May 20, 2018:
I don't remember seeing this commented-on before, although in hindsight it should be obvious. People think through the ideologies which are available to them.
This means their thinking is both culturally and historically determined.
I was reading recently of Chinese students who are trying to be Marxist. What they have available to them in the name of "Marxism" is primarily Mao. Mao's in print, he's a cultural icon, he's the primary avatar of the way Marxism was received in China. Trotsky and Althusser aren't present there intellectually or culturally. Marx's major texts are available but they've been "already-read" through the historical lens of the Chinese Communist movement — meaning it's very difficult to approach them differently, for example, from the perspective of revolutionary working-class democracy. I don't know but I doubt that the early Third International documents are easily available. So these brave young people are quite mistakenly orienting around the Chinese state's voluntarism and ultra-leftism during Mao's lifetime: the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. Realistically, those are the intellectual options which are available to them in their culture at this point in history.
This is exactly why my own evolution centered in the beginning so profoundly on Jefferson. I was radically pro-democracy. Which at the same time meant: anti-elitist. I wasn't so smitten with farmers the way the Jeffersonians claimed to be; and slavery was definitely a puzzling anomaly. What drew me was the language, the narrative, of The People as good and wise in their judgments.
It was an entirely pro-capitalist vision. Essentially it was right-wing libertarianism of the sort you now see espoused by Justin Amash or perhaps Rand Paul. Where "democracy" is The People unfettered to enrich themselves as they see fit.
So that my transition to anti-capitalism late in high school was awkward, stumbling, and painful. It naturally took an anarchist direction, for two reasons. First, beginning from a right-wing libertarian position then rejecting capitalism leads pretty inevitably to a left-wing libertarian position. Second, anarchism was the dominant ideology of the radical left cultural milieu available to me in my historical, and geographical, circumstances. That is, the co-op and collective movement at UCSD.
Which also makes sense. When Marxism is so effectively identified culturally with Stalinist dictatorships and Cold War opponents, if you're on the radical left and you're fervent about democracy anarchism is pretty much the only place there is to go. So the movements there were unsophisticated: theoretically naive, historically ignorant. They centered on hero-figures: Bakunin, Kropotkin, Joe Hill, the Wobblies. Who were misunderstood and romanticized, as were the examples of "spontaneity" most frequently cited.
Breaking leftward to Marx was very painful. It was unclear for a long time how to be Marxist while rejecting statism — although it really shouldn't have been, as Marx is the most consistently radical anti-statist you're every going to encounter. That misunderstanding demonstrates the power of the narratives easily available: the dominant ideologies. They turned Marx into anti-Marx, the polar opposite of who he actually was, and what he actually fought for. I had to invest serious, sustained intellectual effort to recover the genuine, historical Marx from the mountain of bullshit piled on his hairy dead head.
The dam was broken by Perry Anderson, whose Passages From Antiquity to Feudalism gave me for the first time a coherent, let's say "scientific" understanding of the movement of history. And opened the door to both Althusser and Trotsky. At that point it was like the proverbial flood: I read everything in print on Marx, Lenin, Althusser, the Russian Revolution, the revolutionary wave of 1917-1923, fascism, Trotsky, Luxembourg, Kautsky, the Sandinistas, the conjuncture in Central America. By then I knew what a "conjuncture" was and how to look at it.
I went to the altar with Marx kicking and screaming. In a certain way that was a good thing, 'cos it forced me into genuinely deep, sustained study, for a period of many years. Maybe it would have been better to have been handed the Cliff Notes. I dunno. The encounter would certainly have been different.
The ideological conjuncture is very different now. The Soviet Union is gone, the Cold War is quaint, there's a massive upsurge of interest in socialism among young people. Today four of ten Americans prefer socialism to capitalism, the majority of them under age 40. 55% of women aged 18 to 55 prefer socialism. There's much better scholarship available now, far more free of the stultifying Cold War narratives. Young people who are serious about change and who are around the age I was then — 17 to 30 — have a better chance of reaching the real deal more quickly than I did.
Go get 'em, kids.