What leftist tendency were you previously, and what are you now, and what was the main thing that made you change your views?
Libertarian socialist -> read Lenin -> figured out what vanguard do -> ML
This is probably true but I don't read theory so I can't be sure
Just tell me when it's time to go to the gulag
8 months hard labor building high speed rail, then 20 hour work weeks retire at 50 once you're re educated.
I initially tried to organize with SAlt but was frustrated with the way that the people they were organizing had almost no say in the direction of the organization unless they became dues paying members. It was an incredibly top down way of doing things. In reaction to this I looked into other stuff and found a lot of anarchist ideas compelling, especially anarcho-syndicalism. But when I started organizing with anarchists I found that syndicalism was too narrow a framing to explain anything actually going on on the ground. So now I'm sort of an eclectic anarchist who draws from social theory, insurrectionary and anti-civ anarchism, situationism, and Marx, who organizes with syndicalists but is also a big fan of adventurism and the cultural networks anarchism has set up to support it.
Read some Mao, he was good with the whole "the people/peasants voice their will and the vanguard's job is to organize that will into existence". At least that's how the landlord stuff happened. The peasants all agreed that they wanted to do that and the party just made it happen all at the same time so they couldn't respond.
AnSyn.
Now a Luxemburgist with heavy ML sympathies, but I don't believe tendencies are anything more than jumping off points to respond to material conditions. If a vanguard party is needed, one of the orgs trying to Vanguard will become it, if it can form directly from workers orgs that will happen.
The important thing is that the workers are as organised as possible and that there is a diversity of initial approaches to synthesize.
socdem (2014-2016 coup) -> unspecified socialist (2016 coup-> 2018) -> libertarian socialist (2018->jan 2020) -> unspecified marxist after reading the german ideology and the poverty of philosophy (jan 2020->today)
unlike most libsoc-to-marxist stories i see, it wasn't state and rev that changed my mind, nor whatever i had read from capital/18th brumaire/commie manifesto, because those didn't really clarify to me what materialism (as a method) actually meant so i couldn't call myself a marxist (and really was still an idealist without being aware of it)
once i saw marx getting into more detail on historical/dialectical materialism in those two books then it became easy
and btw, what prompted me to read more marx was china's and vietnam's responses to covid, alongside luna's yt channel. do your agitprop guys it works
I just called myself a socialist before, and now, if pressed, I guess I'd call myself a communist just because "socialist" in America is barely associated with a consistent set of baseline beliefs anymore. Identification with all these specific tendencies strikes me as the leftist version of star signs (at least online). If you're able to specify basic beliefs, accepted methodologies, and goals, and cite the literature, history, and/or personal experiences backing those up, you're golden imo.
AnSyn as a teenager -> DemSoc once I actually started following politics more deeply -> ML once Bernie lost and I Read TheoryTM
I used to be a social libertarian but I got tank pilled after learning more about the ussr.
