Dreams of Plenty

By Horace Judson

SOCIALISM

by MICHAEL HARRINGTON

436 pages. Saturday Review Press.

$12.50.

Michael Harrington--social democrat, pacifist, intellectual, born Roman Catholic but out of practice--has the scrubbed, care-lined radiance of a man who in other circumstances might well have been a worker-priest, American style. Instead, he is a revolutionary pamphleteer and chairman of the Socialist Party of the U.S. Yet poverty is his vow and his ideological passion.

Out of his direct experience as a welfare worker in St. Louis and New York, Harrington in 1962 wrote The Other America. A sermon about the extent of poverty in the U.S., the book was credited with inspiring the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations' poverty program. Now Harrington has lifted his gaze to the perspectives of history. In Socialism, his faith shines through. His moral sensibility is right on. Yet in detail and hard argument, his book falters.

The U.S., Harrington writes, is almost "the only country on the face of the globe where 'socialism' is a bad word." As a correction he reviews the history of socialism, concentrating on the mid-19th century in Europe and the mid-20th century in the U.S. Harrington's history is revisionist, intended to demonstrate first that Marx and Engels were not authoritarian elitists but popular democrats, and second that the Democratic Party and American labor even now have within them a democratic-socialist movement. Harrington's phrases repeatedly betray the difficulties of such a task: "the unknown Karl Marx" or "the American social democracy, our invisible mass movement."

It has long been fashionable to distinguish the young Marx--compassionate and angry in his sociology and undeniably idealistic in his belief in mass worker democracy--from the mature author of Das Kapital. Harrington, by contrast, finds the early convictions undiminished in fervor throughout Marx's writings and actions, except for a period at the time of the revolutions of 1848 and The Communist Manifesto. He is a surprisingly effective advocate even when he must argue such an essential but difficult point as that Marx's dictatorship of the proletariat "does not mean dictatorship but the fulfillment of democracy."

As for the socialist impulse in the U.S., Harrington points out that it was vigorous though often eccentric until World War I, and then trickled away. But if one listens carefully enough, he says, socialism is audible as an underground torrent. By the '30s, official Socialists as well as their Communist opponents were noisy but ineffectual and faction-ridden. Certainly Harrington is right to underline once more that the '30s were far more important for the growing power of labor unions within the Democratic Party. Union leaders have from time to time made demands on the welfare state much more audacious than anyone who has not carefully read the party platforms may realize. Still, to generalize from this that the working class forms the basis of a conscious and cohesive mass left-wing movement, comparable to the British Labor Party, is well beyond the proofs Harrington is able to muster.

Through the long argument Har rington's greatest strength is also his greatest weakness: that shining sense of moral purpose. Even when outlining the welfare reforms and the redistribution of wealth that he believes are needed forthwith, he never lets go of his knowledge that socialism is ultimately concerned with the transformation of the relations of men to themselves and their fellows, and that this transformation will never be brought about simply by radical equalization of incomes and democratization of social controls. Socialism, Harrington learned from Marx, is not possible until there is true abundance for everyone, everywhere -- until "the sentence decreed in the Garden of Eden will have been served."

Whether or not the original nature of man would actually be transformed in Paradise appears unlikely to be tested. Depressing figures intervene, despite Harrington's attempts to explain them away. The arithmetical average of the present wealth of nations evenly distributed would bring everyone to some thing like the living standard of Spain or Southern Italy today. Future demands upon resources are likely to in crease geometrically. The mathematics of universal abundance is still Malthusian; to believe that the distribution of scarcity -- which is to say economics itself -- can be wished or willed away is a failure to know that numbers, when multiplied together, are more than abstractions.

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