Bookmarker tag: topic/radicalization (2 notes)

1.4 They met in Kang's apartment on Dwight, blocks from the university, arriving with their copies of Capital, The State and Revolution, WHat Is to be Done?

1.5 Kang opened the discussion. We're going to take this slowly and build our knowledge. What I realize is that this is a body of knowledge that has been censored out of your education, whereas to think in Marxist terms outside of America is common practice. Marxism is a way of thinking.

1.6 Ben spoke enthusiastically: For the first time I feel as if I am reading about my own condition, about the condition of my parents as workers, and I finally understand my father's alienation. Although he did not admit it here, it was the case that as Ben read, he came to passages in Marx where he could not help but to kiss the pages and to whoop and dance about his room.

1.7 Olivia rolled her eyes at what she interpreted to be an excessive emotional display and asked for clarification about the differences and similarities between the peasant and the industrial worker.

“One day when I was about seventeen I was walking up and down in front of a restaurant in some small town in Montana. I had a sandwich board strapped to my chest and back, advertising the restaurant, and I’d been promised a meal if I walked that beat for six hours. So I’m walking up and down there, and some guy comes up to me and he’s about forty, fifty years old, and he’s got cold, angry blue eyes and a big beard like prospectors wore up in the hills, and he says to me: ‘You an Amurrican?’ ‘Sure,’ I says back. He points his finger, really angry, at the sandwich board, and he says to me, ‘You’re an Amurrican and a human being. It don’t seem right that you should have to do that just to eat a meal.’ And he made me take the sandwich board off, right there in the middle of the street, and told me to come with him. I was thunderstruck. No one in my whole life had ever said anything like what he’d just said to me. There was nothing for it but to do as he said, and go with him.

“He took me on out to the edge of town and there, on an embankment near a small river, was a campfire and a bunch of guys sitting around it. I thought they were hoboes, but they weren’t. They were Wobblies. They sat me down, gave me some food to eat, explained themselves to me, and within twelve hours they brought politics into my life. [...]

“Of course, I took to the Wobblies right away. It wasn’t just that they were kind to me, and that their talk hypnotized me, and that somehow I knew they were saying something important and they had a lot of guts to be saying it. No, it wasn’t just that. I don’t know how to explain it to you, but all that talk about solidarity and the working class, I didn’t know what the words meant, but somehow, they were touching that loneliness in me. Something flickered up in me, it was warming, I didn’t feel lonely listening to the Wobblies.