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'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.