Advance, or Retreat, in the 1970S?
Harrington, Michael
The following article is a slightly abbreviated version of a speech given this past February at the convention of the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee, of which Michael Harrington is...
...Liberalism, on the one hand, inspired all the movements that sought progressive change within the system: trade unionists and minorities and women, as well as the middle-class reformers...
...When the general unemployment rate reaches 5.5 percent, we are told, the most advantaged workers—adult males are in short supply...
...In opposition to Republican reaction or in a period of economic upswing and gains, the two could coexist uneasily...
...It is time for a national planning mechanism that will shape the investment process on the basis of social priorities...
...The redistribution of wealth is thus not simply an egalitarian ideal...
...It is unlikely that we will raise our foreign aid much above the present, derisory 0.27 of GNP and, even more important, it is unlikely that we will cooperate in helping the Third World industrialize...
...And it is here that we see the most shocking signs of liberal retreat...
...There is not a potential majority for such a step, not within the democratic left itself and certainly not in American society...
...We are committed to it because we regard democratic decision-making as a central value that is constantly overridden by corporate power...
...The disasters currently being visited on huge cities and entire regions is overwhelming proof that private choice does not maximize the common good...
...The achievement of even significant reform will require a challenge to the basic corporate domination of the economy...
...We are not projecting a doctrinal war between two liberal sects, one progressive and the other conservative...
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...During the next four years the long-run contradictions of American society, above all its hostility to full employment, are going to be its short-run problems...
...If one is unwilling to attack the systemic bias of the American political economy in favor of the corporations and the corporate rich, then we do indeed face intolerable constraints...
...The subsidies paid to agribusiness allowed it to mechanize twice as fast as industry in the postwar period, displacing millions of the rural poor who were forced into the cities just when other federal incentives were financing an exodus from the cities of jobs and affluent taxpayers...
...Economically, politically—morallythat is no longer good enough...
...This agenda is not yet socialist, even though it moves in that direction...
...Schultze has, however, made out a devastating case that there is not enough money even to finance an effort comparable to that of the '60s even though the problem, as measured in mass unemployment, is double what it was then...
...We propose that the entire democratic left, and not just its socialist wing, mobilize behind the approach that we now outline...
...There are debates about how effective the job training programs of the'60s were...
...BUT THIS TENDENCY can be fought if one is willing to make structural changes in the economy...
...We are not outsiders on the fringe of American politics...
...But even then the contradictions accumulated, and in the '70s they boiled to the surface...
...Job guarantees, on the Amtrak model, for all workers displaced because of defense cuts, environmental protection, or American measures designed to facilitate the industrialization of the Third World...
...For the last 40 years, liberalism was as far left as mainstream politics would go in this country...
...Within this context, we do not simply oppose the Cold Warriors, like the Committee on the Present Danger, because their proposals for a reescalation of the arms race threaten the security of America and the world...
...It will move all political debate and all legislation to the right, since proposals will be formulated so as to prove that they do not threaten the corporate status quo—that they are not socialist...
...they are also ineffective and expensive tools in regard to fullemployment policy...
...Credit allocation, requiring all banks to provide a percentage of their loans for specified social purposes...
...These issues, in short, will not be primarily argued out as counterposed theories, but in terms of sharply different political programs...
...A few months earlier, Schultze had argued in a Brookings volume that, on the assumption of 5 percent rates of unemployment, there would be no money for expanding existing social programs or innovation during the next Jive years, That grim prediction, given his testimony, is optimistic since he does not think we will get down to that 5 percent jobless level during this decade...
...international competition subverted the absolute dominance of the world market that America had enjoyed between 1945 and 1960...
...So the choice before us is not "free enterprise" or "statism...
...Clearly this is an extensive agenda and it requires careful consideration in each and every detail...
...We stand behind the unanimous commitment of the 1976 Democratic Convention and the repeated promise of its presidential candidate: that every worker in America has a right to a job...
...It is the struggle toward this latter goal that defines socialism today...
...The Democratic governor of New York proposes a conservative Republican budget, which attacks the poor and the unemployed and pampers business...
...Tax write-offs for corporations do not simply reinforce the maldistribution of wealth and power...
...One reason is that a program of systematic public miseducation, initiated by Richard Nixon, has persuaded a large sector of the public that Washington has spent and innovated wildly in the 131 '60s and failed in practically everything it did...
...Why, then, this retreat...
...The best way to accomplish this goal is through a vast increase in public-service employment in the federal, state, municipal, and nonprofit sectors...
...On the other hand, the liberal ideology tacitly accepted the corporate domination of the economic infrastructure even when it opposed particular big business policies...
...He is telling us that this society requires a labor reserve army that will be disproportionately composed of the minorities, the women, and the young, in order to function...
...Its left wing emphasized the struggle and the reforms...
...There are tens of billions of handouts in the Internal Revenue Code...
...We do not, like the tax-cutters, trust in the corporate-dominated market to make the right allocation of resources...
...The plurality of Americans who voted for Jimmy Carter know that they need full employment, health care, livable cities, fair taxation, and the like...
...The Rural Electrification Administration has demonstrated that money from Washington can be used to underwrite and encourage the creativity of the grass roots...
...Rather, we see the possibility— indeed the probability—of a complex historic process in which the contradictions of the economy and society will explode within very practical debates over public policy...
...Socialism could solve some of the most critical of human problems, like hunger and preventable disease and urban decay, but it will not transform human nature...
...Public intervention is shaped by private priorities in order to get cooperation from the board rooms...
...And conversely, if the democratic left maintains its commitment to liberal aims, like full employment, it will have to fight for structural changes that go beyond liberalism...
...It is a practical necessity if we are to face the immediate crisis of the economy...
...We are simply, but most emphatically, demanding that the Democratic Presidency live up to its own promises...
...This last point is critical, for full employment is the key to progress in every sector of the society...
...We make no messianic claims about the future we seek...
...A national policy to restore the railroads under public ownership within the context of a planned development of mass transit...
...A serious political movement must begin where the people are...
...Humphrey-Hawkins is a "process" bill that does not mandate any specific action for the fulfillment of its goals but describes a way of coming to such decisions...
...Public and employee representation on the board of directors of all major corporations so that all basic decisions on pricing, technology, plant location, etc...
...multinational oil companies received gigantic federal subsidies and were allowed to make the energy economy both wasteful and dependent on foreign sources and thus prepared the way for the sucess of the OPEC cartel...
...The signs of liberalism's retreat are visible on all sides...
...But how will these jobs be funded...
...It is whether the increasing collectivization of economic life is going to take place behind closed doors where basic choices are made by an alliance of government bureaucrats and corporate executives, which is the present trend...
...The consequent fiscal crisis was then blamed on liberals who often did no more than seek relief for the victims of government policies in which profits are more important than people...
...For one of the sources of the bewilderment and confusion one senses throughout this culture is that we have done such a poor job in mastering the products of our own genius, that we seem so often to be the victims of our creativity...
...The Brookings Institution, long a think tank of Establishment liberalism, publishes scholarly papers demonstrating that there can be no new social initiatives for at least five years...
...Above all, it turned out that even a very modest approximation of full employment (a 3.6 percent jobless rate in 1968) threatened corporate profitability—but that the traditional remedy of restoring profitability and price stability by increasing unemployment no longer worked...
...We know from the careful analyses of the Congressional Budget Office that such an investment is the cheapest and most productive way of stimulating the economy...
...If one grants the liberals-in-rout a crucial premise, then they are quite right...
...We agree with the AFL-CIO that Mr...
...And on the other side there will be those who will fight for the structural changes in the system that can make full employment possible...
...or whether it is possible to make that collectivization democratic and libertarian and communitarian...
...But then Washington has not really been taking a hands-off attitude toward the market...
...The costs of this process were socialized, the enormous profits privatized...
...The evidence is overwhelming that this approach simply will not work...
...That bids up their wages and makes for inflation, even though the disadvantaged—who are disproportionately 132 minorities, women, and youths—are still on the street in the millions...
...If the democratic left adapts itself to the reactionary antisocialist myths pervading this country, this will not merely push back a renascent socialist movement that is hardly a mass threat in America...
...But we believe that, here and 134 now, democratic socialism must once again become a normal and natural tendency within the mainstream of American political life...
...But, as Schultze's own unemployment figures show, the economy will be much more resistant to full employment than it was in the last decade...
...And that would be an important dimension of our proposal...
...And second, the 1960s' effort took place while joblessness was declining...
...That system itself is in movement, forced to adopt noncapitalist techniques of making economic decisions politically in order to preserve capitalism...
...The following article is a slightly abbreviated version of a speech given this past February at the convention of the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee, of which Michael Harrington is chairman...
...And the 47 percent who were nonvoters, a group that is mainly composed of working people, the minorities, and the poor, require such measures too...
...A tax credit only available for investments that promote the goals of public policy, e.g., for companies that hire minorities or women, and that move into areas like New York City, etc...
...It is extremely mild and has already been watered down, but it can be taken as an important point of departure...
...And during President Carter's very first week in office, his Budget director modified the Administration's economic program to give more subsidies to corporations in order to mechanize jobs out of existence in the midst of the deepest unemployment crisis since the Great Depression...
...If the Administration vigorously pushes SALT II to a 133 successful conclusion and sets the Vienna discussion on conventional arms limitation in motion, we might finally get that peace "dividend" we have been talking about for so long...
...But we also believe that, with all of the errors inevitable in any human enterprise, our program will be more efficient than the present, scandalously wasteful system...
...It is here that we see a watershed in the current crisis...
...In testifying at hearings on his nomination as Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, Charles Schultze said that the success of the Carter economic plan would only reduce unemployment to 7-7.5 percent in 1977, 6.5-7 percent in 1978, and below 6 percent by the end of 1979...
...And one of our hopes is that the people, in the course of winning control of their society, will find new meanings in their individual lives...
...There is, however, another reason for the retreat from liberalism that is even more serious than Nixon's pernicious myth of the '60s...
...We are also against them because their program would destroy the possibility of progress at home...
...We do believe, however, that our movement is relevant to the profound spiritual crisis of these times, even it it in no way pretends to be a substitute religion...
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...In fact, there were successes, like Medicare and the reduction of unemployment, while the failures were caused by overselling and underfinancing, and the subordination of social programs by corporate goals...
...The work of this society should be the democratic satisfaction of the needs, not only of its own people, but of humankind throughout the world...
...And it is quite possible that we will see the effective dissolution of the liberal ideology formulated by the New Deal...
...There is indeed a profound tendency in this direction built into the American economy, since periodic unemployment works to restrain labor militancy and wages, restore discipline in the plant, and thereby make for new conditions of profitability...
...Therefore, in this society one deals with the problem, not by direct job generation or even fiscal and monetary policy, but by manpower programs that will improve the productivity, of those disadvantaged groups so that they can be integrated into the labor force without causing inflation...
...So this is the critical issue for the Carter Administration...
...Peace is another weapon in this fight...
...Its program would call for the kind of structural change we have outlined here, proposals that move in a socialist direction but are not themselves socialist...
...In good times, there were social gains as well as losses...
...We do not propose that the democratic left become socialist in this period...
...That progress demands national economic planning...
...Disarmament will be made difficult because of the understandable resistance of people working in the defense industry...
...its right wing, the limits...
...The first step, then, is to mobilize the Carter majority and the nonvoters in a democratic left coalition of trade unionists, the minorities, feminists, and reformers...
...The welfare state was designed to make capitalism work, not to replace it...
...They decide what kind of jobs are to be generated, and where and when...
...Indeed, we stress that one of the most important areas for the creation of new jobs is within the framework of neighborhood and community programs...
...There are proposals already before the Congress in the Humphrey-Hawkins bill pointing in this direction...
...But we do know, one of their most problematic aspects was that they were not funded massively enough relative to the need and to the subsidies being handed out to the corporations...
...The evils we have described are systemic, part of a structure in which there is private corporate domination of an increasingly social and international technology, with disastrous consequences for Americans and the poor of this world...
...In fact, the Chairman of President Carter's Council of Economic Advisers has secretly adopted a classic Marxist thesis—but for conservative reasons...
...We most emphatically do not propose to federalize all of the work programs...
...There was a cyclical crisis, and perhaps also a secular crisis, of capitalist growth throughout the Western world...
...In the future, that will not be the case...
...Clearly, there are forces hostile to that undertaking within the Administration—and just as clearly, there are those who are friendly to it...
...On the one side there will be the liberals in retreat, so deferential to established power that they will effectively tolerate levels of unemployment that will subvert the best hopes of the Carter administration, domestically and internationally...
...With chronic high unemployment there will be neither the political nor the economic conditions for ending racial and sexual discrimination in the labor market...
...There will not even be the relatively modest amount of money needed to fund national health...
...Our goal is political: not the creation of heaven on earth, but the construction of a better earth...
...In the foreseeable future, the tactic of that movement should be one of struggle to help, or if necessary push, the President to fulfill the key promises of the Democratic Platform and campaign of 1976...
...The business of America, it was once rightly said, is business...
...are made in the open and, if necessary, are the subject of public hearings to see to it that public priorities are followed...
...Indeed, right-wing liberalism has already sounded retreat...
...It is not enough simply to try and halt that retreat, for, just as the new nay-sayers argue, many of the old verities no longer apply...
...Indeed almost every proposal we have made is contained in the 1976 Democratic platform or, like tax reform, was vigorously endorsed by Jimmy Carter during the campaign...
...But no one will get them if the liberal retreat becomes national policy...
...Second, we must frankly say that we believe that the democratic left must sooner or later--the sooner the better—move to a full socialist position...
...Paradoxically, the fulfillment of liberal values now demands that the nation move beyond liberalism...
...Rather than "solving" the current crisis through the suffering of the unemployed, we should move to require the rich to pay at least their fair share and thereby help fund full employment...
...It has constantly intervened in the investment process and almost always with the same aim: to reinforce the goals of the corporations...
...Within the Humphrey-Hawkins framework, we could then fight for: • The creation of a publicly-owned gas and oil corporation...
...Trickle-down is the policy of the United States and as a result public monies often induce public disasters...
...Carter should immediately move to redeem that promise by a $30 billion economic program that will reduce joblessness by 2 million...
...Yet the human needs that cry out for federal action—the rotting cities and preventable deaths, the wasted generation of jobless youth, and so on— are more urgent than at any time since the '30s...
...Liberalism was committed both to reform and to the status quo...
...Within liberalism two souls were always in conflict...
...So despite the successful reforms of those years, corporations remain in control of the investment process...
...By redeeming another basic Carter campaign pledge: tax reform...
...We propose, then, not simply a program, but a vision...
...These intolerable figures are said to be the result of a new structure of the labor market...
Vol. 24 • April 1977 • No. 2
