by Elizabeth Curran
Rhode Island
I’m a high school senior from the rural suburbs of western RI. I’ve called myself a socialist for about three and a half years, but I think I truly became one two years ago. For a lot of people, especially my age, the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 had a monumental effect. For the first time in my life, people were showing up en masse to show the world the discrimination they still faced. I began to realize just how ineffective the vaguely liberal ideas of policy reform were toward true progress. Violent backlash, even though I’d always condemned it, was a natural result of systemic violence delivered to a marginalized group for decades. There it was, on camera, people and faces that countered my status quo thinking. But what alternative was there?
While unrefined “social media news” captured my attention in the first place, it took reading and dedication to learning to teach me what socialism meant. I called myself a socialist from early on, hearing spouted arguments from online personalities and agreeing with them without recognizing that I would need to think on my own to define myself as a true “radical”. Left-wing talking points attracted me at the surface level, and it took some time before I forced myself from the dizzying cascade of Internet debate. It took meeting a socialist in the flesh, another young person like myself, to realize I needed to put some work into my ideology. She, like me, was engaged in the onslaught of the news cycle but had a repertoire of reading to defend herself with that I simply didn’t. I could say I liked Marx all I wished, but without putting in the work to understand, my words were empty.
Studying and reading taught me quite a bit about what it means to be a socialist. It served the obvious point of understanding, truly, the ideas to create a better world and the experiments attempted by revolutionary leadership around the world. It also shifted my worldview outward beyond the current moment. The fight for a sustainable and ethical system and for the rights of people is one being fought around the globe and is a fight that has lasted centuries. The exact circumstance has changed, but how is my own existence wildly different from workers everywhere, across all time since capitalism’s invention?
Socialism is anything but antiquated. Everything I have experienced only further pushes me towards it, from the exhaustion of working a first job to my family’s financial struggle to applying for colleges. It makes me wonder how I ever could have thought of liberal reform as viable in the first place. I believe in environmentalism, but there is no way to save our planet with the interests of capitalists at play. I advocate for civil rights, but capitalism benefits from division and discrimination. Poverty and capitalism go together like inseparable allies. It is quite literally impossible to create a better world with capitalism still in the picture. The natural conclusion? Well, if only for the sake of logic, socialism. It’s the only answer to that question with a future.
Independent Socialist Group 