Myrdal was a life-long Marxist-Leninist, after breaking with the social democratic politics of his parents at an early age. He supported the politics of the Soviet-backed Swedish Communist Party in the 1940s and early 1950s, but later shifted to a pro-China, anti-colonialist and anti-imperialist brand of Communism, infused with strong, idiosyncratic views on Swedish culture and history. At times, he referred to himself as a Maoist or a Naxalite, although he generally shunned political labels and preferred to speak in terms of a leftist intellectual tradition.