On the finish of July, shortly after Kamala Harris turned the Democratic candidate for President, The Economist described her father, Donald Harris, an emeritus professor of economics at Stanford with whom she reportedly has little contact, as “a combative Marxist.” In September’s Presidential debate, Donald Trump repeated and expanded the cost, calling father and daughter Marxists. “He taught her effectively,” Trump stated. Just lately, I requested Donald Harris, who grew up in Jamaica and is now eighty-six years previous, how he would describe himself. Harris replied, “Marx himself stated, ‘I’m not a Marxist.’ He was expressing his objection to the distortion of his concepts by his contemporaries who used his identify as a label for his or her concepts and practices. Talking for myself and my work, I may say the identical at this time as Marx did again then. However I needn’t accomplish that. I can not settle for duty for, or a necessity to reply to, the ignorance and illiteracy of these within the media or elsewhere.” Harris, who hasn’t engaged with the press in years, had agreed to reply a collection of written questions from me. His reply went on, “All of my work is within the public area. Anybody who takes the time and bother to overview it’s going to see there the that means.”
In latest weeks, I learn as a lot of this materials as I may—tutorial papers, coverage briefs, articles that appeared in a Jamaican newspaper, a 1978 treatise referred to as “Capital Accumulation and Earnings Distribution”—and I additionally spoke with a few of Harris’s former colleagues and college students. What emerged was a portrait of a deeply critical scholar, and one not simply pigeonholed, though, after all, the Trump marketing campaign has been doing its greatest to weaponize his tutorial work and to affiliate his daughter with it, too, regardless of their distant relationship. (Harris and Kamala’s late mom, Shyamala Gopalan, divorced in 1972, and Kamala has stated that her mom raised her.) Setting apart Presidential politics, Harris is a notable determine in his personal proper, and throughout the course of his lengthy profession he has taken half in numerous financial debates that proceed to have reverberations far outdoors of academia.
Within the nineteen-seventies, Harris turned the primary tenured Black economist at Stanford. He taught programs in Marxian economics, which was then an energetic subject of analysis, arguing that it supplied a extra helpful framework for analyzing the long-term dynamics of capitalism—how economies develop and the way wealth will get distributed—than the theories promulgated in customary textbooks and programs. Harris, in his 1978 e-book, which surveyed numerous totally different approaches to financial improvement, wrote that the Marxian system, although incomplete in some necessities, “stays at this time as a robust foundation on which to assemble a idea of progress of the capitalist economic system acceptable to trendy circumstances.” Nonetheless, a lot of his personal theoretical work emerged from a definite however associated mental custom, the post-Keynesian college, which was initially related to some left-leaning British followers of John Maynard Keynes. Harris prolonged the post-Keynesian strategy to growing economies, and he argued {that a} key function of capitalism as an financial system was “uneven improvement,” each inside and throughout nations.
Within the nineteen-sixties and seventies, he was a combatant in a prolonged and heated transatlantic dispute that pitted two bastions of Keynesian scholarship—Cambridge, England, and Cambridge, Massachusetts—in opposition to one another, elevating basic questions on how the pie will get divided in capitalist economies. And, from the eighties onward, he espoused an economic-growth technique for his native Jamaica that positioned him on the facet of supporters of globalization and distanced him from leftists who rejected worldwide capitalism and favored a revolutionary leap to socialism. “The historical past after Marx’s time reveals the injury that may come from the options chosen and applied within the identify of Marx,” Harris wrote in an autobiographical article that he accomplished just lately, a duplicate of which he forwarded to me. “In my opinion, the largest historic blunder and misdirection of the twentieth century got here from the thought of constructing a ‘socialist/communist’ society in an economically backward nation, which is a gross inversion of Marx’s concepts. The individuals who lived (and died) underneath the iron fist of their leaders in these nations suffered the results of these errors.”
In brief, Harris is a extra attention-grabbing and idiosyncratic determine than he has been portrayed in some quarters. His financial views have been formed by his upbringing in colonial-era Jamaica. He was born in 1938, in Orange Hill, a small village close to the island’s northern coast, the place his household owned a farm. In an article revealed in 2018, he stated that his curiosity in economics and politics was sparked by watching the each day routine of his grandmother, referred to as Miss Chrishy, who owned a dry-goods retailer. Harris’s dad and mom made him attend Sunday college and study the catechism. He was a diligent scholar in highschool and secured a spot on the College School of the West Indies, which had been established shortly after the Second World Conflict on a plot of land outdoors the capital metropolis, Kingston. There, Harris earned a common bachelor’s diploma, with majors in economics, English, and Latin. He additionally gained extra publicity to the skin world.
Though Britain had acceded to restricted self-government in Jamaica throughout the struggle, the island was nonetheless dominated, finally, from London, because it had been since 1655. The world was altering, although. Firstly of 1959, whereas Harris was in faculty, a revolution in neighboring Cuba overthrew Fulgencio Batista, the U.S.-supported dictator. Harris, in his autobiographical essay, recounted how developments in Cuba dominated the media in Jamaica, which had an identical heritage: colonialism, sugar plantations, and slavery. “Phrases like Capitalism, Socialism, Communism, Imperialism have been being tossed round, in political speeches that I heard on campus, and within the native and worldwide information,” Harris wrote. “However to me, they have been simply phrases. I had no structured that means or reasoning about them. About capitalism, I knew the little that I acquired from studying the economics textbooks.” And in his thoughts, these books tended to obscure as a lot as enlighten.
Even after Harris moved to Berkeley, in 1961, to enroll within the doctoral program in economics, he was pissed off by the theories he encountered in a lot of his textbooks, which introduced a harmonious image of the economic system: market forces allotted assets effectively, and conflicts between staff and employers have been glossed over. This strategy, which was referred to as neoclassical economics, struck Harris as an unrealistic parable that didn’t replicate the true world. Whereas doing a little studying within the college library, he got here throughout a e-book from the nineteen-thirties that represented a rival mental custom: “Political Financial system and Capitalism,” a set of essays by Maurice Dobb, a Marxist financial historian at Cambridge College. “It provided a perspective on ‘Political Financial system’ very totally different from that being introduced in the usual programs, which I discovered fairly revealing and have become desirous to comply with up,” Harris advised me. Whereas neoclassical economics introduced itself as a universally relevant science primarily based on sure basic axioms, Dobb emphasised historical past, class battle, and imperialism.
Harris was already conversant in the works of two extra outstanding Cambridge economists: Keynes and Joan Robinson, each of whom have been drastically influenced by the Nice Melancholy. In Keynes’s 1936 magnum opus, “The Basic Principle of Employment, Curiosity, and Cash,” he challenged the previous orthodoxy that capitalist economies had self-healing properties and that the correct position of presidency was merely to remain out of the way in which. Recessionary intervals, he argued, required fiscal-stimulus insurance policies—an perception that helped create the mental basis for a postwar period of managed capitalism in Western nations.
Robinson took issues a step additional; she believed that the Nice Melancholy had utterly discredited free-market economics, which wanted to get replaced wholesale. (When she was an assistant lecturer at Cambridge, in 1933, she revealed a pathbreaking e-book about how supposedly aggressive markets come to be dominated by massive corporations which have the ability to set costs above aggressive ranges and wages under them.) In the course of the postwar many years, she and her colleagues tried to increase Keynes’s fundamental perception—that market forces alone couldn’t be relied on to stabilize the economic system—to theorizing about longer-term points like progress and inequality. Moderately than counting on neoclassical theories, they invented new ones.
Harris’s budding curiosity in Cambridge economics was deepened when Amartya Sen, who’s now probably the greatest recognized economists on this planet, however was then a younger instructing fellow at Trinity School, Cambridge, arrived at Berkeley as a visiting professor. Harris, after studying that Sen had obtained his doctorate underneath Dobb’s supervision, requested him to hitch the examination committee for his personal thesis, an investigation of inflation, capital accumulation, and progress within the Jamaican economic system. Sen talked to Harris about Cambridge economics and launched him to a e-book by Piero Sraffa, an enigmatic Italian who had been a fellow on the college’s Trinity School because the nineteen-thirties, after he fled Mussolini’s regime.
Sraffa’s e-book, which was revealed in 1960, represented an formidable effort to maneuver past neoclassical theorizing: it used trendy mathematical strategies to resurrect and prolong the theories of David Ricardo, an early-nineteenth-century Englishman whose writings on rents and wages influenced many economists of his period, together with Marx. Ricardo divided society into three rivalrous courses—landlords, capitalists, and staff—and confirmed how the landlords have been in a position to take the lion’s share of the financial surplus by advantage of proudly owning, and charging hire on, a scarce and helpful useful resource: land. After studying Sraffa’s e-book, and in addition a prolonged introduction to the collected works of Ricardo written by Sraffa and Dobb, “I knew I needed to go to Cambridge,” Harris recalled to me.
In 1966, the identical yr Harris obtained his Ph.D. at Berkeley, and two years after the delivery of his eldest daughter, Kamala, he spent a while as a visiting fellow within the historic college city on the banks of the River Cam. He visited the aged Dobb at his dwelling, outdoors Cambridge, and had tea and crumpets with Robinson at a café overlooking the river, which he described as “a particular deal with.” Robinson and a few of her colleagues have been then engaged within the so-called Cambridge capital controversy, which pitted them in opposition to numerous outstanding neoclassical economists, most notably Paul Samuelson and Robert Solow, who each taught at M.I.T. Though each side have been nominally Keynesians—that means they adhered to the activist coverage doctrines of Keynes, who had died in 1946—a great deal of animosity and bitterness had developed between them.
On the floor, the Cambridge capital controversy was a recondite dispute concerning the nature of bodily capital—manufacturing facility buildings, machine instruments, computer systems, and so forth—and whether or not it’s potential, for theoretical and empirical functions, to combination these elements right into a single complete and fix a greenback determine to them. Staff Cambridge, U.S., stated that it was. Staff Cambridge, U.Ok., stated that it wasn’t. The battles have been waged in tutorial papers filled with Greek symbols, and, studying them at a distance of greater than half a century, it’s obscure the warmth that they generated.
However lurking beneath the algebra have been deep methodological and ideological variations. Within the neoclassical mannequin of the economic system that Samuelson, Solow, and lots of different M.I.T.-style Keynesians relied on, wages are decided by the productiveness of staff, and earnings replicate the productiveness of capital: extremely productive staff receives a commission greater than reasonably productive staff, and new investments that enhance productiveness generate a better fee of return. Certainly, these relationships could be captured in a mathematical equation, referred to as a “manufacturing operate.” On this framework, staff and capitalists, removed from being antagonistic, are each set on an equal footing as “elements of manufacturing.” Market forces insure that they’re each rewarded on the idea of their productiveness, which is finally decided by the state of know-how. Exploitation and the category battle don’t have anything to do with it. The Cambridge, U.Ok., Keynesians balked at this idea. Robinson, specifically, had come to treat the neoclassical strategy as a thinly veiled rationalization for the establishments and inequities of capitalism. Outraged by the members of Staff M.I.T. appropriating the Keynesian moniker, she would begin to seek advice from them as “Bastard Keynesians.”
To an formidable and left-leaning younger scholar like Harris, the conflict of concepts was alluring. He described “tea time” with the economics college as a “thrilling expertise”:
Though Harris’s financial views have been more and more aligned with Robinson and her colleagues, the factor that struck him most about these exchanges, he advised me, was the mental give-and-take. “Important fascinated with concepts was a cultural norm, embraced and welcomed by all sides in any problem up for debate,” he stated. This setting, he went on, “was in sharp distinction to my expertise of reactions (closed-mindedness, condescension, even hostility) of a few of my colleagues, each conservative and liberal, in America.”
The U.Ok. Keynesians took to their customer, too. John Eatwell, a veteran British economist who was then a first-year college member at Cambridge, recalled that Harris was inquisitive, technically adept, and updated on the newest literature on each side of the Atlantic. “I feel that one in every of his benefits was that he was significantly better at understanding the financial sensitivities in America than the Cambridge individuals have been,” Eatwell advised me. “They tended to learn themselves and Samuelson and Solow, however that was it.” Harris was shortly welcomed “onto the Cambridge economics group,” Eatwell recalled. “He turned one of the analytically exact writers inside that physique of labor.”
After Harris returned to america, he focussed on making use of the post-Keynesian strategy—developed totally on the mannequin of superior nations like america and Britain—to growing areas, such because the Indian subcontinent and the Caribbean. In his papers, he highlighted sure structural options of growing economies, similar to a big agricultural sector and a scarcity of funds to import superior equipment, which, he believed, may maintain again progress. Such options didn’t present up in easy neoclassical fashions, and Harris’s objective was to maneuver past these fashions.
In 1968, Harris moved to a tenured submit at College of Wisconsin. He additionally travelled overseas, visiting Cambridge once more, and, in 1970, acquiring a Ford Basis fellowship to the Delhi Faculty of Economics, the main economics division in India. By this stage, the Cambridge capital controversy was winding down—with each side claiming victory—however economics was nonetheless riled by contentious debates over points like inflation, labor unions, and poverty within the growing world. Throughout one in every of his visits to Cambridge, Harris stayed with Eatwell, who recounted, “Don will debate something. It was lengthy discussions into the evening.” Harris additionally reconnected with Joan Robinson, who was nearing retirement from instructing, however who remained a outstanding voice in public debates. (She was an outspoken critic of the Chilly Conflict, the struggle in Vietnam, and the free-market financial doctrines related to Milton Friedman, of the College of Chicago.) Harris “acquired alongside effectively with Joan, however he was not an acolyte,” Eatwell stated. “Don all the time needed to query issues, and to tease out the options.”
In 1972, Harris accepted a suggestion to show at Stanford, which requested him to assist arrange a brand new subject within the graduate program referred to as Different Approaches to Financial Evaluation. Stanford wasn’t precisely Berkeley, however the political tumult of the period had reached the campus in Palo Alto. There have been antiwar protests, and a few college students have been demanding a broadening of the economics syllabus to incorporate radical approaches to the topic. The Stanford Each day reported the information of Harris being provided a full professorship on its entrance web page underneath the headline “Marxist Provided Economics Put up.” (It needs to be famous that, throughout the seventies, curiosity in Marx’s theories wasn’t confined to the far left. Paul Samuelson launched a piece on Marx in his standard textbook, writing,“It’s a scandal that, till just lately, even majors in economics have been taught nothing of Karl Marx besides he was an unsound fellow.”)
