You have got to be kidding me.

The San Francisco Chronicle, a supposedly respectable mainstream newspaper (well, sort of) publishes a surrealistically adulatory review of the latest book by a psychotic street-dwelling Marxist: Berkeley: Memoir follows author’s road to communism. (Hat tip: zombie.)

Bob Avakian has devoted his life to the one ideology that he believes holds the promise of massively releasing human freedom and dignity. The ideology is communism.

Berkeley-bred Avakian’s new memoir, “From Ike to Mao and Beyond,” leaves a breathtaking impression. Having deepened and purified his convictions over 40 years of personal and political struggle, Avakian sounds a high, sustained cry for complete social transformation almost as if he were the trumpet of Lenin himself.

It’s as if democratic capitalism’s triumph in the 20th century was history’s biggest mistake, a tragic wrong turn from the revolutionary road marked out by Lenin in the Russia of 1917 after the writings of Marx and by Mao in the China of the 1950s and 60s. Unswervingly, Avakian holds that road and is esteemed by fellow revolutionaries as the marathon man of the international anti-imperialist struggle.

Avakian, 62, a veteran of the Free Speech Movement and other upheavals of the Bay Area in the 1960s, makes an unqualified case for Marxism-Leninism as a fertile thought system that’s as alive now as it was when the two revolutionary masterminds created it to answer what they saw as capitalism’s fundamental inhumanity.