Reformist (2022)

Book Review from the July 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

A Failure of Vision: Michael Harrington and the Limits of Democratic Socialism. By Doug Greene, Zero Books, 2021. £15.99

This is a political biography of Michael Harrington (1928-1989) who was the best known ‘socialist’ in the US after the death in 1968 of Norman Thomas, the perennial presidential candidate of the Socialist Party of America. Harrington was first associated with the Catholic Worker Movement but then became a ‘Shachtmanite’, an offshoot from Trotskyism based on the ideas of Max Shachtman whose difference with Trotsky was over ‘The Nature of the USSR’. Trotsky maintained that it was basically a ‘workers’ state’. Shachtman could see that this was an untenable position and argued that Russia was best described as ‘bureaucratic collectivism’, a new class society ruled by a new ruling class exploiting the workers. To begin with, he had held that Russia was more progressive than capitalism, but later that it was the other way round and he became a staunch ‘anti-communist’.

Taking this position, in 1958 Shachtman, Harrington and the others joined the Socialist Party of America. This was the nearest equivalent in the US of the Labour Party in Britain and held the same ideas as, at the time, that party did (except that it paid more lip-service to Marx’s ideas, in fact to ideas in general) – that the state capitalism that it called ‘socialism’ would come about gradually as the outcome of a series of nationalisations and social reforms introduced democratically; basically, reformists who wanted to humanise capitalism.

Not getting anywhere as a separate party, in 1973 Harrington and the others (Shachtman had died in 1972) decided to enter the Democratic Party and work to get it to adopt and enact progressive policies. Their political descendants today are the ‘Democratic Socialists of America’ which has recruited tens of thousands of members and succeeded in getting some of its members elected (as Democrats) to the House of Representatives, the most well-known of whom is Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez.

Greene argues that, despite this posthumous relative success, Harrington’s entry into the Democratic Party with a view to ‘realigning’ it was a mistaken strategy; as the Democrats were a capitalist party beholden to capitalist interests, it led to Harrington and his group becoming its tail-end, working to ensure the election of Democratic Presidents and other officials to run the political side of American capitalism. On this point Greene is right. He also argues, again correctly, that capitalism cannot be gradually reformed so as to work in the interest of the working class.

However, he writes as a member of one of the 57 varieties of Trotskyism (a group called ‘Left Voice’). To be fair, he has confined his alternative strategy to get to state capitalism to an appendix in which he criticises Harrington’s ‘Democratic Marxism.’ This was a wise move on his (or his editor’s) part as his ‘vision’ of an insurrection and his defence of the idea that even under Stalin Russia was some sort of ‘workers’ state’ would have led to his criticism of Harrington’s gradualist reformism being taken less seriously.

Adam Buick