The Red Who Came In From The Cold

MY MOTHER told me about a Popular Front meeting of socialists and communists at Brooklyn College in 1940, where the communists advanced a resolution that the USSR had not invaded Finland, but that in fact it had been Finland which had committed acts of aggression upon the people of Russia. As preposterous as the platform was, it passed after a long meeting, because, my mother explained, "The communists were much better sitters than we were--they never slept."

Michael Harrington, national chairman of the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee, wasn't at that particular meeting, but in his 30-odd years of involvement in socialist groups, he has seen plenty of other instances of left-wing sectarianism. He remembers a meeting in 1954 for the unification of the Young Socialists and the Young People's Socialist League. The convention was highlighted by the decision to rename the gathering, "the September Plenum," dedicated to the establishment of a workers' state and to the overthrow of the capitalist, bourgeois regime." The decision was wildly applauded by all of the eighty-three members present.

Now the solemn pronouncements of these cloistered radical groups seem pretty ridiculous. But it appears that Harrington, in his anxiety to avoid ever appearing absurd again, has fallen prey to another pitfall. For the socialist there is always the danger of allowing one's political identity to be blurred, forgetting exactly what it is that makes a socialist's world-view different from that of people with a stake in capitalist institutions.

LAST WEEK in the Winthrop House JCR, I asked Harrington about a piece by Pete Hamill that ran in the Village Voice last year which proposed Harrington as a candidate for president in 1976, arguing that it was time to take Socialism off the "dirty word list" in the American political vocabulary. Harrington rejected the idea out of hand.

"You know," he says, "every time the SWP [Socialist Workers' Party] holds a convention to nominate a candidate, the Times and maybe a couple of other papers will run a profile of the guy, then maybe he gets on the ballot in six states." Harrington laughs. "Like a goddamn dancing bear." Then, still smiling, but with an undertone of seriousness, "I don't want to be a dancing bear."

Harrington feels that the best thing that socialists can do in the immediate future is support the Democratic candidate against Ford or Reagan. "There's a lot of support in DSOC for Bayh, Udall and Harris," he says. I ask him how far to the middle of the spectrum DSOC is ready to go...would it support Humphrey? "I can't speak for the Committee as a whole, but I personally would find Humphrey very acceptable. Hubert's always been a favorite of mine." "And how about Jackson?" Harrington doesn't flinch: "We'll cross that bridge when we come to it." A DSOC member next to me offers, hopefully, "I hope we don't come to that bridge." Harrington smiles tightly. "We'll cross that bridge when we come to it."

This fear of arousing antagonism is echoed in Harrington's stand vis-a-vis the trade unions While indicating his wariness of "left-wing outside-agitator-inspired wildcats," he concedes that there are instances, for example in the Lordstown auto plants, of genuine rank-and-file worker disenchantment with union leadership and a real desire on the part of workers to participate in the organization of the work process. "And I supported that strike," Harrington says. "But we're in a tough position. It's the same thing in New York, where the civil servants crossed the teachers' picket lines. Now we don't like it. but Vic Gotbaum's our friend. Woodcock's our friend, too. And we don't want to embarass them."

Harrington says he believes that liberal reformism is "socialist in content" and that socialism is the "logical outgrowth of liberal consciousness." He has a great deal of faith in the capacity of a centralized bureacracy to deal with problems of distribution of wealth. If only we could re-order our priorities, he argues, and invest our energies and money in people rather than guns, we could move towards a just society.

BUT THE problems with the welfare system are far graver than Harrington makes out. It is not just more money that's needed: the whole system must bereorganized so that it is controlled from the bottom up, not managed by faceless bureaucrats. If Marx taught us anything, it was that freedom cannot be conferred from above--people must have the opportunity to organize their own lives and discover their own dignity and worth. Frederick Wiseman's recent documentary, Welfare, made it amply clear that both freedom and dignity are absent in the current welfare system.

But Harrington, on the other hand, does not even seem willing to commit himself to a broad program for the redistribution of wealth. He doesn't buy the theory that George McGovern would have won more votes in 1972 if he had stuck to his proposals to tax 50% of all inherited wealth over $500,000 and to guarantee a minimum income to every American citizen. "My friends in the trade unions," he says, "told me that the reaction of their members had been, 'You mean if I win the lottery, that bastard is gonna take it all away?'"

McGovern's proposals were badly thought out and perhaps poorly presented. But for a socialist to say, "you see, this is the way things are, this is the state of the working class consciousness, and to suggest a radical program of income redistribution is sectarian and self-defeating," pushes socialist thought back about a century--when many radicals sat back and waited for the inexorable march of history to effect change in society.

IN ALLYING DSOC with the Democratic Party and the trade unions, Harrington has severely hampered his flexibility; he can't capitalize on those opportunities, such as Lordstown, which offer the best hope of realizing the workers' autonomy in the factories for fear of alienating his friends in the union leadership. Such an action would pose a major threat to the union bosses whose main responsibility is the enforcement of the contract in return for certain material concessions from management.

Nor can Harrington agitate for a state welfare apparatus which would be controlled from the bottom by those it serves. Calling for such a restructuring of the system would thrust him into a politically suicidal conflict with the same advocates of New Deal state capitalism--people like Humphrey and Meany.

A member of the 1930's Communist Party USA would have branded Harrington a "social facist." But the problem is more complex. Harrington is tired of being on the outs--maybe all those eighty-three-delegate conventions, all those years as the object of scorn of mainstream American politicians, have gotten to him--now he wants to go to New York City and have Messrs. Udall, Jackson, Harris and Bayn petition for support next year. Maybe he believes that that is what an effective socialist movement is all about.

Paraphrasing Lord Acton last weekend, Harrington observed that "absolute powerlessness corrupts absolutely." But as he bids for power, it is Harrington who is doing the corrupting. His new strategy of alliances would perhaps give some political clout to a small clique of academics, well-meaning students, and old leftists. But the poor and working people to whom socialism is supposed to be responsive will be left out in the cold again.