With his daughter in the running for president, Donald Harris’ 1978 Capital Accumulation and Income Distribution is getting attention. Check out this anonymous review in the July 24 Economist:
The probable Democratic nominee for president breaks into a laugh at the turn of phrase before explaining, somewhat philosophically, the message of the story: “you exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.” For Ms Harris some of that context is esoteric economic theory. Her father, Donald, is an 85-year-old, Jamaican-born economist, formerly a professor at Stanford University.
He is a clear writer. There are few compound nouns or sentences that run for paragraphs. Yet he is still a Marxist and his writings are sprinkled with obscurantist theorising. Republicans who have mocked Ms Harris for word-salad speeches will find precedent in her father’s writing.
Mr Harris did not move on. In his 1978 book he developed a model of growth without an aggregate capital stock.
Trying completely to reconcile Mr. Harris’s work with the mainstream would bowdlerise it, though, as it is more unashamedly Marxist than anything in modern American politics. He is concerned with exploitation, the value form and the diminishing rate of profit. In one paper he dismissed the idea of America’s black population as analogous to those living under colonial rule, arguing that the problem was capitalism rather than dominance by a foreign power. There is no reason why black workers would be better off under black capitalists than white ones, he wrote.
Mr Harris, for his part, retired from academia in 1998 to focus on policy work, including advising the Jamaican government. For all his earlier radicalism, he has recommended fiscal discipline and crime reduction, as well as export-led growth and industrial strategy. In the end, however, perhaps his greatest economic legacy will be his daughter.
Kamala Harris clearly did not move on from her “unashamedly Marxist” father. She tosses off word salads on price controls, taxes on unrealized capital gains, and so forth. This is the economic equivalent of phrenology, another enthusiasm of Karl Marx, as he explained to Engels in 1862:
The Jewish nigger Lassalle who, I’m glad to say, is leaving at the end of this week, has happily lost another 5,000 talers in an ill-judged speculation.
It is now quite plain to me — as the shape of his head and the way his hair grows also testify — that he is descended from the negroes who accompanied Moses’ flight from Egypt (unless his mother or paternal grandmother interbred with a nigger). Now, this blend of Jewishness and Germanness, on the one hand, and basic negroid stock, on the other, must inevitably give rise to a peculiar product. The fellow’s importunity is also nigger-like.
What Donald and Kamala think of that Marxist view is not clear at this writing.
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