12 minute read
Thank You, Bernie
(November 12, 2015)
A longtime democratic socialist looks back at what the socialist movement has (and hasn’t) accomplished—and ahead to where the Sanders revival might lead.
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for those few of us who have Been around the democratIc socialist Left for a long while (and I’m eighty), the road has been hard and often confused. Occasionally, though, we were successful in leading the way on some of the critical political issues of the twentieth century—most particularly on civil, labor, and women’s rights.
American socialism, I hope, will have brighter prospects in the twenty-first. The fall of communism, the Occupy Wall Street movement, growing inequality, and the arrival of Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign suggest that it may. With the “specter” of Soviet communism no longer haunting the world, the S-word is being un-demonized, especially for the young.
My experience of more than sixty years as a democratic socialist may serve to illustrate where the movement that Sanders now speaks for has been and is about. As a teenager, I first came in contact with the anti-democratic Left of Stalinism, attending a Jewish communist children’s camp for four summers in the late 1940s. But I figured out quite early that the Soviet sphere was authoritarian and anti-democratic and that its rationalizations for repression were fraudulent. I was helped in seeing this by two “old socialists” who happened to be at my high school (Samuel J. Tilden) in Brooklyn. One was Abraham Lefkowitz, the principal. He’d been a socialist leader in the 1920s and ’30s and a founder of the teachers union. The other was my legendary high school history teacher, Jules Kolodny, a comrade of Lefkowitz. Kolodny was a lawyer with a PhD—hardly a typical résumé for a high school teacher these days. He later became executive assistant to Albert Shanker when he became the president of the American Federation of Teachers.
My anti-Stalinist perspective was sharpened at Brandeis University, where I studied under a group of ex-Trotskyists who had just left the Independent Socialist League (ISL, better known as the Shachtmanites after its vociferous leader, Max Shachtman) in favor of a less sectarian democratic socialist existence around Dissent magazine, which they founded in 1954. It survives and thrives today under a new generation of writers. Irving Howe, who lived a double life as a left-wing spokesperson and Dissent founder and editor, and as a renowned literary critic, was our leader.
After graduating Brandeis, I moved on to law school at the University of Chicago. My time there was split between the law and left-wing politics. The U of C had vigorous chapters of the ISL both on and off campus. The “youth” leader of the ISL nationally then was Michael Harrington, who had moved through the Catholic Worker movement of Dorothy Day in New York City to become the rising young star of the Shachtmanites. Mike was indefatigable in traversing the country and speaking before any audience that
would listen to his always-intelligent and forceful socialist arguments. However, he is best remembered for his book The Other America, which is credited with starting the War on Poverty in the early 1960s. (Mike and the book were “discovered” by Dwight Macdonald in a 1962 review in the New Yorker, which was apparently read by many in the Kennedy White House.)
By the time I left Chicago, the ISL had merged with the Socialist Party of Eugene V. Debs and Norman Thomas. Thomas, who ran for president six times and was known as “America’s conscience” for such acts as his lonely opposition to the wartime internment of Japanese Americans, was then seventy-five (which I then thought ancient). He was not in the best of health, but he was in better shape than the party itself, which had ceased running candidates for office. The infusion of the Shachtmanites and their young activists helped keep it alive. It had much earlier lost the support of the needle trades unions and their leaders, who had gravitated into the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, led by Hubert Humphrey and former socialist organizer Walter Reuther.
What distinguished and energized the democratic socialists in the early 1960s was the civil rights movement. Between 1957 and 1960, when I left Chicago, the activity in which we had been most involved and made the biggest difference was seeking racial justice. During this period, Bayard Rustin, one of our stalwarts and a longtime anti-war and civil rights activist, and A. Philip Randolph, president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and a Harlem socialist activist going back to the 1920s, had organized with Dr. Martin Luther King both the Youth March for Integrated Schools and the Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom. These rallies in Washington, D.C., were the precursors and training school for the leaders of their celebrated August 28, 1963, March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, which Randolph chaired and Rustin organized. Randolph had threatened such Marches in 1941, demanding the desegregation of defense industries, and in 1948, demanding
the desegregation of the armed forces. He called off both marches only when President Roosevelt and President Truman, respectively, took the actions that Randolph had demanded.
Before I left law school and Chicago in June 1960, the first sit-in in Greensboro, North Carolina, had taken place, and the next phase of the civil rights struggle had begun. Our University of Chicago chapter of the Young People’s Socialist League (YPSL) spent our Saturdays all spring picketing the South Side Chicago Woolworths in support of the struggle in the South.
It was shortly after I left Chicago that Bernie Sanders arrived at the college and joined our YPSL chapter. I assume he got to know many of the wonderful Chicago friends I had made there. For sure, it was the beginning of his journey to his socialist political future.
At that time I planned to obtain an LLM in labor law at the New York University Law School during the 1960/1961 school year. Before the school year began, I succeeded in obtaining a summer job at the legal department of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. This was during the period when the Teamsters Union and its president, James R. Hoffa, were under intense congressional and governmental investigation for alleged corruption, and a feud between then congressional staffer Robert F. Kennedy and Hoffa was in full throttle. Remarkably, however, at the Teamsters headquarters, I found an incredible group of trade unionists clustered around Harold J. Gibbons, the union’s executive vice president. Gibbons was a coal miner’s son who had been a Socialist Party adherent in Chicago and St. Louis.110 Hoffa, too, was a coal miner’s son, but no socialist. During that summer, with union support and with fellow socialists, I continued to engage in civil rights activity in Washington, D.C. This included involvement in the picketing of
110. Gibbons is the subject of a new book by labor historian Robert Bussel, Fighting for Total Person Unionism, which recounts how Gibbons led the Teamsters in St. Louis into community organizing and civil rights campaigns.
the Jim Crow amusement park at Glen Echo, Maryland, with civil rights activists, among them Stokely Carmichael, who was then a student at Howard University.
At the end of the summer, I moved on to New York City and NYU Law School. At that time Harrington and others were deeply involved in left-wing politics and civil rights activity there. One notable meeting that I attended was at Rustin’s Harlem apartment, where we were in the process of taking a moribund, old left-wing youth organization, the Student League for Industrial Democracy (SLID), out of mothballs, reviving it, staffing it, and turning it into a northern college student group that would support the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), then organizing in the South. Thus was born the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and ultimately the “New Left.”
At the end of the school year, the Teamsters asked me to return to Washington as a regular member of its legal staff, where I remained until 1967. This was the period when I learned my craft as a lawyer from some of the best union attorneys who had served the labor movement and working people going back to the 1930s. In my seven years at the Teamsters, we handled seven cases in the United States Supreme Court, all of which the union won. Of course, among the justices then were a number who had family, political, or professional backgrounds and sympathies with unions—such as Chief Justice Earl Warren and Justices William Brennan, Felix Frankfurter, William O. Douglas, Arthur Goldberg, Thurgood Marshall, and Hugo Black.
By 1962, the civil rights movement had advanced dramatically, and with it SDS as well. At a meeting at a union-owned camp in Port Huron, Michigan, a remarkably talented group of young white activists and militants drafted a left-wing political manifesto that came to be known as the Port Huron Statement. It posited the development of a new progressive vision for America around the concept of “participatory democracy.” The principal drafter of the statement
was Tom Hayden, then a recent University of Michigan graduate. Harrington and a few other Socialist Party leaders were invited to attend, but Harrington as their spokesperson lambasted the SDSers because their statement was not sufficiently anti-communist. The rift this created was to have destructive results for the Left for years to come. As the sixties unfolded, the relationship between the “Old Socialist Left” and the “New Left” didn’t improve. Indeed, the hostilities would be intensified over the war in Vietnam.
Early in 1963, Randolph and Rustin issued their “call” for a March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. We socialists went all out in support of Randolph and Rustin; the results are still resonating. A quarter of a million marchers gathered on the Mall in Washington on August 28 to hear the speeches of Dr. King; Randolph; Rustin; John Lewis, then head of SNCC; and others and to plan the next phase of the struggle.
Within the Socialist Party itself, a split developed beginning in the mid-1960s between those who supported the war in Vietnam, principally because it sought to contain the spread of communism, and those who had no truck for communism but felt that the war was misguided and a monumental mistake. As for Harrington, he was slow in coming around to an anti-war position but eventually left the pro-war Socialist Party, which had changed its name to Social Democrats (SDUSA), and with others, such as Irving Howe and me, founded the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC) in 1973. While SDUSA gave voice to the Cold War hawkishness and antipathy to post-sixties social movements that characterized the conservative Meany-Kirkland led AFL-CIO, DSOC aligned itself with liberal activists such as George McGovern, who sought to move the Democratic Party away from aggressive defense policies. With Harrington’s prompting, DSOC also became an organization where onetime sixties radicals met and made common cause with progressives in the labor movement—a reconciliation of New Left and Old that Mike, remorseful about his role at Port Huron, sought to foster.
During his leadership of DSOC, Harrington also served as its representative to the Socialist International, a collective of worldwide socialist parties. In that capacity he worked closely with such socialist leaders as Olaf Palme of Sweden, François Mitterrand of France, and Willy Brandt of Germany. In December 1980, these and many other foreign socialist leaders, along with large numbers of American leftists, came to a conference on “Eurosocialism” in Washington, D.C., which Harrington organized and chaired. This was an effort to introduce the leaders of European democratic socialism to the American Left and to expose Americans to European democratic socialism. The conservative leadership of the AFL-CIO, which had not supported the March on Washington in 1963, opposed Harrington’s 1980 Eurosocialism conference as well.
In 1982, in a move strongly supported by Harrington, DSOC merged with the New American Movement (NAM), an organization composed chiefly of onetime New Leftists. Some, including Irving Howe, saw NAM as a remnant of SDS and opposed the merger based upon their conviction that it still was insufficiently anti-communist. The Soviet Union was then still a hostile and anti-democratic force in the world. But the merger succeeded, and Democratic Socialists of America was born.
Michael Harrington died of cancer at age sixty-one on July 31, 1989. Sadly, he lived to see the brutal suppression of thousands of Chinese students and workers on June 4 of that year at Tiananmen Square and elsewhere, and he missed the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, and the subsequent implosion of Soviet communism. To us, these events served to vindicate the democratic socialist critique of international communism, although many on the right saw these developments as a repudiation of socialism itself. In any event, Harrington’s untimely death took from the democratic socialist movement its most articulate and attractive leader and spokesperson.
The twenty-six years since Harrington’s death were fallow for democratic socialism. The movement barely survived. The Clinton-Bush-Obama years did not provide an opening for a national discussion of democratic socialist alternatives, nor did the movement develop any recognized national leaders prepared to spearhead such a discussion. The devastating Great Recession of 2009 did bring forth the Occupy movement, but it lacked coherent political leadership and direction.
Enter Bernie Sanders into the Democratic presidential race in 2015, and more broadly into public consciousness, and remarkably, the discussion of democratic socialism has been renewed. Most of the credit for this must go to Bernie himself, who has dedicated his political career to advancing progressive and socialist principles and in serving as the first openly socialist United States senator in American history. (There have been several socialist members of the House, going back to 1911.) And now, through debates, speeches, and social media, Bernie is bringing to a new generation of Americans a message of hope and political and economic renewal for the future. Whether or not he succeeds, democratic socialism is back on the American political agenda, perhaps even more broadly than ever before because of new technology and social media, and because the related issues of inequality and oligopoly are more relevant and immediate than ever.
It was Louis Brandeis (often accused, inaccurately, of being a socialist) who said, “We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.” This, of course, is one of Bernie’s principal messages when he calls, for example, for the overruling of Citizens United.
In my law office hangs a poster from Eugene Victor Debs’s 1908 Socialist Party presidential campaign, which bears the slogan “Enough for All—All the Time.” This might be one of Bernie’s slogans as well—when our capacity to provide for the health, education, and general welfare of all Americans has never been greater,
but when the division of the fruits of our labor is heavily skewed in favor of the few.
While the United States has not been able to sustain a strong socialist movement, it has often heard and modestly and belatedly heeded the movement’s most convincing and eloquent voices for progressive social change. Bernie is one of them.
So, for at least right now, America, “Feel the Bern!”
