History lessons from Grampa DSA

[bloodygranuaile]

After being in DSA for a year and a half now I finally decided to get around to reading some Michael Harrington, a figure that everyone seems to have strong opinions about but whom few of the young’uns talk about having actually read. To that end, I picked up his last book, Socialism: Past and Future, published in 1989 just before his death from cancer.

Socialism: Past and Future is listed as an "Introduction to Socialism" book on the YDS reading list that I have, one which I don't have any idea when it was compiled or by whom. But I was surprised and annoyed to see that I have not read a single book on it, so I'm planning on working my way down the whole thing (it should take me about 5 years, at this rate). This book was first on the list.
 

At about 275 pages, not including the notes, it's a reasonably "full-sized" book, in contrast to the bite-sized primers I've read like The ABCs of Socialism or Socialism... Seriously. (It also has many fewer jokes.) t's also certainly older than either of those, thus providing an interesting history of socialist thought that stops just about when I was born. 
 

That said, Harrington has still set himself a task of covering a great deal of ground in a single volume, and to that end I think he has done rather well. The first couple chapters, "Hypotheses" and "Socialisms," give broad-strokes overviews of the variety within socialist thought and why Harrington believes that socialism is still a meaningful and necessary framework for tackling the political problems of the '80s and beyond, whatever they may turn out to be. Since many of the problems we face have their roots in the neoliberal project that was already being implemented by Reagan, Thatcher, etc. when Harrington wrote this book, the result is perhaps not as outdated as one would wish. 
 

The next couple chapters cover socialist history. Chapter 3, "Authoritarian Collectivisms," discusses the rise of the Soviet state and why it ended up looking so different from what the early Communists had envisioned. This section is guaranteed to piss off tankies, who think the Soviet Union was just fine, thanks; conservatives, who think the Soviet Union was nothing but evil from Day 1 and this is why you should never try to make things better; and possibly orthodox Trotskyists, who sometimes tend to put all the bad stuff on Stalin and get a bit defensive about everyone else. Harrington, before leaving what he called the "sectarian left," was a Shachtmanite, a type of heterodox Trotskyist, and the history he gives comes off as pretty balanced--he explains, with close attention to the material political and economic details, the difficulties the Soviet Union faced in developing anything workable out of the mess that was feudal Russia, without excusing the really disastrous decisions that some of the early leaders (especially Stalin, whomst sucked) made. Chapter 4, "The Realpolitik of Utopia," covers what basically became the other main 'branch of socialist influences: the various socialist parties in Europe and their accidental invention and implementation of a new hybrid system, social democracy. The history here is complex but fascinating, and Harrington explains it clearly and coherently, in a way that neither minimizes the achievements of the parliamentary socialists nor conflates welfare state capitalism with socialism itself. The look into the parallel development of the New Deal and the Swedish system is particularly interesting (assuming, of course, you are a big nerd who is interested in this sort of stuff, which is probably a prerequisite for picking up the book in the first place). Then there's a chapter on the decline of the socialist movement in the postwar period, which is pretty lolsob if you know what happened in, say, the '90s. 
 

All this history only brings us up to about halfway through the book -- the subtitle is Past and Future, after all. This, to me, is where things really get interesting. Chapter 6, "The Third Creation of the World," looks at the rise of globally integrated finance capitalism (or "corporate socialization," as Harrington calls it). The economic impotence of newly freed colonies of the great empires in the face of early globalization is a big theme, as are the end of the Keynesian consensus and the rise of transnational (i.e., multinational) corporations. In short, we are looking at the rise of the modern economy, from a period much closer to when it was actually happening. It is from this perspective that Harrington calls for a "new socialism," to match the new form of capitalism eating the world. The later chapters lay out his ideas about what that new socialism should look like, a sometimes dated, sometimes prescient combination of proposed political program, predictions about the future of work and of economics, and a few very underdeveloped (but nonetheless there, which is not bad for 1989) remarks about climate change ("If the GNP goes up, no matter what its composition, it is thought that the society is advancing. But that advance could well be a stride toward catastrophe, for example, toward a greenhouse effect that will threaten life itself" p. 217). He also mentions the "precariat" in terms of the unemployment of the '70s; I had thought that word was only coined along with "gig economy" in the post-crash period. Shows what I know. 
 

The last chapter is dedicated to something called "visionary gradualism," which as far as I can tell seeks to circumvent the usual "reform or revolution" debate by asserting that a transition to a functional, technically complex, fully democratic political economy is going to take some time, however power is acquired. As a known disliker of the "reform or revolution" debate -- and I seem not to be the only one these days -- I generally like Harrington's willingness to think far in the future, in terms of an epochal transformation that we must strive to bring into being on purpose. We've obviously not been on the right track for most of the 30 years or so since this book was published, but it's definitely got lots of food for thought. 
 

Stylistically, some might find Harrington a bit dry; it took me entirely too long to finish reading this book, although some of that might have just been because it was an absurdly busy three weeks and I was too burned out to focus. I tend to rather like Harrington's authorial "voice"; it's occasionally got a bit of dry humor, but mostly I find it sort of... soothing, in a way? It's certainly less grandstandy than a lot of other well-known socialist writers, and noticeably less pompous than, say, Irving Howe, though Harrington and Howe were good friends and seem to be on a similar ideological wavelength. At any rate, I'm interested enough to have started reading another Harrington book, Toward a Democratic Left, written in 1968, some of which is distressingly relevant, but that's for another review.