MICHAEL HARRINGTON
77
bear on some of the serious political themes of the times. In par–
ticular, I will look at a conspiracy methodology which explains lives,
socialist mass movements and a critique of neoconservatism on the
basis of opportunistic corruption.
The essential comes out in Radosh's discussion of the engage–
ment of Willy Brandt and the Socialist International with move–
ments in the third world that range from socialist, through the less–
than-democratic, to the downright authoritarian. What is involved
is an encounter with the moral and political anomalies of a history
largely shaped by Western capitalism.
In 1976, when Brandt took over as President of a moribund
Socialist International, he got the prior agreement of the major
European Socialist leaders to a project of reaching out to the third
world. Democratic socialism, he knew, was largely a white, Euro–
pean phenomenon (the two Japanese member parties were an excep–
tion and, in another way, so were the Labour Parties of Australia,
New Zealand, Israel, and the New Democrats in Canada). That, he
argued on moral
and
practical grounds, was an intolerable limita–
tion . Socialism would completely forfeit its basic commitment of
solidarity with the wretched of the earth if it contented itself with
creating better and better welfare states for a relatively small minor–
ity of the world's people (this was before the crisis of the welfare state
had become apparent).
On a practical level- and this notion was to inform the work of
the nonpartisan Brandt Commission on North/South and its two re–
ports - Brandt anticipated the global debt crisis which exploded with
the near default of Mexico in 1982 . The North, he said, could not
solve its problems if the South were so ruined that it could not buy
from the advanced economies; the South could not transform itself
without massive aid from the North. Therefore, there had to be a
common solution to a common crisis. This plan, Radosh comments,
"certainly merits serious consideration."
This perfunctory bow to the agony of the majority of human
kind lasts for one sentence. Then the real point, which is treated at
great length, emerges : "But the policy also, however, seems to mean
the less than convincing decision to denigrate all meaningful crit–
icism of third-world
~ninism."
Willy Brandt and his friends , who
had watched with terrible anguish as the East German Vopos killed
their
Landsleute
and comrades at the Berlin Wall, had gone soft on
communism much as I had.
