Harris isn’t a carbon copy of her leftist academic dad. But it’d be a stretch to deny at least some similarities.
Harris isn’t a carbon copy of her leftist academic dad. But it’d be a stretch to deny at least some similarities.
‘F weedom!”
Thrilled to recycle, Elle is urging readers to “revisit” the magazine’s 2020 profile of Kamala Harris, which begins with Harris’s recounting a childhood memory. She was a toddler, it seems, being “wheeled through an Oakland, California, civil rights march in a stroller with no straps with her parents and her uncle”:
At some point, she fell from the stroller (few safety regulations existed for children’s equipment back then), and the adults, caught up in the rapture of protest, just kept on marching. By the time they noticed little Kamala was gone and doubled back, she was understandably upset. “My mother tells the story about how I’m fussing,” Harris says, “and she’s like, ‘Baby, what do you want? What do you need?’ And I just looked at her and I said, ‘Fweedom.’”
Kamala loves to retail these portraits of the radical as a young woman. In 2016, the New Yorker recalled the time when Kamala, then ten, and her eight-year-old sister Maya “launched a successful campaign to turn an unused courtyard in their Bay Area apartment building into a playground. Today, Kamala is the attorney general of California, and will likely soon be elected a U.S. senator.”
These are the stories of extraordinary children everywhere — Jesus lecturing rabbis at age twelve, Mozart at four playing for the crowned heads of Europe, Athena born full grown and armored from the noggin of Zeus.
But if Kamala’s origin stories are truly critical in understanding who she is today, we ought to consider briefly the role of her father, Donald J. Harris, a Marxist economist and Stanford professor emeritus.
Donald’s interesting take on economic theory is best laid out in his early foreword to a 1972 reprint of Nikolai Bukharin’s Economic Theory of the Leisure Class. It’s a kind of beginner’s guide to the orthodox left view of “bourgeois economics” as contrasted with the “science” of Marxist analysis.
Bukharin’s Economic Theory is a classic of the oeuvre, in this instance, a Marxian angels-dancing-on-pinheads critique of the then-emerging economic notion of “marginal theory.” In classical (what Donald sometimes also calls “bourgeois”) economics, marginal theory examines how the addition or reduction of a single unit of a good or service affects consumer decisions: To a man dying of thirst, the first bottle of water is likely worth more than the second — and in that moment, to that man, both may be worth everything else he owns.
But don’t worry overmuch about the details of marginal theory, Donald tells us: “They are matters of lesser importance. What is crucial is [and here he begins quoting Bukharin] ‘the point of departure of the . . . theory, its ignoring the social-historical character of economic phenomena.’”
See, to your typical Marxist, free-market economic theory always obscures — it “ignores” — what’s really real, which is class conflict, Donald says.
It wasn’t always this way with the bourgeois theorists, he says:
In the early phase of capitalist development, bourgeois political economy, by championing the interests of the emerging bourgeoisie in its struggle against the pre-existing dominant class, performs a radical scientific role in exposing the nature of commodity-producing precapitalist society. In the later phase of capitalism, however, bourgeois political economy turns to justification of the system in which the bourgeoisie has become ascendant and is threatened by the growing workers’ movement. It thereby loses its scientific role, a role which is to be taken by Marxian political economy rooted in the interests of the working class.
In that single passage, you’ve got a brief overview of Marxism — its sense that free-market theory, however right it was as a critique of feudalism, is mere propaganda designed not to clarify but to mask the oppression of working people. That free-market economic theory therefore helps justify the persistence of a vestigial/parasitic bourgeoisie, which, having created the industrial system that produces so much abundance, has generated a new problem — the “crisis of overproduction,” Marx and Engels called it — a problem that can be solved only by identifying new foreign markets, juicing consumer demand through advertising, and smoke-and-mirrors ideas like “marginal theory” that help in “the formation of demand.”
In a biographical note in the concluding paragraphs, Harris mentions briefly where Bukharin’s work led the once-prominent Soviet thinker: He worked closely with Lenin during the October Revolution, was a member of the Politburo by 1919, “assumed many high-profile offices in the Party,” and “came to exercise great influence within the Party and the Comintern,” Donald writes. Then, in a single, dry sentence, he accounts for Bukharin’s end. There’s no sense of irony here, no sense even that he shares the likely confusion of his readers: “Under Stalin’s regime, . . . he was among those who were arrested and brought to trial on charges of treason and he was executed on March 15, 1938.” Bukharin, 49 at the time of his murder, may have seemed old enough to Donald, just 34 at the time of his writing.
Donald Harris’s entire opus innocently ascribes to Marxian economics a success it would never achieve and is blind to the terror his work implied. In 1966, even as he was wrapping up his dissertation, he made time to review a University of California Press book on Brazil’s 1960s troubles with central planning. It’s a book that “deserves far greater attention than it has apparently received to date,” he writes, and it’s good because it brings “to the problem a perspective sufficiently broad to include its sociopolitical and historical as well as economic dimensions” — which is to say that he approves of the author’s method of inquiry — “its Hegelian origins, and the relevance of its Marxian adaptation to the analysis of development in advanced as well as in underdeveloped economies.” It’s “a useful ‘simplifying hypothesis,’” he calls it, “useful” presumably because it helps explain away the failure of central planners as a feature of the international revolutionary class struggle. Let’s underscore “simplifying” as a theme running through the rest of his life’s work. In his 1972 essay “Feasible Growth with Specificity of Capital and Surplus Labor,” Donald promises (no kidding) to help central planners in emerging economies draw best practices from “certain aspects of Soviet experience during the period of the First Five-Year Plan”). He’s like this all the way through 2022’s “Capital, Technology, and Time” — committed to a fantasy and, even here, just two years ago, at age 82, still celebrating the superpower that allows him to (in his words) “expose a fundamental lacuna in the traditional neoclassical narrative and supporting theory related to the dual problems of agency and dynamics of the transition process involved in analysis of capital accumulation and technological change.”
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Donald’s ability to turn this theology into a marketable product — a Stanford career! — is a fascinating feature of postmodern capitalism as it applies to academia. Born in Jamaica in 1938, Donald earned his bachelor’s degree from London University in 1960 and went immediately to work on a Ph.D. in economics at the University of California, Berkeley. There, at a civil-rights protest, he met Indian-born Shyamala Gopalan, a graduate student of nutrition and endocrinology. They married in 1963, and Kamala was born the next year.
This radical couple’s acting out bourgeois rituals — marriage, housekeeping, a child, graduate degrees — might seem remarkably ironic. But Berkeley was just warming to its reputation for campus chaos. The year of Kamala’s birth was also the year of Mario Savio’s stirring, brief address to protesters gathered outside Berkeley’s Sproul Hall. That speech now is rightly considered pivotal to the campus radicalism that would follow. And it remains timely: In just a few words, Savio characterized the academic project in ways that anyone today might instantly grasp with both hands. A university is a kind of factory, Savio declared, a mass-production system in which “the faculty are a bunch of employees, and we’re the raw material!”
But we’re a bunch of raw material that don’t mean to have any process upon us, don’t mean to be made into any product, don’t mean to end up being bought by some clients of the University, be they the government, be they industry, be they organized labor, be they anyone! We’re human beings!
And then came the lines remembered by some of us who grew up with Savio’s voice still echoing across our California campuses more than a decade later:
There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part; you can’t even passively take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!
That’s where Kamala Harris was born.
It’s easy to imagine that political tumult reverberated through the Harris home. Mom finished her Ph.D. the year Kamala was born but remained a researcher at Berkeley. Donald finished his degree two years later and, like many young Ph.D.s, worked hard to find a permanent gig. His nationwide search took him to temporary positions in econ departments at the University of Illinois and Northwestern University. Shyamala gamely came along with Kamala; her younger sister Maya was born during this Midwestern sojourn, though Shyamala simultaneously managed to pick up research jobs at Illinois and Northwestern. But about the time Donald accepted another spot, at the University of Wisconsin, things seem to have fallen apart for the couple. He moved to Madison; she remained at Illinois and then took a research position back in Berkeley. The couple divorced in 1969.
The terms of that divorce have been generously described as “bitter” and the custody battle as “tough.” What’s clear is that Donald insisted on his paternal rights. With Shyamala and the girls back in Berkeley, he abandoned his tenure-track position at Wisconsin to accept a more precarious visiting professorship at Stanford University in 1973.
At Stanford, Donald soon began to press his case for something permanent. He lobbied — and then bullied — his colleagues in the economics department to create a program aligned with his unique interests. By late 1973, his visit drawing to a close, he took his department fight outside, to the students.
In a January 1974 Stanford Daily article, Donald called out the department in a criticism that tied together race, academia, and the study of economics. He also sent a candid message directly to his colleagues in the econ department:
“I have no great anxiety or desire to remain here,” he confessed, adding that he hasn’t “been terribly excited at Stanford.” He explained he “would like to see serious intellectual or scholarly interest here [at Stanford] consistent with my own interests,” although adding “the possibility doesn’t exist here at the moment.” Harris, a black, further explained he desired “to link up with serious research” of black scholars applying system analysis to problems of blacks throughout the world, but “the University is not prepared to develop that.” He has not been approached about remaining here, he concluded.
That front-page story features a photograph of Donald over an enlightening caption:
RADICAL ECONOMIST — Visiting Economics prof Donald Harris addresses Jan. 18 meeting on student requests for a ‘formal commitment’ by the department to establishing a field in radical economics. His pending departure – and the likelihood that no new Marxian economist will be hired – form the basis for some of the student complaints.
(And if that doesn’t give you a taste for the Stanford campus in the early 1970s, the adjacent headline might: “Faculty Senate Postpones ROTC.”)
The story reveals that, then as now, university administrators are often easily outflanked by campus radicals. “I’ve had several talks with [Donald Harris], and I believe that we are in agreement on the general conditions under which he would like to be considered,” department chairman Moses Abramovitz told the Stanford Daily. Abramovitz
further noted the conditions deal with “a positive faculty commitment in Marxian economics,” and agreed under such conditions Harris “might emerge as a leading candidate for appointment.” He added, however, “these conditions don’t yet exist. They’re exactly the issues that are now before the faculty.”
Donald jetted off for a temporary appointment at the University of the West Indies in Kingston, Jamaica. In the meantime, Stanford’s economics department launched a new program that seems to have been tailored to their absent faculty radical: “alternative approaches to economic analysis.” Perhaps more remarkably, they offered Donald a tenured, full professorship.
And that’s when Shyamala and the girls made yet another move, this time so that Shyamala could take a full-time position of her own, at McGill University in Montreal. “Three seasons a year, the girls lived in Montreal,” the Washington Post has reported. “Summers included bonding time with their father.” During a visit to Stanford in 1978, Kamala recalls going to her first concert: Bob Marley at the Greek Theater in Berkeley.
“We sat up top in the back of the theater and, as I watched the performance, I was in complete awe,” Harris told the Washington Post during the 2020 Biden-Harris campaign. “To this day, I know the lyrics to nearly every Bob Marley song.”
Whether real history or ham-fisted attempt to pump up her multicultural bona fides, she has told people that her father’s Jamaican roots account for her own love of weed. This has the downside of frustrating California progressives who watched her prosecute nearly 2,000 weed-possession cases as San Francisco’s DA. And if Donald was supposed to have felt honored by this recognition, he wasn’t.
“My dear departed grandmothers, . . . as well as my deceased parents, must be turning in their grave right now to see their family’s name, reputation and proud Jamaican identity being connected, in any way, jokingly or not, with the fraudulent stereotype of a pot-smoking joy seeker and in the pursuit of identity politics,” he wrote in a column for Jamaica Global Online.
“Speaking for myself and my immediate Jamaican family, we wish to categorically dissociate ourselves from this travesty.”
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It’s important to stipulate that Donald’s biography isn’t dispositive — it doesn’t prove that Kamala’s own passionate skepticism of capitalism and critique of America emerged in her childhood home. While Kamala talks up her mother, she rarely mentions Donald. Her parents divorced when Kamala was just five years old, about the time Donald was drafting that essay on Bukharin. It’s also important to note that kids are neither responsible for nor necessarily beholden to their parents’ views. There’s Freudian stuff to consider: for one thing, the deep impulse among children to wound the powerful parents who gave them life (and often much more) by adopting ideas that are profoundly hostile to their parents.
And for Kamala, we must consider the influence of the broader progressive movement around her. However chaotic her home life, her upbringing was always middle-class. Today, her peers (and voters) might see that comfort as a liability. Raised by Don and Shyamala on college campuses, it’s fair to say that Kamala springs from the same campus radicalism that now dominates corporate HR departments, media, entertainment, government, academia, and, of course, her own Democratic Party. She is obviously comfortable with and, apparently, ashamed of that comfort. So she embellishes the transgressive qualities of Young Kamala — Bob Marley, the people’s battle for an apartment courtyard in Oakland, and “fweedom!” As Andy Warhol observed, “There’s nothing more bourgeois than the fear of looking bourgeois.”
And where principles are concerned, Kamala ain’t the principled — if badly principled — person we see in her father. Like most old-school Marxists, Donald sees class struggle as the engine of historical change. Identity politics is an impediment to the development of a workers’ movement that operates like a fist. She is, in fact, notoriously, and like many politicians, on all sides of all issues — about as shifty as you can get — on one day calling for an end to private health insurance and on the next saying she’s against it; saying she would welcome corporate support for her 2020 campaign and then, when pressured by the left, complaining that corporate money had gutted American democracy. “So I’ve actually made a decision since I had that conversation that I’m not going to accept corporate PAC checks,” she said. “I just, I’m not.” She called for a ban on fracking and then denied she had ever uttered the words. During that 2020 campaign, she swore she would sue oil producers for their ostensible role in climate change. “I have sued ExxonMobil,” she told CNN, as a kind of proof that she’d do it again. It was left to the New York Times to point out that she had investigated but never actually sued ExxonMobil.
But Kamala knows what her base wants to hear, and that’s often pretty close to her dad’s principled contempt for free markets and his claims about American racism. Rather than grapple with economic research that supports relatively low taxes and light regulations, Kamala dismisses free-market policies as hooey designed to obscure class violence. “Frankly, this economy is not working for working people,” Kamala declared during the 2020 campaign. “For too long the rules have been written in the favor of the people who have the most and not in favor of the people who work the most.”
Such comments ought to make Dad, the old Marxist, proud. But there’s also the identity politics she has used as both shield and sword. Trailing a beehive of reporters, she famously stepped off the 2020 campaign trail to comfort a guy who, moments before he was shot by police, attacked his estranged girlfriend and pulled a knife on the police she had called for help. At the same time, Kamala looked around and saw herself surrounded by the academic elite, media, and vanguard of the proletariat, saw all the outraged calls for defunding police, and she joined in.
Don’t ask her to defend such actions. “I just have to tell you,” she told an interviewer during that same hot summer of 2020, “I’m really sick of having to explain my experiences with racism to people for them to understand that it exists.”
It’s hard to measure precisely the impact Donald Harris has had on his daughter, but we have at least two other metrics by which to assess her worldview: her Senate voting record and her endorsements.
“Her overall voting record is more liberal than that of Bernie Sanders,” writes Judge Glock in City Journal. “Though it is difficult to compare members across time, Harris’s score (-0.709), which is based largely on economic votes, ranks among the more left-wing in American history.”
“History” is a long time, even American history. Through her own more limited tick of the clock, Kamala has been reliable enough to deliver for the leaders of California’s government unions, the men and women who run California’s government for themselves, who talk about protecting the working class so long as working people belong to the unions that bankroll the campaigns of candidates who, once in office, return the favor. Thanks to those union leaders, California has destroyed independent contracting (through A.B. 5), killed thousands of jobs in the state’s fast-food industry through a mandatory hike in the minimum wage, and turned the state’s public schools — once the envy of the nation — into factories for the mass production of fringe racial and gender theories. Union leaders were also the key drivers of the recent antisemitic protests throughout the state’s universities.
The people who openly brag that “we elect our own bosses” have transformed California into an overpriced, overregulated, failing Ottoman empire of failing schools, rampant crime, and public drug use. Within hours of her announced candidacy, they endorsed Kamala Harris for president. And if she wins the White House, she has promised to bring their policies with her. Soon after, terrified toddlers all over America — joining their outraged parents — will cry out desperately for “fweedom!”