askchapo

Grew up in a household that always had the news on. Just watched us drop bomb after bomb on cities, as the reporters would stand there in glee as soldiers marched through streets. I was taught "this was normal" by everyone except my family, who deeply distrusted anything the government said. So i grew up anti-war just on principle. Later got super into union history, as i saw people with the same jobs my family had fight against people doing wrong to the. And also ww2, where i questioned why we hated the Soviet Union so much if we fought alongside them during the war.

Finally, in high school, my history teacher brought out a hat full of names so we can do a deep dive into a historical figure and write out a detailed report on who they are and what they did.

I pulled out my ticket: Vladimir Lenin.

from childhood my dad gave some consciousness. he was a Vietnam vet who was drafted against his will and was resentful of his experiences. He wasn’t necessarily versed in theory but he was as a result pretty fiercely anti war. He struggled with ptsd and health effects from agent orange exposure for the rest of his life. The second point stuck with me and with early Internet access I researched that very young. PTSD is kind of inherent to warfare but a poorly tested ecological weapon that is essentially chemical warfare because of how much cancer, birth defects, etc it causes? And then dropping propaganda on the country to claim it was safe even though scientists were protesting its use domestically? Starting to form the opinion the US is maybe a shithead state and not the “good guys”

High school was 9/11 and Iraq/Afghanistan which was a lot of firsts. Going into this was more of a traditional 90s counterculture “fuck the system” anarchist queer kid. The context of the times was different though; had friends who were shitheads. A lot more was tolerated then. 9/11 was shocking but also what prompted some of us to start researching what could’ve prompted such an attack and the history of imperialism. This led to lots of tension and some friend group fracturing as many buried their heads in the sand believing the attacks were out of spite (the gwb “they hate our freedom” narrative).

This is also around the time I became vegan, although admittedly I stopped for a brief period in my late 20s. That was around 16? Iirc. This was wholly for welfare reasons so i consider that politically informed

As an aside I remember my dad genuinely researching places to send me as the Iraq war started. I was about to turn 18 and he was terrified of another conscription. I had 2 friends from high school enlist and they were killed, I don’t know how to feel about it. I am sad they were exploited and destroyed for imperialist machinations so that they could pay for college, I guess. I am far more sad somewhere between 600,000-1,000,000 Iraqis were murdered.

Shaped from there, lots of reading, went to college and formed new social groups, internet matured, etc this is like 2005 era and when I start getting into reading various philosophers, the classic college freshman ones like Nietzsche and Sartre, then a ton more. Eventually that came into Marx and Engels, etc.

I struggled throughout life defining political concept. Anarchy felt wrong because especially the more i learned about logic and thought about it the state seemed inevitable but i also despise hierarchy. I do believe capitalism is inherently and deeply flawed and i do think communism is a superior model but it is still flawed because it ultimately relies on creating a system wherein some people are more important than others which opens the doors for corruption and avarice, which are part of human nature. I believe this is necessary though, at least for the foreseeable future, because while technology and automation could enable people to self govern we are not at a point where such technology can be deployed in a trustworthy state and protected from malicious actors. in the meantime literally any collaborative model would be a vast improvement. Why fight each other when we can work together? But with this last point I suppose I am preaching to the choir

I was reading The Economist and pop politics books regularly as a tween. I recall questioning my parents and online forum friends about why the hell we were bombing Yugoslavia in '99. I vividly remember the bombing of the Chinese embassy, and being incredulous about the explanation that is was accidental. I was a fucking nerd, for sure, I would probably have been better of spending that time playing soccer.

I'd say I began my political journey in high school. Went through the "classical liberal" phase, was an anarchist for a while, then a weird pseudo ultraleft/cooperative focused "Marxist," then finally settled around ML, more accurately ML-MZT/XJT. The biggest accelerant to my political journey was working in an industrial environment right out of college, that ended up driving me to genuinely take theory more seriously.

watching the bombs drop in Baghdad at age 10 was probably my first "are we the baddies" moment. after that I could trace my political development through the punk bands I listened to as a teen. when I liked Green Day I was anti-Bush but not really a leftist, my first exposure to anti-capitalism came from listening to Refused, and then getting into more anarcho-punk bands made me hate cops and the US military but still had "communism bad" brainworms. by my early 20s I had slipped back into being more of a radlib/socdem (Bernie 2016) and like most of you gradually became more of a socialist/communist from there

both my parents were (actual) leftists, so pretty much when i became conscious in general
though i only became engaged with politics properly at around 14 when i read Lenin

I'm a writer, sorry but this is really long, I've written about this twenty times before on hexbear too.

I have thought about this so much because I am surrounded by liberals or chuds almost whenever I'm around anyone and their presence constantly reminds me that I'm different and makes me ask: why am I different?

Is the answer dialectical? Yes. I was born different, but my difference was also nurtured.

Reich says everyone has two seeds inside them (two wolves): a communist side and a fascist/liberal side. Our environment nurtures one or the other or both at the same time.

One of my earliest memories is someone holding a styrofoam cup with change jingling in it in the winter in the city. Being bored and friendless in school. Constantly being told that I can do better. Becoming obsessed with books (reading and writing) and video games (and girls who weren't interested in me) as a desperate escape. Getting A's in my high school social studies classes because I actually enjoyed them, even though I was a lib and my teachers and family were all libs.

I'm actually re-reading A People's History of the United States right now for the first time since high school, and even though Zinn has his own brainworms he's complaining about capitalism on almost every page. How could anyone read a book like this and think that there was anything positive about this country? But that was exactly what I did in high school. (The book is pretty sobering because there have been so many huge uprisings in US history that just went nowhere.)

9/11 was my first Tuesday in high school. My mom hung an American flag on our house for a week or so, but thankfully my parents never did anything like that ever again. My dad was working one terrible job after another at that time and he was constantly complaining about corporations and I even made fun of him for it. (He inherited some money a few years ago and has comfortably retired with my mom and now they own two houses but we haven't really spoken in years and they disinherited me because I couldn't interact with them without screaming my head off...they're just CNN libs...anyway...)

I supported the Afghanistan invasion but by the time Iraq rolled around I was against it. I supported Dean (who got ratfucked in a preview of what was to come for Bernard), then Kerry, but I would have told you that I supported him just because he wasn't Bush. My dad stayed up all night to watch the election results. He really thought that W. was going to lose. When I got up for school, he was coughing like crazy, like just physically sick at the thought of another four years of W. But if Kerry had won, we would have gotten the same thing, of course.

Toward the end of high school, I got interested in alternative education because I was tired of being constantly told what to do by teachers and administrators who were deeply unimpressive. We had to make these huge portfolios with examples of all the work we had done over the last four years in order to graduate, and it was just such a pain and we all knew that the portfolios were going in the garbage once we finished. While I was reading some book on alternative education in the school library I looked up and wondered: why can't we have a democratic economy? But there were no Marxist texts around to let this little candle blaze up into an inferno, so the light faded for years. I had a Trotskyist friend at the time but he never talked about politics with me.

I was enthusiastic about Obama in college. We had a huge party outside when we realized he had won. I was so happy there actually, just studying literature for four years, I had lots of friends, I loved my professors, I had no reason to ask serious questions about anything. My favorite professor had grown up in the USSR and introduced us to Soviet films, literature, poetry, and the idea that the USSR was not always a nightmare for everyone, even though she was actually a lib. She showed us the first part of Bondarchuk's War and Peace on a relatively big screen, and it might have been the most impressive movie I've ever seen? I was really awed for every second of it.

I graduated and ended up teaching English in East Asia. I thought the country I lived in had serious problems (not China), and I needed to find out why. When you ask this kind of question, there's really only two answers: either it has something to do with race, or it has something to do with society, history, economics. I knew the racist answer was ridiculous so I did my best to hone in on the society. I read lots of books about that place (all written by libs) and I learned the language. But it still didn't radicalize me. I got married and had kids. We thought life would be better in America, so we moved back to my hometown. That's when my radicalization really began.

This was just after Trump had won the presidency in 2016. I had phonebanked for Bernie because I knew from experience that universal health care was better, but I still voted for Hillary. But I had never really lived in the USA as an adult with a family relatively on my own, and it was shockingly more difficult and inconvenient compared with living in a social-democratic East Asian country, and what was even stranger was that no one seemed to care or even be aware that things could easily be better for 99% of people living here.

I applied for many nice jobs and even got some interviews but they all turned me down. Our savings dwindled. We were renting a small freezing house which was invaded by slugs, red ants, raccoons, hornets, and mice. My spouse was an RN in her her home country but needed to study for a year to pass the NCLEX and get hired as an RN here. Both of us were unemployed for a year, burning through thousands of dollars a month on daycare and rent alone. I made the incredibly foolish decision to run in local elections. I worked as hard as I possibly could. I knocked on thousands of doors. I ran on the same policies as Bernie in a blue area of a purple state. And I lost my first race, 31 to 69 (not nice), to a lib in a primary—a lib who never talked about policy and who promised nothing.

It was devastating to me. I had given everything I could to this race. During the campaign, I had already noticed sabotage and hostility from my fellow democrats (especially the actual officials in the democratic party and the wealthier democrats who were organizing Indivisible meetings), but losing that race really turned me against them. That elected government job was supposed to solve every problem in my life: it had decent pay, health care, all kinds of benefits, and lots of prestige. It was going to prove to everyone that I could make it. But I failed. And I started asking why, really asking why, applying the same kinds of analysis I had learned studying literature and history in college and also in East Asia, but now applying that to America. Why couldn't I get a good job and provide for my family? (My spouse passed the NCLEX, got hired immediately, and saved our asses when we were down to our last few hundred dollars.) I had done everything I could. I had plenty of good experience. I had a college education. I worked hard and did my job. Forget electoral races—why wouldn't anyone hire me to do anything that looked even remotely acceptable? Someone on reddit mentioned r/chapotraphouse, and the memes made me laugh, I could relate so much to everyone complaining about liberals, and they told me to read Marxist theory and history, and I did, and here I am. My radicalization has continued. The pandemic radicalized me further. Training and working in a blue collar field radicalized my further. Palestine radicalized me further. Because I was so desperate to talk with people who actually cared about these things, I started chatting a lot on Hellotalk, and now I have friends in Syria, Palestine, Iraq, and Iran, and I've had to watch all of them wonder if they were going to get killed by the USA/isn'treal, and for what?

My anger is incandescent, my sadness is profound, but everyone around where I live is still doing 2015-style politics. I tried organizing here; it all went nowhere. I ran in more electoral races and even won sometimes, but I quit when I realized that the police really were going to kill me if I (an elected official) kept talking about defunding them. I would get killed or thrown in prison, and what would I have accomplished? When you win these races and find yourself at the table with other elected officials, you just have another layer you have to break through in order to help anyone who isn't a fucking millionaire. As we all know, the police and the courts make it nearly impossible. Doing a revolution is simpler, or it would be, if 70%+ of this country wasn't fascist.

I grew up white, cis, male, and relatively privileged. My family didn't take a real vacation until I was 18 or so, but I never went without necessities. I had to get fucked so hard in so many different ways to finally conclude that actually, America isn't a good place. America isn't a good society. And the only good people are the ones who are actively fighting it. I didn't become a Marxist-Leninist until I was around 30 years old.

I was kind of politically aware since Middle School during the Iraq invasion, mostly because I watched MSNBC every night with my dad over dinner. I'd say I only actually became class conscious after I graduated from highschool into financial crisis and Occupy and Wikileaks and the Arab Spring and "we came, we saw, he died, haha!"

And then it took another 10 years to finally start reading theory. Embarassing!

I dunno, I guess it depends on how you want to slice it. Maybe when I was ~12, maybe when I was ~18, maybe some time between those two points, or maybe I only became politically aware once I joined Hexbear. It depends on whether you count having shitty or chunibyo politics as being politically aware.

Around age 9 during the 2000 American election and then 9/11 happened and the subsequent wars. Ive always had pretty strong views against killing people and didn't think anyone who was being attacked had it coming at all.

I was always politically aware because of my Dad, but he was a libertarian/conspiracy bro so he passed on a lot of those brain worms. I didn't become a communist until I was about 17, and even then I had a lot of brain worms to get rid of. Still do, but honestly I'm pretty happy with where I am now with that. The libertarian brain worms were definitely preferable to other brain worms because I was already against imperialism and other parts of the American empire that mainstream politics wouldn't have had me be against.

I'm pretty certain yours is a pretty normal political experience - above average really, considering you've actually engaged with political theory enough to see the world from a wider perspective at any point in your life. You will find people who were politically aware from quite an early age, but they have material circumstances that steered them that way - my parents were already Marxists, so I was attending protests while still in a pram, but that's not an avaerage childhood.

Raised by a Rush Limbaugh fan. So pretty young. During Clinton I realized that Republicans were just complaining even though Clinton was doing what they wanted. Turned 18 registered libertarian.

I grew up doing animal rescue. Before I was consciously political, maybe around age 6~, seeing the complex cognition in other species gave me a naive sense of biocentrism and species-being that were immediately radical. Most of my current eco-Marxism was already there intuitively. Then 9/11 happened and the flagfucking culture in its aftermath was so weird to me that I was opposed to anything nationalistic or racist. At age 12~ I read the Communist Manifesto while trying to find a copy of the Anarchist Cookbook and it made more sense than anything else I had read about social studies to that point. That's when I began identifying as a socialist, even if it took until maybe age 20 before I started reading theory seriously.

i was an Obama fanatic in the second grade. learned about socialism in the 9th grade, communist by 12th grade.

Probably in my late teens. My parents were pretty dull meat and potatoes type. My dad never spoke about politics and my mum was fervently anti communist (and to this day refuses to believe communism can ever work, just look at the Soviet union and china! Oh china is only beating us now because they're becoming more capitalist!) so I was pretty conservative or libertarian. Because you know no world experience. I distinctly remember super hating green arrow in the justice League unlimited cartoon when I was like 18. Oh a big leftie who wants government to help people? What a joke of a hero!

Thankfully working and participating in a union, getting a degree in history from professors that seemed fairly liberal but not really in favour of capitalism or communism. Also my major concentration in history was military history (such a cliche I know sorry) but specifically ended up with lots of classes on the Soviet Union. Which made me more amenable to seeing other sides of coin. Learning that much of the popular western tropes about Soviet participation in the war were utter fabrications really helped introduce me to the concept that the west was desperately trying to reframe history around how the Soviets were incompetent and only won because the west was so awesome.

Disillusionment with Obama becoming a complete joke of a president, not accomplishing much of anything and the discovery pseudo left gaming spaces online helped guide me further towards things while I also fell into the Chapo subreddit and was introduced to how leftists are always right and we need to become communists or else everything is fucked. I think the west wing thing podcast helped alot as well.

Always 💪

7th grade in middle school when I told my (mostly white & christian) classmates on the bus to school that I didn't believe in God and they all branded me a terrorist because that's all we heard about politically in the years post 9/11.

Gotta thank them though because that pushed me into being politically aware (although some of you will be shocked to learn I was a /b/ poster all throughout middle school and up until like Freshman/Sophomore year of HS when Obama was running; to me this is not shocking because obviously 99% of /b/ posters during that era and maybe even now are middle schoolers)

Wasn't a true leftist (read: more left than most liberal) until 10th grade or so, coinciding with my first few jobs lol

Started really thinking of it around 14 and started reading liberal theory. Was reading Kropotkin, Malatesta and shit by 16 and became an anarcho-communist. Read Lenin and then Marx in my early 20s

Pretty young. I’d say around 8. My dad was actually happy he had a buddy to watch the Simpsons with, and it’s how I became a bit more cynical, and my k-12’s social studies class touched up on elections and presidential history. Anime also introduced me to an appreciation for foreign cultures including non-western ones, so for most of my life I was a lib even if I didn’t have the language for it. As for my folks, they were very middle of the road and never liked to talk about politics so I wasn’t swayed one way or another.

I was really happy when Obama won and I watched a lot of reddit atheist content when I was in middle school smirking to myself on how much smarter I am than the hogs. However, I made a brief dip to the right when all the anti-SJW stuff got started but came back after I was then exposed to a leftist on ifunny of all places, and the rest is history.

Around my teenage years/young adult, but I had been very justice minded from a kid (audhd I suppose). I took part in politics in school, was very radlib and interested in all things political pretty much as soon as I could.

When the 90s neoliberalism hit my country, I was a young uni student, saw how people got treated when trying to get welfare and was in the same boat myself with poverty so I started collecting peoples stories and tried to push the stories into the public. This is when I hit my first real wall with a bougie newspaper that refused to publish my opinion piece and pulled back on a story I almost got them to publish. I did get the stories published in a local student magazine. I vaguely knew how all of this works before that, but getting involved in something made it really sink in.

This is also when I still was naive enough to think that human rights, basic rights and just decency means something in the country I live in. This is also a time when I started to really ask why people don't rise up even though they are treated horribly. I just could not understand it as a starry eyed uni student that people just took the shock therapy and internalized it as their own failure. I watched my family lose work and my dad ended up suicidal from the "personal failure" that was not at all on him (or anyone who lost everything then) and been radicalizing from there to whatever I am today.