The Religion and Philosophy Room
I grew up in what at least politically was a fairly typical Vermont center-left, Democrat-voting household. Not that it made any difference since all three of my parents had similar politics, but only my mom was influential on my politics because I hated my dad and stepmom (because they hated me and still do). For example, I can remember my mom talking favorably about Bill Clinton shortly before the 1992 presidential election and that had some lasting influence on me. (I was 8 years old at the time and considered my mom infallible.) Religion wasn't really discussed by any of my parents either. That may sound a little unusual to you, but those kinds of attitudes are common in this area.
The first time my opinion on politics changed was in the year 2000 when I was in Modern History class (this was in the 10th grade) and the class was discussing the upcoming presidential election. I decided that I liked Ralph Nader the best just because I wanted to stand out, considering that everyone else preferred either Gore or Bush. That led me to investigate the politics I had decided to identify myself with. Then, a few months later (early 2001) while watching a late-night rock program (I forget even the name of it now) on VH1, the host at one point casually, but neutrally, described Rage Against the Machine, a favorite band of mine at the time, as "communist" in an introduction before playing their Guerilla Radio music video. I then decided that being a communist would help me stand out even more. Basically, I was a loner looking for attention and felt that being well outside the cultural mainstream in my views would help me get it. To give you an idea of how serious I was about it at the time though, I couldn't have told you who Karl Marx was for another year after that because I didn't especially care about the details. It was all about the label for me and the fact that everyone hated communists. But I think there was something to my upbringing in that because one notices that, while my views changed, they remained fundamentally left-of-center. I couldn't bring myself over to the Bush/Republicans' camp even though it was less popular than the Gore/Democrats' camp. I had to just go further left. I think that's how it is for most people. Few wind up making actual paradigm shifts from left to right or vice versa, and I never made one either.
It was really 9/11 that abolished my casual attitude, teenage-rebellion-type toward politics. Subsequent to that surreal event, I noticed how rapidly events moved: how instantly President Bush was empowered with all kinds of new options in terms of investigating people's personal lives, how quickly we moved toward attacking not just Afghanistan, but also Iraq, and developed a whole "axis of evil" list of enemy states to defeat. I noticed news reports about the government investigating large numbers of people simply for being Muslims. We debated topics like whether to abolish air travel altogether in American History class. Fellow students talked about nuking Afghanistan. There was what seemed to be a complete media blackout on criticism of the president that lasted quite a while. Suddenly he was god and anyone who disagreed was a traitor potentially in league with Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. Put together, it all kind of scared me and made me seriously wonder about what kind of country we were becoming. Out of curiosity, I began investigating the motives of these Al Qaeda people, Islam, and the Palestinians in their struggle for national independence (as that conflict was raging at the time and frequently in the news as well), really just wondering what could possibly motivate someone to do something like what we saw on 9/11. I had already mentally rejected Islam, but I couldn't help questioning my country at that time when it was so unpopular to do so, and to that end I couldn't help wondering if these opponents thereof might have had a valid point buried somewhere in their politics. Not that I agreed with their choice of actions, but I found that indeed there was a whole imperial history to be taken into consideration, and one that was not at all being discussed on TV as we rushed toward war with Iraq. The only people discussing this history I could find (whose web sites were available in English anyway) were the people at the Revolutionary Communist Party USA, a then-Maoist group. Their rhetoric was a little too extreme for me at the time, but that reinforced my positive opinion of communism and communists from before. It was at this point that I got a little serious about my interest in communism. I researched who Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, and Mao Zedong were, for example, and finally figured out a little more about the defining economic views of communists. Rage Against the Machine, now broken up, became my favorite band. I started attending anti-war protests once a Fox News report said derisively that "anarchists and communists were among their ranks.
My increasing radicalism died down a little in 2003 when I got absorbed by Howard Dean's presidential bid. (Dean had been a popular governor of my state.) I only reluctantly supported John Kerry after Dean lost in the Democratic primaries because I loathed his pro-war stance...but I figured it was hard to be a worse president than Bush and I liked Kerry's other positions alright. I had actually first gone from being a Dean supporter to being a Nader supporter after Dean lost in the Democratic primaries, but was turned off when I learned that prominent Republicans were financing his campaign in order to siphon off Democratic votes and thus keep Bush in office. I didn't want to be a pawn in that game. Unseating Bush was, after all, an uphill battle in 2004 because the culture was still somewhat in 9/11 panic mode, from which Bush benefited. I did managed to get myself banned from the Democratic Underground forums though for complaining at too late a date that Kerry's stance on the Iraq War was "worse than Bush's!" Then Kerry lost. I felt really, really demoralized, having invested so much effort in the campaign. I then began a slow, quiet, bitter retreat back into radicalism that was in turn abated in a similar fashion when the 2008 election cycle began, only to be rekindled by Obama's victory in the Democratic primaries. This latter rekindling was much more serious though. I began considering myself in the Revolutionary Communist Party's political orbit at that point before later actually joining the Leading Light Communist Organization for a period of six months. I began moving away from LLCO when I learned about the group leader's now-public plans to re-enter the world of drug dealing, branding it a plan for world revolution. I also got tired of being told what to write on my blog and so forth and had come to feel that there were theoretical problems with conventional Marxism itself.
My time since departing LLCO has been very politically confused (but with an especially careful attention to the views and movements of the masses) until this year, when I finally began to cement a definite worldview of my own that I typically describe as futurist Marxism. (I've written a lot of blog entries on the subject in case you're interested in what that may be. My blog is linked in my signature.)
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Originally Posted by iustitia
