Michael Harrington's "Invisible Social-Democratic Movement," Part IV

There is no longer any there there

In 1970, it made sense to be optimistic about U.S. social-democracy. Assuming, unfortunately, that one skated past the issues of the Vietnam War and race. I will devote a separate post to Harrington’s Vietnam Syndrome (namely, forgetting about the war).

MH had the conflicting impulses of wanting to be supportive of past gains in social legislation, but also, my guess, in trying to impress the radical movement with the depth of his socialist alternative to the status quo. This book doesn’t get there. We get the radical terminology “socialization under democratic control” and similar bromides, but little in the way of content.

In my previous screed, I claimed MH had no substantive alternative to ordinary left-liberalism, a big problem in trying to appeal to the Movement. The latter was focused on the Vietnam War and racism. (Feminism blew up a little later.) In his own way, MH could be accused of what today is described as class reductionism. I could add Euro-centrism (where Euro encompasses the U.S. as well). Ironically, today’s Democratic Socialists of America share some of the class problem (as might I, to an extent), despite being red-hot on all dimensions of anti-imperialism (U.S. only).

MH wants to uphold an authentic socialist alternative to the U.S. welfare state. Alas, his remedies turn out to be . . . more welfare state, with an unclear addition of “planning.” By all appearances, MH knows nothing about planning. He predicts U.S. capitalism will be consumed by planning of a malign capitalist variety. O.K. prediction is hard, and he proved to be wrong. I see no planning of any sort, beyond the routine, evil machinations of the big banks, which have been with us for over a hundred years. We had planning under pressure of World War II, nothing worth the name before or since.

A better sort of planning is called for by MH, but by all appearances, the nature of any such planning is an empty box. Except it should be “democratic.” What the hell that means, anyone could guess. Reallocating the Federal budget towards more housing and public transit is not planning in any radical sense, beneficial though it would be.

A similar, Marxoid MH reference is the “political economy of the working class,” though as noted here, it is not much different from ordinary Democratic-liberal orthodoxy (which was much better than contemporary Democratic orthodoxy). MH pretends to have a categorical, or qualitative critique of the welfare state, but it is really little more than quantitative. We just need more of it. (We do!)

I suppose it could be argued that a skinny welfare state, and ours loses weight by the minute, is the real bulwark against socialism and it needs to be torn down. That is left-wing communism, and we all know how that goes. It occurred to me, thanks to my periodic forays in social media, that today’s cynical, ex-radical drop-outs are yesterday’s ultra-lefts. No advance is good enough for them, even though every regress is another catastrophe. No, concrete advances in social welfare are positive steps on the democratic socialist road. It’s a road, not a destination. Any distractions from such are reactionary and counter-productive, that’s 75-year old me haranguing my 20-year old self.

The “invisible social-democratic movement” referred to the political forces mobilized by the end of the 60s. As noted above, in 1970 this had something to it, as long as one avoided the difficult subject of The War and the tricky subject of Race. Also noted, prediction is hard, and MH cannot be faulted for failing to foresee the dismal future — the erosion of organized labor, the waning of welfare state provision (also a problem in Europe), Reaganomics, Bill Clinton’s “putting people first,” and the whole wretched mess.

MH could be faulted for the extended apologias for the likes of George Meany and the AFL. Meany, it should be recalled, basically inclined towards Richard Nixon and away from George McGovern. Nor was he any ball of fire on Race. MH’s low political profile among we flaming youth is not hard to understand. Again, I don’t see much Marxism in play — it’s mostly evasive anti-communism in social-democratic drag.

MH takes pains to illuminate the democratic, incrementalist Marx and dismisses some of the rhetoric in the Communist Manifesto as a secondary feature of his oeuvre, in contrast to the converse practice in Leninist sects and from the Bolsheviks themselves. Despite that, he seems to be more at pains to debunk Leninist offshoots of Marxism (and their presence among the remains of SDS) than to elaborate his own version of a positive Marx.