by Jacob Bilsky
Conservatives make headlines weekly for crusading against schools that supposedly use books to turn children into Marxists. After becoming a Marxist in my youth, I’m tempted to say I’m this way because of the books I read: Click Clack Moo: Cows That Type, A People’s History of the United States, and The Time Machine, to name a few.
But I read other things in high school—Ayn Rand in freshman English, the Federalist Papers in civics, Hayek and Smith in economics, etc. For teachers I had liberals, conservatives–even a Green! Needless to say my political views were all over the place, changing from class to class.
Four days after high school graduation, I took a summer job as a union Cherry Inspector on the other side of the country. For three months, I labored 10 hours a night, seven nights a week in a packing shed, coming home to an empty apartment too tired to do anything but crawl into bed where all that reading jumbled around my brain.
I saw how my employer charged the packing shed owners $60-90/hr for me to inspect the fruit and write shipping permits while they paid me $14/hr. At lunch, my coworker talked about the other two jobs she worked to support her family, immigrant line workers whispered about ICE raids, and wildfire ash fell like snow from a bright red sky. Few could afford the cherries we packed, and even if we could, East Asian importers bought the best fruit to sell to their countries’ elite.
I’m a Marxist, but not because I read leftist books as a youth or because some professor indoctrinated me. Marx didn’t imagine economic exploitation, nationalist violence, or environmental destruction—he described them as they exist under capitalism in words workers understand because we live through it. Furthermore he suggested an alternative, where working people worldwide cooperate to set humane conditions and hours, reap the full fruit of our labor, and build a brighter future for all. That summer before college, I may have skimmed Marx’s Capital, but importantly, I saw the marks that capital left on the world, and in the years since, I’ve devoted my time to building a socialist world.
Independent Socialist Group 