converts to the left

[Charles Brown]

Not that I am a celebrity, but when I was
6 I liked Ike. I was working a 
poll for Stevenson with my mother for Stevenson, but
I was telling people to vote for Ike.
Then I voted for and
did a little poll work for Humphrey at
my first vote. Then I was 
mildly political when the revolution
had broken out on campus. I was
a cultural materialist in anthropology, then jogged
back right a little as a Levi-Straussian structuralist.
I became a radical reformer in legal services, but
when the judges kept evicting my poor, single
mother clients, I got real radicalized.
Then
I became a Marxist-Leninist in about 1982.

Of course, Marx and Engels joined a party
callled the "Democratic Party" at one point.
And Lenin was elected to a Czarist Duma.
So, there is a lot of room for reformist 
struggle by revolutionaries.

Charles Brown

   Detroit

Workers of the West, it's our turn.


>>> James Devine <jdevine at popmail.lmu.edu> 09/23 1:07 PM >>>
At 08:42 AM 9/23/98 -0700, you wrote:
>Ellsberg was always relatively leftist the way he tells it.  He was an
>enthusiastic union activist before Harvard and Vietnam.
>
>Among economists, I can only think of John Gurley who moved to the left in
>response to Vietnam.  I believe that he was a Quaker.

how about Leonard Rapping, who went from writing with the new classial
Robert Lucas to writing with the radical James Crotty? or did he write for
the former because he was a grad. student serf, needing a publication to
beef up his resume?

BTW, it's often said that profs. sometimes "come out of the closet" as
leftists when they get tenure. But I don't know if that's true. Further, I
think that the indoctrination of grad. school, struggling to publish & get
tenure, etc. affects the _kind_ of leftist one is when one gets the big T.
The long and hard effort to get tenure encourages academic and elitist
leftism, employing all sorts of obscure jargon or math, dealing with arcane
questions, believing strongly in the divisions between and within academic
disciplines, etc. 

Jim Devine jdevine at popmail.lmu.edu &
http://clawww.lmu.edu/Departments/ECON/jdevine.html