Michael Harrington

Michael Harrington (born February 24, 1928, St. Louis, Missouri, U.S.—died July 31, 1989, Larchmont, New York) was an American socialist activist and author, best known for his book The Other America (1962), about poverty. He was also chairman of the Socialist Party of America from 1968 to 1972. Harrington was known as the “man who discovered poverty,” and much of his work was an ethical critique of the capitalist system.

(Read George Bernard Shaw’s 1926 Britannica essay on socialism.)

Harrington started his public career as a devout Roman Catholic and a political conservative. While a student at Yale Law School and the University of Chicago, he was deeply influenced by the neo-Thomist philosophies that informed Roman Catholic social doctrine. Rooted in the papal encyclicals Rerum novarum (1891; “New Things”) and Quadragesimo anno (1931; “In the 40th Year”), this approach to social transformation was critical of both unregulated capitalism and collectivist socialism. Its adherents sought to empower voluntary institutions and private charitable giving, and they believed that the state should work to eliminate causes of industrial conflict and exploitation—by outlawing child labour, instituting a minimum wage, and helping the organized labour movement. Founded in 1933 by activists Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin, the Catholic Worker Movement served to unite practitioners of neo-Thomism and became a principal centre for Christian pacifism in the United States. Harrington became a member in 1951 and served as the editor of its newspaper, the Catholic Worker. He was soon converted to Maurin’s philosophy of personalism, which stressed self-sacrifice and commitment to social engagement and saw collectivism as a form of human objectification.

Shift to Trotskyism and The Other America

Those notions left an indelible mark on Harrington’s thought, but he was unsatisfied with the slow progress of the Catholic Worker Movement. By the mid-1950s he had lost both his religious faith and his belief in Day’s methods of social transformation. Instead, Harrington became a Trotskyist. He joined the small and intensely sectarian Young People’s Socialist League, an affiliate of the Socialist Party that was controlled by Max Shachtman, the leading Trotskyist organizer. At that time the Trotskyists were preoccupied with proving that the Soviet Union was no longer a revolutionary workers’ state but had become a “bureaucratic collectivist” parody of socialism. Deeply anti-Stalinist yet committed to socialism, Harrington became a key publicist for the bureaucratic collectivist thesis. He helped to organize the so-called “Third Camp,” an unsuccessful endeavour which sought to unify all socialists in a single coalition labour party.

In the 1950s Harrington became involved in civil rights struggles. He strongly objected to the violations of civil liberties that occurred during U.S. Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s investigations of communist subversives. He also organized students for the fight against racial discrimination with Bayard Rustin, an associate of Martin Luther King, Jr., and traveled south to take part in marches and sit-ins. That work exposed Harrington to nonsocialist currents of social activism and started slowly to chip away at his doctrinaire Trotskyism. He became more interested in building a progressive coalition labour party that was not class-based and that would pool the strengths of not only socialists but also anti-Stalinist communists, labour and student activists, artists, and intellectuals.

In the late 1950s Harrington began investigating poverty in America, an endeavour that brought him to national attention. Sketched in a series of articles in Commentary magazine in 1959 and 1960 and in his seminal The Other America (1962), Harrington presented three arguments regarding poverty in the U.S. First, he challenged the prevailing assumption that the New Deal had practically ended poverty. His studies suggested that perhaps 50 million people still lived in deep and debilitating poverty, including various unskilled and immigrant workers, urban African Americans, the aged, and the handicapped, none of whom were specifically aided by the New Deal. Second, Harrington maintained that those people had fallen into a widespread “culture of poverty,” by which he meant a pervasive decay in community and family support structures and an almost complete absence of the traditional values of thrift, striving, and self-support. He believed that capitalist society could not provide those disenfranchised people with the essentials of a dignified life, and, in his structuralist view, Harrington claimed that the poor needed to be looked after by a socially conscious state. On that basis, Harrington proposed the third element in his analysis, his comprehensive program for a “war on poverty,” and advocated new federal legislation on housing, education, medical care, and labour relations. As a member of Pres. Lyndon B. Johnson’s task force in the War on Poverty, Harrington played a role in sketching the Great Society social reform program. He continued to insist, however, that the only lasting solution was a socialist reorganization of American government.

Harrington objected to the militant revolutionary tactics with which the emerging New Left tried to tackle this and other contemporary problems, including the Vietnam War. Acting through the Students for a Democratic Society and a successor faction, the “Weathermen” or “Weather Underground,” many of the members of the New Left came to abandon consensual political means in the 1960s and sought instead the complete destruction of all American institutions. Though critical of many aspects of American life, Harrington rejected such extreme ideologies. He denounced both the Vietnam War and the antiwar activists who hoped to use it to justify catastrophic revolutionary acts, and he stepped down from his position as national cochairman of the Socialist Party (which he held from 1968 to 1972) on those grounds. Harrington joined Shachtman’s so-called Realignment Caucus, a group of old Trotskyists within the Democratic Party, and tried to appropriate it for peaceful democratic socialism. Harrington continued that work in 1968 through his own New Democratic Coalition and after 1972 through the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC). Both organizations were meant to develop into powerful democratic socialist havens that could attract student activists to nonmilitant social politics and ideologically redirect the Democratic Party.

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Harrington’s ethical vision and legacy

The philosophy that Harrington disseminated through those groups and his many books was rooted in his lifelong ethical vision. He sought to push the Democratic Party toward what he called the “fourth New Deal,” a comprehensive program for social and economic reform centred on the goals of full employment and a strengthened welfare state. Harrington continued to oppose bureaucratic collectivist models of social reform, which he regarded as undemocratic and needlessly authoritarian. He envisioned the gradual coming of a socialized state that would continue to use the capitalist production process yet would apply socialist criteria in the distribution of its products.

In 1977 many of his proposed immediate reforms were included in the Democratic Party platform, though Harrington subsequently despaired of the party’s direction. In his final years he tried to popularize his vision through his new organization, the Democratic Socialists of America, which formed in 1982 as a joint venture by the DSOC and the New America Movement. In 1988 he published the autobiography The Long-Distance Runner.

When he died of cancer in 1989, Harrington was remembered as the last great intellectual leader of the democratic socialist movement in America. Firmly in the tradition of Eugene Debs and Norman Thomas, his arguments were always grounded in an intensely ethical critique of capitalist injustices and promoted gradualist, democratic, and non-catastrophic versions of socialism. Although he succeeded in only a few of his policy and organizing projects, he left a considerable legacy of writing on social, economic, and racial justice that inspired activists far beyond the small groups in which he worked.