Reviving the Socialist Tradition

...Even if McGovern could not win, his nomination would surely shift the Democrats to the Left...

...They come forth after each historical defeat suffered by the Left, including-or perhaps especially-those that are self-inflicted, to issue a call for new beginnings in the Sisyphean task of bringing their vision closer to realization...

...Harrington cites the important differences between the underdeveloped nations today and postrevolution-ary Russia, and documents the enormous economic waste, failures and human suffering resulting from the development policies imposed by Stalin, Mao and Castro...

...an insistence denied in recent years by Maoist and Guevarist admirers of Third World revolutions and by the antitechnological Jeremiahs of the New Left...

...In a later chapter, Harrington suggests trade and aid policies that socialist-influenced administrations in the West might adopt to encourage economic advancement in the underdeveloped countries...

...I wish that Mao's fantasies, and Fanon's and Che's and Mahatma Gandhi's, were true...

...There is no force on earth," he writes, "that can simultaneously substitute itself for the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, increasing the surplus taken from the people and emancipating them at the same time...

...For the union leadership, at least, remains cool toward George McGovern's candidacy...

...Still, in drawing fully on Marx himself and on the best contemporary Marxist scholarship (particularly on George Lichtheim), Harrington succeeds in persuading us that Marx became a convinced democrat in his own time and place...

...In contending that the West alone can help the Third World achieve economic modernization Harrington continues to support a belief that was taken for granted before the middle '60s...

...Harrington asks toward the end of the book...

...it has been an "invisible mass movement" in which the official antisocialist position of the labor unions has not prevented them from pursuing goals similar to those of European social democratic parties...

...Rooted in the tradition that Harrington so fully and ably describes, democratic socialists have been able to resist and transcend the sweeping shifts in the Zeitgeist that have engulfed the political and cultural worlds over the past decades...

...Rejecting the neo-Leninist view that contemporary capitalism is inherently driven to exploit the Third World, he nonetheless notes that its international economic policies are self-serving and a barrier to modernization...

...He properly regards this conclusion as a bitter truth, whose proponents lay themselves open at best to charges of condescending Western ethnocentrism, at worst to accusations of "racism...

...Why, more particularly, turn once again to the authority of Karl Marx, whose only slightly less inclusive heritage is equally ambiguous...

...Someone asked in dismay: "But what about the 'Leap to Socialism...

...But another answer?what I had in mind in opening this essay with the sentimental cliche, "Old Socialists never die"-is to lay paradoxical stress on the conservative truth that even movements aiming to change the world need and benefit from the possession of a genuine tradition...

...Many of his suggestions are derived from Gunnar Myrdal...

...Socialism, then, has no miraculous scheme for the Third World," he says, "but it may have relevant proposals...

...Harrington seeks to ground the inseparability of socialism and democracy in Marx himself...

...But what about the United States with its long anti- and non-socialist tradition...

...After all the false starts, failed plans, and outright betrayals, is there any meaning left to socialism...

...A good question...

...Yet it is not hard to imagine Harrington's timely work influencing a McGovern administration...

...It was Michael Harrington who at the end of the conservative '50s eloquently publicized the scandal of continuing widespread poverty in The Other America, arousing Washington to make at least limited efforts to eradicate it...

...Separating the wheat from the chaff in the 150-year history of socialism as Utopian aspiration and political movement, Harrington necessarily devotes a great deal of space to demonstrating its indissoluble connection with democracy...

...One feels occasionally that Harrington is guilty of what he criticizes in others: treating Marx's writings "as a scripture to be ransacked for holy precedents...

...One cannot be certain of what Marx, or any other man who antedated them, would have thought about the various authoritarian "Socialisms" that have emerged in this century out of the disorders of shattered precapitalist social orders...

...I wish it were not necessary to write in such a gloomy mode," he says...

...Recently I argued before a campus audience that the politics of democracies was marked by periods of Left reformism alternating with conservative retrenchments that nevertheless did not undo the reformers' major achievements, insuring a spiral movement toward egalitarian goals...

...Now, after a decade that saw protesters on the Left hold the center of the political stage until their rhetorical extravagances bored or antagonized much of the audience, he reaffirms his ideals in a large book called Socialism (Saturday Review Press, 436 pp., $12.50...

...Harrington is fully aware that the preservation and extension of democracy may make it impossible to fulfill the dream of an instantaneous "expropriation of the expropriators," followed by a total transformation of social and economic relationships, in the relatively affluent capitalist Western societies...

...Harrington also lays stress on Marx's insistence that socialism is only attainable in an economy of abundance, Dennis H. Wrong, filling in for Pearl K. Bell this issue is professor of sociology at New York University...

...And Harrington's book will be there to point the direction...

...Social democracy has in fact existed in this country, Harrington argues...

...Like so much else, however, it has been badly tarnished by Vietnam and totally abandoned by those radicals who project onto the Third World the mission of redeeming the West-a role assigned in the past to the Third Empire, the Third Rome, the Third Reich, the Third International, and even, briefly in the '40s, the Third Force...

...At other times, as in the late '60s and during the periods of peak influence of Communist parties in the '30s and '40s, they have appeared to be to the right of the dominant mood in the constituencies responsive to socialist appeals...

...Perhaps Harrington links the fortunes of an American socialism a bit too closely to the unions, especially in this election year when for only the second time since Roosevelt's second-term campaign a prospective Presidential candidate has proposed truly far-reaching reforms in the distribution of income and wealth (the first was RFK in 1968...

...Yet he does not resign himself to accepting "piecemeal reforms" within the limits of welfare-state capitalism...

...Harrington's answer would be "better to creep than to leap" when leaping is likely to require the sacrifice of democracy in a revolutionary seizure of power by a militant minority and the authoritarian, even tyrannical, imposition of "socialism from above" on the population...

...It is hardly a joyous labor for a socialist to carefully detail the tenacity of injustice and the difficulty of overcoming it...

...He carefully notes the shifts, nuances and changing historical contexts of Marx's developing views, acknowledging the occasional warrant for Leninist or Blanquist conceptions of the seizure of power by determined minorities, but maintaining that the mature Marx increasingly adopted a social democratic view of the transition to socialism...

...In Europe, democratic socialist theorists have often had to temper and infuse vision into the short-sighted electoral opportunism of officially social democratic politicians and parties...

...The most obvious answer has long been that it would be politically unwise to abandon "socialism" and "Marx" because they retain the resonance of God-terms for so many and there is a real case for giving them a rational, democratic content...

...For if Marx-and Harrington-are right, the strong regimes required to promote economic development and check population growth in the underdeveloped countries bear closer resemblance to precapitalist and predemocratic autocracies in Western history than to the socialism they claim to embody...

...he recognizes that the ideal of a full-fledged socialism can serve as a guide to proposals for reform and keep those moved by it from complacently accepting limited gains...

...But they are not, and it would be patronizing-and chauvinist-to pretend otherwise...

...The commitment to democratic socialism, though, has given them a set of principles and ideas about the nature of modern industrial societies that outlives the defeats of meteoric new movements...

...Sometimes, as in the '50s and possibly again now, they have been the most active and persuasive voices on the Left in the politics of their countries...

...Since, as he notes earlier, "Most of the people in the world today call the name of their dream 'socialism,' " and since, as he shows, "socialism" has provided ideological legitimation for a huge variety of movements and regimes, including the most monstrously cruel ever seen, why keep the hopelessly vague label...