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Leslie Evans's Outsider's Reveries by Louis Proyect Book Review (Swans - January 25, 2010) Available as a download from Scribd.com, Les Evans's Outsider's Reveries is the latest memoir revolving around the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) of the United States. The best known of these is Saïd Sayrafiezadeh's When Skateboards Will be Free, which seeks to draw a contrast between the author's youthful yearnings to be normal -- hence the skateboard -- and his parent's mad obsessions about overthrowing the capitalist system. For obvious reasons, the memoir was a big hit with The Washington Post and The New York Times. On Facebook, the proud author announced that he has been meeting with HBO. For those who have followed this premium cable station over the years, it is well understood that they find material about dysfunctional families very marketable. It is difficult for me to imagine a fan of "The Sopranos" finding that much of interest in the sad tale of an apolitical youth being forced to boycott grapes, but the HBO executives do have a solid track record making money (the primary ambition of the author they are courting, it should be stressed). Tales about creepy Communists do fit in well, after all, with the American ideological landscape. In 2005 Barry Sheppard, the number two man in the party for many years until he was expelled, published the first installment of The Party, titled The Sixties: a political memoir. This is a largely self-congratulatory effort that contains page after page of the party's accomplishments in the antiwar movement and other struggles under the author's stewardship. The second volume is obviously much more difficult for the author to produce since it is largely about the party's transformation from a powerful force on the American left into the bizarre cult-sect described in Sayrafiezadeh's work, written from the perspective of a tender youth who was not even a member. For Sheppard, the challenge is to produce a volume two that amounts to an autopsy on the party he spent decades building. Perhaps it will prove insurmountable. Just before his death in September 2008, Peter Camejo was putting the final touches on an eagerly awaited memoir that will be released posthumously as The North Star in honor of Fredrick Douglass's abolitionist newspaper. Unlike Sheppard, Camejo was dubious about the Socialist Workers Party even when he was part of a troika including Sheppard and Jack Barnes, the cult leader. In the early 1980s, when I was working with Camejo to build the North Star Network, a loose grouping incorporating his new non-sectarian politics, I once asked him if he regretted not having left the SWP much earlier. Expecting him to say that he should have left after around 10 years (about the length of my own tenure) rather than 20, he said he should have left after several months. There was a dogmatic character that disturbed this young Fidelista from the very outset. Les Evans's memoir is a study in ambivalence. As a top leader of the SWP primarily involved with writing and editing, Evans retains a lot of the "then we did this and then we did that" quality of volume one of Sheppard's book but as another expellee, he cannot help but look askance at the party. Looking back in retrospect, he sees warts that were not obvious at the time. Unlike Camejo, however, these misgivings -- as we shall see -- flow from an anti-Communist perspective in line with the "god that failed" literature. This ambivalence is what gives the book its dramatic tension, notwithstanding the superfluous details that typically show up in an unedited manuscript published by a vanity press. For example, there is a chapter on the author's stepchildren, an obvious labor of love but of almost no interest to people outside the Evans household. full: http://www.swans.com/library/art16/lproy59.html ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: [email protected] Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
