I was born in 1948, so I'm a '60s kid, and in the '60s everyone talked all the time, endlessly, about socialism versus capitalism, about political choices, ideology, Marxism, revolution, 'the system' and so on.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Certainly there's a huge appeal to the '60s, because it was such a big turning point to everyone. It was the era of change, the boiling point. People rebelled against things - the hippies, the feminists, the protesters. All these things just built up and boiled over. I think people can relate to that today.
My first encounter with Marx's writings came very early in life, as a result of the strange times I grew up in, with Greece exiting the nightmare of the neofascist dictatorship of 1967-74.
I was raised a socialist by two very socialist parents, and I still feel very animated about socialist principles.
Since 1948 I have spent every single day thinking how the economic and political worlds have changed.
I came at age in the '60s, and initially my hopes and dreams were invested in politics and the movements of the time - the anti-war movement, the civil rights movement. I worked on Bobby Kennedy's campaign for president as a teenager in California and the night he was killed.
In my speeches, I always condemned communism, national-socialism and fascism.
I started writing seriously about 1960, at the fairly advanced age of 30.
In the 1970s, many intellectuals had become political radicals. Marxism was correct, liberalism was for wimps, and Marx had pronounced that 'the ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.'
I was born in the 1980s, so learning about the late 1960s was really fascinating, not only just because of the way things looked and sounded but because of what was going on in society at that time.
When I was a kid, for me, the '60s seemed so far away. But I was actually born in the late '60s.