I became a Marxist out of sheer perversity.writes Janet Daley, and goes on,
Well, perhaps that is unfair to my adolescent self: it was a mixture of conscientiousness and perversity. The official atmosphere in the California high school where I spent my junior and senior years was—hard as it may be to imagine this now—hysterically anti-communist. This was 1961, but the sixties as we know them had not yet begun.This vivid memoir in the latest City Journal reminds me of a cross-blog discussion several months ago about the antiwar left's association with Marxism. David Adesnik of Oxblog and yours truly pointed out that many civil rights activists had Marxist backgrounds because at that time Marxists were the only ones organizing for those ideals.
. . . from the turn of the century up to WWII, if you thought segregation and Jim Crow were wrong, if you thought women should be able to get birth control and credit in their own names, if you didn't think Modern Art was the harbinger of social chaos, and if you wanted to find others like yourself and maybe even do something to further your ideals, you ended up hanging out with Communists. That's where the action was. . . . After WWII, the abuses of the Soviet system were becoming clearer, but if you came back from the war to legal segregation, women forced out of jobs, and Cold War hysteria about sex and literature, where were you going to go?Today, there are a few more options for those who want to make the world a better place without having to pay lip-service to unworkable economic theories and brutal totalitarianisms, although - as A.N.S.W.E.R., the engine behind the antiwar movement shows - Marxism still owns most of the market share in "social activism."
Read the Daley piece, and also this critical response from Amygdala's comment thread, where I first saw the link.
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