Warning: Yapping
So basically, I'm 16. I never really said this before because I was worried about people disregarding my opinions, but after learning of a lemmygrad user who's about my age, I warmed up to sharing that fact. I guess I just forgot or something, but I'm not sure why I continued omitting that I'm a 
. Maybe I forgot. Anyway; the introduction!
I'm a queer Marxist teen from the U.S. I was exposed to the internet when I just spawned, so by like 8 years old I was watching those stupid ass "feminist debunked!!!1!!!111" videos (alt-right pipeline), but as my prefrontal cortex formed I gained compassion as well as sentience. I evolved into an 'apolitical' 'person' (I was like 11 so idk if that counts) and lived my life not really giving a shit.
An important thing to note going forward is that my parents are labor aristocrats, I won't be elaborating too much further for opsec reasons. We live in a town with a lot of wealth disparity, and many of my friends were not nearly as well off. This was always confusing as hell to me as a kid who was pretty sheltered from actual reality, and was always a point of contention with my (conservative) parents. It never made sense to me why some people had to struggle to get by and others lived lavishly, which led to me becoming really, really angry at everything.
The cognitive dissonance had apparently not infected me yet, because I still considered myself in the 'apolitical center' between democrats and republicans (
), until I came across that Second Thought video about how centrism favors the right wing. By some miracle my mind was still malleable enough at 14 to be swayed by it, and I actually changed my mind about life. An even bigger challenge to my world video was those "Why you should be a Socialist in 20XX" videos, which I at first laughed off. Eventually though, I actually watched them, and my mind actually changed! I was convinced socialism was right.
So naturally, as any dumbass 14 year old socialist does, I downloaded a PDF of Capital and gave up immediately, eventually just reading wikipedia pages about different micro ideologies and watching Hasan Piker. Now, I was still an Amerikkkan, so my anti-AES and brainworms were still deeply rooted, and my 'one of the good ones,' Stalin was ebil, brainrot led me to be a Trotskyist. I read the permanent revolution, a bit of the manifesto (I wasn't much of a reader, if you couldn't tell by me being a trot), and got very zealous. Like, VERY zealous. I almost lost some friends over it.
A year or so passed and I discovered Lemmy somehow, and ended up on .world after a while. Now, this is where the .world admins made me the most dedicated teenage marxist in bumfuck nowhere, USA. They preemptively defederated from this super extreme socialist instance, putting up such shocking takes as "NATO is bad actually" and "the USSR wasn't as bad as Nazi Germany." Even as a brainwormed usonian, I wasn't dumb enough to believe that gommulism killed 2139438905 marxillion innocent babies, and I quickly left .world to join Hexbear.
And that's it, that's my leftist story. I was corrected in most of my shitty viewpoints by other marxists and anarchists here, I began reading and shit. Yeah. I don't really know what else to say or how to end this. lmao
Thank you for making me a well read Marxist, if anyone has any questions I'll answer it, I like answering questions.
Salutations! 
tldr I'm a child
Don't forget to do lots of grass touching with friends
Its more important than reading theorythank you! i have an amazing friend group, we spend a lot of time together studying/hanging out/being queer geeks. i try to squeeze in reading theory when i can though
Thank you very much! That's high praise from one of the all-time great posters and slayer of Kissinger lol.
So naturally, as any dumbass 14 year old socialist does, I downloaded a PDF of Capital and gave up immediately, eventually just reading wikipedia pages about different micro ideologies and watching Hasan Piker. Now, I was still an Amerikkkan, so my anti-AES and brainworms were still deeply rooted, and my 'one of the good ones,' Stalin was ebil, brainrot led me to be a Trotskyist. I read the permanent revolution, a bit of the manifesto (I wasn't much of a reader, if you couldn't tell by me being a trot), and got very zealous. Like, VERY zealous. I almost lost some friends over it.
Yep, sounds like me years ago
That being said, if you are going to read a book like Capital, why not read some other shorter texts to get used to the vocab, like Value, Profit, and Wages, by Marx, and Principles of Communism, and Socialism: Scientific and Utopian by Engels (that's how I got into it, online, if you can't buy books)
Then, you take a google doc or a libre doc, copy-paste a whole chapter of Das Kapital Volume 1, or more, into one much more manageable docs to underline, take notes under, or ctrl + alt + 1, 2 etc. to bookmark it as a title or quote
(An ideal maximum to divide them would be 100 google doc pages, or less)
(Assuming you have a computer)
thanks for the suggestion! i have a pretty great library locally so i try to get books from there whenever they have stuff. i always struggle with reading on a device, the only commie books i finished have been paper and ink. though, if i get really into a specific work i'll definitely do that!
Hello nerd
If you have trouble reading texts online you can find audiobooks of most of the popular marxists books on youtube, plus Capital is a very dense book
thank you! i'm working my way through some stuff on prolewiki lists and whatnot plus some other things i was interested in specifically
I would recommend starting with simpler things than Capital. for the economics there's Wage Labour & Capital and its complimentary text Value, Price, and Profit. For the grounding and connection then to Marxist analysis of history and society, and lessons on the development and evolution of class society and emergence of capitalism and how it all relates to historical and dialectical materialism, I recommend Engels Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (and re-read the dialectics section a bunch).
Then for developing the philosophical methodology just the first chapter of the first Volume of The German Ideology (If your copy has an abridged/abstract version of the 3rd chapter of Vol 1 like this has that can be good too, but the full thing and other chapters and volume isn't really too significant for us imo, just debunking long-forgotten dead people and their now-fringe ideas; the first chapter is most important); and then maybe Marx's Philosophic and Economic Manuscripts of 1844. These would help give you some very strong philosophical grounding and connect things all together into a framework along Marxist lines of historical and dialectical materialism and class struggle as opposed to bourgeois Liberalism in its lines of idealism, individualism, and great man history; and give you the tools of Marxist methodology to analyze things today. Without the philosophical methodology, you're only stuck on the dead past and 'vulgar materialist' copy/pasting of old analyses from bygone eras as they were onto the circumstances of today, rather than accurately and critically discerning the true nature of things and the forces which make them up as they are, in the moving living unfolding present and future
From that point even without yet delving into Capital much would be opened to you. Lenin's State and Revolution and Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism would provide you no issues from this point here.
Thanks! I'm currently going through the ProleWiki starting list.
ngl thats kind of similar to me, though i came to hexbear at age 17 as a repressed gay teen stuck in a very right wing reactionary area of the UK, it was around about the time that george floyd got murdered on camera, britains left had been succesfully couped in front of our eyes and TERF stuff was really starting to take off here, generally just bleak all round. I remember posting dumb shit here, getting told it was dumb and what to read to stop being dumb, even though i dont use the site much anymore in the long run it was good for me imo.
to your credit you've always sound a lot more coherent than i did 5 years ago.
I am not a child but I was once not so long ago and would not have been half as coherent as you tbqh
At work rn but I will send the audiobook when I get home. I even have permission from the author.
Actually just check out our online library
https://mega.nz/folder/cuMwjRyK#eDPayQSdYFwaCh9qr8zzPw
