Bourgeois Revolutionaries

There are many reasons why individuals become interested in class struggle, however essentially one can boil them down into two categories. Those inspired by personal struggle and strife and those motivated by intellectual curiosity and fads.

For people like me who belong in the first category, the writing has always been on the wall even though we haven’t always known what the solution is. You grow up seeing your parents struggling to get by from day to day and put food in your mouth. You see your neighbors evicted and thrown out in the street because their jobs have been moved overseas and they can’t find work. You see your friend’s mother pass away because she can not afford her medication and makes too much to get government assistance.

Everyday you see good hard working people harassed and treated like criminals because they possibly may not have papers to prove they have a right to work in this country. Than one day, war breaks out and you see your friends, (maybe even you) go off to kill some people in a foreign land. But when they come back things seem to be much worse for them yet to get any kind of help for illness cause by military service will take decades of court battles because our government isn’t ever wrong. Than your dear friend whose mother passed away and turned to heroine to deal with the pain is diagnosed with AIDS but any kind of cure is far off because GOD tells our president that he is punishing a deviant lifestyle.

Than one day you pick up a pamphlet or a book by some socialist thinker or other and a little switch in your head is clicked and a light goes on. Suddenly you see the writing on the wall that has always been there for you to see. (Mid you that the above are just examples and do not reflect any particular individual.)

The second category which is comprised of both the intellectual and the fad follower are not really from the working class yet have dove head first into ideology. Now to be fair, I have known some of this category that have been apt enough to see the writing on the wall. Most however seem to take to Marxism as others do to religion. Perhaps they like punk rock and were told that true punk rock fans are all anarchists, or perhaps they like the band Rage Against The Machine a bit more than is healthy. Whatever their reasons, for some the experience may be a profound one that can change their lives and perhaps define it like individuals such as Ernesto “Che” Guevara. Yet sadly, for many of them it is simply a phase in their lives they will look back on with amusement such as I do to the time I had long hair and an earring.