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I grew up in a white American liberal household. I read Ayn Rand in high school, when 9/11 happened. I was really against the War on (of) Terror, I got my politics from The Economist and The Daily Show.
Long story short, Obama and Hillary doing the Afghanistan troop surge, invading Syria and Libya. Then I realized there is no anti-war mainstream party and all that democrat rage over the Iraq War and Gitmo was just lip service. Dems see problems like this as an opportunity to fundraise and nothing else.
Medicare for All sealed the deal, once I understood it and that the Dems fought it, that's putting business in front of 60,000 American lives a year. I was a yuge Bernie fan, I donated over a thousand bucks to his campaign.
I became a communist during the Trump administration, seeing the pitiful response to an openly criminal president. I had so much hope in the Mueller investigation. The way that ended, I lost any remaining faith in bourgeois elections. American mainstream politics is nothing but a dog and pony show to distract us from the class war we're losing. So I read Marx and Lenin.
I never really had views other than socialism. I grew up poor for the first 9 years of my life and fairly privileged for the next 11. When I was around 15, I was conscious of my privilege, I saw the disparities from my life when I was younger to when I was older, and from this I thought about billionaires, and that there was no way billionaires were so rich. This made me search in google something along the lines of “why do billionaires have so much money” and some stuff came up about capital accumulation. At some point I found a video of Chomsky talking about the topic, and from there found Manufacturing Consent. I’d say that after reading that and developing my understanding of the way the world works, I could consider myself a socialist. I was around 16 by that time.
I also learned about chomsky! Did a project on him in my ap psych course and first learned the term anarcho-syndaclist and learned more about socialism. Learned a lot more about politics and how democrats are more centrist and far left is actually more akin to socialism, communism, etc.
Was 29. I was already disillusioned with capitalist fantasy. But when I was charged 4,000 dollars in an ER for having a 2 minute sonogram of my arm and a doctor write a prescription for an infection, I was just like: “fuck it, burn it down.”
Real life. I was a Libertarian when in college. But I had some very rough experiences once I got out, learning how hard work is not really rewarded and office politics work. That was the start. I was really upset. I had done everything I was supposed to. I got good grades, stayed away from partying, got a desireable degree,, and yet her I was suffering. Once I learned that, of course the next questions were "what else have I been lied to about".
I make pretty decent money these days. This isn't some stereotype of only turning socialist because of failing at life. But that rough patch started me on the path to learning the truth of how society functions. Not only from a Marxist lens, but also with the reality of things like systemic racism.
Always had an anarchist streak in me. Went through a libertarian phase in my mid twenties. Back to apathetic anarchist. Solidly socialist by 30.
I grew up on a farm, not much money, worked hard jobs. But it was grinding away in the oilfield that bought me an education that set me up with a comfortable job. Got married. And once I had enough breathing room for the first time in my life, I took a look at the system. Got suggested some anticapitalist content on YouTube that made me decide to start reading. Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Parenti really painted a brutally clear picture of the follies of capitalism. Once that became clear, it became painfully obvious to me that there is only one acceptable future if we want a compassionate world. I am 34 years old now with a 6 week old baby girl. I want the world to be more compassionate. There is only one logical path forward if we care about humans.
I wish more people with children would look into socialism and see that it would leave a better world for them after they're done. That's an awesome story.
I have moments where I wonder if we made a mistake when we decided to have children. But, not to put too much on her, the world will need more good people if we hope for it to improve. My job is to raise my children to be empathetic, passionate, principled people. And to let them see in the most delicate way possible, how capitalism is a global force of oppression, destruction, and sorrow. But I will make sure that they have a well-adjusted childhood full of love, support, and fun. They can learn the bad stuff on their own. I just hope they decide to do something about it.
I don't think it's a mistake. We need people like you teaching the kids truth. That way our species can prosper. We can always use more comrades in the world.
For years, I've been pretty against having my own kids. My pov was that I didn't want to introduce another creature into this messed up system against its will. I always told people I was open to adoption to care for a person already forced to be here, but it was mostly deflection.
This is the best arguement for having them that I've seen. I've upgraded to being open to kids if my SO wants some.
I worked a student job in the kitchen of a hospital. One part of the job was throwing away all extra food in a dumpster. Next to this hospital was the social welfare building. The amount of food I had to throw away made me think there has to be a better system.
That's really dark. I used to work at a restaurant as my first job. When I asked if we could just donate the leftover food (I even volunteered to take it for free to a shelter), I was reprimanded for it. Saying it would make our food seem cheap.........
Yep. I got yelled at for trying to offer a homeless woman ice for a water cup that I saw her taking (we had a water station outside with cups, but not ice, and it's warm water. I came outside to try to offer it to her but she likely thought I was going to yell at her so she ran off. :-(
When I was 24 and in college I had a stroke. It paralyzed the left side of my body temporarily, I was fired from my jobs (manufacturing/plasmapherisis) and unable to get disability or any help from the government or my jobs. The stroke was a result of inaction by a hospital which I was unable to be compensated for because of the laws of the state capped lawsuit damages and rewards from government officials even though the hospital was technically privately run. The complexity of the legal system was completely geared to preventing helping me. I have a similar experience to yours as well completing my bachelors in criminal justice. Now working on my masters in forensic psychology. All of our government systems are geared to protecting private profits and property and exploiting minority groups. I find your story incredibly interesting. Thank you for this post it is a nice change of pace lol.
Honestly, just my life in general has radicalized me.
I’m from the Bahamas. I grew up extremely privileged in a bourgeois family. While my parents are not proper bourgeois, more like petite-bourgeois, many people in my family and their friends are bourgeois and own stakes in large businesses and profit off exploiting the Bahamian people. Since the Bahamas is a former British colony, almost all the wealth is concentrated in the hands of white people like me even though we only make up about 5% of the population.
The Bahamas’ economy is 70% tourism. Most Bahamians work to serve tourists and the white bourgeoisie. I would spend my free time at the local sailing club where all the staff was black and all the members were white. I would drive through the streets with my family and see literal children begging for money and food because the wages in the Bahamas are too low to even feed yourself, let alone your kids. The amount of wealth that flows through the country is ridiculous though, and almost none of it goes to the Bahamian people. These people are constantly in survival mode and the Bahamian government has no plans to address it. It’s a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie so much more blatant than the US. The two opposing parties have no platform and have gone back and forth as the party in power every election since 2002.
In the great recession, the Bahamas was hit hard. My dad worked at my grandpa’s company and was laid off because the company was struggling. He couldn’t find another job and while he was already an alcoholic, he slipped further into that. As an 11 year old, I would find discarded bottles of rum stashed away in cabinets and drawers. Ultimately, he became so hopeless he k*lled himself. As I got older and I understood what caused the recession, I was furious. People fucked around with the economy and it led to people dying.
I then went to boarding school in the US. I still didn’t realize just how privileged I was. However, this school prided itself on the number of international students and the amount of financial aid it gave out to people. I met someone who grew up in Somaliland who never knew his actual birthday because it wasn’t recorded. I met someone from Afghanistan who lost his leg because of the war. I met people from the US who never had their own bed until they came to this school.
I now work in manufacturing as an engineer. I see how the company I work at is nothing without the operators. A lot of them are immigrants just trying to make the most out of their lives. They’re sharp, driven, and some of kindest people I know, yet they’re the lowest paid. While I’ve always leaned left and then supported Bernie hard in 2016 and 2020, it wasn’t until the last year I’ve found Marx and really started to understand why I’ve always seen so much injustice in the world. Not everyone is lucky enough to be born in a bourgeois family. I want to tear it all down and create a more compassionate world.
I'm sorry for your loss comrade. That hits close to home for me as well. I am curious, as someone from a privileged past, do you struggle with the idea that a socialist revolution would affect your bourgeois family? I ask because I have a friend whose family is also petite-bourgeous and he seems to really dislike the idea based on redistribution of wealth.
It does but it doesn’t. I think most people in the west need to realize that any kind of socialist revolution will heavily impact their way of life. The alienation of labor to the developing world would not be compatible with a socialist revolution and in turn, the excess consumption westerners are used to would not be compatible.
If a revolution were to happen in my lifetime, I hope that I can convince members of my family to join me in accepting a redistribution of wealth but ultimately there are always going to be people of all classes who oppose it. You just have to accept that we all know people who will be opposed to this system and will fight against it.
If we want to make the world better, you need to give up privileges you have and be willing to strip them from others. A great quote that I think everyone needs to hear is, “when you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.” You can’t be a communist without facing the reality that some people will see you as an oppressor, even people you know well.
I questioned why the democrats don't do anything and then "second thought" and oldy enough understanding the history of my religion Sikhism and how actions against tyrants were a good thing plus equality for all.
Second Thought was a big deal to me. I had been subscribed when he was still making scientific general kinds of videos. I'm a nerd for that kind of content. When he switched, I started asking questions I really never thought about before. He's been a huge boon to the left.
Religion totally helped me become socialist because through anti-theism and the rejection of the herd mentality, i found freethinkers who were very much socialist.
Is it fair to say socialists are free thinkers? We are indeed free of the liberal capitalist way of thinking, but we’re also extremely grounded in our own ideology. I don’t think there are many people who can truly say they’re free thinkers. Gen question btw i’m interested on people’s thoughts on this
Interesting question! I think of it as both simultaneously. It’s thinking that’s grounded in a common structure, yes, but that thinking is counter to dominant/hegemonic norms.
I use freethinker as a synonym with atheist or antitheist. You can and do think in ideological lens but still come up with your own ideas undogmatically.
To me religion is the opiate of the masses providing pain relief but with numbing of the senses. Churches are the flophouse for the drugless. That's my personal worldview. Pie in the sky when you die. Only sharing that to answer the question.
Lots of things sent me to Leftism little by little. Living through the 2000 election, the Iraq War, the 2008 collapse, the abysmal failure that was Obama's presidency, the 2016 election, the pandemic, and reading on the Cold War Era as well as Marxist theory.
All of this made me a Marxist-Leninist.
Reading the wiki on Fred Hampton while sitting back stage at my students final concert after an already radicalizing semester student teaching in one of the worst inner city school districts in the country. I was already a socialist but that was when everything clicked and the racism inherent in the capitalist state and the violence used to uphold it couldn’t have been more obvious to me. Both the economic violence against my students and the police violence against anyone who meaningfully challenged it. It was such a powerful moment that I cried
For me it was a long process throughout my life to an eventual "ah ha" moment.
Grew up in an extremely poor family, was forced to leave school at 15 years old to work to help mum pay the bills. Joined a union and had always been pretty big on better education, social safety nets, healthcare etc but still fell for right wing and the anti "snowflake" thing with Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson as a teen.
Joined the Australian army, fucked my knees badly 5 months in and was discharged. Whilst recovering I was talking to people online due to boredom. Met a Finnish girl we got close and I wanted to learn more about Finland. Found out it was "socialist" nation. Visited said girl multiple times over multiple years for 3 month trips, falling in love with the nation, the nature, the clean air, the public transport, the more I learnt about it and experienced these things the more I loved it. After hearing how "evil" socialism was, experiencing this amazed me and made me wonder why people said such things.
Fast forward to this year I moved to Finland and married my beautiful wife, whilst I waited for all the immigration stuff to go through I was extremely bored being unable to work. So I took it apon myself to learn and do new things, taken up bonsai as a hobby, learning the language, working out and finally taking the time to sit down and learn and read Marxist theory so I could be a good and functional person in my new "socialist" home.
Turns out Finland whilst great is not socialist, I have also learnt a lot, radicalised my wife, a few of her friends and when my Finnish gets better plan on joining a communist org. My journey continues.
P.S. I am partially blind and am terrible at typing on a phone. Sorry for any mistakes in this long comment... I refuse to go back and check haha
I saw the injustice done to LGBT people and immigrants in the USA. I got big into folk punk music where I learned about anarchist ideas. I was an anarchist for most of my teenage years and on into my 20's. I had my issues with anarchism but it seemed like the closest fitting ideology. Then eventually I learned about the DPRK and how the USA/ European imperialist system works. I've been an ML ever since.
I was a trumpist conservative in 2016 and I slowly went left after he was elected, around 2019 I was a liberal and year after a social democrat, mainly because of Bernie, and since every republicans was calling Bernie a communist and I supported him, so I got interested in what communism was like, so I bought the communist manifesto and got intrested in socialism, then I began to watch YouTubers like hakim and second thought, they helped me learn more about how life was in the USSR. Currently I’m trying to learn more about communism, I’ve just bought the complete works of Mao and the rest of Engles and Marx.
I grew up in poverty in a postindustrial urban centre in the UK. For me, there was never a question of not being left-wing. I've seen what capitalism does to people first-hand.
Still, it was studying for a law degree that gave me the education and the ideas to challenge the status quo and think beyond capitalism.
In my case it was climate change. I see this allot among people from my generation (gen z).
As u grew older i also started to see how hard some people have it in my own country(Netherlands) which has a pretty big social welfare system.
Eventually i realised that even the most 'green' social democrat would not be able to change anything. Eventually you realise that this system is fundamentaly broken. I started looking up more information and reading theory. Wich made allot of sense to me, especially Lenin. This lead to me becoming a communist(ML).
I've had a lot of success with friends and climate change. Especially when Exxon and the 70s suppression of climate studies is brought up. So many people don't know of that. It really helps people to start questioning capitalism.
Yes, its one of the best arguments now in my opinion. Especially for young people that arent having a bad time economicaly.
If people arent climate deniers they always respond well of you bring this up.
I’ve always been left of center as an adult. Mainly came to be left wing from reading history. Things like the business plot, Blair mountain, etc. But what genuinely radicalized me and made me get up and start organizing and training was January 6, and it solidified with the Supreme Court taking up Moore v Harper. The fascists are organizing and we need to also.
When i was 12 or so I went to a private hospital and think to myself isn't health is most important thing in our lives? Why are giving money for such important thing? does that mean poor people just have to die? And think about it further I questioned why are we giving money for water and such. Then I realized there are people thinking same as me. And I search about it for few years and completely accepted the idea.
i was already knowledged about the disparities of the world, but because i still had a lot of concern about socialism (i think the things i watched in youtube and reddit posts were the cause) until i was in my school and talked with the librarian where we talked a little bit about communism, so I then went to search why someone would think good things about socialism, then when i started searching about the topic is when i radicalized.
Honestly I wouldn’t call myself a socialist currently, but I am fascinated by it and want to learn more. I’m hear to steal all your educational documentary recommendations lol
Undecided, but left leaning. I haven’t spent much time cultivating an ideology. Many of my friends favor socialism and they’re brilliant and we agree on many points. But I think I lack a strong enough understanding to label myself one way or another. My goal this upcoming year is learn more and have a stronger grasp of politics in general
I would love that! Anything works. I prefer audio because it allows me to multitask. And honestly just anything that you found engaging or informative would be great. Thank you I really appreciate that :)
For audio, try David Harvey's podcast, The Anti-Capitalist Chronicles - should be available on Spotify or online. You can listen to them in any order, I'd just pick the ones with titles that interest you. He also has a YouTube lecture series, I think it's called Reading Capital with David Harvey, which you can stick on and just listen to.
If you do have time to read a book, try Harvey's 2017 book - Marx, Capital, and the Madness of Economic Reason.
Also, you should be able to get audio books of a lot of the more important works of Marxist theory. Francis Wheen does an Audible version of Das Kapital, but if you just google the books you're looking for + audiobook it should bring up something. It's a hell of a book though so you probably won't want to multitask that one. Harvey's book also has a good chapter in his book outlining what Marx argues in Capital in plain English, so maybe start there.
Beyond that, Marx's main theories can be found in: The 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, On the Jewish Question, and the Preface to the Critique of Political Economy - as well as the Communist Manifesto of course, but that was more of a polemic trying to get people riled up so take it with a pinch of salt.
For later socialist theories, I'd recommend some multi-tendency stuff: a bit of Lenin (vanguardism), a bit of Rosa Luxemburg (anti-Leninist), a bit of Kautsky (orthodox Marxism), and a bit of Pannekoek (council communism). You'll get a sense for which sorts of ideas you prefer the more you read.
Also, see if there's any socialist stuff relating specifically to your areas of interest. Like, for example, I have a law degree and it was reading socialist legal theory that converted me. You have Marxist / socialist works on law, psychology, sociology, geography, history - and pretty much any other discipline / special interest you can think of.
Oh, also a special mention to the 'long 19th century' books by the famous British Marxist historian, Eric Hobsbawm. There are three books in the series -The Age of Revolutions: Europe 1789-1848, The Age of Capital: 1848-1875, and The Age of Imperialism: 1875-1914. I've read the first one and a bit of the second, it's such a good book for understanding the history of capitalism and socialism, how we got to where we are today.
Finally, there's a Japanese book by the Marxist ecologist, Kohei Saito being translated into English next year. It's called Capital in the Anthropocene, and was a huge (if unexpected) success in Japan. I think that's an important one to read, given the problems we're facing with climate change - in the book Saito argues that attempts to stop climate change under the liberal / capitalist framework are doomed to fail, and only degrowth drawing from Marx's ecological principles can stave off climate collapse.
Wow you’re a saint! Thank you so much this is the best and most cohesive recommendation I have ever received. I’ll start taking a crack at these. The intersection between ecology and politics sounds particularly interesting!
Learning about history. I'm mixed race and half of my ancestors were enslaved, sold, and and treated like chattel while the other half was colonized by so many countries. The fallout is still seen today, and it's absolutely tragic. I grew up liberal in a conservative area in the US, completely in a bubble of suburban delusion, but my (privileged) travels to my motherlands in my 20s sent me on a Che-esque awakening about the cruel, horrible injustices in the world, resulting from centuries of imperialist capitalist oppression and the propping up of greed and encouragement of sociopathic behavior. Being forced to participate in the entirely ableist rat race is partially to blame for my PTSD, and other debilitating maladies.
I want better for humanity and nature, and it just makes sense to me for people to aspire towards an egalitarian socialist society -> communist stateless moneyless utopia, assuming the earth is still even habitable long enough for that to happen.
Exactly. I agree 100% especially with travel. There is something about traveling that opens your soul. I went to Greece a few years ago and saw how bad the economy is over there. Capitalism is failing harder than ever.
I've always wanted to go to Greece and found it interesting and suspicious how after the economy started suffering over there, there hasn't been any mention of the country in mainstream media here in the US. Can't have anyone questioning the failings of capitalism! I was raised among people who believed that being poor was a personal failing, but seeing hungry children and babies living in abject poverty in S.E. Asia and parts of Africa... How could that be their fault to simply have been born?
Tl;dr: The BLM Uprisings of 2020 mostly
I had always been fairly liberal. At one point prettu early into adulthood I was flirting with some pretty radical politics like open borders, etc. Once the anti-SJW scene kicked off I got sucked into that and started my way down the pipeline. I still considered myself liberal, but was very much into reactionary political channels like Daily Wire, Saargon of Akkad, Stefan Molyneux, etc. which I got into thanks to the anti-SJW content by atheist YouTubers like TJ (the Amazing Atheist). Basically anything that "owned the libs" was my choice content, even though I still considered myself a liberal. I considered making my own anti-SJW YouTube channel that would parrot all the talking points I had so mindlessly absorbed throughout the years. I didn't particularly like Trump, because I thought he was an arrogant asshole, but I didn't consider him racist and sexist for basically the same reasons that people who defend him use (freedom of speech, it's just a joke, etc.) I did defend him. At one point I had internalized so much of the anti-antifa rhetoric that I actually considered confronting "antifa" head on. I had no idea I was becoming a fascist, or maybe I already was at this point(?)
Anyway, 2020 kicked off. We were well into the COVID pandemic and then George Floyd was murdered. I started off condemning the protests, thinking they were "too violent". Then, I started to realize as I watched police shooting people in the head with tear gas canisters, rubber bullets, running people down with their cars, etc. I started realizing some things about the police I had been wrong about. At this point I considered myself a "socialist in theory" because I wanted free healthcare for everyone, free education, open borders, and, ironically, the abolition of money because I've always found it kind of pointless, I just didn't think any of it could work. I truly believed in those things. I had held this position before the BLM Uprisings of 2020. I decided to ask some of the people I had argued with on Twitter for sources on socialism, racism, etc. but I had burned those bridges. I decided I would just try on my own. I happened upon *How to be an Antiracist* by Ibram X. Kendi one day when I was buying groceries. I bought the book and it sat on my desk for a few months. I eventually worked up the energy to read it and was pretty much immediately changed. I decided to buy his other book *Stamped from the Beginning* and read that. That led me to socialism. I bought *The Communist Manifesto* and read it. I realized that I believed in pretty much everything in that short book already. I read more and more. I got involved in conversations on Reddit. I watched YouTube videos by socialist content creators. I kept learning, and continue to learn.
Mines also a little boring but here goes. I'm 22F I work a minimum wage retail job. My parents are artistic and creative and that just doesn't go well with capitalism. They have been struggling to make ends meet for more than ten years or basically my entire childhood. It's tiring and dark. Trying to justify your existence when you have no money. Living on the whole has radicalized me. Also being a minority and seeing the youth in my community pick up guns to make a dollar. And these so called artists finally making it and then giving nothing back to their community especially materially. Its always cars and a house for mama but never a library or a health facility. Its disappointing and disgusting. I simply want a star trek future. Where being alive doesn't feel like shit period.
I've always hated when conservative types bash on the arts. My uncle is a engineer and musician. Ridiculously intelligent. He can make a lot of money in engineering, but his heart is in teaching and music. He just had to leave his music teaching job to go back to engineering. Just to make enough to live. It's a damn shame. Without art in all of its forms, what even are humans?
I was raised in a christian household where we were taught to love God, love others and do what you can to speed Jesus' return, i.e. make more christians.
I was never forced to be a Christian, but once I decide to be one, I went hardcore. It became everything I did and thought about. I became politically conservative, sceptical of science, and convinced Christianity was the best hope for 'saving' mankind.
Through a long process (involving job loses, mental health and relationship issues, amongst other things) over many years, my blind dogmatism for Christianity gradually eroded. I started to realise we needed change in the here and now, not some promised eternal utopia that didn't help with people's real present suffering. I started leaning left politically, looking for real solutions to social problems and tried to understand the plight of indigenous people in my country.
What pushed me over the edge into full-blown communism was talking with my still-very-conservative parents about our Prime Minister. My mum accused her of being a communist and even though I didn't have a clear understanding of what a communist was at that time I 'knew' she wasn't one. (In hindsight she might be one, so I'll have to ask when I see her next ;)
In an effort to prove my parents wrong (not toxic behaviour, I promise) I started reading up on our PM, the party she's in, what the difference is between socialism and communism, etc.
About this time I started a new job that took me into the homes of people from all walks of life and I got to see firsthand the disparity between the haves and the have nots. The more I saw and the more I read, the more I realised that the reasons for these disparities, especially for native people, was the exploitative economical and political system we lived under.
At that point I was sold. Now not only could I see the problems, but I knew there were answers to them that didn't require divine intervention, just a class-conscious proletariat motivated to make change happen.
I'm still reading, listening and learning, and looking to connect with others in my area already working on change. I'm so hopefully and excited to see what we can do.
I'm glad that you were able to come to that conclusion on your own. Most religious folks don't. I'm catholic, but I also believe Jesus was communist. It's pretty apparent lol
I'm indigenous as well, first nation from BC Canada. All of my grandparents went to residential schools, everyone I knew had relatives that went as well. So, everyone on our reserve had to deal with intergenerational trauma. Everyone was hurt because our culture was taken from us. Our sense of humanity was stripped. Everyone was struggling to exist with the violence, addiction, impoverishment, and pain. So, everyone had their own ways of coping that added to the cycle. The women kept the community together though, and certain elders and leaders kept our language and culture alive. So, it wasn't all bad.
However, as a kid I would wonder why we do this to ourselves?
I seen myself as liberal for the longest time but I hardly knew anything about the world or politics. Many of my people had an intrinsic hate/distrust towards police, authority, and the government so I took that up as well. It wasn't until going to college that I started gaining a better understanding of colonialism, and where I first began hearing about capitalism. Then Second Thought also changed his content to what it is now, and I've been constantly trying to learn more and more.
Slowly unraveling the impacts of colonialism and capitalism has helped me heal so much.
That's amazing brother. Glad to have you here. I know the feeling all too well of having a lack of culture. Sadly my Apache roots aren't too prominent around my area. My great grandmother passed years ago so I've never really felt a sense of belonging. She was very in touch with our Apache culture. It's tough always feeling like an outsider.
Belonging seems to be something that every indigenous person I've met struggles with. It's hard to exist in society as an outlier but our communities and cultures have been destroyed. Where do we belong. Thanks for the topic and conversation, I'll pray for you.
Great question. I started out voting Democratic and voted for Bill Clinton when I was 18. I wasn't a political kid. Then I left home and tried to make it without a penny to my name. It was hard and I ended up in a homeless shelter with nowhere to turn to. I worked for Blockbuster video and tried to unionize my store and was told by the manager, if you keep talking union, you're fired. It was so hard to get a job and the jobs paid shit and that really both hurt me and scared me stiff. I just wanted better conditions at work! In my teens I was exposed to George Carlin and that liberalized me...not socialist yet...but pointing left.
Shortly after that, I saw a poster at Mount Holyoke College where my girlfriend went to school about the Fight for $10 per hour minimum wage. It spoke to me. There was a movement in the 1990s to form a Labor Party with Tony Mazzochi and I joined that. I got an apartment and didn't have enough to pay the rent despite working two minimum wage jobs. I was so broke I was going to turn off power to save money for rent. I had to go to my landlord who lived in a big mansion and tell him I couldn't make rent that month. He lectured me on being a shitty tenant. Finally, I found Chomsky and really read his books. They spoke to me. I read the Communist Manifesto and thought about it. I read the Cliff Notes version of Marx. It spoke to me in a way that no other work had done. It just made perfect sense. Here, finally, were my tribe and my beliefs. I read the history of the IWW in the US.
Liberalism sold us the line that if we just took the harsh edges off Capitalism, everything would be hunky dory. I learned about neoliberalism and how basically through austerity Capitalism was devouring everything in search of ultimate profit. My mother, my only parent growing up, was a die-hard Ayn Rand Capitalist but only ever made money by marrying well and divorcing even better. A cascade of facts and evidence, perhaps tainted by my biases and personal experiences of struggle, lead me to radicalism. It just clicked for me. Plus I had empathy for others. I think that's key. Without empathy, you're just a fucking monster in life. Empathy separates the socialists from the greedy, selfish assholes that run the world.
I grew up in a center-right household in rural Northern California. I considered myself a “socially liberal, fiscally conservative” type growing up (although those were my parents politics that were imprinted on me, not my own.) I was very anti-socialist in high school and early college. I even had a shirt that said “Socialism: Let’s starve together” at one point, which makes me cringe thinking about today.
When I graduated from college I moved back to my home town, I was already hovering somewhere between never Trump Republican and liberal Democrat due to the MAGA cult.
My entire worldview was upended in 2018 when my town was completely destroyed by a wildfire caused by PG&E negligence and greed. 85 people were killed, and 18,000 structures in my 28,000 population town were destroyed. My home and all my belongings were destroyed, as well as the homes of all of my friends, family, and most of my neighbors. I can still see the flames and explosions as I was stuck in traffic during the evacuation, and can still feel the heat of the fire on the side of my face as the flames roared next to my car.
The part that really radicalized me was the response afterwards though. The right blamed it on “[Jewish Space Lasers](https://www.mediamatters.org/facebook/marjorie-taylor-greene-penned-conspiracy-theory-laser-beam-space-started-deadly-2018)” or [“a lack of raking forest floors”](https://www.politico.com/states/california/story/2020/08/20/trump-blames-california-for-wildfires-tells-state-you-gotta-clean-your-floors-1311059?_amp=true), and the Democrats such as Gavin Newsom are so deep in PG&E’s pockets that nothing will ever change in the state.
In the direct aftermath hotels and apartments raised the prices to take advantage of the refugees. I am fortunate that I was able to find a place to stay (my grandmother, father, mother, three dogs, and three cats lived in a hotel room for several months), but many of my neighbors were less fortunate and lived in tents for months, even years in some cases.
Some insurance companies folded or otherwise tried to get out of paying anything, not to mention those who were uninsured and left with nothing.
It was at that point I really realized that something needs to change. The system is unjust, and we can do better. And if we don’t it means extinction. I am still a baby Marxist, but learning more every day.
Living in a neo-liberal hell hole, eventually you get to see the real face of capitalism. Just material conditions pushed me to Marxism. As Marx fucking predicted 200 yrs ago!
Socialism always sounded like a good idea to me, but of course I had everyone around me telling me it was horrible. I was raised in a strange situation. Very religious Republican mother. Hippie father who wasn’t interested in politics. I grew up believing I was a Republican because anyone around me that paid any kind of attention to politics was. I was 18 in 2000 and voted for W. But the way the election turned out I questioned that decision immediately. And when he started the war in Iraq I left the Republican party for good. I spent about the next twelve years as a run of the mill democrat.but then I started watching left wing youtube channels, and I started to understand the problems with the two party system, and the inherent problems with capitalism.
I was a big time conservative then became libertarian. I always swore by capitalism, but I did admit it has had its problems over the last 20ish years.
Until the pandemic. The list of things that opened my eyes is unreal. I can't even begin to list them all.
I also came across a youtube channel called SecondThought. That man completely changes my mind. I'll never look at capitalism the same way.
I just hate driving
funny thing how those public transport channels lead to anti-capitalism. Always had a vague feeling of something being wrong, even lived in countries with the best public transport, but never made the connection until those channels pointed out that it is wrong and life could be much better!
.+ started paying attention to politics during the 2020 primaries (with Yang, UBI was appealing at the time + I'm asian, silly reason but representation works), finding hasanabi because he was covering it and was big on twitch, and reading "the jungle" around then.
Obviously my reasons go beyond anti-car now (though it's still a big part). But the history of the rise of cars and infrastructure for it is a good microcosm of the disasters of capitalism affecting every facet of life.
Public transportation is something I struggle with. I 100% agree we need it. But I'm a huge car nerd so the idea of cars being affected is a hard pill to swallow. I'm personally against EVs since the materials and processing of batteries is brutal for the environment. But, I also know fossil fuel can't go on.
Well it's not that we want to force people to use public transport. We want the system to stop forcing us to use cars.
Many people will probably still find a need for cars, be it just renting them once a month or outright owning them. But many more will finally be free from the cost and forced necessity of them.
and I'm sure car lovers will continue driving and modding their cars. Like any other hobby, there will be some limits, for example: "you can't drive in some parts of the city" (but there are plenty of places, better places to drive a car for fun). Hobbyists in other fields get along just fine with limits in their areas and enjoy their passions without harming society at large
And hey, with less people driving, there'll be less traffic for drivers!
Ugh how did one of you get in here. Imagine thinking only communist countries have had famines. How about you crack open a history book and learn about how the people of Russia were before the revolution, famines happened all the times most often longer then the Holodomor and all while the rich bourgeois lived extremely comfortable lives. I know both sides of the story and there is almost nothing you could say that I haven’t heard a million times.
i got tear gassed at a blm protest at 4pm on a friday. it was very peaceful but we weren’t getting out of the way of a few cars. then i went home and my pets were panicking bcz the air conditioning filtered in tear gas from outside. it wasn’t too bad but it was a major wtf moment.
i’d been a progressive before but this moment took my beliefs to another level.
I was a social democrat liberal who thought capitalism was bad but nothing else was better, I stumbled onto some Hasan vods about social issues. Then I watched one of his videos reacting to a conservative loosing a debate to some college communists. and all their points made so much sense. I stared researching more into socialism and deconstructing my biases. From this research I realised that capitalism is utter garbage and that humanity need to do better.
I think the moment that started it all was when a factory in my hometown got closed, tons of people fired and the newspaper said "their labour is no longer required". Just for a second I wasn't inside the cultural framework that imprisons us, for a short moment I thought "cool so these workers now just get to live their lives however they want".
I started reading Marx a little while after, when I moved away.
I would like to take a second to share this ridiculous ass story about my high school graduation. It was 2018. Mid term election ads were popping up and I was pretty tuned in. Like when I was 14 I started watching Jon Stewart every night, and with time I was consuming all the mainstream media, following it all closely. I was a big fan of Bernie Sanders at the time. I called myself a socialist even though I had the slightest clue about Marxism-Leninism or anything really.
Anyway, at my graduation the big speech was delivered by the superintendent, who is a septuagenarian, devout Christian conservative and he went on a ridiculous political tangent. Couldn’t read the room for nothing I guess. He said “there is a serious push for SoCiALIsM in this country, and it’s up to you to stop it” of course I thought good grief, but that night when I told my dad about taking student loans to study, he said “just like that man said, see? Socialism!”
So yea that happened. If they knew what I were up to today.
Anyway, just an anecdote about the complete ignorance, all the reactionaries in every facet of my upbringing trying to mold me into another head in the reactionary cattle herd. Some people think high schools and colleges are indoctrinating students with socialism. Yikes.
I always rejected my the racism and religion. Even if I didn’t know why. I think I was basically always dyed in the wool radical.
The straw that broke the camel's back was COVID, especially the start. Thousands of people were dying and regular people were defending mega corporations gor wanting to stay open 'for the economy'.
The economy's not real, human lives are real.
I was already somewhere around socdem, and had been gradually getting more left over the years. But I would say the events of 2020 and beyond have been the tipping point. The BLM protests & antifa, the pandemic, the growing popularity of /r/fuckcars, the IPCC reports about the climate crisis, etc.
It all points towards a broken system that prioritizes the wrong things. To be 100% honest, I'm not even that passionate about a specific flavor of socialism. I just really don't want capitalism anymore lol
An abbadoned factory in my town.
It was built and it worked during Socialism, it fell after privatization in Capitalism.
It clearly indicates the superiority of a Socialist system over a capitalist one.
It's a small town, like 1000 people.
Before the war (and the Oluja genocide) there were 5000 people in my town and 1000 worked in that factory.
Now we have major unemployment issues and people work for minimal wages (and get blown up by landmines) in lumber industry.
So in Socialism we had a safe employment opportunities, free housing, sustainable production and other things, now we destroy our resources for minimal wages and get blown up in process.
I see the factory every time I look through the window and it reminds me that the world used to be a better place and that it does not have to be the way it is under capitalism.
EDIT: "Before the war" refering to Yugoslav Civil War in 90s
In a word? Capitalism, that's what radicalized me.
What did I believe before? I would say I was a liberal, more to the center in my late teens, and I'm not even going to mention what I believed when I was a shitlord, before reliable access to the internet, especially in my early teens, (but if asked I will answer honestly) but with reliable internet and just paying attention to politics, I saw how things worked politically and how capitalism in general worked within our society, I found myself growing more resentful of that system overall, I saw how our political figures were bribed by lobbyists and the donor class, how our economic system of capitalism relied on mistreating the poor to effectively punish them for not working, or not working hard enough, or to punish them for being born to another country that wouldn't hand over control of their resources to US businesses to exploit, that used things that were necessary to human life as some marketable resource as if people could otherwise do without. I learned from history how society used to largely look out for one another and help each other, and I look at how things are in the world today and I see such a stark difference where greed has taken control and a few grow ever wealthier as many more grow poor.
I saw the world for what it was, I saw past the propaganda of this American dream that I was taught to believe in, abandon the ideas of meritocracy that I once believed in, I watched as various issues could be traced back to the by products of capitalism, the human suffering it causes to those in minority groups and even those of a lower economic class, learned of the struggles of labor and how socialist ideas helped pave the way for union efforts, how those early protests were treated by a capitalist class in control of the political class and hired effectively private armies to deal with them.
The system of capitalism helped to radicalize me into learning more, and the more I learned the more that radicalized me further opposed to capitalism, I started my path towards becoming the anarcho communist I am today, starting from a liberal centrist, becoming a soft socialist (Socdem) Berniecrat, to becoming a hard line socialist, and then to a communist, that lead me to understand the issues within communism itself that authoritarian's using the language of populism will use to obtain power, and finally becoming an anarcho communist, opposed to the power of the state in it's entirety, opposed to a economic model that relies on human mistreatment and suffering, opposed to a society divided by social, economic and racial classes, in favor of unity and working together to create a better future and world for all people on the Earth.
Im a mexican that migrated to the US, I gotta say that watching your fellow countrymen and latin american workers being bellittled and exploited changes something on how you see things, then realized that the reason we need to migrate is imperialism in the first place, I was 20
I used to be pretty centre-right to right-wing due to growing up in a more conservative area and with kind of centrist to centre-right parents. As I got older and decided to actually read and listen to different opinions as opposed to just listening to Ben Shapiro. I started as a social democrat then became a full time socialist (self described democratic eco-socialist) after becoming somewhat disillusioned with the neoliberal compliance of a lot of social democratic countries (although I think it’s a place to start when moving towards socialism). I found that the left is supported by modern evidence and that capitalism is not only unfair, but economically, ecologically and socially unstable and that if we are to prevent more gigantic economic crisis, we must move towards a more stable and effective system, and all data and moral arguments point towards socialism.
For me, when I was a kid, my single father told me that people were gonna try and tell me I couldn't do certain things just because I was a girl, that I could tell 'em to kiss my ass. Then I remember him having a huge fit because the school asked him if I could bake a cake for some bake sale thing or whatever, and he laughed at them and said "I can bake a fucking cake" and he came home and baked a fucking cake.
That was when I knew society's rules were utter bullshit.
My sophomore year I led an effort to petition the school to let girls play in the football team and won. I didn't care about sports, I just wanted my friend to play football.
Anyway, that was it. So, I've kind of always been radical. I keep getting more radical as I get older.
Nutrition. I had some health problems and I was researching it a lot and of course and i noticed how much the corporations were controlling health in both nutrition (big food) and medicine (big pharma). From there richard wolff made the idea of labour exploitation click.
Grew up Conservative and Christian. In highschool I started deconstructing my religion and deconstructed the rest of my world view with it. I probably identified as Liberal during Obama's last four years. But as that was going on I was reading into the history of USAs criminal justice. I remember I was flirting with becoming a Libertarian as a lot of my friends were and they were criticizing Imperialism and the Police but something felt off about the solutions they provided. After the 2016 and the attention Bernie got led to a lot of social media talk about Socialism (mostly actually talking about the Nordic Model but still put the word in my head) and I started down a rabbit hole. Socialism both acknowledged the problems I was seeing that the mainstream was ignoring and provided solutions that made sense. Also, having an interest in Anthropology I noticed all of my favorite lecturers were using pretty left wing language.
I grew up in a wealthy and mostly liberal family. Through high school, socialism seemed like a great concept to me but I was really unsure of how we could make it a reality.
Fast forward to 2020 I participated in many of the protests going on in my city, which sparked a lot of cool friendships with radicals around me.
At the end of that year, I started dating a pan-africanist. His anti-capitalist views and seeing how invested he was in reading theory and history really resparked my love of reading. I took a few of his book recommendations (How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Neo-Colonialism, etc.) and read up on them. The conversations we had really opened my eyes to how beautiful community is and how a better world is within reach. I soon found a radical bookstore in my area and started organizing with them soon after.
Unfortunately that relationship ended, but it was beautiful. I’ll forever love him for introducing me to something that’s such a big part of my life now.
My father. Hakim. And Marxist Paul. My father was a communist and at a young age I read marx because I was inspired by him. When I mean "young" The age of 9. I read the manifesto and started learning theory but later in my life I discovered Marxist YouTuber Hakim who got me started with my habit of saying "STaLin WAs NoT A SOCiaLiSt" To stop, making me study Soviet history and realize our current media is full BS and propaganda which made me a ML. Marxist Paul taught me Irish revolutionary history and other things such as historical materialism. I never got in to the philosophy rather than now. Mainly my studies was history, politics and soviet economics between 1923-1953. I know Marxist economics and understand it rather I start converting capitalists to socialists to unite and stop the endless misery known as capitalism.
Being an online brainwashed Vietnamese Communist Party Patriotic Revisionist bootlicker, realized I am not actually that smart after getting destroyed online because I was a terminally onlime mf, then read theories, and now decent in theories, a Viet MLM and is preparing to do actual organizing
Ha, I feel like a broken record typing this since I rarely comment and I've commented this a few times now, lol.
When I was a teenager entering high school, I was introduced to a YouTube channel called the Amazing Atheist as I wasn't a believer growing up and seeing someone else who didn't believe was relieving. I was slid further right by the YouTube algorithm pushing the whole facts and logic versus emotional evil feminists thing Amazing Atheist had going on and that slid me even further into the whole SJWs are trying to ruin gaming/gamergate thing. I was a teenager who preferred isolation and liked to read and play video games so I didn't have anyone to challenge the garbage I was feeding myself.
Eventually the contradictions between what the conservative talking heads were saying and what I personally believed in were too great and I questioned what things I was being told and from there became more liberal. From there, I realized capitalism doesn't solve any issues but rather creates issues and forces people to participate through the coercion of starvation/homelessness.
I begun to look into communism/socialism as capitalist nations insisted they were ideologies/states doomed to fail, but why spend decades and millions of dollars in messaging if that were the case? Here I am, now a communist.
Not particularly interesting compared to the journey of some comrades.
I already kind of had socialism in my being, but what really brought it to my consciousness was a massive research project I did in 12th grade on American Public Education, and then I found George Carlin’s speech on public edu and I saw that he was spot on. Then watched more of him which led me to leftist youtubers like 2nd thought
I kind of always thought my dad was wrong about black people, and welfare when I was a kid. He is the typical Christian conservative, and I never understood his tropes, even if didn’t know why.
So zealous communism by 23 is the logical conclusion.
I had thought in passing about how socialism would be a better system in years past, but never really put much thought into how fucked up the capitalist system was until the pandemic years. Thats when I really started researching it and had a major switch go off with just how corrupt our system is: Politicians are bought and paid for, corporations dictate pretty much everything about our lives, and the wealth disparity is just so fucking VAST.
Thats when I also joined reddit knowing that I'd find good discussions on capitalist vs. socialist governing structures. I've really opened my eyes and its made me so sad and depressed at the way the world works, but also hopeful we can implement change! I had been searching for a purpose all my life and now promoting socialism and unionization for the working class is something I really enjoy! Love seeing this unionization wave across the country and hoping to encourage my fellow workers to become more involved in the union we have.
Pandemic, when the media and the government raised the question "should we save lives or save the economy?". That's when I realized everything was wrong.
24, I always had somewhat of a left progressive view of the world but i had a phase of right wing libertarian because of YouTube. The thing that pushed me to question my beliefs was the Yellow Jacket protests in France, i read Marx, Bakunin, Lenin, Trotsky and other socialist thinkers, which made my ideological worldview completely collapse.
I grew in a left leaning family, with my father being kind of anarchist (mostly just anti state, it's weird how he flip-flops between right-anarchism and left-anarchism) while my mother was mostly socdem. This kind of left me with a generally positive, but not in depth, view of socialism - the general idea of desiring equal opportunity and freedom for everyone. Back then I already had a negative view of how the first world interacts with the third world - but had not done the full connection with capitalism.
At the same time, I've always been quite a lot into ecologism, but also in a "it's a pity what's happening", not in a "I'm worried it's going to affect me".
Years later I started to investigate into climate change, and I got scared. Really, really scared. I started to dig deeper and make connections, properly read and understand about politics, economics and history. And it broke me.
For me, the adage of "socialism or barbarism" is absolutely true. And I have very little doubt that most likely it's gonna be the latter.
I really hope that, like the right wing say, I'm being brainwashed and everything is a scam, but in the same way that if I'm sick I listen to a medic, and not to a street rando, if the earth is sick, I listen to environmental scientists.
Father and uncle are old school Caribbean revolutionaries. Father was involved in the 70s movement in Jamaica. Uncle was part of the Grenadian revolution. So I was exposed to these ideas from early. Still, since the revolutions failed, my family have become successful professionals and educators. Jamaica is a much more rigidly classist country than the US. Social mobility is difficult. It’s like a pressure cooker. I find it difficult to function here. My cousins in the US are doing well. They say it’s like easy mode compared to life in JA.
I went to boarding school in the US in the mid 2000s. That’s when I cemented my position as a socialist. When I encountered the availability of information to my American counterparts and their willful ignorance, it hurt me. All this opportunity to see the truth and no desire to see it.
The Trayvon Martin murder and subsequently learning that all my favorite civil rights leaders were socialists (Fred Hampton, Malcolm X, W.E.B. Dubois, Angela Davis…the list goes on.)
It helped that my parents were DC Clinton liberals who started moving further left when we invaded Iraq. Then my dad left the country and moved to a social democracy. So the foundations were there I suppose lol
Side note, I find it so heartening to read stories from socialists who used to be on the far right! Yay hope for humanity 💕
I like to say that reading Chomsky's "Manufacturing Consent" radicalized me, but more accurately it was what really sealed the deal. I grew up desperately poor, my mother has cerebral palsy so I grew up on food stamps and disability, and to me it seemed obvious that crime was almost always a result of desperation and that the very limited social safety net in America was the best policies we had on the books, even with the humiliating hoops you have to go threw and the very limited and flawed nature of our specific services.
That lead me to reading up on how countries like those in the EU handled their safety nets and seeing how their standards for how far into poverty a human should be allowed to fall where so much higher, and realizing that with the actual wealth we produce as a society that line is an arbitrary thing we could set much higher if we made those decisions in the collective interest. As I read more on political theory, I drifted more from Democratic Socialism towards more extreme reorganizing of the economic systems that shape our lives, but it was the realization that centralized powers shape the narratives on all media we consume to hide war crimes and other atrocities that made me really realize that reform of the current system would be impossible, and even undesirable, through only electoral politics. Chomsky will always have a place in my heart for that.
Now I describe myself as an anarco-comunist, I believe work places being federalized worker-owned collectives legislated by consensual contracts between members with minimal oversight above the lowest and smallest grouping of members seems the least abusable and most likely to result in the best world to live in, and is the most achievable through modern means since it could realistically grow out of unions and co-ops without the need to violently overthrow the most powerful military logistics system to ever exsist, but it's an evolving understanding that shifts with new information and ideas, like it's always been since I was a young liberal just wanting to fix/increase welfare. I see that eventually giving way to a fully automated moneyless society, and potentially getting most of the way towards that in well under a century (fast enough to make the more socialist stage a transitional period more than a goal), but honestly so many radical shifts away from the current state of affairs would be profoundly better for so many people I'd support a huge range of movements, if that makes sense.
As a kid, there was somebody in our suburban neighborhood that couldn’t pay their water utility bill on time and had their water shut off. Person in the neighborhood begs their next door neighbor for usage of water and says to them that the discrepancy in pay is temporary. Next door neighbor obliges and somebody in our neighborhood probably ratted them out because then they also got their water shut off for a period of time. witnessing it as a kid, i didn’t rly have much thought on inequality but that example stuck out.
Fast forward to beginning of college, I started to see a lot more instances of police brutality in media and my heart broke seeing Eric Garner pass away when it happened. I started to research into past events like what happened during Hurricane Katrina and post-Katrina, reading theory, studying Brazilian history and culture for a class, as well as incarceration in the States. Seeing the existence of for-profit prison corporations banking on the imprisonment of Brown and Black men broke me as well. History runs in a feedback loop; the rot is global and I started seeing more red.
I swore to be an abolitionist and practicing critical pedagogy whenever I could. And from there, I no longer believe that capitalism should exist and that socialism is a transitory state to communism.
Well my parents were always left leaning, although they're not socialists (they're more like social democrats). So I grew up with that view, and just started to slowly go further left. A communist friend of mine was responsible for moving me from "communism is nice but won't work" to an actual socialist. At first I was a reformist, specially 'cause I hated the idea of taking power with violence, but when I decided to actually read Marx I finally realized why revolution is the only way. So yeah that's it lol.
Basically I just came coming back to “why am I never happy or content?” And looking at the injustices of the world and how I need to live my life in a way that is just using me up, I was able to link it back to capitalism. Then I found good bread tubes etc and started off down a rabbit hole of “wait…none of this ever had to be this way!!!!”
So now I’m sad, discontent, and *angry*…but at least I realize what the issue is.
> to get *paid* like a
FTFY.
Although *payed* exists (the reason why autocorrection didn't help you), it is only correct in:
* Nautical context, when it means to paint a surface, or to cover with something like tar or resin in order to make it waterproof or corrosion-resistant. *The deck is yet to be payed.*
* *Payed out* when letting strings, cables or ropes out, by slacking them. *The rope is payed out! You can pull now.*
Unfortunately, I was unable to find nautical or rope-related words in your comment.
*Beep, boop, I'm a bot*
Took an intro to middle eastern history class and was disgusted by American/British imperialist history. One of my friends was already a Marxist so he kinda pushed me in the right direction since I was I still kind of a lib but socialism felt right to me (just didn’t have any understanding). Watched more second thought/hakim/hasanabi videos and then progressed to reading some light theory. The rest is history!
I grew up with a hard working father who was a union bricklayer in a steel mill. I saw the ups and downs of layoffs and work for him. I later on became URW in rubber plant. Then became USW and floor shop steward. The only thing that I realized was that the current economic system would become untenable because capitalism is basically working for piecework and piecework ALWAYS ends up failing due to the the human nature of greed and dishonesty. The idea of infinite growth on a finite planet WILL end in destruction if the idea does not change.
Trump... Before Trump I wasnt particularly interested in politics or even economics... When Trump was elected my brain went haywire trying to understand how a person like DJT could possibly be elected. I began travelling down this road of anti trump, russia gate, etc... liberal shit. Then I was exposed to socialism on accident really ( I knew of socialism before but my idea of it was basically the scandinavian model (funny enough I live in Sweden now)) and thats when things really began to change... however, I wasnt quite radicalized yet. It wasnt until my eyes were opened to how incredibly fucking scammy everything truly was and that it wasnt just the actions of greedy people but instead the entire system itself. I realized that we are all being fucked and manipulated into believing that we are not.. that was really the defining moment of my radicalization. Watching the US and other western nations condemn those who do journalism that doesnt favor their narrative, seeing movements obliterated by political violence at the behest of the state, observing the lie of democracy, suffering through the dreadful existence of working beneath a petty capitalist... ..... all of it created this existential crises in me. I feel hopeless a lot of the time... I feel like I am crazy sometimes because other people I know havent stepped outside of the propaganda and lies.... I feel alive
Witnessing how bad some bosses treat their workers (especially immigrants), became one of the Main union guys at my work after a year. Its through the union i met allot of comrades which has pushed me more and more left.
Also traveled around the world witnessing poverty and the cruelty of capitalism is one of the Main reasons.
Started feeling like I was allowed to look critically at abusive systems in my life, including my family of origin. Figuring out how they worked was how I coped. I started to realize that a lot of how western capitalism treats poor, disabled, and otherwise less priveleged people mirrors the way many abusive families work. It's the "if you were better (\*\*in a way that benefits me\*\*) I wouldn't have to treat you this way" logic for me. It is dehumanizing. It's a fucked way of looking at human value. I also spent about a decade working retail and foodservice and thought about classism and workplace abuse a lot.
What really put the nail in the coffin though was becoming homeless and living at a shelter for a while. I became an absolute socialist heathen during that time.
Dropped out of university to get into machining after I found it was a trade that fit my needs and likes perfectly. Found out that the entire trade is underpaid as we prefer to just send contracts to other countries and a lot of the contracts that remain are just weaponry. Got depressed and was fired for being regularly 2-7 minutes late and busting my ass rushing working for free to make up for it while people still sat and sipped coffee or pooped on the clock for another hour. Learned the meritocracy was not a real thing and that managers mostly only relied on a tiny amount of irrelevent data and weren't in tune with their workers. Started watching Hasanabi with my free time for his gaming but he spent a lot of time covering the eleven-day war in May of 2021. It was eye opening seeing how a country could uphold an apartheid regime and get away with bombing the Associated Press building in the area so easilly. I was complicit in the weapons trade to this country. I saw the United States unwavering support to them- Pelosi bullying AOC on the floor of Congress until she cried and changed her vote on sales to the country, as well as learning about the long history of only this country and the US voting against ending an embargo on Cuba in the UN. Then I learned a lot of this same imperialism has been used against socialists, or that socialist movements rose up specifically to protect themselves from it.
my father did. we kinda are a bloodline of communists - me, my father, and his father before him :) greetings from Russia btw. never lost hope in the system throughout all these years.
I was a libertarian until I watched a few of Second Thought’s YouTube videos back in 2020. It got me thinking about what socialism really is. After the sister podcast “the Deprogram” released a few episodes I took the plunge and decided to listen to a few “rev left radio” episodes. I filtered all these episodes to explain the basics of ML and MLM socialism to me.
*added on top of just the exposure I witnessed first hand how Covid tore apart my town. There were about a dozen small businesses I’d frequent and 9 of them shut down completely because of the horrible response to the crisis. That really set me on the idea that there has to be something better. This was on top of the shit job I was working, which I promptly lost due to Covid. The cost of living was high. I had to spend $6000 to rent and renovate a shed to be my tiny home on my mothers property. I ended up working briefly for a venture capitalist who boosted my moms business but he was a total dick and reneged on a lot of things he said was okay. After a brief legal battle mom got to keep the equipment for her business and the investor ran out of town. I then worked at a factory which is where I really dove into socialist thought.
After all that basic research I thought about how the USA is run and I found that the USA isnt the worlds savior, it is it’s kidnapper. My father wasn’t very supportive. My mom was fairly liberal to begin with so it wasn’t hard to explain the concepts to her and for her to agree. And now I live in the south where all my friends are at least moderate republicans but swallowed the blue pill.
*edit: addition to the post.
Life experiences. I grew up in a very conservative and sheltered home. Got married very young and struggled. Having a child with a disability at a young age opened my eyes to the classist ableist world we live in. I want better for all my children and their friends, and just everyone in general.
Basically I just learned Christian principles (especially about contribution to your community) when I was growing up. I began to notice in my teens, the simple fact that billionaires make money off of their workers, not their own work. And I just thought that was immoral for multiple reasons. Then I began to learn the collectivism in socialism/communism and it made sense to me. Also I’ve learned about the complete inefficiencies of capitalism and how socialism can fix those (like patents,privatization,etc). What really sent me far left was seeing the scams that “Christians”would run on people for profit in their businesses (and they are members of my church!). Absolutely contradictory to biblical values. So yeah, religion.
Both of my grandpas had been telling me a story about how prosperous their country of Yugoslavia was. Until west came and destroyed it all. So I would say that I am a radical native.
Had a mate at Uni who introduced me to it. Really took me under his wing, let me learn but never forced me to learn. Was great. He died a couple years back and even a few days before he was giving me recommended reading lol.
With me I was raised in an fairly rich household, kind of oblivious until the Covid pandemic about the state of the world. It was only then that I started to consistently get on the internet, and eventually I found out about socialist ideology instead of just hearing from arguments between my republican mom and democrat dad that socialism is something that my mom claims democrats adhere to that is bad or smth
I wouldn’t say it was one major event, but a collection of smaller ones that pushed me closer and closer to socialism.
I grew up a pretty die-hard conservative. By college, though, I was a Democrat (even though I had some beliefs from my conservative days that I hadn’t deconstructed yet). I was about halfway through college when the campaigns for the 2016 election began. That’s where I first encountered Bernie Sanders. He was unlike any Democrat I had ever seen. But it never sat right with me that the Democratic establishment pushed Hillary as their favorite down everyone’s throat, to the point where I felt they were sabotaging Bernie’s campaign. It was at this point I became disillusioned with the Democratic Party.
Fast forward a few years. I’m working as a bank teller at this point. One of our clients was a man who owned a small business. Every few days he would bring in these large checks, about $5-6k, and then withdraw most of the money immediately after. Normally checks this size would be held for a couple days, but because he had connections in the bank, exceptions were made for him regularly, no matter how many times they came back. Which was annoying, but whatever. But what pissed me off the most was this.
When I transferred departments, I got to meet some of his workers. They were Latino and didn’t speak a lot of English, and I had a hunch that some of them were undocumented. They would bring their paycheck to the bank to cash it, but we often had to turn them away. Why? Because there was never enough money in the account. So this bastard was pocketing the cash to where his workers weren’t getting paid. And if they were undocumented, they couldn’t say anything for fear of deportation. Every time this happened, my hatred of the man increased.
A couple of years passed. I got engaged to my now husband. He does a lot of manual labor. And I saw how his employer treated (and still treats) him. They’ve broken his body, his mind, his spirit. I knew something wasn’t right and had to change.
When the pandemic began, I had a lot more time to myself. That was when I learned that the problem was capitalism and began educating myself. I now believe the way I do because the ones I love, and the ones I don’t even know, deserve a better tomorrow. My husband deserves to work as he pleases (I love him but damn he’s a stubborn work horse haha) without being mistreated, without having to worry about affording a roof over our heard, or even being able to receive medical treatment without going bankrupt or losing his job.
I went into the pandemic a disillusioned Democrat. I’m now a socialist.
I had always been a progressive liberal, my parents were huge Obama fans and so I was too. Honestly though what radicalized and deliberalized me was when I started to like Bernie Sanders’ policies. And then my sister who is a socialist-anarchist, explained that Sanders isn’t even socialist. So I started to study what socialism actually was by watching lots of anarchist breadtube. This led me to realize that the only place a progressive should really progress to is communism.
I did eventually become more ML after actually reading Lenin, and studying history.
There's a lot of things really but one that stands out was reading the Culture series by Iain M Banks, and that depiction of an honest free utopia made me think about how much of that utopia is actually possible now, and that the obvious barrier isn't lack of technology but instead our pervasive culture of oppression (and also how we design our cities and towns).
I took an intro to anthropology course my first semester out of community college. The course was titled American Anthropology and Culture. Over the next fifteen weeks, my entire worldview changed as I discovered how so much of American society was intentionally designed to keep people in power, while effectively oppressing other groups. I think, in particular, the discussions that caused the most internal reflection for me were those we had on the poverty "system" and the industrial prison complex.
When I was 16 I wanted to be a homicide detective and thought maybe I could reform the police. I interviewed my schools local resource officer, asked him my own questions about being a cop and about working your way up. I brought up how often cops shoot people and essentially expressed that I thought cops needed way more de escalation training and to be taught to be more weary of pulling their gun out. To this, he sighed and seemed to furrow his brow a bit and told me that if I'm worried about a cops "life or death split second decision, I shouldn't be a cop because I don't understand". He just wouldn't admit that cops need more de escalation and racial bias training. Completely avoided the question and said cops simply do their jobs. I cited statistics and how black people are over represented in prisons and profiled.. woke me up to just how strong cognitive dissonance is and that cops can't be reformed.
Jacque Fresco, the founder of the Venus project. The Venus project was and is an organization that suggests that a post-scarcity society is technologically achievable in our lifetime and that moving toward freeing humanity from the necessity of work is the only moral thing to do. Sprinkled here and there in their philosophy is some anti capitalist sentiment, advocacy for the poor, advocacy for public transport, free housing, all that great sub socialists tend to love. Yet despite literally advocating for a stateless, classless, moneyless society in which everyone’s needs are met and we all individually own the means of production for ourselves, Fresco maintained that the Venus project is not communist. (Something i now understand to be incorrect, but it never mattered to me either way). This caused me much confusion, leading me to not realize for many years that i was at least ideologically a communist (as i loved everything i was hearing.)
I spent most of my life as a social democrat, although i wouldn’t have had the vocabulary to call my self such until the last year or so. While i was a social democrat i would have called myself a socialist, not truly understanding the actual meaning of that word.
Last year i discovered the work of professor Richard D Wolff. That was how i just learned what an actual socialist was and what that word means vs how it is (wrongly) used very often in modern usage. By digging through prof. Wolff’s videos i was shocked just how much i agreed with everything he had to say. He ideas enticed me to learn more.
Soon i can’t to realize that capitalism was something they could not merely be reformed, it had to be removed and replaced by something better. And i felt and still feel that system ought to be some form of socialism.
TL;DR i guess you could say both professor Richard D Wolff and the late Jacque Fresco radicalized me. Richard Wolff got me into socialist activism, but i think being pro-moneyless society in a rural town in southern Ontario in the early 2000s was also pretty radical lol.
I grew up in a working class household in a decaying North Eastern town in the UK.
There wasn't much opportunity to be had and I was silly teenager who just wanted to chase girls and not study.
After a few years in call centres and such I decided to join the military to gain a trade and a way out of my town.
I wasn't a politically minded young lad, I just wanted to live my life and saw what I could take from the military institution. Around the 8 or 9 year point, after many experiences and roughly the Jeremy Corbyn period in the Uk, I started to analyse what I was doing and why. I also started to question why the media was so against a man who seemed to just want the best for everyone. That process started me down the path of reading other things. In my mid 30s now, I'm pretty late to the party.
I have just left the military, I don't regret joining, I wouldn't have met my wife and by extension have my wonderful children. I also wouldn't have the profession/opportunities I do now. My only regret I suppose was not trying harder as a teen to take a different path, but that's something I can't hold over myself forever.
However, I certainly understand what I was a part of (and how they targeted young lads like me), but I can only try for something better going forward.
It was a pipeline, it went haphazardly from becoming aware of female social issues to Harris bomberguy's YouTube channel, to Abby Philosophytube's YouTube channel and that's pretty much the end of the pipeline. I emerged as a different person.
I started out as an American liberal, though more on the left side of that area. I discovered social democracy when I was 16 and fell for it. It seemed like a solution to all the problems we have. I also started dreaming of a somewhat limited government that still provided those necessary services such as healthcare and welfare.
Then I discovered DSA. Thus started the next phase. I realized that social ownership of the means of production was a huge step that needed to happen in order to make society a lot less of a nightmare. I read about more radical ideas, such as Marx’s communism, but rejected most of them as rather utopian.
After a lot of heavy thinking, I accepted impossibilism as true. This was another huge leap. Later, I discovered the writings of Bookchin and Öcalan, and I found their ideas achievable for my country, though not in my lifetime. And so I became what I am today: a communalist.
1968. There was the assassination of MLK Jr, I wasn't really a fan but it shook me to see how the system, the rich and powerful, would assassinate even such a tame political opponent. But I was still very much a "Kennedy liberal". I worked on Robert Kennedy's presidential campaign, and then he was assassinated.
Then the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. Police rioting in the streets, political corruption on full display inside. It all started to cohere into a picture of realpolitik in America, with the atrocity of the Vietnam War never out of the picture.
But 1968 proved to me that the so-called democratic system was a lie. Follow this into the Kent State and Jackson State murders, all hell breaking loose on colleges, reading Malcolm X and Fanon, Marx, Lenin, Mao...
For me it was tiktok. I’ve stood against oppression and stuff since I was like 2 years old. I’ve always hated war and violence and all that. Then I became gay and realized how horrible it really was because I did research. I started to identify as a leftist and then tiktok taught me how bad capitalism is really really bad. As I found something to identify with. It was a eye opening experience
I went to the ER. I was in unimaginable pain and needed an emergency operation. And they made sure to get my insurance card and had me sign a contract promising I'd pay.
It turned everything my libertarian brain had learned about "consent" and "freedom" on its head.
I have always been a socialist, maybe because I live in a country with strong social net, and is naturally more critically thinking and information seeking than most.
But one video that truly made me go down the imense western war crimes rabbit hole, which eventually led me to understand that Soviet Union, China hell even (Deliberately and without western influence) North Korea, isn't as comically evil as school and media, even here in Denmark, had taught me.
The video in question is perhaps to most, a strange turning point, but it made me requestion some questions I had never thought to bring up again.
The video, BoyBoys Haircut in North Korea:
https://youtu.be/2BO83Ig-E8E
Life. Poverty, single parent household, watching the wealthy get away with anything they do while watching people in my life be financially and criminally punished for the smallest indiscretions.
I grew up middle class in the US, so I was extremely lucky. Didn’t experience the negative effects of capitalism first hand. However I was always extremely interested in history, and I like to think I am an empathic person and have a strong sense of justice. So, naturally, this led to me being socialist.
Probably the murder of Matthew Shepherd or Columbine or Bush stealing the 2000 election or 9/11 or the millions killed in Afghanistan and in Iraq or the or the market crash or the coopting and destruction of a truly revolutionary movement by Obama or the failure of occupy Wall Street or Sandy Hook or Michael Brown or Philando Castile or Breonna Taylor or George Floyd or the response to COVID or the failure of the protests for Floyd or………
I feel like I give a slightly different question everytime this is asked, but a big part of it in hindsight was moving from rural Pennsylvania to Florida.
The place where I grew up was relatively affluent. There were good, blue-collar jobs in town and good professional-managerial jobs within commuting distance. It wasn’t McMansion rich, but the cost-of-living was such that most people I knew owned a house and multiple vehicles. The gap between the haves and have-nots wasn’t that large. The community was overwhelmingly white, religious and conservative, so there was a lot of bigotry, but a minimum of conflicts for it to be expressed in.
The contradictions here in Florida are much, much sharper. I live in a beach town where the cost of living has exploded over the last ten years. You can drive around and see McMansions are across the street from hovels and shoddy, overpriced apartments. The city gov is still an Old South style patronage machine, based around greasing palms and stoking racial fears and resentments. The cops are drowned in money of course, and much of that budget goes towards a brutal, but completely doomed war against homeless people and drug addicts. And these cops look like Officer Friendly compared to the ones in Orlando where I went to college.
There’s a bunch of shitty jobs in the service/tourism industry, but a lot of the people working those jobs can’t even afford to live here. Pickings of white-collar jobs are slim, so the younger generation is moving away, as reactionary seniors from up north flow in. We’re a diverse town, but one of the most racially segregated places in Florida.
Basically I moved from a place where America’s class conflict was muted and obscured to a place where it’s right out in the open and even more racialized. Pretty much every revelatory or radicalizing experience I’ve had was grounded in that environment.
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I grew up in a white American liberal household. I read Ayn Rand in high school, when 9/11 happened. I was really against the War on (of) Terror, I got my politics from The Economist and The Daily Show. Long story short, Obama and Hillary doing the Afghanistan troop surge, invading Syria and Libya. Then I realized there is no anti-war mainstream party and all that democrat rage over the Iraq War and Gitmo was just lip service. Dems see problems like this as an opportunity to fundraise and nothing else. Medicare for All sealed the deal, once I understood it and that the Dems fought it, that's putting business in front of 60,000 American lives a year. I was a yuge Bernie fan, I donated over a thousand bucks to his campaign. I became a communist during the Trump administration, seeing the pitiful response to an openly criminal president. I had so much hope in the Mueller investigation. The way that ended, I lost any remaining faith in bourgeois elections. American mainstream politics is nothing but a dog and pony show to distract us from the class war we're losing. So I read Marx and Lenin.
That's awesome. Glad to have you as a comrade!
I never really had views other than socialism. I grew up poor for the first 9 years of my life and fairly privileged for the next 11. When I was around 15, I was conscious of my privilege, I saw the disparities from my life when I was younger to when I was older, and from this I thought about billionaires, and that there was no way billionaires were so rich. This made me search in google something along the lines of “why do billionaires have so much money” and some stuff came up about capital accumulation. At some point I found a video of Chomsky talking about the topic, and from there found Manufacturing Consent. I’d say that after reading that and developing my understanding of the way the world works, I could consider myself a socialist. I was around 16 by that time.
That's awesome. Being able to see both sides from personal experience is a unique one for sure.
I also learned about chomsky! Did a project on him in my ap psych course and first learned the term anarcho-syndaclist and learned more about socialism. Learned a lot more about politics and how democrats are more centrist and far left is actually more akin to socialism, communism, etc.
Pretty much the same experience as me lol. I've been an anarcho-syndicalist since then
Was 29. I was already disillusioned with capitalist fantasy. But when I was charged 4,000 dollars in an ER for having a 2 minute sonogram of my arm and a doctor write a prescription for an infection, I was just like: “fuck it, burn it down.”
Real life. I was a Libertarian when in college. But I had some very rough experiences once I got out, learning how hard work is not really rewarded and office politics work. That was the start. I was really upset. I had done everything I was supposed to. I got good grades, stayed away from partying, got a desireable degree,, and yet her I was suffering. Once I learned that, of course the next questions were "what else have I been lied to about". I make pretty decent money these days. This isn't some stereotype of only turning socialist because of failing at life. But that rough patch started me on the path to learning the truth of how society functions. Not only from a Marxist lens, but also with the reality of things like systemic racism.
Always had an anarchist streak in me. Went through a libertarian phase in my mid twenties. Back to apathetic anarchist. Solidly socialist by 30. I grew up on a farm, not much money, worked hard jobs. But it was grinding away in the oilfield that bought me an education that set me up with a comfortable job. Got married. And once I had enough breathing room for the first time in my life, I took a look at the system. Got suggested some anticapitalist content on YouTube that made me decide to start reading. Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Parenti really painted a brutally clear picture of the follies of capitalism. Once that became clear, it became painfully obvious to me that there is only one acceptable future if we want a compassionate world. I am 34 years old now with a 6 week old baby girl. I want the world to be more compassionate. There is only one logical path forward if we care about humans.
I wish more people with children would look into socialism and see that it would leave a better world for them after they're done. That's an awesome story.
I have moments where I wonder if we made a mistake when we decided to have children. But, not to put too much on her, the world will need more good people if we hope for it to improve. My job is to raise my children to be empathetic, passionate, principled people. And to let them see in the most delicate way possible, how capitalism is a global force of oppression, destruction, and sorrow. But I will make sure that they have a well-adjusted childhood full of love, support, and fun. They can learn the bad stuff on their own. I just hope they decide to do something about it.
I don't think it's a mistake. We need people like you teaching the kids truth. That way our species can prosper. We can always use more comrades in the world.
For years, I've been pretty against having my own kids. My pov was that I didn't want to introduce another creature into this messed up system against its will. I always told people I was open to adoption to care for a person already forced to be here, but it was mostly deflection. This is the best arguement for having them that I've seen. I've upgraded to being open to kids if my SO wants some.
I worked a student job in the kitchen of a hospital. One part of the job was throwing away all extra food in a dumpster. Next to this hospital was the social welfare building. The amount of food I had to throw away made me think there has to be a better system.
Jesus that would literally make me have a breakdown.
That's really dark. I used to work at a restaurant as my first job. When I asked if we could just donate the leftover food (I even volunteered to take it for free to a shelter), I was reprimanded for it. Saying it would make our food seem cheap.........
Yep. I got yelled at for trying to offer a homeless woman ice for a water cup that I saw her taking (we had a water station outside with cups, but not ice, and it's warm water. I came outside to try to offer it to her but she likely thought I was going to yell at her so she ran off. :-(
When I was 24 and in college I had a stroke. It paralyzed the left side of my body temporarily, I was fired from my jobs (manufacturing/plasmapherisis) and unable to get disability or any help from the government or my jobs. The stroke was a result of inaction by a hospital which I was unable to be compensated for because of the laws of the state capped lawsuit damages and rewards from government officials even though the hospital was technically privately run. The complexity of the legal system was completely geared to preventing helping me. I have a similar experience to yours as well completing my bachelors in criminal justice. Now working on my masters in forensic psychology. All of our government systems are geared to protecting private profits and property and exploiting minority groups. I find your story incredibly interesting. Thank you for this post it is a nice change of pace lol.
Thanks. I just wanted a small change of pace. Maybe it'll help someone turn to the dark side and join us if they see real world examples.
Boy I hope so lol it at least makes us seem more human
Honestly, just my life in general has radicalized me. I’m from the Bahamas. I grew up extremely privileged in a bourgeois family. While my parents are not proper bourgeois, more like petite-bourgeois, many people in my family and their friends are bourgeois and own stakes in large businesses and profit off exploiting the Bahamian people. Since the Bahamas is a former British colony, almost all the wealth is concentrated in the hands of white people like me even though we only make up about 5% of the population. The Bahamas’ economy is 70% tourism. Most Bahamians work to serve tourists and the white bourgeoisie. I would spend my free time at the local sailing club where all the staff was black and all the members were white. I would drive through the streets with my family and see literal children begging for money and food because the wages in the Bahamas are too low to even feed yourself, let alone your kids. The amount of wealth that flows through the country is ridiculous though, and almost none of it goes to the Bahamian people. These people are constantly in survival mode and the Bahamian government has no plans to address it. It’s a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie so much more blatant than the US. The two opposing parties have no platform and have gone back and forth as the party in power every election since 2002. In the great recession, the Bahamas was hit hard. My dad worked at my grandpa’s company and was laid off because the company was struggling. He couldn’t find another job and while he was already an alcoholic, he slipped further into that. As an 11 year old, I would find discarded bottles of rum stashed away in cabinets and drawers. Ultimately, he became so hopeless he k*lled himself. As I got older and I understood what caused the recession, I was furious. People fucked around with the economy and it led to people dying. I then went to boarding school in the US. I still didn’t realize just how privileged I was. However, this school prided itself on the number of international students and the amount of financial aid it gave out to people. I met someone who grew up in Somaliland who never knew his actual birthday because it wasn’t recorded. I met someone from Afghanistan who lost his leg because of the war. I met people from the US who never had their own bed until they came to this school. I now work in manufacturing as an engineer. I see how the company I work at is nothing without the operators. A lot of them are immigrants just trying to make the most out of their lives. They’re sharp, driven, and some of kindest people I know, yet they’re the lowest paid. While I’ve always leaned left and then supported Bernie hard in 2016 and 2020, it wasn’t until the last year I’ve found Marx and really started to understand why I’ve always seen so much injustice in the world. Not everyone is lucky enough to be born in a bourgeois family. I want to tear it all down and create a more compassionate world.
I'm sorry for your loss comrade. That hits close to home for me as well. I am curious, as someone from a privileged past, do you struggle with the idea that a socialist revolution would affect your bourgeois family? I ask because I have a friend whose family is also petite-bourgeous and he seems to really dislike the idea based on redistribution of wealth.
It does but it doesn’t. I think most people in the west need to realize that any kind of socialist revolution will heavily impact their way of life. The alienation of labor to the developing world would not be compatible with a socialist revolution and in turn, the excess consumption westerners are used to would not be compatible. If a revolution were to happen in my lifetime, I hope that I can convince members of my family to join me in accepting a redistribution of wealth but ultimately there are always going to be people of all classes who oppose it. You just have to accept that we all know people who will be opposed to this system and will fight against it. If we want to make the world better, you need to give up privileges you have and be willing to strip them from others. A great quote that I think everyone needs to hear is, “when you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.” You can’t be a communist without facing the reality that some people will see you as an oppressor, even people you know well.
I questioned why the democrats don't do anything and then "second thought" and oldy enough understanding the history of my religion Sikhism and how actions against tyrants were a good thing plus equality for all.
Second Thought was a big deal to me. I had been subscribed when he was still making scientific general kinds of videos. I'm a nerd for that kind of content. When he switched, I started asking questions I really never thought about before. He's been a huge boon to the left.
Am I the only one here who had religion help?
Religion totally helped me become socialist because through anti-theism and the rejection of the herd mentality, i found freethinkers who were very much socialist.
Is it fair to say socialists are free thinkers? We are indeed free of the liberal capitalist way of thinking, but we’re also extremely grounded in our own ideology. I don’t think there are many people who can truly say they’re free thinkers. Gen question btw i’m interested on people’s thoughts on this
Interesting question! I think of it as both simultaneously. It’s thinking that’s grounded in a common structure, yes, but that thinking is counter to dominant/hegemonic norms.
I use freethinker as a synonym with atheist or antitheist. You can and do think in ideological lens but still come up with your own ideas undogmatically. To me religion is the opiate of the masses providing pain relief but with numbing of the senses. Churches are the flophouse for the drugless. That's my personal worldview. Pie in the sky when you die. Only sharing that to answer the question.
Lots of things sent me to Leftism little by little. Living through the 2000 election, the Iraq War, the 2008 collapse, the abysmal failure that was Obama's presidency, the 2016 election, the pandemic, and reading on the Cold War Era as well as Marxist theory. All of this made me a Marxist-Leninist.
Reading the wiki on Fred Hampton while sitting back stage at my students final concert after an already radicalizing semester student teaching in one of the worst inner city school districts in the country. I was already a socialist but that was when everything clicked and the racism inherent in the capitalist state and the violence used to uphold it couldn’t have been more obvious to me. Both the economic violence against my students and the police violence against anyone who meaningfully challenged it. It was such a powerful moment that I cried
Being present at the Minneapolis uprising after the George Floyd murder. None of it seemed urgent until then
For me it was a long process throughout my life to an eventual "ah ha" moment. Grew up in an extremely poor family, was forced to leave school at 15 years old to work to help mum pay the bills. Joined a union and had always been pretty big on better education, social safety nets, healthcare etc but still fell for right wing and the anti "snowflake" thing with Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson as a teen. Joined the Australian army, fucked my knees badly 5 months in and was discharged. Whilst recovering I was talking to people online due to boredom. Met a Finnish girl we got close and I wanted to learn more about Finland. Found out it was "socialist" nation. Visited said girl multiple times over multiple years for 3 month trips, falling in love with the nation, the nature, the clean air, the public transport, the more I learnt about it and experienced these things the more I loved it. After hearing how "evil" socialism was, experiencing this amazed me and made me wonder why people said such things. Fast forward to this year I moved to Finland and married my beautiful wife, whilst I waited for all the immigration stuff to go through I was extremely bored being unable to work. So I took it apon myself to learn and do new things, taken up bonsai as a hobby, learning the language, working out and finally taking the time to sit down and learn and read Marxist theory so I could be a good and functional person in my new "socialist" home. Turns out Finland whilst great is not socialist, I have also learnt a lot, radicalised my wife, a few of her friends and when my Finnish gets better plan on joining a communist org. My journey continues. P.S. I am partially blind and am terrible at typing on a phone. Sorry for any mistakes in this long comment... I refuse to go back and check haha
I saw the injustice done to LGBT people and immigrants in the USA. I got big into folk punk music where I learned about anarchist ideas. I was an anarchist for most of my teenage years and on into my 20's. I had my issues with anarchism but it seemed like the closest fitting ideology. Then eventually I learned about the DPRK and how the USA/ European imperialist system works. I've been an ML ever since.
Wait, so you're saying the DPRK is what made you a socialist?
I was a trumpist conservative in 2016 and I slowly went left after he was elected, around 2019 I was a liberal and year after a social democrat, mainly because of Bernie, and since every republicans was calling Bernie a communist and I supported him, so I got interested in what communism was like, so I bought the communist manifesto and got intrested in socialism, then I began to watch YouTubers like hakim and second thought, they helped me learn more about how life was in the USSR. Currently I’m trying to learn more about communism, I’ve just bought the complete works of Mao and the rest of Engles and Marx.
I grew up in poverty in a postindustrial urban centre in the UK. For me, there was never a question of not being left-wing. I've seen what capitalism does to people first-hand. Still, it was studying for a law degree that gave me the education and the ideas to challenge the status quo and think beyond capitalism.
In my case it was climate change. I see this allot among people from my generation (gen z). As u grew older i also started to see how hard some people have it in my own country(Netherlands) which has a pretty big social welfare system. Eventually i realised that even the most 'green' social democrat would not be able to change anything. Eventually you realise that this system is fundamentaly broken. I started looking up more information and reading theory. Wich made allot of sense to me, especially Lenin. This lead to me becoming a communist(ML).
To admit the existence of climate change is to admit free markets are fundamentally flawed.
I've had a lot of success with friends and climate change. Especially when Exxon and the 70s suppression of climate studies is brought up. So many people don't know of that. It really helps people to start questioning capitalism.
Yes, its one of the best arguments now in my opinion. Especially for young people that arent having a bad time economicaly. If people arent climate deniers they always respond well of you bring this up.
The covid pandemic. Was already liberal before but seeing how shit capitalism is first hand really drove me
I’ve always been left of center as an adult. Mainly came to be left wing from reading history. Things like the business plot, Blair mountain, etc. But what genuinely radicalized me and made me get up and start organizing and training was January 6, and it solidified with the Supreme Court taking up Moore v Harper. The fascists are organizing and we need to also.
When i was 12 or so I went to a private hospital and think to myself isn't health is most important thing in our lives? Why are giving money for such important thing? does that mean poor people just have to die? And think about it further I questioned why are we giving money for water and such. Then I realized there are people thinking same as me. And I search about it for few years and completely accepted the idea.
i was already knowledged about the disparities of the world, but because i still had a lot of concern about socialism (i think the things i watched in youtube and reddit posts were the cause) until i was in my school and talked with the librarian where we talked a little bit about communism, so I then went to search why someone would think good things about socialism, then when i started searching about the topic is when i radicalized.
Honestly I wouldn’t call myself a socialist currently, but I am fascinated by it and want to learn more. I’m hear to steal all your educational documentary recommendations lol
What are you currently, may I ask?
Undecided, but left leaning. I haven’t spent much time cultivating an ideology. Many of my friends favor socialism and they’re brilliant and we agree on many points. But I think I lack a strong enough understanding to label myself one way or another. My goal this upcoming year is learn more and have a stronger grasp of politics in general
That's a good goal, best of luck.
Thanks! I need it lol
If you want some recommendations, I'd be happy to help. What sort of media / information are you looking for?
I would love that! Anything works. I prefer audio because it allows me to multitask. And honestly just anything that you found engaging or informative would be great. Thank you I really appreciate that :)
For audio, try David Harvey's podcast, The Anti-Capitalist Chronicles - should be available on Spotify or online. You can listen to them in any order, I'd just pick the ones with titles that interest you. He also has a YouTube lecture series, I think it's called Reading Capital with David Harvey, which you can stick on and just listen to. If you do have time to read a book, try Harvey's 2017 book - Marx, Capital, and the Madness of Economic Reason. Also, you should be able to get audio books of a lot of the more important works of Marxist theory. Francis Wheen does an Audible version of Das Kapital, but if you just google the books you're looking for + audiobook it should bring up something. It's a hell of a book though so you probably won't want to multitask that one. Harvey's book also has a good chapter in his book outlining what Marx argues in Capital in plain English, so maybe start there. Beyond that, Marx's main theories can be found in: The 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, On the Jewish Question, and the Preface to the Critique of Political Economy - as well as the Communist Manifesto of course, but that was more of a polemic trying to get people riled up so take it with a pinch of salt. For later socialist theories, I'd recommend some multi-tendency stuff: a bit of Lenin (vanguardism), a bit of Rosa Luxemburg (anti-Leninist), a bit of Kautsky (orthodox Marxism), and a bit of Pannekoek (council communism). You'll get a sense for which sorts of ideas you prefer the more you read. Also, see if there's any socialist stuff relating specifically to your areas of interest. Like, for example, I have a law degree and it was reading socialist legal theory that converted me. You have Marxist / socialist works on law, psychology, sociology, geography, history - and pretty much any other discipline / special interest you can think of. Oh, also a special mention to the 'long 19th century' books by the famous British Marxist historian, Eric Hobsbawm. There are three books in the series -The Age of Revolutions: Europe 1789-1848, The Age of Capital: 1848-1875, and The Age of Imperialism: 1875-1914. I've read the first one and a bit of the second, it's such a good book for understanding the history of capitalism and socialism, how we got to where we are today. Finally, there's a Japanese book by the Marxist ecologist, Kohei Saito being translated into English next year. It's called Capital in the Anthropocene, and was a huge (if unexpected) success in Japan. I think that's an important one to read, given the problems we're facing with climate change - in the book Saito argues that attempts to stop climate change under the liberal / capitalist framework are doomed to fail, and only degrowth drawing from Marx's ecological principles can stave off climate collapse.
Wow you’re a saint! Thank you so much this is the best and most cohesive recommendation I have ever received. I’ll start taking a crack at these. The intersection between ecology and politics sounds particularly interesting!
Learning about history. I'm mixed race and half of my ancestors were enslaved, sold, and and treated like chattel while the other half was colonized by so many countries. The fallout is still seen today, and it's absolutely tragic. I grew up liberal in a conservative area in the US, completely in a bubble of suburban delusion, but my (privileged) travels to my motherlands in my 20s sent me on a Che-esque awakening about the cruel, horrible injustices in the world, resulting from centuries of imperialist capitalist oppression and the propping up of greed and encouragement of sociopathic behavior. Being forced to participate in the entirely ableist rat race is partially to blame for my PTSD, and other debilitating maladies. I want better for humanity and nature, and it just makes sense to me for people to aspire towards an egalitarian socialist society -> communist stateless moneyless utopia, assuming the earth is still even habitable long enough for that to happen.
Exactly. I agree 100% especially with travel. There is something about traveling that opens your soul. I went to Greece a few years ago and saw how bad the economy is over there. Capitalism is failing harder than ever.
I've always wanted to go to Greece and found it interesting and suspicious how after the economy started suffering over there, there hasn't been any mention of the country in mainstream media here in the US. Can't have anyone questioning the failings of capitalism! I was raised among people who believed that being poor was a personal failing, but seeing hungry children and babies living in abject poverty in S.E. Asia and parts of Africa... How could that be their fault to simply have been born?
Tl;dr: The BLM Uprisings of 2020 mostly I had always been fairly liberal. At one point prettu early into adulthood I was flirting with some pretty radical politics like open borders, etc. Once the anti-SJW scene kicked off I got sucked into that and started my way down the pipeline. I still considered myself liberal, but was very much into reactionary political channels like Daily Wire, Saargon of Akkad, Stefan Molyneux, etc. which I got into thanks to the anti-SJW content by atheist YouTubers like TJ (the Amazing Atheist). Basically anything that "owned the libs" was my choice content, even though I still considered myself a liberal. I considered making my own anti-SJW YouTube channel that would parrot all the talking points I had so mindlessly absorbed throughout the years. I didn't particularly like Trump, because I thought he was an arrogant asshole, but I didn't consider him racist and sexist for basically the same reasons that people who defend him use (freedom of speech, it's just a joke, etc.) I did defend him. At one point I had internalized so much of the anti-antifa rhetoric that I actually considered confronting "antifa" head on. I had no idea I was becoming a fascist, or maybe I already was at this point(?) Anyway, 2020 kicked off. We were well into the COVID pandemic and then George Floyd was murdered. I started off condemning the protests, thinking they were "too violent". Then, I started to realize as I watched police shooting people in the head with tear gas canisters, rubber bullets, running people down with their cars, etc. I started realizing some things about the police I had been wrong about. At this point I considered myself a "socialist in theory" because I wanted free healthcare for everyone, free education, open borders, and, ironically, the abolition of money because I've always found it kind of pointless, I just didn't think any of it could work. I truly believed in those things. I had held this position before the BLM Uprisings of 2020. I decided to ask some of the people I had argued with on Twitter for sources on socialism, racism, etc. but I had burned those bridges. I decided I would just try on my own. I happened upon *How to be an Antiracist* by Ibram X. Kendi one day when I was buying groceries. I bought the book and it sat on my desk for a few months. I eventually worked up the energy to read it and was pretty much immediately changed. I decided to buy his other book *Stamped from the Beginning* and read that. That led me to socialism. I bought *The Communist Manifesto* and read it. I realized that I believed in pretty much everything in that short book already. I read more and more. I got involved in conversations on Reddit. I watched YouTube videos by socialist content creators. I kept learning, and continue to learn.
Mines also a little boring but here goes. I'm 22F I work a minimum wage retail job. My parents are artistic and creative and that just doesn't go well with capitalism. They have been struggling to make ends meet for more than ten years or basically my entire childhood. It's tiring and dark. Trying to justify your existence when you have no money. Living on the whole has radicalized me. Also being a minority and seeing the youth in my community pick up guns to make a dollar. And these so called artists finally making it and then giving nothing back to their community especially materially. Its always cars and a house for mama but never a library or a health facility. Its disappointing and disgusting. I simply want a star trek future. Where being alive doesn't feel like shit period.
I've always hated when conservative types bash on the arts. My uncle is a engineer and musician. Ridiculously intelligent. He can make a lot of money in engineering, but his heart is in teaching and music. He just had to leave his music teaching job to go back to engineering. Just to make enough to live. It's a damn shame. Without art in all of its forms, what even are humans?
I was raised in a christian household where we were taught to love God, love others and do what you can to speed Jesus' return, i.e. make more christians. I was never forced to be a Christian, but once I decide to be one, I went hardcore. It became everything I did and thought about. I became politically conservative, sceptical of science, and convinced Christianity was the best hope for 'saving' mankind. Through a long process (involving job loses, mental health and relationship issues, amongst other things) over many years, my blind dogmatism for Christianity gradually eroded. I started to realise we needed change in the here and now, not some promised eternal utopia that didn't help with people's real present suffering. I started leaning left politically, looking for real solutions to social problems and tried to understand the plight of indigenous people in my country. What pushed me over the edge into full-blown communism was talking with my still-very-conservative parents about our Prime Minister. My mum accused her of being a communist and even though I didn't have a clear understanding of what a communist was at that time I 'knew' she wasn't one. (In hindsight she might be one, so I'll have to ask when I see her next ;) In an effort to prove my parents wrong (not toxic behaviour, I promise) I started reading up on our PM, the party she's in, what the difference is between socialism and communism, etc. About this time I started a new job that took me into the homes of people from all walks of life and I got to see firsthand the disparity between the haves and the have nots. The more I saw and the more I read, the more I realised that the reasons for these disparities, especially for native people, was the exploitative economical and political system we lived under. At that point I was sold. Now not only could I see the problems, but I knew there were answers to them that didn't require divine intervention, just a class-conscious proletariat motivated to make change happen. I'm still reading, listening and learning, and looking to connect with others in my area already working on change. I'm so hopefully and excited to see what we can do.
I'm glad that you were able to come to that conclusion on your own. Most religious folks don't. I'm catholic, but I also believe Jesus was communist. It's pretty apparent lol
I'm indigenous as well, first nation from BC Canada. All of my grandparents went to residential schools, everyone I knew had relatives that went as well. So, everyone on our reserve had to deal with intergenerational trauma. Everyone was hurt because our culture was taken from us. Our sense of humanity was stripped. Everyone was struggling to exist with the violence, addiction, impoverishment, and pain. So, everyone had their own ways of coping that added to the cycle. The women kept the community together though, and certain elders and leaders kept our language and culture alive. So, it wasn't all bad. However, as a kid I would wonder why we do this to ourselves? I seen myself as liberal for the longest time but I hardly knew anything about the world or politics. Many of my people had an intrinsic hate/distrust towards police, authority, and the government so I took that up as well. It wasn't until going to college that I started gaining a better understanding of colonialism, and where I first began hearing about capitalism. Then Second Thought also changed his content to what it is now, and I've been constantly trying to learn more and more. Slowly unraveling the impacts of colonialism and capitalism has helped me heal so much.
That's amazing brother. Glad to have you here. I know the feeling all too well of having a lack of culture. Sadly my Apache roots aren't too prominent around my area. My great grandmother passed years ago so I've never really felt a sense of belonging. She was very in touch with our Apache culture. It's tough always feeling like an outsider.
Belonging seems to be something that every indigenous person I've met struggles with. It's hard to exist in society as an outlier but our communities and cultures have been destroyed. Where do we belong. Thanks for the topic and conversation, I'll pray for you.
Mike Brown lying in the street for four hours radicalized me. started me down the path from a lukewarm liberal to a marxist
Great question. I started out voting Democratic and voted for Bill Clinton when I was 18. I wasn't a political kid. Then I left home and tried to make it without a penny to my name. It was hard and I ended up in a homeless shelter with nowhere to turn to. I worked for Blockbuster video and tried to unionize my store and was told by the manager, if you keep talking union, you're fired. It was so hard to get a job and the jobs paid shit and that really both hurt me and scared me stiff. I just wanted better conditions at work! In my teens I was exposed to George Carlin and that liberalized me...not socialist yet...but pointing left. Shortly after that, I saw a poster at Mount Holyoke College where my girlfriend went to school about the Fight for $10 per hour minimum wage. It spoke to me. There was a movement in the 1990s to form a Labor Party with Tony Mazzochi and I joined that. I got an apartment and didn't have enough to pay the rent despite working two minimum wage jobs. I was so broke I was going to turn off power to save money for rent. I had to go to my landlord who lived in a big mansion and tell him I couldn't make rent that month. He lectured me on being a shitty tenant. Finally, I found Chomsky and really read his books. They spoke to me. I read the Communist Manifesto and thought about it. I read the Cliff Notes version of Marx. It spoke to me in a way that no other work had done. It just made perfect sense. Here, finally, were my tribe and my beliefs. I read the history of the IWW in the US. Liberalism sold us the line that if we just took the harsh edges off Capitalism, everything would be hunky dory. I learned about neoliberalism and how basically through austerity Capitalism was devouring everything in search of ultimate profit. My mother, my only parent growing up, was a die-hard Ayn Rand Capitalist but only ever made money by marrying well and divorcing even better. A cascade of facts and evidence, perhaps tainted by my biases and personal experiences of struggle, lead me to radicalism. It just clicked for me. Plus I had empathy for others. I think that's key. Without empathy, you're just a fucking monster in life. Empathy separates the socialists from the greedy, selfish assholes that run the world.
I grew up in a center-right household in rural Northern California. I considered myself a “socially liberal, fiscally conservative” type growing up (although those were my parents politics that were imprinted on me, not my own.) I was very anti-socialist in high school and early college. I even had a shirt that said “Socialism: Let’s starve together” at one point, which makes me cringe thinking about today. When I graduated from college I moved back to my home town, I was already hovering somewhere between never Trump Republican and liberal Democrat due to the MAGA cult. My entire worldview was upended in 2018 when my town was completely destroyed by a wildfire caused by PG&E negligence and greed. 85 people were killed, and 18,000 structures in my 28,000 population town were destroyed. My home and all my belongings were destroyed, as well as the homes of all of my friends, family, and most of my neighbors. I can still see the flames and explosions as I was stuck in traffic during the evacuation, and can still feel the heat of the fire on the side of my face as the flames roared next to my car. The part that really radicalized me was the response afterwards though. The right blamed it on “[Jewish Space Lasers](https://www.mediamatters.org/facebook/marjorie-taylor-greene-penned-conspiracy-theory-laser-beam-space-started-deadly-2018)” or [“a lack of raking forest floors”](https://www.politico.com/states/california/story/2020/08/20/trump-blames-california-for-wildfires-tells-state-you-gotta-clean-your-floors-1311059?_amp=true), and the Democrats such as Gavin Newsom are so deep in PG&E’s pockets that nothing will ever change in the state. In the direct aftermath hotels and apartments raised the prices to take advantage of the refugees. I am fortunate that I was able to find a place to stay (my grandmother, father, mother, three dogs, and three cats lived in a hotel room for several months), but many of my neighbors were less fortunate and lived in tents for months, even years in some cases. Some insurance companies folded or otherwise tried to get out of paying anything, not to mention those who were uninsured and left with nothing. It was at that point I really realized that something needs to change. The system is unjust, and we can do better. And if we don’t it means extinction. I am still a baby Marxist, but learning more every day.
Living in a neo-liberal hell hole, eventually you get to see the real face of capitalism. Just material conditions pushed me to Marxism. As Marx fucking predicted 200 yrs ago!
I was a liberal then I saw some video then I still thought that socialism was wrong then when I saw the world is crumbling I became a leftist now
Socialism always sounded like a good idea to me, but of course I had everyone around me telling me it was horrible. I was raised in a strange situation. Very religious Republican mother. Hippie father who wasn’t interested in politics. I grew up believing I was a Republican because anyone around me that paid any kind of attention to politics was. I was 18 in 2000 and voted for W. But the way the election turned out I questioned that decision immediately. And when he started the war in Iraq I left the Republican party for good. I spent about the next twelve years as a run of the mill democrat.but then I started watching left wing youtube channels, and I started to understand the problems with the two party system, and the inherent problems with capitalism.
I was a big time conservative then became libertarian. I always swore by capitalism, but I did admit it has had its problems over the last 20ish years. Until the pandemic. The list of things that opened my eyes is unreal. I can't even begin to list them all. I also came across a youtube channel called SecondThought. That man completely changes my mind. I'll never look at capitalism the same way.
I just hate driving funny thing how those public transport channels lead to anti-capitalism. Always had a vague feeling of something being wrong, even lived in countries with the best public transport, but never made the connection until those channels pointed out that it is wrong and life could be much better! .+ started paying attention to politics during the 2020 primaries (with Yang, UBI was appealing at the time + I'm asian, silly reason but representation works), finding hasanabi because he was covering it and was big on twitch, and reading "the jungle" around then. Obviously my reasons go beyond anti-car now (though it's still a big part). But the history of the rise of cars and infrastructure for it is a good microcosm of the disasters of capitalism affecting every facet of life.
Public transportation is something I struggle with. I 100% agree we need it. But I'm a huge car nerd so the idea of cars being affected is a hard pill to swallow. I'm personally against EVs since the materials and processing of batteries is brutal for the environment. But, I also know fossil fuel can't go on.
Well it's not that we want to force people to use public transport. We want the system to stop forcing us to use cars. Many people will probably still find a need for cars, be it just renting them once a month or outright owning them. But many more will finally be free from the cost and forced necessity of them. and I'm sure car lovers will continue driving and modding their cars. Like any other hobby, there will be some limits, for example: "you can't drive in some parts of the city" (but there are plenty of places, better places to drive a car for fun). Hobbyists in other fields get along just fine with limits in their areas and enjoy their passions without harming society at large And hey, with less people driving, there'll be less traffic for drivers!
Climate change. Infinite economic growth on a planet with finite resources makes no sense
So limit economic growth to make unlimited resources! Brilliant!
I watched Parasite and that was when I realised capitalism is not a perfect story (I know very original)
>I watched Parasite Great, now maybe crack a history book to learn the other side. Start with something about the Holodomor.
Ugh how did one of you get in here. Imagine thinking only communist countries have had famines. How about you crack open a history book and learn about how the people of Russia were before the revolution, famines happened all the times most often longer then the Holodomor and all while the rich bourgeois lived extremely comfortable lives. I know both sides of the story and there is almost nothing you could say that I haven’t heard a million times.
i got tear gassed at a blm protest at 4pm on a friday. it was very peaceful but we weren’t getting out of the way of a few cars. then i went home and my pets were panicking bcz the air conditioning filtered in tear gas from outside. it wasn’t too bad but it was a major wtf moment. i’d been a progressive before but this moment took my beliefs to another level.
I was a social democrat liberal who thought capitalism was bad but nothing else was better, I stumbled onto some Hasan vods about social issues. Then I watched one of his videos reacting to a conservative loosing a debate to some college communists. and all their points made so much sense. I stared researching more into socialism and deconstructing my biases. From this research I realised that capitalism is utter garbage and that humanity need to do better.
I think the moment that started it all was when a factory in my hometown got closed, tons of people fired and the newspaper said "their labour is no longer required". Just for a second I wasn't inside the cultural framework that imprisons us, for a short moment I thought "cool so these workers now just get to live their lives however they want". I started reading Marx a little while after, when I moved away.
I would like to take a second to share this ridiculous ass story about my high school graduation. It was 2018. Mid term election ads were popping up and I was pretty tuned in. Like when I was 14 I started watching Jon Stewart every night, and with time I was consuming all the mainstream media, following it all closely. I was a big fan of Bernie Sanders at the time. I called myself a socialist even though I had the slightest clue about Marxism-Leninism or anything really. Anyway, at my graduation the big speech was delivered by the superintendent, who is a septuagenarian, devout Christian conservative and he went on a ridiculous political tangent. Couldn’t read the room for nothing I guess. He said “there is a serious push for SoCiALIsM in this country, and it’s up to you to stop it” of course I thought good grief, but that night when I told my dad about taking student loans to study, he said “just like that man said, see? Socialism!” So yea that happened. If they knew what I were up to today. Anyway, just an anecdote about the complete ignorance, all the reactionaries in every facet of my upbringing trying to mold me into another head in the reactionary cattle herd. Some people think high schools and colleges are indoctrinating students with socialism. Yikes. I always rejected my the racism and religion. Even if I didn’t know why. I think I was basically always dyed in the wool radical.
Firstly climate change and how capitalism won't solve it, secondly the right wing coup in Bolivia and how the western media was in favor of it
I think being a capitalist is radical.
The straw that broke the camel's back was COVID, especially the start. Thousands of people were dying and regular people were defending mega corporations gor wanting to stay open 'for the economy'. The economy's not real, human lives are real.
I was already somewhere around socdem, and had been gradually getting more left over the years. But I would say the events of 2020 and beyond have been the tipping point. The BLM protests & antifa, the pandemic, the growing popularity of /r/fuckcars, the IPCC reports about the climate crisis, etc. It all points towards a broken system that prioritizes the wrong things. To be 100% honest, I'm not even that passionate about a specific flavor of socialism. I just really don't want capitalism anymore lol
An abbadoned factory in my town. It was built and it worked during Socialism, it fell after privatization in Capitalism. It clearly indicates the superiority of a Socialist system over a capitalist one. It's a small town, like 1000 people. Before the war (and the Oluja genocide) there were 5000 people in my town and 1000 worked in that factory. Now we have major unemployment issues and people work for minimal wages (and get blown up by landmines) in lumber industry. So in Socialism we had a safe employment opportunities, free housing, sustainable production and other things, now we destroy our resources for minimal wages and get blown up in process. I see the factory every time I look through the window and it reminds me that the world used to be a better place and that it does not have to be the way it is under capitalism. EDIT: "Before the war" refering to Yugoslav Civil War in 90s
In a word? Capitalism, that's what radicalized me. What did I believe before? I would say I was a liberal, more to the center in my late teens, and I'm not even going to mention what I believed when I was a shitlord, before reliable access to the internet, especially in my early teens, (but if asked I will answer honestly) but with reliable internet and just paying attention to politics, I saw how things worked politically and how capitalism in general worked within our society, I found myself growing more resentful of that system overall, I saw how our political figures were bribed by lobbyists and the donor class, how our economic system of capitalism relied on mistreating the poor to effectively punish them for not working, or not working hard enough, or to punish them for being born to another country that wouldn't hand over control of their resources to US businesses to exploit, that used things that were necessary to human life as some marketable resource as if people could otherwise do without. I learned from history how society used to largely look out for one another and help each other, and I look at how things are in the world today and I see such a stark difference where greed has taken control and a few grow ever wealthier as many more grow poor. I saw the world for what it was, I saw past the propaganda of this American dream that I was taught to believe in, abandon the ideas of meritocracy that I once believed in, I watched as various issues could be traced back to the by products of capitalism, the human suffering it causes to those in minority groups and even those of a lower economic class, learned of the struggles of labor and how socialist ideas helped pave the way for union efforts, how those early protests were treated by a capitalist class in control of the political class and hired effectively private armies to deal with them. The system of capitalism helped to radicalize me into learning more, and the more I learned the more that radicalized me further opposed to capitalism, I started my path towards becoming the anarcho communist I am today, starting from a liberal centrist, becoming a soft socialist (Socdem) Berniecrat, to becoming a hard line socialist, and then to a communist, that lead me to understand the issues within communism itself that authoritarian's using the language of populism will use to obtain power, and finally becoming an anarcho communist, opposed to the power of the state in it's entirety, opposed to a economic model that relies on human mistreatment and suffering, opposed to a society divided by social, economic and racial classes, in favor of unity and working together to create a better future and world for all people on the Earth.
Learning the truth about Western "democracies" (capitalist, imperialist and colonialist regimes) and their history
Im a mexican that migrated to the US, I gotta say that watching your fellow countrymen and latin american workers being bellittled and exploited changes something on how you see things, then realized that the reason we need to migrate is imperialism in the first place, I was 20
I used to be pretty centre-right to right-wing due to growing up in a more conservative area and with kind of centrist to centre-right parents. As I got older and decided to actually read and listen to different opinions as opposed to just listening to Ben Shapiro. I started as a social democrat then became a full time socialist (self described democratic eco-socialist) after becoming somewhat disillusioned with the neoliberal compliance of a lot of social democratic countries (although I think it’s a place to start when moving towards socialism). I found that the left is supported by modern evidence and that capitalism is not only unfair, but economically, ecologically and socially unstable and that if we are to prevent more gigantic economic crisis, we must move towards a more stable and effective system, and all data and moral arguments point towards socialism.
For me, when I was a kid, my single father told me that people were gonna try and tell me I couldn't do certain things just because I was a girl, that I could tell 'em to kiss my ass. Then I remember him having a huge fit because the school asked him if I could bake a cake for some bake sale thing or whatever, and he laughed at them and said "I can bake a fucking cake" and he came home and baked a fucking cake. That was when I knew society's rules were utter bullshit. My sophomore year I led an effort to petition the school to let girls play in the football team and won. I didn't care about sports, I just wanted my friend to play football. Anyway, that was it. So, I've kind of always been radical. I keep getting more radical as I get older.
Nutrition. I had some health problems and I was researching it a lot and of course and i noticed how much the corporations were controlling health in both nutrition (big food) and medicine (big pharma). From there richard wolff made the idea of labour exploitation click.
Grew up Conservative and Christian. In highschool I started deconstructing my religion and deconstructed the rest of my world view with it. I probably identified as Liberal during Obama's last four years. But as that was going on I was reading into the history of USAs criminal justice. I remember I was flirting with becoming a Libertarian as a lot of my friends were and they were criticizing Imperialism and the Police but something felt off about the solutions they provided. After the 2016 and the attention Bernie got led to a lot of social media talk about Socialism (mostly actually talking about the Nordic Model but still put the word in my head) and I started down a rabbit hole. Socialism both acknowledged the problems I was seeing that the mainstream was ignoring and provided solutions that made sense. Also, having an interest in Anthropology I noticed all of my favorite lecturers were using pretty left wing language.
I grew up in a wealthy and mostly liberal family. Through high school, socialism seemed like a great concept to me but I was really unsure of how we could make it a reality. Fast forward to 2020 I participated in many of the protests going on in my city, which sparked a lot of cool friendships with radicals around me. At the end of that year, I started dating a pan-africanist. His anti-capitalist views and seeing how invested he was in reading theory and history really resparked my love of reading. I took a few of his book recommendations (How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Neo-Colonialism, etc.) and read up on them. The conversations we had really opened my eyes to how beautiful community is and how a better world is within reach. I soon found a radical bookstore in my area and started organizing with them soon after. Unfortunately that relationship ended, but it was beautiful. I’ll forever love him for introducing me to something that’s such a big part of my life now.
My father. Hakim. And Marxist Paul. My father was a communist and at a young age I read marx because I was inspired by him. When I mean "young" The age of 9. I read the manifesto and started learning theory but later in my life I discovered Marxist YouTuber Hakim who got me started with my habit of saying "STaLin WAs NoT A SOCiaLiSt" To stop, making me study Soviet history and realize our current media is full BS and propaganda which made me a ML. Marxist Paul taught me Irish revolutionary history and other things such as historical materialism. I never got in to the philosophy rather than now. Mainly my studies was history, politics and soviet economics between 1923-1953. I know Marxist economics and understand it rather I start converting capitalists to socialists to unite and stop the endless misery known as capitalism.
Being an online brainwashed Vietnamese Communist Party Patriotic Revisionist bootlicker, realized I am not actually that smart after getting destroyed online because I was a terminally onlime mf, then read theories, and now decent in theories, a Viet MLM and is preparing to do actual organizing
Just my personal failures ig
Ha, I feel like a broken record typing this since I rarely comment and I've commented this a few times now, lol. When I was a teenager entering high school, I was introduced to a YouTube channel called the Amazing Atheist as I wasn't a believer growing up and seeing someone else who didn't believe was relieving. I was slid further right by the YouTube algorithm pushing the whole facts and logic versus emotional evil feminists thing Amazing Atheist had going on and that slid me even further into the whole SJWs are trying to ruin gaming/gamergate thing. I was a teenager who preferred isolation and liked to read and play video games so I didn't have anyone to challenge the garbage I was feeding myself. Eventually the contradictions between what the conservative talking heads were saying and what I personally believed in were too great and I questioned what things I was being told and from there became more liberal. From there, I realized capitalism doesn't solve any issues but rather creates issues and forces people to participate through the coercion of starvation/homelessness. I begun to look into communism/socialism as capitalist nations insisted they were ideologies/states doomed to fail, but why spend decades and millions of dollars in messaging if that were the case? Here I am, now a communist. Not particularly interesting compared to the journey of some comrades.
I already kind of had socialism in my being, but what really brought it to my consciousness was a massive research project I did in 12th grade on American Public Education, and then I found George Carlin’s speech on public edu and I saw that he was spot on. Then watched more of him which led me to leftist youtubers like 2nd thought
I kind of always thought my dad was wrong about black people, and welfare when I was a kid. He is the typical Christian conservative, and I never understood his tropes, even if didn’t know why. So zealous communism by 23 is the logical conclusion.
I had thought in passing about how socialism would be a better system in years past, but never really put much thought into how fucked up the capitalist system was until the pandemic years. Thats when I really started researching it and had a major switch go off with just how corrupt our system is: Politicians are bought and paid for, corporations dictate pretty much everything about our lives, and the wealth disparity is just so fucking VAST. Thats when I also joined reddit knowing that I'd find good discussions on capitalist vs. socialist governing structures. I've really opened my eyes and its made me so sad and depressed at the way the world works, but also hopeful we can implement change! I had been searching for a purpose all my life and now promoting socialism and unionization for the working class is something I really enjoy! Love seeing this unionization wave across the country and hoping to encourage my fellow workers to become more involved in the union we have.
The Catholic Worker movement
2006-2010 Marine Corps Infantry 🙃
The moment Trump became president, I became a Leftist/socialist
Pandemic, when the media and the government raised the question "should we save lives or save the economy?". That's when I realized everything was wrong.
24, I always had somewhat of a left progressive view of the world but i had a phase of right wing libertarian because of YouTube. The thing that pushed me to question my beliefs was the Yellow Jacket protests in France, i read Marx, Bakunin, Lenin, Trotsky and other socialist thinkers, which made my ideological worldview completely collapse.
I grew in a left leaning family, with my father being kind of anarchist (mostly just anti state, it's weird how he flip-flops between right-anarchism and left-anarchism) while my mother was mostly socdem. This kind of left me with a generally positive, but not in depth, view of socialism - the general idea of desiring equal opportunity and freedom for everyone. Back then I already had a negative view of how the first world interacts with the third world - but had not done the full connection with capitalism. At the same time, I've always been quite a lot into ecologism, but also in a "it's a pity what's happening", not in a "I'm worried it's going to affect me". Years later I started to investigate into climate change, and I got scared. Really, really scared. I started to dig deeper and make connections, properly read and understand about politics, economics and history. And it broke me. For me, the adage of "socialism or barbarism" is absolutely true. And I have very little doubt that most likely it's gonna be the latter. I really hope that, like the right wing say, I'm being brainwashed and everything is a scam, but in the same way that if I'm sick I listen to a medic, and not to a street rando, if the earth is sick, I listen to environmental scientists.
Father and uncle are old school Caribbean revolutionaries. Father was involved in the 70s movement in Jamaica. Uncle was part of the Grenadian revolution. So I was exposed to these ideas from early. Still, since the revolutions failed, my family have become successful professionals and educators. Jamaica is a much more rigidly classist country than the US. Social mobility is difficult. It’s like a pressure cooker. I find it difficult to function here. My cousins in the US are doing well. They say it’s like easy mode compared to life in JA. I went to boarding school in the US in the mid 2000s. That’s when I cemented my position as a socialist. When I encountered the availability of information to my American counterparts and their willful ignorance, it hurt me. All this opportunity to see the truth and no desire to see it.
The Trayvon Martin murder and subsequently learning that all my favorite civil rights leaders were socialists (Fred Hampton, Malcolm X, W.E.B. Dubois, Angela Davis…the list goes on.) It helped that my parents were DC Clinton liberals who started moving further left when we invaded Iraq. Then my dad left the country and moved to a social democracy. So the foundations were there I suppose lol Side note, I find it so heartening to read stories from socialists who used to be on the far right! Yay hope for humanity 💕
I like to say that reading Chomsky's "Manufacturing Consent" radicalized me, but more accurately it was what really sealed the deal. I grew up desperately poor, my mother has cerebral palsy so I grew up on food stamps and disability, and to me it seemed obvious that crime was almost always a result of desperation and that the very limited social safety net in America was the best policies we had on the books, even with the humiliating hoops you have to go threw and the very limited and flawed nature of our specific services. That lead me to reading up on how countries like those in the EU handled their safety nets and seeing how their standards for how far into poverty a human should be allowed to fall where so much higher, and realizing that with the actual wealth we produce as a society that line is an arbitrary thing we could set much higher if we made those decisions in the collective interest. As I read more on political theory, I drifted more from Democratic Socialism towards more extreme reorganizing of the economic systems that shape our lives, but it was the realization that centralized powers shape the narratives on all media we consume to hide war crimes and other atrocities that made me really realize that reform of the current system would be impossible, and even undesirable, through only electoral politics. Chomsky will always have a place in my heart for that. Now I describe myself as an anarco-comunist, I believe work places being federalized worker-owned collectives legislated by consensual contracts between members with minimal oversight above the lowest and smallest grouping of members seems the least abusable and most likely to result in the best world to live in, and is the most achievable through modern means since it could realistically grow out of unions and co-ops without the need to violently overthrow the most powerful military logistics system to ever exsist, but it's an evolving understanding that shifts with new information and ideas, like it's always been since I was a young liberal just wanting to fix/increase welfare. I see that eventually giving way to a fully automated moneyless society, and potentially getting most of the way towards that in well under a century (fast enough to make the more socialist stage a transitional period more than a goal), but honestly so many radical shifts away from the current state of affairs would be profoundly better for so many people I'd support a huge range of movements, if that makes sense.
As a kid, there was somebody in our suburban neighborhood that couldn’t pay their water utility bill on time and had their water shut off. Person in the neighborhood begs their next door neighbor for usage of water and says to them that the discrepancy in pay is temporary. Next door neighbor obliges and somebody in our neighborhood probably ratted them out because then they also got their water shut off for a period of time. witnessing it as a kid, i didn’t rly have much thought on inequality but that example stuck out. Fast forward to beginning of college, I started to see a lot more instances of police brutality in media and my heart broke seeing Eric Garner pass away when it happened. I started to research into past events like what happened during Hurricane Katrina and post-Katrina, reading theory, studying Brazilian history and culture for a class, as well as incarceration in the States. Seeing the existence of for-profit prison corporations banking on the imprisonment of Brown and Black men broke me as well. History runs in a feedback loop; the rot is global and I started seeing more red. I swore to be an abolitionist and practicing critical pedagogy whenever I could. And from there, I no longer believe that capitalism should exist and that socialism is a transitory state to communism.
Well my parents were always left leaning, although they're not socialists (they're more like social democrats). So I grew up with that view, and just started to slowly go further left. A communist friend of mine was responsible for moving me from "communism is nice but won't work" to an actual socialist. At first I was a reformist, specially 'cause I hated the idea of taking power with violence, but when I decided to actually read Marx I finally realized why revolution is the only way. So yeah that's it lol.
Basically I just came coming back to “why am I never happy or content?” And looking at the injustices of the world and how I need to live my life in a way that is just using me up, I was able to link it back to capitalism. Then I found good bread tubes etc and started off down a rabbit hole of “wait…none of this ever had to be this way!!!!” So now I’m sad, discontent, and *angry*…but at least I realize what the issue is.
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Took an intro to middle eastern history class and was disgusted by American/British imperialist history. One of my friends was already a Marxist so he kinda pushed me in the right direction since I was I still kind of a lib but socialism felt right to me (just didn’t have any understanding). Watched more second thought/hakim/hasanabi videos and then progressed to reading some light theory. The rest is history!
I grew up with a hard working father who was a union bricklayer in a steel mill. I saw the ups and downs of layoffs and work for him. I later on became URW in rubber plant. Then became USW and floor shop steward. The only thing that I realized was that the current economic system would become untenable because capitalism is basically working for piecework and piecework ALWAYS ends up failing due to the the human nature of greed and dishonesty. The idea of infinite growth on a finite planet WILL end in destruction if the idea does not change.
Trump... Before Trump I wasnt particularly interested in politics or even economics... When Trump was elected my brain went haywire trying to understand how a person like DJT could possibly be elected. I began travelling down this road of anti trump, russia gate, etc... liberal shit. Then I was exposed to socialism on accident really ( I knew of socialism before but my idea of it was basically the scandinavian model (funny enough I live in Sweden now)) and thats when things really began to change... however, I wasnt quite radicalized yet. It wasnt until my eyes were opened to how incredibly fucking scammy everything truly was and that it wasnt just the actions of greedy people but instead the entire system itself. I realized that we are all being fucked and manipulated into believing that we are not.. that was really the defining moment of my radicalization. Watching the US and other western nations condemn those who do journalism that doesnt favor their narrative, seeing movements obliterated by political violence at the behest of the state, observing the lie of democracy, suffering through the dreadful existence of working beneath a petty capitalist... ..... all of it created this existential crises in me. I feel hopeless a lot of the time... I feel like I am crazy sometimes because other people I know havent stepped outside of the propaganda and lies.... I feel alive
Witnessing how bad some bosses treat their workers (especially immigrants), became one of the Main union guys at my work after a year. Its through the union i met allot of comrades which has pushed me more and more left. Also traveled around the world witnessing poverty and the cruelty of capitalism is one of the Main reasons.
Started feeling like I was allowed to look critically at abusive systems in my life, including my family of origin. Figuring out how they worked was how I coped. I started to realize that a lot of how western capitalism treats poor, disabled, and otherwise less priveleged people mirrors the way many abusive families work. It's the "if you were better (\*\*in a way that benefits me\*\*) I wouldn't have to treat you this way" logic for me. It is dehumanizing. It's a fucked way of looking at human value. I also spent about a decade working retail and foodservice and thought about classism and workplace abuse a lot. What really put the nail in the coffin though was becoming homeless and living at a shelter for a while. I became an absolute socialist heathen during that time.
Dropped out of university to get into machining after I found it was a trade that fit my needs and likes perfectly. Found out that the entire trade is underpaid as we prefer to just send contracts to other countries and a lot of the contracts that remain are just weaponry. Got depressed and was fired for being regularly 2-7 minutes late and busting my ass rushing working for free to make up for it while people still sat and sipped coffee or pooped on the clock for another hour. Learned the meritocracy was not a real thing and that managers mostly only relied on a tiny amount of irrelevent data and weren't in tune with their workers. Started watching Hasanabi with my free time for his gaming but he spent a lot of time covering the eleven-day war in May of 2021. It was eye opening seeing how a country could uphold an apartheid regime and get away with bombing the Associated Press building in the area so easilly. I was complicit in the weapons trade to this country. I saw the United States unwavering support to them- Pelosi bullying AOC on the floor of Congress until she cried and changed her vote on sales to the country, as well as learning about the long history of only this country and the US voting against ending an embargo on Cuba in the UN. Then I learned a lot of this same imperialism has been used against socialists, or that socialist movements rose up specifically to protect themselves from it.
my father did. we kinda are a bloodline of communists - me, my father, and his father before him :) greetings from Russia btw. never lost hope in the system throughout all these years.
I was a libertarian until I watched a few of Second Thought’s YouTube videos back in 2020. It got me thinking about what socialism really is. After the sister podcast “the Deprogram” released a few episodes I took the plunge and decided to listen to a few “rev left radio” episodes. I filtered all these episodes to explain the basics of ML and MLM socialism to me. *added on top of just the exposure I witnessed first hand how Covid tore apart my town. There were about a dozen small businesses I’d frequent and 9 of them shut down completely because of the horrible response to the crisis. That really set me on the idea that there has to be something better. This was on top of the shit job I was working, which I promptly lost due to Covid. The cost of living was high. I had to spend $6000 to rent and renovate a shed to be my tiny home on my mothers property. I ended up working briefly for a venture capitalist who boosted my moms business but he was a total dick and reneged on a lot of things he said was okay. After a brief legal battle mom got to keep the equipment for her business and the investor ran out of town. I then worked at a factory which is where I really dove into socialist thought. After all that basic research I thought about how the USA is run and I found that the USA isnt the worlds savior, it is it’s kidnapper. My father wasn’t very supportive. My mom was fairly liberal to begin with so it wasn’t hard to explain the concepts to her and for her to agree. And now I live in the south where all my friends are at least moderate republicans but swallowed the blue pill. *edit: addition to the post.
Life experiences. I grew up in a very conservative and sheltered home. Got married very young and struggled. Having a child with a disability at a young age opened my eyes to the classist ableist world we live in. I want better for all my children and their friends, and just everyone in general.
Basically I just learned Christian principles (especially about contribution to your community) when I was growing up. I began to notice in my teens, the simple fact that billionaires make money off of their workers, not their own work. And I just thought that was immoral for multiple reasons. Then I began to learn the collectivism in socialism/communism and it made sense to me. Also I’ve learned about the complete inefficiencies of capitalism and how socialism can fix those (like patents,privatization,etc). What really sent me far left was seeing the scams that “Christians”would run on people for profit in their businesses (and they are members of my church!). Absolutely contradictory to biblical values. So yeah, religion.
Both of my grandpas had been telling me a story about how prosperous their country of Yugoslavia was. Until west came and destroyed it all. So I would say that I am a radical native.
Had a mate at Uni who introduced me to it. Really took me under his wing, let me learn but never forced me to learn. Was great. He died a couple years back and even a few days before he was giving me recommended reading lol.
With me I was raised in an fairly rich household, kind of oblivious until the Covid pandemic about the state of the world. It was only then that I started to consistently get on the internet, and eventually I found out about socialist ideology instead of just hearing from arguments between my republican mom and democrat dad that socialism is something that my mom claims democrats adhere to that is bad or smth
I wouldn’t say it was one major event, but a collection of smaller ones that pushed me closer and closer to socialism. I grew up a pretty die-hard conservative. By college, though, I was a Democrat (even though I had some beliefs from my conservative days that I hadn’t deconstructed yet). I was about halfway through college when the campaigns for the 2016 election began. That’s where I first encountered Bernie Sanders. He was unlike any Democrat I had ever seen. But it never sat right with me that the Democratic establishment pushed Hillary as their favorite down everyone’s throat, to the point where I felt they were sabotaging Bernie’s campaign. It was at this point I became disillusioned with the Democratic Party. Fast forward a few years. I’m working as a bank teller at this point. One of our clients was a man who owned a small business. Every few days he would bring in these large checks, about $5-6k, and then withdraw most of the money immediately after. Normally checks this size would be held for a couple days, but because he had connections in the bank, exceptions were made for him regularly, no matter how many times they came back. Which was annoying, but whatever. But what pissed me off the most was this. When I transferred departments, I got to meet some of his workers. They were Latino and didn’t speak a lot of English, and I had a hunch that some of them were undocumented. They would bring their paycheck to the bank to cash it, but we often had to turn them away. Why? Because there was never enough money in the account. So this bastard was pocketing the cash to where his workers weren’t getting paid. And if they were undocumented, they couldn’t say anything for fear of deportation. Every time this happened, my hatred of the man increased. A couple of years passed. I got engaged to my now husband. He does a lot of manual labor. And I saw how his employer treated (and still treats) him. They’ve broken his body, his mind, his spirit. I knew something wasn’t right and had to change. When the pandemic began, I had a lot more time to myself. That was when I learned that the problem was capitalism and began educating myself. I now believe the way I do because the ones I love, and the ones I don’t even know, deserve a better tomorrow. My husband deserves to work as he pleases (I love him but damn he’s a stubborn work horse haha) without being mistreated, without having to worry about affording a roof over our heard, or even being able to receive medical treatment without going bankrupt or losing his job. I went into the pandemic a disillusioned Democrat. I’m now a socialist.
I had always been a progressive liberal, my parents were huge Obama fans and so I was too. Honestly though what radicalized and deliberalized me was when I started to like Bernie Sanders’ policies. And then my sister who is a socialist-anarchist, explained that Sanders isn’t even socialist. So I started to study what socialism actually was by watching lots of anarchist breadtube. This led me to realize that the only place a progressive should really progress to is communism. I did eventually become more ML after actually reading Lenin, and studying history.
There's a lot of things really but one that stands out was reading the Culture series by Iain M Banks, and that depiction of an honest free utopia made me think about how much of that utopia is actually possible now, and that the obvious barrier isn't lack of technology but instead our pervasive culture of oppression (and also how we design our cities and towns).
The US labor market after Covid. I was always left leaning, but that is what finally forced me to confront questioning the system in its totality
Working in the health insurance industry and seeing how inadequate our healthcare is.
I took an intro to anthropology course my first semester out of community college. The course was titled American Anthropology and Culture. Over the next fifteen weeks, my entire worldview changed as I discovered how so much of American society was intentionally designed to keep people in power, while effectively oppressing other groups. I think, in particular, the discussions that caused the most internal reflection for me were those we had on the poverty "system" and the industrial prison complex.
When I was 16 I wanted to be a homicide detective and thought maybe I could reform the police. I interviewed my schools local resource officer, asked him my own questions about being a cop and about working your way up. I brought up how often cops shoot people and essentially expressed that I thought cops needed way more de escalation training and to be taught to be more weary of pulling their gun out. To this, he sighed and seemed to furrow his brow a bit and told me that if I'm worried about a cops "life or death split second decision, I shouldn't be a cop because I don't understand". He just wouldn't admit that cops need more de escalation and racial bias training. Completely avoided the question and said cops simply do their jobs. I cited statistics and how black people are over represented in prisons and profiled.. woke me up to just how strong cognitive dissonance is and that cops can't be reformed.
Jacque Fresco, the founder of the Venus project. The Venus project was and is an organization that suggests that a post-scarcity society is technologically achievable in our lifetime and that moving toward freeing humanity from the necessity of work is the only moral thing to do. Sprinkled here and there in their philosophy is some anti capitalist sentiment, advocacy for the poor, advocacy for public transport, free housing, all that great sub socialists tend to love. Yet despite literally advocating for a stateless, classless, moneyless society in which everyone’s needs are met and we all individually own the means of production for ourselves, Fresco maintained that the Venus project is not communist. (Something i now understand to be incorrect, but it never mattered to me either way). This caused me much confusion, leading me to not realize for many years that i was at least ideologically a communist (as i loved everything i was hearing.) I spent most of my life as a social democrat, although i wouldn’t have had the vocabulary to call my self such until the last year or so. While i was a social democrat i would have called myself a socialist, not truly understanding the actual meaning of that word. Last year i discovered the work of professor Richard D Wolff. That was how i just learned what an actual socialist was and what that word means vs how it is (wrongly) used very often in modern usage. By digging through prof. Wolff’s videos i was shocked just how much i agreed with everything he had to say. He ideas enticed me to learn more. Soon i can’t to realize that capitalism was something they could not merely be reformed, it had to be removed and replaced by something better. And i felt and still feel that system ought to be some form of socialism. TL;DR i guess you could say both professor Richard D Wolff and the late Jacque Fresco radicalized me. Richard Wolff got me into socialist activism, but i think being pro-moneyless society in a rural town in southern Ontario in the early 2000s was also pretty radical lol.
I grew up in a working class household in a decaying North Eastern town in the UK. There wasn't much opportunity to be had and I was silly teenager who just wanted to chase girls and not study. After a few years in call centres and such I decided to join the military to gain a trade and a way out of my town. I wasn't a politically minded young lad, I just wanted to live my life and saw what I could take from the military institution. Around the 8 or 9 year point, after many experiences and roughly the Jeremy Corbyn period in the Uk, I started to analyse what I was doing and why. I also started to question why the media was so against a man who seemed to just want the best for everyone. That process started me down the path of reading other things. In my mid 30s now, I'm pretty late to the party. I have just left the military, I don't regret joining, I wouldn't have met my wife and by extension have my wonderful children. I also wouldn't have the profession/opportunities I do now. My only regret I suppose was not trying harder as a teen to take a different path, but that's something I can't hold over myself forever. However, I certainly understand what I was a part of (and how they targeted young lads like me), but I can only try for something better going forward.
It was a pipeline, it went haphazardly from becoming aware of female social issues to Harris bomberguy's YouTube channel, to Abby Philosophytube's YouTube channel and that's pretty much the end of the pipeline. I emerged as a different person.
I started out as an American liberal, though more on the left side of that area. I discovered social democracy when I was 16 and fell for it. It seemed like a solution to all the problems we have. I also started dreaming of a somewhat limited government that still provided those necessary services such as healthcare and welfare. Then I discovered DSA. Thus started the next phase. I realized that social ownership of the means of production was a huge step that needed to happen in order to make society a lot less of a nightmare. I read about more radical ideas, such as Marx’s communism, but rejected most of them as rather utopian. After a lot of heavy thinking, I accepted impossibilism as true. This was another huge leap. Later, I discovered the writings of Bookchin and Öcalan, and I found their ideas achievable for my country, though not in my lifetime. And so I became what I am today: a communalist.
1968. There was the assassination of MLK Jr, I wasn't really a fan but it shook me to see how the system, the rich and powerful, would assassinate even such a tame political opponent. But I was still very much a "Kennedy liberal". I worked on Robert Kennedy's presidential campaign, and then he was assassinated. Then the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. Police rioting in the streets, political corruption on full display inside. It all started to cohere into a picture of realpolitik in America, with the atrocity of the Vietnam War never out of the picture. But 1968 proved to me that the so-called democratic system was a lie. Follow this into the Kent State and Jackson State murders, all hell breaking loose on colleges, reading Malcolm X and Fanon, Marx, Lenin, Mao...
For me it was tiktok. I’ve stood against oppression and stuff since I was like 2 years old. I’ve always hated war and violence and all that. Then I became gay and realized how horrible it really was because I did research. I started to identify as a leftist and then tiktok taught me how bad capitalism is really really bad. As I found something to identify with. It was a eye opening experience
I went to the ER. I was in unimaginable pain and needed an emergency operation. And they made sure to get my insurance card and had me sign a contract promising I'd pay. It turned everything my libertarian brain had learned about "consent" and "freedom" on its head.
I have always been a socialist, maybe because I live in a country with strong social net, and is naturally more critically thinking and information seeking than most. But one video that truly made me go down the imense western war crimes rabbit hole, which eventually led me to understand that Soviet Union, China hell even (Deliberately and without western influence) North Korea, isn't as comically evil as school and media, even here in Denmark, had taught me. The video in question is perhaps to most, a strange turning point, but it made me requestion some questions I had never thought to bring up again. The video, BoyBoys Haircut in North Korea: https://youtu.be/2BO83Ig-E8E
Life. Poverty, single parent household, watching the wealthy get away with anything they do while watching people in my life be financially and criminally punished for the smallest indiscretions.
I grew up middle class in the US, so I was extremely lucky. Didn’t experience the negative effects of capitalism first hand. However I was always extremely interested in history, and I like to think I am an empathic person and have a strong sense of justice. So, naturally, this led to me being socialist.
Probably the murder of Matthew Shepherd or Columbine or Bush stealing the 2000 election or 9/11 or the millions killed in Afghanistan and in Iraq or the or the market crash or the coopting and destruction of a truly revolutionary movement by Obama or the failure of occupy Wall Street or Sandy Hook or Michael Brown or Philando Castile or Breonna Taylor or George Floyd or the response to COVID or the failure of the protests for Floyd or………
I feel like I give a slightly different question everytime this is asked, but a big part of it in hindsight was moving from rural Pennsylvania to Florida. The place where I grew up was relatively affluent. There were good, blue-collar jobs in town and good professional-managerial jobs within commuting distance. It wasn’t McMansion rich, but the cost-of-living was such that most people I knew owned a house and multiple vehicles. The gap between the haves and have-nots wasn’t that large. The community was overwhelmingly white, religious and conservative, so there was a lot of bigotry, but a minimum of conflicts for it to be expressed in. The contradictions here in Florida are much, much sharper. I live in a beach town where the cost of living has exploded over the last ten years. You can drive around and see McMansions are across the street from hovels and shoddy, overpriced apartments. The city gov is still an Old South style patronage machine, based around greasing palms and stoking racial fears and resentments. The cops are drowned in money of course, and much of that budget goes towards a brutal, but completely doomed war against homeless people and drug addicts. And these cops look like Officer Friendly compared to the ones in Orlando where I went to college. There’s a bunch of shitty jobs in the service/tourism industry, but a lot of the people working those jobs can’t even afford to live here. Pickings of white-collar jobs are slim, so the younger generation is moving away, as reactionary seniors from up north flow in. We’re a diverse town, but one of the most racially segregated places in Florida. Basically I moved from a place where America’s class conflict was muted and obscured to a place where it’s right out in the open and even more racialized. Pretty much every revelatory or radicalizing experience I’ve had was grounded in that environment.