Marxism has been part of me for all my life. Late in my fifties, I’m still learning and sorting out how. Until now, I think I’ve had only one real adventure in Marxism. Still, that one was formidable. It helped me grow up and figure out who I was going to be in the world. And it makes a good story. My father also had a Marxist adventure, one more tragic than mine. It’s only by working through his life that I’ll be in a position to take hold of my own. Life studies is one of the big things Marxism is for.

My father, Murray Berman, died of a heart attack in 1955, when he was just short of forty-eight, and when I wasn’t quite fifteen. He grew up on New York’s Lower East Side and in the Bronx, left school at twelve, and was thrown into “the business world” — that’s what he and my mother called it — pushing a truck in the garment center to help support his parents and nine kids in one room. He called it “the rack,” and often said he was still on it. But the garment center’s friendly malevolence felt like home to him, and we would never leave that home.

Over the years, he graduated from outdoor schlepper to indoor schlep­ per (I guess it would be called stock clerk today) and then to various clerical and sales jobs. He was on the road a lot before I was born and when I was very young. For several years he worked, as both reporter and an advertising salesman, for Women’s Wear Daily. All those years are vague to me. But I know that in 1948, he and a friend from the Bronx made a great leap: they founded a magazine. Its theme, announced on the mast­ head, was “The garment industry meets the world.” My father and his friend Dave had little education and less capital but lots of foresight — the Yiddish word is sachel. Globalization in the garment center was an idea whose time was coming, and for two years the magazine thrived, selling ever more advertising space (my father’s specialty), which, in capitalist economies is what keeps newspapers and magazines alive.