Personally, I was a left liberal for all my life, but had kinda looked into the abyss of anti-sjw and gamergate stuff, like watching Sargon and Bearing, but hadn't really subscribed to their beliefs, more putting them on as background chatter.

Things changed when I read manufacturing consent, listened to Chomsky and found Chapo at around the end of 2018, at which point I found myself as more an ancom, but Chomsky's talking points on Leninism and the USSR was never as cogent and didn't make as much sense as his other points, so I held skepticism about my beliefs then.

Reading more on theory and history, and looking more into different left tendencies via channels like Rev Left moved me over to be a Marxist, as it made the most sense to me in explaining the current and historical situation. Currently making my way through Lenin and looking more into historical ML states and I've found that I'm pretty comfortable as just a Marxist with ML tendencies rn.

  • Tomboys_are_Cute [he/him, comrade/them]
    ·
    4 years ago

    My path to my political present started in 2015. To that point I had been a progressive lib kid, I was from a rougher neighbourhood in Toronto but I was surrounded by well meaning people. The first scratch on my political consciousness was when Trudeau axed electoral reform. I was a nerd and was super excited for it, even though I couldn't even vote at the time. When I found out the reason it was axed (the system the Liberal party wanted (Ranked MMP) would grant them a majority forever, and the commission had said basically any other system would be better) I quickly became disillusioned with them.

    Then, during Trump's election I hadn't really kept up with the primaries beyond knowing that Sanders ran a good race and that Clinton was probably already a war criminal. I figured she still had it though and when she lost I took another blow to my political thought.

    I join the army to pay for school and suddenly I'm surrounded by different with all sorts of views. Everything from Peterson alt-right to kill-the-landlords Maoists. The training for the army in Canada is different than it is in the states, the focus is explicitly on the importance of teamwork and group discipline. That definitely helped me form my political opinions.

    Then a couple years pass, I do more school, get more army training, then one day while I'm on a temp contract I start seeing stuff on reddit about Vietnam for some reason, probably some shitpost about the Viet Kong dunking on some Americans.

    I see some people getting down voted being told to stay on Chapo and I was like "what's Chapo?" I click on it and find what becomes something of a guilty pleasure at first, seeing people wish for the deaths of billionaires and stuff. At first I thought it was too extreme but I guess as I stayed and was exposed to very different views about the world I was persuaded that they have no place in society.

    Then the Epstein story breaks and I snap from "progressive" to wanting a dictatorship of the proletariat. Back at school I'm trying to find arguments to pull people from across the country left (nationalising oil works really well on people from Alberta it turns out) and chewing out my student union for being comprised of spineless careerist libs who wouldn't touch the manifesto with a 10m pole and are literally only doing their job for their resume. I read some theory and bettered myself. Finished my degree and am not looking back.