Of Wolves in Sheep's Clothing and the Damage Done

Abstract

Barbara Epstein is the well-known author of several books, including Political Protest and Cultural Revolution: Nonviolent Direct Action in the Seventies and Eighties, Cultural Politics and Social Movements, and most recently, The Minsk Ghetto, 1941–1943: Jewish Resistance and Soviet Internationalism. She was for many years a member of the faculty of the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC). She began teaching at UCSC in 1973, even before receiving her PhD in history at UC Berkeley in 1975. In 1984, Barbara was invited to join the faculty of the History of Consciousness Department and she taught there until her retirement in 2013. Between 1973 and 2013 the world experienced a number of epochal events from the US defeat in Vietnam to the collapse of the Soviet Union to the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and the subsequent “forever wars,” punctuated by financial crisis, popular revolt and renewed repression. All played out against a backdrop of environmental catastrophe long predicted, long ignored, and now altering life as we know it on this planet. In the midst of the tumult, certain ideas came to prominence in the West which were at once the descendants of the revolutionary Sixties and a departure from them. The worldwide revolution of 1968 appeared to many, especially in the San Francisco Bay Area, to be bringing with it the overthrow of the US government and the replacement of capitalism by socialism. When these hopes were dashed, they left in their wake a great many stranded radicals who sought both to maintain their commitment to social transformation and to explain the failure of analysis that led them to believe revolution was imminent in 1969. A number of theories were advanced that gained widespread and uncritical acceptance loosely grouped under the banner of Socialism and Democracy, 2021 Vol. 35, Nos. 2–3, 1–16, https://doi.org/10.1080/08854300.2021.2007637