Quote:
Originally Posted by bahbahmickey
Tomj, I'd like to hear your response to my last post, but I am also interested in your backround and how you came to be pro-socialism. Nothing too personal, but stuff like where you were born, where else have you lived, your education, any big events in your life that may have effected your decision to be pro-socialism (father lost his job and you were homeless for a while, your grandpa took you to a socialist speaker when you were young, you went to a OWS protest and that convinced you how evil rich people are), etc.
Born in Birkenhead which is near Liverpool and grew up during the Thatcher years which is my earliest political memory, the utter hatred toward this woman for what she did to the miners, steelworkers and so on. Father was quite a bitter man, socialist in many ways but also a bit racist, fond of the Soviet union and devastated when the Berlin Wall came down. Bit of a hippy, mother was as well but she wasn't political. Neither of them worked until I was about 8 or 9. They were educated though - always books in the house, which was a rare sight on our estate, people used to come in and think they were like Professors or something. Nope, just on the dole lol. All kinds of books though, that's where I picked up 1984, I must have looked at the spine since I was 3 and one day picked it up and decided to read it.
Wirral council kept it's grammar schools, offered 11+ which I passed and went to a school which was packed full of middle class kids - what I would say were genuine middle class, posh cars, managers, solicitors. I was the only one from my school on the estate, so I guess I had a unique insight being from a poor are but mixing with posh types and seeing how they lived. Ironically I had a worse standard of living than most of my former mates who went to the comprehensive.
Anyway, all that I guess, coupled with some lefty ideas inherited from my father. It took reading as I said Orwell, and the communist manifesto and other Marxist stuff to decide what I thought was wrong with the world and as Lenin asked, what is to be done. Learned a lot from discussions and activities with other socialists as well as I got older like 20+. Always open to new ideas but fundamentally I am an irreconcilable socialist.