[Marxism] re Radosh

[michael a. lebowitz]

Walter jogged my memory with his mention of Ronald Radosh:

>Radosh played the banjo and was a leftoid at the University of Wisconsin
>when Mike Lebowitz and I were students back in the sixties. Like many who
>had been raised on faith in Stalin and Stalinism, he and his milieu had
>been shattered by the Khruschev revelations and moved slowly, or not so
>slowly, to the political right. George Watt's son, whose name escapes me
>now, was part of that milieu. James Weinstein, the founder of the magazine
>IN THESE TIMES was part of that milieu as well, though he never became the
>hard-line rightist which Radosh has become, who's got more in common with
>David Horowitz than Weinstein did.

         My recollection of Radosh, who I met at a meeting of the 
Wisconsin Socialist Club shortly after arriving in Madison in 1960, 
was that he was a whining crybaby then as now (although the rewards 
are much higher now). Sharpest is my memory of when we subsequently 
were called to the same draft board physical (which we didn't know 
until we were hurried into an official's office when we refused to 
sign the disclaimer affidavit--eg, I have never known a member of the 
following...). Oh, how he wept and wailed--- and this from a member 
of the Labor Youth League and still then a member of the Communist 
Party (ie., 1956 revelations were not a problem)! Small wonder that 
the group around Studies on the Left in Madison had little use or 
respect for him and never once considered asking him to join the 
editorial board.
         As for Jimmy Weinstein, he went from SoL, which he packed in 
his suitcase and took to NYC, then to San Francisco, where he created 
a successor journal, Socialist Revolution (which went on to replace 
Revolution with Review) and then to Chicago where, with In These 
Times, he hoped to realise his dream of setting up a counterpart to 
the widely-read pre-WWI socialist newspaper, the Appeal to Reason. He 
was among the disappointed of '56, like several of the other Studies 
on the Left people (eg., Saul Landau), but I don't know of any who 
became rightwingers. Hope not, at least.
         michael
Michael A. Lebowitz
Professor Emeritus
Economics Department
Simon Fraser University
Burnaby, B.C., Canada V5A 1S6

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