One potential trap that even a large and powerful social democratic party can face, Harrington warned, is getting elected to office and discovering that it has to “administer capitalism.” He noted that if a Social Democratic party in power hopes to deliver prosperity to its supporters, it can’t risk antagonizing the largest corporations too much, or hurting their profitability too severely, because they consequently won’t invest or maintain production, and recession and / or mass unemployment may result. Thus undercutting the appeal of the socialist party to its own supporters, of course.

Harrington notes in passing — I think it’s in “Twilight” — that many liberal and even moderate Americans reacted with scorn in the 1950s when General Motors executive Charles Willson, named Secretary of Defense by President Eisenhower, stated that “What’s good for General Motors is good for America.”

But the dilemma for even the best democratic socialist president, Harrington thought, was that what’s bad for General Motors is likely to be bad for America. Even when GM’s policies are basically destructive, it will be risk for a democratically elected leftist party to challenge those policies too dramatically or too abruptly, for fear that GM will simply pull the rug out from under national prosperity.

Thus “socialist” politicians can be trapped into pursuing a basically capitalist economic agenda and undercutting their own politics, as Harrington observed. In writing this, I think he intuited what many European social democratic parties would end up being forced to in the 1980s and 1990s, to their loss.

Harrington was a good enough Marxist to identify some of these painful contradictions for the democratic left, but I don’t remember him coming up with attractive solutions to them. But in writing this, am I misremembering what “Twilight of Capitalism” says?

Rebuilding class identification and struggle is the longterm task, but the question has to be made in light of the continued asocial socialization of capitalism whether the traditional union is still the ideal level of organization and whether or not there is an alternative in district based organization and the alliance between both the employed and unemployed segments of the working class.

It’s important to note the creation of Community Labor United. I am a big fan of Jobs with Justice. What do they have to do with this article?

Bhaskar — I’m glad JwJ exists. (JwJ has been around for 20 years now — does that count as “recent”?) I’m not that expert on it, though.

I have no desire to defend any of Harrington’s political decisions in the ’60s, but I’d sooner criticize him for the positions he actually held than the ones that some ignorantly think he held.

I don’t really know Louis’ politics, but most people who usher in the “Harrington the hawk” challenge have crappy authoritarian politics themselves. Takes one to know one, I guess.

All of this is outlined in Isserman’s biography. I suggest reading it.