As a recently radicalized baby-lefty I’ve been thinking about this a lot

"the idea of a “moment” of radicalization is liberalism and connotes that people need this singular moment of experience or persuasion whereby they enter the class conscious state."

fair point, just goes to show that my perspective was influenced by my own experience, thanks for pointing it out because now I'm aware :D

So I guess the real question would be "What's your personal history with leftism?"

  • kegel_dialectic [he/him]
    ·
    4 years ago

    My parents were yuppie-ish radlibs. They were devout protestants strongly concerned with social justice. Above all, they were anti-war and anti-racist, so that was a decent foundation.

    Formative anti-imperialism:

    • the lead-up to the Iraq war protests in 03/04, seeing HUGE numbers turn out. seeing cops kettle people. also got me connected to Palestinian solidarity.

    • a protest against Bush at one of his town halls. it was crazy to see his security detail he needed to keep up the straight-talkin folksy schtick. I vividly remember being shocked at seeing how big sniper rifles were in real life, and odds were they were there to be used against Americans if need be

    On Communism:

    • my younger brother studied geography in college. he was introduced to David Harvey and subsequently Marx. my brother and I had/have a great relationship, and as a left-libertarian at the time, I was very easy to convert

    Other galvanizing experiences:

    • working retail

    • having medical debt go into collections

    • having a hilarious amount of student loans that I will never be able to pay off if I want to enjoy a normal quality of life

    • serving on a jury for the first and only time at 19. I failed to cause a mistrial/nullification, and let myself be bullied into rendering a guilty verdict for crack possession against two middle-aged black women who were arrested as part of a sting against a drug dealer. watching cops lie on the stand was wild. I consider this the greatest moral failing of my life

      • kegel_dialectic [he/him]
        ·
        4 years ago

        Thanks! Geography asks: "what is happening where, and why is it happening there?"

        The field can roughly be divided into physical geography and human geography, the latter of which is a social science.

        David Harvey is a human geographer at the CUNY Grad Center, and a foremost expert on Kapital. His lectures on Marx's Kapital are all freely available on YouTube and worth checking out. He's also written extensively on Neoliberalism and late capitalism.

        • duck [he/him,they/them]
          ·
          4 years ago

          That's so cool, always liked physical geography but human geography sounds interesting, I'll look it up