Another interview, with a live guy this time: James Weinstein, founding editor of In These Times, on Salon.

So as time went on, and especially in the New Deal, the ideas that had originally been totally marginal became the property of the mainstream of American political discourse, and meanwhile socialists had nothing new to say, because the Russian Revolution had thrown the whole movement backward. What came to mean ”socialism” after the Russian Revolution was this incredibly backward, pre-capitalist, pre-industrial society whose main goal was to catch up with the west. I mean, in my book I show how the Russian city of Magnitogorsk became the model of a socialist city, but it replicated Gary, Ind. — everything radiated out from the steel mill! — which was probably the worst failed American city. I mean, they had no idea what socialism was. It was a terrible throwback, the use of slave labor, the absence of any kind of political democracy. And yet the communists, who really were at the time the most vital force in the American left, were defending it.

I’ve driven through Gary, Indiana. He’s got a point. (But of course so does the ghost of Karl Marx, who points out that there was no way under any system that industrializing someplace as backward as Tsarist Russia was going to be all ponies and ice cream.)

From there Weinstein goes on to some discussion of what’s continued to go wrong with the American left — or rather with American leftists, since Weinstein maintains there’s no such thing as the American left at the moment. It kind of deteriorates into a discussion of the Democratic presidential primaries, but it’s interesting stuff nonetheless.