Michael Harrington on Socialism

[StockholmSyndrome]

Harrington discusses the strained relationship between liberalism and socialism, the need for a reformist program to move beyond the "welfare state" to include more comprehensive structural changes in the economy, and the need to extend the "welfare state" to the "welfare world". Terrible quality but worth a listen.

http://www.chicagodsa.org/mhlq.mp3

[Thirsty Crow]

I know that you'll probably call me lazy or something, but could you summarize the most important points so we can discuss them (my speakers are an abomiantion, I wouldn't even try listening to it)?

[graymouser]

This seems like it was given in the late '60s, during the radicalization of that period - is that correct? The sound quality is too poor for me to listen to more than a few minutes, a summary would be helpful.

For folks who don't know, Michael Harrington was perhaps the last major figure of the American social democracy - as a party, that is. He was a member of Max Shachtman's group, a former Trotskyist group called the Independent Socialist League, that merged with the Socialist Party-Social Democratic Federation (SP-SDF) of Norman Thomas in 1958. Harrington left Shachtman's camp, which was heading further right, and quickly became one of the centrist figures in the SP-SDF. In 1972, after Thomas and Shachtman had died, the right wing seized control of the SP-SDF and renamed it Social Democrats, USA. The party promptly blew up, and the largest faction followed Harrington into the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee. This group still oriented to the Democratic Party but was not as hardline anti-Communist as SD,USA. In the early 80s, DSOC merged with a small New Left group, the New American Movement, and has since been the Democratic Socialists of America. They have a large paper membership but not much active base.

Harrington's 1962 book The Other America is considered something of a classic account of poverty in the United States during the '50s and early '60s. But I never got the sense that his view of socialism was anything more than a beefed-up version of European social democracy.

[StockholmSyndrome]

The main points are:
1. Socialists must encourage the accomplishments and future development of liberalism and defend it against conservatives and reactionaries, while recognizing liberalism's shortcomings (mainly that it ignores class and inequality and cannot go far enough in dealing with the problems of capitalism). In short we must go beyond liberalism; but rather than simply deriding and alienating ourselves from liberals we must realize that any future mass socialist movement will be made up of people who are currently liberals.

2. We must go beyond the "welfare state" because it still operates within the framework of private property and profit. We should instead have a "comprehensive economic planning", which is something that the traditional capitalist welfare state cannot tolerate. He particularly talks about the need to "socialize investment" in crucial areas such as healthcare, housing and the environment. We should create an "Office of the Future" which opens up a transparent discourse on where we are headed and how to invest our national resources. He also talks about moving beyond the "welfare state" by pushing for more structural changes in the direction of greater economic democracy, such as democratizing the corporation.

3. Global capitalism, in terms of the development of regulatory institutions and global governance, is extremely primitive and resembles 18th and 19th century European capitalism. Transnational corporations essentially have free reign and are accountable to nobody. Global democratic planning for the allocation of the world's resources and institutions of global governance are therefore necessary.

P.S. Graymouser, the talk was given in 1971 at the University of Chicago.

[graymouser]

On 1: This makes sense given that Harrington's main strategic objective was to enter the Democratic Party and turn it into a social-democratic party. For socialists today, when liberalism is mostly discredited, I think this is actually less relevant than it was in the '70s (though I wouldn't have agreed with it then either). Today this would actually mean rehabilitating liberalism - at which point you are better off just fighting for socialist ideas. Generally radicalizations can't rely on this kind of "two-stage process" of first liberal then radical.

2 - That's all well and good, but most people here would pick up within a second on the fact that you can't get there without revolution. Corporations will fight tooth and nail against democratization, which would naturally mean less profits for their shareholders.

3 - Again, all very well as far as goals, but you can't get there without revolution.

[MarxSchmarx]

American liberals have always had this strange "cult of michael harrington" about them that I've never really understood. Mr. Harrington strikes me as a perfectly descent fellow and said a few clever things now or then, but his ideas came out of a culture and a time of American history where class conflict was rather muted and a social contract (at least among white people) ensured that many gains of the class struggle several decades prior were widely available - conditions that are really no longer salient today. Indeed, like galbraith he ultimately embodied a vision of bureaucratic socialism that was arguably more democratic than the soviet model, but still far fell short of the liberatory potential and ultimately failed to inspire grander social change.