Sean, 34, aid-worker in Pakistani administered Kashmir.

I think for me there were two periods of getting involved in revolutionary activism, one when I was a teenager and the second is more recent. The first period began with an interest in the world. I grew up in a very conservative middle class environment: the suburbs that I lived in and the schools that I went to I always remember as being very grey, very narrow minded, even to put it in non-political terms they had a spiritual sensibility of the void. And I was never very good with authority figures. So I became involved in a revolutionary organisation at the age of 15. The reason I stayed involved in those forms of activism, including later in a revolutionary Marxist party, is because I found it a form of real world action.

It was only in my late twenties that I looked back and realised that forms of authority are not all external and that in actual fact we replicate these forms of authority even in our own revolutionary organisations. In my late twenties I went through a rather deep process of reassessment of everything, including Marxism and all of the beliefs I had held up until then. And what I came to realise was the extent to which in our own organisation we had replicated systems of control, surveillance and management: I had been a part of that - it had happened to me - but I had also perpetuated and participated in it as well.

… throughout this process I did disengage from formal institutions of education, I was excluded from university because I failed too many subjects. I supplemented the academic form of education with activist forms of education; reading circles, conferences, private reading and so forth. Those forms of education made me who I am much more than any formal structures of education. That being said, however, over ten years later I went back to university and got a formal education and actually I found that a useful process and quite an enlightening one and filled in some of the holes in my activist education which had been overly partisan within a small framework of Trotskyist Leninism.

… I have always found it far easier to figure out what I think in discussion with others. Most of what I learnt has been through collective discussion and questioning back and forth. And particularly in the period when I was leaving Leninism that collective process was crucial. A small group of us would talk almost every day and if we hadn’t I think I would have found that experience a form of capitulation which would have been totally demoralising. A collective process provides you with courage.

… this process of re-assessment was powered by the emergence of the anti-capitalist movement in the late 1990s, from Seattle to Genoa; not just the summit protests but the whole existence of an anti-capitalist social movement led me to a very major reconsideration of the necessary forms of resistance. There seemed to be new forms which worked, which were exciting and which reinvigorated the movement and which I wanted to be a part of. And I contrasted this with the modes and forms of the organisation I was in and I found the later very much lacking. My evolution was very much a product of what was going on the 90s, the rise of globalisation and responses to it. I learned, I guess, that when you set out to change the world, the world also changes you.

I learnt too that what counts is not leadership, as the Trotskyist had posed the problem, but participation. Leadership is not something that many people can claim. More often than not the leaders of particular movements become its enemies. You can’t intervene into history from outside to shape it to your will, you only participate in it.

… I was deeply moved by the S11 protests outside the World Economic Forum in Melbourne, because they embodied the vision of the movement which I had been blindly working towards for some time without ever being able to articulate – and reading John Holloway “Change the world without Taking Power” changed everything for me, more than anything else because it validated all the various forms of social resistance which existed. My previous perspective had privileged certain forms of social resistance over others, in particular those led by the class conscious revolutionary vanguard. I now realise that this is absurd. The attempt to impose a hierarchy of actions on the world is at the root of the left’s errors because it is incipiently totalitarian.

I cringe at some positions I once held, but I know I didn’t hold them alone: the fantasy that large amounts of the left believed in for most of the 20th century was dreams of power. You can’t oppose something without having a critique of it. The left has traditionally alibied itself because of its intensions, it said this will work out alright, but you have to take the critique of power into your everyday practice and work out the way in which real life makes everyone hypocrites to a certain extent.