Sharpening the Mind: A Response to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
“We came down to the front of the Twelfth Army, back of Riga, where gaunt and bootless men sickened in the mud of desperate trenches; and when they saw us they started up, with their pinched faces and the flesh showing blue through their torn clothing, demanding eagerly, “Did you bring anything to read?”” — John Reed, “Ten Days That Shook the World”
In an article published by Vogue on October 15, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America who stunned many people with her victory against a ten-term incumbent in a primary election for the Democratic Party, had some odd words to say for someone who is a “self-described socialist”:
“I think it’s real bougie to grow up with a defined political ideology,” she adds. “You need to have college-educated parents for that, with a political lexicon. My mother doesn’t even have an English lexicon! When people say I’m not Socialist enough, I find that very classist. It’s like, ‘What — I didn’t read enough books for you, buddy?’ ”
There are multiple issues with Ocasio-Cortez’s statement. I will concede that for many people it is perhaps difficult to have a “defined political ideology” growing up, in large part due to the role of liberal democracy in shaping the minds of the population. However, to define having a political ideology as “bougie” because “you need to have college-educated parents”?
In some ways, I can relate to Ocasio-Cortez in terms of family. My paternal grandmother was a semi-literate peasant from Yugoslavia, in what is present-day Croatia. For someone in her social standing during her youth, her level of education was considered good at the time. She hardly spoke any English, much like Ocasio-Cortez’s mother who does not have “an English lexicon.” Her son — my father — grew up in socialist Yugoslavia, and received a far superior education than my grandmother. They moved to Canada when my father was fourteen, and he only was in one year of high school here before dropping out in order to help pay rent for the family. He had dreamed of becoming an engineer, but the fact of having little money effectively forced him to put that on the shelf. While he is now a carpenter of many years, the point was that his access to education in Canada was blocked because he needed to help pay rent.
My own mother, who was born in Canada, did finish high school, but she never went on to post-secondary education due to the cost. Yet it was my working-class mother, not a teacher at school, who first taught me and my sister the alphabet. It was my working-class immigrant father who, along with my mother encouraged us to read as much as we could.
While my father was not college-educated, he is a voracious reader, mostly of newspapers, and will read those publications across the political spectrum. He may not have an advanced understanding of politics that, say, someone who studied international relations has, but he nonetheless does have a political lexicon. This, along with his interest in history, is what helped me first learn about socialism. If it was not for my working-class immigrant father, I likely would not have picked up a copy of Karl Marx’s and Friedrich Engels’ Manifesto of the Communist Party when I was thirteen. And while I would not describe myself as a dedicated Marxist back then, it led me on a path to pursue and develop that precious defined political lexicon, something which was cultivated by a member of the working-class himself.
So who is Ocasio-Cortez to say that one needs to be “bougie” in order to have a political ideology? My political education in those years was from a son of the working-class, to a future son of the working-class.
On that note, let’s focus our attention on her question, ‘What — I didn’t read enough books for you, buddy?’ I will start off by stating that the education my parents gave me as a child, on top of the education I received in school, paved the way for me to eventually go to university, something very few people in my family had done at that point. For my immigrant grandmother and father especially, it was part of a dream fulfilled that a generation from our family had “made it” so to say. However, due to multiple factors — deteriorating mental health during my second year of university, but even moreso the high cost of tuition compounded by student loans with a high interest rate — I have not completed that dream just yet. Instead, I am working as a machine operator in a factory on a continental night shift. That means long, twelve-hour nights, and days off are mostly spent recuperating the body and mind.
Despite all of that, I still try to read as much as I possibly can on history and politics, especially of the Marxist variety. Thus, most of my political education in Marxism has not come from bourgeois professors of the academy, who are also antagonistic to the Marxist worldview, but from self-education, and learning from my comrades. Either from websites hosting theoretical and historical documents or having physical copies, the worker in the twenty-first century is more than capable developing a defined political lexicon, refining it, sharpening it to use as a weapon against the dominant ideology of the Western world: liberal-democratic capitalism.
Vladimir Lenin recognized the importance of eradicating illiteracy in the early days of the Soviet Union, so much so that he stated “Without that [literacy] there can be no politics; without that there are rumours, gossip, fairy-tales and prejudices, but not politics.” And without the mass literacy campaigns, and despite the extremely overwhelming odds the Bolsheviks went through to consolidate power for the world’s first workers’ state, illiteracy was eventually smashed. From a backwards, illiterate peasant-based society, the Soviet Union made such a gigantic leap forward that it became an industrial powerhouse and the first country to send a human into space in the span of forty years. That would not have been possible without the efforts of eradicating literacy and thus the backwardness of the past.
And before Lenin, Friedrich Engels talked about how the working classes of Europe were reading Marx’s Capital:
“Das Kapital” is often called, on the Continent, “the Bible of the working class.” That the conclusions arrived at in this work are daily more and more becoming the fundamental principles of the great working- class movement, not only in Germany and Switzerland, but in France, in Holland and Belgium, in America, and even in Italy and Spain, that everywhere the working class more and more recognises, in these conclusions, the most adequate expression of its condition and of its aspirations, nobody acquainted with that movement will deny. And in England, too, the theories of Marx, even at this moment, exercise a powerful influence upon the socialist movement which is spreading in the ranks of “cultured” people no less than in those of the working class.”
Engels wrote that passage in 1886! One should then assume whether or not it is Ocasio-Cortez who is the “classist” person here, as she tacitly seems to think working-class people are not capable of grasping theory.
One should also consider something she asked the interviewer later in the Vogue article: “Have you read Infinite Jest?” According to Goodreads.com, Infinite Jest is a whopping 1088 pages-long book. How is it that Ocasio-Cortez can, on the one hand, decry all those criticizing her for not considering herself as a socialist because she has not read some books, while on the other hand is capable of having a conversation about a book which has a similar length to the first volume of Marx’s Capital? This is not to denounce her for not knowing and being well-versed in Marxist theory. Everyone starts from a point of ignorance and it is up to the individual and the people around them to help eliminate that ignorance through reading, debate, and discussion, especially of foundational and far shorter texts than the tomes of Capital. As a person who studied international relations and economics allegedly does not have time for such texts like the Manifesto of the Communist Party while simultaneously being able to strike up a conversation about some long book that many working-class people have probably never read, let alone knows exists, comes off as sounding extremely hypocritical.
The reason that many of us do not consider Ocasio-Cortez a socialist is because she has hardly shown that she is one. She is a member of an organization whose founder — Michael Harrington — argued against calling US troops back home from the Vietnam War, and merely serves as an appendage of the bourgeois Democratic Party. In essence, Ocasio-Cortez is a betrayer of the working-class for believing that there will somehow be a change within the the Democratic Party, let alone any semblance of a revolution!
As for a remedy, I, as a son and member of the working-class, offer Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez a recommendation: read more books, especially of the Marxist variety.
