In this country, the desperation to separate oneself from a Stalinist regime was evident even on the left. Thousands of left wing U.S. students who found value in the Marxist critique of capitalism and who looked to some form of socialism preferred to attach themselves to Mao. The little red book, the “Quotations from Chairman Mao,” was being read by student protesters here in the West more avidly than it was in the streets of Peking. Of course, Mao, too, can be rolled into the evil equation, as can any and essentially all Marxist leaders (elected or not, as we saw in the C.I.A. sponsored assassination of Salvador Allende). Practically within seconds of Mao’s death, China was once again under a regime in which “it is good to be rich.” A similar outcome is no doubt hoped for in Cuba as the vultures hover hungrily over Fidel Castro’s death bed. All of these political twists in the road have been accompanied by endless sectarian battles among leftists. From the old days of the Communist table in the City College cafeteria, texts have been flung back and forth. Lenin’s “Left Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder” ended the argument for some; Trotsky’s collected writings for others. The American intellectual Sidney Hook spent a good part of his life repudiating the words he had inscribed in his essay “Why I Am a Communist”. Susan Sontag would endear herself to the right and alienate her erstwhile leftist friends by attacking American intellectuals as “soft on communism.” Yesterday’s anti-Soviet Marxists became the next day’s neo-conservatives. We still hear—yes, even now in the land of Hamburger and Oral Roberts universities—that U.S. campuses are hotbeds of Marxist thought.
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