politics

Wage Labor and Capital was one of the biggest things for me. It's massively underrated and can explain the world simply enough for a child and deeply enough that other Marxist theory makes sense. If you can get people to engage with that pamphlet there's a good change they might start their own radicalization.

Raised with a very politically charged father, I just mimicked his beliefs, not understanding anything other than democrats bad. Once I reached my early teenage years I started to consider myself a classic libertarian because queer people should be allowed to live their lives and we should be allowed to smoke weed, but 'the government' shouldn't bother people.

Fast forward to moving out with my at the time partner and immediately hit with rent, work, bills, etc while not making much. I started questioning there and as the effects of the 'real world' started crunching down harder and harder I was sure that 'people' can't be trusted to not abuse others so might as well do something about it. Then Bernie Sanders started his campaign and I got sucked right in to being a demsoc.

Few years pass, still jaded from the DNC's actions in the 2016 elections, people are starting ironically/unironically joke about communism. And at this point I had been considering myself as a 'socialist' so it really didn't carry the scary vibes that alot of American conservatives and liberals accossiate it with. So I started looking into Marxism, reading about events, listening to reading podcasts such as Marx Madness, finally realizing that its not 'people' that was the problem before (see paragraph 2) but that it was Capitalism. And well.. A few years later I'm here on Lemmy.

Making a 13 year old read "The O'Reilly Factor for kids" and watching his program with my parents every night from about Sept. 12th 2001 until about sometime in 2006.

I pinpoint me pivoting away from right wing ideologies about the time I read that book. Any such thing as like Anti-theory, I guess? Especially as those right wing ideologies became more and more incompatible with the same morals that my Conservative parents wanted to instill in me.

"I cannot be the sort of good person I was raised to be under capitalism and the current systems of powers that exist"

Everything sprouted from there moving further and further left until I hit my current stage of "Trans Anarcho-Communist" or whatever.

Grew up in a bubble with nothing but conservativism surrounding me. I was always libby, never really conservative though. Eventually, I was exposed to people and ideas from outside that bubble, speaking with people gave me new perspective. Eventually, I grew to learn more about Leftism, and reading Marx and the gang has solidified me as a Marxist.

I guessing the people who had to find leftism are white because the rest of the world sort of just grew up with the people around them being comrades

I started identifying as a socialist around 12-13 when I read the Communist Manifesto and its framing made more sense than rich/middle class/poor. Being a history nerd though, historical materialism and later dialectics were the big breakthrough for me. They meshed with how I saw the world scientifically, a dynamic process of contextual relationships influencing each other.

Once I had a working grasp of dialectics, going back to anything short of it would be like attending preschool as an adult.

i live in a country run by landlords and honestly the old /r/cth sub opened my eyes to a lot of the wild contradictions around rent, etc. and made me see that a situation like this can't be fixed by liberal reforms. Since then I personally have come to think that making people see the hypocrisies, contradictions, and the true evils of liberalism, dispelling people's misconceptions that it's somehow the default, good option and making them lose all faith in the dominant ideology is crucial and it's ideal to radicalise people early along these lines. from there, for young people especially, unless their vision is clouded by something like generational wealth, they likely know the struggle to some extent and the path to the immortal science should start to become relatively clear.

Being gay and then trans and then autistic and then asexual was a really good recipe honestly. I was thinking to the left as soon as I was dealing with medications and gatekeeping therapy, and every subsequent thing pushed me further left. Always hated the church.

But also just reading about shit like paperclip, condor and mkultra, how could anyone think the West is good?

It turns out, I can’t reconcile that I hate Americans while simultaneously aligning with Americans conservatism and libertarianism just because we share a few opinions as they stand against everything else I believe in otherwise

when i started paying attention to politics, it was because i was an election nerd, so i supported the liberal democrats for their support for proportional representation

then covid leftpilled me. we need another global pandemic

I've worked retail and food service with shitty bosses and shitty customers, lived in shitty apartments with shitty landlords, and paid way too much for shitty food, shitty cars, and shitty Obamacare insurance.

The inability or unwillingness of liberals to actually oppose Trump in any meaningful way was what finally prompted me to seriously look into socialism.

I started somewhat conversative-ish and just went further left the older I got (except for that brief period I went from lib to enlightened centrist) until I landed at communism. It also helps that I am a minority where I live (racial/ethnic, sexuality, neurodiverse) and despite doing everything right, all I got was autistic burnout and having to work twice as hard for half as much. Meanwhile, some idiot rich fuck classmate who never worked a day in their life just coasted by and got everything handed to them on a silver platter.

Be raised in liberal family -> become transgender -> look at a lot of communist and anarchist memes -> read communist books

Tada...