Damien , 37, an advisor to an Australian senator

The community in which I grew up in, the coal fields and power stations of the La Trobe Valley in south-eastern Australia, was strongly unionised and was quite militant. Virtually everyone worked for the state owned power-company and growing up there were strikes and industrial action all the time. My grandfather was a shop steward in the carpenters union and my father, while eventually a manager in the company, was an ardent social democrat and internationalist. My fathers stance on the Suez Crisis also had a mythic status in my family, he was so angry at the British invasion of Egypt in 1956 that he renounced his British Citizenship, an unusual thing to do at the time.

Growing up in that political environment and also the personal freedom that came from living in an urbanised rural area, I think, produced my questioning of authority. As a child and teenager there was a pretty constant level of semi-legality and illegal activity – vandalism, drugs, theft and sex. This was something everyone my age engaged in, the difference for me I think is that because of my father I eventually intellectualised this everyday dissidence.

It was this that led me away from the area to want to go to university and where I very quickly began to associate with members of the Communist Party and other leftist groups. The experience was important but more than any other it was the opportunity this gave me at a young age, I had just turned 19, to spend time in the Philippines with the Maoist groups there. This was my first time outside Australia and the experience of poverty, war and super-exploitation during those 4 months really consolidated by commitment to radical politics

…I first studied Archaeology and Anthropology at university and the conflict between my deepening commitment to Marxism, anti-imperialism and post-modernist ideas almost forced me to abandon these studies. The last straw was an academic attempting to explain to me why digging up the grandparents of Pacific Islanders was a legitimate scientific investigation.

Crucial to this was the social and political groups from which I was really obtaining most of my intellectual stimulus. We swapped books and in a quite competitive way engaged in debates about European philosophy and its implications for our lives. Never underestimate the importance of the fad in propagating ideas – we can see it now with Agamben – back then Althusser and Lukacs were popular.

One of the advantages and problems of this type of learning is the fragmented and schematic engagement with ideas. I was a post modern sailor, a theorist in every port, and jumped from one to the other. This viral way of living and thinking can be very exciting and addictive but often is a barrier to the generation of consistent positions and productions that can have more of an affect then the throw away line.

…Having said that, the group of people who have found each other through this process largely still keep in touch and communicate. I call them the “masons” of Left Alliance (one of the student groups). This network has played an important role in moments of social struggle in Australia, such as the mass escapes at Womera, a desert immigrant detention centre, and the S11 protest at the World Economic Forum in Melbourne.

…When I was 23 I participated in organising a protest at an arms trade fair in the Canberra. Looking back the protest was able to take place because of its network and loose organisational structure. For a couple days a battle raged between police and the protest which disrupted the arms dealers so much that future events never took place. It was a wonderful combination of illegal and legal activity with mass participation and a carnival atmosphere that is both exhilarating and often very effective.

I think my political activity since then has in many ways been an attempt to reproduce that moment in various forms and places. Accepting what Marx said about the dangers of repeating history, I am still most inspired and in some ways addicted to this type of action. It is a Freudian burden that is simultaneously incredibly productive, but has the character of a fetish or obsession that I am always aware of.

…my inspirations include: Abbie Hoffman’s biography, he was the architect or “prophet” of all the tactics that have been adopted over the last few decades in the industrialised world; Waldo Salt’s Midnight Cowboy, the music was there all through my childhood so when I saw the film it seemed so familiar, but it was also the first time I felt that aesthetics can have a political affect and it cured me of my Maoist approach to art; most recently Mike Davis’s Planet of Slums is constantly in my mind, it is a text that seems to express the global moment with such clarity, everyone should read it.