Maurice Isserman
Jacobin
Socialism for Harrington, in other words, was more a process, or perhaps a journey. “Socialism is still beginning,” Harrington wrote on another occasion, “a task to be accomplished, not a destiny to be awaited.”
As readers of Jacobin don’t need to be reminded, democratic socialism is currently having its (hopefully longer than) fifteen minutes of fame in the United States, sparked by Bernie Sanders’s strong showing in the 2016 Democratic presidential campaign, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez’s stunning victory in New York State’s 14th Congressional District two years later, and a resulting tenfold growth in DSA’s membership. One side effect is that Michael Harrington’s name is getting mentioned more often in mainstream publications — if sometimes disparagingly.
Last March, in an article in New York magazine titled “When Did Everyone Become a Socialist?” reporter Simon van Zuylen-Wood offered a good-natured, if gossipy, set of variations on the “Brooklyn hipster” trope about DSA’s recent gains (“At least in Brooklyn and the spiritual Brooklyns of America, calling yourself a socialist sounds sexier than anything else out there . . . ”). Well, whatever, he spelled the name right.
Not much history in the piece, at least before 2016, but van Zuylen-Wood does take one glance back toward DSA’s misty origins in the long-ago eighties, writing that the organization “was founded, to little fanfare, in 1982 by the social theorist Michael Harrington. Harrington’s group occupied the ‘left wing of the possible,’ a sensible enough mantra that excited nobody and helped the organization stay minuscule for decades.”
“Left wing of the possible,” I’ll admit, is not the most exciting slogan I’ve ever embraced. As a freshman in college in 1968, I joined Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), which offered much more rousing alternatives — “The elections don’t mean shit – Vote with your feet,” is one I particularly remember from that fall (I still have the button). There were also a lot of bracing slogans about things we were determined to “smash” — imperialism, racism, sexism, you name it. Good stuff. Exciting. Of course, a year later, SDS, a hundred thousand strong when I signed on, proved that its most enduring legacy lay in smashing itself out of existence.
Somehow, in contrast, Harrington’s boring old DSA hung on for three and a half decades of obscurity until it could reinvent itself as the institutional base upon which the current revival of democratic socialism is being built. And, as I asked in a letter to the editor of New York in response to van Zuylen-Wood’s article, what is it that’s “behind DSA’s recent growth, if not a variant of operating as the ‘left wing of the possible’? Isn’t that what Bernie Sanders represents? And Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez? They are working within the Democratic Party to push it leftward.” And with considerable success, I might have added, as the party embraces what a few years ago would have been seen as fringe policies and slogans — Medicare For All, the Green New Deal, a $15 an hour federal minimum wage. All of which was an awfully long time coming — but might, with some historical perspective, be seen as the vindication of Harrington’s “sensible enough mantra that excited nobody.”
Still, it’s probably wiser to let sleeping slogans lie. “Left wing of the possible” was coined in a particular historical moment, the dawn of the “Reagan Revolution,” when Antonio Gramsci’s “pessimism of the intellect” seemed a better guide to the immediate future of the American left than its companion “optimism of the will.” Thanks for the shift lately to a more optimistic appraisal of the Left’s prospects go to Bernie, AOC, Rashida Tlaib, and a host of others.
Members of the new generation of democratic socialists will naturally come up with slogans more congenial to the times in which we now live (and, I suspect, “the elections don’t mean shit” won’t be one of them). Since Harrington’s lifelong political project, from the 1950s through the 1980s, was recruiting the next generation of American socialists, I imagine that would strike him as entirely appropriate.
Reporting back to his comrades on a national speaking tour he had undertaken on behalf of the newly founded Democratic Socialists of America in 1982, Harrington commented wryly that the only “negative note” he encountered en route was an otherwise sympathetic article in the Baltimore Sun describing him as “the grand old man of American socialism.” Actually, he insisted, he remained in his sixth decade “a closet youth.” Thirty years after his death, I think both descriptions fit the man and his legacy.
Colaborador
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| Michael Harrington em Boston em 11 de dezembro de 1977. (Barbara Alper / Getty Images) |
Trinta anos atrás, em 31 de julho de 1989, Michael Harrington morreu em Larchmont, Nova York, vítima do câncer contra o qual lutava desde 1985. Ele tinha 61 anos. Entre os legados duradouros de Harrington estão sua autoria de The Other America: Poverty in the United States, o livro de 1962 que ajudou a desencadear a Guerra contra a Pobreza durante o governo Lyndon Johnson, seu serviço como conselheiro político do Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. ("Você sabe", o Dr. King disse uma vez brincando a Harrington, "nós nem sabíamos que éramos pobres até lermos seu livro") e seu papel de liderança na fundação dos Socialistas Democráticos da América (DSA) em 1982.
Harrington foi criado em uma família devotamente católica em St. Louis, educado em instituições jesuítas e ganhou sua primeira experiência política de esquerda no movimento Catholic Worker de Dorothy Day. Em seus últimos anos, confrontando sua própria mortalidade, ele encontrou as frases religiosas familiares de sua infância ecoando em latim em seus pensamentos, especialmente Magnificat anima mea Dominum (Minha alma magnifica a glória do Senhor).
Harrington não era realmente um crente desde que deixou o Catholic Worker para o movimento socialista em 1952, aos 24 anos. Nem mesmo a perspectiva de morte iminente mudaria isso; pouco antes do fim, ele disse à sua companheira de infância e prima Peggy Fitzgibbon, uma freira, que se ao morrer ele de alguma forma ficasse cara a cara com Deus no céu, ele pretendia acusá-lo de resmungar.
Isso não significava que ele havia perdido o interesse nos ensinamentos religiosos e na sensibilidade de sua juventude; seus ecos continuaram a informar a maneira como ele entendia o mundo, incluindo seu compromisso pessoal com a causa socialista. “Eu cresci na Igreja”, ele disse a um repórter no início dos anos 1980, “e desde quando eu era criança a Igreja dizia que sua vida não é algo que você deve desperdiçar; sua vida é confiada a algo mais importante do que você mesmo.”
No capítulo introdutório de The Politics at God’s Funeral, uma consideração estendida sobre moralidade e política de uma perspectiva socialista publicada em 1983, Harrington discutiu as implicações do argumento do filósofo do século XVIII Immanuel Kant de que a existência de Deus não pode ser provada:
Então Deus não é a base da moralidade, pois a moralidade repousa sobre a razão, e a razão não pode demonstrar que Deus existe. Ele é, ao contrário, um postulado da moralidade, um ser que nos dá causa para agir sobre o imperativo categórico da consciência. Agimos “como se” Deus estivesse lá.
Um “postulado” é algo sugerido ou assumido como verdadeiro, como a base do raciocínio, argumento ou crença. O socialismo para Harrington, pelo menos em seus últimos anos, havia se tornado uma espécie de “imperativo categórico” kantiano, uma exigência que deve ser obedecida para satisfazer as demandas da consciência. Assim, para um crente religioso, “agimos ‘como se’ Deus estivesse lá”, ou, no caso de Harrington como socialista, agimos como se alcançar o socialismo fosse uma possibilidade iminente.
Entrevistando Irving Howe, editor fundador da revista Dissent, alguns anos após a morte de Harrington, perguntei a ele se seu bom amigo e camarada realmente acreditava que ele veria o socialismo em sua própria vida. Na verdade, não, Howe respondeu, certamente não em suas últimas décadas de envolvimento político. Howe também comparou essa compreensão do significado do socialismo ao imperativo categórico de Kant, “algo que ajuda... a determinar seu comportamento imediato”.
Socialism for Harrington, in other words, was more a process, or perhaps a journey. “Socialism is still beginning,” Harrington wrote on another occasion, “a task to be accomplished, not a destiny to be awaited.”
As readers of Jacobin don’t need to be reminded, democratic socialism is currently having its (hopefully longer than) fifteen minutes of fame in the United States, sparked by Bernie Sanders’s strong showing in the 2016 Democratic presidential campaign, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez’s stunning victory in New York State’s 14th Congressional District two years later, and a resulting tenfold growth in DSA’s membership. One side effect is that Michael Harrington’s name is getting mentioned more often in mainstream publications — if sometimes disparagingly.
Last March, in an article in New York magazine titled “When Did Everyone Become a Socialist?” reporter Simon van Zuylen-Wood offered a good-natured, if gossipy, set of variations on the “Brooklyn hipster” trope about DSA’s recent gains (“At least in Brooklyn and the spiritual Brooklyns of America, calling yourself a socialist sounds sexier than anything else out there . . . ”). Well, whatever, he spelled the name right.
Not much history in the piece, at least before 2016, but van Zuylen-Wood does take one glance back toward DSA’s misty origins in the long-ago eighties, writing that the organization “was founded, to little fanfare, in 1982 by the social theorist Michael Harrington. Harrington’s group occupied the ‘left wing of the possible,’ a sensible enough mantra that excited nobody and helped the organization stay minuscule for decades.”
“Left wing of the possible,” I’ll admit, is not the most exciting slogan I’ve ever embraced. As a freshman in college in 1968, I joined Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), which offered much more rousing alternatives — “The elections don’t mean shit – Vote with your feet,” is one I particularly remember from that fall (I still have the button). There were also a lot of bracing slogans about things we were determined to “smash” — imperialism, racism, sexism, you name it. Good stuff. Exciting. Of course, a year later, SDS, a hundred thousand strong when I signed on, proved that its most enduring legacy lay in smashing itself out of existence.
Somehow, in contrast, Harrington’s boring old DSA hung on for three and a half decades of obscurity until it could reinvent itself as the institutional base upon which the current revival of democratic socialism is being built. And, as I asked in a letter to the editor of New York in response to van Zuylen-Wood’s article, what is it that’s “behind DSA’s recent growth, if not a variant of operating as the ‘left wing of the possible’? Isn’t that what Bernie Sanders represents? And Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez? They are working within the Democratic Party to push it leftward.” And with considerable success, I might have added, as the party embraces what a few years ago would have been seen as fringe policies and slogans — Medicare For All, the Green New Deal, a $15 an hour federal minimum wage. All of which was an awfully long time coming — but might, with some historical perspective, be seen as the vindication of Harrington’s “sensible enough mantra that excited nobody.”
Still, it’s probably wiser to let sleeping slogans lie. “Left wing of the possible” was coined in a particular historical moment, the dawn of the “Reagan Revolution,” when Antonio Gramsci’s “pessimism of the intellect” seemed a better guide to the immediate future of the American left than its companion “optimism of the will.” Thanks for the shift lately to a more optimistic appraisal of the Left’s prospects go to Bernie, AOC, Rashida Tlaib, and a host of others.
Members of the new generation of democratic socialists will naturally come up with slogans more congenial to the times in which we now live (and, I suspect, “the elections don’t mean shit” won’t be one of them). Since Harrington’s lifelong political project, from the 1950s through the 1980s, was recruiting the next generation of American socialists, I imagine that would strike him as entirely appropriate.
Reporting back to his comrades on a national speaking tour he had undertaken on behalf of the newly founded Democratic Socialists of America in 1982, Harrington commented wryly that the only “negative note” he encountered en route was an otherwise sympathetic article in the Baltimore Sun describing him as “the grand old man of American socialism.” Actually, he insisted, he remained in his sixth decade “a closet youth.” Thirty years after his death, I think both descriptions fit the man and his legacy.
Colaborador
Maurice Isserman, membro fundador da DSA, é autor de The Other American: The Life of Michael Harrington (2000). Ele leciona história no Hamilton College.
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