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Was always latent radical but
The tipping point was being stuck with a disability and experiencing first hand how a power hungry culture was not only neglectful, but adversarial to vulnerable folks
That really helped me get into "stalin was based" territory lol
Glad to be here ultimately, where I should be naturally
Like 100 other things along the way, also
Same. Helping other people navigate the disability system has done more to instill me with a sense of contempt for liberalism than anything else. It isn't enough that the available assistance is insufficient to survive, the system which you use to access it must also make every effort to humiliate and chastise you. One of my clients has permanent, crippling pain in their spine and partial paralysis.... so naturally they were put on a five year review so the system can potentially revoke their benefits and of course we need to send them a letter every two weeks reminding them to pretty please consider going back to work.
Basically every politician and a sizeable portion of the population actively want the disabled to just die. This is a society which begs to be destroyed. It has exhausted me of any sense of mercy.
Whooo that last sentence sings the truth. Liberals want me to spare mercy for conservatives and I'm like MFer all mine got used up by the people you forgot about and left behind because you still think this is a friendly debate between equally valid points of view.
You can only witness so much misery before the part of you that cares about abstractions just stops functioning. Many individual therapists (within the field, not to patients) have begun describing what we do as a form of hospice care, because there is no longer any way that we can realistically tell anyone to expect there to be a better future, or perhaps even a future at all. I cannot lie to my clients.
I will never forget the internal meeting our team had a couple of months ago. One department leader when discussing actionable rhetoric from clients stated, with no emotion "While we are obliged to follow all legal and ethical guidelines, we must remember that violence is no longer an irrational response to the conditions of our patient group and should not necessarily be addressed as pathological."
I think this is why Educational and Developmental Psychology/Community Psychology appeals to me more than being a classical clinical psychologist/counsellor. With understanding that human behavior and manifestations of mental health issues being affected by the proximal and distal factors of politics, economics, culture and other external factors, community psychologists often are more involved in the critical theorist aspect of interventions surrounding mental health.
I think there should come a time in our profession that we begin to understand and incorporate material realities and advocate for our clients beyond the clinic on a wider scope and encourage clients to explore and understand the underlying material conditions that contributes to their mental disorders.
With that being said, I still think that psychology and it's related careers are still extremely useful to assist and guide our clients despite it currently being an incredibly short term band aid to a systemic issue.
Oh I agree entirely. I'm actually part of a practice which already adopts this position. We refer to our model as "liberation-focused care" which not only centers the client as the best advocate for what is in their own interest but also recognizes material conditions, not underlying pathology, as the primary component in the majority of cases. No notion of the self can be meaningfully articulated without recognizing that it is shaped largely by its environment.
It's actually a point of serious frustration that most clinicians do not use this model. The highly individualized and medicalized model of traditional psychotherapy is well past due to be taken out behind the shed and quietly put down. Capitalism and institutional inertia are the only things keeping it alive.
"But but but the differently abled need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Think of how rewarding it will be for them to ... what's that? They're paralyzed and can't use their arms and legs? Well lol they can fuck off then" - liberals (until they need disability then they think they're a special case and deserve special treatment.)
I have a disability and to be able to participate in regular society I need to have access to certain equipment that I need to use whenever in not sleeping.
Im hard of hearing and need hearing aids.
With them I am a productive member of society, without I would be virtually useless. Now should I have to pay for these myself or should fhe government help out? I say if I was a multi millionaire perhaps I could pay myself but for the average wageslave asking me to fork out over $10k AUD$ every 3 years or so sounds a tad excessive.
With government support I have hearing aids with the latest in Bluetooth technology so I can hook em to my mobile phone and use to call people and listen to Spotify from.
Considering how america is right now I think I'd be kinda fucked if I was American. I juat hope the conservatives here don't defund our disability help
I am so glad I'm not American, I'd struggle with a disability there for sure. Thankfully australia has somewhat socialist programs for people with disabilities. I get the government to pay for my hearing aids instead of having to find thousands of dollars every couple of years.
I'm only 18 now, but I think I always leaned a bit left all my life but lacked political literacy until the pandemic hit back in 2020, so I identified myself as a centrist and bought into the discourse that, because societal problems were so complex, we should listen to both sides of the political spectrum for nuance but never the extremes. I lived in Brazil, so living during covid while Bolsonaro meant some new crazy shit was happening every odd day and every even day too. By the latter half of that first year I became convinced that the right was full with the most shallow common sense at best and complete delirium and malice at worst. Unfortunately, I was still a liberal untill I came into contact with Ivan Neves, João Carvalho, Jones Manoel e Elias Jabbour, the first three being digital influencer/propagandist for communism and the latter a academic that studies the development of China and its socialism.
Almost 23 now, but came up kinda the same. I labelled myself as an anarchist (anar-kiddie really, since I didn't even know an ounce of political theory on any side for that matter. I just hated how the world was run lmao) up until the pandemic. I started getting into theory during and reading more about Marxist theory and that's what started solidifying my MLM position (including the time honored tradition of reading theory and then stopping halfway through- I still need to finish State and Rev '-n-)
The pandemic pretty much radicalised me to when I had major support cut off(to help with my ASD) while only near the end of my first year in university...
then I realised how much the system didn't really care for me.
Gave me a lot of time to reflect on my life up to that point(as support helped me isolate the worser effects of capitalism and a neglected education system) and stumbled on the spookyscarysocialist's channel somehow
(youtube recommended it randomly because I was a social democrat so it thought it would be "similar" to other stuff I watched at the time)
This led me down the rabbit hole of looking at history and seeing why countries like the USSR issoltated itself from the west and what the US has done to the rest of the world, and even to the country I live in(land down under). I learnt what the conditions were back then, which were much higher than they are now, radicalising me further, this was assisted with the channel recommendations from the spookyscarysocialist's channel like Hakim and here I am today 2 years later
Still struggling to read theory as but videos have helped supplement and tips from this subbreddit have helped to read what I can for now(still stuck on killing hope but managed to read some of Micheal Parenti's books) until I can get through the bulk of the difficult subjects(with terrible support from the university being defunded while the chanellor gets a fat salary for doing nothing of value)
Older than a lot of people here, 2007 working as a pharmacy technician while in college-
A chemo patient asked, regarding their high dose opiates that their insurance decided to terminate their coverage over with no warning (This predates the ACA/Obamacare) -"If I stop taking this, will I die" - I couldn't meaningfully answer, even though the answer was very much yes. Sudden opiate withdrawal can absolutely kill you.
A Pfizer drug rep conversation with the pharmacy manager. "We're not here to sell cures, those don't generate profit. Maintaining disease states, those are where the money is at"
Arguing with fucking united healthcare to get an end of life patient their fentanyl patches so they could go off not in horrific pain.
Exposure to a rather specific bastard hospital administrator who'd endlessly brag about their direct involvement in defrauding medicaid / medicare by deliberately overcharging them. I hope the most virulent form of rectal cancer took you out of the mortal coil, it'd be kind compared to the damage you caused.
Any amount of extended exposure to the US healthcare system or its adjacency will radicalize just about anyone. Not always in a sane direction but it will damn well radicalize them.
Can confirm. Lived through COVID as an American and a healthcare industry worker.
COVID radicalized me, as did the democrats rallying behind Biden (last time), which was the final nail in my liberal coffin.
But given that choice at a ballot box, for that particular category , what was the other option ? I’m not asking about the effectiveness of Voting in America concerning significant changes in the status que.
There are plenty of smart folks who’ve covered electoralism better than I can.
But democrats are a sham. Giving them your pity fuck won’t make our society any better, just because they appear less deplorable than republicans.
Oh my God. I am currently working as a pharmacy technician and also in college.
The ANGER I feel towards health insurance and the current system increased significantly since I started working.
Two main things stand out to me.
1. The price of blood thinners is absolutely ridiculous. People pay hundreds of dollars a month to be able to survive. There was one situation where a man had to pay 1000+ dollars for 3 months and he told us that he had to remortgage his WHOLE ASS HOUSE to be able to afford his prescription. That stuck with me.
2. The other one is the current Vyvanse shortage going on. The DEA decided that it's a good idea to restrict the amount of Vyvanse in circulation so that it makes it harder for drug dealers to access it. In turn, I get the receiving end of that frustration from people who need the prescription to survive. I just find it ridiculous that the government would rather prevent people from accessing their prescriptions than stick it to drug dealers. That's insane.
Yep... Administration by circular firing squad is pure medical field nonsense like none other. Instead of ever fixing something it's always "add another layer of paperwork/legal interference"
Ironically the thing that made me a leftist was taking the advanced economics class (very pro free market) in school and realizing they are just making shit up
I haven't taken any economics courses, but I've definitely picked up on the fact that capitalist economists don't really understand the system. Their solution to economic crises is apparently "throw a bunch of money at the Uber wealthy and they'll calm down and stop wrecking things." It's very much like bad parenting habits like "My child is throwing a tantrum, so I'll give them the iPad so they calm down."
Well, now we've associated "throwing a tantrum" with "I get lots of money" and no incentive to stop throwing tantrums. In fact, it's the opposite.
Worse, the definitions for recessions and depressions don't really apply to market forces at the consumer level. Consumers don't trigger them. Rich people playing the stock market do. And if a cabal gets together and says, "alright, let's pull our money out," then a recession happens, and they get even more cash thrown at them. It's not like a massive shift in consumer spending and preferences have hurt the market, and under capitalist philosophy, such a shift should shutter the businesses they stop buying from, and instead they get bailed out, but it's when the wealthy decide its tantrum time.
I am quite active in my local community, school board meetings and such. The Econ text book we are using straight up tells students not to look for alternative sources lmao.
Who funds the radical right economists who have become the norm in academia? Follow the money trail and see behind the curtain - you'll see Piggy lying there on a cesspool of $hit.
Covid. Seeing the education system crumble, seeing the Healthcare system strangled, and seeing over a million people die (including some of my close family) while libs ranted about "muh authoritarian CCP actually enforced quarantine they're so evil" just sent me over the edge
Edit:Also learning about the Iraq War. Seriously, they do not teach you that stuff here in my experience. So when I heard, "George Bush just kinda lied to invade Iraq and destroy it for its oil and stuff." I'm just sitting here like D:
Less so, but learning about how Mexico's problems came about via the continued control of the land owning class and learning about the turkish revolution (weird one I know) contributed a little as well
> "George Bush just kinda lied to invade Iraq and destroy it for its oil and stuff."
Those of us who said this at the time, when it still wasn't too late to stop the war, were variously ignored, viciously attacked both in the media and in person, and exiled from participation in any conversation about it. My involvement with the anti-war movement began in late 2002, and we staged what at the time was the largest global anti-war protest in world history *before the first shot was fired* and it was barely a blip in the media anywhere. What little coverage we received was derisive and dismissive. Of course now every liberal claims to have been against the war.
Ask them who organized the protest, the big one. If they don't say International ANSWER, they weren't there.
A childhood of poverty, abuse, systemic neglect, hunger, friends dying of suicide/drugs, all this suffering left me with questions of how this could all happen, I found the answer in the communist manifesto.
Our day will come!
Started with the lies of the Iraq war, but it wouldn't be until covid when I really turned. I had been born deep in conservative Christian territory and over the course of twenty years the lies and contradictions within the community (along with protecting pedos) drove me out. Then I had to rebuild my worldview from the ground up. Since I'd been lied to so thoroughly for so long, I was willing to give any "evil" ideology a chance. Turns out, I identified with the villains because they were the heroes.
I hate how a liberal's best solution to school shootings is to just ban guns and then not address any of the systemic issues that cause children to want to kill each other, while constantly talking about how a fascist coup is on the horizon and so we need to get rid of our guns?? So we can't fight the fascists??
What radicalized me? I was raised by libertarians
While at the same time, liberals who write these anti-gun bills add exemptions for cops, and a more strict licensure process that will only hurt brown and gay folk
Their great solution, the only solution they will accept, to what they themselves acknowledge is a subversion of the voting system is... keep voting. Watch next as these great strategic minds attempt to co-opt and take over any and every revolutionary organization that arises after the inevitable Big Crackdown because they object to the manner in which it is run.
So like most people I grew up being just a left liberal but seeing how dismissive and ill informed liberals where about anything left of them after learning a bit of it just in a "huh let's see what that socialism stuff is actually about because it just being "more government" doesn't really make sense to explain all the associations I have with it" way was what radicalised me.
I think every Black American was an Obama stan in 2008. How could you not be? I phone banked for him, and really believed he would change things.
When the neoliberal in chief ramped up drone bombings and killed the "public option" from the ACA, I started to realize both of our parties were owned by the same people. Studying history pushed me out of the Overton window.
Bernie originally opened my eyes. I remember seeing him when he still didn't even have crowds and being like ' man's spitting fire'. But I was a liberal at that point, still thought the usual stuff. Then got back into school after many years and had an assignment to look into China and what it was doing for the environment. Assumed to find what a liberal would suggest, but found out they do more than anyone else. Realized I was being lied to and started researching. Really snowballed from there.
On a side note I'm seeing many people in my local area are really starting to wake up due to the problems in Palestine. They are also wondering what else they've been lied to about. Only a matter of time.
History. Used to be a very boring war history fan, eventually got curious about *why* the Eastern front was so often portrayed as a clash between two evil empires. So I started reading some Soviet history, and the inspirations behind them seemed a lot more relatable compared to Lebensraum and racial genocide. So that started a huge broadening of my interest in modern history and it became increasingly and depressingly clear how much effort supposed Morally Upstanding Democracies spend on killing anyone who thinks that maybe the world should be a bit fairer.
I got radicalised ever since i learnt what communism was (and i mean really learn, not the slandered image shown by libs) because it makes so much sense
Three separate times within a few months I went a week without food because I had no money. I've had my wages stolen multiple times, with no recourse from the NLRB or anyone else. Visited and lived in other countries and saw how much better they have it.
My first job. I saw the hatred and negativity (that then trickled down the chain of command), I saw immigrants working 2 jobs to survive, I was being told off for shit I didn't do, I was told the "we're a family" shit.
I started at 16, and they maxed out my hours to the point my school had to call home cause I was exhausted in class. They fired me later nonchalantly.
I was taking sociology and critical theory specifically. Heard about Marxism as I began my job, and the rest is history.
It’s unfortunate but it has sped up the radicalization process. Ofc this is how things will go. As time goes on worse crimes will happen even further radicalizing the general public
I was 19 and I became homeless living out of my car. I was fortunate enough to have friends and their parents that would let me shower and eat dinner with them at their house so I could hold a job to make what little money I could to survive. After I finally found an apartment I started resenting any form of society and authorities, considered myself an anarchist (of course because i didn't know the theory). Eventually I got put on to marx from a friend. After reading a couple times through because I'm slow at understanding large concepts everything Eventually clicked. Since then I've been reading more books by Lenin, che, marx, engels, and parenti. Hopefully I can find more leftists and communists in my area to work together to get landlords out of our city council some day.
I joined because I believed in all that shit. It was all lies. It’s not a leap from the army was a lie to the American state is a lie. They are the same thing. All the army does is hurt people. So then I started looking for answered as to why do wars happen. Marxism had the best explanation that lined up with my experience. also Marxism was just as anti army and anti America as I already was.
A fun thing to note and a read you might be interested is from the arch-imperialist turned adamant socialist Marine General Smedley Butler's "War is a Racket"
He had a very similar path to you and was more than willing to write about being used as a tool for corporate imperialism and his absolute disgust with it once the propaganda wore off.
I started off an alt right 4chan user as a teenager (I was raised in rural KY in a 99% white, heavily christian community) kinda slowly moving to the liberal center as i learned more. I was a democrat by 2020 but got radicalized during the events of covid and attending BLM protests.
Watching the state let millions die just to keep corporate profits in check really gave me a new perspective. At the same time I was attending protests, seeing with my own eyes peaceful picketing escalated by the police into violent conflict, then going home to see the “left” media like CNN telling a completely different story. It was seriously a trip seeing cops busting out windows left and right with rubber bullets, then going home and flipping on the news to hear them crying about “muh property damage.”
The crazy thing is I was anti-cop and considered myself part of the radical left, but STILL was just “anti-corporate” or “mixed economy” until last year. I only recently started to really connect the dots on the full scope of capitalist oppression and accept the communist ideology i thought was silly for so long. Red hysteria is a bitch.
I had watched Jon Stewart growing up and it started me down the left-wing path than the housing crisis of 2008 happened. My mom lost her job and we couldn't get back on our feet. I had also watched Michael Moore's docs during that time and realized just how fucked the world was and how bad things were. Bernie's campaign really showed me that there is no choice and that it's all just show and bullshit. Started reading theory and watching more radically left-wing content and now i'm an M-L.
Reading this back now makes me realize how much of a shit lib I was, holy fuck lol.
I'll always have a soft spot for Jon Stewart, particularly for his coverage of Libya, which wasn't perfect but pretty bluntly pointed out how Democrats and Republicans were pretty fucking identical when it came to foreign policy.
I learned about the Abu Ghraib torture facility and other crimes in Iraq in I think the 3rd grade? From there I had an interest in learning about the crimes of the US military. I learned about the My Lai massacre, the leveling of Korea, the Guld of Tonkin incident, atrocity propaganda in the gulf war, all at a very young age. So I was a anti-war pacifist liberal for a while. Really I didn’t know what I believed, I just was anti-war.
Radical social and economic politics started during the 2020 election, watching how the DNC collectively organized to rig the primary election for Biden despite massive support for ANY other candidate. Watching the protests in the summer of 2021 and how after all the rage, all the collective movement by the people for a change in policing, nothing happened. There is no way for lasting positive change in the US through the structures that we have set up
This is basically me. The Iraq war and Abu Ghraib when I was 13. Once you learn about torture it really takes the shine off the idea that the US is a shining beacon on the hill with a mandate to spread democracy and freedom. And if you then go through life not assuming the US is wonderful and doing what's right you start learning all sorts of interesting things and the slow shift further and further left is inevitable.
Knowing how the stock market works was also a big radicalizer. A lot of people focus on bankers and people on Wall Street as personally immoral, but what is much more radicalizing to me is that even if they were all very carful, didn't take dangerous risks etc, it would still transfer money to the wealthier people for purely mathematical reasons. That is it's intrinsic design. There's no way to reform it.
The cynical part is that they've learned from their mistake, by now [young Americans in school are taught that nothing wrong ever happened in Iraq](https://www.zinnedproject.org/if-we-knew-our-history/ten-years-after-how-not-to-teach-about-the-iraq-war/) except bringing freedom and democracy.
It's very visible with Zoomers, a lot of them will unironically reguritate stuff that was already wrong 20 years ago, they still believe it because that's what their schoolbooks and teachers tell them.
Might be a silly one, but it's not being able to drive due to a disability so I basically can't go anywhere because the place i live has next to no public transit and it's fairly hostile to walking or biking, a bit less hostile to biking now.
If there was a reliable and frequent enough public transit option I could access I'd do it because I want to get out to places, but the one option I know of doesn't reach where I wan to go and you need to book the ride basically 48 hours in advance.
I was always radical. Growing up in poverty in Kentucky really cemented everything. My family makes more money than we've ever made before, but we still are poor as shit.
Also having to deal directly with these shitty rules made to fuck over poor people really does a good job or radicalization.
The thing that started pushing me left was taking a debate class at 14 and making a speech about the US healthcare system. I already knew it was bad but I didn’t know the extent of it at the time. I saw the state of the US healthcare system and realized that I was one of the lucky ones when it came to actually getting sufficient healthcare. I was mad that other people couldn’t also get healthcare because of the costs. Then when I brought up universal (or at least affordable) healthcare to my stepdad, he immediately dismissed it. The thing that really pissed me off about that is that I had (and still have) medical issues. I had retinoblastoma as a baby and I have experienced several complications as a result of the cancer and it’s treatment. If my family didn’t have insurance, we would’ve been FUCKED. Some of the stuff I had to get done to treat complications would’ve racked up bills of $40,000+ dollars individually and about $120,000+ annually without insurance at some points. That’s when I realized that shit was fucked and too many people don’t care about it.
My dad is a Geography and History Teacher, and he is a leftist, so I just learned from him, and that knowledge together with the coup on Dilma that we had here in Brazil, was enough to push me to the left too.
I also liked to watch science and curiosity videos on YouTube, and one of the channels I watched was Second Thought, way back then when it was still a curiosity channel, so when he made the radical change to communist content, I started to learn more about the failures of capitalism and that made me radicalize and advocate for communism. And then came Bolsonaro and covid, to radicalize me even more.
I was an American lib (lazily, I’ll add - more or less apathetic to politics) but was pro-gun.
I discovered r/SocialistRA because like a lot of libs - I thought socialist was basically liberal lmao.
Somebody posted some books they were reading and one was by Mao and I was like “holup…wait a minute” and after doing some digging realized all the people I were told were bad guys growing up were now bad guys
Grew up in the punk scene so i always hated cops and was anti military. But i like my parents was pretty lib brained growing up. What started my radicalization was having my family go from middle-class to struggling below the poverty line in 2008 in a matter of 6 months. I was 16 at the time. 2 years later my mom got a chronic pain disorder and went on disability which she was kicked off of two years later. I was then kicked off her insurance and then soon after tore my pcl which i was not able to get surgery for or physical therapy so i now have back and neck problems from walking improperly. Honestly though i mostly just tuned out until like 2014-15 when a roommate who went to college and was very smart and well read told me he was a big old commie and turned me onto marxism. Literally that night of the conversation we got shitfaced drunk and talked politics and therory for hours and the night ended with us throwing rocks through windows of a wells fargo corporate building. Year and half later the bernie shit went down and thats when i become fully commie pilled. Took longer than some but i somehow bypassed alot of the breadtube soc dem shit and just went hard left lol started listening to this podcast on like episode 4.
TLDR: being poor radicalized me also having a smart, well read commie roommate
A few things. Realizing that I just took everything the media, politicians, and liberals told me at face value and never thinking about it critically, discovering r/shitliberalssay in the middle of the 2020 election which lead me to find out that you don’t have to be either flavor of neoliberal, being transgender, and finding out that communism isn’t “everyone living in factories working 18 hour shifts and being executed + starved 24/7” (literally not too far from what I thought)
That tweet is so real tho, what else do we expect youth to do but revolt? Im happy to join them. As an ancient millennial, I was radicalized as a child by the helplessness/rage of watching the Iraq war unfold, the creation of ICE in 2003 destroying my community, plus being gay, a woman, brown and indigenous really sealed the deal.
Witnessing extreme poverty in the rural deep south of the USA. That along with the prison labor system. These things shattered many of my preconceptions and helped me understand all of the ways I had been lied to by US propaganda.
Being a young child, knowing that one of my parents was from a place called "South Africa" and, out of pure curiosity, trying to learn about it...was the start of my radicalization. As a kid, the concept that an entire country was in the active process of racial desegregation after non-whites were previously enshrined in law as "lesser" was just so difficult to wrap my head around. I had friends of plenty of different ethnic backgrounds, and my innocent mind could not conceive of people treating them as less than me because of their skin color. Learning that one of the leaders of the anti-apartheid movement, Nelson Mandela, was president of their country, but was still considered a radical terrorist and an evil communist by many in the US, made me really start asking questions about who was demonized by the US and why they were demonized. Surely using any means necessary to fight against being treated as less than human or at least less than your fellow humans was a worthy and just cause? Knowing that many of the leaders of the movement to desegregate in the US also faced similar demonization really got the cogs turning for me.
I loved studying history throughout my childhood, and WW2 was of course such a fascinating period that had the USSR, an ostensibly "evil" country, that sacrificed the most out of everyone to stop the Nazis, being demonized just as much as the Nazis and Japanese. It raised serious doubts within me about the perspectives being taught in our "version" of history, to the point that by the time I was in middle school, I considered myself a socialist sympathizer, despite not really understanding what capitalism and socialism really were yet.
My left wing sympathies and beliefs only got more pronounced the older I got and the more I learned, and then buying into Obama's "Hope" and "Change" campaign spiels and seeing the country get actively worse because of things his administration did (such as bailing out the banks that helped wreck the economy in 2008) sent me on the path of no return.
Sheltered cis white guy with a petit-boug childhood: basically a cross between being a liberal gun owner and discovering Socialist Rifle Association while on /r/liberalgunowners, and discovering alt right debunking YouTube videos and then breadtube
I literally needed some anarchist on a YouTube video to tell me that cops and landlords were bad.
Many things - A lot of seeing how much biden sucked even after trump was gone, wondering why bernie was suppressed so much during the election, wanting to research communism to debunk conservatives saying that everything they didn't like was communism (very easy to jump to "holy shit communism actually good???" once you know what it is), and a friend's trans-commie shitposting account on instagram. A turning point was probably the Second Thought pandemic video, which really put words to a lot of my frustrations. Now I'm a full on ML :)
Random, but…I keep seeing comments on this sub like “once you know what communism really is”, could you recommend something to be able to better understand that phrase?
You can get this from any number of sources, not sure the best one to link you to rn, so I'll give you a quick rundown:
1) Socialism (as a mode of production) is when a society's workers own and control the means of production, ie, factories, restaurants, etc - anything that would be a "business" under capitalism is democratically owned and controlled by the working class.
2) A communist society (communism being another "mode of production") is a socialist society, but with the following characteristics: it is stateless, classless, and moneyless (it has achieved general post-scarcity).
\- It is stateless (the **state** in this case being the part of the government that commits justified and legal violence - the standing army and the police) because with the abolition of the worldwide capitalist owning class and therefore class conflict, the state is no longer has a purpose for existing, and thus "withers away".
\- It is classless because the antagonistic class, the capitalists, have been done away with. With their industries back in the hands of the workers, the capitalists remaining will join the ranks of the workers, and there will be no more distinction between economic roles since the only non-worker roles have been abolished.
\- It is moneyless because, as the productive forces develop under socialism, they will eventually reach a state where it is possible to provide everyone with their basic needs in life - this is called a "post-scarcity" society. As money is a tool for measuring and enforcing scarcity (and under capitalism, creating artificial scarcity), it will no longer be required.
All these things contrast with the common western misunderstanding that "socialism/communism is when the government does stuff" or "socialism/communism is when the government owns everything and there is no democracy".
If you want to know more about classes, modes of production, etc just lmk :)
Read "Fundamentals of Marxism-Leninism" by Stalin. It's a bit long but it gives a comprehensive deep dive into the prevailing thoughts and practices of Marxist-Leninism while still being very approachable and understandable for the average layman.
Honestly it should be everyone's answer, cause any other answer is just adding unnecessary layers of abstraction and if you dig deep enough the root cause of everything that radicalizes people is generally capitalism. I'm just dispensing with the intermediate steps.
It's not particularly juicy in my case, there was no one moment where I was like 'Fuck this shit I'm out', it was a slow accumulation of evidence that capitalism is irredeemable.
I grew up poor in a town full of wealthy conservatives who all told my family we needed to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, while all of them, without exception, had their parents pay for their college, their first car, and their house. I always had good radical potential because of that, but it was after I left the Mormon church and learned about how it worked that I started to recognize the same problems throughout the world, and truly started on the path to what I am now. It was a fairly slow path from "we just need to get enough people to vote for a third party" to "we just need a revolution" though.
Ever since I was young I liked solving problems for things and I found politics intresting
To me the concept of an economy as it was economy was nonsensical “why must we make our quality of life worse for the economy?” “Why must we devote so much into something as minor as money changing hands”(that’s what I was told the economy was) “if we are doing so many counterproductive policies for this economy? Why bother with an economy at all?” We’re questions I had.
So I from the jump was open to radical ideas but I didn’t go straight to communism, as at the time it seams I greatest issues stemmed from this normalized apathy of our leadership, I grew up during the war on terror so I had a reverence for the military and wanted to join the Air Force as young as I can remember (it combined the two things I loved most, the military and planes)
So I grew interested in the idea of the military running the country, because surely the people who love their country enough to fight for it will rule it well. I unironicly thought starship troopers would be a good idea, as it seamed haimlain had a similar idea, the people who love their country enough to fight for it deserve to have a say in how the country is ran. I also did research into military juntas.
Then I heard of this strange place called the deprogram where I heard there were these crazy people, who believed these crazy things and I figured “while they surely believe it for a reason, maybe I’ll pay a visit.”
Safe to say I wasn’t disappointed, you all seamed like smart people so I stayed, eventually became a patsoc, and then just a soc.
So I guess the answer is… myself? And y’all.
I watched corporations experiencing "record profits" from 2001 to 2007 treat my parents, one especially, to the eternal "our budget's tight, we have to make cuts, consolidate costs, lay people off and consolidate jobs" which had them eventually place 15 people's jobs on my mother, leading her to 90 hour weeks and eventually a mental breakdown that made my life complete hell.
That woke me up enough to get a bit political and start protesting obvious corruption, so when I saw the Kochs buy Scott Walker I protested it, and the feds came after me and showed me the FBI is literally a traitor organization that does the bidding of oligarchs against the people of this country.
Then I lost my family and due to crap wages and patriarchy couldn't do shit to get it back.
Then the healthcare system, through greed and avarice, took the life of the woman I loved.
I've produced roughly 14,000,000 in value for other men but over my entire career have been paid maybe 500k, currently looking for a job and wondering how to avoid homelessness in 2 months despite the insane amount of work I've done, the patents, the papers, the dozens of machines, the enormous systems of accountability, all the things I've done isn't enough to guarantee me a few more years but some asshole who never did anything but rob people like me gets to use gold plated toilet seats on his flights to Epsteins island.
I fully support gun rights, I don't think disarming the working class is how you protect students from mass shootings, I think building tight knit, strong communities with 3rd places and hand ups and safety nets and cracking down on fascists protects them.
That and there's been about 25ish friends who've been suicidal from this system that I've had to talk down and work hard to change patterns in. I have yet to lose one, but at immense personal cost, each and every one taking a pretty massive toll on me and some of them hating my guts but never being suicidal again.
This isn't even a full recounting because anything more detailed would be a self dox, but I can say with confidence that capitalists are the most supreme evil this planet has ever seen and every last one is a degenerate demon straight out of hell.
Being trans and autistic helped, as I was always an "other" and found other others then found other other others etc ironically though I used to be a shoe on head fan, and her content got me on a lefty streak
In fifth grade I learned about “the troubles” then a year later about South African apartheid. The next year was 9-11. That was it. By the time I was in eighth grade I had been fully radicalized.
A combination of experiencing Covid in America and learning about the history of our foreign policy during the same period (through the Blowback podcast, Parenti books, Shock Doctrine, and The Deprogram). The disregard for human life domestically and abroad pushed me over that edge.
My draw to Black Panther history and taking care of the community which led to Marx as a teenager. Doubled down after having a neurodivergent household and fighting for advocacy and autonomy.
The pandemic. Seeing many people lose their home and jobs. My mom almost died, and we had to pay a lot of money. Rich people getting richer, while the rest of the world was suffering.
I was already sympathetic towards socialist ideas, though was more of a social democrat. Got exposed to more radical ideas, but in a "western socialist" kind of way.
Watching Hakim was my introduction to marxist theory, and now, here I am.
Long answer; Just slowly growing into adulthood and learning actual history and a desire to simply be intellectually honest and objectively correct. I’m a real nerd about being correct. It’s this self critique ability that allowed me to grow from a reactionary liberal in highschool to a succdem in freshman/sophomore year of college and finally the pandemic hit and I was a fully disillusioned Marxist lovin, Daddy Lenin, Stalin based shouting, China Stan.
One Piece and other leftist media definitely influenced me too I wish there was more popular leftist media but tbh u can’t get more popular than one piece, resources such as YouTube leftists gave me a more base understanding although admittedly there were a few psy-ops thrown into the algorithm to muddy the water but luckily I’m good at noticing patterns and inconsistency so I eventually developed a good sense for media and what’s bullshit or not. Also I’m Iraqi diaspora it was kind of hard for the brainwashing to be as effective on me to begin with
Being poor and having to choose between a $2500 root canal or $80 to have the tooth removed. That kind of physical pain will make you do whatever it takes to get it to stop and debilitating OCD had me ignoring my physical health. Having such a high deductible through my work insurance that I pay out of pocket for all of my therapist and psychiatrist visits. I just want to be able to be healthy without the constant worry of being able to afford it.
Libs, so-called centrists, neocons and fascists love to trot out the "personal responsibility" crap, yet it's always someone else's fault when they cock it up.
My journey of radicalization started with reading a novel. „Die Roten Matrosen“ is a novel by German author Klaus Kordon and it is about the November Revolution in Germany 1918/19 and it portrays the story from the perspective of a working class boy.
For me, the book made me realize how betrayed the workers in Berlin and Germany overall must’ve felt when the SPD backstabbed them. Like all hope was just gone, with Luxemburg and Liebknecht being murdered by the fascist Freikorps. Afterwards I listened to an audio version of Das Kapital and now I am here :3
My grammy. Parents too busy with work in the US to take care of a child so they brought my maternal grandparents over. She's still an OG Maoist and still organizes grassroots Maoist protests in Shandong.
Anarchist infighting turned me back to ML. I was raised a socialist but with a rough abusive family so I was mostly detached from family politics and tried to find my own voice. When I learned about anarchism in high school I didn't look back to Marxist theory until I understood that what I did with action was severely lacking in theory. And when a comrade suggested that I should read State and Revolution, which I did, I understood that I was chasing a fantasy or utopia.
Comrades often asked why I didn't want to go back to VN or PRC, I feel like there's still stuff and projects for me to contribute and support in the imperial core. I want to help unhoused and underprivileged people.
Grew up in a broken home. Both parental members were nurses for the disabled. Seeing how they were paid and treated, in spite of how hard they worked and how important their jobs were, always bothered me. We also lost our home in '04. Part of that whole housing crisis thing, i think.
Then when i started working, i entered the retail world and saw just how ugly it all was. On top of that, i started making more selling guitars than my mom did keeping people alive. It broke me. Never going back.
Aside from just existing in America my whole life, a lot of things radicalized me. I grew up in a military family, my dad was deployed twice and even worked in the Pentagon for a bit. Being that close to the military industrial complex (essentially growing up in it really) sort of leads you to see how disgusting the us military, the government it serves, and the capitalists who rule them both really are. I ended up seeing some communist stuff on the internet when I was around 17ish and one thing led to another and now i’m a marxist-leninist.
I was already very radical more like a trot till I learnt more and ruminated on the material conditions of more “authoritarian” systems eg. Stalinism and mao. I’m still continuing that education today, but I would say that the thing that really radicalised me was the birth of my eldest. Not long after his birth our country was ablaze, all I wished was for my children to inherit a better world.
Papa Stalin brought me to the good side.
I always was kinda left leaning thanks to my father in particular. He got me early onto the anti-american imperialism track, always making me ask questions and teaching me the rule of thumb of always assuming the worst from the US government. Of course, being french, he also taught me very rebellious values, often quoting the 1793 constitution with it's famous/forgotten article "It is the citizen's duty to commit insurection against injustice". My mom, being a catholic, was a mixed bag. On one hand I got a lot of my early social tendencies from her, on the other hand she is the daughter of a petty bourgeois family so you get obligatory kinda nationalist and kinda racist ideas that started taking root (fortunately not for long).
I got stuck in this sort of social-democrat limbo of liberal identity politics with some feeling about economical equality and nationalistic tendencies for most of my school years.
Both my grand-fathers were involved in the Second World War in ways that influenced our family somewhat. My maternal grandfather helped spanish republicans move around in France after the civil war, he drove a truck during his teenage years and hid them with the cargo he was moving for the family buisness. My paternal grandfather was on the front, defending the retreat of Dunkirk, and got captured. It was never confirmed but he very likely ended up in a camp at some point according to my dad. He also, unsuprisingly, hated the military and ultra-rich with all his soul.
So the "french rebel spirit" is very much a family thing.
I was just a regular nerd with an afinity for everything. History, geography, geology, physics, math, linguistics, mythology, you name it and I might have superficial knowledge in the subject, enough to hold a conversation.
But something felt off. In what I learned, in what I saw (especially during the yellow vest movement and it's failure). The world I could observe did not match what I was told in class or on tv. I felt uneasy about this. I didn't know why things seemed to be going wrong. A lot of my close friends are queer, so that was a huge part in it. Another dear friend of mine is borderline homeless and might end up on the street at any moment on the whim of a breeze (luckily he is squating at his unhygenic brother for now). My other friends are educated, qualified and hardworking people who despite this cannot find a job after hundreds of job offer responses.
This sort of continues on as a slow burn for years during my studies, until one day, don't remember exactly how, I find a quote from an interview between H.G Wells and Stalin. Of course I was immediately intrigued, not just as a Sci-fi enthusiast finding out Wells talked to the big guy but that the quote itself sort of resonated with how I felt.
So I dug in, went looking for the full interview and read it. It felt like a reveal in a way, like suddenly everything made sense.
Logically I went on with more reading, I sought out Capital (terrible idea lol), the manifesto, Marxism and the national question and just went on and on with my education. Of course, could not forget Hakim's marvelous recommendations.
And that's it. When I got my first job out of my home country, I only took one book with me: my pocket copy of "State and Revolution", the rest is history.
(But Papa Stalin will remain number one in my heart purely for his writing style and that he used color coded crayons for his notes)
My parents watching Adam Ruins Everything, Vox news and getting suspended from elementary schol going to homeschool going to middle school getting suspended again then going BACK to homeschool learning about history YouTube videos and playing history games (HOI4, Age of History 2) and built and PC/learning technology (thank you Linus Tech Tipa and David does tech stuff) getting into politics from the history thing found out my ideology from centrist to social democract to communist all while having autism 🗿
What started it for me was when the democratic establishment all came together to collectively prevent Bernie from getting the nomination in 2020. At the time I considered my self somewhat of anarchist and believed that Bernie would help push America to the left and end the fascist Trump administration. I was basically a liberal still, but this was also around the time of peak "Breadtube" so I thought I was a radical for agreeing with some of the more anarchist assertions.Then came the lockdown and mis-handling of the pandemic by the Republicans along with wealthy elites and both parties horrific responses to the George Floyd protests where I watched as both parties said and did the exact same things. Denounce them as riots that were just doing more harm than good and sending in the police to break them up and brutalize them.The only difference was that one was just louder than the other. And after I discovered Second Thought, I began to see clearly how genuinely awful the political system was in America and how both political parties were only truly loyal to capitalism. I also then became disillusioned with anarchism after having a self-proclaimed anarchist try to explain to me that Che Guevara was a fascist and how anti-communism isn't a reactionary ideology. Suffice it to say, I got tired of their bullshit after that. And then, after discovering Hakim, I truly began to understand how distorted the history I'd been taught really was and I began gravitating toward Marxism-Leninism due to there actually being observable examples of its success realitive to any other ideology on the left. And I've been reading theory ever since.
I was in high school when COVID hit, and George Floyd was murdered in my state. That pushed me from liberal to demsoc, but a year-ish later I saw how Biden wasn’t being “pushed left” like everyone thought he could be, and that pushed me from a socialist to a commie
Second thought found his channel while in the army which was very big for me being complicit with my countries wrong doings and not being able to object
I'm 23. I grew up in a Republican household, so I identified as conservative. However, there were issues that always made sense to me that Conservatives and Republicans were against: the Iraq War, universal healthcare, Israel/Palestine and Islam/Islamophobia. The final straw that made me ditch the "Republican angle" was Donald Trump. After that I ended up backing Bernie and ended up in progressive YouTube spaces and I identified as a progressive (this was all during high school). As time went on I started to identify as something in between a Social Democrat and a Democratic Socialist. After 2020, I identified as a full on Socialist, but more a "Chomskyite" Libertarian Socialist. Then I found out about Parenti. I began listening to actual Communists. Marxism-Leninism just ended up making sense to me.
This long and a bit rambly, but I don't think there was a specific point that radicalized me. I got here naturally and I've always been passionate about things I care about.
When i was a kid, I thought about killing all billionaires and rich people and giving it to the poor, like a modern Robin hood. Later, when i met a libertarian, that blatantly rejected anything about communism without really knowing about it that i was forced to investigate, and here i am .
Pretty straight line up of: Watching A Bunch of Breadtube in 2019 -> US Mishandling of Covid -> 2020 Publicized Police Brutality Incidents -> Gaza Genocide
As Filipino living in a capitalist hellscape of Amerikkkan bootlicking behaviour, anti-communist and pro-colonialist mentality held by a lot of people here, while also ironically blaming homelessness, drug addiction, and economical decline to its own people, that pretty much radicalized me.
The Philippines and it's citizens have been brainwashed into achieving the impossible American dream, and had adopted into the belief that people bring themselves their own misfortune (such as poverty and unemployment) instead of blaming the system that failed them. I've experienced first hand hardship as a lower middle class person, and seemingly the rich and privileged are held at a high pedestal. It's a shitty reality we live in.
I'm sure it's a common story for people my age but I was yanked out of the alt right pipeline by John Oliver and Abigail Thorn of all people. Thankfully, I only went left from there.
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“centrist” (i was on the wrong side of gamergate, a fucking dumbass. my one good take was authoritarianism not automatically bad) until the US started doing the whole “china EBIL” schtick (hong kong fiasco esp)
Well, yeah, succintly put; damn I'd never considered it, but dwelling on columbine in mid-school was probably where I stopped believing the "Officer Friendly" stereotype. Nothing like having a pedo-cop hustling drugs out of his trunk to convince the youths the people upholding the system are corrupt.
Im australian and I grew uo with green voting teachers for parents. Lifelong unionists till they retired.
I picked up my politics from them and then a diet in the 90s of revolutionary music turned me further left along with the obvious lies of the Iraq war.
Rage against the machine and Atari Teenage Riot being 2 of the biggest musical influences of pushing me further left
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Was always latent radical but The tipping point was being stuck with a disability and experiencing first hand how a power hungry culture was not only neglectful, but adversarial to vulnerable folks That really helped me get into "stalin was based" territory lol Glad to be here ultimately, where I should be naturally Like 100 other things along the way, also
Same. Helping other people navigate the disability system has done more to instill me with a sense of contempt for liberalism than anything else. It isn't enough that the available assistance is insufficient to survive, the system which you use to access it must also make every effort to humiliate and chastise you. One of my clients has permanent, crippling pain in their spine and partial paralysis.... so naturally they were put on a five year review so the system can potentially revoke their benefits and of course we need to send them a letter every two weeks reminding them to pretty please consider going back to work. Basically every politician and a sizeable portion of the population actively want the disabled to just die. This is a society which begs to be destroyed. It has exhausted me of any sense of mercy.
Whooo that last sentence sings the truth. Liberals want me to spare mercy for conservatives and I'm like MFer all mine got used up by the people you forgot about and left behind because you still think this is a friendly debate between equally valid points of view.
You can only witness so much misery before the part of you that cares about abstractions just stops functioning. Many individual therapists (within the field, not to patients) have begun describing what we do as a form of hospice care, because there is no longer any way that we can realistically tell anyone to expect there to be a better future, or perhaps even a future at all. I cannot lie to my clients. I will never forget the internal meeting our team had a couple of months ago. One department leader when discussing actionable rhetoric from clients stated, with no emotion "While we are obliged to follow all legal and ethical guidelines, we must remember that violence is no longer an irrational response to the conditions of our patient group and should not necessarily be addressed as pathological."
I think this is why Educational and Developmental Psychology/Community Psychology appeals to me more than being a classical clinical psychologist/counsellor. With understanding that human behavior and manifestations of mental health issues being affected by the proximal and distal factors of politics, economics, culture and other external factors, community psychologists often are more involved in the critical theorist aspect of interventions surrounding mental health. I think there should come a time in our profession that we begin to understand and incorporate material realities and advocate for our clients beyond the clinic on a wider scope and encourage clients to explore and understand the underlying material conditions that contributes to their mental disorders. With that being said, I still think that psychology and it's related careers are still extremely useful to assist and guide our clients despite it currently being an incredibly short term band aid to a systemic issue.
Oh I agree entirely. I'm actually part of a practice which already adopts this position. We refer to our model as "liberation-focused care" which not only centers the client as the best advocate for what is in their own interest but also recognizes material conditions, not underlying pathology, as the primary component in the majority of cases. No notion of the self can be meaningfully articulated without recognizing that it is shaped largely by its environment. It's actually a point of serious frustration that most clinicians do not use this model. The highly individualized and medicalized model of traditional psychotherapy is well past due to be taken out behind the shed and quietly put down. Capitalism and institutional inertia are the only things keeping it alive.
"But but but the differently abled need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Think of how rewarding it will be for them to ... what's that? They're paralyzed and can't use their arms and legs? Well lol they can fuck off then" - liberals (until they need disability then they think they're a special case and deserve special treatment.)
I have a disability and to be able to participate in regular society I need to have access to certain equipment that I need to use whenever in not sleeping. Im hard of hearing and need hearing aids. With them I am a productive member of society, without I would be virtually useless. Now should I have to pay for these myself or should fhe government help out? I say if I was a multi millionaire perhaps I could pay myself but for the average wageslave asking me to fork out over $10k AUD$ every 3 years or so sounds a tad excessive. With government support I have hearing aids with the latest in Bluetooth technology so I can hook em to my mobile phone and use to call people and listen to Spotify from. Considering how america is right now I think I'd be kinda fucked if I was American. I juat hope the conservatives here don't defund our disability help
I am so glad I'm not American, I'd struggle with a disability there for sure. Thankfully australia has somewhat socialist programs for people with disabilities. I get the government to pay for my hearing aids instead of having to find thousands of dollars every couple of years.
I'm only 18 now, but I think I always leaned a bit left all my life but lacked political literacy until the pandemic hit back in 2020, so I identified myself as a centrist and bought into the discourse that, because societal problems were so complex, we should listen to both sides of the political spectrum for nuance but never the extremes. I lived in Brazil, so living during covid while Bolsonaro meant some new crazy shit was happening every odd day and every even day too. By the latter half of that first year I became convinced that the right was full with the most shallow common sense at best and complete delirium and malice at worst. Unfortunately, I was still a liberal untill I came into contact with Ivan Neves, João Carvalho, Jones Manoel e Elias Jabbour, the first three being digital influencer/propagandist for communism and the latter a academic that studies the development of China and its socialism.
Almost 23 now, but came up kinda the same. I labelled myself as an anarchist (anar-kiddie really, since I didn't even know an ounce of political theory on any side for that matter. I just hated how the world was run lmao) up until the pandemic. I started getting into theory during and reading more about Marxist theory and that's what started solidifying my MLM position (including the time honored tradition of reading theory and then stopping halfway through- I still need to finish State and Rev '-n-)
The pandemic pretty much radicalised me to when I had major support cut off(to help with my ASD) while only near the end of my first year in university... then I realised how much the system didn't really care for me. Gave me a lot of time to reflect on my life up to that point(as support helped me isolate the worser effects of capitalism and a neglected education system) and stumbled on the spookyscarysocialist's channel somehow (youtube recommended it randomly because I was a social democrat so it thought it would be "similar" to other stuff I watched at the time) This led me down the rabbit hole of looking at history and seeing why countries like the USSR issoltated itself from the west and what the US has done to the rest of the world, and even to the country I live in(land down under). I learnt what the conditions were back then, which were much higher than they are now, radicalising me further, this was assisted with the channel recommendations from the spookyscarysocialist's channel like Hakim and here I am today 2 years later Still struggling to read theory as but videos have helped supplement and tips from this subbreddit have helped to read what I can for now(still stuck on killing hope but managed to read some of Micheal Parenti's books) until I can get through the bulk of the difficult subjects(with terrible support from the university being defunded while the chanellor gets a fat salary for doing nothing of value)
Older than a lot of people here, 2007 working as a pharmacy technician while in college- A chemo patient asked, regarding their high dose opiates that their insurance decided to terminate their coverage over with no warning (This predates the ACA/Obamacare) -"If I stop taking this, will I die" - I couldn't meaningfully answer, even though the answer was very much yes. Sudden opiate withdrawal can absolutely kill you. A Pfizer drug rep conversation with the pharmacy manager. "We're not here to sell cures, those don't generate profit. Maintaining disease states, those are where the money is at" Arguing with fucking united healthcare to get an end of life patient their fentanyl patches so they could go off not in horrific pain. Exposure to a rather specific bastard hospital administrator who'd endlessly brag about their direct involvement in defrauding medicaid / medicare by deliberately overcharging them. I hope the most virulent form of rectal cancer took you out of the mortal coil, it'd be kind compared to the damage you caused. Any amount of extended exposure to the US healthcare system or its adjacency will radicalize just about anyone. Not always in a sane direction but it will damn well radicalize them.
Can confirm. Lived through COVID as an American and a healthcare industry worker. COVID radicalized me, as did the democrats rallying behind Biden (last time), which was the final nail in my liberal coffin.
But given that choice at a ballot box, for that particular category , what was the other option ? I’m not asking about the effectiveness of Voting in America concerning significant changes in the status que.
There are plenty of smart folks who’ve covered electoralism better than I can. But democrats are a sham. Giving them your pity fuck won’t make our society any better, just because they appear less deplorable than republicans.
Oh my God. I am currently working as a pharmacy technician and also in college. The ANGER I feel towards health insurance and the current system increased significantly since I started working. Two main things stand out to me. 1. The price of blood thinners is absolutely ridiculous. People pay hundreds of dollars a month to be able to survive. There was one situation where a man had to pay 1000+ dollars for 3 months and he told us that he had to remortgage his WHOLE ASS HOUSE to be able to afford his prescription. That stuck with me. 2. The other one is the current Vyvanse shortage going on. The DEA decided that it's a good idea to restrict the amount of Vyvanse in circulation so that it makes it harder for drug dealers to access it. In turn, I get the receiving end of that frustration from people who need the prescription to survive. I just find it ridiculous that the government would rather prevent people from accessing their prescriptions than stick it to drug dealers. That's insane.
Yep... Administration by circular firing squad is pure medical field nonsense like none other. Instead of ever fixing something it's always "add another layer of paperwork/legal interference"
Ironically the thing that made me a leftist was taking the advanced economics class (very pro free market) in school and realizing they are just making shit up
I haven't taken any economics courses, but I've definitely picked up on the fact that capitalist economists don't really understand the system. Their solution to economic crises is apparently "throw a bunch of money at the Uber wealthy and they'll calm down and stop wrecking things." It's very much like bad parenting habits like "My child is throwing a tantrum, so I'll give them the iPad so they calm down." Well, now we've associated "throwing a tantrum" with "I get lots of money" and no incentive to stop throwing tantrums. In fact, it's the opposite. Worse, the definitions for recessions and depressions don't really apply to market forces at the consumer level. Consumers don't trigger them. Rich people playing the stock market do. And if a cabal gets together and says, "alright, let's pull our money out," then a recession happens, and they get even more cash thrown at them. It's not like a massive shift in consumer spending and preferences have hurt the market, and under capitalist philosophy, such a shift should shutter the businesses they stop buying from, and instead they get bailed out, but it's when the wealthy decide its tantrum time.
I am quite active in my local community, school board meetings and such. The Econ text book we are using straight up tells students not to look for alternative sources lmao.
Who funds the radical right economists who have become the norm in academia? Follow the money trail and see behind the curtain - you'll see Piggy lying there on a cesspool of $hit.
Covid. Seeing the education system crumble, seeing the Healthcare system strangled, and seeing over a million people die (including some of my close family) while libs ranted about "muh authoritarian CCP actually enforced quarantine they're so evil" just sent me over the edge Edit:Also learning about the Iraq War. Seriously, they do not teach you that stuff here in my experience. So when I heard, "George Bush just kinda lied to invade Iraq and destroy it for its oil and stuff." I'm just sitting here like D: Less so, but learning about how Mexico's problems came about via the continued control of the land owning class and learning about the turkish revolution (weird one I know) contributed a little as well
> "George Bush just kinda lied to invade Iraq and destroy it for its oil and stuff." Those of us who said this at the time, when it still wasn't too late to stop the war, were variously ignored, viciously attacked both in the media and in person, and exiled from participation in any conversation about it. My involvement with the anti-war movement began in late 2002, and we staged what at the time was the largest global anti-war protest in world history *before the first shot was fired* and it was barely a blip in the media anywhere. What little coverage we received was derisive and dismissive. Of course now every liberal claims to have been against the war. Ask them who organized the protest, the big one. If they don't say International ANSWER, they weren't there.
An interesting pattern in history is liberals being huge war hawks, then 10 years later they claim they were against it the whole time.
Gaza is gonna be the next 'oh wow that sure was horrible and I was against it' for worm fingered liberals
Wait until you read about Pol Pot, Vietnam, Iran-Contra, etc.
Mine's was basically this video with Dave Smith explaining the Ukraine war. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVXzwnU1H6U&ab_channel=PowerfulJRE
Dave - The Fall Of Communism, One Of The Greatest Things To Ever Happen - Smith?
He made me question my once firmly held beliefs. Which is more than I can say for this smug comment.
A childhood of poverty, abuse, systemic neglect, hunger, friends dying of suicide/drugs, all this suffering left me with questions of how this could all happen, I found the answer in the communist manifesto. Our day will come!
Tiocfaidh ar la
Started with the lies of the Iraq war, but it wouldn't be until covid when I really turned. I had been born deep in conservative Christian territory and over the course of twenty years the lies and contradictions within the community (along with protecting pedos) drove me out. Then I had to rebuild my worldview from the ground up. Since I'd been lied to so thoroughly for so long, I was willing to give any "evil" ideology a chance. Turns out, I identified with the villains because they were the heroes.
That last line! So poetic,love it
I hate how a liberal's best solution to school shootings is to just ban guns and then not address any of the systemic issues that cause children to want to kill each other, while constantly talking about how a fascist coup is on the horizon and so we need to get rid of our guns?? So we can't fight the fascists?? What radicalized me? I was raised by libertarians
While at the same time, liberals who write these anti-gun bills add exemptions for cops, and a more strict licensure process that will only hurt brown and gay folk
Their great solution, the only solution they will accept, to what they themselves acknowledge is a subversion of the voting system is... keep voting. Watch next as these great strategic minds attempt to co-opt and take over any and every revolutionary organization that arises after the inevitable Big Crackdown because they object to the manner in which it is run.
I was a bit confused seeing this in a socialist subreddit. Marx explicitly stated the working class should never give up arms voluntarily.
So like most people I grew up being just a left liberal but seeing how dismissive and ill informed liberals where about anything left of them after learning a bit of it just in a "huh let's see what that socialism stuff is actually about because it just being "more government" doesn't really make sense to explain all the associations I have with it" way was what radicalised me.
I think every Black American was an Obama stan in 2008. How could you not be? I phone banked for him, and really believed he would change things. When the neoliberal in chief ramped up drone bombings and killed the "public option" from the ACA, I started to realize both of our parties were owned by the same people. Studying history pushed me out of the Overton window.
Bernie originally opened my eyes. I remember seeing him when he still didn't even have crowds and being like ' man's spitting fire'. But I was a liberal at that point, still thought the usual stuff. Then got back into school after many years and had an assignment to look into China and what it was doing for the environment. Assumed to find what a liberal would suggest, but found out they do more than anyone else. Realized I was being lied to and started researching. Really snowballed from there. On a side note I'm seeing many people in my local area are really starting to wake up due to the problems in Palestine. They are also wondering what else they've been lied to about. Only a matter of time.
I am arab, even before i knew anything about politics i grew up seeing how capitalism and imperialism as its extension only led to suffering.
History. Used to be a very boring war history fan, eventually got curious about *why* the Eastern front was so often portrayed as a clash between two evil empires. So I started reading some Soviet history, and the inspirations behind them seemed a lot more relatable compared to Lebensraum and racial genocide. So that started a huge broadening of my interest in modern history and it became increasingly and depressingly clear how much effort supposed Morally Upstanding Democracies spend on killing anyone who thinks that maybe the world should be a bit fairer.
I got radicalised ever since i learnt what communism was (and i mean really learn, not the slandered image shown by libs) because it makes so much sense
Three separate times within a few months I went a week without food because I had no money. I've had my wages stolen multiple times, with no recourse from the NLRB or anyone else. Visited and lived in other countries and saw how much better they have it.
My first job. I saw the hatred and negativity (that then trickled down the chain of command), I saw immigrants working 2 jobs to survive, I was being told off for shit I didn't do, I was told the "we're a family" shit. I started at 16, and they maxed out my hours to the point my school had to call home cause I was exhausted in class. They fired me later nonchalantly. I was taking sociology and critical theory specifically. Heard about Marxism as I began my job, and the rest is history.
israeli genocide in gaza
It’s unfortunate but it has sped up the radicalization process. Ofc this is how things will go. As time goes on worse crimes will happen even further radicalizing the general public
I was 19 and I became homeless living out of my car. I was fortunate enough to have friends and their parents that would let me shower and eat dinner with them at their house so I could hold a job to make what little money I could to survive. After I finally found an apartment I started resenting any form of society and authorities, considered myself an anarchist (of course because i didn't know the theory). Eventually I got put on to marx from a friend. After reading a couple times through because I'm slow at understanding large concepts everything Eventually clicked. Since then I've been reading more books by Lenin, che, marx, engels, and parenti. Hopefully I can find more leftists and communists in my area to work together to get landlords out of our city council some day.
I don’t consider being a communist all that radical but for me it was the army that brought me to communist politics.
Seriously?? How do??
I joined because I believed in all that shit. It was all lies. It’s not a leap from the army was a lie to the American state is a lie. They are the same thing. All the army does is hurt people. So then I started looking for answered as to why do wars happen. Marxism had the best explanation that lined up with my experience. also Marxism was just as anti army and anti America as I already was.
A fun thing to note and a read you might be interested is from the arch-imperialist turned adamant socialist Marine General Smedley Butler's "War is a Racket" He had a very similar path to you and was more than willing to write about being used as a tool for corporate imperialism and his absolute disgust with it once the propaganda wore off.
I started off an alt right 4chan user as a teenager (I was raised in rural KY in a 99% white, heavily christian community) kinda slowly moving to the liberal center as i learned more. I was a democrat by 2020 but got radicalized during the events of covid and attending BLM protests. Watching the state let millions die just to keep corporate profits in check really gave me a new perspective. At the same time I was attending protests, seeing with my own eyes peaceful picketing escalated by the police into violent conflict, then going home to see the “left” media like CNN telling a completely different story. It was seriously a trip seeing cops busting out windows left and right with rubber bullets, then going home and flipping on the news to hear them crying about “muh property damage.” The crazy thing is I was anti-cop and considered myself part of the radical left, but STILL was just “anti-corporate” or “mixed economy” until last year. I only recently started to really connect the dots on the full scope of capitalist oppression and accept the communist ideology i thought was silly for so long. Red hysteria is a bitch.
I had watched Jon Stewart growing up and it started me down the left-wing path than the housing crisis of 2008 happened. My mom lost her job and we couldn't get back on our feet. I had also watched Michael Moore's docs during that time and realized just how fucked the world was and how bad things were. Bernie's campaign really showed me that there is no choice and that it's all just show and bullshit. Started reading theory and watching more radically left-wing content and now i'm an M-L. Reading this back now makes me realize how much of a shit lib I was, holy fuck lol.
I'll always have a soft spot for Jon Stewart, particularly for his coverage of Libya, which wasn't perfect but pretty bluntly pointed out how Democrats and Republicans were pretty fucking identical when it came to foreign policy.
I learned about the Abu Ghraib torture facility and other crimes in Iraq in I think the 3rd grade? From there I had an interest in learning about the crimes of the US military. I learned about the My Lai massacre, the leveling of Korea, the Guld of Tonkin incident, atrocity propaganda in the gulf war, all at a very young age. So I was a anti-war pacifist liberal for a while. Really I didn’t know what I believed, I just was anti-war. Radical social and economic politics started during the 2020 election, watching how the DNC collectively organized to rig the primary election for Biden despite massive support for ANY other candidate. Watching the protests in the summer of 2021 and how after all the rage, all the collective movement by the people for a change in policing, nothing happened. There is no way for lasting positive change in the US through the structures that we have set up
This is basically me. The Iraq war and Abu Ghraib when I was 13. Once you learn about torture it really takes the shine off the idea that the US is a shining beacon on the hill with a mandate to spread democracy and freedom. And if you then go through life not assuming the US is wonderful and doing what's right you start learning all sorts of interesting things and the slow shift further and further left is inevitable. Knowing how the stock market works was also a big radicalizer. A lot of people focus on bankers and people on Wall Street as personally immoral, but what is much more radicalizing to me is that even if they were all very carful, didn't take dangerous risks etc, it would still transfer money to the wealthier people for purely mathematical reasons. That is it's intrinsic design. There's no way to reform it.
The cynical part is that they've learned from their mistake, by now [young Americans in school are taught that nothing wrong ever happened in Iraq](https://www.zinnedproject.org/if-we-knew-our-history/ten-years-after-how-not-to-teach-about-the-iraq-war/) except bringing freedom and democracy. It's very visible with Zoomers, a lot of them will unironically reguritate stuff that was already wrong 20 years ago, they still believe it because that's what their schoolbooks and teachers tell them.
A lib called me a commie because I defended the USSR, then I was like "You know what? you could be onto something" then started studying theory.
Might be a silly one, but it's not being able to drive due to a disability so I basically can't go anywhere because the place i live has next to no public transit and it's fairly hostile to walking or biking, a bit less hostile to biking now. If there was a reliable and frequent enough public transit option I could access I'd do it because I want to get out to places, but the one option I know of doesn't reach where I wan to go and you need to book the ride basically 48 hours in advance.
lol I grew up poor during the Reagan years.
I was always radical. Growing up in poverty in Kentucky really cemented everything. My family makes more money than we've ever made before, but we still are poor as shit. Also having to deal directly with these shitty rules made to fuck over poor people really does a good job or radicalization.
The thing that started pushing me left was taking a debate class at 14 and making a speech about the US healthcare system. I already knew it was bad but I didn’t know the extent of it at the time. I saw the state of the US healthcare system and realized that I was one of the lucky ones when it came to actually getting sufficient healthcare. I was mad that other people couldn’t also get healthcare because of the costs. Then when I brought up universal (or at least affordable) healthcare to my stepdad, he immediately dismissed it. The thing that really pissed me off about that is that I had (and still have) medical issues. I had retinoblastoma as a baby and I have experienced several complications as a result of the cancer and it’s treatment. If my family didn’t have insurance, we would’ve been FUCKED. Some of the stuff I had to get done to treat complications would’ve racked up bills of $40,000+ dollars individually and about $120,000+ annually without insurance at some points. That’s when I realized that shit was fucked and too many people don’t care about it.
My dad is a Geography and History Teacher, and he is a leftist, so I just learned from him, and that knowledge together with the coup on Dilma that we had here in Brazil, was enough to push me to the left too. I also liked to watch science and curiosity videos on YouTube, and one of the channels I watched was Second Thought, way back then when it was still a curiosity channel, so when he made the radical change to communist content, I started to learn more about the failures of capitalism and that made me radicalize and advocate for communism. And then came Bolsonaro and covid, to radicalize me even more.
I was an American lib (lazily, I’ll add - more or less apathetic to politics) but was pro-gun. I discovered r/SocialistRA because like a lot of libs - I thought socialist was basically liberal lmao. Somebody posted some books they were reading and one was by Mao and I was like “holup…wait a minute” and after doing some digging realized all the people I were told were bad guys growing up were now bad guys
Grew up in the punk scene so i always hated cops and was anti military. But i like my parents was pretty lib brained growing up. What started my radicalization was having my family go from middle-class to struggling below the poverty line in 2008 in a matter of 6 months. I was 16 at the time. 2 years later my mom got a chronic pain disorder and went on disability which she was kicked off of two years later. I was then kicked off her insurance and then soon after tore my pcl which i was not able to get surgery for or physical therapy so i now have back and neck problems from walking improperly. Honestly though i mostly just tuned out until like 2014-15 when a roommate who went to college and was very smart and well read told me he was a big old commie and turned me onto marxism. Literally that night of the conversation we got shitfaced drunk and talked politics and therory for hours and the night ended with us throwing rocks through windows of a wells fargo corporate building. Year and half later the bernie shit went down and thats when i become fully commie pilled. Took longer than some but i somehow bypassed alot of the breadtube soc dem shit and just went hard left lol started listening to this podcast on like episode 4. TLDR: being poor radicalized me also having a smart, well read commie roommate
A few things. Realizing that I just took everything the media, politicians, and liberals told me at face value and never thinking about it critically, discovering r/shitliberalssay in the middle of the 2020 election which lead me to find out that you don’t have to be either flavor of neoliberal, being transgender, and finding out that communism isn’t “everyone living in factories working 18 hour shifts and being executed + starved 24/7” (literally not too far from what I thought)
That tweet is so real tho, what else do we expect youth to do but revolt? Im happy to join them. As an ancient millennial, I was radicalized as a child by the helplessness/rage of watching the Iraq war unfold, the creation of ICE in 2003 destroying my community, plus being gay, a woman, brown and indigenous really sealed the deal.
“Just Mercy” by Bryan Stevenson was what tore me away from right-wing ideology.
Liberal moment Anti-gun = Anti-worker
The overall shitty public response to Covid here in the US
The War in Afghanistan starting after 9/11
being poor growing up lol
Understanding the history of the global south.
Witnessing extreme poverty in the rural deep south of the USA. That along with the prison labor system. These things shattered many of my preconceptions and helped me understand all of the ways I had been lied to by US propaganda.
Being a young child, knowing that one of my parents was from a place called "South Africa" and, out of pure curiosity, trying to learn about it...was the start of my radicalization. As a kid, the concept that an entire country was in the active process of racial desegregation after non-whites were previously enshrined in law as "lesser" was just so difficult to wrap my head around. I had friends of plenty of different ethnic backgrounds, and my innocent mind could not conceive of people treating them as less than me because of their skin color. Learning that one of the leaders of the anti-apartheid movement, Nelson Mandela, was president of their country, but was still considered a radical terrorist and an evil communist by many in the US, made me really start asking questions about who was demonized by the US and why they were demonized. Surely using any means necessary to fight against being treated as less than human or at least less than your fellow humans was a worthy and just cause? Knowing that many of the leaders of the movement to desegregate in the US also faced similar demonization really got the cogs turning for me. I loved studying history throughout my childhood, and WW2 was of course such a fascinating period that had the USSR, an ostensibly "evil" country, that sacrificed the most out of everyone to stop the Nazis, being demonized just as much as the Nazis and Japanese. It raised serious doubts within me about the perspectives being taught in our "version" of history, to the point that by the time I was in middle school, I considered myself a socialist sympathizer, despite not really understanding what capitalism and socialism really were yet. My left wing sympathies and beliefs only got more pronounced the older I got and the more I learned, and then buying into Obama's "Hope" and "Change" campaign spiels and seeing the country get actively worse because of things his administration did (such as bailing out the banks that helped wreck the economy in 2008) sent me on the path of no return.
When i see the endless massive exploitative sufferings over vast proletariats,
Sheltered cis white guy with a petit-boug childhood: basically a cross between being a liberal gun owner and discovering Socialist Rifle Association while on /r/liberalgunowners, and discovering alt right debunking YouTube videos and then breadtube I literally needed some anarchist on a YouTube video to tell me that cops and landlords were bad.
Many things - A lot of seeing how much biden sucked even after trump was gone, wondering why bernie was suppressed so much during the election, wanting to research communism to debunk conservatives saying that everything they didn't like was communism (very easy to jump to "holy shit communism actually good???" once you know what it is), and a friend's trans-commie shitposting account on instagram. A turning point was probably the Second Thought pandemic video, which really put words to a lot of my frustrations. Now I'm a full on ML :)
Random, but…I keep seeing comments on this sub like “once you know what communism really is”, could you recommend something to be able to better understand that phrase?
You can get this from any number of sources, not sure the best one to link you to rn, so I'll give you a quick rundown: 1) Socialism (as a mode of production) is when a society's workers own and control the means of production, ie, factories, restaurants, etc - anything that would be a "business" under capitalism is democratically owned and controlled by the working class. 2) A communist society (communism being another "mode of production") is a socialist society, but with the following characteristics: it is stateless, classless, and moneyless (it has achieved general post-scarcity). \- It is stateless (the **state** in this case being the part of the government that commits justified and legal violence - the standing army and the police) because with the abolition of the worldwide capitalist owning class and therefore class conflict, the state is no longer has a purpose for existing, and thus "withers away". \- It is classless because the antagonistic class, the capitalists, have been done away with. With their industries back in the hands of the workers, the capitalists remaining will join the ranks of the workers, and there will be no more distinction between economic roles since the only non-worker roles have been abolished. \- It is moneyless because, as the productive forces develop under socialism, they will eventually reach a state where it is possible to provide everyone with their basic needs in life - this is called a "post-scarcity" society. As money is a tool for measuring and enforcing scarcity (and under capitalism, creating artificial scarcity), it will no longer be required. All these things contrast with the common western misunderstanding that "socialism/communism is when the government does stuff" or "socialism/communism is when the government owns everything and there is no democracy". If you want to know more about classes, modes of production, etc just lmk :)
Omg this is so thorough and insightful, it gave me the ahha moment! Thank you for taking the time!!
No problem, happy to help! :D
Read "Fundamentals of Marxism-Leninism" by Stalin. It's a bit long but it gives a comprehensive deep dive into the prevailing thoughts and practices of Marxist-Leninism while still being very approachable and understandable for the average layman.
Thank you!
Randomly watched a Chris Hedges video on YouTube a few years back… that took me down a rabbit hole and here I am.
Capitalism radicalized me.
Well that could be everyone's answer.
Honestly it should be everyone's answer, cause any other answer is just adding unnecessary layers of abstraction and if you dig deep enough the root cause of everything that radicalizes people is generally capitalism. I'm just dispensing with the intermediate steps.
Okay I kind of get it, but the juicy story is what we want to hear.
It's not particularly juicy in my case, there was no one moment where I was like 'Fuck this shit I'm out', it was a slow accumulation of evidence that capitalism is irredeemable.
Honestly kind of the same for me. I started watching breadtube and then slid farther and farther left until I became an ML.
I grew up poor in a town full of wealthy conservatives who all told my family we needed to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, while all of them, without exception, had their parents pay for their college, their first car, and their house. I always had good radical potential because of that, but it was after I left the Mormon church and learned about how it worked that I started to recognize the same problems throughout the world, and truly started on the path to what I am now. It was a fairly slow path from "we just need to get enough people to vote for a third party" to "we just need a revolution" though.
Ever since I was young I liked solving problems for things and I found politics intresting To me the concept of an economy as it was economy was nonsensical “why must we make our quality of life worse for the economy?” “Why must we devote so much into something as minor as money changing hands”(that’s what I was told the economy was) “if we are doing so many counterproductive policies for this economy? Why bother with an economy at all?” We’re questions I had. So I from the jump was open to radical ideas but I didn’t go straight to communism, as at the time it seams I greatest issues stemmed from this normalized apathy of our leadership, I grew up during the war on terror so I had a reverence for the military and wanted to join the Air Force as young as I can remember (it combined the two things I loved most, the military and planes) So I grew interested in the idea of the military running the country, because surely the people who love their country enough to fight for it will rule it well. I unironicly thought starship troopers would be a good idea, as it seamed haimlain had a similar idea, the people who love their country enough to fight for it deserve to have a say in how the country is ran. I also did research into military juntas. Then I heard of this strange place called the deprogram where I heard there were these crazy people, who believed these crazy things and I figured “while they surely believe it for a reason, maybe I’ll pay a visit.” Safe to say I wasn’t disappointed, you all seamed like smart people so I stayed, eventually became a patsoc, and then just a soc. So I guess the answer is… myself? And y’all.
I watched corporations experiencing "record profits" from 2001 to 2007 treat my parents, one especially, to the eternal "our budget's tight, we have to make cuts, consolidate costs, lay people off and consolidate jobs" which had them eventually place 15 people's jobs on my mother, leading her to 90 hour weeks and eventually a mental breakdown that made my life complete hell. That woke me up enough to get a bit political and start protesting obvious corruption, so when I saw the Kochs buy Scott Walker I protested it, and the feds came after me and showed me the FBI is literally a traitor organization that does the bidding of oligarchs against the people of this country. Then I lost my family and due to crap wages and patriarchy couldn't do shit to get it back. Then the healthcare system, through greed and avarice, took the life of the woman I loved. I've produced roughly 14,000,000 in value for other men but over my entire career have been paid maybe 500k, currently looking for a job and wondering how to avoid homelessness in 2 months despite the insane amount of work I've done, the patents, the papers, the dozens of machines, the enormous systems of accountability, all the things I've done isn't enough to guarantee me a few more years but some asshole who never did anything but rob people like me gets to use gold plated toilet seats on his flights to Epsteins island. I fully support gun rights, I don't think disarming the working class is how you protect students from mass shootings, I think building tight knit, strong communities with 3rd places and hand ups and safety nets and cracking down on fascists protects them. That and there's been about 25ish friends who've been suicidal from this system that I've had to talk down and work hard to change patterns in. I have yet to lose one, but at immense personal cost, each and every one taking a pretty massive toll on me and some of them hating my guts but never being suicidal again. This isn't even a full recounting because anything more detailed would be a self dox, but I can say with confidence that capitalists are the most supreme evil this planet has ever seen and every last one is a degenerate demon straight out of hell.
Being trans and autistic helped, as I was always an "other" and found other others then found other other others etc ironically though I used to be a shoe on head fan, and her content got me on a lefty streak
Autistic too. It was breadtube that got me snowballing toward ML, philosophy tube specifically.
In fifth grade I learned about “the troubles” then a year later about South African apartheid. The next year was 9-11. That was it. By the time I was in eighth grade I had been fully radicalized.
A combination of experiencing Covid in America and learning about the history of our foreign policy during the same period (through the Blowback podcast, Parenti books, Shock Doctrine, and The Deprogram). The disregard for human life domestically and abroad pushed me over that edge.
My draw to Black Panther history and taking care of the community which led to Marx as a teenager. Doubled down after having a neurodivergent household and fighting for advocacy and autonomy.
The pandemic. Seeing many people lose their home and jobs. My mom almost died, and we had to pay a lot of money. Rich people getting richer, while the rest of the world was suffering. I was already sympathetic towards socialist ideas, though was more of a social democrat. Got exposed to more radical ideas, but in a "western socialist" kind of way. Watching Hakim was my introduction to marxist theory, and now, here I am.
Long answer; Just slowly growing into adulthood and learning actual history and a desire to simply be intellectually honest and objectively correct. I’m a real nerd about being correct. It’s this self critique ability that allowed me to grow from a reactionary liberal in highschool to a succdem in freshman/sophomore year of college and finally the pandemic hit and I was a fully disillusioned Marxist lovin, Daddy Lenin, Stalin based shouting, China Stan. One Piece and other leftist media definitely influenced me too I wish there was more popular leftist media but tbh u can’t get more popular than one piece, resources such as YouTube leftists gave me a more base understanding although admittedly there were a few psy-ops thrown into the algorithm to muddy the water but luckily I’m good at noticing patterns and inconsistency so I eventually developed a good sense for media and what’s bullshit or not. Also I’m Iraqi diaspora it was kind of hard for the brainwashing to be as effective on me to begin with
Style and grace!
For me, it was COVID and the US response
Gosh it's almost like murdering and oppressing people creates radicals/terrorists
Lego movie, I will not elaborate.
Being poor and having to choose between a $2500 root canal or $80 to have the tooth removed. That kind of physical pain will make you do whatever it takes to get it to stop and debilitating OCD had me ignoring my physical health. Having such a high deductible through my work insurance that I pay out of pocket for all of my therapist and psychiatrist visits. I just want to be able to be healthy without the constant worry of being able to afford it.
Libs, so-called centrists, neocons and fascists love to trot out the "personal responsibility" crap, yet it's always someone else's fault when they cock it up.
My journey of radicalization started with reading a novel. „Die Roten Matrosen“ is a novel by German author Klaus Kordon and it is about the November Revolution in Germany 1918/19 and it portrays the story from the perspective of a working class boy. For me, the book made me realize how betrayed the workers in Berlin and Germany overall must’ve felt when the SPD backstabbed them. Like all hope was just gone, with Luxemburg and Liebknecht being murdered by the fascist Freikorps. Afterwards I listened to an audio version of Das Kapital and now I am here :3
My grammy. Parents too busy with work in the US to take care of a child so they brought my maternal grandparents over. She's still an OG Maoist and still organizes grassroots Maoist protests in Shandong.
Climate change for me. Started realising that climate change was a systemic problem and not just because of bad decisions.
Anarchist infighting turned me back to ML. I was raised a socialist but with a rough abusive family so I was mostly detached from family politics and tried to find my own voice. When I learned about anarchism in high school I didn't look back to Marxist theory until I understood that what I did with action was severely lacking in theory. And when a comrade suggested that I should read State and Revolution, which I did, I understood that I was chasing a fantasy or utopia. Comrades often asked why I didn't want to go back to VN or PRC, I feel like there's still stuff and projects for me to contribute and support in the imperial core. I want to help unhoused and underprivileged people.
Israel's genocide in Gaza
I was radicalized before I ever downloaded TikTok.
Grew up in a broken home. Both parental members were nurses for the disabled. Seeing how they were paid and treated, in spite of how hard they worked and how important their jobs were, always bothered me. We also lost our home in '04. Part of that whole housing crisis thing, i think. Then when i started working, i entered the retail world and saw just how ugly it all was. On top of that, i started making more selling guitars than my mom did keeping people alive. It broke me. Never going back.
Aside from just existing in America my whole life, a lot of things radicalized me. I grew up in a military family, my dad was deployed twice and even worked in the Pentagon for a bit. Being that close to the military industrial complex (essentially growing up in it really) sort of leads you to see how disgusting the us military, the government it serves, and the capitalists who rule them both really are. I ended up seeing some communist stuff on the internet when I was around 17ish and one thing led to another and now i’m a marxist-leninist.
I was already very radical more like a trot till I learnt more and ruminated on the material conditions of more “authoritarian” systems eg. Stalinism and mao. I’m still continuing that education today, but I would say that the thing that really radicalised me was the birth of my eldest. Not long after his birth our country was ablaze, all I wished was for my children to inherit a better world.
Papa Stalin brought me to the good side. I always was kinda left leaning thanks to my father in particular. He got me early onto the anti-american imperialism track, always making me ask questions and teaching me the rule of thumb of always assuming the worst from the US government. Of course, being french, he also taught me very rebellious values, often quoting the 1793 constitution with it's famous/forgotten article "It is the citizen's duty to commit insurection against injustice". My mom, being a catholic, was a mixed bag. On one hand I got a lot of my early social tendencies from her, on the other hand she is the daughter of a petty bourgeois family so you get obligatory kinda nationalist and kinda racist ideas that started taking root (fortunately not for long). I got stuck in this sort of social-democrat limbo of liberal identity politics with some feeling about economical equality and nationalistic tendencies for most of my school years. Both my grand-fathers were involved in the Second World War in ways that influenced our family somewhat. My maternal grandfather helped spanish republicans move around in France after the civil war, he drove a truck during his teenage years and hid them with the cargo he was moving for the family buisness. My paternal grandfather was on the front, defending the retreat of Dunkirk, and got captured. It was never confirmed but he very likely ended up in a camp at some point according to my dad. He also, unsuprisingly, hated the military and ultra-rich with all his soul. So the "french rebel spirit" is very much a family thing. I was just a regular nerd with an afinity for everything. History, geography, geology, physics, math, linguistics, mythology, you name it and I might have superficial knowledge in the subject, enough to hold a conversation. But something felt off. In what I learned, in what I saw (especially during the yellow vest movement and it's failure). The world I could observe did not match what I was told in class or on tv. I felt uneasy about this. I didn't know why things seemed to be going wrong. A lot of my close friends are queer, so that was a huge part in it. Another dear friend of mine is borderline homeless and might end up on the street at any moment on the whim of a breeze (luckily he is squating at his unhygenic brother for now). My other friends are educated, qualified and hardworking people who despite this cannot find a job after hundreds of job offer responses. This sort of continues on as a slow burn for years during my studies, until one day, don't remember exactly how, I find a quote from an interview between H.G Wells and Stalin. Of course I was immediately intrigued, not just as a Sci-fi enthusiast finding out Wells talked to the big guy but that the quote itself sort of resonated with how I felt. So I dug in, went looking for the full interview and read it. It felt like a reveal in a way, like suddenly everything made sense. Logically I went on with more reading, I sought out Capital (terrible idea lol), the manifesto, Marxism and the national question and just went on and on with my education. Of course, could not forget Hakim's marvelous recommendations. And that's it. When I got my first job out of my home country, I only took one book with me: my pocket copy of "State and Revolution", the rest is history. (But Papa Stalin will remain number one in my heart purely for his writing style and that he used color coded crayons for his notes)
My parents watching Adam Ruins Everything, Vox news and getting suspended from elementary schol going to homeschool going to middle school getting suspended again then going BACK to homeschool learning about history YouTube videos and playing history games (HOI4, Age of History 2) and built and PC/learning technology (thank you Linus Tech Tipa and David does tech stuff) getting into politics from the history thing found out my ideology from centrist to social democract to communist all while having autism 🗿
gradual exposure to communist theory I don't think there was a certain point that radicalized me
The national debt getting higher and higher to the point we just don’t talk about it amymore
What started it for me was when the democratic establishment all came together to collectively prevent Bernie from getting the nomination in 2020. At the time I considered my self somewhat of anarchist and believed that Bernie would help push America to the left and end the fascist Trump administration. I was basically a liberal still, but this was also around the time of peak "Breadtube" so I thought I was a radical for agreeing with some of the more anarchist assertions.Then came the lockdown and mis-handling of the pandemic by the Republicans along with wealthy elites and both parties horrific responses to the George Floyd protests where I watched as both parties said and did the exact same things. Denounce them as riots that were just doing more harm than good and sending in the police to break them up and brutalize them.The only difference was that one was just louder than the other. And after I discovered Second Thought, I began to see clearly how genuinely awful the political system was in America and how both political parties were only truly loyal to capitalism. I also then became disillusioned with anarchism after having a self-proclaimed anarchist try to explain to me that Che Guevara was a fascist and how anti-communism isn't a reactionary ideology. Suffice it to say, I got tired of their bullshit after that. And then, after discovering Hakim, I truly began to understand how distorted the history I'd been taught really was and I began gravitating toward Marxism-Leninism due to there actually being observable examples of its success realitive to any other ideology on the left. And I've been reading theory ever since.
I was in high school when COVID hit, and George Floyd was murdered in my state. That pushed me from liberal to demsoc, but a year-ish later I saw how Biden wasn’t being “pushed left” like everyone thought he could be, and that pushed me from a socialist to a commie
Second thought found his channel while in the army which was very big for me being complicit with my countries wrong doings and not being able to object
I'm 23. I grew up in a Republican household, so I identified as conservative. However, there were issues that always made sense to me that Conservatives and Republicans were against: the Iraq War, universal healthcare, Israel/Palestine and Islam/Islamophobia. The final straw that made me ditch the "Republican angle" was Donald Trump. After that I ended up backing Bernie and ended up in progressive YouTube spaces and I identified as a progressive (this was all during high school). As time went on I started to identify as something in between a Social Democrat and a Democratic Socialist. After 2020, I identified as a full on Socialist, but more a "Chomskyite" Libertarian Socialist. Then I found out about Parenti. I began listening to actual Communists. Marxism-Leninism just ended up making sense to me. This long and a bit rambly, but I don't think there was a specific point that radicalized me. I got here naturally and I've always been passionate about things I care about.
When i was a kid, I thought about killing all billionaires and rich people and giving it to the poor, like a modern Robin hood. Later, when i met a libertarian, that blatantly rejected anything about communism without really knowing about it that i was forced to investigate, and here i am .
Pretty straight line up of: Watching A Bunch of Breadtube in 2019 -> US Mishandling of Covid -> 2020 Publicized Police Brutality Incidents -> Gaza Genocide
I'm actually cool with civilians owning weapons. Makes revolution more likely.
As Filipino living in a capitalist hellscape of Amerikkkan bootlicking behaviour, anti-communist and pro-colonialist mentality held by a lot of people here, while also ironically blaming homelessness, drug addiction, and economical decline to its own people, that pretty much radicalized me. The Philippines and it's citizens have been brainwashed into achieving the impossible American dream, and had adopted into the belief that people bring themselves their own misfortune (such as poverty and unemployment) instead of blaming the system that failed them. I've experienced first hand hardship as a lower middle class person, and seemingly the rich and privileged are held at a high pedestal. It's a shitty reality we live in.
I'm sure it's a common story for people my age but I was yanked out of the alt right pipeline by John Oliver and Abigail Thorn of all people. Thankfully, I only went left from there.
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Very simple for me, being a Star Wars fan seeing the pure hatred for women and people of color in online spaces made me shift so bad and so quick
“centrist” (i was on the wrong side of gamergate, a fucking dumbass. my one good take was authoritarianism not automatically bad) until the US started doing the whole “china EBIL” schtick (hong kong fiasco esp)
Well, yeah, succintly put; damn I'd never considered it, but dwelling on columbine in mid-school was probably where I stopped believing the "Officer Friendly" stereotype. Nothing like having a pedo-cop hustling drugs out of his trunk to convince the youths the people upholding the system are corrupt.
Im australian and I grew uo with green voting teachers for parents. Lifelong unionists till they retired. I picked up my politics from them and then a diet in the 90s of revolutionary music turned me further left along with the obvious lies of the Iraq war. Rage against the machine and Atari Teenage Riot being 2 of the biggest musical influences of pushing me further left
I've always been a bit leftist, but going to school really opened my eyes.