"...
Like so many other influential intellectuals you've also made a political journey in your life, having started as a man of the left. Was it a slow and gradual process or was there one particular drastic breaking point?

I was a confirmed and enthusiastic believer in the (very) radical left from the age of 14, in 1962, to the age of 29, in 1977. It was then that I first began to doubt the millenarian promises of Marxism. Let me stress here that I was a serious Marxist, not a '60s street radical. But I had studied anthropology and realized that since our species had existed for some 35,000 years, and in all that time a "great change" and the onset of "species being" or "the end of history" had never taken place, it would not take place. State-socialist revolution is a fantasy of return to the security of the womb, of a world without conflict or death. But conflict is innate to nature and death is the unavoidable outcome of life. I further recognized that no social experiment could succeed on a compulsory or "universal" basis. I tried to find ways to reconcile my emotional identification with the left and intellectual and political liberty, through anarchist, syndicalist, and surrealist conceptions, as well as the legacy of Trotsky.

But most importantly, I was and am bilingual in Spanish and the rise of the Sandinista dictatorship in Nicaragua was the final blow for me. I simply could not support the erection of another Cuba. In addition, I saw that in Spain after Franco, popular sovereignty had been secured by a monarchy, not by revolution. I broke publicly with the left in 1984, after seven years of doubts. The process of disengagement was mainly internal, but was painful for myself and those close to me.
..."
http://www.chrenkoff.blogspot.com/

Gosh, I don't think ever cared that much about political views. I wonder when he became a Sufi; and whether that had any influence? Being Sufi and atheist Marxist isn't going to be very compatible. I also don't see how anthropology fits very well with Marxism- though I know there is no shortage Marxist anthropologists, but to be serious about both would be difficult.