For me, two points:
(dating myself here) Minimum wage used to be $5.75 when I was in high school. I worked my ass off for an entire summer. I fuckin hated it, but we all gotta hustle. Around my last shift, I came out to the parking lot, and someone had done my car dirty with a hit'n'run. No note, no CCTV, nothing. The damage was in the neighborhood of $2k, which is exactly everything I had saved up that summer.
I worked my ass off 300 hours to break even. It might as well just have been some community service work release program. Fuck capitalism.
The other is when I was older, post-grad. I had a shitty job where I had to pony up for own health insurance plan with high deductibles. I started having random tingling in my joints, so I did the responsible thing and had it checked out. I got sent to several specialists who ran a battery of tests. I'm already in the hole, $3k out of pocket, and all I got was, "We're not sure what's wrong."
The tingling lingered, and I started looking up information for myself on alternative, holistic sites. Someone had listed similar symptoms and said it was just a vitamin deficiency. That couldn't be it, right? Well I ordered some supplements, and within a month, the tingling was gone.
$3k down the hole. Fuck capitalism.
2008
Banks stole my families home.
2009
Amazon fucked my dad's business into the ground with undercutting and lawyers
2010
My first taste of minimum wage work
2012
Mental breakdown following two years of working two jobs with abusive bosses leading to me getting evicted from my apartment and them suing me for 8k in back rent
2014
Now a drunk, became radicalized at a bar and have kept those comrades close to me since.
Damn, that was like a road-to-Damascus event in a random bar or you were going there all the time and seeing rad randos?
Being said, learning about this stuff helped me be able to understand wtf happened to myself and my family.
So it was definitely a turning point in figuring out who the fuck I was in society.
The 2008-2009 recession. I watched my parents nearly lose everything as the floor fell out from under their feet. Spent the remainder of my teens working to help them and later support them in my early 20s. Several years of adulthood wasted trying to make sure they could survive.
When Obamacare passed, it hit me again when I was forced to buy insurance and looking over everything I was offered and suddenly realized it was a scam. The entire thing was a bail out for insurance companies. I could barely afford one plan and none of them covered dental. I will never forget going home, pulling up the actual bill online and reading it. I sat there for an hour thinking to myself; how the fuck is this supposed to help me or ANYONE who is poor? Only people being helped are insurance companies.
I had a friend growing up who was able to travel the world with a church ministry. One thing he told me after we reached adulthood and it stuck with me in my mind. He traveled all over the world and said that he kept asking himself growing up; how come I see poor people everywhere I go? He left the church and started reading Marx and Stalin and I feel blessed I had him as something of a mentor to guide me.
It's a bit embarrassing to admit it so late I think the real pushing point was about 6 months ago, a few days after the death of George Floyd. I had already been fast tracking towards real leftism at that point, watching Bernie sanders get shafted in real time was especially frustrating and made me lose an incredible deal of hope in electoral reform, but seeing front a firsthand perspective how police deal with political dissidents really opened my eyes
I was reasonably just a tad angry about the death of George Floyd and so I went downtown and just joined in with a crowd of protesters a few days after his death. For the most part it was a crowd of libs whose only real plan was "be angry and shout" but we marched up and down the streets shouting "Defund [our city] PD!" and "I don't like cops very much!", you know the drill. It was totally "Peaceful" to a liberal perspective. Maybe like 2 people with spray paint vandalizing shit. For the most part, the march was pretty aimless. Some guy would shout "Let's go to [Local landmark]!" and we'd all march there until we got there, didn't know what to do, and waited for the next guy to shout a different landmark to go to. Then we pull up on city hall, and before anybody came up with any other ideas, some guy shouts something to the effect of "HEY GUYS!" and hurls a big fucking rock through a window. Now, given that most people in the crowd were big liberal, the majority of the crowd basically responded with "Hey what the fuck, man?" and "We're trying to be peaceful!". I was still trying to comprehend what the fuck was going on when I look over and maybe 8 riot cops apparate out of nowhere, chucked several flashbangs fired a few pepper balls into the crowd. When I saw the flashbangs go out, I instinctively dove away onto the sidewalk, failed to pay attention to what was around me, tackled a streetlight with my shoulder and rolled onto the sidewalk. A bike goes whizzing past me only inches to my left while I'm lying there. I look up and it's another bike cop. My shoulder was pretty sore for a week but I was fine.
After getting my bearings and moving back to a safer and less pepper spray filled area, I hear something about 2 people being arrested in the chaos.
And after thinking about all of that, of how the police attacked a whole crowd of hundreds of people and arrested at least 2 because one of them broke a window, of how I very nearly could have gotten hurt myself from just standing in the vague vicinity of a criminal really gave me the final push in realizing "yo capitalism sucks fuck this shit"
Was probably a cop who broke the window for it to be that convenient timing-wise.
Maybe. I don't want to dox myself any further but I don't think it was a cop. The look on his face gave me the impression that we wanted to gauge the crowd to see if they were ready to start breaking shit. Though it really doesn't matter, the cops got their pretext to attack political dissidents. Could very easily have been some guy working for the cops but honestly I feel like all the cops had to do was wait for one guy to do something like that before attacking
Graduating from university and working full time under capitalism. They don't even try to hide that you're there to be make as much money as possible, while being paid as little as possible. They use every possible loophole to pay you less and even if they didn't you still couldn't afford to get by. I live in the greater vancouver area where rent is insanely high, to the point where I can only afford to live on the other side of the city from where I work. I lose a total of 2 hours a day to my commute, to go to a job that I slowly ruin and destroy my body/hearing, to make a wage so low that I will never be able to retire, so my company's owner can make literal millions. This is all deliberate in it's design. I hate it. I'm miserable, most of my friends are miserable, and anyone not at the top of society is miserable. I just want everyone to have a better life but some asshole born into wealth wants to own my life
I grew up poor. Ate a lot of ketchup sandwiches, and sometimes the lights got shut off for a while. Both my parents worked, it just plain wasn't enough. It was apparent to me from a young age that things as they are aren't right, and that things don't have to be this way. In 2016, after Sanders got ratfucked, some Green Party people got me to read Marx, and it was like a switch being flipped. A lot of what I was reading was stuff I already knew, but articulated better, and with proper frameworks.
Now I'm a communist.
Still can't stand the taste of ketchup, though.
Graduating college and entering the career market for the first time. I had worked multiple service jobs in college and assumed that things would get better when I had a degree. I believed that being paid shit wages in college was "all part of the college experience". You know the stereotypes: Instant ramen, pirating everything, asking friends with meal tickets for free food, wearing old clothes, ect. Turns out the value of a generic 4 year degree disintegrated after the 2008 crash and never recovered.
But honestly I'm kind of grateful. If I had gone straight from college to a cushy salaried corporate job like I was told to expect all my childhood I would have never become a leftist. I think my overall empathy would still be near zero because I was raised by petite bourgeois, so I'm really glad I regained some basic fucking humanity that I was taught to ignore when I was a kid. :improve-society:
I had always been leftish-leaning. I was the kind of radlib succdem who thought that if just those slightly to the left of the official social democratic party got enough votes to lead a government coalition then everything would be fun. I was young and naïve and I didn't know what I was doing.
What brought me to realise that the system is fundamentally evil and incompatible with human happiness was two things. One structural, the other personal.
The 2008 financial crash was a big eye opener for me. The right wing liberal government has just bragged about how we would be able to buy the entire world and how the economic textbooks would have to be rewritten as we had now entered a new phase of crisis-free capitalism. And then it all came tumbling down. It had all been built on lies and the adults in the room, the fiscally responsible people who was supposedly extremely smart and knew everything about the economy didn't know what to do. The people whose recklessness caused the crash walked away free from responsibility while good people lost their jobs and had their meagre benefits cut by austerity politics. Austerity politics championed by the very social democratic led coalition who were supposed to be the lesser evil.
About the same time I had what I now believe to be a clinical depression. Years and years of undiagnosed ADHD and avoidant personality disorder finally threw me into the abyss at about the time I was supposed to finish my university degree.
I had always been a quiet bookish kid. I was too shy and anxious to form the kind of relations I wanted with my peers. It really sucked growing up and going to university with very few friends, no girlfriends, a constant sense of social anxiety etc. But I clinged to the hope that at least I would be rewarded for my nerdiness with a high-paying job and The Good Life™ once I finished college.
And then my brain stopped working. I fell into a black hole and couldn't do anything but stay at home all day. I couldn't finish the very last part of my education and I dropped out without a degree.
I still have the student debt though. A colossal hopeless heap of defaulted debt that just keeps growing because of the insane interest rates they slap onto it as a punishment for defaulting. And I don't have access to the kind of high paying job that would allow me to pay it back either. I'm stuck in this debt trap for life.
I will never have the good life. Life is going to suck until the day I die. And for what? What crime did I commit that warrants life-long punishment? — Trying to do what all the politicians and businessmen wanted me to do, for trying to get an education but failing because of mental illness that is completely outside of my control.
Reading about how the climate and biosphere are being destroyed and how no one is willing to do enough about it. We a literally fucked as a civilisation if we keep going as we are and yet no politician is taking it as seriously as it should be taken.
reading history and seeing the crimes my country participated in to "stopcommunism"
