Personally, I grew up on a single parent home, where I saw my mom get destroyed by her office work. The lack of unions, no external help and general misoginy, made her get super depressed, and became an alcoholic. In my teenage years I was almost lured by the manosphere communities, but got helped by a group of close friends that were left leaning. Most of them were anarchist, so I started with that. Slowly but surely, I started to understand how sick this system is, and it made me furious, but I never found a way to show my ideas. No political party represented my ideas, and I fell deeper in the anarchist rabbit hole. Yes, I was a hardcore anarkiddie, but I bite me back. When I needed them the most, they turned their backs on me, and fell into deep depression. And in seeking psychological help, my counselor recommended me going back to my roots. So I went back to videogames, japanese culture and most importantly, read again after years The Communist Manifesto. I still don't know how to position myself in the left, but I know that I'm a Marxist, and that I want change. Stay safe, comrades.
Even though I'm Indian I got radicalised by chapotraphouse subreddit and Bernie Sanders getting ratfucked in primaries.
I never fell into traps of western idealist leftism because even when I was not explicitly leftist I was vaguely anti-imperialist because rich-poor division never sat well with me.
Ironically when I first read Communist Manifesto I did not understand it well because the writing style came off as strange to me. I became more leftist as I read news and comments on reddit that had a leftist bent. When I had marble slab of implicit understanding of the world order I started chiseling it by reading theory because it made more sense to me then.
One thing that helped in preventing me from becoming an anti-communist leftist is witnessing the rampant and ever increasing inequality in India and reading about how USSR despite its flaws did and exponentially better job at elevating the lives of the common person even while defeating a Nazi horde. So extreme and widespread poverty is sort of a "solved problem" in that a viable framework to follow to eradicate it exists. It's just that the political will is missing. Considering this, reading tone deaf online condemnations of the USSR and China from the crackerverse which has done nothing but pillage and destroy the global south always felt wrong to me. After that as I read historical books my views pretty much were vindicated.
I’m a western cracker but this is such a major thing for me.
All the accusations of corruption and self-interest etc are so obviously false. It’s so clear that the communists, or at least the revolutionary generation of Lenin and Stalin, and Che and Fidel, they truly believed in what they were doing.
Yes they cracked some skulls. They were ruthless and as philosophers they explained why they needed to be ruthless.
But they were not corrupt. They absolutely weren’t. They believed in communism and they were seeking to build it. They believed in equality, evidenced by the more equal society they created. They believed in anti-imperialism, evidenced by the personal sacrifices they made to fight it.
They were not corrupt.
Compare to someone like Churchill or Roosevelt or Truman. What were they fighting for? They were wealthy patricians fighting to maintain and build empires.
I want to stand with the communists. They’re more noble than the patricians.