{"id":6446,"date":"2022-05-11T17:15:31","date_gmt":"2022-05-11T21:15:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.tempestmag.org\/v01_2020\/staging\/?p=6446"},"modified":"2022-05-16T18:30:06","modified_gmt":"2022-05-16T22:30:06","slug":"the-left-wing-of-the-possible","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/2022\/05\/the-left-wing-of-the-possible\/","title":{"rendered":"The left wing of the possible?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span class=\"dropcap\">M<\/span>ichael Harrington (1928\u201389) is mainly known on the US Left today for two reasons. First, his 1962 book <em>The Other America<\/em> was, as Doug Greene says, \u201ca groundbreaking and moving expos\u00e9 of poverty in the United States\u201d (60). Its \u201ccall to enlightened liberals for action to rescue the poor\u201d (63) exerted a significant influence on the Kennedy administration and then, more consequentially, on Lyndon Johnson\u2019s \u201cWar on Poverty.\u201d By 1965 <em>The Other America<\/em> had sold more than 70,000 copies and was in its fifth edition. Secondly, in March 1982 Harrington was instrumental in founding, and became chairman of, the Democratic Socialists of America. DSA brought together the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee that Harrington had led since its founding in 1973 (DSOC brought some 4000 of its members into DSA) and the New American Movement (which had roughly 2000 members at the time).<\/p>\n<p>Harrington\u2019s Reagan-era DSA was different in several respects from today\u2019s DSA\u2014and not only in terms of its size (the financial report submitted to the 2021 DSA national convention claimed almost 95,000 members). As a member of the Rutgers-New Brunswick DSOC\/DSA \u201clocal\u201d in the late 1970s and early 1980s, I never once heard members call each other \u201ccomrade.\u201d Nor was I aware of DSA working groups with the word \u201crevolutionary\u201d in their titles. Although there were student-based contingents at some college campuses around the country, the overall membership of DSA was considerably older then than it is now. Despite these differences, however, the fundamental questions about DSA\u2019s politics remain the same. Although DSA has moved to the left on some issues in recent years, its \u201coverwhelming priority,\u201d as Greene argues, \u201cremains electoral politics\u201d\u2014and ultimately its influence on the Democratic Party. Having voted at its 2019 convention not to support any presidential candidate other than Bernie Sanders, factions of the formal leadership nonetheless publicly advocated for a Biden vote, against the mandate of the DSA Convention. The \u201cdirty break\u201d from the Democrats articulated in a resolution passed at the DSA convention remains, two years into Biden\u2019s presidency, mainly \u201cdirty\u201d and no real \u201cbreak.\u201d This is the case despite radical activist interventions by local DSA working groups around the country.<\/p>\n<aside class=\"pullquote\"><em>A Failure of Vision<\/em> helps us understand what it will take to contend with the rise of right-wing authoritarianism and the depressing acceptance of lesser-evilism, and to build a diverse, multiracial, defiant socialism from below\u2026<\/aside>\n<p>It&#8217;s clear from the title that Greene\u2019s political biography of Harrington is openly critical\u2014not only of Harrington himself but also of DSA and the entire tradition of social democratic reformism. The book is forcefully written and impressive in its integration of history and political analysis. It deserves to be read not only by revolutionary socialists who will for the most part share Greene\u2019s critical perspective, but by reform socialists and liberals open to learning from the questions he raises about Harrington\u2019s accomplishments and influence. Greene acknowledges Harrington\u2019s abilities as a writer, his astonishing energy as an organizer and polemicist, and his stature within the Socialist International. <em>A Failure of Vision<\/em> shows that socialists today have much to learn from the contradictions and limitations of Harrington\u2019s career as the best-known U.S. socialist from the early 1960s until his death in 1989.<\/p>\n<p>Harrington was born in St. Louis in 1928, the only child of staunchly Catholic, Irish American, and Democratic parents. He went to Jesuit schools in St. Louis and then to the Jesuit College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts. Following his father\u2019s wishes he entered Yale Law School, which had become \u201ca bastion of unabashed liberalism.\u201d He wasn\u2019t politically active at Yale\u2014though he did become an avid supporter of the Zionist cause in Palestine, a commitment he would retain for the rest of his life. Harrington eventually dropped out of law school and joined the graduate program in English at the University of Chicago. His main ambition at this time in his life was to become a writer. He initially kept his distance from the intense political environment of Chicago of the late 1940s and was, as he acknowledges in his 1973 autobiography <em>Fragments of the Century<\/em>, drawn to the \u201cBohemian\u201d culture of the city and a worldview that he himself saw as \u201cdistinctively aesthetic and elitist.\u201d (65)<\/p>\n<p>By 1949, when Harrington received an MA in English from the University of Chicago, he had lost his faith in the Catholic Church. He returned to St. Louis and took a job for several months as a social worker in the Public Welfare Department of the public schools. It was this experience, he later said, that drew him into anti-poverty activism. Still restless and attracted to the life of an avant-garde artist, he moved to Greenwich Village in New York, where he took a variety of temporary jobs, wrote poetry, and took part in radical political discussions for the first time. In retrospect, he described this moment in his life as a \u201cspiritual crisis.\u201d Harrington decided to return to the Catholic Church on terms that would substantially influence his subsequent political direction. He took a job writing for <em>Catholic Worker<\/em>, founded in 1927 by the socialist Dorothy Day and, as part of the Catholic Worker Movement, a notable force on the U.S. Left. This was Harrington\u2019s first opportunity to write for a mass audience. He came to know other prominent New York writers on the Left, such as critic and <em>Partisan Review<\/em> editor Dwight Macdonald, and began to read seriously in the Marxist tradition.<\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_6453\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-6453\" style=\"width: 800px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-6453\" src=\"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/05\/490px-Michael_Harrington_author-204x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"450\" \/><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-6453\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Michael Harrington, 1988. <a href=\"https:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/wiki\/File:Michael_Harrington,_author.jpg#\/media\/File:Michael_Harrington,_author.jpg\">Photo<\/a> by Bernard Gotfyrd.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>At a March 1952 protest Harrington met Bogdan Denitch, a Yugoslavian exile from the Nazis who was then a student at the City University of New York and a member of the Young People\u2019s Socialist League (YPSL), the youth organization attached to the Socialist Party of America (SPA). Harrington soon joined the YPSL. He and Denitch, along with other YPSL members, opposed the Socialist Party\u2019s support for the Korean War. Denitch was a strong supporter of Max Shachtman\u2019s Independent Socialist League (ISL), which also opposed the war. In August 1953, along with 37 other members of the YPSL, Harrington and Denitch voted to leave the SPA. The following February they joined forces with Shachtman\u2019s ISL under the banner of the \u201cYoung Socialist League\u201d (YSL). According to Greene, despite the ISL\/YSL\u2019s small numbers, \u201cHarrington was optimistic that they would lead the forthcoming socialist revolution.\u201d (25)<\/p>\n<p>Harrington credited Shachtman with \u201cintroduc[ing] me to the vision of democratic Marxism\u201d and to the \u201ctheory of bureaucratic collectivism.\u201d Some fifteen years earlier, Shachtman had broken with the mainstream Trotskyist movement\u2019s perspective that the Soviet Union was \u201ca degenerated workers\u2019 state\u201d or \u201ca worker\u2019s state with bureaucratic distortions.\u201d He insisted instead that Joseph Stalin had created \u201ca bureaucratic collectivist evil empire\u201d (the latter phrase is from Harrington\u2019s book <em>Socialism<\/em>, published in 1970) that had to be opposed at all political costs. Shachtman and the ISL\/YSL saw World War II as \u201ca struggle between different warring empires\u201d and insisted that \u201cMarxists should support none of them\u201d (28).<\/p>\n<p>In the case of the Shachtmanite movement that Harrington joined in 1954, this \u201cthird camp\u201d position had also come to mean moving away from revolutionary Marxism (34) altogether rather than advancing its original vision. As Greene demonstrates, many of the basic tenets of Harrington\u2019s \u201cdemocratic socialism\u201d\u2014especially the priority given to Democratic Party \u201cRealignment\u201d\u2014had their roots in Shachtman\u2019s move to the right.<\/p>\n<p>In the 1950s, with the U.S. Communist Party in disarray and the SPA shrinking in size and influence, regroupment was inevitably on the agenda. The Socialist Party, reduced to under 700 dues-paying members and threatened with losing its formal affiliation to the Socialist International, decided to merge with the tiny Social Democratic Federation to form the Socialist Party of America-Social Democratic Federation (SPA-SDF). At the same time, Shachtman pronounced the ISL\/YSL vanguard project no longer viable and argued \u201cthat the American left needed a Debsian style broad-tent social-democratic party that would be untainted by communism.\u201d (43) In 1958, when the ISL dissolved itself, its members were able to take over the new but aimless SPA-SDF and fashion it into a revived Socialist Party. Harrington, although now approaching thirty, became leader of the SPA\u2019s reconstituted youth wing (YPSL). He spoke widely on college campuses in the hope of recruiting students to the new version of the Socialist Party.<\/p>\n<p>In the 1960s realignment became the central focus of Harrington\u2019s political work. In the first issue of a biweekly paper he edited called <em>New America<\/em>, Harrington offered the following definition of \u201crealignment\u201d:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\u201cAmerican socialism must concentrate its efforts on the battle for political realignment, for the creation of a real second party that will unite labor, liberals, Negros, and provide them with an instrument for principled debate and effective action. Such a party as the Democratic Party will be when the Southern racists and certain corruptive elements have been forced out of it.\u201d (52\u201353)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>In the speeches I heard Harrington give in the late 1970s and 1980s, his main way of invoking\u2014and defending\u2014this vision of realigning the Democrats was to refer to \u201cthe left wing of the possible,\u201d or sometimes to \u201cthe left wing of reality.\u201d The \u201cdemocratic left,\u201d according to Harrington, works within the Democratic Party not \u201cto maintain that institution but to transform it.\u2019\u201d (56; quoted from <em>Towards a Democratic Left<\/em>, 1968, 294).<\/p>\n<p>Greene shows persuasively that Harrington\u2019s vision of realigning the Democrats along these lines, \u201c[f]or all its theoretical sophistication,\u201d mistakenly assumed that the Democratic Party was \u201ca loose coalition of diverse interest groups\u201d that could be \u201ccaptured\u201d by socialists, rather than \u201ca capitalist-controlled party\u201d of the ruling class that cultivated the support of the working class and minorities but ultimately subordinated the real interests of these groups to its own agenda. (57\u201358)<\/p>\n<p>Harrington\u2019s orientation towards the Democratic Party was reinforced by the reception of <em>The Other America<\/em> in the years following its publication in 1962. The Kennedy administration was already planning an anti-poverty campaign, and when an anti-poverty task-force was created in early 1963, Harrington\u2019s book was central to its thinking. This continued to be the case when Johnson assumed the presidency following Kennedy\u2019s assassination on November 22, 1963. Johnson\u2019s \u201cWar on Poverty\u201d was formally launched in the State of the Union Address in February 1964 ahead of his landslide win over the reactionary Barry Goldwater. Sargent Shriver, Director of the Peace Corps, was asked to form a new taskforce and invited Harrington to be part of it. Harrington accepted. He insisted that Johnson\u2019s version of the welfare state was \u201ca necessary stepping stone on the road to socialism\u201d (70).<\/p>\n<p>With the intensification of campus-based activism led by Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in the early 1960s, Harrington saw a vital new left arena in which the YPSL could intervene. He participated actively in the 1962 SDS conference at Port Huron, Michigan, under the banner of its forerunner, the Student League for Industrial Democracy (SLID), and made the case that student activists needed to see the civil rights and labor movements as crucial allies. The <em>Port Huron Statement<\/em> issued by the conference rejected \u201cthe kind of virulent anticommunism favored by Harrington\u201d (81), but in other respects it reflected the interventions of Harrington and his fellow SLID members<\/p>\n<p>When it came to the civil rights movement, some on the left saw the emergence of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) in the months leading up to the 1964 Democratic Convention as an affirmation of Harrington\u2019s realignment strategy. But the Democrats refused to seat the MFDP\u2019s primarily Black alternative slate of delegates and instead offered a demeaning compromise, which Harrington accepted on the grounds of \u201cpolitical practicality.\u201d So much for realigning the Democratic Party.<\/p>\n<p>In the months following Johnson\u2019s election in 1964 the growing U.S. military intervention in Vietnam fueled a serious antiwar movement. Prior to the election, Harrington argued that though Johnson was heading towards war in Vietnam, he was a significantly lesser evil than Barry Goldwater, who was likely to lead the country into World War III. From his work with Shachtman and the ISL\/YSL, Harrington inherited an increasingly critical attitude toward Ho Chi Minh and the Vietminh because of their perceived Stalinism. When SDS and other antiwar groups called for a march in Washington DC on April 21, 1965, Harrington criticized \u201cSDS\u2019s willingness to work with communists and Trotskyists\u201d and argued that such involvement would \u201calienate liberals and moderates.\u201d (94) The march turned out to be the biggest antiwar protest to that point in US history: instead of the 3,000 participants SDS predicted, 25,000 took part. For SDS and other antiwar radicals, Greene observes, \u201cdemocratic socialists like Michael Harrington were no longer seen as allies but were part of the Establishment [that SDS was] fighting against.\u201d (100)<\/p>\n<p>On March 31, 1968, largely because of the growing momentum of the antiwar movement, Johnson surprised everyone by announcing that he would not run again for president. Harrington was quick to back the new frontrunner, antiwar Congressman Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota. But when Robert Kennedy entered the race, Harrington switched his support. Speaking at a campaign stop with United Farmworkers leader Cesar Chavez and SNCC leader John Lewis, Harrington saw \u201ca socialist [himself] together with organized labor and a civil rights activist\u201d as \u201cthe realization of Realignment\u201d (102). When Kennedy was assassinated following his June 5 primary victory in California, Harrington\u2019s hopes \u201clay in ruins\u201d (102). His subsequent support for the eventual Democratic candidate, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, was \u201cstraight lesser-evilism\u201d (103; Greene\u2019s quotation is from Harrington\u2019s 1985 book <em>Taking Sides: The Education of a Militant Mind<\/em>, 149).<\/p>\n<p>Harrington\u2019s ascendancy represented a victory for the growing conservatism of Shachtman\u2019s influence inside the Socialist Party. Greene calls his chapter on Harrington\u2019s politics during the mid-1960s \u201cThe Tightrope,\u201d and with good reason. Harrington shared Shachtman\u2019s hatred for New Left radicalism, but he wouldn\u2019t dismiss the movement <em>in toto<\/em>.\u201d (109) He also came to see Shachtman\u2019s support for the most conservative layer of the labor bureaucracy as a threat to the cause of realignment. Yet in the 1968 strike of New York teachers, when United Federation of Teachers president Al Shanker blamed \u201cblack antisemitism\u201d for a spate of recent firings and turned a majority of Black New Yorkers against the union, Harrington organized support for Shanker. Though the UFT won almost all its demands, its victory strengthened the right, damaged the liberal-labor-Black alliance, and seriously threatened both Harrington\u2019s and Shachtman\u2019s increasingly divergent approaches to a strategy of realignment.<\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_6454\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-6454\" style=\"width: 800px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-6454\" src=\"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/05\/1968-teacher-strike-300x225.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"450\" \/><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-6454\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Police intervene to separate striking teachers from Black community members during the infamous 36-day 1968 strike, supported by Harrington. <a href=\"https:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/nicknormal\/51007997208\/in\/photolist-5YK2Je-9rVTvP-9rV48c-2hYGzFr-82S8yq-8svPsD-6z2eiq-boA4g9-21FXzkw-2kHpjtJ\">Photo<\/a> by Nick Normal.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>By 1969 \u201cthe hostility between Shachtman and Harrington in the Socialist Party was boiling over.\u201d (112) It reached a peak during the 1972 election, when the SP\u2019s faint support for George McGovern, whom the Shachtman faction accused of being soft on communism, was at odds with Harrington\u2019s belief that \u201cMcGovern is the closest thing to a Socialist to run for President since Norman Thomas.\u201d (116) Harrington resigned as co-chairman of the SP before the election, on October 22. The SP renamed itself the Social Democrats,USA in December, and the following June Harrington resigned from the party.<\/p>\n<p>Even before his resignation, Greene says, Harrington \u201cwas laying the foundations for a new socialist organization.\u201d (119) In February 1973, he headed a weekend conference at New York University called, \u201cThe Future of the Democratic Left.\u201d A few months later he and five hundred of his associates met in New York to found the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC), with Harrington as chair.<\/p>\n<p>With only 250 \u201csolid\u201d members and a tiny budget, DSOC faced an uphill battle. It grew modestly but steadily during the 1970s, created a youth wing in 1975, and by 1980 could claim around a thousand members. DSOC supported reforms and worked to move the Democrats to what it regarded as the left. But to an important degree DSOC remained isolated from the liberal and labor allies it worked hard to cultivate. In the run-up to the 1976 election Harrington ended up supporting Jimmy Carter. He later argued that the party\u2019s platform that year \u201cwas probably the most liberal in the history of the Democratic party\u201d (127; quoting <em>The Long-Distance Runner: An Autobiography<\/em>, 104). Harrington\u2019s hopes were boosted when Carter won the election and the Democrats gained large majorities in both the House and the Senate. But then, in the wake of the severe recession of 1974\u201375, the Carter administration delivered not New Deal reforms \u201cbut cutbacks and austerity.\u201d (130) Carter was nominated again in 1980 and lost catastrophically to Ronald Reagan.<\/p>\n<p>Out of the frustrations of the Carter years came a plan by Harrington and other founding DSOC members to expand by joining forces with the New American Movement (NAM), created in 1971 by former SDS and New Left activists. In March 1982, the Democratic Socialists of America was founded. Harrington was elected chair, along with a national board dominated by former DSOC members such as Irving Howe, William Winpisinger (president of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers), feminist author Barbara Ehrenreich, and Manning Marable (distinguished professor of African-American Studies at Columbia University). With some 6,000 members, DSA was \u201cthe largest democratic socialist organization in the United States since the Socialist Party in the 1930s\u201d (137)\u2014a significant but sobering reality.<\/p>\n<p>Reagan\u2019s attacks on the working class during his first term\u2014especially his firing in 1981 of striking members of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO)\u2014showed that the AFL-CIO leadership was unwilling to mobilize a serious rank-and-file fightback. Harrington and DSA were aware of the problem but reluctant to go against their allies in the union bureaucracy. Similarly, when the Reagan administration began to provide support for right-wing death squads in El Salvador and Nicaragua and for Islamic fundamentalist fighters in Afghanistan, Harrington was verbally critical but insisted that he was being so \u201cin the name of the national security of the United States\u201d (140; quoting Harrington and Howe, \u201cVoices from the Left,\u201d <em>New York Times<\/em>, 17 June 1984).<\/p>\n<p>My strongest memory of being a DSA member during the Reagan years was traveling by bus to Washington D.C. with other Rutgers DSA members on August 27, 1983 for the twentieth anniversary of the great 1963 March on Washington. More than 250,000 civil rights activists were on the mall that blistering day. The most vivid of the speakers was Jesse Jackson, who told those of us in the crowd, \u201cOur day has come.\u201d<\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_6449\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-6449\" style=\"width: 800px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-6449\" src=\"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/05\/jessejackson-300x198.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"450\" \/><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-6449\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Jesse Jackson at a 1984 voter rally at Howard University. <a href=\"https:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/chuckp\/33049225\/in\/photolist-3Vooe-dDZ46u-dDZ1SE-dDZ22W-dDTFyR-63GpHd-dEgyQ5-2d4CKq8-5785mB-5Xt1vF-xxEYsW-5TMPyT-auzLuy-auzLBd-qUrJ21-TVqWej-9unZwk-TznajJ-5r2Ato-26owYes-NRwByF-2exQq5Z-cwYRfJ-ootkCq-TXLiqr-SVELAH-28XJ9rh-SVELzk-Tznbf1-U6HVey-U6HVzy-TXLiVp-iHeXxu-8cnakb-TXLjW2-c2KasW-vtsdV8-TznaWf-TXLj4F-TznbmU-SSWKkU-SSWHuu-TznaWA-TznbnW-27LofK6-c2Kkuh-8qbksJ-U6HVDw-c2Kk5m-c8EX7L\">Photo<\/a> by Chuck Patch.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>In 1984 Jackson and his Rainbow Coalition mounted a presidential primary campaign that, as Greene puts it, \u201chad all the hallmarks of [Harrington\u2019s] Realignment with a social-democratic program and support from labor unions, blacks and progressives\u201d (141). Jackson also spoke out against US intervention in Central America, met with Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega and Cuban president Fidel Castro, and broke with the Democrat\u2019s persistent Zionism [by] supporting the formation of an independent Palestinian state.\u201d Jackson\u2019s primary run offered \u201ceverything that Michael Harrington expected from a Realignment campaign,\u201d Greene argues. Yet Harrington \u201cwillfully ignored it\u201d\u2014despite Manning Marable\u2019s support for Jackson. The eventual Democratic nominee, Walter Mondale, moved to the right in response to Reagan\u2019s popularity instead of to the left as represented by the Jackson campaign. The result? Reagan carried every state except Mondale\u2019s home state of Minnesota. Greene provides a trenchant overview: \u201cJust a scant four years before, Michael Harrington had predicted that a Reagan victory would open the Democratic Party to the left. Now the opposite was occurring as the party swung to the right and ditched its commitment to New Deal liberalism\u201d (143).<\/p>\n<p>When Jackson ran again in the 1988 Democratic primaries he toned down what most Democrats regarded as his \u201cextreme\u201d positions. This earned him Harrington\u2019s and DSA\u2019s support. He even asked for Harrington\u2019s advice in writing some of his speeches. But the nomination went to a more cautious, low-key white liberal, Governor Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts. Harrington was quick to support Dukakis. As a comment on this outcome Greene quotes Lance Selfa\u2019s 2008 Haymarket book <em>The Democrats: A Critical History<\/em>: \u201cInstead of DSA influencing the Democrats, the Democrats influenced DSA\u201d (148).<\/p>\n<p>Less than a year after the 1988 election, Michael Harrington died of cancer. Green\u2019s \u201cConclusion: The Legacy\u201d notes that by this time DSA had moved even further away from its previous realignment strategy: \u201cIf we once positioned ourselves as the left wing of the possible, there is now no \u2018possible\u2019 to be the left wing of\u201d (DSA\u2019s \u201cWhere We Stand,\u201d www.dsausa.org\/about\/where.html, quoted in Selfa, 229 and 283 n.).<\/p>\n<aside class=\"pullquote\">Harrington\u2019s Marx\u2026\u201cbears little relation to the actual one since [Marx\u2019s] revolutionary vision is effaced and he is transformed into a mild-mannered reformer . . . strikingly similar to Michael Harrington himself.\u201d (177)<\/aside>\n<p>With discerning insight Greene follows developments in DSA from the break with Harrington\u2019s vision of realignment in the 1990s through the debates around a \u201cdirty break\u201d from the Democrats during the period leading up to and through the 2020 election. Greene insists that \u201c[a]ll the factions in DSA are formally committed to the democratic socialist road to power that Michael Harrington would have felt quite comfortable with.\u201d This generalization overlooks DSA working groups organized around revolutionary perspectives that Harrington wouldn\u2019t have tolerated, such as the Afro-Socialist Caucus. But Greene is convincing when he argues: \u201cWhen it comes to an orientation to the Democratic Party and \u2018democratic-socialist\u2019 reformism, Michael Harrington\u2019s politics remain the \u2018common sense\u2019 of DSA.\u201d (159)<\/p>\n<p>Greene\u2019s book ends with an \u201cAppendix: The Meaning of Democratic Marxism\u201d that evaluates Harrington\u2019s considerable body of theoretical writing on a \u201creal\u201d Karl Marx who was \u201cthe foe of every dogma, champion of human freedom and [a] democratic socialist\u201d (165, quoting Harrington\u2019s 1976 book <em>The Twilight of Capitalism<\/em>, 2). Harrington\u2019s Marx, Greene demonstrates, \u201cbears little relation to the actual one since [Marx\u2019s] revolutionary vision is effaced and he is transformed into a mild-mannered reformer . . . strikingly similar to Michael Harrington himself.\u201d (177)<\/p>\n<p>Today the US left, reformist as well as revolutionary, is confronted with challenges greater even than those faced by Harrington and his contemporaries. <em>A Failure of Vision<\/em> helps us understand what it will take to contend with the rise of right-wing authoritarianism and the depressing acceptance of lesser-evilism, and to build a diverse, multiracial, defiant socialism from below that can contend with the ravages of global capitalism in all its forms. The fight for reforms needs socialists who take reforms seriously but also insist on looking beyond them to the real possibility of creating a society free of systemic oppression and exploitation.<\/p>\n<p><small><em>Featured Image Credit:\u00a0Photo by Gretchen Dohart; modified by Tempest.<\/em><\/small><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Bill Keach<\/strong> reviews  A Failure of Vision: Michael Harrington and the Limits of Democratic Socialism by Doug Greene.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":46,"featured_media":6451,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,11],"tags":[262,28,240,141,171,226],"class_list":["post-6446","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-article","category-review","tag-book-review","tag-dsa","tag-electoral-politics","tag-review","tag-socialist-history","tag-socialist-strategy"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/05\/harrington-review.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6446","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/46"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6446"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6446\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6451"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6446"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6446"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6446"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}