Private School Helped Make Me a Socialist
Photo by Museums Victoria
There’s a famous quote, attributed to various people, that says, “If a man is not a socialist by the time he is 20, he has no heart. If he is not a conservative by the time he is 40, he has no brain.” I’m a few years shy of 40. While I’m more of champagne socialist than I was while working at a grocery store and getting arrested at Occupy Wall Street, I still believe in democratic control of the means of production.
Sometimes I wonder why this is. I think there are a number of factors, one of which is simply being born in the late 1980s, around the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Anti-communism was a much less powerful force than it had been during the formative years of previous generations. Graduating college in the midst of the Great Recession probably helped as well.
But the truth is, by that point, I had already attended meetings with the International Socialist Organization, a defunct Trotskyist group, that, in the mid-2000s, was the only game in town for many American leftists. My break with liberal orthodoxy was complete after John Kerry’s loss in the 2004 presidential election. If such a bland, uninspiring Democrat couldn’t win, what was the point of hiding my radicalism?
Hip hop being the dominant musical genre of my adolescence probably contributed to a sense of class consciousness. The gangster rap which surrounded me was problematic in a number of ways. It was filled with misogyny, homophobia and glorifications of violence. One of its greatest redeeming aspects, in my view, was how much of it served as an indictment of the inequalities of capitalism.
No doubt, many things led me to socialism. However, I believe my parents’ work in private schools, which I attended, was one of my most significant influences. These were progressive institutions. My father was rightfully proud to say a blacklisted Pete Seeger performed at one school, while another was the first in the region to racially integrate. The institutions represented my parents’ politics.
Some families are centered around church. Ours was centered around education. My parents met as young teachers at a private boarding school in the Adirondacks. They were married on the property. I lived there for much of my childhood. Despite my feigned cynicism as a teenager, I think I absorbed and took seriously the school’s teaching about non-violence and equality.
So I noticed when the institution didn’t live up to its professed ideals or contradicted them. For instance, the school had an animal farm, where I participated in my first ‘chicken harvest.’ As a 12 year old, this was the first real scene of violence I’d witnessed, aside from schoolyard scuffles or things of that nature. That eventually I became a vegan activist isn’t an accident. But that’s a story for another day.
Some of the most glaring inequality I recognized at the institution was economic. Many of my classmates came from fabulous wealth, a kind I couldn’t imagine. In turn, my family’s upper-middle-class existence was altogether different from that of the school’s support staff, who worked in the kitchen or maintenance department. Finally, on a Spanish trip to Mexico, I was exposed to still further levels of poverty.
That I became a socialist wasn’t a surprise. In order to accept the broader ideals of the progressive schools to which my parents dedicated their lives, I had to reject some of what I saw as their inconsistencies. While I’ve made compromises of my own, and live a comfortable, petit-bourgeois life, I intend on remaining a socialist until the end of my days. If that means I have no brain, as the adage suggests, so be it.
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