hello

[contracycle]

Hi all,

dunno how much of a bio you want here. Headline items are that I live in London, but was raised in what was then still apartheid South Africa.

That was, unsurprisingly, what set the political gears grinding, although it was only in the UK that I committed myself to socialism and revolution. I'm not exactly new at this by now, and I hope to contribute something to those who are starting to look into this philosophy, but there are also clearly many here who know much more than I do and from whom I hope to learn.

Pleased to meet you.

[Q]

Welcome :)

If you have political questions, you can ask them in the Learning forum. That's why it's there after all!

If you have questions about your account, don't hesitate to send me a PM or ask here.

What are your political ideas, if anything in particular and what attracts you to them?

[contracycle]

My political ideas are, in short, that either we kill capitalism, or capitalism will kill us.

You could say that I was drawn, or perhaps pushed, to look for alternative ideas out of self defence. Without wanting to pretend that white South Africans had it rough - and looking back at my first post, I see I didn't mention that I am white - there was still a good deal of fear and danger.

There were bombs going off; someone I knew was killed in the nailbombing of a church. SA had universal male conscription, and we were fighting a pretty hot war in Namibia, and every night on TV the national anthem would play, and against a backdrop of the fluttering flag, the names of soldiers killed in action would scroll up the screen.

So I knew that one day my turn would come, and the question arose, how can we solve this, how can we fix this godawful mess? And yet every orthodox analysis was telling me it couldn't be fixed, that the laws of property prevented them; that we couldn't put electricity and water in the townships, that we couldn't build decent houses, or provide health care, because of the "moral hazard".

Communist texts were banned in SA, so at that point I didn't have access to them. Once in the UK, I started reading the Manifesto and such, thinking to myself that the dude had some good ideas, but that, as "everyone knows", Marxism doesn't work; but maybe I could find something that would offer a way to break the deadlock. And what I found instead was that I could not defeat the arguments I was reading; they rang far too true for me to dismiss.

So I hooked up with an outfit, and they spoke about politics in a way I'd never heard before, and they answered my questions with a realism and pragmatism that blew me away, and so I stayed, and read more, and it wasn't long before I was thoroughly convinced. And that was pretty much that.

[RedWorker]

Welcome, comrade!