By "thinking for myself" I don't mean rejecting any idea which someone else has thought of. I mean determining which ideas are right or wrong by bringing reason to bear rather then simply accepting that because some great prophet/holy book/authority figure/tradition says something is true it actually is true. Just because Marx, Lenin or anyone else said something is true does not make it true. And I actually dismissed claims by conservatives that Marxism is a "secular religion" as idiotic until I had read through a lot of Marxist theory and came to the conclusions that it is, by which time I had moved to the left of Marxism.
> Just how many Marxist writers have you read?
Oh, I've lost count. Let's see there's Engels, Lenin, Trosky, Lukacs, John Reed, Erich Fromm, Shatchman, CLR James, Stalin, Mao, Castro, Che, Dunayeskaya, Kevin Anderson, DeLeon, Kautsky, Luxemburg, Debs, Gorky, Pannekoek, Luxemburg, Bukharin, Zinoviev, Gramsci and probably many others I've lost count of. So, that's at least 24 Marxist writers I've read. I've also read all of Karl Marx's major works who, although he wasn't a Marxist, obviously had a major impact on Marxism. I treat the works of Marx, Engels, etc. as one of many sources of inspiration and analysis rather then some kind of materialist 'revelation' the way Marxists do.
-- Joe R. Golowka JoeG at ieee.org Anarchist FAQ - http://www.anarchyfaq.org
"If the Nuremberg laws were applied today, then every Post-War American president would have to be hanged." - Noam Chomsky