Harrington, Michael (1928–1989)

Michael Harrington, chairman of the Socialist Party of America from 1968 to 1972, was one of the most influential democratic socialists in 20th-century United States. During his long career of social activism, his affiliations ranged from the Catholic Worker movement of the 1950s, the Trotskyist Young Peoples Socialist League, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, to his chairmanship of the reconstructed Socialist Party in the late 1960s, the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee in the 1970s and the Democratic Socialists of America in the 1980s. Known as the “man who discovered poverty,” much of Harrington's work related to ethical critiquing of the capitalist system, but he fought also for racial justice during the civil rights struggle and for peace during the Vietnam War. For most of his life, he stood in the tradition of reformist democratic socialism, for which he devised some of the most cogent intellectual justifications and programs.

Harrington started his public career as a devout 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 Catholic social doctrine. Rooted in the papal encyclicals Rerum Novarum of 1891 and Quadragesimo Anno of 1931, this approach to social transformation was critical alike of unregulated capitalism and collectivist socialism. Its adherents wanted to empower voluntary institutions and private charitable giving and insisted that the state should work to eliminate causes of industrial conflict and exploitation by outlawing child labor, instituting a minimum wage, and helping the organized labor movement. Since 1933, one of the key practitioners of Neo-Thomism had been Dorothy Day's and Peter Maurin's Catholic Worker movement, which was also a principal center for Christian pacifism in the United States. Harrington joined it and became editor of its newspaper, the Catholic Worker. Like Day, he was soon converted to Maurin's philosophy of personalism. Its stress on personal self-sacrifice and commitment to social engagement, personalism objected to collectivism as a form of objectification of human beings.

These notions left an indelible mark on Harrington's thought for the rest of his life, but temperamentally he was ill at ease with the Catholic Worker movement's inevitably slow methodology. By the early 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 Peoples Socialist [Page 673]League (the “Yipsels”), an affiliate of the Socialist Party that was controlled by the leading Trotskyist organizer of the time, Max Shachtman. In these years, the Trotskyists' preoccupation was 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 failed, so-called third camp movement by which the Shachtmanites tried to unify in a single coalition labor party all “genuine” socialists.

In the 1950s, Harrington became involved in civil rights struggles, as well. He strongly objected to the occasional violations of civil liberties that were involved in Senator Joseph McCarthy's attempts at ferreting out communist subversives. Together with Rev. Martin Luther King's associate Bayard Rustin, he began, too, to organize students for the fight against racial discrimination, and he traveled south to take part in several marches and sit-ins. This work exposed Harrington to new nonsocialist currents of social activism and started slowly to chip away at his doctrinaire Trotskyism. More and more, he became interested in building a non-class-based coalition labor and progressive party that would pool the strengths of socialists and anti-Stalinist communists, labor and student activists, artists, and intellectuals. At the same time, Harrington set upon the investigation of poverty in America that first brought him to national attention.

...