The Long Shadow of Michael Harrington: A Review of A Failure of Vision

by Zack Frailey Escobar · Published August 16, 2022 · Updated August 16, 2022

Doug Greene’s new biography of Michael Harrington brings crucial historical context to debates on the socialist Left today. It is essential reading for newly minted socialists and seasoned activists alike.

Even among socialists, Michael Harrington is an obscure figure, but his work has enormous relevance today, for better and for worse. Harrington rose to national prominence as “the man who discovered poverty” with his 1962 book The Other America, a moving expose on poverty in the United States. In today’s context, his most important contribution is his role as the prominent founder and ideologue of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). The DSA has in the last few years become the largest self-described socialist organization in the U.S., since the heyday of the Socialist Party in the early 20th century.

Greene’s biography traces Harrington’s evolution from a young bohemian from a middle-class family into the foremost public figure of U.S.-American socialism. While the text is critical of Harrington’s philosophy of “Democratic Marxism”, Greene’s conscientiousness as a biographer and historian mean that it will be useful to those on all sides of this debate. In an environment in which so many polemicists flatten all historical debates into “good” and “bad” sides, and mistakes or crimes are read back or projected forward in to the lives of people and organizations as some fatal flaw, A Failure of Vision is carefully attentive to both the continuity and the evolution of Harrington’s thought as he converted from cosmopolitan atheism to left-wing Catholicism, and finally to a social democratic interpretation of Marxism. Despite any disagreements, Greene consistently recognizes the sincerity of Harrington’s desire for a better society and the talent and sophistication of his arguments (sometimes, perhaps, even going even too far in this direction!).

Some will object that any in-depth study on “another dead white man” is too esoteric and irrelevant to be bothered with. But, as Greene astutely observes, “Harringtonism” casts a long shadow across the socialist movement today. Understanding his life and thought is a way to contextualize the debates over socialist strategy taking place today and evaluate them in the light of history.

The debates recounted in the text will be familiar to many on the left today, as most of them remain unresolved. Harrington clashed with his contemporaries across a range of issues, from labor strategy to Palestine and Zionism, but ultimately, they almost always come back to the relationship of socialists to liberalism, the Democratic Party, and the capitalist state.

On one side, you have radicals and revolutionaries of various stripes arguing for a break from both major parties on the grounds that they are controlled by the owners of capital and cannot be made to serve socialist ends. On the other, you have democratic socialist reformers like Michael Harrington and his mentor Max Shachtman who argued that the only path toward relevance for socialists in the short to medium term—and toward a socialist majority in the long term—is to adapt to the present state of consciousness of the working class. This means embracing anticommunism, U.S. global hegemony, and above all, the Democratic Party.

It would be hard to overstate what a thorough victory Harrington and his allies achieved in these strategic debates. Since the destruction of the Black Panther Party and the decline of Socialist Workers Party (US) in the late 1970’s, no socialist organization of real national prominence has taken a position of principled opposition to the Democratic Party. Even the radicals of Students for a Democratic Society, who underwent an acrimonious split from Michael Harrington during his time in the leadership of SDS’s then parent organization League for Industrial Democracy, mostly found their way back to positions in the labor bureaucracy, the NGO-industrial complex, and the Democratic Party.

What has nearly half a century of reformist hegemony in the socialist movement delivered? Michael Harrington would no doubt point to the popularity of “democratic socialist” politicians like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the growth of DSA; which despite some partial breaks from Harrington’s views, continues to embrace his overall strategy of realignment the Democratic Party as a vindication of his perspective. But there is a broader context to these gains, which casts them in a different light.

The strategy of “business unionism” (i.e., the strategy of cooperation with the bosses) pursued by the labor bureaucracy which the reformists have so loyally supported has not led to gains for the working class—but instead to decades of steady decay of organized labor. Meanwhile, the electoral successes of democratic socialists have inspired new hope among liberal and socialist voters, but has failed to actually change the trajectory of the party.

Despite big promises by the Biden administration, no major social democratic reforms have been passed on his watch. The bold declarations about the “death of neoliberalism” made by some socialists in the wake of emergency spending during the height of the Covid pandemic have since fallen flat. His signature achievement up until now, appointing Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court, has been rendered irrelevant with the historic defeat inflicted by the court’s right-wing majority with the overturning of Roe v. Wade.

Readers of A Failure of Vision will see that this is just the most recent of a long list of disappointing and demoralizing liberal administrations, from Lyndon Johnson’s atrocities in Vietnam to Jimmy Carter’s pre-Reagan Reaganomics.

The DSA, inheritor of the Harringtonian tradition, benefitted enormously from its association with Bernie Sanders during his first presidential run, and was subsequently well placed to act as the main political home for people politicized by the shock and horror of the Trump presidency and looking to get organized. This is a credit to Harrington’s understanding that socialists need an organization of our own. Despite his commitment to working within the Democratic Party, he did not ever advocate for socialists to completely dissolve within it. But if DSA and the wider socialist movement continue on the course that Harrington set, it will become just another liberal pressure group.

A Failure of Vision is a biography first and foremost, and therefore cannot be a full rebuttal to the “democratic” critics of revolutionary communism. But Greene’s historical account shows that the fate of every attempt to enact the “Realignment Strategy” that Harrington championed, from the Mississippi Freedom Democrats to Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition, has ended not in socialists taking over the Democratic Party, but in the Party itself absorbing and demobilizing once-promising socialist activists and organizations. That is the final legacy of Michael Harrington, which in the last analysis we must reject.

Zack Frailey Escobar is a communist dock worker and sociology student living in San Diego. You can find more of his work at redhorizon.home.blog.