Journey of an American Socialist

...Most working men, the potential constituency of such a movement, will not entertain for a moment the notion that there is the slightest thing wrong with such comforts, however much they may agree that these are maldistributed...

...I think it is fair to say that the average person would react to this story with incredulity...

...And, as a Marxist, I had always objected to those radicals who pictured the good society as a place of Spartan asceticism...

...Reviewers of his last book, Socialism, inevitably praised most of his analysis, but predictably balked at how he could call the "reactionary," "racist" and "bureaucratic" unions the country's main force for social progress...

...The second question dividing Harrington from his Social Democratic opponents was the confrontation between organized labor and the New Politics camp within the Democratic party...

...Harrington touches upon what may be the overriding point of his book...

...Louis Catholic who was educated in Jesuit schools, retraces with candor and often with wit how he came into the Socialist movement...

...For the remnant of fellow travelers from the '30s, '40s and '50s, as well as the generation first politicized by Vietnam, the war caused no moral traumas: In their view America was wrong, period...

...Moreover, he considered this group a growing force in advanced industrial societies, and one the Democratic party needed to win elections...

...He sympathized with the protests against the Vietnam War and some of the other "lifestyle" issues being raised by the educated, middle-class New Politics constituency...

...involvement in Vietnam...

...Psychologically, he simply could not adjust to his new success...

...Schachtman, for example, had opposed the Korean War, yet ended up supporting—albeit critically—the U.S...

...But for others on the Left the moral issue posed by the spread of Communist totalitarianism in Southeast Asia was more difficult...

...Harrington writes emphatically about the position of those, like Schachtman, who came to be regarded as some sort of moral lepers by the trendsetters of the Left...

...In the late '60s the anti-Communist Left in this country—Democratic Socialists, trade unionists, liberals?was deeply divided, as was the rest of the nation, by Vietnam...

...Finally, the chapter on Harrington's nervous breakdown—widely discussed since its appearance in New York magazine last fall—provides insights, perhaps some the author himself is not aware of, into the dilemma of radicalism in this country...

...Reviewed by Steven Kelman Author, "Behind the Berlin Wall," "Push Comes to Shove" Michael Harrington's latest book is many things...

...For no mass Socialist movement can ever be built in this country by people who react against good food or clean, airy rooms...

...His opponents, on the other hand, shared the AFL-CIO's position on Vietnam as well as labor's hostility to the lifestyle issues, and played down the importance of the New Politics people...

...So there was a distinctly esthetic and elitist dimension to my Leftism...

...Yet once he became involved in the Marxist theorizing of the tiny Independent Socialist League headed by the late Max Schachtman?one-time Communist, then Trotsky-ist, but by the '50s distinctly a "Schachtmanite"—Harrington went at it with Jesuit fervor...

...Considering the personal bitterness this factional dispute aroused, and the quick negative reaction on the Left to anyone expressing less than complete hatred for supporters of the Vietnam war...

...The bourgeoisie had, it seemed to me...

...There was, he writes, a part of him that "still lived in spiritual blue jeans and believed, as my Socialist comrades at Antioch College used to say, 'If it's bourgy, it can't be good.'" Here, it seems to me...

...Indeed, on an intellectual level Harrington himself recognized that there was nothing wrong with success: "Even when I was living at the Catholic Worker in voluntary poverty during 1951 and 1952, I had always said that it was not money, but the things you had to do to get it, that I rejected...

...his account is excruciatingly well balanced...

...He has also been an uncompromising voice among Left intellectuals against totalitarianism—and was decades before Anthony Lewis and I. F. Stone made skepticism about the Nixon version of detente into the received wisdom...

...As national chairman of the recently formed Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee, Harrington has become the most effective and insistent voice speaking to the intellectual community for the need to forge a coalition of liberals and radicals with labor if we are to bring about a majority movement for social change...

...He had been a radical organizer, an impoverished bohemian and an outsider all his life...

...As for the nervous breakdown Harrington suffered in the mid-'60s, he tells us it was a case of "social vertigo...

...It describes the stages in his own life as a radical: "Bohemia" in the '50s, the "small Socialist loft" in the McCarthy era, the civil rights drive in the early '60s, the New Left...

...Harrington, a St...

...Being a member of the movement with which Harrington has so long been identified—he calls himself a "Socialist jukebox"—I was personally most interested in the chapter entitled "The Tightrope," his discussion of the split in the Democratic Socialist community that was consummated by the formation of the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee in 1973...

...Capitalism was not so much cruel and exploitative as crass and vulgar...

...For in a decade when it was fashionable to talk about the disappearance of class in the U.S., Harrington and his friends were analyzing poverty and the labor movement...

...Hence, he writes, his early Socialism had a bohemian and literary stamp: "I was really more interested in writing poetry than in the class struggle (after five years of working at it every day I published five poems in Poetry Chicago and then was forced to admit that I had no talent, or at least no genius...

...that were not evil in the least, only maldistributed...

...Following the publication of The Other America, however, he was called to Washington for consultations and began receiving speaking engagements at $1,500 a shot...

...It gives a very fair, very gently and movingly written account of the events in the late '60s that split the nation's small group of Democratic Socialists...

...It offers a liberal sprinkling of anecdotes, pungent and poignant, from his nearly 25 years in the American radical movement...

...Currently a professor of political science at Queens College in New York, he happily confesses that he never took a political science course in his life...

...Moving into an apartment with decent plumbing, having enough money to raise a child, finally being able to live somewhat comfortably—these are hardly regarded as grounds for an emotional crisis...

...But, Harrington continues, "My mind was clear on the issue...

...Though he now admits that many of the resolutions he wrote in those days were outdated by the time the little group had polished them to ideological perfection, he rightly maintains that much of the theorizing, despite its seeming irrelevancy, did address itself to issues largely ignored in the American celebration of the period...

...Nor will they accept the visceral disgust with every aspect of society that seems to motivate so many young American radicals...

...developed a number of valuable things—among them democratic liberties, good food, clean airy rooms with fresh sheets...

...my emotions were not...

...While both factions did talk of the necessity for seeking accommodation with the groups that emerged during the '60s, only Harrington seemed to actively pursue that goal...

...his background was in literature and poetry...

...Other reviewers of Fragments of the Century have concentrated on its treatment of the death of bohem-ianism, the civil rights struggle and the New Left...