[lbo-talk] how did you become a lefty

[Max Sawicky]

I came to college as a right-wing liberal in '67 thinking I would join
ROTC, got radicalized by my freshman comp professor who was a recent
Berkeley Ph.D.  (He was kind of an a-hole; got thrown out of the
department, went on to write some big books. Name was Peter Manso.
You can google him.) Later he got me into Norman Mailer's New York
City mayoral campaign, another step in the process. I decided to major
in English instead of math. Rutgers English dept was also the home of
Partisan Review, at one time a great radical publication.  The big
issues were race and the war.  I came to radical politics via PR &
modern fiction (Mailer, Burroughs, Heller, Baldwin) and beat poetry.
But for politics I would have gone to grad school in English lit (got
into Washington U/St Loo and U of Iowa or Indiana, forget which) and
probably would have spent my life as an old fogie ranting about
semiotics, post-structuralism, cultural studies, etc.

On Wed, May 5, 2010 at 3:26 PM, John Treat <johntreat at lavabit.com> wrote:
> I've always skewed leftish, however haltingly and imperfectly, but LBO talk is mostly responsible for any real radicalization I've experienced (and continue to experience). I've lurked for maybe a year, basically since googling across Doug's interview with James Howard Kunstler after hearing the latter on local radio here (South Africa). Have remained quite in awe of having the opportunity to listen in on many of the discussions here, and have followed and tried to absorb as many of the links as I could find time for. Have done lots of leftish things in my life (organizing farmers in Bosnia after the war, working against GBV in sub-Saharan Africa, defending rights of association and expression globally) but largely on intuition and without an adequate theoretical grounding. Still learning, but already profoundly grateful, especially to Doug, shag, SA, Carrol, MPerelman, and B&N.
>
>
> On 04 May 2010, at 2:11 AM, shag carpet bomb wrote:
>
>> stories of how your consciousness was raised please!
>>
>> shag
>>
>> --
>> http://cleandraws.com
>> Wear Clean Draws
>> ('coz there's 5 million ways to kill a CEO)
>>
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