It Could Happen Here - I Read Kamala Harris’ Dad’s Book

Episode Date: July 30, 2024

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.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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and it's all packed with gems, fun, straight-up comedia, and that's a song that only nuestra gente can sprinkle. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Calls on Media. apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast call zone media welcome to it could happen here a podcast where i mia wong have read kamala harris's dad donald harris's book uh this is this is the podcast that you're listening to now uh with me to experience this uh actually genuinely fairly interesting work of political

economy is james stout hi man i'm so excited to learn 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 the actual key element of of this book which is called Capital Accumulation and Income Distribution, is that it is unbelievably technically dense. Okay, we're going to get into the book. First, we should talk a bit about who Donald Harris is. So a lot of the focus around, this is Kamala Harris, the presumptive Democratic nominee's dad. So a lot of the media coverage around him is around him being a Marxist. This is debatable. Obviously, it's the 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 is not a Marxist. Yeah. So the thing about this book, so this book is from 1978, Yeah, I mean, I think, so the thing about this book, so this book is from 1978, 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, something like four or five. So this is written about a decade after that. Yeah, much like the new American Communist Party. Like a lot of divorced guys just love to be communist.

It's a thing about divorce guys. Oh, God, yeah. So, you know, the sort of, the thing everyone kind of cites about, like, Donald Harris's politics is 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 But the interesting thing about Donald Harris is that he is not the Marxist that you would expect to see coming out of that milieu. Because those people's Marxism – I mean, he is very interested in underdevelopment and you know sort of like imperialism but he's he's not what from one of the sort of like bowis inflected kinds of marxism which are the kinds that tended to be sort of floating around like that yeah 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 marxian the entire time um but b yeah intolerable we don't understand what this is so there's a very famous marx quote where he's complaining about i think it's something the german social democratic party did or something where he or 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 a hundred years since then 150 years people have been calling themselves marxians instead of Marxists. But this is all over that book. I'm developing a picture of a kind of guy. Oh, yeah. You're painting me a rich portrait. Yeah. So but the interesting part is he's what's known as a post Keynesian.

And weirdly, dear listeners, you are you are some of the only people in this entire country who 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 year, I guess two years, I don't know. It's been a long time. But the episodes about inflation that we did with the folks over at Strange

Matters, those people are one of the groups that are the intellectual heirs to post-Keynesianism. It's a... I guess post-Keynesianism is kind of... I guess it's like the largest of what's called the heterodox economics

schools. We're going to get more into what it is later because it's not just... So it's post-Keynesian after John Bader Keynes. It's not really Keynes. And that not really Keynes, and that's going to become very important in a second. But, you know, 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 post-Keynesian economics, and I also have studied a lot of marx and you need both of those to be able to write about this however comma i discovered two hours before this recording i discovered that the economist had sent some hack who they refused to name to write about this book and this person managed okay on top of just like straight up not like not literally the their explanation of what the book is about is simply wrong in in just four paragraphs they managed to make an error so egregious that i if i had turned this shit into my professors in college it would have failed me for 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 Neo and post-Keynesians.

Now, this is probably gibberish to like 99% of people listening to this, but in terms of heterodox economics, this is the equivalent of not knowing who fought in World War II. Like, this is, the Cambridge Capital Controversy is, it's basically the single moment

in which this kind of, like this kind of heterodox economics appears onto the economic scene in a way that they were able to force the mainstream neoclassical economists to pay attention to. And this battle should, intellectually,

should have completely destroyed all of neoclassical economics. Everything you've ever heard about how price equals supply and demand, all of those curves, all of that is fucking bullshit. all of it was destroyed by one single it was about it was happened about the course of a decade between the sort of post-Keynesians mostly Serafa but also Joe and Robinson I think actually started it um we're gonna talk about those people more later this is a battle between them and very 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 the two machines. And this, this completely annihilates neoclassical economics. All of it is fucking fake because you know, they, they need this for the production function without the production function. Like you can't even get to supply and demand, right? Literally everything, all of their stuff immediately falls apart. I'm not going to attempt to do an explanation of the Cambridge capital controversy, what it was actually about here, because 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're 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 a level of sort of like confusion we're getting with here. We're like the, the person, the economist 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 Controversy is in the book. And in the book, Donald Harris very specifically talks about, there's an entire chapter of the book that is just him using the products of the Cambridge Capital Controversy to completely destroy neoclassical economics. This is an entire chapter of the book, and this guy got who it 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 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 the very the shortest answer i can possibly give is it's an attempt to build a sort of mathematical model of how – that measures the growth of an economy and can sort of determine based on different sort of inputs of – we'll get to the board of this in a second. In terms of inputs of capital and parts of labor, 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 230, 240 years of economics. But before we do that, do you know what economics exists to sell you? I do, actually. That is a fantastic transition,

Mia. Is it goods and services? It is, in fact, goods and services. Priceless capital goods. in fact, goods and services, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. You know that rush of endorphins you feel after a great workout? Well, that's when the real magic happens. if you love hearing real inspiring stories from the people you know follow and admire join me every week for post run high it's where we take the

conversation beyond the run and get into the heart of it all it's light-hearted pretty crazy and very fun listen to post run high on the i, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Jack Peace Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. I'm Jack Peace Thomas, and I'm inviting you to join me and a vibrant community of literary enthusiasts dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while commuting or running errands, for those who find themselves seeking solace, wisdom, and refuge between the chapters. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Together, we'll dissect classics and contemporary works

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and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. All right, and we are back. So, okay, in order to understand literally what this fundamental project is, we have to talk about

sort of the three broad categories of economists. So the first sort of original in, we're not going to, there's a couple, there's some people before this, but like the, in terms of like economists whose work is important to now, there's three broad categories.

And we're going to start with the classical economists. Broadly, there's also about three important classical economists. And 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 malthus for our purposes um he's most well known for being the like the the like out of control population growth will kill everyone

on earth we need to like slow populate stuff like that's not super relevant for us. Everyone, I think, kind of 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, there's three major classes, right? There's landlords, there's capitalists, and there's workers.

And he's concerned about how the surplus product of a society, which is like all of the sort of stuff that's produced in an economy that isn't literally directly necessary for everyone to survive, how is that sort of surplus distributed and how does this sort of impact economic growth? The post-Keynesian tradition that Donald Harris is in is, in a real sense, their successors to Ricardo, right? A lot of – I've mentioned Piero Serafa, who is probably the central figure of post-Keynesian economics.

He's a really interesting guy. He knows everyone. He knew Keynes. He was weirdly friends with Antonio Gramsci, the former head of the Italian Communist Party, whose enormously influential work was like knew him. And a lot of what Seraph'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 is and 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.

For our purposes, you know, 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-Ricardian stuff that Sarafa is doing. Does he change later? Do you know, is Harris one of these guys who goes on an intellectual journey and becomes a fucking neoliberal? Oh, we'll get there. We'll get to where all this ends up at the end of this episode. But 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 sort of i love that i love a book where the author goes to the personal journey it's also very funny because the economist guy 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 uh what the the economist article is subtitled a combative marxist economist with white house influence which like thanks guys yeah okay so the the the the the basis of marxist marxian political economy is the labor theory of value. We're going to 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. They're paid enough to sort of like eat, sleep, and have kids so there can be more workers. But the rest of their labor time is stolen by capitalists and is thus unrenumerated. This unpaid labor time is called surplus value, and this is what capital is made of.

So this is like the very, very basis of sort of what Marxism is. And, you know, in sort of Marxism, and this is sort of different than Ricardo, which is like, Ricardo understands that there are classes and that they are in conflict to some extent but you know for marx the central dynamics of capitalism is you know it's the conflict between the bourgeoisie or the capitalists who own the means of production

and then you know and by that ownership like extract surplus value from the proletariat and the proletariat or the working class are forced to sell their labor to capitalists etc etc something very interesting two 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 Sarafa. And this is the post-Keynesians, right? And that surplus is very critically not the same thing as Marxian surplus value. And that surplus is very critically not the same thing as Marxian surplus value. So part of what's happening here is that Harris is trying to square the circle basically between these two approaches to what surplus is and sort of what right um surplus value is still in labor time and the value it produces 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 uh in the post in post-kensian economics surplus is you know so so in in in sort of like a seraphim work or in in this book too right you have basically a production matrix, which is like, it's a matrix 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 there, 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 talked about with the card. All right. There's a,

there's a certain amount of commodities you need to produce so that everyone can this 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 we're 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 this Ricardian sense of there's a bunch of commodities that we've produced that's access to our ability to... our need to

reproduce ourselves. And he's trying to square these, and it doesn't work. It just sort of breaks down. Does he actively address this dual meaning and then explain like yeah well so his basic issue is that so he 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 do i 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 the sort of like neo-ricardian thing you need to turn it into prices and there's there's a long-running controversy 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 going to... 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 cop-out answer I've ever seen in my entire life. It's... I love that. Yeah, it's it's it's wild but you know so so back to the sort of main arc of what the fuck is this book about

oh i'm probably i'm probably we're reaching the promised land we have to do this stuff first okay so those are you know the, the two kinds of economics that Donald Harris is trying to work with are this sort of post-Keynesian 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 supply-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. What's very important for our purposes, and 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 in neoclassical economics there are no classes.

They just pretend that classes don't exist. Yeah. And in much of American politics. 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 it is 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 the detriment of other like yeah but and you go to america and fucking like like if you have a job that pays you occasionally you're 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 very explicitly for political reasons, right? Neoclassical economics is developed as an attack on Marxism. This is its actual origin, and its originators are very explicit about this, right?

Rafa in 99 pages literally destroys everything they'd ever produced. But, you know, the neoclassical solution to this is basically to get everyone who talked about it fired. And this actually worked. Like they did this basically massive social cleansing campaign of like all of the sort of heterodox economists. They got they got them all fired and it worked. And Harris actually weirdly was kind of was like one of the last holdouts into the 90s. But he just like retires in like the late 90s and that's like basically every all of them get ran out uh there's a good we'll talk about him later there's there's another uh post-keynesian economists named frederick lee who my friends at strange

matter really like who's an anarchist who's in the school and he has like an excruciatingly detailed account of all of these economists getting run out by the neoclassical people. And so, you know, like neoclassical economists, like in some sense, their strategy is a strategy of capitalism, which is like, obviously we're not right here, but we have money and we have force. And so we're going to defeat your ideas by simply destroying you all by like actual physical force.

Incredible. Yeah, the cultural revolution in economics. Yeah, but it's interesting because Donald Harris is writing this in 78. And in 78, it's still, the battle hasn't been settled yet, right? There's still kind of like the fight going on between who is going to be in control of economics. And the answer is that the post-Keynesians lose. But that wasn't necessarily the case at this time. There's also a really weird artifact of this that I want to talk about a little bit, which is that...

Remember at the beginning of this, I said that that stupid economist person has said that it was neo-Keynesians versus post-Keynesians. So those two groups are not the same thing. The Post-Keynesians are the people who we've been talking about this whole time, right? Like they're, they're like, they're basically Neo-Ricardians, right?

They're, they're like basing on classical economics. The, the Neo-Keynesians are just regular Keynesians basically, but they had to change the math to be shittier and make, make themselves more right wing to like survive. Should we explain like john maynard keens and supply-side economics yeah if you want to yeah you want to give it i mean it's 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 i am i you could tell me afterwards if i fucked up the state interventions can be beneficial for the economy and it emerges like in the i guess post great depression like i guess maybe from yeah 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 ii the idea that like the state shouldn't necessarily be like what's that adam hand the invisible hand the fucking invisible hand maybe isn't killing it and we need instead the hand of the state yeah't necessarily be like, what's that Adam hand, the visible hand, the fucking invisible hand maybe isn't killing it. And we need instead 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. I mean, sorry,

the invisible hand is explicitly God. Unfortunately, unfortunately there was no God to bail out the markets of the 1920s. So Keynes was like, shit. Yeah. And I mean, you know,

he's like in sort of like more detail like his thing basically is is about like he's he's obsessed with sort of like like like basically cyclically counteracting crises by using states 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 it's like a stable economy and the problem is that but but by the late 70s the keynesians are in crisis because in in original like keynesian 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 Keynesians like they use, you know, and like the beginning of this book is a bit of of like Keynesian 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 78. He Harris calls himself a neokinesian and he calls all of his collaborators neocansians because the real neocansians 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 his 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 their their school had a had as good a claim to it as anyone it's just that they got kicked out later by the sort of more capitalist ones. Yeah. It's also – a thing that's also important about this for reasons we're going to get to in a second is that the post-Keynesian tradition also has a lot of very eclectic Marxists in it. We're going to get to Joanne Robinson, who's a very close collaborator of a very good Marxist philosopher.

She's actually the person who like kicks off the Cambridge capital, capital controversy. And she's, she's a very kind of esoteric Marxist kind of in a similar way to, 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. Yeah. It's product and services that support this podcast. We're distributing them using the price mechanism. athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast Post Run High is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. You know that rush of endorphins you feel after a great workout? Well, that's when the real magic happens.

So if you love hearing real inspiring stories from the people, you know, follow and admire, join me every week for post run high. It's where we take the conversation beyond the run and get into the heart of it all. It's lighthearted, pretty crazy, and very fun. It's lighthearted, pretty crazy, and very fun. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. deep into the rich world of Black literature. I'm Jack Peace Thomas, and I'm inviting you to join me in a vibrant community of literary enthusiasts dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories. Black Lit is for the page turners,

for those who listen to audiobooks while commuting or running errands, for those who find themselves seeking solace, wisdom, and refuge between the chapters. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Together, we'll dissect classics and contemporary works while uncovering the stories of the brilliant writers behind them. Black Lit is here to amplify the voices of Black writers

and to bring their words to life. Listen to Black Lit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hola, mi gente. It's Honey German, and I'm bringing you Gracias, Come Again, the podcast where we dive deep into the world of Latin culture, musica, peliculas, and entertainment with some of the biggest names in the game. If you love hearing real conversations with your favorite Latin celebrities, artists, and culture shifters, this is the podcast for you. We're talking real conversations with our Latin stars, from actors and artists to musicians and creators, sharing

their stories, struggles, and successes. You know it's going to be filled with chisme laughs and all the vibes that you love. Each week, we'll explore everything from music and pop culture to deeper topics like identity, community, and breaking down barriers in all sorts of industries. Don't miss out on the fun, el té caliente, and life stories. Join me for Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get into todo lo actual y viral. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Yeah, we're back. So, yeah, there's also, you know, there's got a Kalecki who's very important to this, too.

So there are Marxists kind of on the ground of this, and they're trying to sort of, 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 what this book is about which is that it's it's about developing a sort of growth model that you can sort of you know that, that accounts, that can be modified to account for all of these things. So the initial thing that they're trying to produce is like a model of what they call a golden age, which is a thing that's from Joanne Robinson. That's basically like, a golden age is a theoretical like economic configuration you have when you have full employment, you have constant constant stable economic growth and the system can reproduce itself and you know i'm i'm gonna 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 steady state uh 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 income, a given state of technological knowledge, a 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. right is you can you can build these like models of like these sort of keynesian models that like and i started post keynesian models that you know if if you if you set up all the elements right you

can theoretically generate stable growth yeah 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 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 using this as basically the model for

as like a sort of toy model that you can then sort of warp to fit the rest of the capitalist economy but in order to do this he has to generate a crisis theory. And this is where he just like suddenly all the Marx comes back in and he's like, so the project he's trying to do is he's trying to use a post Keynesian model of how economic growth works and then combine that with Marx's crisis theory to produce basically a model

of what kinds of conditions in an economy will cause like crisis states now okay the other thing that's very weird about this right is 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 that are like, wait, it's, it's so weird. It's so baffling.

Maybe he wanted to make him make his mark, you know? Yeah, I guess it's weird. Cause 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 road not travel thing it's partially because as as the post-keynesians went on they got less and less marxist so like a lot of the original people are like seraph is not a marxist but like a lot of the original joan robinson is definitely a marxist but they get like less, less and less over time. And so there's less interest in kind of, like, folding in Marxism to it. Yeah, so he's losing 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 68 and 78, 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 that'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 need to pay them for in order for them to survive, right? And one of the crucial things about this is that that and then 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 in like in different places and contexts 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 deterred like the the function of the capitalist economy is produced by class struggle this is like this is like this is even one of this is marxism zero zero zero like this is this is the shit they hand you on the flaw i'm like your fucking tour of marxism school before you get enrolled in 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 sine qua non little 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 it's like the 30th thing he mentions after like technical composition of capital and like some other crisis like it's all of this shit. And he just doesn't mention it. because it's like it's all of this shit 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 marx's 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 and it's funny because he has this thing that he calls the rate of exploitation right which is this calculation 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 nah screw it I'm just putting his one number like it's just. But he's like, well, obviously, because the rate is going to change over time due to the conditions of struggle. But he's like, nah, screw it. I'm just putting it as one number.

It's just like one coefficient. Right? Yeah. I don't know how to interpret it. I'm too lazy to figure that out. And I'm like, what? What are you doing? This is the basis of Marxism. Yeah. I mean, maybe he was just an economics guy, but even still. No, yeah. This is the thing that

I've been sort of realizing, because one of the issues with Serafa is that, you know, Serafa is a genius economist, right? He is genuinely and unbelievably brilliant, but he's also a pure economist. Like, here is how the start of his most influential book, Production of Commodities on 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, etc. So, okay, what is he?

He just has like created a mental model. This is the basis of like of his major economic theory is him just creating a mental model where somehow out of nowhere has appeared a simple society that produces one commodity, which is just enough commodities. They're produced by separate industries and they're changing. And if you think about Marx, Marx is also a sociologist. He cares about the actual point of production. He cares about the production process.

He cares that 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 things don't, like as Kamala Harris's mom, this is actually very important.

The Kamala Harris, you didn't just fall out of the coconut tree. You exist in the context of all that came before you. That's Kamala Harris's mom, who was like, I think a better Marxist than donald harris's and harris will occasionally like donald harris will occasionally gesture to this would be like well yeah obviously this is all determined by like 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-Keynesianism is that it doesn't have like Marxism at least in theory has politics embedded into it post-Keynesianism kind of doesn't right it's just form of economic analysis I have a lot of friends who I like I deeply care about who are post-Keynesians right they are political like you know they're leftists because they're leftists right

like it's not something that's an automatic generation of their 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 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 train drivers people sort of, like, learn economics from. Like, I mean, indirectly, but, like, through his book. But, you know, Lee is a committed anarchist, and that shows up in his work. But he has to, like, add that in. Just pure, like, pure seraphim by itself, you could theoretically, like, run any form of government you want with it. Right.

seraphic 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 um one of which is a book that is like commissioned by the jamaican government okay he's a jamaican descent or he was born himself directly in jamaica you know like he's like he's jamaican he lives in jamaica okay i think i think he currently lives in jamaica i'm pretty sure yeah he came to the u.s for his graduate for his like for his academics yeah well he lived in the u.s for a long time too because he was at stanford but then he kind of like left and went i think went back to jamaica i i'm good i'm going to read so that so he wrote a book called, this is in 2011, A Growth Inducement Strategy for Jamaica in the Short and 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 in idle assets. Infrastructure investments as catalyzation for job creation through strengthening resiliency of the built and natural environment. 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, expanded self-agency and equity, and proactive partnership between government and private sector. There's also a giant thing in this about crime.

What has happened is that these two people have circled back around and they now have the same politics, which is tough on crime, austerity, public-private partnership, fucking infrastructure spending.

They've circled back around.'s funny because the the person writing the economist 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 the distribution of surplus is that Serafin economics like doesn't have a fixed ratio 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. right yeah there's a point in here there's a point in this book too that like is the thing that like really first struck me about it where he's talking about how he's talking about surplus value he's talking about how this is an objective measure of exploitation but then he goes and he says contrary to vulgar readings this does not actually indicate who deserves like it doesn't 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 to sort of make it work to straight up i'm writing investment documents for the chebican government yeah like he seemed

like it's very um like in a way like you know there are lots of like ed miller bandstabbers and marxist right but like 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 there was some keynesian influence i guess but certainly nothing the one would call communist or even really socialist yeah yeah and i don't know it's it's sad because it's like this because the interesting thing about... That was 2012 he wrote the growth inducement strategy. Fuck me.

Okay, he's still in the game. Yeah, but he's still in 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 with 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 it's a lot of like uh analyst guy think tank guy kind of talk right like which was extremely like it looks like he left stan in the late nineties, which is when this shit was fucking everywhere. Right. Like, uh, yeah. Um,

what's he called? Joseph Stiglitz. Is that right? And like, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Like, yeah, this was the economic fucking, uh, theory of the day, you know, this was very popular then, but it is absolutely just like this, this is not like a black panther black panther inflected marxism this is this is not what is characterized as by the economist here yeah no this is this this is this is something genuinely very sad because it doesn't have to go that we 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 giveww member until the day he died like he's he's like out there at occupy give like like in the first days of like not first he's out there like there

are videos of him giving speeches to crowds at 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 you can see in it like how his child even though he wasn't in her life much 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 child are libs yeah these are the things that tenure does to a motherfucker they uh you start to hang out with a bunch of other rich people who have tenure and you begin to identify with them and bunch of other rich people who have turned you into identify with them and stripped you away from who you were

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