My Journey Through Bolshevism
My Journey Through Bolshevism
The September 11th terrorist attacks were what first got me interested in matters of public policy. Or more correctly, the way my country (the United States) chose to respond did. You know that one impractical person you knew back then who questioned whether the government should be allowed to keep track of what books you check out at the library (...well people still used those back then) and thought the Guantanamo Bay concentration camp was a bad idea from the outset? That was me. While even I wanted something done militarily about Al Qaeda after the attacks, I really, reeeeeaaaaally hated the suffocatingly jingoistic atmosphere that defined the media climate at that moment in time. For you Americans younger than me who think you've seen that before, no you haven't! You have seen nothing that way unless you lived through 2001-3 and were old enough at the time to know what was going on. Nothing like it has again happened since. Not here. To me, it was pretty fucking scary! I literally went to school on September 12th and there was a lengthy debate in our history class of whether we should abolish air travel. I am not shitting you! I overheard a couple guys at lunch the previous day suggesting we should nuke Afghanistan until the whole place is nothing but a giant crater. The media climate, which revolved around replaying the footage of the towers being struck from new angles over and over and over again and telling the stories of the deceased and their harrowing final moments seemingly one at a time for like six months straight, made it impossible to convince anyone that we were overreacting except for a fringe minority of hippie peacenik types who nobody took seriously (including me).
I was that one person who never bought the official narrative that Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda were teaming up to nuke us or that we were on a mission from Isaiah and noticed that both the sitting president and VP had extensive experience in the oil business. By 2003, I wasn't quite alone anymore and the previous governor of my state (Howard Dean) jumped in the presidential race as an anti-Iraq-War candidate. I voted for him. He lost the nominating contest though, so I didn't vote in the 2004 general election, as there were no anti-war candidates who were relevant. I voted for Hillary Clinton in the Democratic Party's 2008 nominating contest mostly because the political establishment had abandoned her in favor of Obama, so her's just felt like the more outsider campaign atm. She lost. I still voted for Obama in the general election because...the Iraq War, the economy (the crash had just happened), the cost of health care, warrantless wiretapping, gay rights (I was starting to come out of my shell that way), you name it frankly, though I think it worth saying that that was also the beginning of the end of my mainstream progressive era. I say "progressive era" because I never really was much of a proper liberal. Anyway, by this time I had already read Pornography: Men Possessing Women and Female Chauvinist Pigs, so my journey toward radical feminism had begun. I'd also started dabbling in Marxist politics though and you might say that disappointment with the early Obama years took me further down that road.
The first stop on my journey through Marxist fringe politics was a little group called the Revolutionary Communist Party USA, or RCP for short. I never did develop much interest in the Frankfurt School type stuff you got on college campuses, as it seemed to me that that stuff never made a difference in the real world. I looked for something that had before and the RCP at the time had a Maoist reputation. It was this position paper of theirs on women's emancipation that ultimately sold me on their specific brand. I was impressed specifically by their concurrent opposition to both American imperialism and Islamist politics (as not all Bolshevik parties were equally against both), by their audacity to be not only pro-choice, but specifically take the stance that justice for women means there should be, if anything, more, not fewer, abortions happening, and by their principled stand against the sex industry (which was matched by few other Bolshevik groups that I found in my online research; the bulk embracing a frustratingly tolerant attitude toward spaces like Craig's List) and sexual violence against women of both consensual and non-consenting varieties. It almost felt like a Catherine MacKinnon sort of way of thinking to me; like how MacKinnon attempts to fuse Marxism and radical feminism together into a singular persuasion.
EDIT 1:
The reason I took inspiration from Maoism specifically was because over in Nepal a party of Maoist fighters led a successful revolt against their country's monarchy that resulted in it becoming a republic and adopting a new constitution. The story of their revolutionary struggle was in the news on occasion in that general window of time (mainly the late 2000s) as it unfolded. I thought it was awesome and that convinced me to look into Maoist parties here in the U.S. There was more than one of those here in America, but I landed on the RCP for the aforementioned reasons. I never formally joined, but I did participate in their orbit of front groups and help distribute their newspaper, simply titled Revolution. In 2010, I learned from a departing member of the RCP that the party was actually undergoing a transition away from Maoism and into frankly being a personality cult geared around the ideas of the party chair, Bob Avakian. He pointed out to me that the primer on Marxism-Leninism-Maoism that used to appear on the site's left side had disappeared and explained to me that that was why, and also why all the new position papers had been coming out rapid-fire lately. BA considered his way of thinking to represent a new stage in the evolution of Marxist thought. (In fact, the RCP still believes this today.) ...Yeah. Suddenly the whole site dedicated just to Bob Avakian and his works and the constant references to BA across like every Revolution article made sense. That was the point where I knew their orientation was wrong and started looking for the next thing. This is when I discovered a fascinating Wordpress blog called Monkey Smashes Heaven.
I shall continue this later. There will be a point to all this personal narrative, I promise!
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Thought I'd go for something a bit different tonight and take you through some of my mental journey to the particular type of feminist thinking (part of the journey anyway) that I possess today. So much of what's proven fashionable this year has fallen into the category of socialist feminism that I thought it worth taking you through the Bolshevik chapter of my life.
The September 11th terrorist attacks were what first got me interested in matters of public policy. Or more correctly, the way my country (the United States) chose to respond did. You know that one impractical person you knew back then who questioned whether the government should be allowed to keep track of what books you check out at the library (...well people still used those back then) and thought the Guantanamo Bay concentration camp was a bad idea from the outset? That was me. While even I wanted something done militarily about Al Qaeda after the attacks, I really, reeeeeaaaaally hated the suffocatingly jingoistic atmosphere that defined the media climate at that moment in time. For you Americans younger than me who think you've seen that before, no you haven't! You have seen nothing that way unless you lived through 2001-3 and were old enough at the time to know what was going on. Nothing like it has again happened since. Not here. To me, it was pretty fucking scary! I literally went to school on September 12th and there was a lengthy debate in our history class of whether we should abolish air travel. I am not shitting you! I overheard a couple guys at lunch the previous day suggesting we should nuke Afghanistan until the whole place is nothing but a giant crater. The media climate, which revolved around replaying the footage of the towers being struck from new angles over and over and over again and telling the stories of the deceased and their harrowing final moments seemingly one at a time for like six months straight, made it impossible to convince anyone that we were overreacting except for a fringe minority of hippie peacenik types who nobody took seriously (including me).
I was that one person who never bought the official narrative that Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda were teaming up to nuke us or that we were on a mission from Isaiah and noticed that both the sitting president and VP had extensive experience in the oil business. By 2003, I wasn't quite alone anymore and the previous governor of my state (Howard Dean) jumped in the presidential race as an anti-Iraq-War candidate. I voted for him. He lost the nominating contest though, so I didn't vote in the 2004 general election, as there were no anti-war candidates who were relevant. I voted for Hillary Clinton in the Democratic Party's 2008 nominating contest mostly because the political establishment had abandoned her in favor of Obama, so her's just felt like the more outsider campaign atm. She lost. I still voted for Obama in the general election because...the Iraq War, the economy (the crash had just happened), the cost of health care, warrantless wiretapping, gay rights (I was starting to come out of my shell that way), you name it frankly, though I think it worth saying that that was also the beginning of the end of my mainstream progressive era. I say "progressive era" because I never really was much of a proper liberal. Anyway, by this time I had already read Pornography: Men Possessing Women and Female Chauvinist Pigs, so my journey toward radical feminism had begun. I'd also started dabbling in Marxist politics though and you might say that disappointment with the early Obama years took me further down that road.
The first stop on my journey through Marxist fringe politics was a little group called the Revolutionary Communist Party USA, or RCP for short. I never did develop much interest in the Frankfurt School type stuff you got on college campuses, as it seemed to me that that stuff never made a difference in the real world. I looked for something that had before and the RCP at the time had a Maoist reputation. It was this position paper of theirs on women's emancipation that ultimately sold me on their specific brand. I was impressed specifically by their concurrent opposition to both American imperialism and Islamist politics (as not all Bolshevik parties were equally against both), by their audacity to be not only pro-choice, but specifically take the stance that justice for women means there should be, if anything, more, not fewer, abortions happening, and by their principled stand against the sex industry (which was matched by few other Bolshevik groups that I found in my online research; the bulk embracing a frustratingly tolerant attitude toward spaces like Craig's List) and sexual violence against women of both consensual and non-consenting varieties. It almost felt like a Catherine MacKinnon sort of way of thinking to me; like how MacKinnon attempts to fuse Marxism and radical feminism together into a singular persuasion.
EDIT 1:
The reason I took inspiration from Maoism specifically was because over in Nepal a party of Maoist fighters led a successful revolt against their country's monarchy that resulted in it becoming a republic and adopting a new constitution. The story of their revolutionary struggle was in the news on occasion in that general window of time (mainly the late 2000s) as it unfolded. I thought it was awesome and that convinced me to look into Maoist parties here in the U.S. There was more than one of those here in America, but I landed on the RCP for the aforementioned reasons. I never formally joined, but I did participate in their orbit of front groups and help distribute their newspaper, simply titled Revolution. In 2010, I learned from a departing member of the RCP that the party was actually undergoing a transition away from Maoism and into frankly being a personality cult geared around the ideas of the party chair, Bob Avakian. He pointed out to me that the primer on Marxism-Leninism-Maoism that used to appear on the site's left side had disappeared and explained to me that that was why, and also why all the new position papers had been coming out rapid-fire lately. BA considered his way of thinking to represent a new stage in the evolution of Marxist thought. (In fact, the RCP still believes this today.) ...Yeah. Suddenly the whole site dedicated just to Bob Avakian and his works and the constant references to BA across like every Revolution article made sense. That was the point where I knew their orientation was wrong and started looking for the next thing. This is when I discovered a fascinating Wordpress blog called Monkey Smashes Heaven.
I shall continue this later. There will be a point to all this personal narrative, I promise!