Michael Harrington Archives

August 16, 2022

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

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.

May 30, 2022

by Atlee McFellin

The Revolutionary Passion of Those Who Suffer Most

Most people know who Karl Marx was, at least to one extent or another. Remarkably and, yet also unsurprisingly, it’s Jenny Westphalen (aka Jenny Marx) whose understanding of the world we desperately need right now. The sensuous materialism she briefly expressed in her letters to husband Karl illuminates a path of hopeful imminent communal revolution.

Roughly a year after they married and less than a month after the birth of their first child, Karl unfortunately left Jenny for Paris to cosplay as revolutionary less than three years after completing his doctoral dissertation in philosophy. Awaiting him was a meagerly paying job as an agitational socialist journalist. In June of 1844, less than a month after he left, she wrote to him that her “heart is yearning” and for even just “a few words to tell me that you are well and are longing for me a little.”