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.
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.
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Yeah, for a while your choices were like ANSWER coalition or the Eugene primitivist stuff. The 2000s were weird.