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