I often like to say that it isn’t by reading theory that I realized that Communism was the answer to our liberation, but that I learned the name for what I already was by reading theory.

Growing up so poor that we grew our own food & we received gifts of socks & warm blankets from the local church, I noticed early on that there were differences between my peers & I (my father was going to medical school & my mother was a dance teacher). The other kids in my class didn’t have to wear their dad’s old clothes, or have to eat the free lunches at school.

Otherwise, my upbringing was entirely normal for the time. I went to public school & worked doing yardwork during the summers to help my family pay the bills. I didn’t realize until much later how few of my friends had to do the same. They got to have their summers free. I often joke that I started my first “real job” at 16 years old in order to get out of yardwork (for those wondering, farms don’t have an HR department that check if you’re old enough).

Going to college at a time when you could still mostly pay for it by part time work, my entire goal was to serve my country in the military. This goal was made impossible by my ADHD & the need for medication to maintain focus, but I at least learned that it was a bad goal after losing so many of my friends & classmates killed to enable the rich to pillage Middle-Eastern nations.

Later as a young adult, I worked as a chef in Washington D.C. It was here that I encountered the vast differences that lay between the truly rich & everyone else. At one place I worked, the average cost for a single person to eat there was $5,000, & there were people who ate there several times a week. While I was struggling to live on a $25,000 per year income, I was serving people spending 1/5 of that on one meal. I cooked for such people as First Ladies, Supreme Court Justices, Congressmen & the very rich they all serve. I also learned by living in D.C. that while the greater part of the people doing such work believe themselves to be doing good (including the ones you hate), the greater part of them are also dumb as hell.

Moving back to Wichita was another lesson on the toxic effects of capitalism, as the city is infested with those who consider themselves among the rich in reflection of its most secure citizen, while scheming constantly to actually make their fantasies reality. I finished my degree at Wichita State, a school where Charles Koch had personally financed the economics department to ensure that the grind of ruthless entrepreneurship was the most touted use of a person’s education & abilities. I saw this mindset grind honest people down in to conniving caricatures of capitalists as they chased a dream made impossible by the very system they upheld as the best possible.

These experiences got me to start thinking of what an equitable society would look like if I had the power to build it from the floor up. I wondered what kind of laws it would have (after going through the normal Anarchist phases in my youth), or what ways the people could be motivated to participate in their society. I was a voracious reader, & had read The Manifesto in high school, but it wasn’t until later that things finally clicked for me the theorists I had been reading had already considered the ideas I foolishly thought were my unique invention. I finally had a name for the ideas that I had long held, Communism.

For a time I thought that we could become free by expert use of the electoral process. I even worked for the state Democratic Party at one point, & was a fierce proponent of its virtues. All we needed was “one more Representative” I would say, mindlessly repeating the talking heads on TV. I knew that the Dems didn’t back of some of the things I supported, like universal healthcare or a higher minimum wage, but I thought that once their great victory over the “Evil” republicans was accomplished, we could push them to embrace those ideas.

It was learning the intricacies of the law that made me believe that we could not achieve our liberation via any capitalist party, or even any capitalist structures. Seeing how the laws were constructed & the complex reinforcement to the status quo resulting from centuries of elite rule, I realized that the only way to free ourselves would be the same methods that other oppressed peoples have had to use since recorded time. We could not erect a new system without tearing down the last, & we have to do so at any cost. “Communism” was the answer to the “what”, “Revolution” was the answer to the how.

Some Books That Inspired Me

• Justice as Fairness. Rawls, J. (1958). The Philosophical Review, 67(2), 164–194.
• The State and Revolution. Lenin, V. (1918). Penguin Classics.
• If We Burn. Vincent Bevins (2023). Hatchette Book Group.
• When Sunflowers Bloomed Red. Steven Cox & R. Alton Lee (2020). Bison Books.
• Parenti, Michael. Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism. City Lights Publishers, 2020.