I've never considered myself remotely right wing, so it didn't come from there.

However I did used to think that supporting the Labour party (UK) was as far left as it was possible to be. I was very much in the camp of "vote for the best thing you can! :)"

Now I'm here and I'm nihilistic.

Really good effort post that I'm replying to with not even a hundredth of the effort

Working backwards, it goes like

ChaCha <- r/CTH <- me getting curious about the sub from how Scary all the more lib-y leftist subs I frequented (r/LSC type stuff) made it out to be (I was expecting it to be what I later found out r/cumtown actually is) <- metareddit criticism, specifically SRS (also Negareddit, which I moderated) <- joining reddit to begin with (I don't remember why but regret it)

deleted by creator

won't write an autobiographical essay, but if anyone wants to libjacket me in the future, here's the comment for it.

12yo atheist gamer -> socially isolated 4chan edgelord -> anti-gamergate Tumblr user -> generic depressoid redditor -> Chapo fan -> Self-identified free market neoliberal

and that's where I am today, obviously

Grew up with DemSoc parents in an area with a history of labour radicalism so I've always been 'left', was drawn towards anarchism and libertarian socialism in general when I started reading theory in my late teens

As for my online journey I was on anarchist subs like r/anarchy101 and r/DebateAnarchism for a while, got in an argument with someone on r/politics and they 'chapo checked' me which led me to being curious what it was and checking it out, and it was nice to see an active leftist space that wasn't militant about adherence to a specific tendency and was committed to anti-capitalism and equality, this was in the ramp up to the 2020 primary and it was a good place was memes, shitposts and info about it you weren't getting elsewhere, eventually started posting, and was surprised by how much I missed it after the ban, so it was great when I saw a post on r/trueanon that this place was up and here I am

deleted by creator

First protest I ever went to was one for the Iraq War, ended up getting fucked up by some teargas at 13. Some years later I was liking Ron Paul cause he was isolationist, and I spent so much time protesting the war that I was like fuck ya this guy has a little bit of traction. To be young and dumb again. I got involved in the Republican Party, and quickly, like literally the first meeting I was like, oh shit, these are the bad guys there is nothing here to save. Ended up getting tricked by Obama’s promises so I voted for that dweeb. Shortly after that I felted burned by lame duck shit, so I got out of those kind of politics and started working with prochoice orgs, marriage equality, and domestic shelters to repent for registering as a republican.

Didn’t really get back into a political party until 2014. Became a ward chair, then a precinct chair for the local Democratic Party. Did a bunch of lib shit. 2015 rolls around start giving a shit about Bernie’s run. Worked hard on his campaign. Watched how my previous colleagues became really toxic towards us Bernie people, even at the conventions where I was a delegate, just vile. Still got out the vote and did a bunch of canvassing in my precinct for pretty much the entire democratic ticket, but Hillary. My precinct ended up going like 90% for Hillary, I think I was like 1 of 10 votes that went to Jill Stein. After that I resigned all my chairs.

Started reading theory, moving around the country, and fell in love. /r/cth popped up on /r/all with dumb meme. Pretty much after that my socialism just kind of turned up to 11. I think I would have gotten to this point on my own, but probably not for another 4 years or so.

I think the biggest push for me was how awful the Hillary people were inside the party in 2016. It literally killed the lib in me.

I guess it started when I had the sensitive, sweet lil boi pounded out of me by chuds on an army base. I was a military kid and I thought I hated everyone and everything. Turns out, I just hated military culture. At the time it wasn't really overtly racist (tons of people from all sorts of backgrounds on the bases I grew up on), but it definitely was toxic as fuck.

When my dad retired I discovered bands like Anti-Flag and the Dead Kennedys and hey! They hated chuds too. I ended up really embracing the punk lifestyle. Drugs, fighting, raging against "the system". All the cliche shit. I was smart enough to stay in school and while my friends started dropping to drug addiction and juvie I discovered nerds like Sartre, Nietzsche, Kant, etc. I started styling myself as a philosopher which I eventually pursued in college. I legit thought if I could finish Sartre's work I could change the world and end stupid shit like racism and misogyny through philosophical truth. I was a really naïve 16 year old.

Anyway, I went to the lib protests. I vooted. I was big in my area canvassing under Punk Voter to get rid of Bush in 2004. I actually made it on the news for dunking on some counter-protester. That was basically the same thing as being famous back then, when the internet was small and I was a teenager. After the 2004 ohio ballots were rigged I became completely disenchanted with politics and threw myself back into philosophy. I'm probably one of the few people on the planet who has actually read Being and Nothingness, and I became obsessed with resolving the contiental woo-woo of existentialism with the material reality around me. (Spoiler: This was Marx and Engel's whole project, which was completely redacted from my education). I ended up kinda-sorta rediscovering Kropotkin's Mutal Aid through my own ponderings, but eventually realised philosophy wasn't gonna change shit and the world was a fuck and I was stuck in a debt trap.

So I quit school and joined a union. I knew a little about the American unions rooted in left politics so I thought it would be a good place. At this point I was still pretty lib, voted for Obama and shit. But when he bailed out the banks I just quit on politics and became an apolitical gamer and a drunk. I worked my way up in my union, became a steward, did some good shit. Owned AT&T for a couple of mil, and moved on to an actual organizer position. Up until this point I was still a "communism only works in theory" guy, but unions are a fuck. If you get into labor organizing as a true believer it only ends one of two ways - you quit in disgust, or become so disillusioned that you cash in your values for DNC checks. It really fucking sucks.

Sometime around the rise of Gamergate, youtube reactionaries, and Baltimore, I became reradicalized towards communism. I would get into these long debates with my roommate which lead to me discovering Sartre embraced Marxism later in life and told the Nobel Prize Committee to fuck off with their bougie shit and I thought that was pretty cool. I broke my promise to myself to never read philosophy again (because I was losing myself down that rabbit hole and it was destroying my brain), and discovered that actually communism works just fine in practice. The last couple of years I've gone through a divorce and had to move back to "the most hateful state in the US" with zero organization, not even a DSA chapter.

Being surrounded by chuds drove me to the internet, and I've been on chapo for the last 3 or 4 years. My life is finally recovered to the point where I can think about moving, and I'm looking at my best options for places to punch Nazis. Unless this Covid depression really kicks my ass. Which I'm pretty concerned about lol. But hey, if I'm going to be homeless I might as well go be homeless in Portland and fight some fucking proud boys

I'm honestly not in much of a mood to type out my life story but if I had to make a TL;DR version

:cereal1: Me circa late 2019/early 2020: Commies are ridiculous. You don't need to tear down society to get things like healthcare, we can get things by voting. Watch Bernie Sander over here, he's going to win the primary and destroy Donald Trump and we're all going to get healthcare and student loan debt forgiveness and and then we're all going to be fine.

:cereal2: After the rest of 2020 plays out

Man I can't believe thought I was so much further left than I really was back then

TW: mental health issues

I used to be one of those "learn to code", "work hard and you can become rich too" types. I was even a fan of Elon Musk 🤢. A total lib, but with a foot in libertarianism.

Then a series of unpaid stressful overtime under the threat of being fired turned me into a Big Time Socialist. At this time I just couldn't lose my job because my family depended on me to survive (post 2008) and I had no time to look for another job or to prepare for interviews. When I just couldn't do it any longer, I quit and shortly after had to be taken to a psych clinic (burnout, alcoholism, depression and suicide attempts).

That period made me rethink everything I took for granted about politics and capitalism in general. In the end it was my material reality that radicalized me.

Had solidly right wing parents, and so in elementary and middle school I just repeated what I heard from them (including some pretty racist stuff 😬). Then I started trying to "talk politics" with people and realized I had no answer for basic lib ideas, and other middle schoolers spouting right wing talking points sounded like morons.

Naturally, in high school I became a libertarian, read that Ayn Rand, and owned the libs. Gave up on the weird bigoted shit I learned from my parents after learning basic world history. Had a friend who was really into that stuff too, and she and I talked what we thought were these big political ideas that made us so much smarter than everyone else.

Went to college kind of vaguely realizing that libertarianism might not actually produce good results for people like I thought it would, reading stuff like The Jungle made me question that. But the democrats were just so bad and I didn't really get that you could be anything else.

Then I saw :antler-bernie: and things just sort of clicked. Started going down a very predictable path, ended up shitposting on reddit since my major had a lot of nerdy guys that did the same and I didn't want to be left out, found left wing subs but the weird moderator coups and power struggles on Full communism and stuff kind of freaked me out, then after noticing things being cross-posted from Chapo all the time, I decided to check it out.

The combination of a bullshit job that used the worst libtech jargon but never did anything to actually do anything, an ex boyfriends whose actions never matched his words and the Revolutions podcast.

I guess I was always a run-of-the-mill European socdem; I always voted for the Greens. I was on the SJW side of tumblr as a teen. Some parts of it annoyed me but overall I was into their ideas. I started moving further left because of a bunch of reasons.

• Talking with friends for whom class was really significant.
• Becoming frustrated that despite "SJW" ideas (particularly feminism and queer theory) becoming more mainstream, it felt like they were coopted by consumerism instead of achieving actual liberation.
• Reading Mieville's October (I liked his fantasy book) and getting a better understanding of what Lenin and co wanted - including that they were absolutely not "class reductionist" as the popular image is.
• Reading Sheila Rowbotham's Women, Resistance, and Revolution and finding out more about Marxist feminism, and feeling like yeah, she gets it.
• Talking more to my parents about life in the USSR, both the good sides and bad.
• Visiting the Hermitage, seeing the big throne and then also the little throne room, and having the really clear thought, "Lenin was right".

Etc. I don't think I've read enough theory to label myself as anything more specific than a "leftist" yet. I'm so disappointed by the Greens now they're in the ruling coalition, I'm considering voting for the Communist Party next time.

copy-pasting my own comment from a previous thread :

It’s weird because it’s not a straight line for me.

I grew up in a fairly privileged middle-income family but my mom was a immense influence in sociology, psychology and a lot of feminist stuff. My family has always been, at the end of the day, pretty “centrist” and liberal, parents sometimes voting left sometimes right (this is NOT in the US btw). Apart from that I felt “apolitical”, like I didn’t really care, because I didn’t have to care. I started being more politically aware through my group of friends and meeting people who had very different situations, some of them seemingly unbearable to me, and that got me questioning. One of my oldest and best friends has almost always been an Ancom through his own family education, and bless him he was a big influence.

But a lot of those things were just kinda swirling at the back of my mind for years because I didn’t have a consistent philosophy or theory, and I didn’t have to care. I could focus on school and work opportunities and my path was pretty set, I just had to not question it.

Later on, with the financial crisis and the deepening gap between my generation’s opportunities (and even worse for the ones after mine) and my parent’s generation, some friction started happening. My situation and my group of friends wasn’t the worst, but It certainly wasn’t what I was promised and what the system claimed it was. My studies were increasingly frustrating, jobs were not easy to find in the first place and it was even harder to find something “meaningful”, with the growing arguments with my parents who for a while didn’t understand what was going on. The ecological collapse was another factor on top of that that made me realize something was deeply wrong, but still at the time I was some kind of tech liberal, “science will figure it out” kinda person.

Then I had a reactionary period, for a few years. The way I understand it now, a lot of those little bits and pieces were swirling around in my mind but nothing made sense or was consistent : why does politics suck so bad and not make sense? why do I feel like i’m missing something or that i’m lying to myself when I think about politics? why does “meritocracy” not feel like it should? why do we ignore the ecological problems? why is it getting worse for me and my friends? why are some of my friends at their limit, in unbearable situations? Why am i depressed, why does it feel like everyone around me is depressed, why is it all so fucking “normal”? Why do my parents dismiss it and not seem to even understand what i’m talking about? why does politics (electoralism in truth but I didn’t know that) feel like such a joke, such a useless frustrating experience? Why do politicians or “important people” seem so evil or incompetent (important people being mostly celebrities)? why does my job and my previous hopes and aspirations now feel meaningless?

I played a lot of video games, I was in a kind of “tech-centrist” world in my job, and online i’d always lurked on places like Something awful & 4-chan in the olden-days. I liked those spaces and their weird history, weird crowds. I didn’t realise how much it had changed over time and how many skeletons were buried under the ground in those communities. Gamergate happened, and at the time another big question made me fall into the alt-right pipeline : “Why the fuck is everything about identity now?”, I didn’t understand it at all. None of it made sense, why does it all feel so fake? What is all this about “feminism”, because this doesn’t feel like it’s about feminism? Why does it feel like everything is advertising? I watched more and more videos, sargon of akkad and the like, started lurking on tumblrInAction, then KotakuInAction. I knew around me were a lot of alt-right people, I realized (although I probably didn’t admit to myself at first) I was increasingly surrounded by neo-nazis and the like.

So my mind went further : I guess i’m part of this identity group then, since I like X and Y, and apparently that’s bad and some other groups hate us? Why do I feel attacked and angry? Why do I feel like shit, why am i so fucking angry, angry, angry, angry, angry all the time? Ranting about “SJWs” and contemporary art, post-modernism, “some feminism goes too far”, etc, etc. I wasn’t very structured, but It felt like I was finally making sense of things, because at least there was an acknowledgment of the problems. The problems are real, you’re not alone, it’s not normal, and here’s why : [Insert Identity politics and Scapegoatism leading into Fascism]

My friends (unknowingly) saved me. One of my best friends, an amazing writer and feminist, would have conversations with me about it, since I would bring political topics up more and more. It kinda kept me grounded, her and all my other friends situation, the love I had for them and how much I cared about them. I realized I was ignorant about feminism, I realized it wasn’t normal for me to be so bitter and angry at “sjws” all the time. I also realized i was uncomfortable because my beliefs had giant holes in them. I was lying to myself, some things still didn’t feel right, some “answers” felt wrong or incomplete.

It was always gradual even when it was fast. And interestingly it wasn’t all at the same time/speed depending on the topic. My vision of feminism changed, that and LGBTQI+ topics. My media changed, and I started curating more what I watched, learned more about philosophy and politics and basically just kept digging more and more for things that fully made sense. Started watching more socdem, then breatube type stuff, Joined a socdem/slightly radical political party in my country and I got so, so excited at the program (which was actually trying to address the issues and fix things and was so hopeful and humanist), excited about the possibility of winning (which was a real possibility). Disillusioned about the loss and electoralism in general, kept digging, joined more and more radical communities and discords or on reddit, and eventually arrived on chapo.

Sorry for the long rant.

My progression is basically : “Apolitical” Centrist -> Tech-Liberal -> Tech-Libertarian-Edgelord -> Alt-right Pipeline Gamergater -> Socdem -> Questioning Anarchist -> AnCom (not really knowing what it’s supposed to mean but an interest in both ML and anarchism and trying to reconciliate the two) -> Maoism

To add on this, i've also done a lot of work on myself regarding masculinity and toxicity. Lots of self-crit and analysis of my own identity, my behaviours, and the stuff I carry over from family upbringing (lots of bad debate-bro behaviour in my family). Huge thanks to my friends, to breadtube (in part) and especially to this community (old sub, discord and this place) for bullying and helping on that :Care-Comrade:

I could probably add a bigger interest in "leftism" outside of the west, especially in south america and asia, and a more nuanced understanding of china. I don't know if i'm a "dengist" but I certainly understand that context and those decisions better than I used to.

Regularly watching This Hour Has 22 Minutes from a very young age made me a third grade demsoc. Then i got really into punk (still am) and became an anarchist because that's what you do, but y'know I figured I'd read some books about it. Uh then I read more books and became a Marxist. I think I found Chapo through that YouTube video where they discuss starship troopers after I watched some other video about Verhoeven. Few years later here I am.