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| Baruch Spinoza ✆ Alexandre Camanho |
George Souvlis: Would you like to present yourself by focusing on the formative experiences (academic and political) that strongly influenced you?
Warren
Montag: My political and intellectual formation was governed, fittingly I
suppose, by a logic of the encounter: that is, I was extraordinarily lucky. If
I had not been in the right place at the right time and in proximity to the
right people, I would not have thought or written as I have. In the mid to late
seventies in Los Angeles (to which I returned after receiving my B.A. from UC
Berkeley), I met both Geoff Goshgarian and Mike Davis and we soon formed a kind
of collective with a few others (in particular I remember Samira Haj, now a
historian at CUNY, I believe). We also organized a study group in which we read
the three volumes of Capital, as well as Mandel’s Late Capitalism and
other works.
Through
Mike (who had recently returned from Britain where he had been close to the
International Marxist Group [IMG]), I was introduced to the Trotskyism of the Fourth
International (or more accurately its dominant tendency), that is, of Mandel,
Krivine, Bensaid, Tariq Ali and others. This variant of Trotskyism, which had
virtually no presence in the US at that time was very much a codification of
the political experiences of 1968 internationally, combining a notion of the
direct democracy of workers’ councils, consistent opposition to the
bureaucratic regimes of the USSR and its satellites, and intransigent support
for anti-colonial and anti-imperialist movements around the world.
