Harrington's "Socialism": Part VI, the Wrap-Up

I have to admit that after all my quibbling, I end up in roughly the same place as Michael Harrington (MH). Here I want to try and crystallize a few of my problems with his views.

I shouldn’t try to mind-read, since I never knew MH nor followed his activities. However, my theory is that his desire to appeal to the excitable boys of the New Left, like myself, distorted his analysis. He presented socialism as an ideal state, in contrast to the unsatisfactory status quo.

My take is that socialism, democratic or otherwise, or social-democracy if you like, is a journey, not a destination. The constituent parts of MH’s vision reflect plausible points in such a journey, so in my old age I have ended up with similar politics. As the New Left evolved towards untenable varieties of Marxism-Leninism, it rejected evolutionary change. We wanted socialism immediately. The pressure of the carnage in Southeast Asia and racism in the U.S. fortified a sense of urgency.

MH’s focus on ideal alternatives inspires a futurism, apparently in his other books as well, that could hardly be expected to age well in fifty years. It would be silly to make much of it. More to the point, there are problems he raises that remain with us.

One is the tenable scope of nationalization or socialization of the proverbial means of production (private business firms). MH raises some substantive issues in this regard, borrowing sensibly from European social-democratic experience. I still think he is at sea on the basic issue. He is torn between the socialization of profitable vs. unprofitable lines of business. Socialization of bankrupt firms can entail bail-outs of unfortunate, possibly malfeasant owners. Welfare for the rich is bad.

In ordinary public economics, there is a simple principle that answers the question. The line is not profitability. When a business firm produces too much or too little output, from a social standpoint, it should be regulated or taken over by government. The basic objective is that operation is geared to ensure that social benefits outweigh social costs. This could involve user fees, or it could mean free distribution of output.

An example of a field where user fees that cover total costs are contra-indicated is passenger rail. I did some work on this at GAO. Nowhere in the world do passenger rail systems, found in many countries, cover their entire costs. My old buddy Eliott Sclar of Columbia U. did work many moons ago arguing that the NYC subways should be free.

One could argue that economic methods do not provide reliable numbers on costs and benefits, but any such estimates provide some information. Otherwise one is running blind, which is worse. I once spent a fair amount of time with Bill Niskanen, in his time the king of the libertarians. I suggested that cost-benefit analysis was so dodgy that for big projects you just have to be willing to take a plunge. He actually agreed with me. I hope I am not sullying his memory. It’s kind of like the Tom Cruise line in Risky Business: “Sometimes you just have to say what the fuck.”

I like to point out that the Brooklyn Bridge might have failed a cost-benefit test, but it would be hard to imagine New York City without it. A wise man once told me in public policy, when somebody wants to kill a project proposal, they insist it first be subjected to a cost-benefit analysis.

My GAO project was on California’s high-speed rail system, which has been fooled with for decades, remains mostly unbuilt, and has never had the funding it required. The economic theory analyzing such problems that I spent many hours puzzling over is ingenious and I would say verges on science fiction. My blogger-friend Kevin Drum, may he R.I.P., objected that regional rail systems for California would be more useful than inter-city rail. Perhaps so, but the fact is we could have both. We could have high-speed rail from Boston to Miami, and from Miami to New Orleans to Dallas. We could have a ton more passenger rail, so what the fuck. Build everything.

MH’s uncertainty about nationalization connects to a more general animus on the left against Profits. Me, I like profits. Profits can enlarge a nation’s economic surplus and, directed in the right hands, can be devoted to no end of noble endeavors. By contrast, a negative-profit business like passenger rail is still worth provision by the public sector. How or whether any owners are compensated for moving their operation to the public sector is a separate, political question.

Another point that sticks out for me is MH’s insistence that socialism requires abundance. I wouldn’t knock abundance, and it can make things easier, but it can make things harder too (Google the “resource curse”). The abundance bit stems from the ancient Marxist debates about the preconditions for socialism. Russia didn’t have them, and Germany did. We know how that turned out.

Since socialism is evolution, I would say you can get progress anywhere. Or regress. We’re seen enormous growth in China, and now India, for instance, both coming out of impoverished circumstances. MH lapses into Zero Population Growth concerns regarding the Third World.

I’ve already mentioned MH’s zero-growth-adjacent susceptibility to resource limitations. The other day in the Wall Street Journal, I found out about a new one. You know what we’re running out of? Dirt. You need a certain kind of sand to make concrete structures. Desert sand is no good. Greenland has the right kind, thanks to the retreat of the glaciers. It’s all good.

Finally there is MH’s imperialism problem. He’s a little disingenuous. I’ve mentioned MH’s statement that the U.S. “is not an imperialism.” I still recall this, after all this time, because it pissed me off. In this book, imperialism, including that of the U.S., is acknowledged as ubiquitous. At the same time, in the book there is scarcely any mention of the Vietnam War, at the time the preeminent issue of imperialism in the world. It is only cited in passing as a thing that confounded LBJ’s Great Society and the march of MH’s “invisible social-democratic movement.”

MH wants to argue that imperialism is not an inevitable stage or feature of Capitalism, contra Lenin. It’s a choice. Reformist remedies are conceivable. As a social-democrat, I have to agree. Better trade and aid policies are feasible. MH devolves to nostrums about humanitarian foreign aid and free trade, but his discussion of foreign policy would take a lot more unpacking, and I’m tired of this book and MH. As with The Nation magazine, I get bored reading stuff I mostly agree with.

Finally there is the neglect in “Socialism” of race. This is egregious for a book that focuses on the U.S. It’s also odd, since the civil rights movement of the 1950s, under the leadership of figures such as A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin, according to Adolph Reed and others, provided the foundation for subsequent social-democratic politics. Racism was also the other great preoccupation of the student movement in the 1960s. The labor movement that MH often applauds uncritically was an important catalyst.

MH closes with the suggestion that Socialism will bring the end of compulsory work and of money. (More stuff would be free.) I hope to grapple with that by channeling someone I’ve written about here before, whom I found very inspiring in this regard, Adam Przeworsky. This coming week.