Kamala Harris' Father Was a 'Marxist Economist'?
By: Anna Rascouet-Paz (Snopes)
So, how should we expect a President Harris to manage the government's influence over the economy? The possibility doesn't bode well for fiscal responsibility or national prosperity. Harris will likely fall back on the tired, old trope of taxing the rich to redistribute wealth. But that will only force Harris to ensure the rich become richer. If Harris actually forced the rich to become poorer then her 'trickle down' economic theories would collapse.
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Claim: U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris' father was a marxist economist. Rating: True
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In July 2024, after U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris entered the race to become president, a claim that her father was a marxist economist began to circulate online (archived):
The X post, which had gained 1.7 million views and 4,900 likes, came from Maxine Fowe, a political economist and an economic policy adviser at the German Federal Parliament, according to her LinkedIn profile.
The claim is true. Taking a closer look at Harris' work and the economics school of thought he professed, we were able to confirm that he inscribed himself in Marx's intellectual tradition.
Starting with Fowe, we found her biography on the website of one her previous employers, the German think tank Das Progressive Zentrum, which described her focus on "issues in the field of democratization of the economy and post-Keynesian economics in times of financialization dynamics."
This detail is important because Donald J. Harris, a professor of economics at Stanford University, also did his research from a post-Keynesian perspective. Fowe was noting his line of inquiry admiringly. Keynesians stipulate that markets alone cannot ensure full employment and instead advocate for government intervention. Post-Keynesians agree, but argue that in intervening, the government should focus on equality and redistribution of wealth.
The post-Keynesian school of economics finds its roots in "The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money" — a 1936 book by economist John Maynard Keynes. In his book, Keynes attacked classical economics, which was the orthodoxy — that is, the mainstream — of the time.
Keynes' main argument was that, contrary to classical economics' assumption, markets alone would never ensure full employment because employment depends on demand — that is, the amount of money people and companies spend on available goods and services. He said that the psychology of markets was too volatile to manage. Instead, Keynes advocated for government intervention to stabilize the economy. For example, his recommendation for getting out of the 1930s Great Depression was that governments should simultaneously spend more and cut taxes.
From Keynes, three schools of thought emerged: Neo-Keynesians, new Keynesians and post-Keynesians. Neo-Keynesianism supporters, who focus on growth and stability rather than full employment, were the mainstream — or the orthodoxy — in the 1950s and 1960s. In the 1980s and 1990s, new Keynesians took the spotlight. New Keynesians argued that due to the fact that prices and wages are "rigid" — they don't move easily as others schools of thought assume they do — unemployment and monetary policy (interest rates and money supply) have a much larger impact on demand.
Post-Keynesianism, which also evolved from Keynesianism, is in the heterodoxy — outside of the mainstream. Like Keynesianism, it assumes that markets alone cannot ensure full employment, and that the government must stimulate demand. But to post-Keynesians, the dimension of equality, classes and economic power is very important. Therefore, they are very concerned with distribution of income — how a country's wealth is distributed among its inhabitants.
The title of Harris' 1978 book, "Capital Accumulation and Income Distribution," illustrates this concern. Harris was also preoccupied with exploitation and other concepts that came directly from Karl Marx's theory of capital. For example, The Economist recounts that he once argued that the inequality that beset Black people in the U.S. did not come from a form of "colonial rule" where white people dominate. Instead, he argued that the problem was capitalism. In this sense, Harris was indeed marxist in his thinking.
In fact, a 2019 paper in Elgar Online argued that "Marx should not be considered as an 'early post-Keynesian' but rather as an important forerunner of modern post-Keynesianism, with certain similarities, but also some important differences, and several areas of compatibility."
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Yes, Kamala Harris has been tainted by Marx. Snopes says it's true. So, there's no denying that truth.
Wow. So the best the right wing can come up with is that the 59 year old Kamala Harris' father used to be a Marxist economist?
That's reaching.........................................
Cool, still voting for her...
In that case how do you feel about Trump's father being a member of the Ku Klux Klan?
Many prominent New Yorkers (mostly upstate but also in NYC) were members of the KKK in the 1920s. The KKK was a national organization that paraded in Washington, D.C.
Several prominent New Yorkers were active in the German Bund, too.
New York City has always been a center of anti-Semitism in the US; due mostly to the large Jewish population.
So, it wouldn't be very surprising, given the unvarnished history of New York, that Fred Trump could have been associated with the KKK, American NAZIs, or anti-Semitic factions. But that has more to do with New York's history than it does with Fred Trump's history.
Now THAT is reaching by deflection.
What is so very surprising is that so-called progressives don't understand that people in finance tend to be bigots. Finance ain't centered in New York because of socially liberal attitudes.
That can't be right, everybody knows the most racist cities are in the south,
Most Racist Cities in America 2024 (worldpopulationreview.com)
The Worst Cities For Black Americans - 24/7 Wall St. (247wallst.com)
Does that make it okay????
See above.
See above.
New York City did not choose to join a racist, violent club with the intent to physically and mentally attack minorities.
So apparently this is okay with you....
Apparently in Democrats' telling of history it's okay.
Yes, they did. New York City has always been a hotbed of bigotry. There's been bigotry against indigenous people, Irish, Italians, Jews, Blacks, Asians, and, now Hispanics. That's why New Yorkers are some to the rudest people on the planet; they hate each other.
Donald Trump is a typical New Yorker. Chuck Schumer acts the same way. So does AOC.
I don't live in New York. There's not enough money in this galaxy to entice me to live in New York. And there's no way to fix it because New York has too much influence over the country.
So you are saying an entire city joined the KKK. The reaching you are doing to try and justify your support of the KKK is truly mindboggling.
AOC is a member of the KKK? Wow....!
So nothing is sacred. Kamala's parents divorced in 1971. She is probably 'tainted' by that more so than anything else. Just saying.
How appropriate with new economic concerns on the rise.
I'm sure many would like to bury this information.
Kamala's also has "Afro-Jamaican" descent surely that weighs her down politically too. /s
Mr. Harris is not running for any political office at his fine old age of 85 years.
It is pretty insidious to assume that offspring are clones of their parents thinking. I love my parents but we think very differently on everything, with the one exception of how critical it is to keep a certain criminal out of the White House. On all things Trump we are simpatico.
Then you should be spouting off any time anybody tries to call Trump a Nazi because his father was. Or is that a stretch too far for you?
I’ve never even seen or heard anyone say that. Donald Trump’s nazi leanings are evidenced by the copy of mein kampf on his shelf.
Don't believe your denial. It was common fodder on this site during the 2016 elections.
Note: The article goes on to point out that the Trump 2016 campaign blamed the 'error' in production on a young intern. Though one could wonder why a young intern was tasked to make the graphic in the first place for it to be a communication's blunder.
Donald Trump on Tuesday addressed criticism of a new practice at his rallies that has been compared to the “Heil” salute from Nazi Germany, dismissing the controversy as “ridiculous” before saying he would look into ending it.
“I don’t know about the Hitler comparison. I hadn’t heard that, but it’s a terrible comparison. I’m not happy about that certainly,” Trump said on ABC’s “Good Morning America.”
Recently, Trump has started asking voters to raise their right hand and pledge to support him – creating an image that some have argued evokes the rise of Adolf Hitler, particularly when coupled with his sharp rhetoric toward minority groups like Mexicans and Muslims.
Hitler comparisons are not new for Trump. Comedian Louis C.K ., in a postscript to a Saturday email about the latest episode of his web series “Horace and Pete,” he asked fans and readers to “please stop it with voting for Trump.”
“It was funny for a little while,” he wrote. “But the guy is Hitler. And by that I mean that we are being Germany in the 30s.”
Former Mexican President Vicente Fox, a spirited Trump detractor, said last month that the GOP front-runner “reminds me of Hitler.”
Anne Frank’s stepsister, in a January essay to mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day, accused Trump of “acting like another Hitler.”
READ: Louis C.K.: ‘Insane bigot’ Donald Trump ‘is Hitler’
Before that, former New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman, a Republican, told CNN’s Alisyn Camerota on “New Day” that his plan to halt the immigration of Muslims into the U.S. reminded her of “the kind of rhetoric that allowed Hitler to move forward.”
Trump has dismissed such comparisons in the past. When a Philadelphia newspaper made the comparison on its cover last December, Trump, told CNN it was “just another paper going out of business.”
When ABC News asked him directly about the comparisons in the context of his plan to ban Muslim travel to the U.S., Trump said he was acting more like Franklin Roosevelt than Hitler.
On Tuesday, Trump continued his deflections. During an interview on “The Today Show” on NBC, host Matt Lauer asked Trump to consider the historical context of the image.
The Republican front-runner at first dismissed the controversial comparison, calling it “ridiculous” and “a big stretch,” and insisting rally attendees were just “having fun.”
“Well, I think it’s ridiculous, I mean we’re having such a great time,” Trump said. “Sometimes we’ll do it for fun, and they’ll start screaming at me, ‘do the swear-in, do the swear-in!’ “
But pressed if he would stop asking supporters to make the pledge now that he was aware of the controversy, Trump said, “Well, I’ll certainly look into it.”
“I mean I’d like to find out that that’s true, but I would certainly look into it, because I don’t want to offend anybody. But I can tell you that it’s been amazingly received, but I will certainly look into that.”
Trump also discussed the issue in an interview on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”
“I say jokingly, ‘Raise your hand if you swear to endorse me,’ ” he said. “The entire place is practically laughing and having a good time. They’re raising their hands in the form of a vote, not in the form of a salute.”
This is the kind of miscommunication that can occur at a political event when you have an inept inexperienced "politician" playing up the crowd.
For the record. I don't care about this 'Hitler' crap nor did I ever participate in it before this. But, I can see why it is part of the atmospheric discussion related to Donald from his recent past.
OMG, the Trump campaign used a stock photo purchased from iStock. They must be NAZIs.
And, of course, you can explain why the uniforms are all mixed up. There's desert camo, woodland camo, standard uniform, and one guy is all mixed up. And the helmets don't match the uniforms, either. I seriously doubt the real WWII Wehrmacht would allow that shit. These are most likely reenactors. You are aware that Europeans reenact WWII the same way we reenact the Civil War and Revolutionary War. You do realize the people wear Wehrmacht uniforms fairly often in Europe today because somebody has to play that part. And you do realize that photographs of those reenactments end up in stock photo libraries.
So, the phony outrage ends up looking really, really idiotic. I suppose fake history is supposed to trump Kamala Harris' real ties to socialism.
OMG, the Statue of Liberty is a NAZI. And the J6 committee required everyone to raise their right hand and swear an oath, can't get more NAZI than that. Bennie Thompson is a NAZI; message received.
The loonies making this stuff up aren't weird, they're just ignorant clods.
I am not outraged at all. I only served to produce a rationale for where this notion that Trump, himself, was or is, depending on one's perspective, considered to be a "Nazi" sympathizer. Subsequently, doing so, says absolutely nothing about me.
If the collective 'you' read the Guardian article attached to the comment, yes, they are reenactors. Still, does not explain why the stock photo was not properly vetted in 2016 by Trump staff before attaching Donald's face on it. But, I digress.
And good. But my comment was directly related to the posting in 5.1 where it's stated :
When it was common fodder during the 2016 & 2020 cycles for several to post that Trump was a Nazi and had Nazi leanings because his father was a Nazi. Plan & simple it's partisan bullshit to blame the father for the child when it's the other party but defend the son from the father when it's one's one party. If such hypocrisy is not correctly pointed out then it is condoned.
After the Gold Rush
MARIE BRENNER
SEPTEMBER 1990
[Excerpt.]
Donald Trump appears to take aspects of his German background seriously. John Walter works for the Trump Organization, and when he visits Donald in his office, Ivana told a friend, he clicks his heels and says, "Heil Hitler," possibly as a family joke.
Last April, perhaps in a surge of Czech nationalism, Ivana Trump told her lawyer Michael Kennedy that from time to time her husband reads a book of Hitler's collected speeches , My New Order , which he keeps in a cabinet by his bed. Kennedy now guards a copy of My New Order in a closet at his office, as if it were a grenade. Hitler's speeches, from his earliest days up through the Phony War of 1939, reveal his extraordinary ability as a master propagandist .
"Did your cousin John give you the Hitler speeches?" I asked Trump.
Trump hesitated. "Who told you that?"
"I don't remember," I said.
"Actually, it was my friend Marty Davis from Paramount who gave me a copy of Mein Kampf, and he's a Jew." ("I did give him a book about Hitler," Marty Davis said. "But it was My New Order, Hitler's speeches, not Mein Kampf. I thought he would find it interesting. I am his friend, but I'm not Jewish.")
Later, Trump returned to this subject. "If I had these speeches, and I am not saying that I do, I would never read them."
Is Ivana trying to convince her friends and lawyer that Trump is a crypto-Nazi? Trump is no reader or history buff. Perhaps his possession of Hitler's speeches merely indicates an interest in Hitler's genius at propaganda . The Führer often described his defeats at Stalingrad and in North Africa as great victories. Trump continues to endow his diminishing world with significance as well.
My aim is to put a fine point on it that Donald engaged in the rumor mill about Hitler/Trump family himself intentionally or unintentionally in the 'company' of media writers and journalists.
See: 5.1.11.
Well, claiming intellectual objectivity would be farcical. And blaming Trump abandons any notion of intellectual integrity. That approach becomes nothing more than gaslighting.
Is it necessary to find examples of Kamal Harris advocating governmental policy that conforms with her own father's intellectual arguments? I assume there is a basic understanding of how Google works. And Google would confirm that Harris has taken far left positions on criminal justice issues, immigration issues, education issues, the role of the courts, and foreign policy advocacy. Harris can rightly be accused of being autocratic (she was a prosecutor and DA, after all).
The collective "you" are attempting quite the "stretch," as one writer suggest above, to label what you would call 'Sins' (yet to be proven) of the father being 'stuck' to the his child. Not possible. You may have the last word.
Are you suggesting that a father has no influence on his children? Maybe there is a divergence in expectations due to racial/cultural/traditional values.
How did Trump come to adopt the term?
This is another irony.
There have long been warnings about Trump’s lies. That Jacobson story in the Post is from 2018. Trump falsely claimed after the 2016 election , which he won, that millions of people had illegally voted for his opponent, Hillary Clinton. Leading up to the 2020 election, Trump again routinely asserted that voting in the US would be rigged against him, and afterward, when he denied his loss, critics began using the term “the Big Lie” to describe his rejection of the factual world.
Trump, master propagandist , has since seized the term from his critics and now routinely uses it to claim it is he who is the victim of untruths and conspiracies.
“The Fraudulent Presidential Election of 2020 will be, from this day forth, known as THE BIG LIE! ” [Trump] said in a statement issued by his PAC on May 3.
Since then, Trump’s use of it to claim his own persecution has arguably eclipsed its use to warn about his lies as a form of propaganda.
People who freak out at any mention of Marx crack me up.
Quick! Run for the hills!
I wouldn't be surprised if Snopes updates this flawed 'fact check' in the future. It was only published yesterday and looks like garbage to me. The article clearly places her father in the post-Keynesian school of thought, while at the same time affirming the claim of him being a 'Marxist economist'. The problem is, they're not the same thing. This fact checker is acting like Keynes literally equals Marx or something, which is ridiculous.
Even if her father were in the Marxian school, it wouldn't be that big of a deal. It's an honest to goodness intellectual school of thought, not what a person might consider 'political Marxism'.
The guy is an economics professor emeritus at Stanford, for crying out loud. He also got divorced from Kamala's mother when Kamala was 7.
The right wings answer to everything is to scream "Marxist" or "communist". Its almost as if we are back in the John Birch Society days.
It's fear-mongering. And it works well on 'newly-minted' Trumpist wannabes 'every' election season.
Karl Marx spent most of his time analyzing Capitalism. His works focus on the problems he saw with Capitalism and the root of the problem is indeed exploitation. It is not possible to produce the driving forces of greed and power if those were unattainable. The only way to attain them is to exploit others. The most obvious manifestation of this is the notion of cheap labor. Without cheap labor (paying people far less than the value of that which they produce), it is difficult to deliver products at a competitive price. Capitalism, unchecked, naturally favors the owners and produces an ever increasing disparity between owners and workers.
It is not wrong or evil to recognize that for all of its good (compared to other systems) that Capitalism is inherently exploitative. To deny this is to be blind, ignorant or both.
Marxism is, at its core, anti-capitalism. Marx favored workers sharing the wealth. This is not an evil philosophy but those who learn about Marx from superficial slogans and repeated talking points have a very distorted understanding of same.
See, if we ever evolve to a system better than Capitalism (and clearly there is room for improvement) people in the future will look back as Capitalism with disdain and will appreciate the critical analysis of Capitalism from individuals such as Marx even if they see his views as unrealistic.
Moreover, we get it. What some conservatives and now Trumpist don't approve of they diminish, marginalize, discount, and demonize, reflexively. As for capitalism, it's an excellent economic system-when tempered (balanced) with regard for those participating in it. Raw capitalism. . . can brazenly and unmercifully: harm, injure, damage, ruin, and finally kill its participants.