Sorry if this has already been discussed or if I've already told you these stories before.
I didn't radicalize until 2017 or so and was a lib until then. I was in high school in the '00s and there was only one guy there who was an out communist. He was more than an acquaintance but not a close friend. He once went through the trouble of downloading a bootleg copy of The Fellowship of the Ring for me, which would have taken like all day with the internet speeds of the time, and then he burned it onto a CD, for which I will be forever grateful. We never talked about his political beliefs together—I was a lib but always against the Iraq War (wish I could say the same for the Afghanistan War). My lib friends and I discussed his beliefs once behind his back, saying it was funny that he thought capitalism would expand across the world and then destroy itself, ha ha, how could that possibly ever happen?
When I was radicalizing in 2017 I reconnected with him and he gave me a Trotskyist book, Socialism Seriously, which I liked a great deal, even though it trash-talks the USSR within the first two or three pages. He moved to a state with more jobs and became a [member of a rare decent powerful union with good pay and benefits] and seems to be more or less a lib now, although I haven't been on FB for quite some time so I'm not sure.
Anyway, being a radical today is hard, even though to be honest it seems like it's even harder to be a liberal or a fascist ("Why is everyone around me sick, dying, or miserable all the time? They just need to work harder and smarter!"). Most of us were radicalized, if I'm correct, post-OWS or post-Bernie, so I'm curious if any of you were radicalized earlier and how things were different at the time—for instance, as terrible as the internet is, I can't recall anything resembling a communist community existing anywhere in the '00s. Leftwing websites were merely progressive at best.
both my parents were leftists, so i had no chance
for me it was more hopeful i guessWhen the Soviet Union still existed, no matter its faults, leftists worldwide still looked at it as symbol of hope. At least the USSR is still there, at least they show how capital isn't invincible.
After 1991, there was still a general hope in the air, mainly because that's simply how it felt being in a western country. Technology got better at a breakneck pace, climate activists started making victories too, like banning certain aerosols and regulating car exhaust. The 90s were a hopeful time in general, the future didn't seem to be erased yet. Doing things still felt meaningful and like history could still move forward.
Also there was a kind of sigh after the cold war. The American consciousness briefly forgot it was supposed to suppress leftists. "Communism" became more of a silly word to most people rather than conjuring instant hatred, so in weird way it actually became easier to talk about leftism.
I was a kid at the time, so for me the ‘90s was hightop sneakers, Clinton did something with Monica Lewinsky, Oklahoma City, OJ Simpson, bombing Yugoslavia, TNG reruns, Star Wars: Young Jedi Knights, and pictures of naked ladies taking half an hour to load on our Windows 3.1 PC.
I got radicalized in 2014 after moving back to South Africa, which quickly got me out of my lib phase. It was certainly something being in a different setting where Obama was hated for completely different (and actual) reasons across the Atlantic from USA. Also the wave of Palestinian+SACP activism throughout all of 2014. I also heard about "Operation Cast Lead " (over 5 years after it happened BTW) and how Israel is basically the Apartheid era's violent alcoholic racist uncle.
Death to America and guillotine the IDF with piss
guillotine the IDF with piss
I support this as long as the guillotine isn't made of piss, which strikes me as an ineffective material. I assume you mean like, piss in addition to the guillotine. Like a piss garnish.
With enough pressure, a jet of water (or piss in this case) can cut through steel also
Yeah, but the salts in the piss would quickly build up and ruin the flow, and the IDF is not a small organization, so...
11,000 cubic kilometers of piss to make Israel resemble the :ukkkraine: flag. I think I can manage.
With the power of teamwork!
And after the piss tide has receded, the land will be freshly reinvigorated with nitrates and more fertile and hospitable than ever. We can expect a huge bumper crop. :meow-coffee:
what if you froze the piss into a sharp blade using a metal mold and flash freezer
In college I was an early '00 libertarian, so legal weed gay marriage and the only function of the government was basically corporate regulations. But i went way farther than the rest the libertarians I talked to at time. I thought all corporations should be destroyed, government should only exist at small local levels with extreme controls from the citizens. I didn't have the right words to be anti capitalist as a whole but I could see the world burning and knew who to blame.
I was basically an anarchist with no theory at all. After college my rage faded to the back ground, it was always there but I didn't politically grow at all until Bernie, than it came back in full force and you fuckers bullied me into reading a hand full of books.
I thought all corporations should be destroyed, government should only exist at small local levels with extreme controls from the citizens.
I remember a Vernor Vinge short story where Earth is invaded by hyper Libertarian aliens who have banned all social structures with more than 500 people. They defeat the aliens by launching an Anti-Trust suit against them, saying that the invasion is actually an anti-competitive cartel. This succeeds and the entire alien civilisation falls apart.
From memory that's how Matt from Chapo started out. Socially 'do what you want without hurting people', economically left without thinking you're left
Ah so you're trying to summon the ancients if you're trying to find radicals pre-2011.
Ah, I see. I think if you shout "WALTER MONDALE WALTER MONDALE" in the mirror enough times you can summon an American radicalized before the 2000s.
Honestly, it's currently a good age split between how I look (often mistaken for 10 years younger) and personality (curmudgeon)
I think mid-O'Bunglers 2nd term was the tipping point. Can't say there was a particular moment where I crossed over, but I do remember tuning into Morning Joe or whatever horseshit morning show was on one morning and sitting there stunned when I had an epiphany that American politics are just a complete fucking joke. Like, why didnt i see it before? It was so obvious. Somewhere in the same timeframe I saw Oliver Stone's miniseries on modern American history and that was sort of that.
I started calling myself a socialist around the start of the Iraq War, but I was a baby idiot radlib until around 2008 when I finally read some Marx.
This is justy experience, but it was better and worse back then. Calling yourself a communist in the Obama admin would get you curiosity from most people, like oh how quaint, communists are still real? These days you're more likely to get an instant negative response from libs and chuds alike.
It was a lot worse though because of how empty and scattered everything was. Want to read some obscure theory? Here's a website run by a crank who believes Marx would have supported Israel. Want to meet up with some leftists? They're currently in a huge fight over something being too Stalinist or lifestylist. And if you're unable to find leftists, you're saddled with Democrats by default, who all believed politics were over since they had Obama in office.
Sanders for all his faults did seem to light a fire I'd never seen before. Branch offices for the DSA would go from literally 3 people to over a thousand. You started to hear more scary stories about Marxists on college campuses. Before 2016, a communist in America was a silly kind of cartoon character, someone either holding onto the past or some kind of very strange bookworm glued to tiny forums with 12 other people writing screeds about why eating oranges is revisionists. Actually I guess not that much has changed in that regard
Totally true, I was an 'anarchist' (syndicalist who liked Marx but believed anti Soviet prop still) but when talking to normies I'd call myself a communist cause if you say socialist they assume you're socdem, if you say anarchist they assume you're an idiot but when you say your a communist people would be curious and you could get a conversation going. You just gave me nostalgia I never had before.
These days the only time I get someone curious is when they've never heard the term "communist" before, which is more frequent than you'd think. It's mostly younger people. I guess there was a lapse in how much propaganda was being fed to kids, so there's a whole generation that has no negative or positive attachment to these terms
I usually get around it by trying to live by my principles and to help everywhere that I can, remember that I'm representing something greater than myself at ALL times, especially at work and really being there for my co-workers in the actual job and when grievances come up in chit chat or whatever, and then you've gotta try to cover every single base someone can ask about which takes rigorous study of a lot of topics. Luckily I've had 15 years to be ready for it.
Yeah, for a while your choices were like ANSWER coalition or the Eugene primitivist stuff. The 2000s were weird.
Called myself an anarchist since the early 90s, was into punk an DIY stuff. Always supported Cuba. Was the only person I know IRL who was against Iraq and Afghanistan. It was a very lonely time. Kind of slipped into liberalism again in time to watch the media bury Howard Dean. Very similar to what they did to Bernie. It seems libs just keep forgetting the lesson that the media can and will smother any sort of even mild reform in its infancy.
Became a ML during covid when I realized people needed to be forced to do the right thing.
Liberals cannot comprehend that their own media institutions are free from bias. They can demonize Fox News and any foreign press, but they never think too critically about their own. I think because if you admit "the news media I consume is ideologically in favor of the status quo and frequently manipulates public opinion," then you admit you've been fooled. They need to believe the smartest people are in charge, otherwise they themselves will feel stupid. And if you have material comfort, then there's no reason to challenge the status quo if you have a constant barrage of media telling you how bad "the other side" is.
I thought the revolution was on the verge of breaking out when the anti-globalization movement stopped the WTO and rioted in Seattle in 1999, and then could summon 100,000 people every few months for the next big IMF/WB/WTO meeting.... sadly this was ruthlessly crushed by the forces of repression, co-optation, and sabotage. classic divide and conquer and it worked. they got lucky that 9/11 happened right around the same time (or they did it as a "break glass in case of emergency" action when they saw they were getting their asses whooped and the movement was growing) and it gave the ruling class way more power and sympathy and trust than they had on 9/10/01....
then the anti-iraq war organizing gave me a little hope but it was always very liberal and shallow.
then OWS gave me some hope but it was very liberal and full of psy-ops and crazy people.
then bernie gave me some hope but it was brutally crushed by the forces of elite power.
now i just want to live long enough to see some of the evil people i despise die before i do.
Through ows I met some people that took crazy to new levels. They weren't always effective, but sometimes they really did annoy the right people. I'll take what I can get. :rat-salute:
I was an incredibly based child, there's a video out there somewhere of like 8yo me arguing for a universal debt cancellation so people could start fresh.
Then after that I went: whatever my parents were (vaguely progressive libs) -> curious PragerU/gamergate near collision -> 2016 bernard brother -> r/cth anarcho-socdem -> GenZedong novice -> enlightened Hexbear communist
Honestly young kid me was so cool, I wish I could hang out with that little dude. There was something unique and special in me that got snuffed out by life events between then and now
There was something unique and special in me that got snuffed out by life events between then and now
Same for me
When the USA went completely off the rails after 9/11. I started to look for alternatives. I was always sympathetic to communist ideals, even before then. But it was idealistic, not materialistic.
As a lib I never had a serious problem with communism. I thought all the clichés (“good in theory, bad in practice, Cuba will collapse any day now”) but knew that fascism was worse. Of course I would also encounter death counts for Stalin and Mao and didn’t question them even mentally…
The 2000 election taught me the system doesn't work when I was 9, afterward there was that whole 9/11 thing and those wars that just ended had just started as well as getting into punk music at the same time and then was an anarchist until my mid 20s when I finally read some fucking books (sorry anarchists, I got won over) and well...here I am. So yeah, it was basically 2 years after I even knew what a government was that I was radical, I also read a lot of Calvin and Hobbes as a kid
It's so uncanny having almost the exact trajectory- seeing Kosovo blend into the 2000 election blend into the Afghanistan and Iraq wars absolutely pulled me out of the spell real quick.
Calvin and Hobbes ruled.
I've been some sort of vague ancom since the early 2000s.
I had pretty high hopes for OWS. It came around right after 4chan's anti-Scientology protests won a ton of concessions, and I thought the nascent internet-based activism might be a major part of future change. In retrospect the jump from taking on a cult to taking on the banking establishment was way too much. I think it was a nearer thing than we gave it credit for though; if there had been a few rounds of bigger and bigger wins between those, I don't think the media establishment would've been ready to fight back against a more fully-fledged internet-based protest culture.
The Sanders campaign was a weird time. I saw him as just a reformist socdem presidential candidate with revolution-themed marketing. Not all that different from if Elizabeth Warren had hired whatever marketing firm Apple was using in the 90s. It was so strange watching people treat him as if he was a true revolutionary figure. Heck I'm probably still going to get flamed in the comments here by people who still want to view him as a fallen martyr, instead of someone who goes to work every day and has lunch with all the mass murderers instead of bringing a gun.
The post-Sanders growth of the online left has been good though. There's a lot more discussion and resources out there now, the ideas are more visible. This era is what took me from some sort of vague ancom to some sort of hyper-specific type of ancom.
Sanders was never going to be our savoir but he did make an excellent martyr. After both primaries I was able to talk to libs who would have likely never moved left of him on their own and be like "look the dems don't give a fuck about what the people want, they'd rather lose than have to give us free health care and education" I think Bernie getting shafted woke a lot of people up to how absolutely corrupt the US political system is. So yeah as politician not great but definitely a useful martyr.
Bernie sux but many of us are what we are at least partly because of him. He can have an easier assignment at the gulag once the revolution succeeds.
