Michael Harrington's "Socialism," Part I

“It is almost 90 years since the death of Karl Marx. In that period his memory has become one of the principal obstacles to socialism.” — Michael Harrington, 1970

This was a book suggested to me upon seeing a bit of my spiels about socialism and Marxism, and it is certainly on point. Yet I’m encountering numerous, big problems with the analysis.

I have nothing but good things to say about the person and career of Harrington himself. I could add that, judging by the picture on the back of the dust jacket of my copy, he was one handsome dude. I’ve heard he was a fabulous speaker. I never met him or heard him speak, nor was I acquainted with any of his followers, back in the 60s, 70s or 80s. In fact, I was downright hostile to the entire bunch, since my perception (for which there is a reasonable case, I am told) was that he was hostile to SDS and the anti-war movement.

His “Socialism” is a labored effort to claim Marx for his own brand of politics, a politics to which I have come around in my old age. I am uninterested in justifying whatever I believe by quotations from Marx, as if it was scripture. Harrington says he feels the same, but his narrative smells like an effort to build bridges to the fading embers of red-hot, Marx-obsessed student revolutionism, circa 1970. To that end, you had to show you were onside with Marx and Engels.

Still, I think MH short-changes the most compelling angles in Marx. More about that later. I’m only part-way through the book, so these notes reflect a few first impressions.

My over-riding reservation at the outset is with MH’s attempt to criticize what he calls “anti-socialist socialism” or “state socialism.” A big thing among student radicals was the need to escape “co-optation,” which seems to inspire MH’s incoherent attacks on reformism, incoherent because MH was himself the consummate reformer. He is referring primarily to concessions to the workers’ movements in the form of expanded welfare states and social insurance. I’m guessing MH wanted to fortify credibility with SDS alumni. I think here he hoists himself on his own petard.

Concessions to labor are victories and steps on the road to evolutionary, democratic socialism, which really coincides with MH’s own view. They are observationally equivalent to tangible responses to workers’ demands. MH takes a jaundiced view of what he calls “state socialism.” What could that mean?

Sure, the German nobility and Bismarck could institute social insurance programs to buttress their own power. But how is that different from a genuine workers’ victory? Is that not a measure of the power of the workers’ movement? Isn’t that what we, and MH, want more of?

There is a murky notion of democracy floating around there, made more so by MH’s ambivalent responses to expansions of the voting franchise. Maybe I’m too cynical about popular democracy, or too elitist. One reason is, with the benefit of some education in economics, hearing the great unwashed talk about policy. It’s like nails on a blackboard. So it would also be with “democratic planning.” Nobody wants to sit through meetings where the economy is planned. I don’t want to sit through such meetings. (I have.) Give me a choice of jobs and tell me what you want from me at work. Otherwise, leave me be. Meetings, yuck.

If socialist democracy must entail workers running their own workplaces, I would not dispute that such a system could make a better world, but it still leaves much to the imagination. In general, the democracy allegedly missing from MH’s targets is elusive. The flip side of the knocks on “state socialism” is the vagueness of the concept of “authentic socialism.” I like MH’s distinction between schemes to divide the property of the capitalists among individuals, versus holding it in common, but there is still much more involved.

MH was stuck on the historic, epochal rise of bureaucratic collectivism of both Left and Right. This used to be a thing, but it is less so now. What I see emerging under capitalism in the Western Hemisphere and Europe, and parts of Asia, is not collectivism, but the rule of capital via fragmentation. I wrote about this in my review of the nice book by Quinn Slobodian.

What MH fails to anticipate, and he could hardly be blamed writing in 1970, is the spectacular rise of capitalism, excuse me, “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” in China, the Far East, and now India. This indeed smacks of bureaucratic collectivism, but economies elsewhere are evolving in other directions.

In Europe we have eroding social-democracy, in the U.S. we have a hollowing-out of a public sector that was devoted to fortifying capitalism (the public sector, not the hollowing out), and in Russia and the U.S. we have kleptocracy. Kleptocracy is facilitated in the U.S. by that hollowing out I mentioned, and in Russia by the absence of democratic institutions under conditions of war.

A related question is MH’s emphasis on the necessity of abundance for socialism. I suspected he felt the need to criticize the Bolsheviks’ grab for power in a nation clearly short of the conditions Marx and Engels tried to anticipate. Such conditions applied in Germany most of all, where of course they failed to come to fruition.

That aside, China again is a gigantic exception. Abundance is lovely, don’t get me wrong. I take the point that economic upturns elevate morale and are conducive to rebellion. But societies can make do under conditions of scarcity — indeed, we see it all the time — and the average person’s obsessions with his material circumstances can be exaggerated.

At one point MH refers to the “Third World’s socialization of poverty,” as if outside powers were up to something else, which reminded me of something MH said ages ago, which bugged me at the time, and still does, that “the U.S. is not an imperialism.”

MH makes a lot of the concept that “man creates wealth” as central to Marx. That sounds trite to me. Maybe I’m too stuck on a young Marx, but I would prefer the formulation that man creates a world that is not his own, one that is turned against his basic well-being.