Don't blame the socialists: A response to Sheri Berrman
Barkan, Joanne
Sheri Berman has written an exhortation to the "present day" democratic socialist Left in the "Western world" to get over "the loss of its vision of a postcapitalist society," to stop...
...But from the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 to the implosion of the financial system last fall, free market ideology ruled...
...they also thought he was too great an admirer of Sweden (Berman's touchstone for successful social democracy—and mine...
...His leftist detractors considered him too thoroughly social democratic...
...In the abstract, I don't object to Berman's isolating the story of socialists vs...
...Many socialists concluded that the "socialist vision" was becoming increasingly irrelevant to their political lives...
...Strife between democratic socialists and social democrats dissolved during this period because they were doing the same reform work...
...Undoubtedly, but that in no way mars their social democratic credentials...
...In my estimation, he spent most of his energy on convincing leftists to become reform activists...
...By insisting that true justice could come only with capitalism's elimination, democratic socialists implicitly (and often explicitly) denigrated efforts at taming it—thus limiting the left's cohesiveness and appeal and its ability to offer practical benefits to suffering populations in the short and mid term...
...It's worth noting that his most enthusiastic admirers (and readers) outside the United States were social democrats in northern Europe, especially Sweden...
...Do some still think of themselves as socialists...
...Ignoring the United States in this early part of her article doesn't work because she suddenly makes it the focus of the next part...
...But how did she miss everything the democratic Left has been doing for three decades...
...In the United States, haven't they by now provided many hundreds, perhaps thousands, of troops and leaders to the labor movement, health care reform, and public education...
...My point is that it didn't matter: his theorizing didn't detract from his important practical political work and other writings...
...For example, it doesn't apply well to the United States in the 1920s and 1930s, when the central intra-left struggle was between the Leninists and the democratic Left...
...Berman cites Harrington correctly and concludes this: The problem with such statements and the larger worldview that lay behind them is not merely that they were wrong, but also that they were counterproductive...
...The current economic crisis has created the first significant opening since Lyndon Johnson signed the Medicare bill into law in 1965...
...If Berman looks around now, she'll see that the democratic Left, which includes the socialists—everywhere from labor unions to women's organizations to environmental groups—is mobilized...
...Her concise version of this early history is very good...
...According to Berman, the opportunity for social democratic reform in the United States has existed in recent decades, but "American leftists" have had nothing positive to offer...
...social democrats from the larger saga of the Left even though non-democratic groups (especially the communist parties of the Third International) played a pivotal role...
...But to do this successfully would have required much more attention to the specific features of individual countries...
...So who in the Western world is Berman writing about...
...Berman uses the first four paragraphs of her second section, "The Postwar World," to describe the remarkable (but imperfect) successes of social democratic governance...
...Since, say, Representative Ron Dellums (D-CA and a member of the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee) drafted a bill in the U.S...
...Consider the two quotations below, which come, respectively, from the beginning and the concluding section of her article: The left, which until relatively recently had seemed adrift across much of the Western world, lacking in coherent and convincing responses to globalization and neoliberalism, appears once again poised for a comeback, as citizens yearn for stability and security in difficult times...
...So hoW to account for the quotations that Berman has selected from several of Harrington's sixteen books...
...He offered, I think, a politics (and an organization) that didn't exclude anyone on the democratic Left, that allowed democratic socialists to hold together their desire for a postcapitalist society and their reform activism during a long post-sixties transition...
...Berman could have found what she needed to know about Harrington in his memoirs, biographies of him, and documents produced by the organizations he worked in...
...They were able to reconcile his critique of capitalism with their concept of a good society...
...Berman devotes the first 40 percent of her article to the "backstory" of the conflict between democratic socialists and social democrats from the late nineteenth century through the 1930s—a conflict, she argues, that has shaped the contemporary Left in the West...
...Congress for a national health service some thirty years ago, we have been awash with ideas about building social democracy in this country...
...Reform work and speculation about democratic socialism—Irving Howe called them "the near and the far"—have coexisted comfortably for more than a political generation...
...When is the last time a democratic socialist said, "I won't support public day care because it will delay the collapse of capitalism...
...Although no one knows how his thinking might have evolved, it's not plausible that it would have included crusading against social democracy...
...Berman claims that he spent much of his energy on convincing his readers not to bother with reforms...
...She quotes from several of Harrington's books (published between 1968 and 1986) on the inability of capitalism to meet people's needs and the system's inevitable demise...
...Moreover, he died twenty years ago...
...Convinced that a better world had to await capitalism's demise, Harrington devoted much of his intellectual and political energy to convincing his readers that capitalism's apparent triumphs were fictional and that the system was really on its way out...
...Didn't democratic socialists begin doing that decades ago...
...she uses "social democrat" and "democratic socialist" as if they've referred to identical politics everywhere for the last 110 years...
...Is this the indefatigable deviser of short- and midterm programs...
...Let me be clear: I am not saying that Michael Harrington thought of himself as providing a way-station politics...
...As a leader in Norman Thomas's Socialist Party in the 1960s, he supported the realignment strategy of working within the Democratic Party—a strategy for socialists who knew the value of reforming capitalism...
...they shared goals for the foreseeable future...
...American leftists must try to do what the Scandinavians have done: develop a program that pro...
...They valued Harrington most for his optimistic energy and his tenacious movement building...
...In the 1970s and in the 1980s until he died, he devoted himself to building a new organization geared to reformist activism (first called the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee, then the Democratic Socialists of America...
...When activists found that the "s" word interfered with their organizing, they stopped identifying themselves as socialists and went on with their work...
...She uses "the left" and "the West" as generics that never need to be broken into their constituent elements...
...The question sounds absurd...
...Pulling out one strand of the Left's tangled history can be useful, especially when the strand chosen by Berman is the more honorable...
...My jaw drops...
...Is this Michael Harrington the labor union stalwart, the organizer who focused on uniting the Left's disparate movements—minorities, unionists, feminists, and environmentalists— into a coalition for social democratic reforms...
...Berman's lack of specificity is a major problem...
...These paragraphs, too, best describe Western Europe...
...For Berman, the Left will go on failing to respond to political challenges unless democratic socialists start to act like social democrats...
...Disregarding it has given Berman an upside-down interpretation of what's happening now...
...Then she abruptly shifts to the writings of American socialist leader Michael Harrington and uses him as her case in point (she mentions no one else): democratic socialists are still leading part of the Left astray...
...Yet she would have done better to bill it as an account of the genesis and development of the conflict in Europe: it doesn't apply to the Western world in general, as she proposes...
...He regularly invoked his vision of democratic socialism, and Berman correctly argues that his vision was vague, unconvincing...
...I'd argue the opposite...
...Left Wing of the Possible...
...But a lack of specificity doesn't account for this essay's greatest shortcoming: Berman has the post-sixties history of the democratic Left in the United States (and probably in many Western European countries as well) completely wrong...
...motes growth and social solidarity together, rather than forcing a choice between them...
...Dissent, the American Prospect, In These Times, the Nation, and a dozen other left periodicals, along with think tanks like the Economic Policy Institute, have continually produced policy proposals and descriptions of reform efforts...
...Sheri Berman has written an exhortation to the "present day" democratic socialist Left in the "Western world" to get over "the loss of its vision of a postcapitalist society," to stop denigrating efforts to reform capitalism, and to begin agitating for social democratic policies, such as affordable health care, government-supported job retraining, and investment in education ("Unheralded Battle: The Left, Social Democracy, and Democratic Socialism," Dissent, Winter 2009...
...I'll begin where she does...
...And he sought to persuade the left that its chief task was not to reform and humanize capitalism but rather to press for its passing...
...leftists have written scores of books on reforms...
Vol. 56 • April 2009 • No. 2
