First off, sorry for the troll post earlier. I was copying things I saw liberals actually say that I thought were extreme and evil. Sometimes I have trouble conveying sarcasm online.
I have been a fence sitting progressive type my whole life. I disliked the dems but still supported them every time. I didn't get to vote (ballot issue and I left the country). Done with this shit since last night. They claim they can be racist and screw poor people because it makes them more electable. It's a lie. Socialism all the way. And not that bitch-loser progressive dem-soc or whatever tf. I want it all baby. Eat the rich. Equality/equity for EVERYONE is the only way we can survive (in terms of elections AND the world).
Much love to y'all, fuck kamala, fuck biden, and fuck trump. fuck bernie too for not trying to run even if he wouldnt have won and for supporting the genocide for far, far too long.
To anyone reading this was there one thing that changed you or was it a long term thing?
Still my go to to start deprograming the liberals in my life who have a heart.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Next stop on the big beautiful comrade train is reading Blackshirts and Reds by Parenti!
+1 for Blackshirts and Reds.
Reading it in my mid-30s even after having considered myself a leftist my whole adult life still made a major impact on how I view the world.
Bernie getting ratfucked threw me into the arms of Marxism. up until then i was a recently reformed former left-libertarian to social democrat.
watching other left parties getting ratfucked around the world reinforced this. we weren't going to be allowed to vote in even the mildest, weakest, most squishy social democratic reforms. we would not be allowed anything besides cold, hustle-grind neoliberalism or white-hot, frothing fascism.
i'm still pretty uneducated i have read only snippets of theory but absorb everything i can. ADHD sucks. i need a reading nook
so yeah i finally saw the lightFor me it was a slow burn. After Trump won in 2016 I expected the Dems (and their equivalent in other western countries) to get serious about opposing the right. Clearly there was no time to be dicking around playing nice with fascists.
But they didn't get serious, they continued business as usual, they were more concerned with civility than helping people. They were so weak at protecting people from the wrath of republican policy. As I became more and more annoyed with liberals being nice to the devil, I found the dirtbag left and breadtube (feel free to mock me) and was relieved to find places where people at least had the gall to at least provide a real vocal resistance to the right other than "Trump says uncouth things sometimes and has tiny hands." It was so dire that people saying "Yo fuck these assholes and here's the material reasons why." Was a breath of fresh air.
Then the 2020 primaries rolled on by and it looked like Bernie was going to be a decent response to the facism boiling up. He was the compromise. He was still part of the system, but at least he wanted to provide things that would actually materially help people, like healthcare, education and taxing the wealthy oligarchs. He was popular, his policies would improve lives and show people that socialism can work. He was winning in polls, and then the entire Dem party joined together to make sure that didn't happen. We got Joe fucking Biden instead and four more years of neoliberal capitalism driving people to the far-right. Corbyn in the UK had been ratfucked in a similar way by the neoliberals earlier, being branded an anti-Semite for addressing Israels colonialism. So for me the it became clear that there is no way the current system will ever let good things happen. They will continue to drag the world towards economic and ecological collapse and will do anything to keep it that way. They do not play fair and they have all the power.
And then COVID happened and they let millions die to make sure the oligarchs stayed rich, any illusion that the powers that be have a soul and can be swayed by reason dissolved. The rulers of the west are sick, brainwashed and heading to an early grave and nothing will convince them to change. There is no reason with people that can allow what happened to happen.
That was the the thing that got me fully radicalised I think.
For me it was Shaun. I was a lib already but in mostly conservative circles so I felt like I was a reasonable left wing person, but Shaun's videos breaking down a lot of the right wing narratives and assumptions I had been given for how things work started me down the path reexamining the stuff I thought.
I read The Jungle 20 years ago for a book report, and the "fun trivia" about how it was actually about socialism but it got conveniently misinterpreted to only be about food safety, that planted a seed in my brain that never left.
Dems jerking themselves raw at McCain's funeral was the thing that finally pushed me out of liberalism, and there was only one direction I could go. Capitalism was the real meatgrinder all along.
For me it was finding hexbear in late september of 2023... those were radicalizing times if there were any
Welcome comrade
To anyone reading this was there one thing that changed you or was it a long term thing?
Both really, it was a long term of becoming more radicalized by maturing, learning, and understanding the world better, but seeing what everyone had to say on October 7th and what was about to follow is something that accelarated that process very quickly.
I remember it pretty distinctly. While I was an arch-conservative shit up until high school, by the end of high school/undergrad I identified as an unironic social democrat. It was the pathetic Democrat/liberal response to the murder of Michael Brown and Ferguson protests, and the subsequent Black Lives Matter movement, that led to me to some sort of communist belief. I would say the next big push was the histrionic lib/lib-left response to Jan 6th, which again pushed me from a wishy-washy compatible leftist to a more principled Marxist-Leninist belief system.
There are non-Marxist socialisms and socialists that wouldn't call themselves communists.
thanks I'm a marxist at this point I don't care about labels. Lenin and Engels were right.
Solidarity forever, comrade! Educating yourself on theory is a long road without an end. We will always have new developments to understand and synthesize with marxism. It is at least as important to get into organizing in community with comrades. We learn through the struggle and grow stronger and develop our real-world capacity to resist the forces of capital and build alternatives by doing it.
And you don't need to have mastered ML theory before you hold a sign, go to a party meeting, join a strike line, show up at a protest, work with a community organization, etc. I think a lot of us in the heart of the beast experience some amount of imposter syndrome. Don't let that stop you from starting to work! The world's gonna burn and capital is gonna become increasingly more desperate and incapable of managing the contradictions during its decline. We've got a lot to do, glad to have you on the side of humanity's future.
It was a slow burn for me.
The first major turning point was Obama's assassination of Anwar al-Awlaki, and the way that liberals just accepted it and moved on. I had an understanding of liberalism as fundamentally being the good guy protagonists of the story of America, and I could not square the circle in my head. It was the beginning of a major reorientation in my mind about whether the actions of the Obama administration really matched up with the professed values on the liberal movement.
The second major turning point was working in a really heavy industry factory job during the late Obama and early Trump years. I worked with a lot of people from very different backgrounds from me, and it really made me face my own internalized bigotries about people from rural areas, and those with a lot less education than I had. I think it finally helped me exorcise the remnants of shitty techbro libertarianism in my soul and actually try to become a better, more compassionate person.
If you are compassionate, and you are curious, you inevitably end up discovering certain things about the world
To anyone reading this was there one thing that changed you or was it a long term thing?
A long term thing but I would say, that while I understood the need for revolutionary socialism and cultural progressivism, I never really understood anti-western leftist, let alone communist foreign policy until I read an unequal exchange study by Jason Hickel, 1990-2015)
Something something the West drains lots of resources, energy, and labor from the Global South, through trade agreements, and uses it as the economic basis of capitalism as their lifestyle... this is the legacy of western colonialism
Also, something about 750+ U.S military bases globally, dollar domination, IMF structural adjustment agreements (debt traps), and so on
Show
I was pretty politically oblivious until high school around the time of things like occupy wallstreet. Somehow ended up in socialist* spaces on facebook,.
*was also in progressive lib/socdem spaces, so I wasn't particularly differentiating at the time. Honestly couldn't tell you how much I'd still support the candidate I voted for in 2012 (one of the socialist 3rd party candidates). Just that it was seemed better than what the dems and greens or justice had to offer.
Guess it was the failure of "Hope & Change" in 2008-2012 that led to the movements that made me pretty anti-democrat, but I never believed in that hope & change; was simply unaware politically before. But it wasn't like some discrete event.
