When I was like 14 and under, I was already big on looking through newspapers and following up on current events. Had a class in elementary school where the teacher asked people to talk about the news they read somewhere, and I was a standout at that time. My dad worked in a political environment and founded his own charity, so that brought him/me in contact with all sorts of provincial/federal/international politicians, so I grew up very at ease in speaking to big shots. Also, very unimpressed by living in their societies that needed 12 year olds like me to do hours of charity work for the homeless, where the police sneered and refused to help me and my dad with basic issues like unlocking our charity van so we could keep giving out winter clothes to those in need.

I guess at that time I was a left-liberal, with communist aesthetic stuff starting around 16. But by the time I was finally able to vote in elections, I was already struggling to read the communist manifesto and other marx/engels stuff I downloaded and put into a binder, but that was mostly to back up my drive for soviet aesthetic stuff. Learned as much as I could about the Black Panthers.

I was kinda wary of describing myself as a communist once I met the ushanka wearing dorks in my area who were memeing about genocide or whatever, given my family has been affected by a genocide done for ‘the betterment of the people’… also they were so fucking cringe. So that period was an anarchist one. (Highschool to most of university)

Read more about Marcos after having many mexican comrades in my life, who had ties to Chiapas. This period was marked by actually reading theoretical texts more than before, as I was using the work printer to bind books and make it look like I was working, though I mostly just read Malcolm X’s bio and assorted texts about western imperialism and genocide. Then I worked near an anarchist bookstore and bought “bricks” as the guy at the shop would say. Read lots of texts from there, about Kronstad, Durruti, etc.

With the onset of covid, I had read enough Marcos and Mandela to not particularly care about labels while in favour of a synthetic left with no real name, picking and choosing what felt like good aspects of both Communism and Anarchism. The responses necessary to covid made me more in favour of communist-style use of the state apparatus to coordinate efforts against the virus, and I spent a lot of the downtime in my apt reading Mao thoroughly. The Maoist approach to the Mass line seems to placate most of my anarchist tendencies, though I still have reservations about a majority pushing past a minority, given my family’s history. Looking into the modern Black Panther Movement stuff a bit more lately.

Overall, I am big on the Zapatista fusion (“You are right. The EZLN and its larger populist body the FZLN are NOT Anarchist. Nor do we intend to be, nor should we be. In order for us to make concrete change in our social and political struggles, we cannot limit ourselves by adhering to a singular ideology. […] What we all have in common is a desire to make things better for ourselves and our country. None of this can be accomplished if we are to build walls of words and abstract ideas around ourselves.”) and sympathetic to Maoism, and fighting the perceptions of the imperialist west.

My big covid reads have been more Zapatista stuff, more Maoist stuff, and the tao te ching. Ultimately, I believe I have no reason to barricade myself off behind walls of words and abstract ideas and wish only to change the objective conditions of the world that lead to the unnecessary suffering and death of millions if not billions of people.