A better, and more helpful way for young leftists to ‘do politics’ when you are young is not through media consumption, but through actual participation in politics. In particular, a very interesting breeding ground for these experiences is school politics, where you will begin, if you can even run a successful campaign in the first place (which is a learning experience itself) how systems of power actually influence the world, like how a 'democratic institution" is actually completely at the whims of an undemocratic bureaucracy.

For example, when I was a young rad-lib in high school, I was treasurer for two years in a row, with one of the major projects that happened in our first year being the development of a subsidized after-school study program for under-performing students that would actually pay kids to be there (we could only afford 5 dollars an hour a day, but it was better than nothing). This was because most of the kids I knew that were struggling in school also had other money problems this would require not doing expensive dances, but we felt that if we could get students even a little extra time, it could potentially get us more government money for the school in general. Surprisingly, most of the student government was on board with it. After running it through a bunch of different things, we eventually were able to vote on a version of the program that would run for only one month before standardized testing. Not great, but again, better than nothing.

After the vote, we went to the administration to iron out the details with them, and they immediatly put the kai-bosh on it, killing the program in the womb and telling us we were interfering with academic programming and that it was illegal. To be fair, it might not be legal to pay kids to go to school, but we didn’t know that.

The next year we were allowed to spend a bunch of money on a huge new American flag and huge dance venue on a military base, being strictly monitored throughout our voting process. You know, things that only benefit rich kids and subsidize costs that the administration themselves should be spending.

It was one of the eye-openers for me and really started me down the path of radicalization, more so than any event that was mediated (the Iraq war etc.) in particular it taught me not to trust what I believed at the time were ‘so-called liberal administrators’. My full turn toward M-L theory and communism came after watching and participating in the Bernie campaign, but I likely would have never done that without those formative experiences in actual student politics.

Meanwhile, almost every radical anarchist kid I knew in school (we didn’t have any commies at the time), that didn’t participate in student government because it was ‘lame and pointless’ (which, ya know, fair) has become some form of hyper-online right-wing libertarian or anarcho-natoist in their thirties. It’s one of those things where I feel like because they never actually are where the rubber hits the road, their politics are almost purely reactionary, as opposed to attempting to be forward thinking, program oriented and analytical. The real ones were big in Food Not Bombs, and aren’t as online.