This morning as I walked around Stow Lake, so glad to be back to a spot I enjoy so much after a few days away in the mountains, I overheard a snippet of a conversation which got me thinking, giving me fodder for writing this blog entry this morning.
Spoken by a woman who appears to me a politically progressive person in her late 40's or early 50's that I often see towards the tail end of my walk, she said, "...it shocked me because he's such a political person."
Of course this was just the smallest part of a dialogue which I was not privy to so have no idea in what sense or context the sentence was uttered, but what I perceived was that the woman was describing a person that she had previously thought was 'political', but who no longer gave her that impression.
I immediately recalled my younger years and the radical Marxist ideas which I was so interested in, particularly the concept of hegemony as elicited in the writing of Antonio Gramsci. In his work, the concept of the person as a political entity in capitalist societies is hidden, so as to appear natural, allowing the ruling classes to continue their domination.
As I thought about what I had heard, I imagine that what this woman had been talking about involved this very idea, in that she probably assessed that the person she had spoken of had either lessened their interest in, or ceased to become consciously involved in 'the political'. It appeared to me a classic example of the kind of political recuperation and naturalization that Gramsci felt was so important to address in Marxist theoretical analysis.
These thoughts had been such an important part of my life for some years, and although I am pretty uninterested in being politically involved for the past half decade or more, I still believe in Gramsci's ideas, and cannot forgot that I am always political.
Although my ideas of myself have changed and hopefully continue to as I grow older, socially and politically, 'myself' has not.
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