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The main editor of the (I would say misnamed) Jacobin magazine has
published a couple of hosannas to Michael Harrington (who I will not
further characterize in deference to comrades who insist it is impolitic
to call people social-imperialist scumbags).
This has provoked some discussion on the ISO's Socialist Worker
website: <http://socialistworker.org/2013/05/08/taking-sides-on-harrington>
This is my take on the discussion, which I submitted to their comment
section a few minutes ago.
* * *
I'm glad to see Socialist Worker isn't falling for the "Saint Michael
Harrington" BS that seem to have overthrown Jacobin politics at a
certain magazine.
But let me say --as someone who in less than a month will be eligible
for social security-- that those of us of my generation who were exposed
to Michael Harrington in the Vietnam era, and have not repented of being
rebels, have much more assertive opinions about Harrington than your
writer, who was a few years younger.
In my book, at least, Michael Harrington wasn't wrong. He was a scab. A
Judas goat. A traitor.
Some people say Harrington was "against" the Vietnam War. Bullshit. He
was a firm supporter of American imperialism. He was critical of the way
the U.S. went about imposing its imperial rule because it was clumsy,
ham-handed and ineffective -- not because it was wrong. He focused his
energy not on combating the war, but on countering the antiwar
movement. He was a vicious red-baiting opponent of the antiwar movement
who used his supposedly "critical" stance towards the war to make his
fifth-columnist sabotage of the antiwar movement more effective.
True, he was for "negotiations" starting in 1965, and five or six year
later, there was a big debate in the antiwar movement around
negotiation-focused demands that, in essence, supported the diplomatic
efforts of the Vietnamese to "help" the U.S. extricate itself from the
quagmire. Them issue was something like whether adopting such stances
would undermine the principled position of the antiwar movement that the
U.S. had no right to dictate --or even discuss!-- what the Vietnamese
should do with THEIR country.
Harrington had absolutely NOTHING to do with that. That was a discussion
on OUR side of the barricades. Harrington was not on that side; his
positions were NOT about defending the rights of the Vietnamese, but
about how far the U.S. could go in imposing its dictates on the Vietnamese.
Saying Harrington was "for" the antiwar movement or the Vietnamese
patriots is like saying some newspaper editor in the coal country is
"for" the workers because he says they really deserve higher wages and
it's a shame about all the accidents but that doesn't justify them
joining a union or going on strike, especially since that's the sort of
thing only Communist terrorist subversives do.
One last comment -- when I was around 19 or 20, at the time of the (May
4, 1970) Kent State massacres or a little after, Harrington published
book called "Socialism." You can find it on Amazon for $.01 plus
shipping, but let me warn you: even if you don't pay shipping, you're
being ripped off.
One surprising thing about it is that at the very peak of he struggle
around Vietnam --the most important political issue of his entire
lifetime-- he could not find himself clear to devoting at least one
paragraph to the conflict in his 400-page magnum opus. The other very
surprising thing was his thesis that if people in poor countries tried
to make a socialist revolution, this would inevitable lead to a
Stalinist Zombie apocalypse, because only white --I mean economically
developed-- countries could hope to have a real socialist revolution.
I remember discussing this with a friend and comrade, James Logan and my
saying this smelled like some sort of white liberal fantasy about saving
the world, and he said, yeah, wearing white robes and a mask.
Anyways, this was back in the day, circa 1970, and James was Black, from
the South, and in the South. And I'm sure he didn't mean anything from
the wisecrack.
Still, if it's about socialism, I'd just as soon comrades left Michael
Harrington out of it. He doesn't belong there.
Joaquín
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