BTW, I've been told that a lot of folks who left the CPUSA and other leftist parties (or were purged from labor unions) in the 1940s and 1950s went to Wall Street and applied Marxian political economy to play the market. I don't know if that's true or not, but part of the story is some got rich that way. (As far as I can tell, Marxian theory can't be used for that purpose, but what the heck.)
If this rumor is true, I'd like to know.
Jim Devine, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] web: http://myweb.lmu.edu/jdevine/
I don't know about CP'ers, but we had a guy named Dick Roberts who was the SWP's top economics expert. He dropped out, along with millions of others, in the early 1980s and moved to Los Angeles where he intended to launch a career as a screenwriter, like millions of others. He used his economics expertise from the SWP to invest in the market, which would allow him to pay the rent until his scripts were bought by some Hollywood studio. He lost everything in the 1987 crash. So much for Marxist economic theory and the market. Dick began drinking heavily around that time and joined AA to get himself straight. The implicit spirituality in AA then led him to become a Christian. That's the last I heard of him.
In 1978, Dick buttonholed me at an SWP convention and demanded to know when I was going into industry. This coming from a trust fund radical (his dad had invented the electron microscope.) This was just around the time I decided that the group I had belonged to for 11 years was filled with nuts, myself included. I drink in moderation.
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