For me, it was two big things in the last couple of years that shifted my politics from a kind of bourgeois-idealist form of Marxism to what I think of as a more properly communist kind. Firstly, seeing how the entire capitalist class mobilised against Corbyn made me realise that a left wing candidate would never be permitted to win an election in the imperial core. For me, it suggested that bourgeois democracy is essentially a scam. The press coverage of that and other things such as the coup in Bolivia brought about a fundamental loss of faith in the underlying 'truths' that structure western narratives about history, politics, society, etc. This led to the second thing: I started to read far more about history (and particularly the history of left wing movements and states) and this gave me a far more nuanced view of AES states. It made me recognise the positive aspects of these states as well as their flaws, and gave me a better understanding of the contexts that they operated in. It made me realise that they (largely - I mean, there's little to redeem, for example, the Khmer Rouge) were far from the monsterous regimes that the dominant histories taught in the liberal democratic 'west' made them out to be. And, in fact, that this monsterous image involved a large amount of projection on the part of the 'west'. This also got me reading the work of communist theorists that I'd not picked up before due to the prejudices of my cultural upbringing. In particular, I started reading Lenin for the first time, in whose work I found a description of liberal (i.e. bourgeois) democracy that felt instinctively true based upon my experiences of the bourgeois state - just as Marx's Capital had felt instinctively true with regards to my experiences of work.
In terms of the site, I'd speculate that the shift from r/cth to here is partly a result of the struggle sessions that took place in the early days of the site and who emerged as the dominant groups, as well as the result of the tendencies of the admins/mods at that time who played a big role in shaping what this site would become. It's probably also a result of the kinds of self-selection that happen when you get banned from a mass media site and start your own small forum. I imagine a lot of the more 'normie' users on r/cth didn't come over in the first place. At this point, I also think this site would be off-putting for a lot of more liberal left types, purely because of the degree to which a lot of people on here stan China. Honestly, I find it a bit much sometimes, even if I welcome China's challenge to US hegemony. In the end, I find those users much less annoying than I would the average liberal with their tacit (often explicit) apologia for imperialism, and I also know I agree with them on more fundamental issues (i.e. we are all on the far left here). However, I think that also has contributed to the radicalisation of the site (or whatever you want to call it), because most of my liberal left friends will immediately dissociate with any movement, group, etc. that doesn't fit within the boundaries of their existing belief system, and they believe that China is undertaking a genocide. Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, etc. are big enough that those people don't see those sites as monolithic, so even though those sites are filled with actual fascists, and in the case of (at least) Facebook have helped to facilitate actual genocides, they'll use them because they see them as just platforms, while a site like this is seen as tainted by apologia. I'm sure most of you know which of your friends you could show this place and which you couldn't without it being an issue
This is a good point. Like most boomers, my socdem Dad used to browse Hexbear as part of his morning routine. Unfortunately he came upon a post using the offending phrase and now just posts 'so much for the tolerant left' under any article about Joe Biden on the Washington Post's website. Y'all need to reflect on this. If not for the sake of this website, but for the democrats reelection chances in 2024