Explain your political progression. I'll start with mine, I live in the US for reference.
>I started off as vaguely conservative when I first starting learning about politics (was really into the whole "competition drives innovation" type thing). Didn't like feminism and what I thought was political correctness gone mad. Was christian (still thought shit like noahs ark was retarded though).
>Grew out of Christianity and as a result became disillusioned with a lot of the republican messaging.
>Became friends with a group of guys that were very right wing and slowly realized they were completely retarded which drove me away from being a republican.
>Became a democrat still heavily pro-capitalism of course. Very destiny style liberal with some reactionary tendencies
>Don't remember why but started looking into fidel castro and realized that he wasn't nearly as bad as everyone said he was and actually agreed with a lot of his ideas.
>Read "Principles of Communism" and heavily resonated with it.
>Spent a couple years still as a lib but with sympathies to communism, didn't fully understand it and disagreed but didn't outright hate it like 99% of liberals do.
>Around 2018 started to feel alienated amongst liberals, it's difficult to explain but I felt like I *cared* about things while liberals did not, they would act like they cared but they didn't really give a shit.
>Finally got around to reading some of capital and dove deep into a lot of online communities
>The rest is history
What about you guys?
Working for a shitty small business owner (landscaping) during the first Bernie campaign
>>2823294Process of elimination. I didn't like cons, libs, or fascists. Anprim sounds nice, but it's infeasible, and we've destroyed the world, so the "only way is through," which leaves socialism or some weird techno-libertarian stuff, and the latter is transparently a madeup thing for billionaires, so I guess it's up to communism to show some alternative. Not a great showing yet.
Right-wingers, no further explanation needed.
I went from libertatian to social democrat bernie bro
poor amerikkkan, father went to war & never forgave himself for what he did but also never managed to fully own up to it, have had to work since high school to help keep my family above water, everything is horrible & i really like to read
theres an ancient screencap from a thread like this back from like 2017 or so that was me lol i think it was like 'capitalism destroys families'
>>2823294I saw too much injustices in my country and in the world. I discovered it and thought that it's just great.
I am not a communist but i like lots of the things they did
started working doing odd jobs at 11. I read a lot, in general, and from history you learn about all these communist revolutions, so set out to figure out why. then i ate a cactus when i was 19 and decided to join a local org.
>>2823294Nothing "made" me be a communist. I have eyes and ears and ever since I was a child I was some form of socialist. I thought it was a novel idea, cause nobody seemed to talk about it. Later I found out that the thing has a name and other people do agree.
I can proudly say that I have never ever had a right-wing "phase", nor was I liberal/conservative first then became communist. I think lesser of people who came from the right. Obviously I respect them, and recognize them as comrades. They just need to work harder to prove themselves. How can I know that this isn't just another phase and that in a year they'd be making a thread on Stormfront asking how they became Nazis and say they used to be a communist?
>>2823294I come from a left wing family with an immigrant mother, we started off working class (altho my father's family was in denial) but as the ages went on we got somewhat richer, when I went to university, I just saw how much rich people looked down on me for simply existing, rich people would befriend me and then leave me like a little shit when they learned about my background. Make up weird shit about me. Made me see the class war in reality, I also saw the rest of my family's life decline because of capitalism, my grandfather dying in a shitty hospital because some liberal took away the funding for healthcare. I'd say I'm a communist because thats where I'm the closest ideologically, but every communist I meet is some bougie kid with no idea what the world and is obsessed by the most random of microcauses, and who obviously, as always, look down upon me. I honestly feel a bit politically homeless.
>>2823294I became a commie mostly by accident. Essentially, when I was 17-18 I started reading a lot of philosophy and started developing my own "philosophical" system, which was really just an ontology of the individual based upon an ecclectic recollection of various works.
During that time, I was searching for authors with similar ideas to mine and stumbled upon some book made by a marxist author about the individual and alienation.
After reading that, I thought that marxism was essentially a philosophy about alienation, so I started reading more of it and once I had realized that this wasn't the case I had already been convinced by most of the other theories.
I wouldn't say I'm a complete commie though because I have a lot of heterodox thought and reject some major premise within Marx. However, I agree with historical materialism and a structural interpretation of marxism so that's that.
>>2823294voted trump in 2016, due to basically not being very educated and disappointed with obama (I was old enough to be aware of his 2008 campaign, occupy wall street, debates over the iraq war, though I could never vote for him). I remember being torn because I knew my parents would not be voting for trump. They are the sort of decently well-off liberals that only despise trump (and still do) mostly because of his outrageous vulgarity and have never expressed much ideological opposition to his policy. I feel certain I would have voted for Bernie had he been option, because I liked him for many of the same reasons that trump seemed to represent. I very quickly became disillusioned in Trump's first term as he engaged in a bunch of neo-con shit that I felt like I had been voting against when I voted for him. I sort of became the bitterly apolitical type. I vowed not to ever pay attention to politics again because nobody does anything to help you and they all lie. Just vote blue no matter who every 4 years and ignoring everything otherwise, they might suck less and that's what the rest of my family does anyway. Eventually my natural curiosity lead me to left-wing politics. I think it's sort unavoidable to discover Marxian theories if you're a person that feels driven to understand the forces at play in the world. Any kind of reactionary sympathies I had couldn't really stand up to my hunger to understand and learn more about the peoples and cultures of the world and their histories and perspectives.
>>2823294Small capitalists
I went from liberal to leftist to leftcommunist. Liberal because my parents are liberal. Leftist after discovering the OG leftypol while browsing 4chan. Leftcommunist after someone told me to read Bordiga. Further reading of Marx after reading Bordiga solidified my politics.
Apolitical › Reactionary › Socialism
Political form is Anarcho-Syndicalist Platformism
Economic doctrine is that of Marxist third worldism and anti-imperialism + Henryk Grossman's Crisis Theory.
>born into a left lib household
>absorb those politics by osmosis
>as I get older, start asking more and more questions about why so many problems in the world (especially climate change) go unsolved despite obvious solutions being available
>every question produces the same answer, even from my lib parents: corporate greed, money grubbing, etc.
>start imagining the notion of a society without money and researching related philosophies
>discover anarcho-communism, fully embrace it throughout my teenage years
>become more moderate around starting uni, essentially become a social democrat
>go to uni for political science
>begin researching the history of the labour movement in North America
>shocked by how miserable things once were for workers, the brutality that the ruling class used to repress them, and the level of bloodshed and violence it took to get basic labour rights
>start reading Marx and Lenin
>become a Marxist, but continue to harbour "anti-authoritarian", anti-Soviet views (this was around when I discovered leftypol in 2015)
>at this point I'm floating in a vague millieu of non-ML Marxism with influences from Trotsky, left communism, Titoism, syndicalism, etc.
>do more research into the early history of the USSR, the lead-up to WW2, and US aggression against socialist states and even liberal democracies during the Cold War
>start thinking that maybe those tankies have a point about the need to aggressively defend the revolution
>write an undergraduate thesis analyzing the causes and reactions to the 1956 uprising in Hungary (I fully intended to own the tankies)
>look at a bunch of primary sources and realize that they had a point the whole time, and weren't just doing it because they hated freedom or whatever
>start to realize how much of what I "knew" about Soviet socialism was a lie
>start looking more carefully at the Cold War, notice that the USSR for all its problems is always on the right side of pretty much every issue (e.g. against colonialism, Zionism, apartheid, fascism, etc.)
>look into the achievements of the Soviets and other communists (e.g. literacy and medical programs, infrastructure, economic development, anti-discrimination programs, racial and gender equality, land reform, etc.)
>do more research on capitalist states, realize that they are guilty of everything they accused (often falsely) the USSR of doing
>notice how every just and worthwhile cause in the world has suffered immensely as a result of the Soviet Union's defeat
>realise it was doing far more good than harm, that its flaws didn't outweigh its merits, and were in large part a result of the extremely difficult conditions in which it emerged
>realize this is true of most 20th century communist states
>finally understand that every revolution is imperfect, the central question is whether it does more to advance class struggle than hinder it
>become an ML
Im not a communist because I'm not an active member in a communist party, but what turned me into a communist supporter was the experience of extreme poverty.
I was interested in moral philosophy and that lead to Marx. In the meantime I was also curious about the DPRK and found out that the hysterical news about it were fake. Before that I was largely apolitical, I've always hated unfairness and fake news so it was a natural conclusion I think.
>>2823294>what made you a communistJoining the party obviously
>>2823294I'm Russian. This should be enough to explain it, but for some reason those other liberal and conservative people exist.
>>2823617>>2823335>>2823299You guys get the "became communists because of working instead of abstract philosophy" award.
my Catholic faith and reading of the Bible
>>2824790My other thing was a CS Lewis quote about how no human is responsible enough to be a slave owner, the same applies to business
>>2824866Ecclesiastes is really funny, it’s pages and pages of Solomon going “man pussy and money aren’t shit, I’m suffering from success”. It’s also true but I have fun imagining how frustrating it would be to be in his harem and he’s just moping.
>>2823294Immigrant background, through adolescence filled with questions as to why people and the world in general behave in such ignorant and irrational manner where there are clear possibilities to do otherwise. After various detours Marxism was, and still is, the only satisfying answer, both theoretically and pragmatically.
>>2823294I don't consider myself a communist, but I think it was Winston Churchill who said that democracy is the worst system except for all the others that have been tried. Well, the alternative to hanging around communists when talking about politics and what's going on in the world is to hang around with liberals or chuds and that's worse. I was in an ML group but didn't mesh with the general weirdness and crankishness.
But with Marxists you get critical people who are looking at what is driving people to make decisions, and what are the material conditions people face and why is this happening and what are the contradictions present in society and future society. It doesn't run perfectly but it's relative and not (in theory) based in the existential fear of the Big Other (although some MLs construct an imaginary one – ideology) or on a set of universal transcendent truths as laid out by God.
>>2823294Not much of big change, and it was slow:
- A kind of vague social corporatism.
- Culturally conservative/moderate social-democracy.
- Marxist sympathies with third worldist tendencies.
Always throughout had sympathies with the USSR & central planning, was never into liberalism ideologically (in any of its variants).
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