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[Contribution to the Reimagining Society Project hosted by ZCommunications] The topic of my essay is the current weakness of the…
Barbara Epstein
I became involved in the peace movement (Student Sane) as a high school student in New York City in the late fifties/early sixties. I also became a socialist, and in 1963, during my first year in college, I joined the Communist. Party. Five years later, by that time a graduate student in Berkeley, I left the CP, having concluded that it was hopelessly dogmatic and unlikely to go anywhere. I was involved in the anti-war movement and the women's movement, and became a member of the editorial collective of the journal then called Socialist Revolution (later Socialist Review). I got a Ph.D. in History and a job at UC Santa Cruz, tried hard to maintain involvement in activism, but found that it was very difficult to do this consistently while also teaching and writing. I write about social movements, I have connections with Socialist Register and Monthly Review, and I have been sporadically involved in activism, especially in peace/anti-war movements and currently in the Middle East peace movement.