....In order to clear the ground for making over Marx to social-democratic specifications, Harrington lays open to question the whole inventory of Marxism. He does so by summarizing and endorsing, with minimal reservations, "the most dramatic statement" authorizing such skepticism from Georg Lukacs's History and Class Consciousness.
"One can be an 'orthodox Marxist, 'Lukacs said, and reject all of Marx's specific applications of his theories, as long as one asserts that the Marxist method offers the best way of proceeding and that it can only be deepened in the spirit of its founder." That is to say, so long as you profess to be a Marxist, you are licensed to comb from the works and ideas of the founders of dialectical and historical materialism whatever does not suit your taste or needs.
The Marxist method is not so readily detachable from the materials of its inquiries, the verified results of its applications, and the experience of the international class struggle over the past century-and-a-half, as this assertion implies. Marxism is open to amendment and enrichment as scientific advances and social and political experience warrant. But both as method and a scientific theory it imposes certain conditions upon the "openness" allowed to its adherents. Whoever denies that material production is the basis of social life, negates the central role of the class struggle throughout civilization and in contemporary affairs, or gives allegiance to a capitalist party or government has left the ground of Marxism, regardless of his pretentions....
I am posting this September 1977 article by George Novack not because I see a 1:1 relation between Harrington and Bernie Sanders, or between the DSOC and the DSA. But I do think Novack clearly underlines factors that are similar in continuity.
One big difference in the historical periods between 1977 and 2020 is that the rout of the US working class and its unions had only just kicked-off in the middle of the Carter administration. Today, while there are sporadic strike against union-busting, the four-decade-long ruling class program of driving down the social wage and making the working class pay for the crisis of capitalist production and trade continues.
Creating a pole of support for independent working class political action and independence from the two U.S. bourgeois parties in the working class itself remains to be accomplished.
Jay
Politics and Philosophy in Harrington's 'The Twilight of Capitalism'
Would Karl Marx support the Carter administration if he were alive today? Would he be a loyal Democrat? Michael Harrington creates a 'new' Marx in Harrington's own reformist image.
By George Novack
Michael Harrington is a significant figure on the American left-an unabashed, though intellectually sophisticated, social democrat, who prefers the less compromised appellation of "democratic socialist."
Social democracy has remained an undeveloped force in the United States. The exceptional wealth, power, and stability of American capitalism, and the concomitant political backwardness of the working class, have prevented reformist socialists from playing as considerable a role in national politics as their counterparts elsewhere. The organizational feebleness of American social democracy has been matched by the paucity of its theoretical productions and the mediocrity of its publications. Harrington's latest book, The Twilight of Capitalism, issued in 1976, and its 1972 predecessor, Socialism, represent an ambitious effort to make up for the ideological deficiency of his movement over the past four decades. They are designed to provide reasoned arguments for the political course mapped out by his branch of reformism.
There are three social-democratic organizations in the United States. The weakest is the provincial Socialist Party, a remnant from the days of Norman Thomas, when the party engaged in some independent electoral activity. The most flagrantly reactionary is the Social Democrats USA. This witch-hunting, warmongering outfit, run by AFL-CIO President George Meany's flunkeys, is quick to pounce on anybody who criticizes U.S. imperialism. Its ideologue is Sidney Hook.
Harrington is the founder and national chairman of the third group, the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC). He resigned as national cochairman of the Socialist Party Democratic Socialist Federation, the precursor of SDUSA, in October 1972 because it was "doing the work of Richard Nixon" by turning its back on George McGovern, the Democratic presidential candidate. He complained that the SP-SDF had also refused "to support American withdrawal from Vietnam," and, in fact, supported the U.S. intervention. DOSC aligns itself with the "liberal" wing of the union bureaucracy that backed McGovern in 1972. In 1976 DSOC supporters backed Morris Udall for the Democratic nomination and later went all-out to elect Jimmy Carter. DSOC operates exclusively as a "socialist" pressure group supporting left-liberal currents within the Democratic Party. Harrington was a delegate to the last two Democratic national conventions.
Harrington comes out of the group led by Max Shachtman that broke away from the Trotskyist movement and its program in 1940, and, after a period of independent activity, dissolved into the Socialist Party. He has derived from the Shachtman school its approach to world politics, embodied in the doctrine of "bureaucratic collectivism" as a definition of the nature of the USSR and other postcapitalist societies, and the habit of presenting his positions in Marxist terms. Harrington is well-versed in the literature of the Marxist movement, an able journalist, and the author of a celebrated study of poverty in the United States, The Other America. He is well qualified to attempt a theoretical justification for the minireformism disguised as socialism represented by DSOC.
The Twilight of Capitalism is divided into two parts: a theoretical exposition, described as "a scholarly rediscovery of Marx," followed by an analysis of the U.S. economy today.
The theme of Harrington's project is announced in the dedication, which reads: "To the future of an almost forgotten genius: the foe of every dogma, champion of human freedom and democratic socialist-KARL MARX." It is refreshing to have Marx recognized as a protagonist of freedom in a country where he is usually slandered as the progenitor of totalitarian enslavement. However, it is odd to refer to Marx as "an almost forgotten genius," when, along with Darwin, he is the most universally known nineteenth century thinker and a foremost influence in world politics.
This paradoxical statement is explained by Harrington's labeling of Marx as a "democratic socialist," that is, a social democrat. Selectively skipping through Marx's biography, Harrington depicted him in Socialism as a gradualist who gave way to occasional fits of ultraleftism, as in 1850 when he put forward the perspective of permanent revolution and in 1S71 when he hailed the Paris Commune as prefiguring the dictatorship of the proletariat. In this new work he tries to show that Marx not only behaved, but thought, along lines appropriate to a social democrat such as Harrington. Harrington claims to have discovered a "true" Marx who has been hidden from view for the past century until Harrington brought forth the innermost secret of his teachings. After he gets through "trimming Marx's beard," the fiery, irreconcilable foe of capitalism turns out to look more like a radical university professor or a parliamentary politician than the man his comrades and contemporaries knew.
Even so, Harrington's appeal to Marx would be considered excessive by the leaders of the West German Social Democratic Party, who renounced the last vestiges of their Marxist heritage in the Godesburg Program of 1959. They grasped the incompatibility of Marx's conception of the class struggle with their political role better than their fellow member of the Second International. Harrington, unlike them, is not engaged in administering the affairs of his own capitalist regime; he has the more modest task of assembling the initial cadres for such a vocation in the far future, which permits him to be more of a "doctrinaire."
Inconsistency in Theory and Practice
While Harrington employs Marxian categories such as the labor theory of value in his economic analyses, he reserves an escape hatch for himself in the sphere of politics by methodological contrivance. His kind of Marxist is not obliged to harmonize theory with practice. "There is no necessary relationship between Marxist theory and political positions (that is ... those who agree as to methodology can utilize that method to reach contradictory political judgments.)" To be sure, people and parties are very often inconsistent; their deeds are at angles with their avowed principles. Social democrats and Stalinists offer conspicuous examples of this discrepancy. Moreover, as Harrington says, "there is a personal element in the way in which various individuals translate the same methodological propositions into politics." However, Harrington, who correctly criticizes empiricists and positivists for remaining on the surface of phenomena, cannot let the matter rest by simply recording the fact; he should uncover the underlying reasons for systematic arbitrariness.
Trotsky did so in a probing manner in a 1939 polemic with Max Shachtman. "Appealing to 'inconsistency' as justification for an unprincipled theoretical bloc, signifies giving oneself bad credentials as a Marxist. Inconsistency is not accidental, and in politics it does not appear solely as an individual symptom. Inconsistency usually serves a social function. There are social groupings which cannot be consistent. Petty-bourgeois elements who have not rid themselves of hoary petty-bourgeois tendencies are systematically compelled within a workers' party to make theoretical compromises with their own conscience"(In Defense of Marxism).
Instead of exposing the social and political roots of inconsistency, as a materialist should, Harrington offers a theoretical justification for this trait. What's more, he practices what he preaches. What could be more anomalous than for a would-be "socialist" to support the president at the helm of the major imperialist power and defend this in the name of Marxism? There is a logical connection between Harrington's· efforts to remake Marx along social democratic lines and Harrington's reformist politics. The Twilight of Capitalism thus offers an object lesson in the affinity between theory and politics.
In order to clear the ground for making over Marx to social-democratic specifications, Harrington lays open to question the whole inventory of Marxism. He does so by summarizing and endorsing, with minimal reservations, "the most dramatic statement" authorizing such skepticism from Georg Lukacs's History and Class Consciousness.
"One can be an 'orthodox Marxist,'" Lukacs said, "and reject all of Marx's specific applications of his theories, as long as one asserts that the Marxist method offers the best way of proceeding and that it can only be deepened in the spirit of its founder." That is to say, so long as you profess to be a Marxist, you are licensed to comb from the works and ideas of the founders of dialectical and historical materialism whatever does not suit your taste or needs.
The Marxist method is not so readily detachable from the materials of its inquiries, the verified results of its applications, and the experience of the international class struggle over the past century-and-a-half, as this assertion implies. Marxism is open to amendment and enrichment as scientific advances and social and political experience warrant. But both as method and a scientific theory it imposes certain conditions upon the "openness" allowed to its adherents. Whoever denies that material production is the basis of social life, negates the central role of the class struggle throughout civilization and in contemporary affairs, or gives allegiance to a capitalist party or government has left the ground of Marxism, regardless of his pretentions. Harrington chafes under such confinement. Harrington's "new Marx" does not teach dialectical materialism, but preaches "spiritual materialism." He borrows this odd designation from Erich Fromm, though he takes care to distance himself from the more extreme distortions of Marxism popularized by his fellow social democrat. It is less dangerous, he opines, to defend the spiritual element in Marx than "the myth of his crass, sordid materialism." Marxism takes into account the spiritual side of human beings expressed in their consciousness, values, and cultural creations. It must give the utmost attention to all forms of collective consciousness, since as a system of scientific ideas it aims to change the mentality of the masses and direct them toward revolutionary action. But it always keeps in mind that the manifestations of social and political consciousness are molded by material conditions. The full implications of this truth are what Harrington bridles at.
"As a tool of social and economic analysis, the concept of man as a spiritual materialist is almost empty of meaning," he confesses. However, it does serve the purpose of demarcating the pure-spirited vision and values from those of the "crass materialists" who take Marx at his word.
Marx Misunderstands Harrington
Philosophically Harrington keeps company with the fashionable "praxis" thinkers of Western Marxism; he contracts the scope of Marxist ideas to the framework of society and adopts a subjectivist theory of knowledge. Thus he endorses Leszek Kolakowski's assertion that "the senses do not, in the Marxist view, 'reflect' an external reality that is independent of the subject." This is not the Marxist view. Every materialist theory of knowledge has held that sensory experience is the primary source of our knowledge about the world, which exists independently of human activity and individual consciousness. If sensory reflection did not provide relatively accurate and reliable information about the things and events in the environment the human species would not have survived or developed. Without the checks upon our mind and imagination imposed by objective reality we would have no way to distinguish fact from fantasy, truth from error.
A sensation is a subjective image with an objective content referring and corresponding to some aspect of the material world. To deny any internal connection of our sensations with what exists outside ourselves is to make a mystery of knowledge, since whatever we know comes in the first place from evidence supplied by the senses. Let Harrington put his finger on a red-hot stove and then cry out that the painful sensation he reacts to does not "reflect" an external reality. The materialist conception of knowledge steered Marx and Engels to radical conclusions, as Marx brought out in The Holy Family. "If man derives all his knowledge . . . from the sensible world, and from his experience of the sensible world, it follows that the task consists in so ordering the empirical world that man encounters in it what is truly human . . . that he experiences himself humanly ... "(quoted from Marxism by George Lichtheim. New York, 1965, p. 39 footnote).
Having adopted the view that our senses are not organically linked to an independently existing material world, Harrington is led to attack the sociological principle that "the material base determines the superstructure." He takes violent exception to Marx's statement in the introduction to Critique of Political Economy that "the mode of production in material life determines the general character of the social, political, and spiritual processes of life." This text is "certainly the most unfortunate statement of what Marxism is," Harrington asserts. "It is the very essence of vulgar Marxism," he continues, and is "also an ideological foundation of Stalinism."
Harrington expresses his preference for an earlier draft in which Marx expressed the same basic idea in less pointed language. Harrington claims that the rejected version is closer to the "real" Harringtonian Marx, while the final version represents Marx's "misunderstanding" of himself that paved the way for Stalinism. In weighing this estimate of Marx's preferred formulation it is useful to bear in mind Harrington's stricture on the French philosopher Althusser who distorted Marx's views on alienation: "It is a dangerous procedure in any case to declare that a world-historical genius has misunderstood himself, not in a few pages or in an essay or two, but in a major work." The foreword to The Critique of Political Economy was a carefully considered major formulation of Marx's method that he never repudiated, often applied, and even repeated virtually word for word in a footnote to Volume I of Capital (Chicago: Charles. Kerr, 1906, p. 94). The rebuke he addresses to the French misreader of Marx likewise applies to Harrington himself.
Harrington tries to explain why the errors he attributes to Marx and Engels have gained such widespread currency. He offers four reasons for this development. The co-creators of Marxism were first of all responsible for misunderstanding themselves and misleading others. "Both Marx and Engels ... contributed to the distortion of Marxism, the former on occasion, the later more systematically." Marx himself tolerated a kind of intellectual double standard by letting Engels propagate "a schematic determinism."
The masses swallowed these misrepresentations-often rejecting religion and other variants of idealism in doing so-because they "were not and are not capable of the intellectual subtlety required to fathom authentic Marxism on the theoretical level," (a rather elitist conception of socialist theory for a "democratic socialist"!). Then the pre-World War I social-democratic functionaries, and later the Stalinist officialdom, had their own bureaucratic reasons for falsifying Marxism.
Without absolving these worthies from participation in the degradation of Marxism in theory and practice, Harrington would have done well to emphasize the assiduous efforts of the bourgeois opponents and academic Marxologists, some of whose arguments he echoes.
Base and Superstructure
Harrington errs in ascribing to the creators of historical materialism "the mechanistic theory that there is an economic base that immediately determines the content of cultural and a political superstructure." Marx never thought that Dante's Divine Comedy and Aquinas's Summa Theologiae were direct products of the feudal mode of production, though their essential ideas and outlook were certainly shaped by its productive relations through the mediation of Catholicism. Philosophizing and artistic creativity developed according to their own laws. While the underlying mode of production and prevailing form of property do not immediately determine events in the other areas of social activity, they do so indirectly, fundamentally, and at length through a whole series of intermediate factors and their reciprocal interaction.
Anyone who cares to know the Marxist position of the manner in which economic basis determines cultural superstructure, on the relative autonomy of the superstructural spheres from politics to philosophy, and on the reciprocal action of all the elements in a historical process and social formation can find a lucid explanation in a letter Engels wrote to Conrad Schmidt on October 27, 1890. When it comes to economics and politics, "it is the interaction of two unequal forces: on the one hand the economic movement, on the other the new political power, which strives for as much independence as possible, and which, having once been established, is also endowed with a movement of its own. On the whole, the economic movement gets its way, but it has also to suffer reactions from the political movement which it established and endowed with relative independence itself, from the movement of the state power on the one hand and of the opposition simultaneously engendered on the other."
In regard to literature and philosophy he wrote: "I consider the ultimate supremacy of economic development established in these spheres too, but it comes to pass within conditions imposed by the particular sphere itself; philosophy, for instance, through the operation of economic influences (which again generally only act under political, etc., guises) upon the existing philosophic material handed down by predecessors. Here economy creates nothing absolutely new (a novo), but it determines the way in which the existing material of thought is altered and further developed, and that too for the most part indirectly, for it is the political, legal and moral reflexes which exercise the greatest direct influence upon philosophy ..." In summary, "the whole vast process proceeds in the form of interaction (though of very unequal forces, the economic movement being by far the strongest, most elemental, and most decisive)." (Marx-Engels, Correspondence 1846-1895. International Publishers, New York 1935, pp. 477-484.)
Harrington's Alternative
These elucidations indicate how baseless is Harrington's charge that "what is usually known as 'historical materialism' tends to be vulgar, mechanistic, and catechetical." What alternative does Harrington propose to historical materialism, "Marx's signal contribution to the misunderstanding of Marxism"? Harrington seeks to correct this alleged aberration arising from Marx's self-misunderstanding by informing us that all the elements in society codetermine its nature and development. This is a variant of the multiple factors theory of social structure and historical development advocated by many eclectic sociologists, Max Weber to C. Wright Mills, which pulverizes the social formation into institutional pieces of prospectively equivalent weight and assigns supremacy now to one element and now to another. What is the purpose of identifying this method of liberal academic sociology with "real" Marxism? Harrington does acknowledge in several places that "production predominates within the organic whole" of a social formation and triumphantly announces that "it exists in a reciprocal relationship with all the other elements." Marx and Engels would not have objected to this observation, since they learned from Hegel about the interdependence and interaction of all the diverse aspects of social and cultural life and was aware that every manifestation of human thought, will and activity contributed in some measure to the making of history.
Yet the crucial question still remains to be answered: what plays the ultimately decisive part in the process of historical determination? Is it the economy, politics, legal system, morality, religion, the arts, sciences, or philosophy? Harrington wobbles on this point.
Sometimes economics is paramount; in other cases it is not. He is of two minds on this, as on other important issues.
Harrington's version of Marxist philosophy has political advantages for him: it provides him with a basis for the theory of bureaucratic collectivism and for supporting the capitalist welfare state. Both require a reversal of the relationship between base and superstructure that Marx laid bare.
Bureaucratized Workers States
The anti-Marxist theory of bureaucratic collectivism acquired from Shachtman prevents Harrington from comprehending the sociological nature of the anticapitalist revolutions of our century and the regimes issuing from them. Wherever victorious worker-peasant revolutions have abolished capitalist property and productive relations, replaced them with collective relations of production under state ownership, and instituted a planned economy (as in the USSR, China, and Cuba) he judges these to be not praiseworthy progressive accomplishments, but the formation and foundation of an inferior, more retrogressive system.
The methodological source of this misconception is his departure from the cardinal principle of historical materialism, which judges the essential nature of a society and its political structure according to the form of property and mode of production dominant within it. Just as Italy has remained capitalist under the Savoy monarchy, Mussolini's fascism, and the present parliamentary republic, so the Soviet Union has remained a postcapitalist society under Lenin and Trotsky's regime as under the bureaucratic tyranny of Stalin and his successors by virtue of the surviving gains of the October revolution. Harrington takes the possession of political authority, a superstructural power, as the prime criterion of the character of a society and its state. Most social democrats since the Mensheviks who refuse to acknowledge the legitimacy or reality of the socialist orientation of the October revolution have considered the Soviet Union to be state capitalist. Harrington, however, classifies it under a different label, although his conclusions are similar. While he concedes that Lenin's Bolsheviks made a socialist revolution in1917, he claims that Stalin converted Russia into a bureaucratic-collectivist society in 1929. This society obeys neither the laws of capitalism or socialism; it is a unique socio-economic development that Marx did not foresee.
Trotskyists admit that the workers states exhibit unprecedented features arising from the exceptional conditions of their birth and growth since 1917. We thereby define the countries from Russia to China as degenerated or deformed workers states, which combine a progressive nationalized and planned economy with a reactionary bureaucratic rulership. The first has to be defended and developed; the second opposed and replaced with a democratic regime installed and controlled by the working masses. That salutary change would bring the political superstructure into harmony with its socio-economic foundation.
Harrington goes wrong by assigning a correspondence between the economy, which is a conquest of the revolution, with the Stalinist regime, which is in contradiction with its dynamics, just as he sees a harmony between the official leadership and the ranks in the American union movement. In both cases he employs a mechanical method of analysis that leads him to see an essential coincidence of interests.
The dialectical and materialist method, on the other hand, recognizes the coexistence of opposing interests in a contradictory unity. The policies and outlook of the misleaders at the helm of the AFL-CIO are basically at odds with the welfare of the membership; the friction and deepening distrust between them can only be resolved by ousting that officialdom and establishing rank-and-file control over the unions.
The same approach holds good for the bureaucratized workers states. Their privileged and parasitic leaderships, imbued with narrow, nationalistic outlooks, do not promote the program and goals of socialism; that's why progressive-minded oppositionists yearn to get rid of their dictatorship and move forward to socialist democracy. Just as the union organizations have to be strengthened and defended against the bosses' attacks, so the social gains and economic basis of the workers states have to be safeguarded against imperialist encroachment or bureaucratic maladministration. Harrington completely fails to grasp the problems involved in the difficult and protracted period of transition in the once-backward countries that are going from capitalism and colonialism toward socialism. He expresses sympathy for the democratization movement in Czechoslovakia crushed by the Kremlin's occupation in 1968.Yet he gives no weight to the explicit commitment of its participants-workers and intellectuals alike-to the nationalized economy, which is for them the irreplaceable foundation of "socialism with a human face." They understand that the issue of who owns what is decisive and that collective ownership of the means of production provides the sole material basis for socialist democracy.
Bureaucratized Trade Unions
Harrington cites the case of Hungary, where he opposed the Soviet invasion of 1956 that crushed the Hungarian workers, as proof positive that the USSR is not a workers state. Moscow's criminal intervention further exposed the counterrevolutionary character of the Stalinist leadership-but it did not nullify the class nature of the social foundation on which it rests.
"It is clear that workers' states, by definition, crush only counterrevolutions, not revolutions," he writes. That holds true of a healthy workers state with a genuine Marxist party at its head. But the Soviet Union is a diseased workers state commanded by a caste that is hostile to all manifestations of workers' democracy, and the country stands in dire need of a political revolution to cure its malignant bureaucratism. Analogously, it could be said that a union, by definition, engages in strikes but does not break them. What about a union such as the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, which threw its resources into a long effort, supported by agribusiness, to crush the United Farm Workers union? What about a union whose leadership such as the former Boyle leadership of the United Mine Workers-engages in bloody violence to suppress movements for democracy? Does Harrington regard these as real unions? He does, of course, but his sort of theorizing should bar such a conclusion.
While unions of this type are deeply diseased, they still have to be recognized as workers organizations to be protected from attacks by the employers. A similar role applies to the postcapitalist states from Russia to Cuba. The question of democracy is extremely important, and Marxists fight at all times and in all places for the optimum degree of democracy for the people. But when an imperialist democracy tries to strangle a bureaucratized workers state, or its government seeks to cripple a bureaucratized union, the workers must protect their class organizations in order to democratize them through their own efforts.
Harrington counters that democracy is the essence of socialism. Democracy is the political essence of a socialist movement and the hallmark of a flourishing workers state. But the socio-economic objective of the socialist forces is to "expropriate the expropriators" and radically transform property relations in order to lay down the necessary material foundation of a superior order and ensure a greater degree of democracy for the working people than the freest capitalism can provide. Despite the deformations of their political systems, which Trotskyists perceive and fight against, the revolutions since 1917, from Russia to Vietnam, have succeeded in demolishing capitalist relations within their borders and thereby lifting humanity to a higher level of development.
The Cuban Revolution
The political logic of this position is revealed in Harrington's treatment of the Cuban revolution. He platonically admires the humanism of Castro and the heroism of Guevara, but deplores their evolutionism. Che is described as an "idealistic totalitarian" who went wrong by engaging in a revolution on the island when the time was not ripe.
Harrington does not grasp the tremendous significance of the first breakthrough of the socialist revolution in the Americas. He dwells only on its shortcomings, not its accomplishments. The confrontation of class forces and the resulting transformation of property relations from a capitalist to a proletarian basis, and the impact of this on the struggle for socialism on a world scale including the United States, eludes his understanding.
Contrast his hostility toward the Cuban revolution with his favorable judgment on the AFL-CIO bureaucracy. He contends in Socialism that under Meany's auspices "the unions ...had created a social-democratic party, with its own apparatus and program within the Democratic Party." This ersatz labor party, which is invisible to almost everyone but Harrington, is hailed as "a class movement of workers which seeks to democratize many of the specific powers of capital but does not denounce capitalism itself." Apart from its atrocious foreign policy, on most domestic issues the Meany leadership which Harrington styles "the American social democracy"-represents "the mass left wing of American society."
Everything in this picture is topsy-turvy. The warriors of the July 26 movement, who overthrew their native capitalism, defied U.S. imperialism, and started amidst heavy handicaps toward socialism, are derogated as totalitarians. But the highly paid AFL-CIO bureaucrats, who violate the democratic rights of union members in the interest of collaboration with the capitalists, who backed the Bay of Pigs invasion, who hailed the war in Vietnam, and who represent the most reactionary force in labor circles, are painted up as crypto-socialists.
According to Harrington, three systems are competing for hegemony on the world arena: capitalism, socialism, and bureaucratic collectivism. In a conflict between the first and the third he throws his support to the first in the name of defending democracy and in the hope that it will someday evolve into socialism. That accounts for his aversion to Cuba. The imperialist democracy headquartered in Washington, which sought to strangle Cuba because of its efforts to abolish capitalist oppression, stands higher in his eyes. This reveals the real quality of Harrington's "spiritual materialism."
Harrington's mentor, Max Shachtman, gave an even more graphic demonstration of the meaning of "bureaucratic collectivism." He hailed the invasion of Cuba and supported Johnson's bombing of Vietnam, all in the name of defending capitalist democracy from the encroachments of bureaucratic collectivism. Harrington drew back from Shachtman's most extreme views, though such positions are immanent in the theory he defends. Inconsistency has its uses!
The second half of The Twilight of Capitalism concentrates on the economic and political aspects of the domestic life of the welfare state. Harrington's analysis of the economy is superior to his political line; he has a keen eye for the built-in inequities and shocking contradictions of the system. Yet he politely refrains from calling monopoly capitalism by its proper name, preferring to embellish its "war-fare" and "ill-fare" reality with the prettified title of "the welfare state" liberals have bestowed upon it. Indeed, his appraisal of the regime substantially merges with the ideology of those liberals to whom the state is either an institution above the classes or an indeterminate agency that can serve the plutocrats or the people depending upon the pressures it undergoes. According to Harrington, the contemporary American welfare state has both a capitalist bias and an anticapitalist potential. For all the government intervention in the economy, he argues, it is indubitably capitalist because of its domination by the corporate rich.
The failures of the welfare state in recent years "derive from the antiegalitarian and capitalist limitations of the system." Capitalism is "outrageously unjust," "self-destructive," and bound to collapse some day, somehow. On the other hand, the state can be swayed to meet the needs of the masses and even holds a latent socialist potential.
Harrington effectively polemicizes against the theories that in its present phase American society has transcended capitalism, placed some new ruling elite in power through a silent revolution, and become a postindustrial society (Raymond Aron and Daniel Bell) or a technocratic system (Galbraith).
He surveys one sector after another to show how the federal government kowtows to big business and leaves the ordinary citizen in the lurch.
"All the evidence shows," he points out, "that there has been no change in basic income distribution" between the rich and the rest of the American people "at least since 1947." Responsibility for the "energy crisis" should not be saddled upon the Mideast sheiks, Harrington explains. It resulted from a generation of government policy that followed and subsidized corporate priorities. "The secret of the welfare state," he concludes, "is national economic planning subordinated to corporate priorities."
The 'Welfare State'
After such a damning verdict on the policies pursued by Democratic and Republican administrations alike over the past decades, one would logically expect a socialist-minded critic to repudiate the rulership of big business and its political managers lock, stock, and barrel. Harrington is not ready to give up on their welfare state. It should not be condemned en bloc or simply dismissed as a tool of monied interests. It has another, more benign side; its "complexities, contradictions and ambiguities" allow it considerable leeway for flexibility and improvement, leaving it open to extensive reformation to the advantage of the lower classes.
The welfare state, he writes, "represents the reluctant concessions of the ruling class, the increments of reform that function to make basic change unnecessary. But it is also the product of conscience and consciousness, that of socialist workers and middle-class liberals, of militant blacks and students, and of the aging. As such, it has been the instrument of the oppressed as well as of the oppressors, a means of partial liberation as well as of partial pacification." That makes it worthy of being cherished, not opposed.
Those Marxists, Harrington claims, who maintain that the administrations from Roosevelt on have essentially and necessarily been obedient servitors and defenders of the wealthy in power see with only one eye; if they had both eyes open they would see how much they have also done for the poor and are still capable of doing.
It should be noted that in the above encomium of the bright side of the welfare state Harrington speaks of "the ruling class." This may be a slip of the pen since a few pages later he assures us that while "there is unquestionably an upper class in America . . . that does not mean either in theory or in fact that there is a ruling class. "The notion that the national government functions as the executive committee of the plutocracy" goes well with a base-superstructure model of society and is flawed for that reason." Marxists have shown that the economic structure of monopoly capitalism is the force that ultimately shapes the domestic and foreign policies "of the federal government. It is uncertain, however, where Harrington locates the supreme decision-making power or who is on top of the capitalist hierarchy. For Harrington, the representatives of the Morgans, Mellons, Rockefellers, DuPonts, and the like, who own the economy and control the means of production and exchange, do not thereby call the tune in government policy.
Political power is not centralized, as is capital, in the hands of monopolists, but appears to be dispersed and exercised by a plurality of forces. "Sophisticated businessmen" are "the decisive, though not always dominant class of welfare-state society ... " It follows that if no ruling class exists, there can be no rulers, and the American people can exult in ·their unexampled freedom.
Dogmatic Marxists who focus on the political consequences of the capitalist supremacy over the economy do not understand that the political structure has a "relative autonomy" that permits it to act on behalf of the upper class at one occasion and for the benefit of the lower classes on another. "Relative autonomy" means, however, that there are limits upon the leeway accorded to the politicians and diplomats. Who and what sets those limits? Experience verifies what Marxist theory indicates, that the fundamental class interests of the monopolists shape the main course of action followed at home and abroad by the political officeholders and the military chiefs, and these cannot be transgressed with impunity. By attributing an indeterminate and hybrid nature to the welfare state, floating in space and undominated by any ruling class, Harrington justifies the reformist politics of DSOC and its practice of choosing "the lesser evil" in the capitalist sweepstakes. He is quite explicit on this score. He stated in a debate with me in 1972: "Liberals are the mass left wing of American society….If we are ever going to build a socialist movement in America we will not build it on the basis of principled hostility to liberals and their candidates, but on the basis of socialists participating with liberals and candidates in the struggle for immediate gains and generalizing these immediate struggles." Harrington writes: "If it [the welfare state] is seen as merely, or primarily, as a tool in the hands of the ruling class, then the struggles between the Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals, really don't matter very much." For him the contests, between the twin parties of the capitalist class, fixed in advance against the masses, are all that count in political realism.
It is foolishly utopian to put up an independent socialist party and program as an alternative, even though that has been the way the socialist forces in America have been assembled, trained, and strengthened since the days of Eugene Debs.
Reformist Strategy
Harrington calls his coalition with the liberals inside the Democratic Party a tactic. But though it differs in form, it conforms to the strategy pursued by social democrats the world over. None of the parties of the Second International, to which Harrington belongs, from Germany in 1918 to England in the 1970s, have socialized the economy or ousted the capitalists from power. They have, as Harrington admits, functioned as caretakers for ailing capitalist regimes until disillusioned electorates turned them out of office or military or fascist coups crushed them. Under a bourgeois democracy, especially in prosperous times, where politicians depend on votes to get or stay in office, it is possible to wrest concessions from the powers-that-be through organized struggle and persistent mass pressure. Marxists try to mobilize the power of the discontented for that purpose. Reforms can be stepping-stones toward revolutionary class action insofar as they improve the conditions, strengthen the position, and heighten the confidence of the masses. That is the grain of truth in Harrington's statement that "reforms provide the only Archimedean point from which the system itself can be changed."
But reformism as a strategy, a long-range policy, and a practice of discouraging the initiative, independent mobilization, and self-action of the oppressed and staying at all costs within the confines of the system of capitalist politics is an altogether different matter. The antiwar movement, the most important and progressive political event of this generation, started and developed outside of and against the institutions of the bipartisan warlords in Washington. Moreover, in an economic downturn counter-reforms keep cutting into the gains made in the past, as the urban crisis proves.
Harrington is bound by two allegiances that override such considerations. One is his commitment to working in and through the Democratic Party; the other is his fidelity to the international social democracy.
Believe it or not, he expresses confidence that the Second International, in spite of its procapitalist record over sixty years, will ultimately lead the breakthrough to socialism. Greater faith hath no man!
Harrington denies that the United States is an imperialist power "in the neo-Leninist sense of the term." Apart from the oil industry (the world's foremost industrial empire is indeed a majestic exception!), the welfare state has significantly altered the old pattern of exploitation since a larger percentage of total foreign investment now goes to Europe, Australia and Japan than to the colonial lands. Thus "the welfare state . . . is not dependent on the exploitation of the Third World."
He misreads Lenin's analysis of imperialism. Unlike Rosa Luxemburg, Lenin did not regard foreign investment in, and exploitation of, the raw materials of semicolonial lands as the exclusive or main aspect of imperialism, which he viewed as the inevitable outgrowth of the monopolist stage of capitalist development. In his famous pamphlet on the subject he stressed as its central aspect the division of the world markets between the major capitalist powers. He singled out five distinguishing features of imperialism: the decisive role of monopolies; the interpenetration of banking and industrial capital creating finance capital and financial oligarchies; capital exports; the formation of international monopolies; and the "territorial divisions of the world among the greatest capitalist powers."
Considering that since Lenin wrote the global markets available to big capital have shrunk as a result of anti-imperialist revolutions, his definition is more pertinent than ever. Monopoly power has never been more concentrated than it is today in the gigantic industrial and banking trusts of the United States. Exxon, the biggest corporation in the capitalist world, sells more than half of its oil to Europe. The Chase Manhattan Bank floats interest-bearing loans in more than 100 nations. Both exploit global resources in order to pile up private profits for the Rockefeller branch of the American financial oligarchy. When America's banking and multinational corporations invade the advanced, along with the less developed and weaker countries, that signifies not the slackening, but the widening, of their field of exploitation.
Harrington gives the capitalist "planning" more credit than it deserves. "Today one can hardly speak of the 'anarchy of capitalist production' when there is welfare-state planning." However, the U.S. government does not in any sense guide the overall national economy or fix its objectives; the effective decisions are made by private firms headed by the giant corporations. Their internal planning and price-fixing agreements do not eliminate competition, but render it more intense on the domestic and world markets. State intervention is limited to "fine-tuning" the economy by fiscal or monetary measures. While the government is increasingly called upon to bail out failing enterprises, recurrent crises demonstrate that the state cannot avert the vicissitudes of the industrial cycle or keep the economy booming. The reason, in Harrington's words, is the "practical rationality and generalized irrationality of capitalist production."
The welfare state is not stable or harmonious; it is, he says, "a contradictory, crisis-prone, last stage of capitalism." The depression of the seventies has arisen from the conjunction of two crises; one is the exhaustion of the long wave of capital expansion and accumulation since World War II; the other is a result of specific events of the decade. "The secret history of the crisis of the seventies reveals that, first of all, an antisocial socialization of the economy in behalf of the corporations perpetuates and aggravates, rather than resolves, the contradictions of capitalism. Secondly, it shows that the capitalist mechanism of boom and bust continues in a moderated and sometimes politically exacerbated, form and that the system thus sickens from its own success. Thirdly, the new expressions of the intrinsic instability of bourgeois society have, since 1973,been magnified by the effect of an oil cartel whose effectiveness is, in considerable measure, a result of the fact that American energy planning followed capitalist priorities for a generation."
Harrington, LBJ, and Carter
Harrington is not among those theorists who believe that state or monopolist regulation of the economy have succeeded in eliminating or suspending the internal contradictions of this mode of production and overcoming its infirmities. He points out that the welfare state takes away with the right hand what it gives with the left, and that social reforms are whittled away by the mechanics of the system; endemic inflation makes it difficult for the poor and the pensioners to eke out an existence.
He should know from personal experience how the major tendencies of monopoly capitalism cripple the efficacy of reforms decreed from the White House. After writing The Other America, he was drawn in as an adviser on President Lyndon B. Johnson's "war on poverty," which was sunk by the war in Vietnam. More than a decade later he admits that poverty and misery are as widespread as ever. Yet he is undismayed about the virtues of the welfare state and is more than ready to repeat the experiment with the present Democratic incumbent.
Despite his proclamation that this is the twilight of capitalism, he does not anticipate that the current crisis will lead to a decisive breakdown of the system. It will recover, and the decline will drag on indefinitely.
There is no realistic possibility of acute class conflicts in his outlook, and the prospect of revolution does not enter into this theorizing or practice. He has little to say about the struggles of the oppressed nationalities in the United States, and is pessimistic about the possibilities of revolution in the third world.
His attitude toward the welfare state parallels John Kenneth Galbraith's prescription for taming the power of the great corporations: exclude its antisocial abuses from its social uses. So the monopolist state is not to be combated and replaced by a state based on the power of the workers and democratically controlled by them but transformed by repeated dosages of social reform into a vehicle of socialism. That will ease the way to a gradual, prolonged, and peaceful transition to a better social order.
The kind of "struggle" he envisages, and DSOC practices, is to try to push the Democratic Party leftward. For that it is necessary to support and elect its candidates and assure the people that these are the best available figures to lead the nation forward.
In this spirit Harrington hailed the new chief at the time of the inauguration: "Jimmy Carter has a program which make his the most progressive presidency of the twentieth century." This appeared in the New Republic January 22, 1977. A few months later, in the June New York Times, columnist Tom Wicker complained: "Jimmy Carter is turning out to be the most conservative Democratic President since Grover Cleveland."
'Anguish Before Revolution'
It remains to be asked: what does all this have to do with Karl Marx, whom Harrington has taken as his totem? Marx anticipated, prepared for, participated in, and welcomed all revolutionary movements of the oppressed directed against capitalism and its upholders. He was the very antithesis of a socia1 democrat. As Engels emphasized in his speech at the graveside in 1883: "Marx was before all else a revolutionary.... His real mission was to contribute in one way or another to the overthrow of capitalist society and of the state institutions which it had brought into being, to contribute to the liberation of the present-day proletariat. ... Fighting was his element."
That is the real and the true Marx. Engels also said of the reformist British Fabians that their guiding principle was "anguish before revolution." These reformists provide more of a model for Harrington than Marx.
His mission, as outlined in The Twilight of Capitalism, is to save the capitalist state from itself. That is not only an impossible, but an unworthy, enterprise for an avowed socialist.
THE MILITANT
SEPTEMBER 9, 1977
http://themilitant.com/1977/4133/MIL4133.pdf
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