A common question in Marxist circles is, “What radicalized you?” I’ve been asked that plenty of times, and while there are a number of things I can point to, ultimately, there are a few core things that pushed me down the path to communism. What follows is not an exhaustive list, more a few thoughts on some key moments in my maturation as a human being.
The first moment in my radicalization was, undoubtedly, Bernie Sanders’ 2016 United States Presidential campaign. I’m not going to get into the nuts and bolts of the campaign, nor am I going to touch on modern-day Bernie, whom I have become disillusioned by and now view as nothing more than a bulwark to redirect those seeking something different back into the Democratic Party. What I want to talk about is how I owe Bernie a deep debt of gratitude for being a different voice at a time when I was looking for something different. I’d long been disillusioned by politics and, sometime in my 20s, had decided to write off politics for the most part. I still abhor politics, but there is a difference, in my mind at least, between politics and theory. I have come to love theory, and that is something I was turned onto by the mere idea that Bernie was a socialist. It doesn’t matter, for my part in this tale at least, that he was never an actual socialist. No, what matters is that I was looking for something, and for a brief moment, I thought I had found that something in Bernie. Even though he would let me down and show himself a class traitor, he sparked a drive in me to discover all I could about socialism, and by extension, Marxism and communism.
The next sentinel event in my radicalization was working for my first full-time service. I had already been working there for about five years in 2016. I hated my job, and I hated everything about how my service did business. It wasn’t until 2016 when it finally clicked in my head that I was so upset with my service because healthcare is not a business and shouldn’t be treated like one. With that realization, every call became another moment propelling me further down the radicalization rabbit hole. Every meeting with management and every bullshit story peddled my way in an effort to cover up the service’s callousness towards the people it was meant to serve simply accelerated my drive to fight against it all.
Lastly, becoming a Paramedic truly radicalized me. I had convinced myself that all the societal ills I was witnessing as an Emergency Medical Technician could be addressed once I became someone with true power on the ambulance. Instead, I was confronted by the fact that I was utterly powerless. A minuscule human attempting to stop the bleeding from a wound the size of the Grand Canyon. All my new skills didn’t matter because I did not have a purpose behind wielding them. I was thrashing about blindly attempting to figure out how to make a difference. That’s when I realized I could make a difference by bringing the Marxist tendencies that had come to dominate my personal life into my professional life. I started fighting for my patients, focusing on their humanity, and treating what I could. I had found my purpose, to plant my feet firmly in both Marxism and medicine.
Maybe I’ll write about this in more depth at some point. For now, these scattered thoughts will have to do. The tones have been dropping a lot today. Maybe I’m making a difference, maybe I’m not, but I’m approaching each patient, understanding the contradictions of the system, and allowing dialectical thinking to guide me. The journey to radicalization continues, much like being a clinician, the growth and the journey never stops.
Lead image courtesy of Push Left Media – Spotify
