A Life Assessed
JOSEPH SCHWARTZ
Those who have heard Michael Harrington speak in public are now over forty years old, which is a huge issue for DSA. It’s our responsibility to make sure that we don’t “gray” the way that the Socialist Party of Debs and Thomas did.
One of the real strengths of Maurice Isserman’s book The Other American is that Maurice is, first and foremost, a great historian of the left. He uncovered some extraordinary material on St. Louis in the 1940s, Mike’s family origins, and his psychological formation, which created this interesting insider-outsider personality. Mike always wanted to be mainstream, but also a dissident. Mike was fairly proud, for example, that his favorite singer was Sinatra. He was “conservative” in many ways and didn’t have much of an ear for the later 1960s feminist movement, or the black liberation movements — though he later tried to embrace them.
Maurice’s book poses the question of why Mike stayed with all those right-wing anti-Communist New York needle-trades union losers — almost through 1973. That’s the tragedy of Mike’s life, that he didn’t leave the ossifying old SP with Bogdan Denitch and Debbie Meier in 1965, and didn’t come out earlier against the Vietnam War and for unilateral withdrawal. At the same time Maurice identifies the out-of-proportion influence of this small group, in which Bogdan played a key role, of anti-authoritarian socialists who pre-figured in many ways the decentralized, liberatory stands of the New Left, including notions of participatory work, humane uses for technology, and for injecting aspects of the heart in politics. We have to remember that the Stalinist left had an outsized role when Mike and others were foursquare radical democrats in the 1950s.
There’s a mention in the book that Mike was the socialist you took your parents to hear if they were fairly Middle-American, to show that socialists weren’t crazy. In this way he was both a popularizer, and I think he also wanted to be an academic. In America, by and large, there aren’t such public intellectuals bridging both worlds. I think that a book like Socialism, or his last book Socialism: Past and Future, did reach more people than the academic tomes that many of us write. Mike was incredibly good at giving an accessible version of Marx’s critique of capitalism–that capitalism really was a social system, interdependent and cooperative in the way it produced the world, uncooperative in its governance, and often anti-social. He would always translate Marx’s German and say that capitalism was “a social system governed asocially,” a system that should be governed democratically but wasn’t. Mike did more to popularize that type of analysis and to resurrect Marx from the dustbin of Marxist-Leninist authoritarianism than anybody else.
Maurice’s conclusion in his book is historically accurate: the conditions that would support a socialist movement yielding a Debs-Thomas-Harrington figure have changed. In fact, his chapters on the 1970s and 1980s give one pause; if you are a DSA loyalist you have to consider Maurice’s honest challenge to us. Mike’s original inclusive strategy in those years was realignment, building a left social democratic presence around the Democratic Party and the unions. Ever since the Democratic Agenda strategy, predicated on a strong trade union left in the Democratic Party, crashed with the Reagan election, we have been in an organizationally weak position. Of course, as Steve Max and others have observed, “we are all left social democrats now,” meaning the old faction fights are over and the commitment to liberty and democracy on the broad left is not questioned.
In Mike’s last book, Socialism: Past and Future, written under the cloud of terminal cancer, he addressed the decline of the labor movement, the greater fragmentation of social movements among various identities, and he asked if they could unite around a common commitment to radical democracy, or what he and we would call democratic socialism. At the 1985 DSA convention, he said that “there is no universal class anymore” in the manner of the labor movement of the 1930s, or as Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement embodied universal aspirations for democracy, social rights and justice. He knew back then that all this would present major organizing obstacles into the 21st century.
DSA has trained many younger people to be nonsectarian radical activists, to go out and do real work. Mike used to go to colleges and his first sentence was that “the revolution is not going to happen in your lifetime,” and what he meant was that there was a small, ongoing revolution happening daily below the radar screen. This is a hard message to employ if you want to motivate 18 year-olds, who may want to go to the barricades the next morning. But Mike tried to inspire and describe the world as it is, while giving people hope that the world could change. Many responded to his call for a life commitment to social justice by action.
Extracted from the Spring 2000 edition of Democratic Left
Excellent piece, though I would have to disagree at the assertion that “there is no universal class anymore.” It might have made more sense in its original context.
When Joe gets back in town he might be able to give us more insight into what Harrington meant.
(It might be a bit unreasonable to ask this considering that the speech was made almost a quarter-century ago).
What Harrington meant by saying that there is no “universal class” he meant that nowhere in industrial democracies (certainly not late capitalist, somewhat post-industrial societies) have the vast majority of ‘objective’ members of the working class become ’subjectively’ revolutionary (that was Marx’s vision of the eventual telos of the “universal class”). And today’s “working class” is stratified not only by gender, race, and nationality, but also by educational status, income level, and skill-level. Not that broader (and narrower) alliances among working people can’t be built, but to say that there’s an inherent, inexorable tendency for that to happen ignores the open, contestible, and political nature of the construction of ‘class consciousness.’ Just even think of the division of interests between public sector/helping sector workers and private sector workers. Public sector workers (including quite high wage ones) are much more likely to support left parties and progressive values than are workers in the private sector. Take away public sector workers and the Western left does not have an operative majority among the remaining working class.
Harrington’s point is not much different than Erik Olin Wright’s — when we think about class, we have to think about not just whether one owns capital or not, but whether one has some autonomy over one’s work or not (being both bossed and bossing others is very different from just being bossed), and what type of skill does one have (a skilled computer software designer at Microsoft is a rather different member of the working class than is an undocumented worker in the unorganized service sector).
Yes, in some sense, all college profs are ‘workers,’ but tenured profs have different levels of autonomy and (somewhat) job security than adjuncts, to say the least. As a tenured prof who struggles to get other tenure (and tenure-track) unionized profs (I teach at a public u.) to agitate for the right of adjuncts to unionized (our TAs are) and improve their conditions, let me tell you that the “labor aristocracy” of profs need to be subjectively convinced to support the collective interest of their class. (They don’t even realize that the very future of any tenured faculty depends upon ending the exploitation of adjuncts and grad students!).
In any event, class consciousness and class unity can be built…but it won’t be totally unified and it will be ever-shifting. And you can’t essentialize any sector of the working class being more progressive than another. And the left will always be a coalition of workers of brain and of hand who are culturally quite distinct and often in tension. The Western left would be very weak if you took away public sector workers, teachers, social workers, journalists, etc. And highly educated, relatively well-remunerated workers of the brain tend to vote left more consistently than religious or culturally conservative blue collar workers. That is, class is crucial to the left, but it ain’t simple and the left is a coalition of radical democratic forces, many of whom are not in unions and don’t think of themselves as classically “working class.”
Thanks for the reply, that does clear things up. We do often forget that the battle that the American left has to wage is around building up class identification — we can’t just assume we have a force for immediate, meaningful class struggle.
I read Isserman’s excellent biography of Harrington as well as several of Harrington’s books as a freshman in college in late 2002, as it became increasingly clear that the Bush regime was really serious about invading Iraq and that the American Left was in no position to do anything about it.
At the time, I was very interested in the sectoloy and inter-sectarian squabbles of American Marxism (God knows why) and it seemed to me that Harrington had, in the later part of his career, found a narrow path around the rightward-drifting, hawkish Shachtmanites and between Stalinism of the CP and the sectarian madness of the Trostkyist parties.
The final six years of the Bush administration, the Cylon-Human Alliance and a number of other developments since my introduction to Michael Harrington have reshaped my political sensibilities.
These days, I believe that kindness, humility and empathy are the only real antidotes to sectarianism and Stalinism within the organized left. That’s not to say that theory doesn’t matter. Harrington’s point that capitalism itself is a bureaucratic collectivizing system, for example, is pretty key to understanding the world.
However, I do think that soundly reasoned Marxist formulas, correct lines on “Russian questions,” etc., really do not amount to a pile of beans when espoused by an arrogant or megalomaniacal person. There are plenty of old Jewish Communists who are wonderful, big-hearted people despite having CP cooties, and there are plenty of hip young anarchists who are sectarian bullies.
In “The Prophet Outcast” there is a part where Issac Deutscher talks about what Trotsky’s wife (?) said, observing the sectarian squabbles of her husband’s protege. She said that if a group doesn’t believe that a revolution will happen in its lifetime than it either gives up hope of revolution or it thinks its mission is merely to keep the flame burning and keep its ideas pure until some indeterminate point in the future. ****
The “strategy of patience” and the push towards non-reformist reform by good democratic socialists is an antidote to this.
***
I’ve recently read this from Postone, who is pretty close to me on the War on Terror and on the transition from Fordism.
http://platypus1917.home.comcast.net/~platypus1917/postonemoishe_historyhelplessness.pdf
I recommend it, but assuming you subscribe to most of his views, think about the role of ANSWER — shouldn’t the Left have come out harder on some of its slogans and political alignment? Shouldn’t there have been a post-9/11 dilemma for the Left? Instead there was a rationalization of far-right political violence and a knee-jerk “anti-imperialism.”
Among the far left in the United States I don’t think the problem is that complete sectarianism prevents us from trying to work together or join progressive movements; in my experience I’ve been to SDS (“anarchist”), PSL (staliniod), and ISO (“trotskyist”) joint actions.
I wouldn’t mind more critical engagement in the left — NOT about lines or vague theoretical questions — but about pertinent, modern ones. There is definitely a fine line somewhere and I reserve the right to come to the same conclusions as Adrian over the course of the next few years.
[edit: an autocorrection on my web browser wildly changed the meaning of two words to something incomprehensible]
**** I’m actually like 90 percent sure I got this idea from Luckacs’ “History and Class Consciousness”, though similar thoughts were definitely in “The Prophet Outcast”.
If the problem with International ANSWER were merely bad theory there would be a strong case for critical engagement. But a 50-year-old ANSWER activist who has spent half of her life in Workers World and is now passing out pamphlets for PSL does not need an essay from Chris Cutrone to show her the error of her ways, she needs psychotherapy to help her emancipate herself from a cult-like organization that has emotionally enslaved her. Expending any more energy policing and challenging the weird things ANSWER and its ilk say and do will only help aggrandize a tiny, crazy and very sad group that 99% of Americans have never heard of and that only matters because it is organized enough to do the paperwork for demo permits.
^ well said (and very politically correct pronoun usage)
That link I posted to was actually by Postone (well worth reading). Cutrone’s (who I do agree with more than I disagree with) personal website just happens to host a very good collection of essays.
The thing is far-left insanity is actually the norm in the international Left. So even though I recognize that engaging with the mainstream is more important, I can’t help but ignore self-described radicals especially when they proclaim themselves to be “Marxists” and go around calling me a “social democrat” (at best) or more commonly a “neocon”.