Marx and Me

Abstract

This is the story of how I encountered Marxism and how I have used it to make sense of the world, and hence to inform my political activism. I describe how humanist materialism has helped me interrogate social structures so as to discover underlying interacting forces and the role played by human praxis and understandings. On the way, I examine debates about the researcher as outsider; criticisms of political multiculturalism; difficulties of being a Marxist after the cultural turn when many academics will no longer even engage with Marxist arguments; problems in writing about and working with Islamists; struggles to excavate housing studies from being buried in policy detail; uncomfortable truths about immigration and the reserve army of labour; and warnings from the failure of revolutionary stages theory. I end with lessons from the Kurdish freedom movement on human relationships and bottom-up democracy, and with its inspirational example of a society attempting to live as if in the early days of a better world.