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The more you learn the less you'll default to reactionary ideas. It will come with time.
The fact that its so hard to "get into" the left is something that gets discussed a lot and you're not the only one.
Congratulations for escaping fascism. I haven’t seen Brett’s podcasts mentioned here: Revolutionary Left Radio, Red Menace, and Guerrilla History. All of them have lots of episodes which are great and accessible introductions to Marxism.
Understanding Marxism is also a lifelong process. There is always more to learn.
Understanding Marxism is also a lifelong process.
And it's also a book by Richard Wolff.
To begin with, welcome to the movement. I always recommend Engels' Principles of Communism as a starting point.
Once you're confident in the grasp of the basic principles laid out by Marx and Engels, I find Lenin to be a good next step. Imperialism: The Highest Stage Of Capitalism builds on Marx's work and incorporates trends that emerged during Lenin's lifetime: namely, the rise of imperialism and the inevitability of monopoly under capitalism.
And I still often find myself instinctively going to places that I picked up on /pol/ especially when it comes to race. I’ve unlearned most right wing bullshit on race but there’s always some part of me going “Alright but what *will * happen when white people become a minority?”. “Sure but who are these people to lecture you on privilege when your life has been fucking horrible?”
A good thing you can do for this is to study the foundation of black liberation movements in the mid-20th century. The establishment doesn't want you to know this, but a huge chunk of black liberation theory in this time period was intellectually and explicitly Marxist, and its leaders were outspoken in their beliefs that resistance to racism was inextricable from resistance to capitalism. Have a look at Huey Newton's autobiography Revolutionary Suicide and take note of just how often this theme comes up.
It is a process of years, not weeks.
Literally nobody here that could be considered part of the "confident" group of leftists who feel like they understand enough to speak and teach got to where they are in just a little bit of time. Everyone, except those born into leftist families, has had to unlearn shit.
It will take you years to fully divert yourself from these thoughts, many of them won't even be things you believe but things that you have habitually learned to go to. You need to unlearn that. That's going to take a long time.
If you want to make this go faster? Go do something. Do something to do with race. Do something to do with groups you now want to help, do something with communities that you yourself previously under these fascist beliefs had horrible thoughts and feelings about.
Connect emotionally with real human beings. Care about them. Teach yourself that they're all your brothers and sisters, that we're all ultimately the same wherever we are in the world. You can cut down racial theory by better connecting yourself internationally, to international politics, realising that mankind is the same everywhere, you can replace these racial thoughts with thoughts about the brotherhood of man.
Otherwise? Just do what every other leftist online does. Absorb it all passively and occasionally force yourself through a book, when you can. If you can get a book reading routine going that will go better, but really a shit load of leftists aren't reading anything at all, they are learning online from other leftists.
Do what works for you, but always keep learning. Don't ever feel like you're at the end of the political journey, it never stops.
Don't worry, nobody's hopeless.
Puyi is a strong contender for one of the most evil people ever: forced his servants to fight, r*ped children, got his wife hooked to opium because it made her easier to manage, oh and also signed papers enslaving all the Manchurians into slaves for the Japanese imperialists.
He ended his life as a dedicated communist gardener, who visited a woman in the hospital every day because he accidentally hit her with a bicycle.
I don't really have a solution for you but I just wanted to say I came to the left from being a right-wing reactionary and it does get better.
I also have ASD and would take the concept of white privilege or male privilege as a personal attack, but I eventually realized that it's because I was buying the dishonest framing from reactionaries that privilege means I have the world handed to me on a platter. All it really means is I don't face the disadvantages of systemic racism or sexism. Once I stopped following toxic communities on :reddit-logo: and started talking to other people more my perspective started to change for the better. My prejudices didn't stand up to reality.
I found A People's History of the United States to be informative on the history of class and race conflict in the US. I also recommend Women, Race, and Class by Angela Davis. In addition to the manifesto, Marx's Wage Labour and Capital is a pamphlet that explains the basics of Marxist economics without going into excruciating detail. (I'm slowly getting through Capital, but it is a drag at times. I don't think it's necessary to be an expert on economics to be a good comrade.) Kropotkin's The Conquest of Bread is another classic that's not hard to get through, and Anarchism and Other Essays by Emma Goldman is a great book of short essays on various left-related topics.
I think you'll also pick up a lot just from talking to other leftists and people with different backgrounds and making an effort to understand. Keep an open mind and be ready to learn rather than being defensive/reactionary and I think you'll do fine. Glad to have you here comrade.
Alright. So, the first part is admitting that you've got a ways to go. We don't really have a line for you to follow to 'git gud' at leftism, but I can give you babby's first leftist;
https://readcomicmanga.com/manga/106901/das-kapital/chapter-2127401
Go read the manga adaptation of Das Kapital. It helps lay out theory in a non-dense way. If, and only if, you feel you are ready to go onto denser stuff, go ahead for it.
A big failing of leftist materials is that it isn't easily consumable, unlike 'Fash propaganda. So don't feel like you're unintelligent because you're uninformed. The capitalist class wants you to be ignorant.
If you have the "great replacement" thing scratching at the back of your mind, you probably have the "but why did white people become so powerful?" thing too.
What finally got rid of it for me was this realization. Societies were only able to consistently maintain specialized, non-food-producing workers under certain circumstances.
They need to move east-west and not north-south, so when their area has a drought, they can plant the same crops they've been growing.
They also need good tamable animals.
They also need access to certain minerals and metals etc.
Thats why the middle east had the first high tech civilizations.
After those basic issues are solved, there's a new major source of instability: raids by horseback nomads. They are basically impossible to beat on wide open landscapes. When horses were reintroduced to the Americas, it fucked over a lot of advanced sedentary societies that hadn't been dealing with nomadic raiders. Just like in Asia.
Europe found it relatively easy to defend against them, because of the mountainous terrain- I mean there's a few reasons the skinny peninsula with the mountain passes became the dominant power in the region for a millennia, and that terrain is a big one.
That's why they developed, not because of some inherent racial difference.
This can be called determinism, and yes there are many other deciding factors including individual choices, but when you're talking about thousands of years and the bare limits on practical work that can be done, these things do matter on a long time scale. When you're talking about whole cultures dying off, getting overrun, and people migrating back and forth, you wind up with certain areas making all those complicated things practical.
And really, you can't call low-tech societies less "advanced" anyway, something I've avoided saying. They're adapted well to their particular conditions, and would only try to ignore those constraints of they were stupid, and they just aren't. Dumbass white people constantly go try to "help" hunter-gatherer African tribes by being like "just plant some tomatoes lol" before a bunch of hippos tear through the plots and devour everything, and the hunter-gatherers are like yeah coulda fuckin told you that.
It's just that certain conditions create the opportunity to dominate neighbors and take even more resources and gain an even bigger upper hand militarily, and white people absolutely did that.
You can't ignore the actions of individuals throughout history and become fully determinist - it's stupid and anti Marxist. But you also have to recognize that someone living on a 2 square mile island isn't going to roll up on you with a fleet of warships.
It just so happens that there's only one easily defensible area next to the middle east, and it doesn't get much sunlight, so it's a coincidence that the people who colonized everything and took advantage of everyone were also pale.
I spent some time in the pipeline and used to have those same worries, but the more time I spent with other groups of people, the more I came to realize that I was unconsciously viewing it through the zero/sum worldview that all fascist spaces cultivate. "As soon as we stop doing it to them, they'll start doing it to us." It's a way of looking at things that precludes any way of interacting with each other besides domination, an extension of the psychotic, solipsistic fascist war of all against all that can only be maintained by reinforcing illusory differences.
Most people outside fash spaces aren't like that, and just want to live their lives in peace. There are always a few exceptions in any large enough group of people, but when I was in those spaces, those were the only examples shown, over and over and over again. Fascist "communities", for all their bloviating about :freeze-peach:, go to great lengths to ensure their users never actually encounter socialist ideas. When I was there they just spent all their time making fun of Assigned Male and reposting the same three hysterical college students. The reason for that isn't just laziness, its a lack of content. You're told again and again that "this is what they're all like", but if that's true, why isn't there a glut of fresh content every day? Because the vast majority of leftists understand that we didn't choose to be born into a racial categorization that has historically oppressed others, and while you'll see some venting and good-natured ribbing, no comrade is gonna honestly give you shit for the color of your skin. They might point out issues that we don't have experience with as a result, but no leftist treats whiteness as an "original sin" the way right wingers crow about. It's simply not a materialist thing to do. If anything it's liberal shit, and we hate those smug pricks even more than right wingers do. Its just that they can't tell the difference between liberals and the left.
This has been my long-winded way of saying you'll be fine. Fascist propaganda works by evoking strong emotions of fear and outrage, and those little mental barbs stay for a while after you leave. As long as you don't actively reinforce them, those thoughts do fade. Remember first that you and other people are the same being, "separated" only by social context and lived experience. The same liquid poured into different glasses. Love yourself, for you are everyone. Love everyone, for they are you. Welcome to a better place, you're a comrade now.
Yeah liberals really do fucking represent the left and it's simply the god damn worst
Don;t read diamond, he's an ornithologist working his way through anthropology.
It's not that it's hard to "get into" the left, it's that getting a solid and productive understanding of the world, history, politics, praxis, etc.. takes a lot of energy and time because it has to be learned and practiced, and because in our western world we have to unlearn a lot of things as well. It's exercise and it takes time.
Legitimately, reading theory is a great way of reconstructing a mindset, one that's learned and structured and not automatic.
I'm not sure where you should start from (there's a lot of reading lists, maybe just pick something that seems cool to start, something about the history of the US if that's your country, an easy classic from lenin.. I don't know if starting with Capital is a good idea since you actually need some theory context to understand it well), but having a solid understanding of the why could help you.
So not just "I'm a communist so I think X/Y/Z", but "I think X/Y/Z because I've been convinced by the arguments and I see the logic", if that makes sense. If philosophy is more your thing than specifically political theory, getting a proper understanding of what materialism is, what the dialectical approach is, dialectical materialism, historical materialism, and a general marxist approach to the world, could help a lot. And to go with that mindset, understanding History through a marxist mindset is a must.
Be warned, as an ex-reactionary, there are a lot of philosophical/theory dead-ends and pitfalls ahead. The paths that others took, philosophers and theorists included, is not always that clear. You have people who follow the marxist path for a while only to take a wrong turn, get lost and end up writing reactionary nonsense (like Nick Land), and there are ways of falsely understanding things in a way that only fits what you want to believe and just become a new easy dogma. Question yourself thoroughly, even marx, engels, lenin, mao, etc.. were only describing changing things and not static ones, they were wrong on things, they made mistakes. The moment you're convinced you know everything and you are right without doubt, is the moment you know with certainty that you are wrong, etc etc.
But, speaking as someone who's also kindof an ex-reactionary (a couple years down a pipeline, thankfully short), that can also give you special intuition. You can probably recognize very well certain reactionary concepts, tactics and ways of speaking if you train it. I have reactionary red-flag senses still, and I can catch myself (and others) with that intuition which helps in avoiding those pitfalls, probably better than leftists who have never been down a wrong path before and don't know how to realise it.
Oh also avoid most social-media-left circles like the plague. I mean it can be fine in moderation and good for agitation but I think it's important to remember that on twitter, youtube, or even here, people are driven to act and behave in strange ways online, ways that are often twisted and non-productive. Especially for twitter, you don't learn theory from people there, and you especially don't learn good praxis from there. Best way imo is to participate in a serious group (even an online one) with regular discussions, book-clubs, etc, and even a good org if you can.
Best of luck!
Honestly I've struggled with Marx as well but have learned a lot about dialectics from Mao, who's work is much more readily digestible.
You don't have to understand everything. Some people do and really want to dive deep, maybe you're one of those and that's cool, but most people don't need to. It's an array of things, and obviously the more you learn the better you are, but in most cases you can afford to focus on a specific topic and fill the rest with praxis and experience. Theory NEEDS to be fueled with praxis and experience anyway, otherwise you don't understand the process of how those previous marxists got to those conclusions.
Hard to say where to start on getting the basics, it's kinda wide and if I'm honest a TON of people in the leftist sphere (especially online, and even more especially on places likes twitter) don't really have that. They sort of grok it, they're better on a particular topic, a topic that directly affects them or that they've had to learn about because they can't avoid it (job, identity..), but most wouldn't really able to cite you a great definition of dialectics of whatever. And to be honest I can't either, I'm still learning and the more I read about it the more I realise how hard the topic is. That's another thing about leftist theory, it's not just "deeper", it's literally still being written constantly. So you can go back and read authors like marx, lenin and mao and understand how they saw and understood things then, but things have changed and the theory has progressed! Sometimes it's moved down wrong paths with some people, sometimes good ones (which is why it's important to link it with its context, its results, etc..), and most of the time (if we're talking about the present or really recent stuff) nobody really knows for sure who's right or wrong, we're still exploring, still testing.
I think starting from the past is easier, you can have a more "set in stone" understanding of things, then gradually read back up to now with a great understanding of the history and the gradual process of how the theory got where it is. Because depending on who you ask now, you'll still have different theories and interpretations of what materialism is, what dialectics is, etc.. especially in the philosophy realm because a ton of stuff has happened since then.
I wish I remembered the first thing I read on that path but I don't. A lot of my early understanding wasn't a particular book but a ton of discussions and articles with a lot of different viewpoints. If I just randomly grab stuff I think is good, I'd recommend stuff like https://redsails.org/, youtube channels like democracy at work (I basically only watch Prof Wolff), or like bayarea and luna oi (and a lot more in that sort of sphere of people), the affiliated discord communities can be great info-gathering places even as a lurker (like Tankie Bunker and such but your mileage may vary on discord servers). I recently read End of the Megamachine (I really liked the overall look at history through a different narrative, but from around chapter 9 it gets shit, the author has this weird an-prim angle and almost everything from the 20th century onwards is complete radlib trash), The Society of the Spectacle (very nice and important but fuck me is it annoying to read, Debord wrote in a cryptic way on purpose because he's an asshole). I'd recommend Federici on marxism + feminism she's great, and someone on hexbear recommended Beyond Pink or Blue: Trans Liberation by Feinberg and it's great too. Uuuuuh I've been reading a book on paris commune and I just finished Capital Is Dead by McKenzie Wark and I'm gonna read more from her because her stuff is fascinating and very approachable. I'm planning on reading stuff about the french revolutions, the Anti-Duhring and a book-club reading of Capital because it really is a tough read. There ya go that's all I can remember right now.
Welcome! Glad you're here, comrade.
Seconding the person who suggested the manga, it's a much easier entry point than full dense theory texts.
I'd also recommend Total Propaganda: Marxist Brainwashing for the Young and Angry by Helen Razor as an entry text. It's written in conversational language and only a couple years old so the examples are modern and easy to wrap your head around. It presents concepts in an entry point sort of way, and intends to be an introduction to a couple of basic Marxist concepts. This is the book I usually give to friends before getting them to read denser or older theory.
Edit: Sometimes podcasts are a great way to unfuck your brain about stuff too. Citations Needed is a great one that covers current events and the disingenuous ways that they're portrayed in the media. Looking at how the propaganda machine feeds into right-wing talking points really helps to understand where some of your former beliefs originally came from and how they're wrong.
If I could recommend something not as explicitly Marxist, but does a great job contextualizing economic history, I'd say go read Debt: the first 5000 years by David Graeber. It's an anthropological dive into the origins of money for a general audience. Really great writing, I found it an enjoyable read. It does all of the connecting to other people's writing for you.
I don’t intend to post here very often until I’ve done some serious learning and self-reflection for obvious reasons.
Not necessary. I'm being honest. Hang out, ask questions and talk with people.
If you have a bad take you might get dunked on but there are plenty of people who are willing to engage in good faith.
I remember on the old subreddit before it all "clicked" for me, I said something along the lines of "we need affordable healthcare" about 1000 people called me a lib because I used the word "affordable". They were right to do so, but there were several people who took the time to talk me through their worldview.
