Sergio
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Two books I read when I was 14 (the Michael Parenti was in my high school library!) that, besides listening to Pacifica Radio station KPFK in L.A. esp. Dorothy Healey and being mentored by Blase Bonpane the radical Jesuit) that had a major effect in moving me from left-liberalism to marxism and socialism were, "American Power and the New Mandarins, " by the Noamster and, "Democracy for the Few, " by Michael Parenti, his left gov't./civics textbook.
That over the yrs, both have made some bad judgements in terms of political alignments and sourcing in their books(Parenti, much, much more, see his Verso vol, "To Kill A Nation, " that cites Thatcher advisor Sir Alfred Sherman's Lord Byron Institute and has a chapter (#10) on Blagovesta Doncheva, a Bulgarian follower of Russian neo-fascist metaphysician, Alexander Dugin [see, "The Black Hundreds, " by Walter Laqueur] has led to folks like me being much more skeptical of Chomsky. Not in toto. At least not yet. What the Chomskyites have yet to do or Noam, is to just cut their losses, admit he was wrong to call Faurisson a relatively apolitical French liberal and say that he knee jerked in assuming that since the NYT, TNR and the Reader's Digest plus the USG was saying that the KR were genocidalists that they must be engaged, in imperial whiterwash apologetics. Now that centrists and rightists at TNR and the Reader's Digest had that motive, is UNDENIABLE. But, those sectors of the left, that back then (see, "Camodia: The Revolution Rescued, " by Irwin Silber, Oakland, Ca. 1986) that just like in the period of the Purge Trials in '36-'38, supported the Stalinist line that the Old Bolsheviks had morphed into Fascists (in the coffe table book, "The Commissar Vanishes, " from Penguin there is a Pravda cartoon of Two Dogs, one Trotsky , the other Hitler) and that only the bourgeois press said they were innocent.(Though, the notorious, Walter Duranty of the NYT said they must be guilty.)
Sad but true, (the bit abot the Reader's Digest! Communism was NOT fascism,
Sontag isn't a political scientist! I've always thought the the New Class
theories of Djilas, Shasctman, Rizzi, made the most sense.See, "Marxism and the
USSR, " by Paul Bellis.)
http://www.policyreview.org/spring89/meyerson.html
>...February 6. Sontag Says Conservatives Right about Communism. Literary
critic Susan Sontag berates New York intellectual world for failure to
understand that Communism is "the most successful variant of Fascism." Argues
that subscribers to Reader's Digest learn more about realities of Communism
than readers of The Nation. "Could it be that our enemies were right?"
Michael Pugliese