Robert J. Cymbala was born in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, on 1st April 1966. Cymbala studied philosophy on the side while attending Nutley High School with an emphasis on Nietzschean existentialism. After earning a B.S. in forestry (SUNY-ESF Resources Management, Syracuse NY), he studied Marxism with the Marxist Collective at Syracuse University in response to the first Gulf War under the leadership of the first Bush (Sr.) presidency. With the on-going genocide in Iraq under the leadership of the President's son, Cymbala thinks that the United States is a democracy only in the sense that democracy is a form of mass manipulation needed by the ruling class to continue its wars of imperialist global domination. He worked on an alternative student newspaper called "The Alternative Orange" (see Google) while working as a research scientist on the North American Maple Project (U. S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service). Cymbala quit his job in 1994 and dropped out of a Master's degree program in silviculture in order to "head west, young man."
Currently he lives in the Westlake district of Los Angeles and believes he can finish LENIN COLLECTED WORKS (www.marxists.org) by the end of 2005. His interests include Debian GNU/Linux and believes that one way to undermine Microsoft's domination is to teach people who can't afford M$ to use GNU. Besides saving money, using GNU is the best way to teach oneself about computer technology. Cymbala enjoys being a civil servant on his part-time day job as Metro bus operator (metro.net) in and around downtown Los Angeles.
