Michael Harrington's "Socialism," Part II

Nobody likes a scold

I started on my late-life Marxoid binge with a substack I’ve written about before, the core question it raised being, what does Marx provide that is worthwhile, besides a commitment to reducing economic inequality? Inequality, and even more, poverty and destitution, provoke emotional reactions. But people of the book-reading sort want more. Inequality is not really Marx’s Bête noire.

It’s not that I was baffled by this question. I already had a few answers, but it continued to preoccupy me. In my usual, inefficient way, I started circling around the issue, reading peripheral texts and avoiding the central statement, meaning Das Kapital itself.

It was suggested to me that Michael Harrington’s 1970 book Socialism was an effort to get at this. I’m about 2/3rds through it, and it mostly reads like a harangue against assorted strands of the 60s radical student movement. Not that we didn’t need it, but it does not feed my Marx habit. The targets no longer present themselves in the same form, so the book has not aged well.

MH was clearly groping for a way to appeal to the movement. I don’t think he succeeded. This was certainly obvious in radical politics. MH had missed the boat. Nobody I knew invoked his name. We were absorbed by the Black Panther Party and the anti-imperialist uprisings around the world. By contrast, the old-time “social democrats” tied up with the AFL-CIO were on the other side. They had supported the U.S. assault on Vietnam and even sabotaged the McGovern candidacy.

People still associate the term “social democrat” with the AFL crowd, but I can tell you I dealt with these fellow from my niche at the Economic Policy Institute, and most of them are either retired or dead. There is no present need to shrink from the terminology of “social-democracy.” Still, the influence of the old Cold Warriors survived in Harrington’s need to set the New Left straight. He couldn’t quite tear himself away from them.

It does not help that MH was weak on the Imperialism thing. I mentioned this in Part I. At one point he refers to the division of labor” imposed on the Third World by Capitalism. At another, he speaks of the world market imposing its “disciplines, its needs” on poor nations. There is an extended section on how Mao lost his way with no mention of Japanese imperialism, but Mao could have given MH some tips on ‘running dog’ anti-imperialist rhetoric.

MH focuses on three delusions that could be taken as stand-ins for the socialistically-incorrect. They are reliance on 1) the peasantry, 2) the lumpenproletariat, and 3) the “new man.” All three have been substituted for the working class as agents of socialist transformation. MH is not above exploiting orthodox Marxism, namely the necessity of proletarian class consciousness, when it suits him. In this respect, however, he shares the missing link in old Marxian orthodoxy, by which I mean the way we get from Here to There, how we transition from left movement to successful socialist governance.

In the picture on the back cover MH is standing in a crowd, dressed informally in some kind of denim shirt, looking forlorn, like he knew he had missed the boat. He was born 20 years too soon, but that never stopped David Dellinger, David McReynolds, or Reverend Berrigan. Still, I can identify in my own relations, or lack thereof, with the 20- and 30-somethings who dominate Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). They don’t listen to me either. Ha-ha. Welcome to super-annuation!

To cut to the chase, MH wanted to portray an “authentic socialism” that would escape the perversities of the “bureaucratic collectivisms” of left and right. He wants to join the 60s radicals in criticism of reformism (sometimes described as “corporate liberalism”). He goes on at length against “state socialism,” “capitalist socialism,” and “anti-socialist socialism” in favor of a democratic socialism.

The fundamental problem is that his implied alternative is lacking. It boils down to vague approval of modern German social-democratic party doctrine, including co-determination. As I said in Part I, MH criticizes reformism as insufficiently socialist, but he is a reformist himself. He fails to distinguish his own brand, beyond vague references to being more ‘radical.’ He was not as radical as he let on.

I would say being radical is not a matter of degree, but of kind. In future posts, I will try to explicate this more. There is the unproductive binary between parliamentary cretinism and insurrectionism. (The current DSA leans in the latter direction.) To that unedifying conflict, which summarizes most of left radical political debate, I would counterpose a vigorous sort of reformist, evolutionary socialism.

MH makes an effort to draft in the wake of the New Left’s long-standing suspicion of bureaucracy and centralization. There is loose talk of workers’ control. It’s hard for me to connect that to any sort of economic planning, and I have studied both workers’ control and planning. Trust me, they don’t go together. Call me an elitist if you like.

Finding the right spot between inadequate, even collaborationist incrementalism and over-ambitious demands is not just a problem, it is THE political problem for radical politics. Defaulting to the ultimate, maximum program, the chronic weakness of the further-Left, is just a cop-out. It is one step short of banal, defeatist cynicism. I fall into that myself, every time I opt for the lazy option, like this year abstaining from any May Day festivities. There was one “just over the mountain,” in a place called Berryville. I should have gone.