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?"

  • spectre [he/him]
    ·
    4 years ago

    Never followed politics much, but did my civic duty of trying to research candidates and selecting whoever I thought had the best ideas. In the couple of elections that I earnestly voted in, I just ended up getting pissed at the Republicans for basically forcing me to vote Democrat. Democrats were never all that appealing to me, but Republicans were obviously fucking ridiculous. Same story in 2016: "Thanks to the Republicans for handing Clinton the win, so we get 4 more years of mediocre Obama". I didn't really have much of a vision for what I actually wanted to have happen (coming from a very PMC family and a PMC upbringing), but I knew that shit was boring as fuck if anything.

    Trump wins and combined with some IRL experiences (met a few millionaires from my work and conversation with them was...uninspiring if anything), I realized that what I now know as the liberal notion of meritocracy wasn't real at all (I knew it wasn't real but figured it was kinda real).

    I also have been very interested in tech, and constantly wondered what the transition to an automated society would look like, since that's obviously not a possible bridge to cross under capitalism.

    The only ones talking about the conditions that led Trump to get elected (instead of the same old "Trump is an evil liar" stuff that was already well established), and an automated society were the socialists. Started out on the libertarian side, since there's obviously a lack of freedom under capitalism, and I've started to understand the materialist/Marxist side better over time. I don't really claim to ascribe to any particular tendency.