Marxism After Marx: Donald Harris

What kind of economist is Kamala Harris's father, Donald Harris? In this video, we take a look at *some* of the papers Donald Harris has written to showcase his positions on various concepts in the Marxist tradition.
--------
-------
--------
References:
Harris, Donald J. 1972a. “On Marx’s Scheme of Reproduction and Accumulation.” Journal of Political Economy 80 (3): 505–22.
———. 1972b. “The Black Ghetto as Colony: A Theoretical Critique and Alternative Formulation.” 1972 2:3–33.
———. 1975. “The Theory of Economic Growth: A Critique and Reformulation.” The American Economic Review 65 (2): 329–37.
———. 1978. “Capitalist Exploitation and Black Labor: Some Conceptual Issues.” The Review of Black Political Economy 8 (2): 133–51.
Rowthorn, Bob, and Donald J. Harris. 1985. “The Organic Composition of Capital and Capitalist Development.” Rethinking Marxism, 345–57.
--------
00:00 - 02:00 Background
02:01 - 02:14 Intro
02:15 - 06:14 The Falling Rate of Profit
06:15 - 09:36 Theories of Growth
09:37 - 15:03 Exploitation and Racism in the US
15:04 - 16:38 Conclusion

[natemarx]

This channel stumbling on my notifications makes me happy.

[partimentieveryday]

What a disappointment his daughter turned out to be lmao

[irbis_rosh]

Thesis: Donald Trump
Antithesis: Kamala Harris
Synthesis: Donald Harris

Sorry, i had to😅

[alexanderredhorse]

I didnt even realize Donald Harris had such great contributions to economics. it's so sad his daughter had become a neoliberal genocider conducting a horrific holocaust causing unimaginable suffering globally. i couldnt imagine the shame and pain that must bring him. like holy fuck what went wrong.

[evanw]

Never heard of him before now. Very cool!

[mapleandsteel]

I think it’s very important to mention Marx’s Gründrisse here. He did change his mind on the dialectic of use and exchange value.

[lljkgktudjlrsmygilug]

This has been the greatest let down in levels of political desirability from one generation of a family to another involving a president (VPs and candidates included) since the jump from Henry Wallace to George Wallace. Not even Bush Senior to his children, or RFK Jr to the Kennedy name can compare, be it on how much I agree with them or actual competency/qualifications.

[antoinebenobre]

New TMP video ! Yay ! I may be late for work today

[speculativescientist]

Regarding the theories of economic growth presented in this video, my understanding is this:

The expanded reproduction of capitalism, as in any historical society, is conditioned by the growth of the working population. On this basis, the annual reproduction of commodities uniformly expands with the conversion of surplus value into capital, provided that the composition of constant capital does not grow with it. However, the actual process of capitalist accumulation aims to overcome all contingencies to valorization, for otherwise capital could not accomplish its end of valorization and organise an entire historical society on the basis of value. To overcome this restriction, capital introduces innovations in the technical method of production, thereby advancing the productive powers of the economy. In adopting of a new technical method, the individual capitalist is motivated by the pursuit of an extra surplus value. Even though the extra surplus value diminishes as the new method of production becomes widely adopted and standardized, the productive powers of the economy continue to expand. Technical progress contributes to the reduction of the necessary labor-time and the production of relative surplus value is enhanced. But the pursuit of extra surplus value is only a possibility for the individual capitalist and cannot be actualized under every circumstance. Extra surplus value is only vigorously pursued in the phase of depression, when the severity of capitalist competition is especially pronounced (due to the proliferation of fixed capital embodying the value of a technical method of production). Market competition has a general tendency to eliminate surpluses / losses in the long run because the technical efficiency across industries are standardized. The land market is an exception to this general tendency because land is an inelastic means of production, so the surplus profits that remain are converted into rent.

The formation of rental incomes from landed property implies the commodification of land. However, for land to even be a commodity, there must exist a method of determining its price. If land is to be purchased as a commodity, the money needed to pay the price must come from idle money that has yet to be converted into capital. Therefore money must itself be converted into a commodity and floated as loans in a money market to earn interest instead of average profit. But this does not quite function as a method for pricing land since the price paid for its use is not equal to its principal money value. Moreover, idle funds take the form of loan-capital only temporarily, pending their eventual conversion into industrial capital that earns average profit instead of interest. So if the agricultural capitalist had to purchase his own land, he must have fixed the purchase price of the land permanently, which earns him only interest in the form of rent. Therefore, in order to justify the capitalist purchase of land as an advance of money as capital, it is necessary that capital itself must be regarded as an interest-bearing asset, the price of which is calculated by capitalisation. This requires the conversion of capital itself into a commodity.

It is with the generation of interest-bearing capital that the commodity-economic logic of capital has reached its logical conclusion. With the conception of a capital as self-expanding asset, of money that generates money, the conception all production relations hitherto of capitalist society begin to evaporate without a trace. Protective tariffs give finance cartels a home base safe from foreign competition. But states which succeed in taming interest-bearing capital become increasingly militarized and culminates into a imperialist force dividing the world into its spheres of influence. The labor process is rapidly socialized as workers are combined en masse by large multinational corporations, which in turn fuels the class struggle which concretely takes the shape of a trade union and socialist movements. To appease class struggles and achieve internal peace, however, bourgeois states had to take on the form of proto-welfare state, directly intervening into the management of the national economy in order to pacify the worker’s movement and ensuring the supremacy of the capitalist class. But at this point the power of capital is already increasingly ennervated; the markets for labor, land and money cease to be self-regulating and thereby implies the real possibility of an economic system managed by and for the workers themselves. Here we can think of social ownership manifesting as joint-ownership which scales across three levels: the joint-ownership of the cooperative by its workers, the joint-ownership of land by community members, and the joint-ownership of industry by its communities. The cooperative hires labor from its community to produce use-values that can only be sold or purchased by other members of the community, so the incentive to work is directly social and for the satisfaction of local needs. The benefits and burdens of production are shared, so free development of each is the condition for the free development of all. A portion of the surplus earned by each cooperatives is paid to the community in the form of rent, generating a property income that can be spent on further socializing services (public transit, hospitals, schools, etc.) as well as importing goods from other communities. This in turn implies that the production of capital goods upon which the whole of society depends be owned by the communities that it services.

[What-ezim]

profit rate has fallen. look at dividend payment over time in the stock market, average was above 3% for a long time. Now it's closer to 1.5%

[TankieVN]

For the TRPF, it has been verified by the likes of Paul Cockshott but the rest are interesting still.

Maybe Paul Cockshott is worth a video for his works.

[MatejaGašić]

Why don't you upload more frequently bro.

[kobi_pw]

Hello from Russia. I have a question for Western Marxists. In the East, it is generally believed that the Frankfurt school is idealism and has nothing to do with Marxism. Movements such as LGBT, BLM, are engaged in superstructure. Whereas Marxism itself speaks of a basis. Can anyone explain why the United States and Europe really consider the Frankfurt School to be a new step in Marxism? I would be grateful if you could provide links to some material on this issue. Or tell me which author is worth watching, reading.

[endodouble]

I don’t know why there is so much debate about it, but Donald Harris is black and so is his daughter

[fayjohnson]

The video is not for everyday Americans that do not have economy education background. The short version is that Harris father was/is a Marxist and he teach Marxist ideologies and policies in our universities.

[jamoriah]

Shes suppisedly a powerful political figure but why does she come across so dumb. It has to be an act. Shes wearing a mask.

[kussemeinkont]

Here's a conundrum for you. It's possible for workers to own the means of production under capitalism, for example, a carpenter owns his tools, a taxi driver might own his taxi, a dressmaker owns her sewing machine, etc. Under a Marxist model this would not be allowed, as that person would be considered a capitalist, the means of production must be owned by everybody. Private ownership of so much as a pencil would be banned as that person could write stories and make money from it. Under communism everything that exists in society must be owned by the state and distributed according to state needs. You see the problem here? Actual Marxism is possible under capitalism but not communism. Some clever clogs explain that for me.