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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.
Hi, man, I'm so excited to know what Donald has for us today. Me too.
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. 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.
I am shocked that people in our media today might misunderstand basic things about Marxism and who is and he's not a Marxist.
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.
Was he like not present in her younger life.
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.
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.
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 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 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 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.
I'm developing a picture of a kind of guy, Oh yeah, panting maat Rich portrait man.
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, 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 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 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, 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, 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 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, 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 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
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.
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 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.
I it was.
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 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 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?
I do. Actually, that is a fantastic transition, mayah. That is it goods and services.
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 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 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
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. 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 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 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 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, 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.
Does he change later? Do you know? Is Harris one of these guys who goes on like intellectual journey and becomes oh.
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.
So I love that. I love a book where your thickerest of a personal journey.
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 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.
The What the Economists is subtitled a Combative Marxist Economists with White House Influence, which like.
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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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.
Does he like, does he like actively address this like dual meaning and then explain like.
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 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, 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.
It's I love that.
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 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, 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.
Yeah, and in much of American politics, yeah, Germany politics sadly well.
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.
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, your middle class and then fucking everyone is apparently and like it becomes a meaningless term.
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
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 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, 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.
So incredible, Yeah, the cultural revolution in economics.
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 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. 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.
To re explained like John Maynard Keynes and supply side economics.
Yeah, if you if you want to Yeah, if you want to give, I mean, go ahead.
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 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.
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 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 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 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.
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.
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 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.
Would that be the sale of goods? And services.
Yeah.
Yeahs product and services that support this podcast.
Distributing them using the price mechanism.
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 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,
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.
You're talking about hit.
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 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 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, 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
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
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. And I like, what, it's so weird, it's so bad.
Like maybe he wanted to make him make his mock you know.
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.
Right, It's just like this dead end of academic theory.
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.
Yeah, so he's lose interest in that.
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 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.
Right.
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.
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 before you holding classes.
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.
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 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 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.
Yeah, so, like the struggle between the classes is is And it's.
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? Like you this is this is the basis of Marxism.
Yeah, I mean maybe he was just an economics guy, but even still, no.
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. 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 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.
Right.
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, 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 like Marxism, at least in theory, has politics embedded into it. Post Kannsianism kind of doesn't.
It's just like I have a.
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.
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 is like commissioned by the Jamaican government.
Okay, he's Jamaican descent or he was born himself directly in Jamaica, you.
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.
I'm pretty sure this came to the US for his graduate like for his academic Yeah.
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, 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 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.
Public private partnership, fucking infrastructure spending.
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 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.
Right, Yeah, there's.
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 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 investment documents for the Jamaican government.
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
of Yeah. That there with some Keynesian influence, I guess, but certainly nothing that one would call combius or even really so list Yeah.
Yeah, And I don't know. It's it's sad because it's like because the interesting thing about.
That was twenty twelve, he wrote the growth inducement strategy. Fuck me, okay's in the game, Like yeah.
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.
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 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.
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 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 he's not a Marxist and him and his childer lives.
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.
So this this has been It could happen here. Don't become a daughter and capitalist bastard and your old.
Age, yeah or your young age.
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