As both sides of my family are politically rooted in Chinese and Soviet Communism – I can say that outside my house was very different to being it – when I was a young child learning to navigate the (alienating) bourgeois system. Lenin struck me really hard as an eight-year-old. I picked-up a book left lying around by my mother and Lenin was criticising the type of Utopian Socialism we have in the UK. He said that the bourgeoisie acts to control us – the ‘working-class’ – by ensnaring us in a Welfare System that is as abusive to our needs, as it is helpful to our survival. This is the uncaring nature of a Welfare State cynically used by the bourgeoisie to keep the working-class disempowered and materially poor. Lenin’s point is not an argument against the principle of Welfare per se – but rather the way the capitalist States uses Welfare as a ‘threat’ to keep the working-class in its place and not organise itself into effective unions, or rise-up against the continuous injustice and tyranny it is forced to live under.
Lenin said ‘let them starve – then perhaps they will rise-up and over-throw the people hat make them starve!’ Again, not an argument against Welfare – but an argument against bourgeois cruelty and exploitation. As an eight-year-old – this felt ‘right’ – although as a working-class boy I did not yet possess the intellectual ability to understand ‘why’ it was that it felt like Lenin was talking directly at myself – as if he could ‘see’ my daily sufferings! As the years went by, and my brain and mind matured and settled-down – I realised my place in the stream of material history. I understood that I was a small wave in a large ocean – a gigantic body of water that is flowing in just one direction. I worked my way through the bourgeoisie system – being told by ‘it’ that I was ‘nothing’ and would amount to ‘nothing’. I put up with this abuse because I needed to learn from bourgeoise academia. I need the literacy-skills and analytical-skills a bourgeois education grants its adherents. These things I have acquired and now use them toward working-class ends.
As a professional academic living in the UK – I reject the bourgeois publishing industry due to its exploitative nature. Instead, I use my skills for the betterment and development of the working-class. This process amounts to extracting important information and data from the bourgeois academic community and presenting on my blog in relatively short and well-written essays that can be easily accessed, understood, copied and made use of. As a historian, I focus on deconstructing and exposing all Cold War myths fabricated through the auspices of US anti-intellectualism. As Marx said – the bourgeoisie must be over-thrown – but whilst we are arranging to do this, we can extract as much relevant data from it as we can, for our own usage. Keep studying!
