too that like is the thing that's like really first
struck me about it where he's talking about how he's
talking about surplus value and he's talking about how this
is an objective measure of exploitation. But then he goes
and he says, contrary to vulgar reading, is this does
not actually indicate who deserves Like it's not it's not
(36:04):
a moral argument about who should have the value that's
been stolen. And this this right here, this, this is
the road. This is the road that is going to
lead this man from a kind of interesting book about
like the dynamics of of of economic growth and like
building economic models and like using marks in theory does
sort of make it work to straight up I writing
(36:27):
investment documents for the Jamaican government.
Speaker 3 (36:30):
Yeah, Like he seems like it's very like in a way, like,
you know, there are looks like Admitler band stabbers and
Marxist right, but it reminds me a lot of like
the New Labor thing in the UK, you know, which
grew out of a party which genuinely had a commitment
to socialism and became like, yeah, this sort of very
neoliberal like like sort of really like peak neoliberal kind
(36:52):
of Yeah. That there with some Keynesian influence, I guess,
but certainly nothing that one would call combius or even
really so list Yeah.
Speaker 2 (37:01):
Yeah, And I don't know. It's it's sad because it's
like because the interesting thing about.
Speaker 3 (37:07):
That was twenty twelve, he wrote the growth inducement strategy.
Fuck me, okay's in the game, Like yeah.
Speaker 2 (37:13):
But he's still the game in the sense that he's
doing like this is you know, reading that, it very
much felt like I was reading like a modern Chinese
five year plan, except it was like less weird slogans.
Speaker 3 (37:28):
Yeah, I mean it reads like a like a fucking
like a new labor policy document, like a think tank.
It's a lot of like a analyst guy, think tank
guy kind of talk right, like which was extremely like
it looks like he left stand for in the late nineties,
which is when this ship was fucking everywhere, right, Like
(37:49):
what is he called Joseph Stiglitz? Is that right? And
like yeah, yeah, yeah, like yeah, this was the economic
fucking theory of the day. You know, this was very
popular then. But it's absolutely just like this. This is
not like black panther, black panther inflected Marxism. This is
not what is characteristized by the economists here.
Speaker 2 (38:10):
Yeah, no, this is this is this is something genuinely
very sad because it doesn't have to go that. We
know that it's possible to like do this kind of
economics not be like this because Frederick Lee was an
IWW member until the day he died. Like he's he's
like out there at Occupy given like like in the
first days of all like not like he's out there,
like there are videos of him giving speeches to crowds
(38:32):
that occupy right, Like, you don't have to do this,
but he did. And this is also, like, you know,
I think that this kind of political trajectory is kind
of also you can see in it like how his child,
even though he wasn't in her life, Munch is going
to end up as the person she is. And I
think that's my that's my final conclusion from this is
(38:52):
he's not a Marxist and him and his childer lives.
Speaker 3 (38:58):
Yeah, the thing's a ten year as to a motherfucker.
They you start to hang out with a bunch of
other rich people who have ten and you'd be in
too identify with him and you know, stripped you away
from who you Yeah.
Speaker 2 (39:10):
So this this has been It could happen here. Don't
become a daughter and capitalist bastard and your old.
Speaker 3 (39:16):
Age, yeah or your young age.
Speaker 1 (39:20):
Yeah, it could happen here. As a production of cool
Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit
our website cool zonemedia dot com, or check us out
on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to podcasts. You can find sources for it could happen here,
updated monthly at cool zonemedia dot com slash sources. Thanks
(39:44):
for listening,
All Media.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Welcome to kit Appy here a podcast where I Mia
Wong have read Kamala Harris's dad. Donald Harris's book. This
is the podcast that you're listening to now with me
to experience this actually genuinely fairly interesting work of political
economy is James Stout.
Speaker 3 (00:24):
Hi, man, I'm so excited to know what Donald has
for us today. Me too.
Speaker 2 (00:29):
I'm you know, I'm I'm of a bunch of minds
of this book because I think the actual key element
of this book, which is called Capital Accumulation and Income Distribution,
is that it is unbelievably technically dense. You know. Okay,
we're gonna get into the book. First, we sort of
we should talk a bit about who Donald Harris is.
(00:50):
So a lot of the focus around this is Kamala
Harris is the presumptive Democratic nominees dad, so a lot
of the media coverage around him is around him being
a Marxist. This is debatable, obviously, is what I like
conclusion I'm going to come out of this with.
Speaker 3 (01:07):
I am shocked that people in our media today might
misunderstand basic things about Marxism and who is and he's
not a Marxist.
Speaker 2 (01:14):
Yeah, I mean, I think. But so the thing about
this book, so this book is from nineteen seventy eight,
which is actually after he had broken up with Kamala's mom,
and so Kamala doesn't like know him super well.
Speaker 3 (01:27):
Was he like not present in her younger life.
Speaker 2 (01:29):
Kamala's mom and dad divorced when she was like five,
was like four or five. So this is this is
written about a decade after that.
Speaker 3 (01:36):
Yeah, much like the New American Communist Party, like a
lot a lot of divorce guys just love to be communist.
It's a thing about divorce guys.
Speaker 2 (01:43):
Oh god. Yeah. So you know, one of the sort
of the thing everyone kind of cites about, like Tom
Harris's politics, that he was in this sort of like
Black Studies, like I guess proto Black Studies group that
produced a bunch of like black panthers, produced a lot
of very radical people. But you know, the interesting thing
about Donald Harris is that he is not the Marxist
(02:07):
that you would expect to see coming out of sort
of like that Miliu because those people's Marxism, you know,
I mean, he is very interested in sort of underdevelopment
and you know, sort of like imperialism. But he's he's
not well from one of the sort of like Baoist
inflected kinds of Marxism, which are the kinds that tended
to be sort of floating around like that time. He
(02:31):
in fact, he is a very very rare kind of Marxist,
which is to say, well, A, he doesn't call himself
a Marxist. He calls himself a Marxi in the entire time.
But b yeah, intolerable and we don't understand what this is.
So there's a very famous marx quote where he's complaining
about I think it was something the German Social Democratic
Party did or something where he where people are calling
(02:51):
themselves Marxists, and he goes, and this is what if
this is what Marxism is, and I am not a Marxist.
And so for one hundred years since then, one hundred
and fifty years, people have been calling them those Marxians
instead of Marxists. This is all over that book.
Speaker 3 (03:03):
I'm developing a picture of a kind of guy, Oh yeah,
panting maat Rich portrait man.
Speaker 2 (03:09):
Yeah. So but the interesting part is he's what's known
as a post Kanesian. And weirdly, dear listeners, you are
you are some of the only people in this entire country.
You have a prayer of knowing who these people are,
because we've actually had a bunch of them on the show.
If people remember the episodes that I did about inflation
over the last sort of like year, I guess, like
two years. I don't know's it's been a long time,
(03:30):
but the episode's about inflation that we did with with
the folks over at Strange Matters. Those people are the
sort of the int one of one of the groups
that are the intellectual heirs to sort of post Kanesianism.
It's a you know, I guess it's post Kansianism is
kind of it's I guess it's like the largest of
what's called the heterodox economics uh schools. We're going to
(03:51):
get more into what it is later because it's not
just like, you know, so it's post Kanesian after like
John Vader Kines, it's not really Canes and that's gonna
become very important as second. But you know, this this
is sort of an issue because it means that it's
actually it's really really hard for a normal person to
figure out what the fuck is going on with this book.
And this is something that I discovered, you know, partially
(04:11):
just from reading it, and partially also I mean this like,
I have a pretty good background to do this, because
I know a lot of postcinsine economics and I also
have studied a lot of marks, and you need both
of those to be able to write about this. However,
come I discovered two hours before this recording. I discovered
that the economist had set some hack who they refused
to name, to write about this book, and this person managed, okay,
(04:35):
on top of just like straight up, like not literally,
their explanation of what the book is about is simply wrong.
In just four paragraphs, they managed to make an error
so egregious that I if I had turned this shit
into my professor's in college, you would have failed before it.
So okay, okay. So one of the things the author
talks about is this thing called the Cambridge Capital controversy,
(04:56):
and this author claims that this controversy was fought between
the ne and post Kansians. Now, this is probably gibberish
to like ninety nine percent of people listening to this,
but in terms of heterodox economics, this is the equivalent
of not knowing who fought in World War Two, Like
this is the Cambridge Catro controversy. Is it's it's basically
these single moments in which this kind of like, this
(05:17):
kind of heterodox economics appears onto the economic scene in
a way that like they were able to force the
sort of mainstream neoclassical economists to take to pay attention to.
And this battle should, like intellectually should have completely destroyed
all of neoclassical economics. Right, everything you've ever heard about
how price equal supply and demand like so all those curves,
(05:38):
all of that is fucking bullshit. All of it was
destroyed by one single happened about the course of a
decade between the sort of post Kanesians mostly Sarrappha but
also Joe and Robinson I think actually started it. We're
gonna talk about those people more later. This is a
battle between them and there is specifically the neoclassical economists,
and by the end of it, the neoclassical economists were
forced to admit that they couldn't they couldn't figure out
(06:02):
a way to like measure the value of a bundle
of like capital goods. So if you have two different machines,
neoclassical economics cannot tell you the value of machines, and this,
this completely annihilates neoclassical economics. All of it is fucking
fake because you know, they need this for the production function.
Without the production function, like you can't even get to
supply and demand, right, every literally everything, all of their
(06:24):
stuff immediately falls apart. I'm not going to like attempt
to do an explanation of the Cambridge capital controversy what
was what it was actually about here, because it's it's
a little bit it's something that you can understand, but
it's a little bit technical and it's hard to explain
in podcast form if you if you're really curious about this,
the book Capital as Power. Capital as Power has a
really great explanation of it in chapter five that's pretty short.
(06:46):
You can just literally find a PDF of Capital as
Power by just googling it. But this is the level
of sort of like confusion we're getting with here. We're
like the person the economists assigned to write this like
knows so little about it that and you know the
other thing about about this, this whole controversy is that
the Cambridge capital capital controversy is in the book and
in the book Donald Harris very specifically talks about there's
(07:09):
an entire chapter of the book that it's just him
using the products of the Cambridge capital controversy to completely
destroy new classical economics. This is an entire chapter of
the book. And this guy got who was about wrong? Right,
So this is a book that is is very very
easy to misinterpret and very very easy to sort of
not like you know, just to sort of like completely
misunderstand or bounce off of.
Speaker 3 (07:30):
I it was.
Speaker 2 (07:30):
It was hard for me, and like, I'm pretty well
set up to deal with it. So, Okay, what what
the fuck is this book about? The very the shortest
answer I can possibly give is it's an attempt to
build a sort of mathematical model of how of how
of of sort of like that measures the growth of
(07:51):
an economy and can sort of like determine based on
like different sort of inputs of uh, you know, we'll
get to the or the second and like in terms
of like inputs of capital and like parts of labor,
like how you can have an economy that grows stably
over time. But in order to get into really what
this is, we need to do something that actually is
(08:12):
the first part of this book. We need to do
a brief survey of the last two hundred and thirty
two hundred and forty years of economics. But before we
do that, do you know what economics exist to sell you?
Speaker 3 (08:28):
I do. Actually, that is a fantastic transition, mayah. That
is it goods and services.
Speaker 2 (08:33):
It is in fact goods and services, priceless capital goods.
All right, and we are back, so okay, And in
order to understand literally what this fundamental project is, we
(08:54):
have to talk about sort of the three broad categories
of of economists. So the first sort of original and
we're not gonnare there's a couple there's some people before this,
but like the the in terms of like economists whose
work is important to now there's three broad categories, and
we're gonna start with the classical economists broadly. There's also
(09:16):
about three important classical economists. This is This is an argument,
and this is one of the arguments that Donald Harris
makes in the opening of this book is about who
these people are. So his argument is it's Adam Smith, Malthus,
and Ricardo. We don't care about Mauthis for our purposes.
He's most well known for being the like the the
like out of control population growth will kill every one
(09:36):
on earth. We need to like slow populate. Stuff like
that's not super relevant for us. Everyone, I think kind
of has a has a basic familiarity with Adam Smith.
But for our purposes, the important one is Ricardo, who
is not very well known at all. Ricardo is sort
of concerned with basically the distribution of surpluses between the classes.
(09:59):
So for him, that there's there's three major classes, right,
there's landloardsers, capitalists, and there's workers. And he's concerned about
how the sort of the surplus product of a society,
which is like all of the sort of stuff that's
producing in an economy that isn't literally directly necessary for
everyone to survive, how is that sort of surplus like distributed,
and how does this sort of impact economic growth? The
(10:20):
post Kanesian tradition that Donald Harris is in is in
a real sense, there are successors to Ricardo, right, A
lot of I've mentioned Piero Siraffa, who is like probably
the central figure of post Kanesian economics. He's a really
interesting guy. He knows like everyone, like he knew Canes.
He was weirdly friends with Antonio GRAMPSI the former head
(10:41):
of the Italian Communist Party, who's enormously influential work was
like new him. And a lot of what Sarafa's work
is is kind of like getting Ricardo's economics to like
work properly and then turning that into sort of a
new framework for how you model economies. Now, the other
part of this, you know, so, okay, who isn't isn't
(11:03):
a classical economist is also a huge source of debate
because there's a lot of people who throw Marx in
as part of the classical economists, that's a traditional way
to view it. Harris doesn't think that he's a classical economist.
He thinks that he's his own thing. So for our purposes,
you know, it's and and Harris is also I mean,
I think he considers himself a Marxist even in this period,
(11:24):
And a lot of this book is an attempt to
sort of merge Marxian political economy with like the sort
of neo Ricardi and stuff that's Raffa is doing.
Speaker 3 (11:32):
Does he change later? Do you know? Is Harris one
of these guys who goes on like intellectual journey and
becomes oh.
Speaker 2 (11:39):
We'll get there, okay, we'll get we'll get to where
all this ends up at the end of this episode.
But you know, it's interesting because you can actually see
it kind of happening in the middle of this book
in ways that we're going to get to.
Speaker 3 (11:49):
So I love that. I love a book where your
thickerest of a personal journey.
Speaker 2 (11:53):
It's also very funny because the economist guy, I was like,
oh my god, he's so Marxist. He's concerned with the
value for him and like, okay, I to put my
Marxist cards on the table. Maybe six people will understand this.
But like I was like brought up in terms of
learning like Marxist theory, like through the through the value
form school. He is not a value form guy. He
plays really fast and loose. What value is? Uh? It's
(12:16):
it's I was reading this and I was going, oh god,
oh no, what is this. He's so wrong. He's so
bafflingly wrong.
Speaker 3 (12:25):
The What the Economists is subtitled a Combative Marxist Economists
with White House Influence, which like.
Speaker 2 (12:34):
Thanks God, yeah, okay, so so the the the basis
of Marxist Marxian political economy is the labor theory of value.
We're gonna explain this briefly because it actually winds up
mattering a lot to this book. So value is the
product of the labor time socially necessary to produce a commodity. Right,
It's like how long does it take like a specific
place to produce a watch. You know, workers are paid
(12:56):
enough to reproduce themselves, so they're paid enough to sort
of like eat, sleep and like have kids. There are
more workers, but the rest of their labor time is
stolen by capitalists and is thus unremunerated. This unpaid labor
time is called surplus value. And this is what capital
is made out. So this is like a very very
basis of sort of what Marxism is and you know,
in in sort of Marxism, and this is sort of
(13:17):
different than Riccardo, which is like work. Ricardo understands that
there are classes and that they are in conflict to
some extent. But you know, from Marx the central dynamics
of capitalism is, you know, is the conflict between the
bourgeoisie or the capitalists who owned the means of production
and then you know and buy that ownership, like extract
surplus value from the proletariat and the proletariat or the
(13:37):
working class are forced to sell their labor to capitalists,
et cetera, et cetera. Something very interesting two ideas run
into each other very quickly in Harris's work, because you know,
so there is a thing called surplus in the tradition
of sort of Ricardo and in the tradition of like
Serapha and this of the post Kansians, right, and that
(13:58):
surplus is very critically not the same same thing as
Marxian surplus value. So you know what part of part
of what's happening here is that Harris is trying to
square the circle basically between these two approaches to like
to what surplus is and sort of what the nature
of value is. So you know, in the Marxist tradition, right,
(14:19):
surplus value is still in labor time, and the value
of producer sort of flows through the economy and it's
what turned you know, like stealing this labor time is
what turns capital into more capital. Right in the post
in post Cantine economics, surplus is you know, so so
in in sort of like a seraph in work or
in this book too, right, you have basically a production
(14:41):
matrix which is like as a matric that models how
production works, and it's what it's doing is modeling the
entire output of society at one time. And in this model,
so they're there's sort of like, you know, there's all
the commodity and labor inputs that compose the economy and
they come back out and there's a certain amount of commodities.
This is the thing we talk about with a card, right,
There's there's certain amount of commodities you need to produce
(15:02):
so that everyone can the entire system can reproduce itself,
and beyond that is surplus. So what you're dealing with
is this weird mixture because Harris is trying to work
with both of these at the same time. Where Like,
on the one hand, you have surplus as like like
stolen value in a form of like stolen labor time,
and on the other hand, you have it in this
regarded sense of like there's a bunch of commodities that
(15:23):
we've produced that's like access to our like ability to
to like our needs to reproduce ourselves. And he's trying
to square these and it doesn't work. It just sort
of breaks down.
Speaker 3 (15:38):
Does he like, does he like actively address this like
dual meaning and then explain like.
Speaker 2 (15:44):
Ye, yeah, well so his basic issue is that so
the way he does this mostly is by just moving
back and forth between the two systems and not trying
to reconcile them. And then the one time he has
to kind of do it, he has to, oh God,
don't want to try to explain the transformation problem. He
(16:05):
has to do this thing where Okay, so if theoretically,
if you want to convert surplus value, like in the
Marxist Marxian sense, into this sort of like neo Ricardian thing,
you need to turn it into prices. And there's there's
a long running controversy in in Marxism over whether or
not you can actually do that because the math is weird,
(16:27):
it doesn't work very well. I'm not gonna he doesn't
solve it. He just gives up and says that you
can't do it because they're in two separate spheres, which
is the most compound answer I've ever seen in my
entire life.
Speaker 3 (16:39):
It's I love that.
Speaker 2 (16:43):
Yeah, it's it's it's it's wild. But you know, so,
so back to the sort of main arc of what
the fuck is smoke about here, I'm probably probably I problems.
We're reaching the promised lamp. We have to do this
stuff first. Okay, so those are you know, the two
kinds of economics that Donald Harris is trying to work
(17:04):
with are this sort of post Canesian stuff, which is
derived from like Ricardo and classical economists, and then like
Marxian stuff. There's also the third school, which is neoclassical economics,
which this is all the economics that you've learned in school, right,
This is supplied demand. This is like your production functions.
This is your like every time someone starts lecturing you
about how the economy works. This is all this stuff. Yeah,
(17:27):
what's very important for our purposes. This is something that
Harris brings up is the single largest difference between neoclassical
economics and whatever came before. It isn't that like, I
don't know, everything's about marginal utility or whatever the fuck.
It's that. It's that in neoclassical economics there are no classes.
They just pretend that classes don't exist.
Speaker 3 (17:49):
Yeah, and in much of American politics, yeah, Germany politics
sadly well.
Speaker 2 (17:57):
And this is also why like the American conception of
class is so nuts, and why everyone's running around in circles,
trying to measure it by like income levels, because all
the economics they use don't have a thing that establishes
what class is.
Speaker 3 (18:10):
And it's one of the jarring differences between the United
Kingdom and the United States, how like we are hyper
aware of class and like it's something that like arguably,
like Britain is obsessed with to detriment of other Like yes,
but and you go to America and fucking like like
if if you have a job that pays you occasionally,
(18:31):
your middle class and then fucking everyone is apparently and
like it becomes a meaningless term.
Speaker 2 (18:36):
I guess, yeah, this is this is very explicitly for
political reasons, right Neoclassical economics is developed as an attack
on Marxism, Like this is this is this is its
actual sort of origin, and it's originators are like very
explicit about this right now. And this is where we
get back to Sarrafa, because Saraffa's work effectively is an
attack on neoclassical economics, and Sarraffa in ninety nine pages
(18:58):
literally destroy everything they'd ever produced. But you know, the
new classical solution to this is basically to get everyone
who talked about it fired and this actually worked, like
they did, is basically massive social cleansing campaign of like
all of the sort of heterodox economists they got they
got the ball fired and it worked. And Harris actually
weirdly was kind of was like one of the last
holdouts into the nineties. But he just like retires in
(19:21):
like the late nineties and that's like basically every all
of them get rent out. Uh, there's a good we'll
talk about him later. There's there's another Postcanesian economists named
Frederick Lee, who my friends estrange matter really like, who's
an anarchist who's in this school, and he has like
an excruciatingly detailed account of all of these economists getting
run out by the new classical people. And so, you know,
(19:43):
like neoclassical economists like in in some sense they there there.
Their strategy is a strategy of capitalism, which is like,
obviously we're not right here, but we have money and
we have force, so we're going to defeat your ideas
by SI destroying you all rightly actual physical force.
Speaker 3 (20:04):
So incredible, Yeah, the cultural revolution in economics.
Speaker 2 (20:09):
Yeah, but it's interesting because Harris Harris is writing this
in seventy eight, and in seventy eight it's still the
battle hasn't been settled yet, right, there's still kind of
like the fight going on between like who is going
to be like in control of economics. And I mean,
the you know, the answer is to Theokanzian is that
the post Kansians lose. But you know that wasn't necessarily
the case of this time. There's also a really weird
(20:30):
artifact of this that I want to talk about a
little bit, which is that, like, you know, so remember
at the beginning of this, I said that that stupid
economist person has said that it was neo Kandians versus
post Kansians. So those two groups are not the same thing.
The post Kandians are the people who we've been talking
about this whole time, right like they're they're like they're
basically neo Ricardans right there. They're like based on classical economics.
(20:51):
The neo Kansians are just regular Kansians basically, but they
had to change the math to be shittier and make
themselves more right wing to like survive.
Speaker 3 (21:01):
To re explained like John Maynard Keynes and supply side economics.
Speaker 2 (21:04):
Yeah, if you if you want to Yeah, if you
want to give, I mean, go ahead.
Speaker 3 (21:08):
I don't know, I'm fucking I am a historian, but
it's a it differs from classical economics. I guess in
the idea that the state can make interventions am Ukutumbi,
after as I fucked up, the state interventions can beneficial
for the economy. And it emerges like in the I
guess post Great Depression, Like I guess maybe from the
(21:29):
from like you know, the New Deal and these these,
and then post World War two, right, like it's very
influential in the kind of build up after World War Two.
The idea that like the state shouldn't necessarily be like
what's happening Adam hand, the invisible hand, the fucking invisible
hand maybe isn't killing it and we needn't said the
hand of the state.
Speaker 2 (21:46):
Yeah, And I mean, well, you know, it's worth mentioning
that like in Adam Smith, the hand of the state
is explicitly God, sorry, explicitly God. Unfortunately, unfortunately, there was
no God to bail out the markets of the nineteen twenties,
so kids was like shit, yeah, and I'm mean, you know,
his is like in sort of like more detail, like
his thing basically is about like he's he's obsessed with
(22:06):
sort of like like like basically cyclically counteracting crises by
using states of betting to like, you know, like his
things basically is that, like capital will misallocate resources, you
have to use the state to like kick the bastards
into line, like the stable economy. And the problem is
that by by the late seventies, the Kansians are in
crisis because in original like Kansian theory, it wasn't supposed
(22:28):
to be possible for there to be both rising unemployment
and rising inflation, but that was like happening over the
entire world, and so they got kind of annihilated. And
this is the thing that like the neoliberals used to
like take power. And it's interesting because the post Kansians
like they use and you know, and like the beginning
of this book is a bit of of like Kansian stuff.
But then he just like you know, they go off
(22:50):
and do other more interesting things. But it's very funny
because because this is still seventy eight, he Harris calls
himself a neo Kansian, and he called all of his
collaborators Neokansians because the real Neo Kansians hadn't like developed yet.
Speaker 3 (23:05):
Oh so he's just trying to he's just trying to
fucking claim it, like he's trying to get his like
stick in the ground. First.
Speaker 2 (23:12):
Yeah, well, but I mean that's the thing, like at
that point they were the neo like the there. There
wasn't like there. Their school had had as good a
claim to it as anyone. It's just that they got
kicked out later by the sort of board Like, yeah,
makes sense, ones, Yeah, it's also a thing. It's also
important about this, for reasons we're gonna get to in
a second, is that the post Kansian tradition also has
a lot of very eclectic Marxists in it. We're gonna
(23:35):
get the Joe and Robinson who's a very close collaborator
of a very good Marxis philosopher. She's actually the person
who like kicks off the Cambridge Captural capital controversy, and
she's she's a very kind of esoteric Marxist kind of
in a similar way to uh uh, to what Donald
Harris is. But you know, you know what Marxism in
theory isn't supposed to support.
Speaker 3 (23:55):
Would that be the sale of goods? And services.
Speaker 1 (23:57):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (23:58):
Yeahs product and services that support this podcast.
Speaker 3 (24:00):
Distributing them using the price mechanism.
Speaker 2 (24:13):
Yeah, we're back. So yeah, there's there. There's also you know,
there's got a Galecki who's very important to this too,
so that there are Marxists kind of on the ground
of this, and they're they're trying to sort of their
their goal is to try to like explain an economy
that has monopolies in it, because Marxist theory sort of
like assumed that there weren't and that there was like
actual competition in markets and so part of what but
(24:37):
this this comes to the sort of fundamental project of
of what this book is about, which is that it's
it's it's about developing a sort of growth model that
you can sort of you know, that that that that
accounts that that can be modified to account for all
of these things. So the initial thing that they're trying
to produce is is like a model of what they
call a Golden Age, which is a thing that's from
Joe and Robinson. Yeah, that's basically like it's the goal name,
(25:00):
which is a theoretical like economic configuration. You have you
have full employment, you have constant, stable economic growth and
the system can reproduce itself. And you know, I'm going
to read a passage from this book so you can understand.
Partially so you can because it's about this, right, and
partially so you can understand. Like this isn't even a
particularly technical paragraph.
Speaker 3 (25:23):
You're talking about hit.
Speaker 2 (25:24):
Me steady state. Yeah, Golden Age is also kind of
similar thing to a concept called steady state economies he's
writing about. A particular steady state is based on a
given set of conditions and interrelations among them, a given
rate of accumulation of capital, given rates of savings from
the stream of net income, a given state of technological
(25:44):
knowledge or rate of technological innovation, a given rate of
increase of the labor force, and a given set of expectations.
To ask whether such a situation exists is to ask
whether the conditions which define it are mutually compatible or
self consistent. So this, this is basically what he's doing, right,
is you can you can build these like models of
(26:05):
like these sort of Kanzian models that like and I
started post Kansian models that you know, if you if you,
if you set up all the elements right, you can
theoretically generate stable growth. But then you know, obviously his
thing is like this doesn't work, right, Like, no, no,
no economy will ever generate this because there's there's only
really like it's extremely hard to actually get you know,
(26:26):
your sort of like input levels and your technological development
whatever the fuck like at the same rate to do this.
But he's he's using this as basically the model for
as like as like a sort of toy model that
you can then sort of warp to fit the rest
of the sort of the rest of the capitalist economy.
But in order to do this, he has to generate
(26:47):
a crisis theory. And this is where he's just like
suddenly all the marks comes back in and he's like,
so his he's the product he's trying to do is
he's trying to use a post Kanzian model of how
economic growth works and then and then combine that with
Marxist crisis theory to produce basically a model of you know,
what kinds of conditions in an economy will cause like
(27:08):
crisis states. Now, ooka, the every thing is very weird
about this, right, It's like he doesn't do normal Like
there's like an entire school of Marxist crisis theory, and
he doesn't do it. He instead like rewrites a bunch
of Marxist equations and then comes up with his own
like version of crisis theory of like different kinds of crises.
(27:28):
And I like, what, it's so weird, it's so bad.
Speaker 3 (27:33):
Like maybe he wanted to make him make his mock
you know.
Speaker 2 (27:37):
Yeah, I guess it's weird because it's like this whole
thing is interesting, but it's like I don't think anyone
ever followed up on it really.
Speaker 3 (27:43):
Right, It's just like this dead end of academic theory.
Speaker 2 (27:46):
Yeah, well, I think it's also you know, I mean
it's partially like a rudnut travel thing. It's partially because
as as the post Kanesians went on, they got less
and less Marxists. So like a lot of the original
people are like Seraphus on Marxist, but like a lot
of the original like Joan Robinson is definitely a Marxist,
but they get like less and less over time, and
so there's less interest in kind of like folding in
Marxism to it.
Speaker 3 (28:07):
Yeah, so he's lose interest in that.
Speaker 2 (28:10):
Yeah. But this is where we get to the final question,
like is he a Marxist and My answer is I
don't even in even in sixty eight and seventy eight,
which is pretty early, I don't think he's a Marxist.
I don't think he's a Marxist in this book. I
think he's using Marxist theory, but I don't think he's
actually a Marxist like politically. And the reason I don't
think this is because, you know, so we talk about
surplus value, right, So surplus value is supposed to be
(28:32):
this value it's extracted, but it's the magnitude of it.
One of the things, like how much value you extract,
like how many hours of the day you can steal
from a worker, depends on how many hours of the
day you'd need to pay them for in order for
them to survive.
Speaker 3 (28:44):
Right.
Speaker 2 (28:45):
And one of the crucial things about this is that
that Marx is very explicit about this, that rate of
like how much you need to pay them to survive
is determined by social struggle, right, because like you know
what what a worker quote unquote needs to survive in
like a different places in context is different, and you
can fight in order for that rate to be higher.
(29:06):
And this is like an incredibly basic part of Marxism right,
it's the part of Marxism where the economy is also determed,
like the function of the capitalist economy is produced by
class struggle. This is like, this is like this is
even one. This is Marxism zero zero zero like this
this is this is the shit they hand you on
the flo on like your fucking tour of Marxism school
(29:27):
before you holding classes.
Speaker 3 (29:30):
Yeah, so when you get that very you know, there's
very short introductions you can get where it's like like
a tiny little booklet that explains so like the sene
Quan on the little elements of things.
Speaker 2 (29:40):
Yeah, and Harris writes pages and pages and pages of
stuff about like about about like the rate of surplus
value extraction, and do you know how many times he
mentions class fucking once in like and it's it's like
the thirty eight thing he mentions after like the technical
compensation of capital and like it's some other crisis like
(30:01):
this all of this ship and he just doesn't mention it.
And this is this is the thing that like fundamentally
has convinced me that what what he's doing isn't substantively Marxism.
He's using the tools of merchant political economy but he's
he's he's he's viewing capitalism as purely a sort of
(30:24):
like top down thing, right as and not something that's
actually like you know, like he acknowledges there are classes,
but he doesn't see them as actors at all.
Speaker 3 (30:34):
Yeah, so, like the struggle between the classes is is
And it's.
Speaker 2 (30:38):
Funny because he has this thing that he calls the
rate of exploitation, right, which is this calculation of sort
of surplus value extraction. But he's like, well, obviously because
the rate is going to change over time due to
the condition to struggle. But he's like an oscar, I'm
just putting his one number. Like it's just like this, right, Yeah,
I don't kind of interpin it. I'm too lazy to
figure that out. And I'm like, what what are you doing?
(30:58):
Like you this is this is the basis of Marxism.
Speaker 3 (31:00):
Yeah, I mean maybe he was just an economics guy,
but even still, no.
Speaker 2 (31:04):
Yeah, this is this is This is the thing that
I've been sort of realizing because one of the issues
with Sarafa is that, you know, Sarafa is a genius economist, right,
he is genuinely, unbelievably brilliant, but he's also a pure economist.
Like here's here is how the start of his most
influential book, Production of Commodities and Means of Commodities starts.
(31:25):
Let us consider an extremely simple society which produces just
enough to maintain itself. Commodities are produced by separate industries
and are exchanged for one another, et cetera. Cut So, okay,
what is he he? He he just has like created
a mental model. And this is the basis of like
of his major economic theories. Him just creating a mental
model where somehow, out of nowhere has appeared a simple
(31:49):
society that produces like one commodity, which is like just
enough commodities, separduties. And you know, if you think about
sort of like Marx, right, Marx is also a sociologist. Right.
He cares about you know, like like the actual point
of production.
Speaker 1 (32:03):
Right.
Speaker 2 (32:04):
He cares about the production process. He cares about the
sort of like like that there are He cares that
there are workers that are doing the production. He cares
about the sort of historical conditions that created you know,
these these things. Don't like as Kamala Harris's mom, this
is actually very important. The Kamala Harris, you didn't just
follow out of the coconut tree. You exist in the
context of all that came before you. That's Kamala Harris's mom,
(32:24):
who is like, I think a better Marxist than Donel
Harris's and Harris will occasionally, like Donald Harris WI occasionally
gesture to this one. He'd be like, well, yeah, obviously
this is all determined by historical conditions. And then he
just has no interest in ever pursuing any of that.
He's just like, yeah, this is we left a later
book that he never wrote. And what you get to
is is this and this is like a real issue
with sort of post Kansianism is that it doesn't have
(32:46):
like Marxism, at least in theory, has politics embedded into it.
Post Kannsianism kind of doesn't.
Speaker 3 (32:51):
It's just like I have a.
Speaker 2 (32:53):
Lot of friends who I like, I deeply care about
who are post Kansian's right, they are political, like you know,
they're they're leftist because they're right, Like it's it's not
something as an automatic generation of your theory, and you
know you can kind of write it that way, right,
Like this is the thing about Frederick Lee, who's the
sort of the guy. A lot of my like a
lot of the Traine writers, people sort of like learn
economics from like I mean indirectly, but like through his book.
(33:14):
But you know, Lee Lee is a committed anarchist and
that shows up at his work. But he has to
like add that in pure like pure sir rafa. By itself,
you could theoretically like run any form of government you
want with it. Right. And I think I've been vindicated
in this whole process because Donald Harris writes a couple
more books on one of which is a book that
(33:35):
is like commissioned by the Jamaican government.
Speaker 3 (33:38):
Okay, he's Jamaican descent or he was born himself directly
in Jamaica, you.
Speaker 2 (33:44):
Know, Like he's just like he's he's Jamaica and he
lives in Jamaica. Okay, I think I think he currently
lives in Jamaica.
Speaker 3 (33:50):
I'm pretty sure this came to the US for his
graduate like for his academic Yeah.
Speaker 2 (33:55):
One, one he lived in the US for a long
time because he's at Stanford, but then he kind of
like left and one I think back at Jamaica. I'm
going to read. So he wrote a book called a Growth.
This is in twenty eleven a growth inducement strategy for
Jamaica and the shortened medium term. I'm going to read
you the bullet points under a section called guiding Principles. Okay,
(34:16):
unleash entrepreneurial dynamism by unlocking latent wealth, tied up and
idle assets. Infrastructure investments is catalysm for job creation through
strengthening resiliency of the built in natural environments. Build an
innovative and competitive modern economy of big and small firms
by strengthening business networks and removing supply side constraints. Modernize
(34:38):
and improve the efficiency of government. Social inclusion through community renewal,
expand as south agency in equity, and proactive partnership between
government and private sector. Also a giant thing in this
about crime. So what has happened is that these two
people have circled back around and they now have the
same politics, which is like tough on crime, austerity, uh.
Speaker 3 (35:02):
Public private partnership, fucking infrastructure spending.
Speaker 2 (35:06):
Yea, yeah, they circled back around. It's funny because the
person writing the economists was like, oh, yeah, they actually
have circled back around because they're both They're both concerned
about wealth inequality. And this book is not concerned about
wealth inequality at all, Like that's not that's not what
it's about. It's about like capital accumulation, and you know,
it's sort of about distribution of surplus, but it's it
doesn't it's concerned with a distribution of surplus. Is that
(35:29):
seraphan economics like doesn't have a fixed race like way
for it to be distributed. It can be distributed in
an enormous number of ways. And the trick is finding
out how it's actually done.
Speaker 3 (35:41):
Right, Yeah, there's.
Speaker 2 (35:44):
A point in here. There's a point in this book
too that like is the thing that's like really first
struck me about it where he's talking about how he's
talking about surplus value and he's talking about how this
is an objective measure of exploitation. But then he goes
and he says, contrary to vulgar reading, is this does
not actually indicate who deserves Like it's not it's not
(36:04):
a moral argument about who should have the value that's
been stolen. And this this right here, this, this is
the road. This is the road that is going to
lead this man from a kind of interesting book about
like the dynamics of of of economic growth and like
building economic models and like using marks in theory does
sort of make it work to straight up I writing
(36:27):
investment documents for the Jamaican government.
Speaker 3 (36:30):
Yeah, Like he seems like it's very like in a way, like,
you know, there are looks like Admitler band stabbers and
Marxist right, but it reminds me a lot of like
the New Labor thing in the UK, you know, which
grew out of a party which genuinely had a commitment
to socialism and became like, yeah, this sort of very
neoliberal like like sort of really like peak neoliberal kind
(36:52):
of Yeah. That there with some Keynesian influence, I guess,
but certainly nothing that one would call combius or even
really so list Yeah.
Speaker 2 (37:01):
Yeah, And I don't know. It's it's sad because it's
like because the interesting thing about.
Speaker 3 (37:07):
That was twenty twelve, he wrote the growth inducement strategy.
Fuck me, okay's in the game, Like yeah.
Speaker 2 (37:13):
But he's still the game in the sense that he's
doing like this is you know, reading that, it very
much felt like I was reading like a modern Chinese
five year plan, except it was like less weird slogans.
Speaker 3 (37:28):
Yeah, I mean it reads like a like a fucking
like a new labor policy document, like a think tank.
It's a lot of like a analyst guy, think tank
guy kind of talk right, like which was extremely like
it looks like he left stand for in the late nineties,
which is when this ship was fucking everywhere, right, Like
(37:49):
what is he called Joseph Stiglitz? Is that right? And
like yeah, yeah, yeah, like yeah, this was the economic
fucking theory of the day. You know, this was very
popular then. But it's absolutely just like this. This is
not like black panther, black panther inflected Marxism. This is
not what is characteristized by the economists here.
Speaker 2 (38:10):
Yeah, no, this is this is this is something genuinely
very sad because it doesn't have to go that. We
know that it's possible to like do this kind of
economics not be like this because Frederick Lee was an
IWW member until the day he died. Like he's he's
like out there at Occupy given like like in the
first days of all like not like he's out there,
like there are videos of him giving speeches to crowds
(38:32):
that occupy right, Like, you don't have to do this,
but he did. And this is also, like, you know,
I think that this kind of political trajectory is kind
of also you can see in it like how his child,
even though he wasn't in her life, Munch is going
to end up as the person she is. And I
think that's my that's my final conclusion from this is
(38:52):
he's not a Marxist and him and his childer lives.
Speaker 3 (38:58):
Yeah, the thing's a ten year as to a motherfucker.
They you start to hang out with a bunch of
other rich people who have ten and you'd be in
too identify with him and you know, stripped you away
from who you Yeah.
Speaker 2 (39:10):
So this this has been It could happen here. Don't
become a daughter and capitalist bastard and your old.
Speaker 3 (39:16):
Age, yeah or your young age.
Speaker 1 (39:20):
Yeah, it could happen here. As a production of cool
Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit
our website cool zonemedia dot com, or check us out
on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to podcasts. You can find sources for it could happen here,
updated monthly at cool zonemedia dot com slash sources. Thanks
(39:44):
for listening,
It Could Happen Here News
Hosts And Creators
Robert Evans
Garrison Davis
James Stout
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