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hawkish A.F.L.-C.I.O. leadership; and working-class "rednecks"
who leaned towards George Wallace's form of populism. Diverse as
they were on social and political issues, Harrington believed they
could be united by concentrating on economic issues such as health
insurance and full employment, all of which would push American
politics towards the left. His radical agenda, then, was to be waged
within the Democratic Party, rather than outside its ranks where
only left sectarians dwelled.
The hidden theme in Harrington's book appears in a brief but
revealing notation . At the start ofthe seventies, he writes, he and his
comrades were "very much in sync with the liberal/labor forces on
our right flank," while those to the left of him considered Harrington
to be a sellout. By the 1980s, this no longer was true. As Harrington's
book appeared, he was supporting and writing speeches for Jesse
Jackson, and authoring apologias for a candidate whose own oppor–
tunism, uncritical third-worldism and anti-Semitism used to make
up the very kind of left-wing politics Harrington rejected.
Why did Harrington move in such a direction? The key, I
think, is to be found in his statement that he sought to build a new
movement that would "become the multi-tendency rallying point of
the entire anticapitalist Left," that would avoid "historic differences"
while moving towards unity on behalf of immediate tasks . In prac–
tice, such a perspective meant seeking an opening to the avowed an–
tidemocratic left - including fellow travellers who may have broken
with the old pro-Moscow Communist Party, but whose intellectual
orbit and political practice had not strayed beyond the point of their
origin. Thus Harrington, who had rejected marching with Com–
munists in peace marches of the sixties, now sought to have his old
enemies join him in his new organization.
What one can find in Harrington's book is how that kind of in–
tellectual transformation occurred, although it is usually concealed
by questionable comparisons. Thus Harrington sullies the reputa–
tion of A. Philip Randolph when he writes that Jackson was trying to
"build a Populist, multi-racial coalition on the Randolph model."
Yet Randolph, unlike Jackson, would not have hesitated to criticize
black anti-Semitism, nor would he have endorsed as allies the varied
left-wing dictatorships favored by Jackson .
What happened since the 1970s to put him out of sync with the
labor/liberal forces? Indeed, in the late sixties and seventies Har–
rington was actually hardly in sync with them. As Seymour Martin
