Re: [Marxism] GP entrails [In defense of Harrington and American Menshevism]

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Although I am no Peter Camejo, let me take a stab at answering Harrington.

>But in the United States anyone who declares himself or herself a 
>member of a party can, without the payment
>of dues or the affirmation of a single political principle, help 
>determine the leadership, program, and policies of the party.

This is ridiculous. Just read the NY Times article on Chuck Schumer 
and his Wall Street pals to see whether "dues" determines program in 
the DP. Politicians are for sale and gladly go to bed with the 
highest bidder. Also, program means anything except that which goes 
against the grain of capitalism, like imperialist war. Politicians 
would rather lose an election than lose a war.

>The U.S. electoral system ? something which socialists cannot change 
>by an act of will ? does not allow for a credible form of 
>"independent political action" (as the Trotskyist and 
>Trotskyist-derived portions of the U.S. Left call it). The real 
>options are to support and build the anti-corporate left wing of the 
>Democrats to the point where either (a) the Democrats 
>becomedominated by the left or (b) more likely, the "party" splits 
>along ideological and class lines, or to abstain from electoral 
>politicsaltogether except as a form of protest, which ensures that 
>American workers will not take you seriously.

What the hell is the anti-corporate left wing of the Democrats? What 
does it really mean to be "anti-corporate"? Is Dennis Kucinich 
"anti-corporate"? The real goal is not to be "anti-corporate" but 
"anti-capitalist". The only politician that has ever suggested that 
he is opposed to capitalism is Bernie Sanders and the left learned 
long ago that this is just sugar frosting on a pile of shit. Sanders 
in fact has mastered the art of using some rhetoric against 
capitalism while he is happy to fit into capitalist politics.

>I wish it was otherwise. Yes, the Democratic Party taken as a whole 
>is a cesspool. But it's a cesspool in which those fighting for a 
>pro-worker politics have no choice but to wade.

Was Harrington "fighting for pro-worker politics" when he supported 
the war in Vietnam? I guess Vietnamese workers are not real workers.

>It's true that prior to the 20th century, U.S. primaries were 
>machine-driven, closed affairs. With open primaries the parties became more
>amorphous ? which is why industrial unions in the 1930s were able to 
>influence them in a positive way, within limits. *The nature of the 
>American electoral system is what it is, and not to be overcome by 
>an act of will*. The reason that third parties haven't become major 
>parties once the ballot access rules were changed in the 1890s is 
>not a failure to try. It's been tried, and tried, and tried again. 
>Similarly, the link of major institutions such as the NAACP and the 
>AFL-CIO to the Democratic Party is not to be overcome by an act of will.

Industrial unions did not make their influence felt in the 1930s 
through primaries but through direct action. FDR retreated from 
centrism because socialist revolution was a very real threat. Workers 
were voting through their feet when they sat in at factories.

>Build the working people's organizations, build the unions, build 
>the progressive forces, but don't expect to build a new Labour Party 
>and then expect the working people to come to you.  Then what do you 
>do?  Wait for some radicalizing event, some downturn and expect this 
>working peoples party (which would be what-- Social Democratic at 
>best), to become radicalized and turned into a revolutionary 
>party?  Its a fantasy.

It should be stressed that Michael Harrington had the same kind of 
rotten, anti-revolutionary politics as a young man that he had when 
he debated Peter Camejo as an old codger. In a 1959 exchange between 
Harrington and Bert Cochran, who was sort of the Peter Camejo of his 
day, over China. Harrington fretted that Cochran was you "unwitting 
aid to those who would corrupt the very image of socialism through 
their attitude phenomenon like that of Chinese Communism." The full 
exchange is here:

http://www.marx.org/history/etol/newspape/amersocialist/amersoc_5905.htm

>I wish the situation was different in America.  I wish there was a 
>revolutionary force that had any sort of potential.  I wish the left-wing of
>possible could be overcome by an act of will, but unforuntately like 
>Karl Marx himself said, "Men make their own history, but they do not 
>make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances 
>chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, 
>given and transmitted from the past."

There should be a law against people like Michael Harrington (or Norm 
Geras, et al) quoting Marx.

>I'll be in the DSA, in the cess pool of the Democratic Party, in the 
>mainstream unions, where the working people are, until you comrades 
>can prove me wrong and build a viable alternative for working people 
>and then I'll apologize and happily join you.

For people interested in a good critique of Michael Harrington, you 
can read Maurice Isserman's biography which is sympathetic in many 
ways. However, you can get an idea of what troubled Isserman from Tom 
Hayden's review of the book:

The Shachtmanites were vectors of a toxic leftist tradition that 
Michael himself once described (in reference to Bella Abzug!) as 
"high-minded viciousness, an ugly inheritance from Karl Marx's 
dyspeptic, angry attitude toward all opponents."

They imagined themselves an elite cadre whose task was to "bore from 
within" to take over groups like the student branch of Americans for 
Democratic Action (which folded in convulsions as a result), to 
distribute party propaganda and hold forums to expose other leftists 
as impostors. Needless to say, new activitists like myself felt the 
last thing cold-war America needed was another movement against 
Communism. In our eyes the Soviet Union was neither a beacon of hope 
nor an immediate threat. We wanted America to live up to its ideals 
and stop supporting apartheid in the name of anti-Communism, and we 
wanted both sides to decelerate the arms race. According to 
Shachtmanite doctrine, this made us potential "Stalinoids" who had to 
be corrected at all costs.

What was Michael Harrington doing in this crowd? According to 
Isserman, "good-hearted, amiable Michael, defying expectations, 
proved a natural at faction-fighting." In the early fifties, 
foreshadowing things to come, Michael was expelled from Norman 
Thomas's Socialist Party because of his involvement in trying to take 
over its youth branch. In less than a decade, Michael would trigger 
similar internal crises with the new generation of radicals, like 
myself, who should have sparked his hope. Isserman's account is 
readable and objective, covering such episodes as these:

§ In 1962 Michael spent the entire opening night at the founding 
convention of Students for a Democratic Society in Port Huron, 
Michigan, attacking the draft I wrote of the Port Huron Statement for 
its criticism of both sides in the cold war arms race, its suggestion 
that organized labor lacked a vision and its assertion that students 
were a historical agency of change. He left abruptly the next 
morning, later acknowledging that he hadn't read the document.

§ Shortly afterward, Michael chaired an inquisitorial hearing on the 
Port Huron Statement by the League for Industrial Democracy, the 
parent organization of SDS, and ordered the firing of two SDS staff 
members (Al Haber and myself), the placement of locks on our doors 
and the impoundment of the organization's mailing lists. While we 
continued trying to launch a student movement, he then went to Paris 
for a year.

§ In 1964 he joined the Democratic Party establishment in favoring a 
compromise that would give two nonvoting seats to the Mississippi 
Freedom Democratic Party while seating the white-only delegation at 
the Democratic convention. Since the expulsion of the segregationist 
Democrats would have achieved the very "political realignment" that 
Michael preached, the compromise was denounced bitterly as a sellout 
by civil rights activists.

§ From 1965 on, according to Isserman, Michael and his comrades 
"established the reputation...as a group that had little to offer to 
the cause of peace in Vietnam--little that is, except for criticisms 
of those who were actually trying to stop the war." SDS leader Carl 
Oglesby said that while he originally admired Harrington and Howe, 
"here were these guys...denouncing me as a Red because I wouldn't 
criticize both sides equally--which seemed bullshit because both 
sides weren't invading each other equally, weren't napalming each 
other equally."

§ While Michael occasionally criticized the Vietnam War in 
editorials, he didn't make a public speech against it until 1969, 
when Richard Nixon was in the White House instead of Michael's 
Democratic labor allies.

full: http://www.tomhayden.com/articlesGA7.htm






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