Search results
American programmer and businessman
- Mike Harrington (born 1964) is an American programmer and businessman. He is the co-founder of the video game company Valve. After the success of the first Valve product, Half-Life (1998), Harrington left Valve in 2000. In 2006, he co-founded the photo editing service Picnik.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Harrington
People also ask
Who is Michael Harrington?
What are some good books about Michael Harrington?
How old was Michael Harrington when he died?
Was Michael Harrington a high point of life on the left?
Mike Harrington (born 1964) is an American programmer and businessman. He is the co-founder of the video game company Valve. After the success of the first Valve product, Half-Life (1998), Harrington left Valve in 2000. In 2006, he co-founded the photo editing service Picnik .
- Overview
- Shift to Trotskyism and The Other America
- Harrington’s ethical vision and legacy
Michael Harrington, (born February 24, 1928, St. Louis, Missouri, U.S.—died July 31, 1989, Larchmont, New York), American socialist activist and author, best known for his book The Other America (1962), about poverty. He was also chairman of the Socialist Party of America from 1968 to 1972. Harrington was known as the “man who discovered poverty,” and much of his work was an ethical critique of the capitalist system.
(Read George Bernard Shaw’s 1926 Britannica essay on socialism.)
Those notions left an indelible mark on Harrington’s thought, but he was unsatisfied with the slow progress of the Catholic Worker Movement. By the mid-1950s he had lost both his religious faith and his belief in Day’s methods of social transformation. Instead, Harrington became a Trotskyist. He joined the small and intensely sectarian Young People’s Socialist League, an affiliate of the Socialist Party that was controlled by Max Shachtman, the leading Trotskyist organizer. At that time the Trotskyists were preoccupied with proving that the Soviet Union was no longer a revolutionary workers’ state but had become a “bureaucratic collectivist” parody of socialism. Deeply anti-Stalinist yet committed to socialism, Harrington became a key publicist for the bureaucratic collectivist thesis. He helped to organize the so-called “Third Camp,” an unsuccessful endeavour which sought to unify all socialists in a single coalition labour party.
In the 1950s Harrington became involved in civil rights struggles. He strongly objected to the violations of civil liberties that occurred during U.S. Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s investigations of communist subversives. He also organized students for the fight against racial discrimination with Bayard Rustin, an associate of Martin Luther King, Jr., and traveled south to take part in marches and sit-ins. That work exposed Harrington to nonsocialist currents of social activism and started slowly to chip away at his doctrinaire Trotskyism. He became more interested in building a progressive coalition labour party that was not class-based and that would pool the strengths of not only socialists but also anti-Stalinist communists, labour and student activists, artists, and intellectuals.
In the late 1950s Harrington began investigating poverty in America, an endeavour that brought him to national attention. Sketched in a series of articles in Commentary magazine in 1959 and 1960 and in his seminal The Other America (1962), Harrington presented three arguments regarding poverty in the U.S. First, he challenged the prevailing assumption that the New Deal had practically ended poverty. His studies suggested that perhaps 50 million people still lived in deep and debilitating poverty, including various unskilled and immigrant workers, urban African Americans, the aged, and the handicapped, none of whom were specifically aided by the New Deal. Second, Harrington maintained that those people had fallen into a widespread “culture of poverty,” by which he meant a pervasive decay in community and family support structures and an almost complete absence of the traditional values of thrift, striving, and self-support. He believed that capitalist society could not provide those disenfranchised people with the essentials of a dignified life, and, in his structuralist view, Harrington claimed that the poor needed to be looked after by a socially conscious state. On that basis, Harrington proposed the third element in his analysis, his comprehensive program for a “war on poverty,” and advocated new federal legislation on housing, education, medical care, and labour relations. As a member of Pres. Lyndon B. Johnson’s task force in the War on Poverty, Harrington played a role in sketching the Great Society social reform program. He continued to insist, however, that the only lasting solution was a socialist reorganization of American government.
Are you a student? Get Britannica Premium for only 24.95 - a 67% discount!
Learn More
Harrington objected to the militant revolutionary tactics with which the emerging New Left tried to tackle this and other contemporary problems, including the Vietnam War. Acting through the Students for a Democratic Society and a successor faction, the “Weathermen” or “Weather Underground,” many of the members of the New Left came to abandon consensual political means in the 1960s and sought instead the complete destruction of all American institutions. Though critical of many aspects of American life, Harrington rejected such extreme ideologies. He denounced both the Vietnam War and the antiwar activists who hoped to use it to justify catastrophic revolutionary acts, and he stepped down from his position as national cochairman of the Socialist Party (which he held from 1968 to 1972) on those grounds. Harrington joined Shachtman’s so-called Realignment Caucus, a group of old Trotskyists within the Democratic Party, and tried to appropriate it for peaceful democratic socialism. Harrington continued that work in 1968 through his own New Democratic Coalition and after 1972 through the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC). Both organizations were meant to develop into powerful democratic socialist havens that could attract student activists to nonmilitant social politics and ideologically redirect the Democratic Party.
The philosophy that Harrington disseminated through those groups and his many books was rooted in his lifelong ethical vision. He sought to push the Democratic Party toward what he called the “fourth New Deal,” a comprehensive program for social and economic reform centred on the goals of full employment and a strengthened welfare state. Harrington continued to oppose bureaucratic collectivist models of social reform, which he regarded as undemocratic and needlessly authoritarian. He envisioned the gradual coming of a socialized state that would continue to use the capitalist production process yet would apply socialist criteria in the distribution of its products.
In 1977 many of his proposed immediate reforms were included in the Democratic Party platform, though Harrington subsequently despaired of the party’s direction. In his final years he tried to popularize his vision through his new organization, the Democratic Socialists of America, which formed in 1982 as a joint venture by the DSOC and the New America Movement. In 1988 he published the autobiography The Long-Distance Runner.
- Markku Ruotsila
Edward Michael Harrington Jr. (February 24, 1928 – July 31, 1989) was an American democratic socialist. As a writer, he was best known as the author of The Other America. Harrington was also a political activist, theorist, professor of political science, and radio commentator.
Politics. History. Michael Harrington, American Socialist. By. Maurice Isserman. Democratic Socialists of America founder Michael Harrington, who died thirty years ago today, was a beacon of humanity, decency, and socialism throughout his lifetime. Michael Harrington in Boston on December 11, 1977. (Barbara Alper / Getty Images)
Aug 1, 2000 · The (Still) Relevant Socialist. Michael Harrington, the author of The Other America ,was the most charismatic figure on the American left in the past half century. His case for a...
The Other America is Michael Harrington's best known and likely most influential book. He was an American democratic socialist, writer, political activist, political theorist, professor of political science, radio commentator, and founding member of the Democratic Socialists of America.
Mike Harrington is an American computer programmer. He is the co-founder of the video game development and digital distribution company Valve. [1] . Previously a game programmer at Dynamix and a designer on the Windows NT operating system at Microsoft, [2] Harrington founded Valve in 1996 with Gabe Newell, another former Microsoft employee.
