by Tom Gallagher
Tom Gallagher is a former Massachusetts State Representative and the author of 'The Primary Route: How the 99% Take On the Military Industrial Complex.' He lives in San Francisco. He can be reached at TGTGTGTGTG@aol.com HE STILL USES AOLOL
Published on Saturday, May 15, 2021
by Common Dreams
Michael Harrington, dust jacket photo from Twilight of Capitalism (1977)
A talk given to the San Francisco Democratic Socialists of America.
During the dark ages of American socialism, well before the first Bernie Sanders presidential campaign, a friend of mine used to say that he thought our role as American socialists was similar to that of the medieval Irish monks who would spend their days transcribing ancient manuscripts that would be largely ignored in their day but available to hoped-for future readers. His notion was that even if what we socialists were saying wasn’t exactly catching fire now, we were at the least preserving the idea for a hoped-for more enlightened future. And so, if you will accept the metaphor for the moment, if we were to ask who might be considered the abbot of those imagined modern-day socialist preservationist monks, a logical choice might be Michael Harrington.
And indeed, probably not coincidentally, one of Harrington’s earliest political affiliations – in 1951, when he was 23 – was with the Catholic Worker, an organization that has run hospitality houses serving meals to the down and out since 1933. The organization, by the way, continues in 187 locations today, including two each in San Francisco, Berkeley, and Oakland.
But as for Harrington, he soon shifted his efforts permanently to organizations that viewed themselves as part of an American socialist tradition dating back to Eugene Debs. The young Harrington, like many a young socialist before and after him, cobbled together a living. He was one of the original writers for the Village Voice, and as an outgrowth of an article he wrote for the magazine Commentary, in 1962 he published The Other America, a book dispelling the illusion that the title of another prominent book of the day, The Affluent Society, actually described the entire nation. If there was one single book that became associated with the War on Poverty programs passed during the Lyndon Johnson administration,The Other America was the one, and Harrington eventually parlayed the notoriety that came with the book into becoming virtually the only socialist of that Cold War era with access to national media – as a socialist.
In 1968, he became something of a figurehead president of the Socialist Party which he then quit in 1972. By that point, the Socialist Party was no longer running its own presidential candidates, and the rift came about because the bulk of the leadership of the party did not support the anti-Vietnam War presidential candidacy of George McGovern against Richard Nixon. (Something that was also true of the leadership of the AFL-CIO.)
But by now, what was loosely described as a New Left had sprung up in America. Based primarily in the civil rights and antiwar movements, and centered in the Students for a Democratic Society and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, this New Left found little to love in either of the two main claimants to the American socialist tradition – the Communist Party that had steadfastly defended the Soviet Union right through the Stalin years, or the Socialist Party, whose anti-Communism now extended to supporting the Vietnam War. (They had supported the Korean War, too, but no one much paid attention to that one – then or now.)
Harrington was about half a generation older than the leadership of the New Left and got off on the wrong foot in his relations with them by pressing them to more forthrightly declare their lack of sympathy with the Soviet Union. He would later come to regard his inability to establish better relations with the New Left as the greatest failure of his political life. As a result, the new Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC) that emerged from the Socialist Party split in 1973 was never, properly speaking, a New Left organization.
What was distinctive about the new socialist organization was that it was not a political party. The highpoint of American socialist presidential candidacies had occurred back in 1912, which also was – and remains – the only presidential election since 1852 when the top two spots were not taken by a Democrat and a Republican. So the thinking was that it was probably time to try a different tack and take the fight inside – an approach that would not actually be fully vindicated for another forty years – in the 2016 campaign.
DSOC and DSA were never very large in Harrington’s day – maybe 10,000 at the most. But members included two Congressional Representatives, Ron Dellums of Berkeley and Major Owens of Brooklyn. These two self-identified socialists actually matched the highest number the Socialist Party ever had in the House – and was not exceeded until this current congressional term. The organization’s members also at one point or another included the mayor of New York City, the borough president of Manhattan, a smattering of state legislators, and a variety of local officials. (All of these numbers have also been exceeded by the current organization).
Harrington chaired DSOC – and later DSA, after its formation in 1982 – until his death in 1989. Along the way, he more or less inherited the mantle of Mr. Socialist from Norman Thomas, the Socialist Party leader and six-time presidential candidate who had followed Debs. In a memoir, Harrington once mused of perhaps being remembered in the future as a “lesser Norman Thomas.”
While it was his authorship of The Other America that first brought him the invites for such as writing columns for the New York Times or commenting on National Public Radio, it was what he had to say that got him invited back. Some may have thought the democratic portion of DSOC and DSA’s name was redundant in a socialist organization because, after all, socialism was already supposed to be a higher form of democracy that extended the public’s control past the government and into the economy. But the organizations’ founders considered it a necessity to reassert socialism’s commitment to democratic principles, due to the obviously undemocratic nature of various governments that claimed that what they were building was socialism.
Harrington wrote 16 books, and in his speaking and writing continually reflected that democratic commitment – both substantively and rhetorically. With the civil rights movement’s struggle for voting rights of paramount importance to so many – as it is again today – Harrington, for instance, would never make dismissive references to mere “bourgeois democracy,” as some others on the left might. He called socialism “the left-wing of the possible.” While operating and thinking very much in the tradition of the Marxist analysis of capitalism, he also thought that with his talk of the eventual “withering away of the state,” Marx himself arguably qualified as the last of the utopians.
Harrington believed that just as capitalism had been built within the world of feudalism, we had to build socialism within the capitalist world we have inherited. His was an ongoing effort to convince Americans that the socialist ideal was not some exotic, dangerous fantasy that would be foisted upon them. He always avoided archaic phraseology such as “smashing the bourgeois state” or establishing the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” Instead, he relentlessly made the case that ultimately only a socialist approach could deal with the ever-increasing complexity of the modern world – in a democratic fashion.
Harrington thought that (and I’m quoting here) “the vocation of a radical ... is to walk a perilous tightrope ... to be true to the socialist vision of a new society ... constantly develop and extend its content ... and ... bring” it “into contact with actual movements fighting not to transform the system, but to gain some little increment of dignity or even just a piece of bread.”
Whether he is ultimately remembered as a “lesser Norman Thomas,” or something else, what we do know is that when Bernie Sanders put democratic socialism into play in the national discussion, there was an organization already in place that made sense to many of the newly motivated and newly converted socialists. And that fact is in no small part due to the lifelong efforts of Michael Harrington.
by Common Dreams
Michael Harrington, dust jacket photo from Twilight of Capitalism (1977)
A talk given to the San Francisco Democratic Socialists of America.
During the dark ages of American socialism, well before the first Bernie Sanders presidential campaign, a friend of mine used to say that he thought our role as American socialists was similar to that of the medieval Irish monks who would spend their days transcribing ancient manuscripts that would be largely ignored in their day but available to hoped-for future readers. His notion was that even if what we socialists were saying wasn’t exactly catching fire now, we were at the least preserving the idea for a hoped-for more enlightened future. And so, if you will accept the metaphor for the moment, if we were to ask who might be considered the abbot of those imagined modern-day socialist preservationist monks, a logical choice might be Michael Harrington.
And indeed, probably not coincidentally, one of Harrington’s earliest political affiliations – in 1951, when he was 23 – was with the Catholic Worker, an organization that has run hospitality houses serving meals to the down and out since 1933. The organization, by the way, continues in 187 locations today, including two each in San Francisco, Berkeley, and Oakland.
But as for Harrington, he soon shifted his efforts permanently to organizations that viewed themselves as part of an American socialist tradition dating back to Eugene Debs. The young Harrington, like many a young socialist before and after him, cobbled together a living. He was one of the original writers for the Village Voice, and as an outgrowth of an article he wrote for the magazine Commentary, in 1962 he published The Other America, a book dispelling the illusion that the title of another prominent book of the day, The Affluent Society, actually described the entire nation. If there was one single book that became associated with the War on Poverty programs passed during the Lyndon Johnson administration,The Other America was the one, and Harrington eventually parlayed the notoriety that came with the book into becoming virtually the only socialist of that Cold War era with access to national media – as a socialist.
In 1968, he became something of a figurehead president of the Socialist Party which he then quit in 1972. By that point, the Socialist Party was no longer running its own presidential candidates, and the rift came about because the bulk of the leadership of the party did not support the anti-Vietnam War presidential candidacy of George McGovern against Richard Nixon. (Something that was also true of the leadership of the AFL-CIO.)
But by now, what was loosely described as a New Left had sprung up in America. Based primarily in the civil rights and antiwar movements, and centered in the Students for a Democratic Society and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, this New Left found little to love in either of the two main claimants to the American socialist tradition – the Communist Party that had steadfastly defended the Soviet Union right through the Stalin years, or the Socialist Party, whose anti-Communism now extended to supporting the Vietnam War. (They had supported the Korean War, too, but no one much paid attention to that one – then or now.)
Harrington was about half a generation older than the leadership of the New Left and got off on the wrong foot in his relations with them by pressing them to more forthrightly declare their lack of sympathy with the Soviet Union. He would later come to regard his inability to establish better relations with the New Left as the greatest failure of his political life. As a result, the new Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC) that emerged from the Socialist Party split in 1973 was never, properly speaking, a New Left organization.
What was distinctive about the new socialist organization was that it was not a political party. The highpoint of American socialist presidential candidacies had occurred back in 1912, which also was – and remains – the only presidential election since 1852 when the top two spots were not taken by a Democrat and a Republican. So the thinking was that it was probably time to try a different tack and take the fight inside – an approach that would not actually be fully vindicated for another forty years – in the 2016 campaign.
DSOC and DSA were never very large in Harrington’s day – maybe 10,000 at the most. But members included two Congressional Representatives, Ron Dellums of Berkeley and Major Owens of Brooklyn. These two self-identified socialists actually matched the highest number the Socialist Party ever had in the House – and was not exceeded until this current congressional term. The organization’s members also at one point or another included the mayor of New York City, the borough president of Manhattan, a smattering of state legislators, and a variety of local officials. (All of these numbers have also been exceeded by the current organization).
Harrington chaired DSOC – and later DSA, after its formation in 1982 – until his death in 1989. Along the way, he more or less inherited the mantle of Mr. Socialist from Norman Thomas, the Socialist Party leader and six-time presidential candidate who had followed Debs. In a memoir, Harrington once mused of perhaps being remembered in the future as a “lesser Norman Thomas.”
While it was his authorship of The Other America that first brought him the invites for such as writing columns for the New York Times or commenting on National Public Radio, it was what he had to say that got him invited back. Some may have thought the democratic portion of DSOC and DSA’s name was redundant in a socialist organization because, after all, socialism was already supposed to be a higher form of democracy that extended the public’s control past the government and into the economy. But the organizations’ founders considered it a necessity to reassert socialism’s commitment to democratic principles, due to the obviously undemocratic nature of various governments that claimed that what they were building was socialism.
Harrington wrote 16 books, and in his speaking and writing continually reflected that democratic commitment – both substantively and rhetorically. With the civil rights movement’s struggle for voting rights of paramount importance to so many – as it is again today – Harrington, for instance, would never make dismissive references to mere “bourgeois democracy,” as some others on the left might. He called socialism “the left-wing of the possible.” While operating and thinking very much in the tradition of the Marxist analysis of capitalism, he also thought that with his talk of the eventual “withering away of the state,” Marx himself arguably qualified as the last of the utopians.
Harrington believed that just as capitalism had been built within the world of feudalism, we had to build socialism within the capitalist world we have inherited. His was an ongoing effort to convince Americans that the socialist ideal was not some exotic, dangerous fantasy that would be foisted upon them. He always avoided archaic phraseology such as “smashing the bourgeois state” or establishing the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” Instead, he relentlessly made the case that ultimately only a socialist approach could deal with the ever-increasing complexity of the modern world – in a democratic fashion.
Harrington thought that (and I’m quoting here) “the vocation of a radical ... is to walk a perilous tightrope ... to be true to the socialist vision of a new society ... constantly develop and extend its content ... and ... bring” it “into contact with actual movements fighting not to transform the system, but to gain some little increment of dignity or even just a piece of bread.”
Whether he is ultimately remembered as a “lesser Norman Thomas,” or something else, what we do know is that when Bernie Sanders put democratic socialism into play in the national discussion, there was an organization already in place that made sense to many of the newly motivated and newly converted socialists. And that fact is in no small part due to the lifelong efforts of Michael Harrington.
Tom Gallagher is a former Massachusetts State Representative and the author of 'The Primary Route: How the 99% Take On the Military Industrial Complex.' He lives in San Francisco. He can be reached at TGTGTGTGTG@aol.com HE STILL USES AOLOL
Why Michael Harrington Matters
JACOBIN 07, 2019
In a time when America and the world were moving rightwards, Michael Harrington kept the socialist flame burning.
As the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) — newly grown to more than sixty thousand members — prepare to meet in Atlanta this weekend, it will have been exactly thirty years since the death of the organization’s founder.
Michael Harrington, who kept the idea and promise of democratic socialism alive and relevant in a time when the world was moving to the right, died of esophageal cancer on July 31, 1989. He’d spent his final months writing the last of his sixteen books — an account of the global corporate autocracy he feared would dominate the twenty-first century, and a scholarly, nuanced, yet impassioned case for the socialism he saw as the only alternative to capitalism’s brave new repressive world.
When Harrington founded DSA’s predecessor, the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC), in 1973, it was not a propitious moment for socialism. The New Left had shattered into sects, the New Deal coalition had irreparably broken apart, the labor movement was losing both members and direction, and Soviet communism, however sclerotic, still loomed large enough to constitute most Americans’ idea of socialism.
Perhaps most damaging to socialist prospects, however, was the fact that the economic legacy of the New Deal — the broadly shared prosperity created by decades of union density, progressive taxation, social benefits, and public investment — was just then peaking. Americans’ median incomes hit an all-time high in the year of DSOC’s birth, only to begin a plodding, tortuous descent.
Harrington would speak in those years of “a slow 1929” (a phrase he borrowed from a French economist), but slow 1929s had few of the radicalizing effects of fast ones. Unlike his great predecessors — Eugene Debs, who spoke for and to early-twentieth-century workers excluded from both prosperity and the polity, and Norman Thomas, whose Depression-era listeners needed little schooling in the bankruptcy of capitalism — Harrington made the case for socialism in a time when even many progressive activists saw that case as a matter of largely academic interest.
That was partly because they didn’t foresee what Harrington saw — that the social democracies of postwar Europe and the watered-down welfare state that had brought a modicum of economic equality to America were far from being permanent. He knew that they were the results of social struggles that could be overturned by capitalist power, and that that power was growing as our working-class coalitions stagnated and decayed. “This nation must go as far beyond Roosevelt as Roosevelt went beyond Hoover,” Harrington would say repeatedly during the 1970s and ’80s, “or it’s going back to Hoover.”
Even when progressives didn’t believe Harrington’s prophecies, many were wowed by the scope and depth of his vision. That’s not all that wowed them. Harrington was a more accomplished writer than either Debs or Thomas, but like them, he won most of his converts through the power of the spoken word.
Harrington delivered more than a hundred speeches a year, traveling to campuses, union halls, and rallies for social justice, invariably meeting both before and after with DSA members and prospective members over drinks. A Harrington speech was both a tour de force and a tour de horizon. He invariably made the case for the moral vision and practical advantages of democratic socialism, tailored to the causes and controversies of the moment, buttressed by scholarly consideration of social trends and statistics, strengthened by his habit of entertaining opposing arguments before dispatching them.
Harrington provided listeners with something that was none too easy to find elsewhere on either the liberal or socialist left: a sense of historic context, of how his listeners’ own activism fit into a larger pattern they might otherwise have trouble discerning, of where they stood, broadly speaking, in the flow of history. And he provided them — subtly — with one more thing: an overwhelming sense of the moral urgency that underlay his critique of capitalism.
Harrington was schooled in a culture of speaking that would be impossible to replicate today. He learned rigor and logic from the Jesuits he studied with as a schoolboy; rigor, irony, and modes of attack from the Shachtmanites (a socialist sect that looked to Trotsky as the model rhetorician) he joined when he left the Catholic Worker; and leavened these influences with his affinity for poetry, his vestigial Irish lilt and Midwestern twang, his Greenwich Village cosmopolitanism, his generosity of spirit, and his willingness to confess doubt. No one else could weave Marx, Kautsky, Luxemburg, Virgil, Proust, Willy Brandt, and Jimmy Hoffa into a talk and still sound like the boy — the brilliant boy — next door.
Underpinning it all was a deep moral intensity. Mike held out the prospect of neither certitude nor salvation in his talks, but there was always an unspoken subtext to his speeches: If this cause is as urgent as I’ve demonstrated, as plausible as I’ve shown, and so important that I’m devoting my life to it — why, then, so should you.
And probably more than any other factor, that’s how DSOC, and then DSA, grew.
Keeping the Socialist Flame Burning
Whether through the synoptic force of his talks and writing, his strategic sense, or his considerable charisma, Harrington played a double role on the American left — socialist leader and the programmatic and strategic convener of the broader left.
As early as 1964, the liberal journalist James Weschler wrote that Harrington was the person most likely to unite the fledgling New Left, the labor movement, the civil rights activists, and liberal middle-class reformers into a powerful new force. He was one of only three people over thirty, Tom Hayden wrote in those years, that the student left trusted. But it was right then, in the early sixties, that Harrington forfeited that trust.
In 1962, Harrington attended SDS’s Port Huron Conference as a kind of (slightly) elder counselor on matters strategic and ideological. He ended up attacking the SDSers for insufficient anticommunism, with an intensity that the Shachtmanites generally reserved for hard-line Stalinists and their dupes — terms that described nobody who’d come to Port Huron. Harrington soon came to deeply regret his outburst, which helped create the rift between New Left and Old that no one else was able to bridge throughout the sixties.
In founding DSOC, Harrington parted company with many of his old socialist comrades who’d grown to detest the New Left and the middle-class progressives who’d walked precincts for Gene McCarthy, Robert Kennedy, and George McGovern. As Mike saw it, DSOC, and later DSA, offered an opportunity not only to begin again the rebuilding of American socialism, but also, in the process, to bring together the various progressive constituencies that Vietnam had ripped asunder.
To that end, DSOC began building a progressive coalition within the Democratic Party, under the aegis of Democratic Agenda, a loose organization pushing for federally guaranteed full employment — the sine qua non, Harrington argued, for progressive advances. With full employment, white workers, who’d been drifting toward George Wallace and Republicans, would feel less threatened by the extension of long overdue rights to minorities and women, by their ascent into more and better jobs, and by the just demands of environmentalists. (Harrington also argued that when it came to electoral politics, given the United States’ entrenchment in a two-party system, socialists would reach a much wider audience and more effectively promote socialism by working within the Democratic Party — an argument that Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have since validated.)
Democratic Agenda became a rallying point for those unions opposed to the hard-line Cold War politics of George Meany’s AFL-CIO — chiefly, the United Auto Workers, AFSCME, the Machinists, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, and various regions of SEIU. These were the unions where onetime New Leftists, occasionally through the intercession of DSOC, found jobs and, ultimately, careers. More broadly, Democratic Agenda became the political vehicle for Democrats opposed to the party’s drift to the right after George McGovern’s defeat, which intensified during Jimmy Carter’s presidency.
Under Harrington’ leadership, Democratic Agenda spearheaded the opposition to Jimmy Carter’s economic policies at the 1978 Democratic Midterm Convention in Memphis, where Arkansas’s young governor-elect, Bill Clinton, led the Carter forces and Harrington led the 40 percent of the delegates who opposed Carter and backed the Democratic Agenda platform of federally provided universal health care, full employment, and a shift away from fossil fuels. Democratic Agenda’s successes at Memphis so stunned the party establishment that the Democratic National Committee voted shortly thereafter to abolish midterm conventions.
As the United States descended from Carter to Reagan, Harrington continued his missionary work for democratic socialism, and increasingly warned about the rise and perils of globalized capitalism. He foresaw the possibility of a reactive nationalism among American workers, and endeavored to redirect their anger to the corporations that were shuttering American factories in search of cheap labor abroad.
I was present for a speech he gave to the 1983 convention of the UAW where he told delegates their enemies weren’t Mexican workers but the companies that pitted workers against each other. The delegates were largely silent at first, but as Harrington’s logic unfolded and his passion exploded, they raised the roof with their cheers.
Harrington died in 1989, just sixty-one years old. He did not succeed in building a mass socialist organization — that would require two decades more of capitalism’s erosion of democracy and economic security, the crash of 2008, and the elite recovery that followed. But no one who’d read Mike’s writing or heard him speak could be completely surprised at the instability and cruelty of capitalism, nor by the current democratic-socialist surge against the devastation that capitalism has wrought.
In a time when America and the world were moving rightwards, Harrington kept the socialist flame burning, and fitted the socialist idea to the global challenges of the twenty-first century.
In a time when America and the world were moving rightwards, Michael Harrington kept the socialist flame burning.
As the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) — newly grown to more than sixty thousand members — prepare to meet in Atlanta this weekend, it will have been exactly thirty years since the death of the organization’s founder.
Michael Harrington, who kept the idea and promise of democratic socialism alive and relevant in a time when the world was moving to the right, died of esophageal cancer on July 31, 1989. He’d spent his final months writing the last of his sixteen books — an account of the global corporate autocracy he feared would dominate the twenty-first century, and a scholarly, nuanced, yet impassioned case for the socialism he saw as the only alternative to capitalism’s brave new repressive world.
When Harrington founded DSA’s predecessor, the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC), in 1973, it was not a propitious moment for socialism. The New Left had shattered into sects, the New Deal coalition had irreparably broken apart, the labor movement was losing both members and direction, and Soviet communism, however sclerotic, still loomed large enough to constitute most Americans’ idea of socialism.
Perhaps most damaging to socialist prospects, however, was the fact that the economic legacy of the New Deal — the broadly shared prosperity created by decades of union density, progressive taxation, social benefits, and public investment — was just then peaking. Americans’ median incomes hit an all-time high in the year of DSOC’s birth, only to begin a plodding, tortuous descent.
Harrington would speak in those years of “a slow 1929” (a phrase he borrowed from a French economist), but slow 1929s had few of the radicalizing effects of fast ones. Unlike his great predecessors — Eugene Debs, who spoke for and to early-twentieth-century workers excluded from both prosperity and the polity, and Norman Thomas, whose Depression-era listeners needed little schooling in the bankruptcy of capitalism — Harrington made the case for socialism in a time when even many progressive activists saw that case as a matter of largely academic interest.
That was partly because they didn’t foresee what Harrington saw — that the social democracies of postwar Europe and the watered-down welfare state that had brought a modicum of economic equality to America were far from being permanent. He knew that they were the results of social struggles that could be overturned by capitalist power, and that that power was growing as our working-class coalitions stagnated and decayed. “This nation must go as far beyond Roosevelt as Roosevelt went beyond Hoover,” Harrington would say repeatedly during the 1970s and ’80s, “or it’s going back to Hoover.”
Even when progressives didn’t believe Harrington’s prophecies, many were wowed by the scope and depth of his vision. That’s not all that wowed them. Harrington was a more accomplished writer than either Debs or Thomas, but like them, he won most of his converts through the power of the spoken word.
Harrington delivered more than a hundred speeches a year, traveling to campuses, union halls, and rallies for social justice, invariably meeting both before and after with DSA members and prospective members over drinks. A Harrington speech was both a tour de force and a tour de horizon. He invariably made the case for the moral vision and practical advantages of democratic socialism, tailored to the causes and controversies of the moment, buttressed by scholarly consideration of social trends and statistics, strengthened by his habit of entertaining opposing arguments before dispatching them.
Harrington provided listeners with something that was none too easy to find elsewhere on either the liberal or socialist left: a sense of historic context, of how his listeners’ own activism fit into a larger pattern they might otherwise have trouble discerning, of where they stood, broadly speaking, in the flow of history. And he provided them — subtly — with one more thing: an overwhelming sense of the moral urgency that underlay his critique of capitalism.
Harrington was schooled in a culture of speaking that would be impossible to replicate today. He learned rigor and logic from the Jesuits he studied with as a schoolboy; rigor, irony, and modes of attack from the Shachtmanites (a socialist sect that looked to Trotsky as the model rhetorician) he joined when he left the Catholic Worker; and leavened these influences with his affinity for poetry, his vestigial Irish lilt and Midwestern twang, his Greenwich Village cosmopolitanism, his generosity of spirit, and his willingness to confess doubt. No one else could weave Marx, Kautsky, Luxemburg, Virgil, Proust, Willy Brandt, and Jimmy Hoffa into a talk and still sound like the boy — the brilliant boy — next door.
Underpinning it all was a deep moral intensity. Mike held out the prospect of neither certitude nor salvation in his talks, but there was always an unspoken subtext to his speeches: If this cause is as urgent as I’ve demonstrated, as plausible as I’ve shown, and so important that I’m devoting my life to it — why, then, so should you.
And probably more than any other factor, that’s how DSOC, and then DSA, grew.
Keeping the Socialist Flame Burning
Whether through the synoptic force of his talks and writing, his strategic sense, or his considerable charisma, Harrington played a double role on the American left — socialist leader and the programmatic and strategic convener of the broader left.
As early as 1964, the liberal journalist James Weschler wrote that Harrington was the person most likely to unite the fledgling New Left, the labor movement, the civil rights activists, and liberal middle-class reformers into a powerful new force. He was one of only three people over thirty, Tom Hayden wrote in those years, that the student left trusted. But it was right then, in the early sixties, that Harrington forfeited that trust.
In 1962, Harrington attended SDS’s Port Huron Conference as a kind of (slightly) elder counselor on matters strategic and ideological. He ended up attacking the SDSers for insufficient anticommunism, with an intensity that the Shachtmanites generally reserved for hard-line Stalinists and their dupes — terms that described nobody who’d come to Port Huron. Harrington soon came to deeply regret his outburst, which helped create the rift between New Left and Old that no one else was able to bridge throughout the sixties.
In founding DSOC, Harrington parted company with many of his old socialist comrades who’d grown to detest the New Left and the middle-class progressives who’d walked precincts for Gene McCarthy, Robert Kennedy, and George McGovern. As Mike saw it, DSOC, and later DSA, offered an opportunity not only to begin again the rebuilding of American socialism, but also, in the process, to bring together the various progressive constituencies that Vietnam had ripped asunder.
To that end, DSOC began building a progressive coalition within the Democratic Party, under the aegis of Democratic Agenda, a loose organization pushing for federally guaranteed full employment — the sine qua non, Harrington argued, for progressive advances. With full employment, white workers, who’d been drifting toward George Wallace and Republicans, would feel less threatened by the extension of long overdue rights to minorities and women, by their ascent into more and better jobs, and by the just demands of environmentalists. (Harrington also argued that when it came to electoral politics, given the United States’ entrenchment in a two-party system, socialists would reach a much wider audience and more effectively promote socialism by working within the Democratic Party — an argument that Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have since validated.)
Democratic Agenda became a rallying point for those unions opposed to the hard-line Cold War politics of George Meany’s AFL-CIO — chiefly, the United Auto Workers, AFSCME, the Machinists, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, and various regions of SEIU. These were the unions where onetime New Leftists, occasionally through the intercession of DSOC, found jobs and, ultimately, careers. More broadly, Democratic Agenda became the political vehicle for Democrats opposed to the party’s drift to the right after George McGovern’s defeat, which intensified during Jimmy Carter’s presidency.
Under Harrington’ leadership, Democratic Agenda spearheaded the opposition to Jimmy Carter’s economic policies at the 1978 Democratic Midterm Convention in Memphis, where Arkansas’s young governor-elect, Bill Clinton, led the Carter forces and Harrington led the 40 percent of the delegates who opposed Carter and backed the Democratic Agenda platform of federally provided universal health care, full employment, and a shift away from fossil fuels. Democratic Agenda’s successes at Memphis so stunned the party establishment that the Democratic National Committee voted shortly thereafter to abolish midterm conventions.
As the United States descended from Carter to Reagan, Harrington continued his missionary work for democratic socialism, and increasingly warned about the rise and perils of globalized capitalism. He foresaw the possibility of a reactive nationalism among American workers, and endeavored to redirect their anger to the corporations that were shuttering American factories in search of cheap labor abroad.
I was present for a speech he gave to the 1983 convention of the UAW where he told delegates their enemies weren’t Mexican workers but the companies that pitted workers against each other. The delegates were largely silent at first, but as Harrington’s logic unfolded and his passion exploded, they raised the roof with their cheers.
Harrington died in 1989, just sixty-one years old. He did not succeed in building a mass socialist organization — that would require two decades more of capitalism’s erosion of democracy and economic security, the crash of 2008, and the elite recovery that followed. But no one who’d read Mike’s writing or heard him speak could be completely surprised at the instability and cruelty of capitalism, nor by the current democratic-socialist surge against the devastation that capitalism has wrought.
In a time when America and the world were moving rightwards, Harrington kept the socialist flame burning, and fitted the socialist idea to the global challenges of the twenty-first century.
Harold Meyerson is the editor-at-large of the American Prospect. In the 1970s and ‘80s, he was a leader of the Los Angeles local of DSOC and DSA, and served on the groups’ national executive committee.
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