politics

ive always been a communist

try having a commie grandma sometime, esp when youre trans

To keep my answer overly simplistic: being intersectional.

Being Black and being confronted by the open fascism from the right made me look for anything and anyone who would oppose them. In a way, my leftism is a counter-reaction to the rise of the alt-right and right-wing movements across the West.

It's kind of funny when you think about it. Fewer people would turn towards leftism if white people could just be chill.

Normalizing Marxist theory as an approachable thing to read is important for onboarding a certain kind of person.

Many people never even read the Manifesto because they think it’s akin to reading Mein Kampf. It doesn’t help that many associate the word “manifesto” with unhinged ravings a la Ted Kaczynski.

Literally just reading Marx with an open mind is what it took for me. I’m sure I could psychoanalyze some more from my past, but ultimately, Marxist theory stands on its own and is proven to connect with many types of people around the world.

In order for something to be normal, it has to be casual. So my suggestion is don’t be afraid to talk about communist ideas, but also don’t be weird or aggressive about it.

Some things that moved me from squishy western "leftism" into actual leftism:

• The financial crash of 2008. All the adults in the room were showing their entire ass and the only people giving an explanation of what was happening that actually made sense were self-declared Marxists like Richard Wolff
• Local political developments made me realise the futility of the soft squishy boyscouts passing for acceptable leftism around here. For the past 30 years we have had increasing racism, greater divide between rich and poor and an expansion of the police state. The "left" around here has shown itself to be completely unable to do anything to stop or delay these developments. At festive occasions they stand up and say "how dare you!" and then they go on to be nice and friendly to the ghouls responsible.
• Experiencing actually existing social democracy in action. If you believe the fairy tales they tell you in social studies class, getting a succdem-controlled government should be an improvement over a liberal/conservative one. They might not exactly create a worker's utopia but at least they might make some improvements here and there and be a little less evil. After all they depend on the "left" for parliamentary support, right? Nope. The Iron Law of Late Capitalist Electoralism is true, every administration, regardless of party affiliation or electoral primises, is going to be worse than the preceding one. The succdems are just as nasty as anyone else and the left will do nothing to rein them in.
• Becoming aware of climate change, the monumental scale of the task ahead and seeing how ridiculously small and insufficient policies are being touted as the solution by the establishment.
• Learning about history, especially the history of the USSR, WWII and western imperialism. There are so many omissions, distortions and outright lies in what you pick up from the western education system and popular culture that you begin questioning all of what you've learned once you start learning from more nuanced sources.

Some sources that opened my eyes along the way.

• My mom. I know it is cheesy and not applicable on a large scale but she deserves a lot of credit for laying the groundwork for my political development. She used to be a member of the communist party in her youth and although I never felt her trying to force any beliefs on me, but she presented me for an openness to communism and anti-capitalist ideas and introduced me to communist culture like the collages of John Heartfield and the novels of Hans Scherfig.
• My dad. Again a cheesy choice. Today the man is a deranged tradcath nerd-chud but credit where credit is due, although insane he is an intelligent and educated guy and his intellectual snobbery meant that I learned about stuff like formal logic and critical thinking from an early age which later on made it easier for me to break out of the liberal mind-prison.
• Chomsky. The guy is problematic but his propaganda theory and his work on US imperialism did a lot to move me left back in the day.
• Richard Wolff. He might be a bit too preoccupied with forming cooperatives under capitalism but he did a lot to explain how the capitalist economy works.
• Parenti. The guy is a legend. You might not be receptive to him if you are still full of anticommunist brainworms but once cracks have formed in that mindset he can expand those cracks quickly.
• Graeber. His intellectual originality really helped to question a lot of the preconceived notions about debt and money that supports capitalism.
• On a more local level I want to point out two people who helped me understand Danish history: The first one is Carl Heinrich Petersen who was an anarchist historian who wrote about the labour movement to the left of the succdems. I credit him with puncturing some of the common rose-tinted myths about inter-war succdem leader Thorvald Stauning. Then there is the before-mentioned author Hans Scherfig whose novels Idealister set in the inter-war period and Frydenholm set during Nazi occupation gives a good understanding of the mindset of nazi collaboration, the fecklessness of non-materialism and liberalism and the memory-holing of communist resistance ans well as bourgeois collaboration after the war. Another Danish author of note is Carl Madsen, a communist lawyer who wrote about the class nature of the legal system, official collaboration with Nazi Germany before and during WWII and pre-war refugee policy. He also wrote some pieces explaining the Democratic German and Soviet legal system from a positive standpoint.

I came out of the womb crying what sounded like the melody of the internationale, i learned to read at three by trying to digest all of the volumes of capital. I was bullied in school because I told my classmates that were all going to be wage slaves. I am better than all of them and its true because i am so much smarter and built different than them for knowing the truth.

read The Jungle for a book report 20 years ago

that planted the first seeds with the whole funny trivia about "this is a story about the misery capitalism visits upon the working class" "ew yucky sausage"

was just kind of a dipshit "lib by default" until a bunch of things coincided to push me left: chuds pointing out that trump was just doing shit obama already did ("oh ok well that doesn't make me like trump it just makes me hate obama too"), dems making me sick of them by sucking off mccain's fresh corpse right as I'm in the middle of re-evaluating everything I thought I knew about both parties, and cth existing at the right time and place to catch my frustration with civility theater

then several years of the sub and now you folks deworming my brain

Was browising r/redditalternative and found out about some tankie instance called lemmygrad.ml then my whole worldview came crashing down

Honestly for me it was a lot of small things over time but what pushed me to actually learn about socialism was the memes on lemmy.

ShitRedditSays

Also a side of Philosophy Tube's Mad Marx series.

I was a lib in the beginning purely because actual leftism had successfully excluded from my worldview growing up in Texas. What opened my mind was seeing that there was an actual, effective solution fascism, and a path towards a more empathetic society than just trying your best to make fun of conservatives for being the way they are and hoping it'll convince enough people to vote for someone who might legalize gay weed or whatever.

As for turning still-existing libs towards leftism, I do my best to fan the tiny flames of indignation that inherently exist in their ideology, and hope that they are open enough to come to the realization that a handful of the most ruthlessly monstrous and vile human beings alive having all the power over how the world operates actually kind of sucks for humanity. If they're not open enough, I just move on to someone else.

I was an edgy 13-year old who discovered the meaning of "left wing" and "right wing", repeated Ben Shapiro talking points for six months, then became a lib when I developed empathy. Started going to climate change student protests and I felt amazing, powerful, like I was changing the world. Nothing came of it and I questioned why people would burn our world for profit, which lead to me reading Marx when I was 16.

Grew up in a very liberal area/family, had an instinctive revulsion against inequality and the wealthy from a young age. In high school I read Zinn, Chomsky, and a bunch of Crimethinc type stuff, lived through the reactionary hysteria of 9/11, and became an "anarchist." Anarchist in quotes, because it was a very surface level, lifestylist understanding of anarchism (no shade to any comrades reading).

Without any real theoretical grounding, during college and after I drifted into a sort of standard issue succdem position, feeling like there was no viable alternative to capitalism, but also no path but slow reform. The brief excitement of getting Bush out and Obama in quickly turned to disillusionment when he failed to hold the previous administration accountable for any of its crimes and continued all its worst foreign policy. By the time 2008 rolled around, I was not surprised by the failures of the state.

After Trump was elected. I managed to avoid the worst of the liberal panic, but I also felt that any system that would elect Trump was not one that was salvageable. I knew something had to give. I had been identifying as a socialist for a few years at that point, but hadn't been politically active and nor yet politically conscious. I joined DSA and started trying to learn what socialism was really all about, which led me to the chapotraphouse subreddit and eventually here.

Looking over this whole story, the thing that strikes me the most is that Marxist theory had been so completely excluded from the range of acceptable thought that it didn't even occur to me to seek it out until quite late in my political journey. Even as an adult, cracking open a book by Lenin felt a bit dangerous and forbidden in a way that anarchism never did. I know "read theory" is a bit of meme on here and people whine and complain about it, but honestly I do think it's the most important thing. Your life experience can help radicalize you (the shitty jobs I worked certainly did), getting out in the world and doing praxis is great and necessary, and so on. But without a framework to understand these things within and relate to a larger struggle, you are far more likely to fall into error or disillusionment or to lack solidarity with others.

My parents are middle class turbolibs (Colbert watching, RBG autobiography reading, "Because Trump" wine glass owning turbolibs) so I was a lib growing up. When I was about 16 I decided I was a libertarian. I don't think there was a coherent reason why, I think I just wanted to be different from my parents while keeping true to the social issues I actually cared about (gay rights, racial equality, dude weed lmao, etc.). I was naive and didn't understand how economics or governance or anything worked lol.

One evening when I was 19 I stumbled across r/collapse (good then, less so post-covid), and fell down the rabbit hole of just how bad we're fucked climatewise (accelerating carbon emissions, microplastics, ocean acidification, topsoil loss, severe wildlife decline, etc.). This shattered my entire worldview and I went into a full doomer depression spiral for about a year. Most of the people talking about this stuff were leftists (e.g. the Ashes Ashes guys), and I eventually came out the other end as a communist (though still a doomer, we're really fucked )

No, I always hated this shit. There was never a time where I really believed in Capitalism or that I would have a place in it when I grow up.

The only thing that changed is I discovered that anti-capitalism is a real, legitimate thing and there are other people who feel the same (even if I can only find them on the internet)

Have their estranged parent move in with them for two years because said parent is dying. Let them experience how every facet of our western social contract fails while changing adult diapers and feeding an extra mouth, with the added joy of trying to stay employed and raise a toddler!

I was pretty much a regular liberal in a former life, I would even dare say centrist. And then the above happened to me and I've seen first hand what's waiting for most of us when we're no longer useful to capitalism. Get fucked with any supposed nuanced ideas of liberal incrementalism and voting for the right Dems, and go read some theory. Then ponder, what is the Western answer to global warming, homelessness, and/or any human challenge not associated with making (someone else) money?

After that, welcome to Hexbear.

Veganism made me hate capitalism

Seeing an incredibly indignant transgender communist on twitter at about the time I was starting to pay rent by working as a dishwasher

i feel like this is a pretty regular topic on here, but a recap of mine: arab american child during the bush administration, us government is openly a white christian supremacist plutocracy that lies and kills for profit. then obama wins, cool young guy, first black president, supposed to fix everything. he doesn't, weakens civil liberties even further, cracks down on whistleblowers, bails out the banks. and somehow the people that hated bush still love him. Trayvon Martin is killed. PRISM is exposed. nothing seems to change. I learn about history, both in school and on the internet. how there used to be pitched battles on American soil waged against the workers by the bosses. Sacco and Vanzetti. I learn about the Nakba and about Vietnam. Leaving home gets me out of my upper class bubble and makes me realize just how fucked most people are.

On a personal level I was a basically unhappy kid who became an unhappy and neurotic adult. I was browsing 4chan a lot and steeping in the ambient bigotry of the site, but with my liberal upbringing, i was only able to stand it as long as i could believe that it was all just a joke. i quit when gamergate happened and i realized that some of these guys have real issues with women and black people and also think the jews are coming for their toys. Besides being morally odious, it was too clearly a tantrum. Cringe. Helped me self-reflect. Spent a lot of time on tumblr, read some cool posts, even read actual books where before all i read was scifi novels. Became anarchy.

If there's a theme, it was realizing that things are worse than I previously thought, that everyone already knows, and they don't care. I'm not sure if that still works for young people. Now, everybody cares, no one ever shuts up about how everything is terrible. But also no one knows what to do or why it's all happening, and it's like their goal is to get back to 20 years ago when everything was fine, actually.

I’ve spent years thinking about this. My conclusion is that the only people who want to destroy capitalism are the ones getting fucked by it. If you’re part of the roughly 1-10% of humanity that benefits from capitalism, it’s unlikely that you’re going to question it. You’ll always be able to excuse it.

I converted because I did everything right. I’m a white able-bodied cis male. I come from a wealthy family. I have a college degree. I still couldn’t get ahead. I couldn’t get a decent white collar job. I also saw people who, in my opinion, were of lesser ability, basically beating me in the rat race. I ran in elections as a progressive democrat, put everything I had into them, and still lost. And then when I won, I found myself sitting at the fabled bargaining table, surrounded by nazis. It infuriated me so much that I started asking questions that I had never asked before. “Are the democrats really on my side?” Radicalization from r/chapotraphouse and hexbear helped immensely. Once you seriously read Marxist texts, there’s no going back.

I grew up poor but conservative. What got me thinking was just going to college as a poor and experiencing rich people for the first time. That and the student loan bill that i had to work two jobs to pay down was enough for me.

Try living in southern Europe during one of the largest economic crises in the bourgeois era. That made me go from socdem-by-default to reading Marx (and becoming an anarchist at first because Stalin)

Many things happened to me, but the absolute most important parts of me becoming an ML were

1. Reading soviet history and economics
2. Paying rent for the first time
3. Reading philosophy, not just Marxist philosophy

I would say that learning about the soviet union was the most important part of my "journey" because it was the first time in my life that I discovered an actual living alternative to capitalism. Seeing is believing, and there is no substitute.

This is why I dislike the anti-communist "leftists" so much. They have no history. They have no grounding in the real world because they shun all real experiments in socialism. They cannot learn from past experience or get inspired.

As you can tell by my username, I lived in West Texas. Not the cool part, the shitty panhandle part. Going to college really opened my eyes, being an environment that has support. I really appreciated the lack of hierarchy my small high school had; it was incredibly segregated between the rich white girls and their assholes boyfriends, and all the Hispanic kids. I lost 90 lbs in undergrad.

What got me out of being a lib was Hillary Clinton stans being snarky when talking anything regarding policy. I was a bit too young for 2008, but my sister was older and I remember her telling me how absolutely nasty they were. I saw it in 2016.

Trump was obvious a big role in making Twitter shit, but the Hillary Clinton stans snarkiness really turned me off of that platform altogether.

Reading the recent history of the country I currently live in (Spain) was well enough

For me it was being involved in healthcare early in my careers as well as pursuing a MPH, that shit will either disillusion you to healthcare in the US or turn you into a weird ghoul unable to face the contradictions of privatized healthcare.

CW: IQ bell curve meme

Me at 12 listening to the Sex Pistols and being handed Chomsky so I could "learn what anarchy means", me in my early 20s reading Emma Goldman and eating tons of acid, me after that reading Stirner and Malatesta and going out with FnB and copwatchers and the like. There was one semester in college where I was a proponent of enlightened despotism, but we all do embarrassing shit when we're on the rebound.

EDIT: I also forgot the teacher I had in elementary school who gave me a copy of Ishmael, which is probably at least a little responsible for my anti/post-civ green anarchist politics.

Mostly I just met people. I saw the world. I listened to what people were saying about their situations.

It was always "I could do so much more in my life if I didn't have to do X" where X is some capitalist or reactionary bullshit reason.

I think the only skill anyone needs to be an leftist is to be willing and able to confront the world. Hear people out. Tie the things you hear together. It's all right there you just have to be willing to do it and to trust that people generally understand their own situations

I was a pro-putin socdem when i was 13 mostly because i used to watch RT a lot during the syrian civil war days and socdem because corruption and poverty in Mexico moved me leftwards, i never really liked the new-right when it started to get famous since it was american led and i hated the USA after learning history of Mexico in the 4th-5th grade, i really liked history so after reading some basic history of the russian revolution i started to move to socialism mostly because i found Lenin cool, by 18 i knew i was a socialist with a liking to the ussr.

also i never really had a negative view to socialism since my mom was pro-allende and cuba while you can see the disaster neoliberalism and conservatism made in the country

Growing up my parents were strict authoritarian religious liberals. They never questioned their beliefs, and I never had any framework for doing so either. Your typical "raised under a rock" type.

In college my roommate was a Texas Republican. I'm from New England. He had a lot of ideas I'd never heard before, but he had solid arguments to defend them. That was the first time I realized I only believed what I believed because everyone around me had always believed the same stuff.

A few years later I saw the zeitgeist movie, and that really opened things up for me.

Edit: also many years later I worked for Bernie's campaign, which really opened my eyes to just how truly corrupt the establishment Dems are

I'm betting most of us were much more lib/right-wing in the past

I really don't get how we'll all nod along to this obvious truth and then turn around and do the "if you aren't my brand of True Leftist right now you're basically a fascist" bit.

Jokes about shooting people who don't perfectly agree with your every opinion = terminally online, identifying people who can be moved left and putting in the work to do that = touching grass. There's a reason all the leaders of real world mass movements sound like the latter, i.e., sound like they are actually trying to reach the masses.

I cut my political teeth during 9/11 and the bush admin. I went to protests all the time, and was constantly sickened by the libs that were there. My first insight into leftism was Abbie Hoffman. I have all of his books and have read them over and over. Sure, he's a huge hippie, but he was smart.

I did dabble in liberalism during the Obama campaign. Those of us who went through Bernie and the subsequent depression after he sold out will know how it felt when Obama got elected on this wave of progressivism, then stabbed us in the back. I stopped giving anyone who isn't a leftist a chance after Obama's second year.

I was a teen during Occupy, I guess getting let down by Obama was what created my politics, but what really got me going on my own political journey was arguing with my lib parents about Snowden, Manning, and Assange. Here we had evidence of our government committing crimes, and they just didn't want to hear about it. These people really watched 24 and came away thinking that that was how the world had to be.