Perhaps the title would be more accurate if it was why Marxism chose me, but a large number people reading this would probably identify with most of the reasons I give, and would have come to a different ideological understanding of the world. So I will stand by my assertion that I chose Marxism, whether this was a conscious or forced choice is, for the most part, irrelevant. What people may not be able to identify with are the individual milestones in my life that shaped my outlook from a very young age, the questioning of the status quo, the naive understanding that things were just not right, which eventually led to my discovery of an alternative, better ideology. These were all experienced in isolation from my friends, family, and community. This is not to say that this same process of evaluation of the world around us was not simultaneously occurring among my peers, just that I never shared my thoughts with others until recently. There was no sense of the community leading me towards my encounter with Marxist thought, I sought out an explanation and identified with it by myself, albeit with a few small kicks in the right direction.
That rather neatly brings me to the point of this post. I often hear people I am boring to death, with yet another rant about the rich fuckers exploiting the earth/working class/pretty much anything they can extract surplus value from, say, why are you a Marxist? This question has always been a difficult one for me to answer, not because it is particularly hard, or because I do not have a coherent answer to the question, it has always been because any answer I would give would require a substantial amount of time to provide. Most people simply do not want to devote that amount of time to a question they believe is relatively simple. The truth is that it is anything but simple.
The first time I can remember questioning the way wealth was dispersed among society I was aged seven or eight, it was Christmas day, and as was traditionally the case my rather meagre, but none-the-less appreciated, range of toys was bringing me the usual amount of rather fleeting joy. This was when the invitation to join a friend at his house was extended my way. Until that day I had never been to a friends house on Christmas day, I was not expecting to notice just how much more wealthy he was than I, even though there had always been an acknowledgement by myself that he had more money. Where my clothes had always been tatty, cheap, hand me downs, he was always relatively turned out for the time, wearing all of the latest sports gear that was desired so much during the mid to late nineties, Upon walking in to his house I was shocked by the sheer range of what I would now consider consumerist junk, but at the time thought was among the most important things in the world, he could afford. Playing with each and every one of his gifts for the next couple of hours felt like receiving a kick in the knackers, with every new thing he showed me that sickness and pain I felt grew exponentially. After a few hours I could no longer take it, I felt for the first time in my life like I was worth considerably less than someone. That he had more 'things' proved it to me. I ran home and cried for an hour or so until my father came in to comfort me. Why I remember this is because it was the first, and only time, he had done this. The image is so vivid in my mind because I now come to realise this is something he too suffered from, the knowledge that despite being surrounded by the poor, the working class, we were very much in the underclass, and as I grew older I learned we were suffering the worst effects of poverty at the time.
Life carried on much the same for a while, we were on appallingly inadequate benefits, we had no money, I grew to acknowledge this. Whilst I did not like the strain it put my family under, that it put me under, I did not think I could do anything about it. After a couple of years this changed. As a family we were now in employment, for a while at least, we had a few pennies to our name. These new found earnings were not without a cost for my brother and I. We were also in employment. The nature of the work my family had managed to secure was pay-per-unit work, and the pay was terrible! To make ends meet my brother and I was required to work a couple of hours a day making light fittings during term time, during the school holidays we worked in the factory making them, and on the weekend we delivered them by van. Those were the good times in this period. When the amount of money paid per unit fell it was not uncommon for us to be taken out of school and put to work. Where friends were enjoying their childhood, going to school, and playing football with friends, we were working up to ten hours a day. My education suffered significantly. During the early years of my education I remember being classed among some of the brightest pupils in my year, my parents were proud, but by the time I had finished my primary education I had slipped from the top of the pile to the middle of the pack and I never fully recovered. I cannot fault my parents too much for this, we needed the money, and riding around in that rickety death trap of a van with my brother was fun. I remember with great fondness driving down a road and the doors suddenly blowing open on the back exposing us to the cars behind, we struggled to close the doors whilst holding up boxes of brass connectors and plastic-moulded lights. We still laugh about it occasionally today. We were more than happy to help out, not only because we had an acute knowledge of our economic inequality, but because we knew that was what you had to do when you was as poor as we were. Why the Thatcherite political class, and the uncaring society in which we live, largely ignore the effects of extreme poverty on children is another matter.
Moving into secondary school my memories of what led me to choosing to identify with Marxist ideology become less nostalgic. It was tough. Really, really tough. Most people would identify the period of their life that they are in secondary school as being the hardest part of their life. You are developing a sense of individuality and trying to find a place for yourself. The differences between people, between you and your classmates, become more pronounced than at any point in your life. Hyper-divisions exist everywhere, even between people with very little that marks them apart. You feel alone in almost every sense of the word. When picking my options for secondary education my choices were limited, the grammar schools were now out of the equation, I had fallen too far behind where I once was. This left a few options, but due to the cost of travel this was whittled down to two. The local one with a bad reputation or the village based one, a bit farther out, but with a fairly decent reputation. It served the slightly richer community in the villages and small towns just outside of my own. Having now reverted back to benefits, my parents decided I should go the better option, I could get back to where I once was with a push. Looking back I cannot help but feel this was the worst decision they could have made. There was not many of us at this school on benefits. The difference between myself and my classmates was immediately noticeable, they had access to everything I did not and I quickly found myself slipping from the 'grammar stream' to the bottom/middle once more. The economic disparity between my family and theirs affected me in other ways, in worse ways. My inability to keep up with their 'fads' and other nonsense found me slipping more and more towards the outside of the mainstream, until I was both derided by those I was forced to be around and invisible to the rest. I did not want to be there. My attendance slipped from 100% in year 7 to just over 30% by year 11. It felt pointless to me. I was poor, I was not going to make it in this world. I just wanted to be done with it all and work. I needed the money as fast as possible so that I could no longer be the poor kid, the irrelevant mass in the classroom. Like most of the working class, being in school offered me nothing. You need money to succeed, it buys the freedom to learn. It affords the individual an escape all of the concerns that plague an adolescents mind. Once more I felt like I was worth significantly less than those around me, I was that kid crying on Christmas day again.
Fast forward a few years and I am in low-paid work. It is part-time at a local supermarket. Before that I had been out of work for over two years since leaving school. They had kicked me off benefits for not looking for work, when in truth I was and there was no work, I just did not follow their procedures to prove I had been. The lovely people at the jobcentre annoyed me with their implied accusations that I was simply lazy and so I gave up caring. I had enrolled in college as a way to pass the time. It was here that I first encountered Marxism, and whilst I agreed with much of what was said, I spent far too much time drunk to fully appreciate how relevant it was to me and the working class struggle. My studies at this point followed a familiar pattern, at first I was exceeding expectations, then as I became aware of my inability to afford university, alongside added pressures from home, I simply stopped going and let grades fall away. The main problem was the financial pressures from home after my father had lost his employment once again. It meant I was working near full-time hours in addition to going to college five days a week. I asked myself what the point was if I could not afford to go to university. I was needed at home. So once again, economic pressures and barriers had pulled me away from reaching my potential. I had become a vital part of the economic lifeblood of my household. It was at this point I started questioning everything in much more detail than before. I began reading and searching for an answer that explained why I was unable to achieve anything without being pulled back into deprivation. I remember spending large amounts of time thinking about the Marxist theories we had skimmed over in my Sociology class and decided read into it and to find out more.
Four years later and I was still working for the local supermarket, at just above minimum wage (by about six pence... the gits). I had read quite a bit of Marxist thought and I had found my place. I had found the truth behind the collective struggle experienced by vast swathes of people trying to achieve the great capitalist lie, like I once had, of raising themselves up from the working class to become 'successful'. I found myself constantly banging the war drum against the lazy bastards earning a fortune for walking around inspecting the shop once a month with a stick up their arses. I began to argue about their exploitation of us workers more and more by the day. Why should the owner be earning about a thousand times more than me for doing jack shit everyday? He had not even founded the company, he had just inherited this wealth. I argued about how much profit they were extracting from each hour of work with my fellow employees. It was then that I came to realise that I had chosen Marxism.
Shortly after this revelation the last thing holding me in my home town had been lost to me. Suddenly I had found myself enrolling into the only university willing to take a punt on me. I was going as a mature student, with little to no academic achievement behind me, but I was determined to succeed.
After my three years at university I had (very nearly) repaid the faith whoever decided to accept my application had in me, I missed out on my target of a first class degree by around one percent, it was a good result, far better than I would have predicted going in, but I find the struggle to lift myself from the lower reaches of the working class continues to this day. To date Capitalism has done nothing to help me, and many others like me, and that's why I will continue to choose Marxism.
