[Following is the preface to my recently published memoir, Outsider's Reverie. There is more about this book in the heading to the right on this website. It can be purchased from Amazon.com. ]

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This project was first suggested by my friend Joseph Soares, now at Wake Forest University, more than twenty years ago. His reasoning was that it would provide an example of a life path far from the money-centered conventionality of the 1950s in which I grew up and might prove helpful, both for its positive insights and its negative ones, to some young people considering alternatives to the commercial mainstream. The idea lay fallow for a long time. Then in the spring of 2008 another old friend, Peter Camejo, called to ask if I would serve as editor of his memoirs. I had known Peter when we were both active in the Marxist movement in the 1960s and 1970s. He in later years ran for governor of California, three times on the Green Party ticket, and served as Ralph Nader's vice presidential running mate in the 2004 presidential elections.

I worked closely with Peter from April 2008 to his untimely death that September. His book, North Star, is slated for publication early in 2010 by Haymarket Books. Working on his manuscript led me to think I should take more seriously composing my own. This book is the consequence.

I spent the majority of my life absorbed by subterranean currents far from the American mainstream. That is not to say these were not venerable schools of thought of some antiquity that exerted influence on the broader culture. I grew up in a home steeped in what is called the Western hermetic tradition, the largely pre-Christian lore of ghostly apparitions, spirit guides, star charts, and the astral plane. An unseen personage my parents spoke of frequently was the dead thirteenth century crusader knight Father Randall, who had personally instructed them in the arcane mysteries before I was born.
In high school in the 1950s, under the influence of Colin Wilson's The Outsider, I decided to renounce any conventional career and commit myself to an esoteric quest for mystic experience, rather like the hero of Somerset Maugham's The Razor's Edge. I explored the doctrines of Gnosticism, the Hellenic mystery religion, visited the coffee houses of the Beats, and, following the example of Aldous Huxley, experimented with peyote.

I detoured from my quest, I thought temporarily, when I was swept up in the civil rights movement, at least in its thinner Los Angeles expression, marching, picketing, being convicted of false imprisonment for a sit-in led by the Congress of Racial Equality against a racist meeting. I organized a student political party at Los Angeles City College with black nationalist ideologue Ron Karenga, with whom I used to double date.

Then, with the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in April 1961, I set off for still farther political shores. I was recruited by two European Jews who had escaped from the Nazis, powerful witnesses to society's evils, to  what seemed then the most improbable of organizations, American followers of the martyred Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky. This in many ways was the political analog of the occultic doctrines that absorbed my parents. It had its own massive literature that could not be found in ordinary bookstores, a promise of a world beyond this one after an apocalyptic overturn of the existing order, differing only in that this utopian world was to be constructed on earth and was not preexistent on the astral plane. In comparison to the mainstream this was unconventional in the extreme and didn't set off my alarms over my long-standing fear of the deadening hand of conformity.

The organization was the Socialist Workers Party, then a musty isolated handful of aging adherents. It had fewer than five hundred members nationally. In some ways it was exactly what I was looking for: the reclusive handful of adepts possessed of mysterious knowledge and of a grand purpose that rose above all mundane occupations. Unlike the New Left, which would arise a few years later and which largely invented itself on the spur of  the moment, this group of political outcasts possessed an internal culture worthy of a Talmudic sect: the vast literature of Western Marxism and especially its Trotskyist branch, internal documents dating from the 1920s, dozens of living veterans of the radical movement of the 1930s, and even from shortly after the turn of the century, in the person of James P. Cannon, its founder, who was still alive and lived nearby in Los Angeles,. The group had ties to similar small bands of disciples in scores of countries, which gave it gravitas, a wealth of traditions on endless subjects.

Of course, committed membership in such a disciplined fellowship has a dynamic of its own. There are daily tasks to be performed, battles to fight, books to read. Friendships are forged, and enemies made. One soon fits into the skin of the acolyte. Into this framework, as the sixties advanced, a new generation of student activists emerged, committed, competent, and ruthless, consummating a surprisingly effective fusion with the growing public anger against the government's war in Vietnam. At its height the Socialist Workers Party had a central part in bringing hundreds of thousands of demonstrators repeatedly to the country's major cities and the nation's capital, as well as leading a student organization with 100,000 members. In the process it grew, built a substantial apparatus, and extended the reach of its press.

Most of the attention to the sixties radicalization has gone to the counterculture and the New Left. My text is in part the tale of this band of political outsiders, rooted intellectually in the far away Russian Revolution, their relative resurgence in the 1960s, and how the leaders of my generation turned on the old guard as the radical wave ebbed in the 1970s.

I was close enough to the center of these events to see much of how they unfolded. I belonged to the SWP in Los Angeles and San Francisco, then was on its full-time staff in New York for twelve years, serving as managing editor of the Trotskyist Fourth International's weekly news service, editor of the party's theoretical magazine, and an editor in its book publishing house. When the party sent its members into industry at the end of the seventies I spent three years on the Mesabi Iron Range in northern Minnesota, two of them working in the iron mines. Along the way there were many adventures and memorable experiences. In this book I recount a few of them:

· My parents met at a seance;

· I organized an antinuclear rally from the home of the Pentagon's top nuclear war strategist;

· James P. Cannon, the SWP's founder, asked me to serve as his representative to try to convince the party's leadership in New York to change what he saw as their fatally self-isolating policy;

· The FBI put me on the list for immediate arrest and detention in the event of a national emergency;

· he San Bernardino, California, district attorney issued a restraining order against me as a drug dealer;

· J. Edgar Hoover wrote to his Los Angeles office to ask how it was possible that I could simultaneously be a member of both the Socialist Workers Party and the Communist Party;

· Jerry Rubin made me the editor of the Vietnam Day Committee's newspaper for the May 1965 Berkeley teach-in of 30,000;

· Isaac Deutscher, Trotsky's biographer, told me some unsettling things about the SWP in the 1950s;

· I worked for four years on the Fourth International's weekly world news service, under Joseph Hansen, Trotsky's principal secretary, who captured the assassin, Ramon Mercader;

· I was the SWP's liaison with Ralph Schoenman, who had been Bertrand Russell's secretary and head of the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation. I met him in 1967, the year he spent a week in Havana trying to persuade Castro's intelligence chief, Manuel "Red Beard" Pineiro Losada, to mount a rescue operation for Che Guevara, who was being hunted by the CIA and the Bolivian army;

· I knew Lyndon LaRouche and watched carefully as his organization careened into madness;

· I spent an evening with Susan Sontag while the party's philosopher, George Novack, tried to persuade her to become a supporter;

· I took part in and often reported most of the major East Coast antiwar demonstrations of the 1960s and 1970s, including the "levitation" of the Pentagon in October 1967 and the March against Death of 800,000 in Washington, D.C., in November 1969, more than the total population of the city;

· Peng Shu-tse, who once outranked Mao Zedong in the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party and was the central leader of the Chinese Trotskyists, was a long-time friend and told me his final doubts about Marxism just before he died;

· I was terminated after four years as editor of the International Socialist Review after George Novack tried to convince the party leaders that the magazine should engage in debates with the country's left-wing intellectuals to win influence among them, as the party had successfully done in the 1930s;

· I heard Jack Barnes, the head of the Socialist Workers Party, describe the moment when he became convinced that Fidel Castro's foreign policy was the wave of the future;

· I studied Chinese under Ronnie Chiang, whose father was head of the health services in Shanghai and was murdered by the Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution;

· I once spent a night in the home of Attorney General Francis Biddle, who ordered the prosecution of the Socialist Workers Party under the Smith Act during World War II;

· With Russell Block I was coeditor of the definitive edition of Leon Trotsky's writings on China, which remains the standard library edition today;

· After being backed around my car by a right-wing, hatchet wielding former mental patient on the Mesabi Range, I went to see a Minntac miner for the loan of his .44 magnum revolver;

· Present at their founding, I proposed the names that were adopted and still used by two socialist groups: Socialist Action and Solidarity;

· I served for two years as production editor on a World Health Organization report documenting the failure to invest in research on the diseases that ravage the third world, which resulted in a major reform of how the WHO measures the burden of disease;

· While working in Peru on a report for the World Bank I was put in touch with a Los Angeles priest who helped solve the mystery of a scary house in my neighborhood — by revealing that members of the Manson Family had lived there;

· My wife Jennifer and I restored a 1910 house in the West Adams section of South Los Angeles that became a city Historic Cultural Monument, in the process probing deeply into the lives of its former residents, founders of the privately owned industrial city of Vernon;

· There were eight people murdered within two blocks of our house during the gang wars of the early 1990s. Jennifer and I each witnessed a separate murder;

· As a web journalist for UCLA's International Institute, I reported on talks by Mikhail Gorbachev, Edward Said, Shirin Ebadi, Shimon Peres, and many others;

· I spent fourteen years building a scale model of a 1368 building in Bacharach, Germany. The model has been written up in a collectors' magazine;

· I have spent the last seven years as a neighborhood activist in predominantly black and Latino South Los Angeles, working to fix residents' complaints about drug houses, abandoned buildings, just-paroled child molesters living near elementary schools, illegal dumping, gang depredations, and the many other ills of the inner city;

I have tried to tell this story as it happened, with sympathy for many of the people I met along the way. At the same time, I cannot help but think often of the aphorism Marx appropriated from Hegel, that the owl of Minerva flies at twilight. That is, only as a movement or historical period enters its decline can its true shape and significance be discerned. In retrospect, though Marxism as an apocalyptic utopian creed won a large following in the European and Asian working classes from the mid-nineteenth century, and a much smaller one in the United States, it proved to be a secular religion that once in power was more a disastrous experiment in extreme centralism than a viable social formation growing organically out of what it disparaged as "capitalist" society.

Trotskyism sought to distance itself from the existing experiments by attributing all of their repugnant repressive sides to Stalinism, which in turn it explained by relative economic backwardness. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and China's abandonment of state centralism, where Trotsky's predicted resistance by the workers entirely failed to materialize, this view would seem untenable. Marxism today is restricted to a tiny left press in the developed countries, a few third world currents, the Cuban state, which has some notable welfare measures but is neither democratic nor a viable economic model, and the Orwellian nightmare of North Korea. There is also, of course, a section of the professoriate who achieved tenure during the radical days of the sixties, but are not likely to inspire a later generation of scholars to follow in their footsteps.

There are also digressions in this work on the history of West Adams and the city of Vernon, restoring an old house, on copyright law, and on the paranormal, one of my earliest interests, and what in its lore may have a scientific basis in the theories of present day physicists and cosmologists. And, finally, there are a few stories about some of our cats, good companions and constant reminders that we humans must share the planet with the rest of the animal kingdom and not proceed further with the mass extinction we are presently engineering.

Leslie Evans
Historic West Adams,
Los Angeles, California
November 2009