Working jobs where I had to count the nightly deposit and it was 3x the biweekly pay of the whole staff despite corporate doing diddly squat in the running of the store is what radicalized me. Turns out you pick up the Labor Theory of Value real quick once you've lived it.
Likewise, I'm willing to disbelieve the official government position and the mainstream media because they proved themselves untrustworthy. The Iraq War dispelled any illusion I had that these people would tell the truth, and learning about things like the government's interventions in other countries and in the country's own social movements for racial equality in the 60s or wealth redistribution in the 2010s made me realize that their interests were directly opposed to my own. Though it wasn't until I had a proper materialist grounding with a Marxist education that I was able to look objectively and critically at international relations.
Watching the coup in Bolivia shook me of any SuccDem liberalism I still had in me. Peaceful transition will never be allowed
I was a hardcore lib in the bush era because of the daily show, air america etc. I knew that something was wrong with our system but I didn't have the words or the time to articulate it. I eventually transitioned in the Obama era and, like many trans people, the experience made me question everything around me. I got really into Bernie Sanders and volunteered on his campaign. (Critiques aside, I will say that Sanders was a fantastic Lib to Left pipeline and a majority of my friends are moving to communism, and having discussions about communism, who never would have before)
I decided to look into Karl Marx because I knew -of- communism, but I realized I didn't know much about the ideology itself beyond red scare propaganda.
I started reading Capital (well, skimming and looking at spark notes) and the communist manifesto. Then it clicked- all the problems he was describing weren't just the way "the world was" our problems are systemic. While things like "Air America" critiqued events and individuals, they did not get to the root of our problems. Why do we have to live in a system where people can't get homes? Why do we have to produce piles of literal garbage for our economy to function? Why do we have to work our assess off for the benefit of corporations? What kind of a world are we, as a society, striving for? Is this really a world I want to help build?
I've only gotten more radical as time has gone on and I'm now a full blown tankie.
I genuinely believe that organized violence is the only outcome of Neoliberal policy at this point- not because I want to participate in it, but because capital has blocked off all other alternatives. When a system causes mass violence and death it's only a matter of time before people will violently turn against the system itself.
But yeah, there is my disjointed ramble about radicalization.
I am certain that there are people here who are more informed and articulate than me who can discuss this, but I'll give my armchair take.
There is not going to be one, singular, event that breaks the system down. The struggle is exponential, and with every event the system will erode further as the contradictions of capitalism increase.
Yes, the state outlasts those protests, but not without getting damaged. BLM for example. Thanks to BLM cops were exposed and continue to be exposed for their crimes.
Now my region is struggling to hire cops. No one wants to be a cop because if you become a cop, you will get ostracized from the community. This is a WHITE community! And this is happening in the entire region. Police, an apparatus of the state, are losing their grip. This is erosion in real time.
As long as capitalism causes humans to suffer the violence will increase. If masses of people can't afford to have a place to live, they will kill their landlords. If people can't eat, they will kill the rich and eat them.
It is the job of the average communist to present alternatives to the status quo so when the state does inevitably fail, it isn't replaced by fascism.
Most westerners think those places are awful, despite never having set foot there. Most of the world was neutral.
There's a link posted here recently showing the video of the guy on Tiananmen. The tank stops, they talk and he walks away unharmed. But nobody is denying that there were skirmishes in other parts of the city. What's left out of the story is that the CIA was arming one group of protestors expecting them to perform a coup.
In the same way, nobody is denying that there was a famine in Ukraine. What we oppose is the literal nazi narrative that it was an intentional genocide targeted towards Ukrainians, when other parts of the union were worse affected.
I've seen a lot of posts denying white genocide, what made people go to such lengths?
What radicalized me was a protest against nazis when the police showed their true colors. I read what I thought was respectable liberal media whitewashing events I witnessed with my own eyes, and after that I couldn't trust anything they say anymore. I'm not saying that journalists are evil, they're just lazy and understandably cowardly. They ask the police what happened and why and then just print that without any criticism or opposing perspective.
Edit: found the video (the comments there also answer your questions)
Went to israel, they showed a military tech presentation and bragged about having a strip of landmines and facial recognition technology, which was enough cognitive dissonance alongside a 104 fever days later for some good ol ego death
As for my opinion on actually existing socialism, it was learning about their historical context. It's easy to criticise with 2020 hindsight and the comfort of your chair. I still have criticisms and yes socialist nations should be held a higher standard. And you also have to mind who you are talking to, focusing on the criticisms makes little sense if talking to a lib who is only gonna agree on that.
Just seeing shit go down during covid and BLM and liberals doing nothing but making things worse. Their uncaring-while-pretending-to-care attitude disgusts me to no end. They did nothing to stop the conservatives, and will sacrifice us all on the altar of capitalism just for their meager comforts. So I looked around and saw they hated communists and the soviet union, and dedicated myself to becoming the thing they fear most: a real, unapologetic, communist.
Yeah, and a bunch of other stuff I don't want to talk about, but pure rage can be useful
Communist family doing communist things for as long as communism has been a thing. My parents raised me with Marxist philosophy in mind.
Not a particularly interesting story compared to everyone else.
Do you have writings or stuff about what they did to ensure they enstilled those values in you? I love hearing about that so let me know if you could share
Some of the stuff they did:
They had a whole wall of the house that was filled with books, like, a quarter of those were works of left wing literature of various tendencies. When I started being taught about politics on school, they encouraged me to read from these books to get a more balanced view on leftist ideologies.
Whenever they talked to me about history, they did it with a materialist framework and did their best to avoid instilling any idea of "great man theory" in my conception of the past.
I remember distinctly the last time a labour canvasser knocked our door, because my dad told him exactly what he thought of the local MPs imperialist voting record.
They'd make sure to take me and my siblings with them when they went to protests.
This is great! Thank you for sharing. I hope to have kids in the future and want to learn about other’s experiences with teaching them about left wing politics as I have seen many parents not enstill their values properly. Thank you again for sharing!
Having a family member that defected to the ussr in the 80s and her stories of actually living under communism humanised the USSR to me a lot, I never really saw them as evil when I was a liberal just as a place that existed and then stopped existing. Idk, I'm too tired for a big write up rn but I think the humanisation of the ussr was what meant that I never saw them as this great evil force like many other newly "radicalised" westerners do (and, to a lesser degree did at the time)
Also seeing Corbyn hounded out of power and being coupled by the liberal elements of his own party that would rather throw away the election than risk winning with a "far left" leader
Bernie's 2020 campaign seemed promising, and then he undermined his own aides that criticized Joe Biden's corruption, refused to acknowledge his dementia, and actively refused to tap into the deeper energy of the movement itself. We basically watched everyone get grifted into financing his campaign, and then he turns around and humiliates all his supporters by surrendering them to Biden's campaign, handing the DNC a decisive victory and a devastating, demoralizing defeat to all those who still believed in electoralism.
Understanding that I had no horse in this race, I abandoned electoralism, but an ever-increasing hunger for justice continued to fester. I saw that the established political, financial, judicial, educational and informational institutions were all unanimously engaging in the dirtiest tactics imaginable to undermine working class interests and harm its people.
Seeing the use of force used by the state time and time again, endlessly, just blew up the narrative that peaceful transition is possible and that force was an illegitimate means to achieve enforcement of class interests. Thus, anarchism seemed far more appealing so that was my next stop on the political pipeline. I was pissed off, and wanted physical justice for the harm that's being done to the working class and the planet itself. Having such a limited window to reverse the trend of climate change even further cemented this inevitable radicalization because the threat of extinction calls for more radical praxis than what "democratic socialists" were willing to accept.
After the worst of the anger and venting subsided, I just thought to myself "Well, what the hell. The worst bogeymen the US ever talked about (China, DPRK, Cuba, etc etc) couldn't possibly be any worse than the shit I have to deal with here. They lied to me about everything else, so let's go meet the big bad bogeyman that is China"
I watched a few videos from the channel "Living in China" like this one here: CHINA... is it as SAFE as People Say? 中国... 真如人们说的这么安全吗？Unseen China 🇨🇳
My entire foundational understanding of what I believed about the world was completely shattered and turned upside down in real-time during videos like this. I had absolutely no answers and nowhere to look for a better world, and here it was in one of the countries most hated and vilified by the US.
Since I had felt infinitely betrayed by my upbringing in the US, I took the next logical step and investigated the ultimate bogeyman of them all: The Communist Manifesto Audiobook
I was basically finally handed the keys to understanding how all these millions of issues I've encountered in my life were connected: class and class conflict
From here, it was impossible to go back and there was nothing the US could ever do or say that would put the blinders back on. I arrived at my final political destination of being a Marxist-Leninist and fully accepted class war as fundamental and revolution as the only possible path forward (yes, that means the use of force).
The rest, is history and here I am after over a year later.
the main things that concern me about China are all the censorship and control of information
Facebook Targets Cambodia's Prime Minister: A Lesson in Securing Information Space
Rule of Law-Internet Court: New Rules for a New Era
Democracy in China
China Says Democracy Is Not A Single Flavor Coca-Cola WorldwideThe Great Firewall of China is meant to keep the US out, not its people in. VPNs are perfectly legal, and the people can decide for themselves if they want to see the Western side of the internet. A lot of the people who do simply go back inside the Great Firewall to shield themselves from all the lies and hysteria of the West. In fact, that's something we all want. We're here on Lemmy instead of hostile places like Reddit, right?
China's censorship of the internet is mainly for things like pornography, and also speech aimed at destabilizing the country's political legitimacy. The point is to encourage healthy social trends and protect their people from US interference in China's internal affairs.
The latter I'm talking about issues like Taiwan, which is an island province of China and an inalienable part of its territory. There is only one China, and Taiwan is part of China.
There is only one legitimate government of all of China (Taiwan included), and that is the Communist Party of China headquartered in Beijing of the People's Republic of China.The US has been trying time and time again to break up countries into smaller pieces using separatism, racism, religious extremism and various other insidious tactics to divide and destroy a people.
This happened in Hong Kong (separatism: 29 defendants in Hong Kong plead guilty to subversion: HK court), it happened in Xinjiang province (religious extremism), and it's currently happening in Taiwan (separatism).The US wants to break up China into smaller pieces and destroy it because quite frankly, the US cannot possibly compete with the technological and industrial behemoth at this stage in the game. China is taking over the US as the world's most relevant country for progress in all respects, and the US is doing everything it can to undermine its legitimacy and all of its industry (sanctioning and trying to sabotage China's semiconductor industry) because it's trying to save its dying empire.
A well known effort to try and smear China as this totalitarian bogeyman is the infamous "social credit system". You can see a video about it here: China's "Social Credit Score System" - Fact or Fiction?
You can watch this video here to learn more about the Taiwan issue: What is Behind the Growing US-China Crisis Over Taiwan?
Even nations around China are being targeted because the US wants to establish more and more military bases and an ever-increasing military presence around its borders to destroy the country.
See this video here: US-backed Terrorism Targets Vietnam & Myanmar in Wider War on ChinaEDIT: wait I just realized, in a lot of places there is no visible homelessness because the police just kicks them out, I'm not sure if that's the same for China...
Searching for HOMELESS People in China 中国的流浪汉在哪？Unseen China 🇨🇳
Apartment Tour in China | What can $300 a month get you? 🇨🇳
President Xi inspects poverty alleviation achievements in SW China (2019)
The secrets to China's poverty alleviation success (2023)The US leverages and deliberately causes unemployment to increase employer leverage and decrease worker bargaining power. The homeless are indeed chased around by the cops endlessly, to both punish the poor and also maintain the facade that poverty isn't as bad as it is in reality (out of sight, out of mind). Homelessness is also basically fatal, especially with the increasing extreme heat causing more and more climate casualties.
China, on the other hand, has been actually helping people directly with tangible results and efforts to reverse and even eradicate the trend of poverty.
China is not only doing this for their own people, but expanding the development to other nations who want to benefit, in a mission to bring the entire world out of poverty in a shared future for humanity.
See this video here: 'Reality Check': China's BRI geopolitical gambit or project of the century?The US empire has no clothes. It deliberately causes and maintains the highest possible levels of poverty not only within the US, but also outside the US in places like Latin America and Africa, because desperate people are much easier to exploit. It has no credibility, and no future on this planet. It will continue to decay and eventually die for the benefit of humanity and all life on this planet.
censoring porn is pretty regressive to me and doesn't really solve anything, as proved in Japan
This statement is made in a vacuum without historical context, so I will try my best to provide it.
Japan historically was an imperialist country, and colonized territories in East and Southeast Asia. Most notably China and Korea. The Japanese imperialists committed unspeakable acts against the Chinese and Korean peoples, but most relevant here is forcing the women of the two peoples into sexual slavery. They were called "comfort women", and were basically forced to service their imperial invaders as if they were their wives and girlfriends. This humiliation was devastating and extremely traumatizing, and Japan has a very grave responsibility to the peoples subjected to it. To this day, Japan hasn't apologized for their crimes against humanity. History books were re-written deliberately leaving out just how serious the offenses of Japan were in the Second World War.
You may not know much about China right now, which is why you'd say that you don't think censoring pornography would "really solve anything", but you should know enough about Japan for what I'm about to say next to make sense. Japan hyper sexualizes its women. Patriarchy is still a big problem in Japan, and women are not treated with the same level of respect as men. Japan also has some of the most horrendously abusive and outright disgusting pornography in existence, not to mention the age of consent in Japan has been 13 years old for a long time. You may not think much of this, but a nation's use of art reflects the characteristics of the nation itself, which should tell you something about how a lot of Japan sees its women.
Japan has also been under US dictatorship since the end of WWII after they dropped two nukes, one on Hiroshima and the other on Nagasaki. A blatant flex at the Soviet Union, using Japan's own civilian population to make that statement. The ruling party in Japan right now is the Liberal Democratic Party, which was created by the US and remains subservient to it. All liberal parties, especially those under US dominance always trend fascist. Thus, the country is hyper-capitalist and worker exploitation is severe. People's living conditions continue to decay and people get less for their money the longer it goes on. Take a look at all the broom closet and school locker sized apartments in Japan. People don't have reliable opportunity to escape poverty because the working class have not been in power to develop the country to serve their interests. Thus, naturally, desperate people, especially women, turn to pornography to make faster money because sexual exploitation is immensely profitable.
China, as I have hopefully helped you to understand, has been following the exact opposite trend of Japan. They've pulled over 800 million people (more than twice the population of the US) out of poverty with their government's policies and guidance under the CPC, which is a working class party. People actually have much more plentiful and healthy opportunity to be prosperous because the CPC, with the support of its people, has cultivated the most advanced, most educated and most upwardly mobile society on planet Earth. They did this in no small part to resisting unhealthy social trends like hedonism. Pornography causes addiction, and lowers the quality of cognitive function massively over time. The Chinese people treat pornography just like a drug, and China actually was a victim of opium thanks to the British Empire and other Western powers, which came to be known as a big player in the century of humiliation. China does not tolerate drugs because drugs were forced on and crippled their population. For pornography, it's the same, in addition to the historical scars and trauma and humiliation of its people being sexually exploited as "comfort women" back then. Because opportunity is so plentiful in China, especially so in the STEM fields, it makes little sense to pursue a career in sexual exploitation. They even dress a lot more conservatively, in a conscious effort to not sexualize their people. Women would rather be engineers and do something productive that helps build up the country than make their living on their backs. Who would've thought.
China's censorship of pornography makes sense, given the historical context provided. Porn isn't just censored in terms of mosaics, it's outright banned and illegal in the country. This is why I say history matters and does not expire. They have arguably the healthiest population on Earth, and are by far the most productive given the national conditions of their country.
Like in my other response, I urge you to go back through and watch all the videos I provided you.
Did you patiently watch all the videos I provided in my response? If not, I strongly encourage you to make time to do so as much of what you had trouble grappling with was already addressed therein.
I would like to have constructive conversation, but there are things you just need to see for yourself to really get the full picture, hence providing those video resources. They are all information dense and provide much needed context to why I said the things I said. What we absolutely must understand is that concepts of "independence" and technological competency and literacy do not exist in a vacuum. They are not neutral in the world of geopolitics. History matters and, more importantly, history does not expire. We have a responsibility to know how we got here, so we can make an informed and responsible decision about where to go from here.
I urge you to go back through and watch every video in order, and then re-read the text part of my statement. The videos themselves can also be considered intertwined with the rest of my comment.
It's all right, I understand. I know you're here in good faith and just trying to learn. I checked your profile and its description early on, so I'm doing what I can to accommodate your needs.
When you feel ready and have caught up on everything I provided, I look forward to speaking with you again. In the meantime, take care of yourself
because realistically speaking only very few people relative to everyone else will even know what a VPN is.
You spend too much time talking to techies who think they're super special people who are the only ones smart enough to touch computers. Everyone knows how to use a VPN. A working VPN is was the first result on Baidu when I tried to use one last time. Boomers who are afraid to update their computer know what Tor is. And even besides that there are plenty of times I've seen articles from western news media posted in China, usually consumed by the local libs. Who do you think the NYT Chinese version is for? Chinese diaspora don't read the NYT enough to justify them having a Chinese version of like half their articles, it's for Mainland Chinese liberals. Chinese people know about and complain about DW, BBC, NHK, CNN etc because we can read the articles and see the shit they pull (for example a big meme is when DW published some article about China and the title said "human fork" instead of "human rights" in Chinese, or the time the BBC published an ominous photo of the WIV (with a grey filter) and another photo of the BBC photographer having to to lay in a ditch to take the photo came out).
Ultimately in the 21st century access to information doesn't matter as much as having a population that actually is capable of consuming information. In the west people are trained to ignore everything that goes against the narrative as propaganda. The average westerner can not name a single Chinese social media site or news publication. They cry shill and propaganda followed by some racial slurs any time they encounter Chinese people online.
I have to say, from what I understand it's the nations themselves that petition US bases
Okinawa/Ryukyu has regular protests against US military bases. The people there do not want a US military base. It's so bad I even saw a Ryukyu nationalists cringily try to cozy up to China.
this is probably a really intense issue here but I honestly just don't really agree... I don't think a country is entitled to invade land just because it previously held it
You do realize that Taiwan officially considers itself the "Republic of China" and the legitimate government of not just China but also Mongolia right? Even Tsai Ing-Wen calls herself Chinese when giving campaign speeches. The whole Taiwanese identity thing is an idpol ruse by the DPP. Those same "taiwanese" will go on long rants about how they're the only real Chinese and all mainlanders are "yellow russians" right after yelling slurs about various northern Chinese minorities/Taiwanese aboriginals. If you can read Chinese they're all over social media. This also ironically leads to the 2% aboriginal Taiwanese population voting for the pro-China party. The funny thing is these people drop the act immediately when they sense they're about to get hatecrimed abroad. I personally knew a guy who went out of his way to call himself Taiwanese and make fun of mainlanders until Asian hate crimes started happening, then he started posting about how he was Chinese and had Chinese flags all over his social media.
This is in contrast to places like Singapore, which are majority ethnically Chinese but have an actual legitimate national identity, instead of whatever crazy shit the DPP does. Again if you can read Chinese you can easily see the difference between well adjusted Singaporean vs. Deranged DPP supporters on social media(look up 1450 army, every liberal accusation is an admission of guilt).
because realistically speaking only very few people relative to everyone else will even know what a VPN is.
Sorry for the misgendering.
people living in taiwan don't want to be a part of china
About half of them vote for the pro-reunification party(KMT), the other half are the Chinese equivalent of white supremacists(DPP) who champion the Taiwanese identity stuff. They don't legitimately believe in Taiwanese identity, they hate the mainland because there's too many ethnic minorities/ the culture and language is "tainted" by ethnic minorities. You act as though thinking they are the real China is some facade, it's not, that is their core belief, especially the ones who talk loudly about Taiwanese identity because the whole point is that Taiwanese are the real Chinese and everyone else is impure.
I'm sorry but I honestly don't care for the DPP's Southern Han Supremacist bullshit. I personally believe peaceful reunification is inevitable as the KMT gain power again, but it is immoral to allow the DPP to remain in power. I would hope that if there was a white supremacist confederate holdout next to America that Americans would be against its existence.
Nobody really cares about land. That's some weird projection. Mongolia used to be a part of China but the only ones who want to invade it are the Taiwanese(guess why, hint hint.). It's about having a bunch of weirdo fascists who believe they're the rightful inheritors of China and that everyone else is culturally/ethnically impure. The DPP could be floating in a shipping container in the middle of the ocean and it would be the same calculus.
The KMT has pivoted to pro-reunification once it became clear they wouldn't be able to retake the mainland. Obviously a party that calls itself the "Chinese Nationalist Party" are Chinese first and anti-communist second. The irony is that if they were able to reign in the racist tendencies of the DPP most mainlanders wouldn't care about reunification in the first place.
You mean those 996 schedules that were outlawed in '21? What protests?
It would surprise me if it was Huawei. Huawei is largely owned and democratically controlled by its workers, remarkable in its structure even for an AES country like China and one of very few large firms of this kind in the world (this is why the Failed States tries so hard to smear and destroy it, harder than say for example Xiaomi, which is publicly traded and subject to the whims of capital). If you are talking about pushback from software firms maybe you are thinking of eg. Tencent or Alibaba, which are publicly traded.
The CEO does have more shares than most but more or less it follows that model. It really is quite amazing, learning about it was a bit of a revelation for me.
https://www.huawei.com/my/facts/question-answer/who-owns-huawei
There's a reason America hates it and wants it destroyed.
All that aspirational talk you hear about industrial democracy from the "libertarian" left in western countries? Yeah that actually concretely exists. In "authoritarian" China. On the scale of companies that can go toe to toe with fucking Google and win.
Of course they will tell you Huawei is evil.
Also also this is a big reason why the Failed States is so hellbent on stifling the development of Chinese microelectronics. Imagine if it got out that really, China is the democracy, a country of free citizens of democratic firms battling a hegemonic empire representing the divine right of modern despotic kings, the private shareholders. The ones who demand starvation, immiseration, the blood sacrifice of layoffs to satisfy their demented fucking god, the capital market.
Of course this is not to say that all Chinese firms are like this or that China is perfect. But please understand, unlike the Failed States, China is trying. China is constructing socialism with communism as an aspirational goal. And China has been forced by the Failed States and international market forces to cede ground in various ways regarding even its internal structure. But how are we, from outside, from countries that are not even trying, to judge any of this too harshly?
In China, Huawei can exist. You don't see it in California.
It's a hard problem when, as you can clearly see even reading western news, companies like Huawei are uniquely targeted by international trading partners like the Failed States and its subject nations with sanctions and boycotts. For example, it had to spin off its smartphone brand Honor and reform it as a capitalist company so it could continue selling phones in the west with Google enabled. This was a terrible sacrifice but they did it to keep the people working in that division employed.
The great virtue of the existing Chinese state is that it allows for firms like this to exist, and it is demonstrable that, like in the old cliche a nation of free people can beat a nation of slaves, a company of free people can beat a company of slaves, even in the arena of the market that capitalists worship. The state pushing for it is hardly required, the state only needs to allow its possibility. Unfortunately China exists in a world of states hell bent on preserving the notion that democracy will always lose to dictatorship in market competition, and they manipulate the rules of the game to make it seem that way.
To offer a small partial answer to your question though, learning about Huawei and the fact that such a firm was able to exist in China while so relentlessly attacked by the Failed States of America and its imperial subjects, the profound difference between the reality one discovers about this specific company and the propaganda, is a big reason I personally have a positive view of the modern Chinese state.
EDIT: wait I just realized, in a lot of places there is no visible homelessness because the police just kicks them out, I'm not sure if that's the same for China...
I've had anti-CCP liberal Chinese people unironically ask me "why are there so many homeless in America, why can't they just go back to their home villages and receive government assistance". These are people who will complain about the CCP 24/7 and Idolize America. That interaction was my wake-up call.
Mostly a lurker here and not in the mood to go into detail, esp since it gives away too much personal info, but it's been a painful, fumbling 20+ year process to get to this point. For a tiny bit of context, I come from a different class bg (specifically, one of my parents did) than most of Hexbear, and I'm also in the upper half of the age range. Also not white.
Let me just put it this way. It starts with trivial inconsistencies that you notice in your day-to-day life. Things as simple and seemingly innocuous/"apolitical" as the way society talks about your culture vs. your actual lived experiences. One by one, these tiny hypocrisies and contradictions start piling up. Small lies or even "innocent" misconceptions from trusted authority figures, from textbooks, from people you love and care about, people you don't want to doubt. It is madness inducing. Just an endless cycle of disbelief, disgust, confusion, undirected anger, denial.
Eventually there came a point where I just couldn't paper over the cracks anymore. Also, the older I get, the more I realize just how damn much I don't actually know -- and how confident I was in my own ignorance at many points in my life. Once it's obvious just how many lies you've been exposed to your entire fucking life, all you can think of is "what else?"
tl;dr the "radical" left was the only place offering sober, logically coherent analysis of the state of the world and honestly, after COVID any last lingering doubts I may have had were utterly demolished.
Once it's obvious just how many lies you've been exposed to your entire fucking life, all you can think of is "what else?"
This is exactly where I'm at right now.
And 100% yes about being the only place with logically coherent analysis, I'll never forget the feeling of the world starting to make sense for once.
Bernie Sanders and working a Real Job pushed me toward democratic socialism, and then I did this thing called "read theory" (actually it was history books, not abstract theory, that made me the most radical)
sure does! If I had known earlier what the us and eu countries had been up to in the third world for centuries and what a scam their "democracy" is, I would have skiped my lib phase.
We all have our stories of coming face to face with the reactionary forces dominating our culture, unfortunately. I'm sorry you had to go through that - I've definitely dealt with my fair share of bigotry from my family so I can relate.
In a word: liberals
They just became so god damned insufferable during the 2020 election that I needed to find something else, then I found
