A 17-year-old kid started working with me, and he was talking politics with another co-worker. I was staying out of it, but then he asked me what I consider myself to be, politically. I hit him with, "I'm a pretty hardcore communist, actually." His jaw dropped and he laughed, and he was like, "No, really. What are you, actually?" When I told him that I was a Marxist-Leninist, he responded with, "Dude, that's terrible. Why?"
I'm normally not super open about my politics unless I gauge that someone is accepting to hear some theory, but I just wanted to fuck with this kid lol. I told him that the incentive for ever-increasing profits in the interest of a small group of elites is destroying the planet and exploiting people all around the world. He came back with, "You really need to read more. If you understood more about what you were saying, you wouldn't support such a violent ideology." I'm literally twice his age, lmao.
Then he asked me if I ever read 1984 :michael-laugh:
He asked what led to me becoming a Marxist. I told him that I used to be a libertarian like him when I was his age, but as I grew older and started learning historical materialism, my worldview changed.
We went back and forth a little over the next 20 minutes. I kept it cool and respectful because I wasn't super invested in debating him. But he was getting all flustered and started playing all the hits, like workers not being entitled to owning their work because the boss took all the risk. Humans are naturally greedy, so socialism could never work. Marxism is responsible for over 100 million deaths. I rebutted what I could when I felt like it, but I'm not a debate bro and I didn't really care what he had to say. I just thought the whole thing was funny.
My favorite part was his face when I told him that I don't support liberal democracy, and that a one party state is actually far superior. :che-smile:
I was really confused when I was 17 too, and I probably would have benefited from someone openly calling themselves a communist. I got primed for radicalization after receiving my first minimum wage paycheck, but had no idea where to look or what to do. I was surrounded by some goofy centrist liberals and an ocean of horrifying evangelical fundamentalist conservatives. I guess I was probably primed to become a fascist too in that same instant and maybe if I were a decade younger I could have been swept up in some online pepe meme bullshit and blamed the problems in my life on immigrants or whatever. I identified as non-binary back then, so that possibly saved me, but it might be different now.
Instead I had to do it the nerd way and read some Marx, Lenin, Luxemburg, etc. So yeah maybe you helped out that kid, or at least gave him some perspective.
I want the average American to know communists actually exist, like as an extant political ideology with leaders and worldwide movements. Because the average American thinks of communism as some kind of abstract, nonsense, extinct ideology that's best for accusing your opponents of being bad. I want to see how they'd react to organized, existing, and present communist movements who aren't ashamed.
There is so much power that exists in people just being open about it. There are shit loads of people that can be made amenable in a handful of conversations knowing that they're talking to a completely unashamed and open communist. Just hitting the 101 stuff and teaching people what class they are and how to recognise class carries you half way there.
I wonder how they’d react to CPUSA becoming something other than alphabet soup agents spying on each other
Reminder to join and contribute to your local CPUSA if you're not in an org