Like a moment that seemed insignificant and unimportant at the time, but looking back was in fact a pivotal moment in pushing you towards radicalization.
For me probably being introduced to Guitar Hero at my friend’s house in like summer 2007. At the time it was just another day, but looking back I ended up falling in love with those games, I ended up being introduced to The Ramones and even more importantly the Dead Kennedys through them, which caused me to get into punk music and resulted in me adopting very critical attitudes towards larger American society, attitudes which later grew into anarchism and then Marxism
Getting a job
yeah getting a dishwashing job at a first-wave gentrification business under a leftist head cook did it, more of a political education than my liberal arts degree ever got me
Specifically getting a job and the immediate dissatisfaction of my paychecks lol
I didn’t know what the hell was wrong until I ran into a leftist at a bar when I was like 23. Had no idea about these topics, the online discourse wasn’t there yet so this was like the only way I could’ve found out
Gonna have to go with losing my job and enlisting. Absolutely spiralled after basic training and AIT. The perspective from being a part of the American machine did not do a lot to make me more patriotic lol. A lot of dudes I was in with drank the Kool aid and went the other direction, though. I don’t think anyone leaves the military as a centrist.
I was always left-of-liberal but someone on r/politics mentioned r/chapotraphouse and here I am. I was like…you can hate liberals from the left? This is amazing!
I lost my faith in electoralism after watching democrats in the same room steal Bernie’s delegates right in front of me. I also ran in elections and even won some…and then thought my life was in danger (and that I needed at least a few bodyguards 24/7 for myself and my family because the sheriff screamed right in my face once when I voted to defund his ass). I quit after that and realized that nothing would change this shithole except a violent revolution.
Bible class.
The pastor mentioned in passing one morning that animals didn’t have souls. I asked if that meant my cats wouldn’t be in heaven with me, and he said that was correct.
I realized that he was 100% sincere in his belief, and in my tween eyes, that made him a fool, because anyone who has ever loved and been loved in return by an animal knows that they have souls.
“What do they know?! They don’t even think animals have souls!!!” became the mantra in my head anytime I contemplated doing something the church community would frown on ❤️ thank you, Pastor John
Getting pepper sprayed back in '99 got me most of the way there. I think a lot of “Extinction Rebellion” kids were similarly idealistic and hopefully some of them had a similar experience to push them left after those faith-in-cops blunder years.
Remarking over a coffee that there were far fewer homeless people than a couple of years previously, suddenly realizing that they had all died
someone in government near me admitted this recently
they were touting their reductions in homelessness, and someone at the meeting called them out and asked if that statistic would include people who died, and they don’t even monitor that shit or try to adjust for it so of course it does.
Yep. We tend not to see it this way because it’s just too horrible to bear, but homelessness is a death sentence.
Yep. I’ve made this connection before although I wouldn’t be surprised if people much smarter than me did it before, but America is the Sparta of the modern day. Sure, you can say Britain is as well but they’ve fully passed the torch onto us.
Although more subtle, it’s disgusting just how eugenic this society is. Prohibitively expensive rent likely in no small part to “weed out the weaklings” and have them die homeless. The low paychecks because “the american worker is too tough for decadence”, and the creeping militarization of everything, but that’s a rant for another day. Almost everything feels like it is designed to make life so insufferable for the poors under the foolish idea that they’re “toughening us up” or something.
I think for me it was just generally being raised by my parents (well-meaning socdem/lefty lib types), but one thing that I think planted the seeds of communism in my mind was my dad quoting Marx to get me to do my chores lol, specifically “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need”. Of course when he said it he just wanted me to mow the lawn or wash the dishes since he worked all day, but I really took it to heart
Lol shit I need to write this down.
I’m going to try this on my kids.
Bernie getting nerfed pushed me to read the communist manifesto lol
Same lmao
Being really shouted at for being a sneering imperialist one time and a rabid homophobe another time. That and learning details about the colonial wars the u.s marines waged in the Phillipines.
That shifted me on a slow course correction towards being a marxist-leninist.
Ok, being real? Out of all the people on this forum, I would NEVER expect you to have had those views in the past. God damn, theory is powerful
You are a product of your material environment. By which me and @SorosFootSoldier@hexbear.net both share similar life experiences of having a reactionary jackass of a dad. Like imagine having one of those radio shock jock asshats like Limbaugh, Levine, or Savage, as your dad and simply imagine wanting to make your dad proud. Like I was reactionary enough that if gamergate existed when I was a kid, I’m fairly confident I would’ve simply been refined by the pipeline into a self-hating asian ultranat fash that vicariously overemphasizes my white side while hating every moment of my existence.
Now I shouldn’t bear any credit to the ethnic background of my friend who was the final nail in the coffin of my reactionary past as they’re a self-hating Russian and a liberal, but you could say that the soviet legacy that helped make them who they are - via their parents - helped make me who I am.
dude i grew up with gamergate and i have no idea how i never got sucked into it. most of my friends were though
Laugh all you want but I genuinely think Disney’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame planted some seeds in my young mind. Like, the bad guy is a religious conservative who is obsessed with hunting down immigrants and minorities, and burns shit down and violates civil rights to do satisfy his obsession (which is driven by sexual pathology). Generic Hero Guy defects from the military over it and leads a popular uprising, and the bad guy is dragged down to hell. I’m not saying it’s good, but I am saying that you couldn’t make that movie post-9/11 because it would have been a call to action to overthrow the US government.
Counterintuitively: falling down the alt-right pipeline. I could never bring myself to fully agree with it and was “deprogrammed” by (and I really hate to say it)
. I was a ite for awhile and even (also to my current regret) voted for Jim Crowe Joe in the 2020 election. However, my ism also led me to finding out tankies existed. Like many ites, I mocked and sneered and resisted them at first. However, I like to think of myself as somewhat intellectually honest, and my confrontations with them led me to reading and finding out they were right.Before long I was a frequenter of r/genzedong (I didn’t use reddit at the time chapo was the specter haunting reddit and only heard of the sub from genzedongers after it had been banned for awhile). I migrated to Lemmy when genzedong got quarantined for fighting against liberal disinformation regarding Russia’s liberation of Ukraine in early 2022.
However, my
ism also led me to finding out tankies existed. Like many ites, I mocked and sneered and resisted them at first. However, I like to think of myself as somewhat intellectually honest, and my confrontations with them led me to reading and finding out they were right.First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.
“I aimed at the public’s heart and by accident I hit it in the stomach”
spoiler
the real meat grinder was capitalism
Probably when I stopped regarding the bible as the literal word of god, but as stories by men about god. Suddenly a lot of stuff made more sense, granted this was more due to the contradictions becoming insurmountable, but this approach of thinking, where you find the position that marries the most contradictions helped me a lot. Also is very satisfying.
it was exhausting being a liberal, every time Lucy pulled the football it required lots of mental gymnastics.
it’s exhausting being a marxist but in an entirely different way— your predictions turn out correct
I was happier as a lib for sure. Now there is just dread.
idk being a liberal was extremely frustrating for me. Anxiously following polls and election results, volunteering time and money, and even when your person wins seeing nothing change anyway — I don’t like the word but cuck is really the only way to describe it.
At least as a Marxist I can be disappointed but also understand wtf is going on
I thought I was a liberal, but it turns out I didn’t know what words even mean, apparently. Because it’s not what I thought it was! This post made me Google things.
Probably not a popular take in this community, but apparently I fall in somewhere between Democratic Socialism and Centrist Marxism, with a sprinkle of Social Democracy thrown in. Big props to LeftValues for giving me a start on that. Marxism-Leninism score of 0%, though, so that’s odd to me. I thought there works be at least some shared values, but my fondness for decentralization means probably not. Seems like there’s a lot to learn. At the very least, it seems like everyone wants things to get better.
I can recommend https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Category:Crit's_absolute_beginner_reading_list for more about Marxism-Leninism. There is also the sidebar in https://hexbear.net/c/anarchism for more about that, if that makes more sense to you maybe.
Anyway I am not big on labels as I have
a) read too little theory to be calling myself this or that
b) the debate about whether I am more x or y is pointless hairsplitting which does not serve any meaningful purposeRight on! I made a post in communism for some resources as well, although that community looks like it might be mildly dead. I appreciate the links!
I don’t know what instance you’re talking about, about hexbear is probably the most active explicitly left-wing instance in the lemmyverse. There is hexbear.net/c/askchapo or hexbear.net/c/lib_rehab if you want to ask a bit more spicy questions. Or pick any other comm that semi-fits what you want, it doesn’t matter too much.
hexbear.net/c/theory is probably where you want to go if you want to read more theory and there is also
https://bulletins.hexbear.net/posts/readinglist/
There probably are also very valuable comms on lemmygrad.ml but I don’t know about that instance too well unfortunately.
Probably my mother being a type 1 diabetic and seeing the financial strain it put on us just because she was born with it.
The American medical system is a case study in the horrors of capitalism.
Two things actually. My first grade teacher explained (in gentlest terms possible) that some people opposed Columbus Day because he was an enslaver and initiated the genocide of the native americans. She also talked about why people took issue with thanksgiving and why doing that thing where you ululate while putting your hand over your mouth was deeply racist. “Huh, it seems like something fucky is going on” is the impression she left on me.
The other thing was that at some point in time when I was a kid I started to question the purpose of money and why there were rich and poor people, my mother cautioned me to not think or talk like that because “that’s called communism, it’s bad, and you’ll get beat up at bars if you say that to people.” This struck me as rather odd at the time but I did ultimately drop that vision of a better, more just world for a good long while.
The path to leftist thought is similar to my gender journey, where after many misdirections and much confusion I have come back to the place I started from. That initial “this seems strange, but this feels right” was the truth all along.
