Share yall's journey over here. Here's mine. TLDR: apolitical -> chud -> lib -> based commie :sicko-laser:
Was mostly apolitical until the culture war shit of 2016 and I got sucked into anti-SJW youtube. Naturally I developped the standard reactionary views (systemic racism isn't real, offensive = funny, gays are weird, etc).
Then I went on 4chan after seeing a funny video about them trolling Shia LaBeouf, and being edgy I naturally hit the "politically incorrect" board. I knew they were edgy and I had experienced racism before but the shit on there was something else to say the least.
After that I started questioning my views and realized how cucked it is to be a reactionary minority. At this point I was a lib, cuz fuck rightists but Communism seems silly.
What made me swing left is:
-
Learning Obama and Trump both supported the corruput authoritarian president in my home country.
-
Taking econ and having cognitive dissonance between the lessons and real life. If the profit motive rewards benefiting society then what's up with climate change? If "supply/demand = cheap price" then why does my mother have to ration her medicine every other month? Etc etc.
Then I stumbled on a Parenti video and everything clicked. Thanks Parenti :michael-rosen:
Funny story. I was raised by racist chuds so while I had leftist views as a kid but had some chuddiness views from being influence by the people around me (think stupidpol minset). It took going to highschool and getting the shit kicked out of me by the indigenous students and then getting to know them in a legit effort to change to make me realise how fucked up my veiws were. I was then a socdem until around 2015 when I saw how ineffective electorialism is and how right-wing and weak the so-called leftist parties were.
Long story short, beat up racists.
I was a conspiracy junkie, I really liked the feeling of learning secrets that no one else knew. Besides the real out there shit like David Icke, though, you begin to notice a pattern, namely, that if you lift the rug of literally any major industry, you find evidence of terrible and immoral bullshit. At first you're just assuming it's all about individual greed, but this left unanswered the question of why these greedy people seemed to run everything. I had a sort of sudden revelation when I realized that, because of the competitive nature of capitalism, the theory of evolution applies, and the only parameter for fitness is profitability. Combine that with the fact that profit is, by definition, socially corrosive (taking more than you give is literally the moral of countless fables), and that goes a long way to explaining why everything seems to be getting worse all the time. Peter Joseph and his Zeitgeist and Culture in Decline series, an absolute shit-ton of Chomsky lectures, then finally Marx, and 10 years after I started looking into this shit, here I am, a unabashed and terminally online communist.
That's a pretty good trajectory. I get the feeling that most conspiracy junkies who realize see a pattern just go "Jews! Jews everywhere!" because its always easier to blame some nefarious corrupting agent than to examine a system which enables corruption.
I never understood that, it's a very unsatisfying explanation. It also doesn't answer the core question, why institutions seemed designed to benefit the greedy. I realized, as I said, that it was an evolutionary system, and was extremely gratified to learn later that Marx understood this in the 19th century, (to paraphrase) that because of competition, the internal decisions of capitalists over their own businesses have the character of being coerced by a external force.
This isn't a bit, I swear it isn't a bit.
I went left because of Avatar.
But it wasn't because of the movie itself, it was the reaction of the people I was hanging out with. I was your basic internet rationalist atheist, and I thought the movie was basic brainless fun, and then all the people I hung out with started using words like "Race Traitor" to talk about the hero of the movie and fantasizing about how the Galactic Empire would genocide the blue space cats and take the resources of the planet.
And I went, oh fuck, I'm surrounded by Nazis.
And then there was Gamergate, which further cemented me in being sure where the right position was on the subjects of both racism and misogyny, but I was still missing something because I was reading blogs by wealthy white feminists and they had a ton of good points, but then they would jump from a post about the evils of the patriarchy to photos of the $400 meal they just had in an upscale restaurant.
Turns out what I needed was a little dialectical materialism.
Libertarian - >but health care is good - > soc dem - >anarchist leaning leftist - > somewhere between anarchist & ML.
Raised in a generally conservative home; felt the need to be a republican in high school. Became a lib in college. Liked Bernie in 2016 but considered voting for Trump in the general (I didn’t). Realized after the 16 election that the Democrats were basically pointless. Liked, donated to, made calls and knocked doors for Bernie in 2020. That was my last stand. Read Lenin in 2020 and in 2021 I’m reading mao. I live in PA so I’ll vote for fetterman in the senate race but I’m kind of done with voting. now any family get together I just get accused of liking trump because I didn’t vote for Biden. Good times
Lib -> anti feminist -> TERF -> ML -> anarchist (I think)
The event that pushed me from TERF to ML was realising that I am in fact trans and had internalised society's transphobia.
:astronaut-meme:
Astronaut: Wait, it was internalized transphobia which made me transphobic?
Astronaut after noticing being trans: gun clicks Always has been.
fash -> radical centrist -> lib -> commie
The vast majority of my home country is drowned in reactionary beliefs, and if you are young and impressionable and you cant figure out what this dysphoria thing is you can get sucked into some less than pleasant ideologies. Then you can realize, that you are now 15, and have to act grown up so you start moving towards the radical centrism, free market, science, fuck SJWs stuf. Then you figure things about yourself have a crisis, realize you have been a terrible person, and surrounded by terrible people, so you kinda start listening for a change -> Then you transition, listen to a couple of podcasts, work in corporate environment, and realize that those commies had a lot of very good points.
I was pretty lib growing up, in the privileged 'don't need to think about politics sort of way'. As a teenager I was vaguely aware of Gamergate as being about 'ethics in video game journalism', and was subscribed to places like /r/tumblrinaction and /r/imgoingtohellforthis. What ended up getting me out of those spaces and on a path to the left was this Lindsay Ellis video talking about feminism and gender in transformers lol. It made me give pause and think about what my own preconceived notions about gender and feminism said about me. I then got introduced to Contrapoints through Ellis, and it helped crystalize a lot of disjointed lefty thoughts into more of a coherent ideology. She was also the first trans voice that I really listened to, and so for that I'll be forever thankful, even if she is a bit of a lib.
Then I started reading theory, and making my own way. Found the subreddit, and it felt like home immediately. Stuck around until the end, and then joined the discord before coming here. Was a great community to have through this summer, I'll tell ya.
Exactly. Most in this community have outgrown the breadtube creators, but it's important to recognize them as a stepping stone. Sure beats having the youth watching SJW cringe compilations and getting their politics from g*mers.
Breadtube works, folks. Contrapoints, Shaun, and Donoteat brought me left.
I read The Jungle in middle school, and that trivia nugget about people misunderstanding Sinclair's anticapitalist intent was the seed that rooted and grew in my brain for the last 20 years
9/11 happens, I will always find it absurd that the fuckin' Dixie Chicks getting ostracized for saying "war bad" is my first explicitly political memory
Never understood the appeal of cultish patriotic displays or black friday tier consumer spectacles, but otherwise was pretty apathetic. Had a couple friends who were gay, hated the creeping anti-Arab racism
all of the above led naturally to being repulsed by the GOP, and then Obama was just kinda "yeah he's better, but what's with this treating him like the sun god incarnate shit," still too apathetic to give a shit about Ron Paul or whatever
Bernie's message really resonated in 2016, blood-run-cold horror when we elected the genocide gameshow president, but also rapidly being repulsed by the dems as I learn how much Bad Shit was actually holdovers
started listening to podcasts, PSA and Chapo at the same time at one point, their wildly different reactions to McCain's death finally snapped whichever neuron was still making me think dems were worth anything
it's been downhill ever since :agony-turbo:
I’m having an Arnold / Total Recall moment: I’M YOU AND YOU’RE ME AND YOU’RE ME AND I’M YOU!