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A fascinating tale about a radical youth, the 1960s, and the decline of the Socialist Workers Party into a bizarre cult.
The first seven chapters wonderfully capture Los Angeles and the 1950s and early 1960s youth counterculture there. . . .Evans' memoir has wonderful chapters about Evans' time at Los Angeles City College participating in the civil rights movement and coffee house scene around LACC and then his recruitment into the youth group of the Socialist Workers Party, the dominant U.S. Trotskyite party and then being a left organizer at UCLA. . . . These Los Angeles chapters beautifully capture the outsider currents among Los Angeles youth in the 1950s and early 1960s including meeting older radicals from the 1930s.
The heart of this book is Evans' 22 years in the Socialist Workers Party, starting in Los Angeles and then over a decade and half in New York during the SWP's glory years when it was central to mobilizing huge numbers in the anti-Vietnam War marches. . . .
Evans describes a fascinating tale how he was a miner/organizer of SWP; the 12 activists valiantly tried but failed to support miners' union dissidents while their party began expulsions of dissidents to the new party line. Evans realized that when the miners' faced huge layoffs the SWP on the Iron Range was a failure at doing anything to stop the layoffs. Evans as a dissident was more and more isolated.
Finally he moved back to Los Angeles where he and many others were formally expelled in bizarre trials. . . . Evans, always a boy from the streets with survival skills, hooks up with an old girlfriend who becomes the love of his life and gets himself into graduate school at UCLA in sociology where he encounters Max Weber and ceased being a Marxist by 1988.
--Julia Stein, the Red Room blog
One Intellectual's Travels On The Left
I highly recommend this book. It chronicles a young intellectual's travels through the Sixties Left, particularly the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party. Born of parents, who met at a séance and believed in the occult, he ended up in an increasingly cultic political organization. The dream of a communist future has become the cover for the transformation of the SWP into an organization dedicated to the preservation of its leader Jack Barnes. I had passed through a similar experience in the orbit of British Trotskyist leader Gerry Healy.
However Evans had his productive moments, particularly his editing and writing of material on modern China as well as his editing of the journal International Socialist Review and work on a number of books. In fact it appears from Evans' account that it was precisely his intellectual contributions to the movement that brought him into conflict with the supreme leader Jack Barnes.
Evans' memoir and personal experience raises broader issues beyond the narrow confines of the small Trotskyist circles he participated in. First and foremost is the relationship of the Marxist tradition to the development of repressive regimes in the Twentieth Century and its relevance to the Twenty-First Century Left. Another matter he explores in the role of intellectuals within working class organizations.
A must read.
--Tim Wohlforth
(Author of The Prophet's Children, a memoir of his years in the Trotskyist movement,
and a writer of detective fiction.)
5.0 out of 5 stars. Essential for Understanding Political Sects
Leslie Evans's "Outsider's Reverie" is an indispensable source for students of social movements. The author, a former long-term leader in the Socialist Workers Party, has used his experiences to give us details that have heretofore been lacking about this American Trotskyist grouping. More generally, the book constitutes a valuable document for the understanding of many such organizations, political as well as religious. Students of religious sects, for example, will want to study this work to compare with what is known about groups like the Plymouth Brethren. I found the similarities very striking, especially the lengths to which these sectarians go in what the Germans call "Besserwisserei" (know-it-all), and in the cult of leadership, not to mention mutual back-stabbing. We are indeed indebted to Evans for telling us things that are generally hidden to outsiders.
--Werner Cohn
(Professor Emeritus of Sociology, University of British Columbia,
author of Partners in Hate: Noam Chomsky and the Holocaust Deniers)
A well-written, intensely interesting memoir, June 14, 2010
Outsider's Reverie is the work of a highly talented writer with a gift for storytelling and finding the interesting anecdote or literary allusion necessary to illustrate any point. Leslie Evans' intense interest in ideas, together with the ability to clarify those ideas, subtle humor, and attention to detail, all make reading this memoir an enjoyable and worthwhile experience.
The core of the autobiography is its middle chapters, which cover the period of the author's years as a leading intellectual and activist in a Marxist political organization, the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). For those unfamiliar with the SWP, or who know it only in its present incarnation, a few words of clarification are necessary.
Although the SWP was never a "household name" in the United States, it played a major world-historic role in the 1960s and 1970s. It had a few thousand members and was so well organized that its political influence surpassed that of organizations hundreds of times larger. Most notably, the SWP was the driving force behind the American antiwar movement that eventually helped force an end to the U.S. imperialist assault on Vietnam.
But in the 1980s the SWP came under the influence of a monomaniacal leader, turned inward, and morphed into a grotesque caricature of its former self. Leslie Evans and all those who resisted the SWP's self-destruction were expelled. At last report, the membership of this bizarre cult had fallen to fewer than a hundred.
The expelled members of the SWP went in a number of diverging political directions. Some attempted to revive the historic mission of the SWP under other names, but Leslie Evans slowly began to distance himself from Marxism altogether. In this memoir he states that that it was "sometime in 1988" when "I was no longer a Marxist."
Is this a familiar tale of a radical mellowing into moderation--a leftwinger "moving to the right" as he ages? Apparently not. In spite of his apostasy with regard to Marxism, his insights are incisive and valuable in understanding the decline and fall of the SWP. As an eyewitness to much of what he describes in these chapters, I can vouch for their fundamental honesty. In contrast to most "renegades' narratives," his explication of the Marxist views we once shared (and which I still hold) strikes me as remarkably accurate.
There is no attempt, as far as I could see, to rewrite history and deny committing what he now considers to be the errors of his youth. In fact, there is a page at the beginning of the volume, just after the title page, that lists a number of the books he wrote and edited in his Marxist days--books of which he is apparently (and justifiably) proud although no longer in agreement with their contents. There are frequent intrusions of his current critique of his former Marxist views, but the dividing line between past and present is kept sharp enough that readers should not be confused.
There was life after the SWP, and Outsider's Reverie continues to be interesting as it proceeds into the 1990s and beyond. Perhaps as another manifestation of "outsiderness," he and his wife Jennifer moved into the notorious part of Los Angeles that now serves as the bleak setting for the television drama Southland. As white folks in a mostly nonwhite and immigrant neighborhood, they stood out, and despite the constant gang activity and drug-related violence that surrounded them, they stayed. The matter-of-factness with which he describes witnessing murders from his window is remarkable.
Leslie and Jennifer didn't see themselves as social missionaries or anything of that sort; they simply wanted to live and let live. They united with other homeowners in their immediate vicinity to form a neighborhood improvement association, and through struggle they survived. They now have "neighbors we have known for two decades, who make this place a small town within the great impersonal city." It seems that Leslie has at last come in from the cold; he is no longer an outsider.
-- Clifford D. Conner, author of A People's History of Science: Miners, Midwives, and Low Mechanicks
A well written, honest account of his life and times, March 12, 2011
People who have been, or are now, involved in social movements that might be considered outliers will find this book fascinating. More than that, however, anyone wrestling with how they can contribute positively to society should put this book on their list of books to read. There are a lot of political and life lessons in the book. In the end, politics is about human beings, dealing with hard choices, difficult situations, danger, etc.
Making sense of the world by painting it black and white is the easy way out. 'You're either with us or against us' opens the Pandora's Box to a host of troubles. Evans gives a pretty unvarnished inside view of how crazy (or silly) an organization can get using this philosophical base. He clearly doesn't expect - or desire - the reader to agree with him on all points...which is one of his points, really. If you think this is just a left wing question, or just political, try re-reading the news, including the business pages. Every MBA candidate should read this book. But I digress.
A lot of people mentioned in the book will probably quibble about details or interpretations. While I was not (and would hardly expect to be!) mentioned, I had some level of contact with a fair piece of the people and events in the middle section of the book. From my perspective, he got the broad picture about right.
Good people can do really bad things to other good people. The trials and expulsions in the SWP, and events surrounding them, fall mostly into that category. The examples Evans brings up were part of a whole, and he gives a remarkably calm account of his view of things. Like with the proverbial elephant, his perspective isn't the entire picture, but it's pretty accurate for the part of the beast he had his hand on, insofar as my own knowledge goes into events.
The sections on community building, dealing with gangs, dealing with city politics and so forth are great. My wife and I have had our share of adventures in this venue, in a much smaller city. What the Los Angeles community where Evans lives is doing is a model for other neighborhoods across the country. It inspires me to do more, and I think that many readers will feel the same.
The SWP (at least as I knew it) was pretty disdainful of people who focused on such matters. I've come to much the same view that Evans has done; there is no reason anyone should be considered a leader of working people if they don't see the value of community action. Leaving aside the practicality of leading or running a government with no experience running anything but internal events...do you deserve the trust to be in that position?
All of this is relevant as heck, and will be more so over the coming decades. The children of today will live in a world of massive environmental damage. They are facing and will face much the same challenges of Evans generation, greatly magnified. I think he has some useful lessons for the future in his book.
- Greg Relaford, Amazon review