ravi wrote:
>
>
> Extremely bright people who arrived at their left positions not because
> of organized struggle, spiritual awakening or instruction,
No spiritual awakening or instruction, but it was _precisely_ (and ONLY) because of organized struggle that I moved towards Marxism. I found myself (a) in a group trying to win an open-housing ordinance in Bloomington, Illinois, (b) amongst those who (on quite liberal grounds initially) were beginning to oppose the Vietnam War, and (c) in a hassle over a department chair which unexpectedly blew up in our faces -- and in that context discovered that the principles I had followed all my life simply didn't explain what I was doing or what was happening. At that point I had never read a word of marxism & until a few months earlier would have said you wer crazy had you suggested I might become a communist. And then it became obvious to me that the only people who had been fighting this horror for over a century were communists -- so I decided that when I found out what Marxism was, _then_ I would be a marxist. The only abstract thinking involved was the recognition that even if we won all our immediate struggles in Bloomington and on campus it wouldn't make a fucking bit of difference. I began to think (or rather feel) in terms of an image of boxes within boxes within boxes, and the outer box was capitalism. And the marxists I then began reading made sense of what I was experiencing.
Quite frankly I am sceptical of the marxism of those who come to it through being bright enough to figure things out, though I guess that occurs rarely. There were no marxists in central illinois at the time so I had to recruit myself to marxism then go out looking for marxist texts to explain what had happened.
Carrol