[lbo-talk] how did you become a lefty

[Alan Rudy]

Mine's a family/academic story.  Grandma was almost surely in the CP, her
sister definitely was, and Grandpa co-founded Group Health Medical Coop in
Seattle in the late 40s.  Parents took me on anti-Vietnam War protests,
always critiqued the NYTimes at breakfast and talked left-liberally about
national and international politics constantly at the dinner table, I spent
a lot of time doing liberal environmental stuff - though I leaned more
towards Greenpeace than the Sierra Club, as a teen and then, immediately
upon entering college, Reagan was elected, his recession was imposed (voodoo
trickle down anyone?), limited winnable nuclear war was advanced, unions
were busted and Interior/EPA were ruined.  I was almost immediately assigned
Tucker's red Marx-Engels Reader (three times) and Bertell Ollman's
Alienation (twice), took a intro poli sci class where Steven Lukes' stuff on
power was the core, spent three years with a non-credit Topics in Human
Sexuality course, spent a summer with the Pesticide Action Network at the
Friends of the Earth - tied environmentalism and social justice together
before I knew about the anti-toxics campaigns and environmental justice
movements (in SF, hello mind, meet blown... "I'm straight, you asshole, you
don't have to say that... I'm straight, you asshole, what the hell are you
worried about?!... I'm straight, why the fuck can't I stop this stupid
cycle!?" holy shit, was that a 6'2" transvestite street guitarist playing
Hendrix at the Castro entrance to BART?!) and took a Latin American
Comparative Politics Course (to prove to me the festering nightmare that has
been US foreign policy), Reagan proposed Star Wars... I was completely and
utterly and intensely bewildered when the whole world didn't become
radicalized... and, worse, most moved rightward - cheerleaders, YAF and a
love of the NFL returned to campus while I was there).  If it wasn't set in
stone by that time, my graduate advisor was a Marxist theorist of the state,
and we worked to develop a theory of and for socialist ecology, and the
other one was an old Trot doing the political economy of agriculture... and
then there was Haraway's Feminist Theory seminar. Done deal, ruined
career... not that I realized how unbelievable conservative Sociology
departments and journal editorial boards were going to turn out to be.

On Mon, May 3, 2010 at 8:11 PM, shag carpet bomb <shag at cleandraws.com>wrote:


> stories of how your consciousness was raised please!
>
> shag
>
> --
> http://cleandraws.com
> Wear Clean Draws
> ('coz there's 5 million ways to kill a CEO)
>
>
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>

-- 
*********************************************************
Alan P. Rudy
Dept. Sociology, Anthropology and Social Work
Central Michigan University
124 Anspach Hall
Mt Pleasant, MI 48858
517-881-6319