“How many different translations of Das Kapital does a man need?”
I recently paid a much overdue visit to my uncle who lives in Bogotá. The last time I was in Colombia, where a good chunk of my family resides, was in the mid-aughts, back when the aspect of the man I was greeted my family with a different mixture than today. They knew me as a nephew or a cousin, depending on who we’re talking about, who managed to become wildly successful in the music industry and they also knew me as someone with a slightly jaundiced complexion. The two were not unrelated, of course.
My aunt—married to my uncle who is the brother of my mother—has confirmed this impression, if perhaps without the hyperbole I’m certain the above paragraph contains. All she really said was that today, as compared with that erstwhile visit from over a decade-and-a-half, I seem to be a much more open human being, owing perhaps slightly to my greater facility with the Spanish language, but not exclusively so. There’s been a change, she said.
I mention this anecdote because it illustrates most directly how wonderful it is in life when time passes and someone confirms that change has indeed occurred. I may be more restless than average, but, regardless, it seems to be a universal truth that life is about change, so it’s good when there’s proof.
My uncle is a respected political scientist in Colombia and was instrumental in “El Proceso de Paz” and it was easy to detect all this in the way his impromptu lectures unfolded over the first handful of evenings I spent at his house the other week. He has that steady diction of a professor well-accustomed to spontaneous aggregates of clauses and arguments and he deploys rhetorical devices, such as self-questioning aloud, that move his cases forward. I learned more about Colombian history from him during the first part of my stay than in my entire life, along with my own family’s involvement with it.
I’ll write about the particulars of that involvement some other time. Today I’m enjoying looking at the image I’ve pasted at the top of this blog post. This is the view afforded by my uncle’s desk in his study.
As an artist I often question why I’m so drawn to politics. I am especially inquisitive about this recently, as my art has sought to evoke much quieter spaces, such as wilderness settings, than the boisterous and contentious atmospheres that characterize the political sphere. When I engage in political discussions, whether on Twitter or while talking with neighbors, I notice immediately the much more piquant vibe, a saucier texture of staccato rhythms and higher blood pressure, than, say, the singing bowl tintinnabulation of all of my meditation music and nebulous sound baths.
Why, then, do my interests in ideological contestation persist?
I think it’s just the way I’m made. Thanks to my father, I grew up suffused in politics. He was adamant about checking the progress of what he saw as liberal propaganda in the schools and on the television with the alternative framework of his conservative vision. Mostly this turned out to verge on the paranoiac and was almost singularly trained on the illumination of the moral failings of the liberal world view. I grew up with a steady stream of “owning the libs” rhetoric, before that was even a thing.
Sadly for him, his worldview could not compete with the persuasive power of modern media and education, both of which turned out to factor greatly into my turn to the left in my late teens.
I started out on the right and not just because of my dad. Patriarchy and racism were part and parcel of the working class Elmhurst, Queens of the ‘80s which was my home, along with the “small town” car mechanic culture I aligned with in the New Jersey suburbs as a metalhead in the early ‘90s.
Then a real big change happened when Grunge swept through the zeitgeist, when I ditched my suddenly uncool headbanger threads and got interested in more “real” musics which were becoming fashionable in the wake of Seattle’s incursion such as punk-hardcore. The friends I kept in this new circle were decidedly anti-racist—if not entirely non-patriarchal—and were instrumental in ushering me towards the pursuit of a more leftist politics than what I had known up to that point. When I read Kurt Cobain’s slightly hysterical antiracist/antisexist manifesto in the liner notes of In Utero, Nirvana’s follow-up to Nevermind, I hear an echo of the same unease I felt with being connected to a scene with a much more regressive politics than I had come to appreciate by hanging out with all of these leftist punks.
What I learned at that juncture basically stayed unchanged for about twenty years. I went around thinking I was very leftwing, not even aware of how I’d really only learned to appreciate a rather topical issue. Being on the leftwing side of cultural issues is only half of the puzzle, but I still didn’t know that all those years.
I stayed this way until 2020 when I discovered Bernie Sanders and the last vestige of my class interests dominating my politics cracked. I had noticed a sharp drop in my sense of status when I left the music industry and this was fairly traumatic for my ego. I’m still learning from this occurrence—even to this day. I think the reason why I’m so attracted to socialism is because of what that trauma made painfully clear to me: that the higher status I experienced in the music industry occluded my awareness of my own class interests. Socialism, then, with its rational deconstruction of the way social relations are defined by, and occluded by, capital, feels quite logical to me.
I’m struck by the difference between my politics today and the last time I saw my uncle all those years ago. Though I’d been a liberal for quite some time by that point, I still couldn't even define “leftism” back then. The spiritual change in myself that my aunt Martha noticed and took pains to point out correlates with a political one: despite my liberalism (or, some would say, because of it) my class interests when she first saw me over fifteen years ago dominated my politics. I read the New York Times every day and believed every neoliberal word that jumped out of the page. I could only see in the binary of left and right a difference in culture and failed to see the much more troubling economic consensus of class interests between both the left and the right that characterizes that paper’s program. In other words, when I looked at the above image over my uncle’s desk, I saw only a dude in a long beard and knew very little of the radicalism behind his thought, how Marxism demolishes the neat binaries of mainstream media.
Unlike my father, my uncle had no say in my turn to the left, the more recent, much more authentic, turn I have taken. Or, if he did, it was all rather indirect. The internal reverberations of the things I learned on this trip to Bogotá about my family’s political history, on the Colombian side, my mother’s side, are going to echo within me for a long time. Yet, already, I can see something that has happened conclusively and maybe it’s something that actually points out of the political arena, to a truth about what it means to be part of a family in general.
For if there is indeed an invisible line that ties us to our blood relations and to our ancestors and to our descendants, if there is some kind of spiritual thread that binds members of clans together, irrespective of narrative or persuasion, something, that is, ontological which links us as members of the same family, irrespective of conscious awareness, such that one might be able to talk with objectivity of family curses and family spells and family spirits, if all of this is indeed true, then it was with some wonderful recognition of the homecoming of a journey that I was able to see this poster hanging up on the wall in front of my uncle’s desk and notice that, independently of any possible influence he could’ve had over the last fifteen years, I had connected with a spirit within me that was older than I was.
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