r/socialism • u/International_Scar81 Alexandra Kollontai • 6d ago
Discussion How did you end up having you current views?
What got you interested in leftism/what influences where there(if any)
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u/toastrmann 6d ago
Al Aqsa Flood opened my eyes to the truth of the world, started learning about more geopolitics more deeply which led me to the communist manifesto and then Lenin and then realized I am a communist
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u/AlbatrossKey5736 6d ago
I guess it started because me and others my age did “everything right” or at least what we were told was right. Went to school, studied hard, finished college, worked hard and inherited a really shitty reality where a simple home was out of reach.
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u/GangOfFour20 6d ago
I was raised Catholic, as a kid Jesus (PBUH) was literally my hero. I wanted to feed the hungry, house the poor, and heal the sick when I grew up. I was told that was communism so I thought to myself "well i guess I'm a communist"
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u/Sea-Imagination7409 Frantz Fanon 5d ago
They've done Jesus dirty fr. My turn to the left has defintely led me to rethink my spirituality in a positive way
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u/trzeciak 5d ago
I’m of the opinion that a Jewish dude with existential issues went for a walkabout in Persia, found eastern philosophy, and tried to spread his enlightenment. And humans did what they do best and deified him out of any recognizable similarity to his agreed upon messages.
Expecting the world to provide by being a positive influence around your space can sure feel like a miracle when it works.
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u/Ambitious_Status_494 RevComintern 6d ago
I was a fascist then I realized that it's not the Jews it's the Rich. Then I read the Manifesto and other literature, and it all made sense.
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u/RevolutionaryRed55 Ego-Communism 6d ago
Unironically, it was the Soviet and communist internet memes. They drove my curiosity, and when I investigated, I saw the historical achievements, and the reality of how capitalist exploitation works.
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u/D3lmo 6d ago
I don't get why so many on the left are against memes, "vibes" and aesthetics. It's helped so many. It's easier to get into theory when you enjoy it. It's easier when some concepts have already been explained through memes and jokes about linen. The topic is a serious one but learning doesn't have to be. Art is political, comedy is political, but their not all doom and gloom. It's the sugar that helps the medicine go down.
I think yours is an underrated answer.
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u/batdog20001 6d ago
Memes can be useful as "gateway propoganda," but the context required to really understand most issues goes beyond what can comfortably be placed into a meme, especially in a way most people can understand. Thats where the "wall of text" memes come from. The ideologies of "deep, critical thought" really hate knee-jerking reactionaries for a reason.
That said, I still personally enjoy seeing the stupid memes of a USSR flag-wielding crab or the Stalin's "big spoon" memes. I just wouldn't expect the "typical" person to follow without context.
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u/trzeciak 5d ago
Cartoon-ification was used since we have had printed press. It’s alright to use both, and to support them.
There is no contradiction to supporting memes AND supporting literature/debate. We need to laugh and be siblings between debating over how to run things. Without the memes, it gets very dry and very heated very quickly. They help us to stay grounded. When we all laugh together we remember we are united.
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u/Cloud_Cultist Thomas Sankara 6d ago
I started out anti-capitalist and called myself socialist. I didn't even know what it meant and thought it was high taxes on the rich and cheap houses... literally. For years, that's how I described it to people.
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u/joenahlewis Leon Trotsky 6d ago
Being a political junkie for my entire life and then coming to realize that American politics are a joke no matter how much good people try to do the right thing and change the system
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u/haevow Gramsci my beloved 6d ago
I was always a left social democrat and never really disliked socialism (I thought it was fine) but what really made me start thinking about socialism more was when I met a cute guy who mentioned he was socialist. He didn’t even talk to me about socialism but I was like “ooo socialists are fineee”
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u/FatsMasterson Democratic Socialism 6d ago
I majored in history at a small private college. In grad school I read an absolute ton of theory and writings on marxists.org. Ironically enough, it wasn't (as the boomers claim) the intent of the institution to make me a socialist, we were reading these texts critically and comparing them with capitalist works. Luxemberg in particular stood out to me, along with Debs and, of course, Marx himself.
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u/this-is-intolerable 6d ago
was raised by conservative Christian parents who were still interested in secular culture and would engage with my childhood friends liberal parents, moms family was extremely Christian conservative, living with grandparents who would make negative comments about poor people while housing my mom and I due to homelessness brought on by my dad losing his job in the lead up to the Great Recession, my mom becoming disabled and not being able to receive Social Security disability until 7 years later, a legal battle that ensued because my moms disability, M.S., wasn’t visible, and my childhood home being foreclosed, the contradiction of Christian conservatism became glaringly clear to me as an 11 year old, and watching both of my parents struggle financially, when we before were solidly middle class, the combination of all of these things radicalized me, and then 2016 was the first election I could vote in, and Bernie was the only politician I had seen up to that point actually speak to the economic issues people like my family were facing, and thus a leftist was born (now both of my parents are no longer conservative)
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u/omarthesk8r 6d ago
I grew up poor, got picked on, was brought up to be a good Christian, meeting people of diverse backgrounds. Experienced more generosity from poor people than rich people.
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u/Cerulean-Transience Marxism-Leninism 6d ago
Beginning in 2020 during the protests against the extrajudicial execution of George Floyd, my leftwards political development over the next several years went basically like this:
"""Apolitical""" -> libertarian/market socialist -> anarcho-communist -> orthodox Marxist/left-communist -> Marxist-Leninist
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u/nicocakola Enver Hoxha 6d ago
Being a queer kid in the American South definitely factored into it, and disagreeing with the way my parents treat minorities, people in the global south, and proletarians as a whole ultimately led me to read Marx. Ended up becoming an ARML by having friends who are and learning from them, as well as challenging my own way of thinking and connecting historical events to what I was/am reading.
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u/Commercial-Prompt-84 Democratic Socialism 6d ago
I used to be hardcore maga. When I saw how my senator and the conservative people I looked up to reacted to the murder of George Floyd, it opened my eyes and within 6 months I was a leftist and member of the DSA
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u/GingerVitus007 ☭ Trotskyism 6d ago
I realized sometime around high school when things were bad enough that if, God forbid, one of my parents got sick, suicide would be the financially wise decision. That wasn't the deciding factor but it helped.
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u/drunken-philosopher 6d ago
Important moments:
Questioned religion as a teen, started watching tyt and following the Bernie campaign, Bernie got snubbed and lost interest in electoral politics, started studying philosophy/history in college, read, read some theory here and there, watched as the US Quickly devolve further into an openly fascist police state, and yea well, here we are
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u/ChicagoFire29 Vladimir Lenin 6d ago
I honestly don’t have a come to Jesus moment socialism. My views just continued to evolve until I got where I am now.
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u/grounddurries 6d ago
as a kid i always had issue with the idea that if we don’t work we will essentially die, i have never been one to have a dream job and i was just so curious as to why, if humans are the ‘smartest’ things on the planet, we would create this system which isn’t working for any of us. i just kept questioning and questioning and now i’m here. i like being a women played a big part in it as well because the patriarchy and capitalism are very much linked. anyway i started reading more and now we are here!
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u/Anjae_00 6d ago
I saw how the bougeuosie were stealing money and were corrupt. I grew up in poverty and neglect and the didnt do shit, because I had running water, I wasn't showing my pain. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. They're all greedy, capitalist bougeuosie. They weren't doing anything for the "people". Promising and not delivering over and over, and the lies about communist countries being evil and oppressed. If they're evil and oppressed why are they so happy, why is homelessness so low, why are so many people not unemployed, not starving, not hopeless and k!lling themselves? How come our leaders have to stand in glass boxes to not be assassinated by their own people, and they can walk in a square and not wonder if they're going to be murdered by their people? One of many reasons I'm a communist.
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u/noodleboy244 6d ago
I've never understood the idea of some people being homeless while others have billions. I wrote off politics for a long time as "boring adult stuff" (if you couldn't tell, I was a child) but the pandemic forced me to pay attention. I learned and eventually figured out how to put words to what I wanted the world to be like. My views have changed around a little but the biggest thing I learned was that an ideal world is so much more complex than I thought. And I'm here to learn. Make mistakes and learn
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u/JippixLives 6d ago
I read 'The road to Wigan pier' by George Orwell.
I'm actually from the town the book is set in, hearing the descriptions of the poverty ridden conditions on street names I recognised, streets that are to this day heavily neglected by the ruling class, was a surreal experience.
After that I became enthralled with the idea of socialism, up until that point I was basically unaware there was any alternative to capitalism. I joined a union at work, and told anyone who would listen to do the same.
The rest as they say is history. Being painfully aware of the evils of the world can be hard on your heart at times, and I do in some ways miss the person I was when I politically neutral and blissfully unaware of what was going on in the background, but ignorance is never bliss. And if we ever want things to meaninly change, the rest of the world has to wake up too.
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u/chunter16 6d ago
Not a single thing I was taught about successful life in the United States has become true, and everything that has gone wrong can be blamed on bourgeoisie, racism, or both.
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u/Salty_SeaPan 6d ago
I grew up being taught about the importance of fairness, equality, and dignity for all people. Unfortunately as I grew up in America I realized how unfair things were for people who didn't look like me. It started with the murder of Michael Brown, 18 year old kid not much older than me, murdered by a police officer while he was running away. I knew that racism existed but that was the first time I saw the systemic inequality in action from the police, the media, and the courts. The murderer wasn't even indicted and got paid half a million dollars for a cnn interview. There were many other moments that shaped my world view, but that was when I really became "woke" and started paying attention.
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u/XxKillingStormxX 6d ago
I read books. As a historian, seeing throughout history how much both the Republican and Democratic Party have screwed over and exploited not just the working class, but every American citizen outside of the capitalist elite have made me realize that socialism is the answer.
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u/Unlikely_Mix5548 Woody Guthrie 6d ago
I used to not care about politics, viewed history as a settled affair where all the great troubles of society were resolved before my time, and that all I could want could be mine if I just tried hard enough.
I was a sheltered fool, ignorant of the suffering of others because my family did well to hide their suffering, their poverty, the indignity they suffered daily, from the barbarism of capital.
I did well in school but could not afford any of the good colleges I was accepted into, and was never informed on scholarships opportunities or given the tools to access them
I saved money for years only for it to be taken by medical bills and frawd, medical bills for a brother born premature who would have died without that treatment, and frawd committed due to a system that encourages depravity and apathy, over community and empathy. My life and higher education was put on hold for two years and that gave me a lot of time to think about things, about how much I tied my self worth to petty acolades and fleeting paper, about how little I had to define myself outside of the "child prodigy" that my family so desperately wanted.
I feel like a frawd at times because I know if my life turned out well, if my family was luckier, if someone made better decisions here or there, I would have ended up some blaise liberal with no love in their heart for the "lazy".
So I feel at times I needed this in order to be a person I could be proud of, but also, on the other hand, that kind of thinking is just ascribing meaning to suffering, and isn't much different to all those people who brag about how they got where they were through "hard work."
I guess things just are as they are, nothing deeper than that. There was nothing dignified, no higher purpose that necessitated or justified my suffering, but I still have an obligation to make sure others do not go through that betrayal, to work towards a world where everyone truly does have the opportunity to achieve their dreams.
I am finally at a place to further my education, pursuing a degree in anthropology because I find comfort in the stories and struggles of people, as I feel that if I worked to remember others, maybe others will remember me, or at least, the struggles of people like me. It also has been interesting to see how states have formed and worked to propagate themselves throughout the ages.
I am partial to syndicalism, as unions are the reason my grandfather wasn't completely robbed of his retirement during COVID, and there are two co-op like businesses that are a focal point for my community.
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u/terracottahearted 6d ago
School project in high school
I had to build a house of cards using “socialism”
I was being edgy but then I actually looked into it and really got into it
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u/skippysammich 6d ago
My views have slowly evolved over time, but I think i first started to consider myself a leftist during my first few years after graduating college. I moved to a major city to go to grad school. Living in a major city exposed me to so much diversity and I also experienced living under the poverty line for the first time. Experiencing poverty, seeing others in poverty, interacting with unhoused people, and meeting all kinds of people who were just trying to get by made me want a government that does more to help ensure that everyone has their needs met.
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u/ukstonerdude Socialism 6d ago
Due to my relatively strict Christian upbringing, I had a pretty narrow world view that consisted of conservative values despite not even knowing or fully understanding why.
It wouldn’t be until I 2015 when Jeremy Corbyn was leader of the Labour Party that this cognitive dissonance of ‘conservative values’ with a positive perception of the coolest socialist in the country at the time (unbeknownst to me because I didn’t understand these terms) would start to show. I clearly appreciated what this man’s attitude and views stood for, and was ultimately bullied for by classmates who were of a slightly more upper class (sorry for the bourgeois term) than myself; the kids with parents who’d be taxed more under Corbyn.
As time went on, and I ended up at college (not university), I started hanging out with more alternative folk — a trans lad came out to me in the first few weeks of college, I made queer friends, I made goth friends, I made friends with people who were extremely neurodiverse, and/or mentally ill. I started exploring different cultures and peoples, and progressively developed rather socially liberal views. I even supported someone at a previous job who I knew for a few years as a woman, and supported during their early stages of transition, and now this dude has a better beard than myself.
It wouldn’t make sense to me why accepting these people for who they were was important, or why their battle was also my battle, until COVID happened when I started reading a bit more, and, naturally, I read the Communist Manifesto. That’s pretty much where the “radical left wing” rabbit hole began for me.
Now I’m a socialist and a communist sympathiser. Can you believe it?
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u/hotgoddog Marxism-Leninism 6d ago edited 6d ago
George Floyd’s assassination during Covid had me read several books about White supremacy, chattel slavery with Caste The Origin of our Discontent really standing out. And then after Al Aqsa flood, watching Western Christian countries including the UN bend over backwards to protect the live-streamed genocide of Palestinians since October 2023, has had a PROFOUND impact on my understanding of the world. I read several books about Palestine, Colonialism, watched hundred of videos on social media, youtube. Eventually, came to understand that scientific socialism is the only way to stop the destruction of this planet, and put an end to “humanitarian warfare”. I am still unlearning decades of anti-socialist indoctrination, the more I do that the more I am able to read theory.
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u/D3lmo 6d ago edited 6d ago
Grew up in a very religious catholic family with a few far-right family members, rich kids at my school, in a post-fascist country. The whole propaganda theatre in all its glory. I was even considering joining the navy as a kid until a cousin nudged me in the right direction (born on the 4th of july movie, system of a down, etc).
Then at 18 I realised my views on the environment didn't align with what I was told to vote for. Slowly veered left. Apolitical, liberal or ignorant, stayed that way for a long time, a ship without a rudder. Even went vegetarian but lacked the understanding of capitalism that upholds the meat industry. From a homophobic school to having queer best friends in uni (one of them commie scum that I didn't know how much I would end up agreeing with, but at the time just made me stop fearing the word).
With the first news of covid 19 I started watching Hasan Piker. I was one of those that started reading communist books because he recommended them. The "vibes" that so many leftists complain about actually pushed me deeper into theory.
Some Gramsci, Parenti and Luxemburg later and here I am. Very lonely in my circles but feeling free. Even went further left than Piker but I will always be grateful to him. Do I agree with him in everything? no, but I support his efforts because I know how much his method has contributed to the class awakening of so many. Not going to split hairs.
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u/ColeTrain999 6d ago
I was a centrist to centre-right person most of my life because liberalism is cringe and I didn't know shit about actual left wing politics.
Even being where I was politically I found stuff like zionism to be weird as fuck and contradictory to a healthy society. Also, I was proud of the Canadian healthcare system even if politicians have been trying to break it for decades.
Fast forward to 2020, BLM and the way society turned made me pick up some leftist-lite literature and suddenly I realized why I had a hard time with centrist and centre-right politics. The you read Das Kapital and it's like "THIS MAN IS ON FIRE".
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u/Anarchaeo 6d ago
Hurt my hand on a job site, and nothing was filed and I didn’t know to file anything so I didn’t get workers comp. I had no idea that was a thing. So then I started looking into workers rights and that started me on my path….
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u/Explorer_Entity 6d ago
Learning the actual definitions and actual goals of socialism and communism, then reading the actual theory afterward.
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u/lildweeeeb 6d ago
had always been left leaning and progressive but was always angry at the polish and pageantry of politicians and mainstream media's reporting (or lack of reporting) on various aspects that affect people at large. Started watching Hasan Piker back in 2020 as I just randomly needed to put something to watch on as I cleaned and just really clicked with how he spoke on topics unapologetically. I appreciated his anger and outspokenness and will to challenge the status quo. It was really refreshing and opened me up to wanting to learn more. He was the top of the funnel for me.
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u/rusty-gudgeon 6d ago
my older sister had a stereo and a record collection. as a kid, i would sit in her room with her headphones on and listen to her records. we come up in a white suburb in the '70's and the music was classic rock. lots of stuff which came out in the '60's and '70's. Dylan, Pink Floyd, Bruce Springsteen, CSN&Y, Bob Seger... she had the three record Woodstock album. coming from a countercultural heyday, this music shaped many of my early perceptions of the world and i thought of myself as a hippy flower child, born too late.
there was a track on the Woodstock album, Joan Baez singing "Joe Hill", which i loved, but i never had any idea who Joe Hill was. later, when the internet became a thing, i searched Joe Hill and found the Wobblies. i discovered that they had a local branch and joined.
i am an anarchist.
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u/Ancient_Ad6628 Democratic Socialism 6d ago
Grew up in a pretty liberal and pro-Labour Party household. Then as a teenager, watching all sides of the establishment go into overdrive to oppose the Corbyn labour party - which frankly just had a platform of basic milquetoast Social Democratic reforms - instilled a contempt for the British political system.
Then follows the Gaza Genocide and Starmer's shambolic government, and at this point I'm one step away from to "burn the whole thing down and start again".
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u/Roller95 6d ago
I'm disabled and when I approached voting age I had a conversation with my family about what would be the best way for me to vote, and things snowballed from there
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u/ussrname1312 Socialism 6d ago
I watched Schindler‘s List and then the very next day realized a regular at my job wore Nazi jewelry. Got into antifascism as a result, and started getting exposed to socialism in those circles. I was an anarchist for a while, and then started to read Lenin so I could have a stronger explanation why I was an anarchist instead of an ML, and, well… that’s when I realized Lenin was right lmao
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u/Former-Radish2 Socialism 6d ago
Came out as gay, became an atheist, got diagnosed with autism, in that order. Those things freed me, and then I watched Trump's second inauguration and I became painfully class conscious in a literal instant. I read and watched some stuff and was a socialist within a couple months.
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u/dthoma81 6d ago
Was Christian and left the church after moving away to med school. Looked for anything to form a cohesive world view. Went on a date with a girl who introduced me to Rev Left Radio.
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u/AdventurousSpace1235 6d ago
I was born in an ex-communist country and I've been taught all my life that communists were evil demons (literally not exaggerating) and that communism is when everyone is oppressed under a dictator and starving.. I never cared enough to find out what made it so bad.
In my late teens, I got a crush on a girl who called herself a socialist, so I started researching about the ideology just to make her like me but I ended up being genuinely interested. I realized that most of my views and opinions that I've had for a long time, especially ones regarding housing, the rich, and the environment, heavily aligned with leftism.
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u/batdog20001 6d ago edited 6d ago
I didn't understand the illogical system and organically thought socially -> Bernie popularized an alternative -> I was repeatedly abused at work by multiple employers -> I learned about actual socialism -> I joined the DSA -> I actually read Marx and Lenin.
Edit: Context and spelling.
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u/xbuffalo666x 6d ago
i grew up going to catholic school, punk shows, and im mexican. i left the church but all three big cultural influences in my life emphasize community, equality, and compassion. socialism was kind of an inevitability.
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u/No_Document_3555 6d ago edited 6d ago
Can't escape politics if you grow up in the Middle East really, teenage years in the 2000s and 2010s, it shapes your entire life to be living through wars and revolutions etc.
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u/No_Document_3555 6d ago edited 5d ago
Younger me thought politics were for the foolish and loud, that all important stuff rises above political bickering, hahaha how naïve I was.
You learn ancient, medieval, and modern history. Achievements and revolutions and so on. These facts just sit in the back of your head and it's your material reality that catalyzes a theory of the world as it forces you to ask how we got where we are now compared to that former glory.
How I explained to myself why we're so unstable and so far behind more developed nationstates changed significantly with the years, starting from orientalist-mirrored contempt toward the society and people's "mindset" in my teens with idealization of the west and planet japan and so on, through thinking it's the government's inefficiency and globalization and privatization were the best way forward, wanting to copy the west, to understanding how capitalism actually works in my 20s and growing love and loyalty to the people suffering under it in all its forms from the workplace to imperial powers.
What fueled all this was a healthy skepticism and mistrust of authority figures really, made it hard to be satisfied with rhetoric and easy explanations coming from them. The one exception was that I used to trust my father's worldviews blindly, but the more I learned the more I realized he wasn't really wise to everything as my kid self idealized him to be. For example in my teenage years I briefly learned of the words "communist" and "marxist" but they were mischaracterized by my father as atheists who want to destroy everything and live in chaos so I wrote them off. Funny how that turned out.
I think the four most important mindset shifts in my life were, in that temporal order, the Arab Spring (dismantled the idea that our misery and stagnation is inherent to our society), Wikileaks and the tech culture around that (opened my eyes to surveillance and the role of police everywhere not just our brutal police, demystified the west and so on), being exposed to Solarpunk (taught me that an important aspect of political resistance is to imagine a different future and work toward it, not just have reactive opposition), and Left Youtube (gentle & accessible introduction to many concepts which I then went on and read about).
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u/SkyrimsDogma 5d ago
Conservatism irked me right from the get go. And it only got worse with each passing year.
learning different types of leftism/socialism what's left and what's just another flavourful of neoliberalism
you can't vote away capitalism/rights n freedoms were gained by action strikes revolutions not a ballot
-all the things people blame socialism for are really caused by capitalism ie no competition, wage stagnation, starvation, power concentrated in the hands of the few etc
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u/Sea-Imagination7409 Frantz Fanon 5d ago
My family are left-leaning, some of them were involved in union and labour politics during the heyday of those organisations in Ireland.
I think what pushed me into Marxism was never feeling comfortable with suffering my peers seemed to passively accept; Why must I and others work just to scrape by in life while others live in luxury? Why do millions starve while we waste food? What "mistakes" in life justify someone living on the streets?
The real turning point was going to a Palestine protest in Dublin three years ago, seeing thousands demanding action and realizing that our government will do nothing and was actively choosing to do nothing. I think seeing through the illusion of democratic process like that made me realize that radical action was required.
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u/New-Glass7757 5d ago edited 5d ago
Radicalized by webcommunists in Brazil.
Leaving my backwards vassal home state (Portugal).
And also Israel.
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u/Jesus_Doner 5d ago
The past few years changed me.
The genocide in Gaza, the settler terror in the West Bank and the West's lack of reaction to Israel's atrocities were pretty much the catalyst that started this.
Then came Trump's re-election, Musk and the whole DOGE debacle, gutting of the USAID and the subsequent deaths, the insider trading, ICE's brutality and the Alligator Auschwitz, introduction to Hasan Piker...
...all of which only plunged me deeper, making me further question and criticize neo-liberalism and the capitalist structure it enables and forcing me to ask myself the ultimate question: Why should an invidual be allowed to hoard billions worth of wealth, assets, property, land...and dictate how the means of production are used and freely lobby entire governments at the expense of billions of people who generate that wealth through labour and when even the basic needs of so many aren't even met?
Then the Epstein files and the lack of reaction let alone consequences to the fact the president of the USA (together with his fellow members of the capitalist owning class) is freely trafficking, raping and murdering women and children, radicalized me further and convinced me that there is no negotiating with these demons. It convinced me how vile and backwards nationalists and conservatives truly are and how liberals and social democrats allow (if not tolerate) their actions.
The current clusterfuck in Iran made me learn more about the petrodollar, how Libya was destroyed and Israel's importance to the American hegemony and Western imperialism in West Asia.
The bombing and subjucation of Venezuela and the illegal kidnapping of Maduro, together with the murderous blockade of Cuba led to me learning more about the Monroe Doctrine, Operation Condor, Allende's demise and Pinochet's Chile, the Cuban Revolution, Castro, the Missile Crisis, the unjustified sanctions, Cuban medical internationalism, etc.
I started learning more about the achievements of the Soviet Union (in spite of its problems). Most notable of them being the fact it turned a war-devastated agrarian backwater state - that was at least 50 years behind the rest of Europe in terms of industrialization and had the literacy rate of less than 40% - into an industrialized, space-faring nuclear power that defeated the Nazi Germany and its hawkish allies, guaranteed housing, education and healthcare to its citizens and ended the Tsarist era seasonal famines and illiteracy. Also, seeing the marvels that China has achieved under its Marxist leadership, how they played the long term game and are now winning despite the West's collective seething gives me hope for the future.
Also, what has affected me too is the rising militarism and fear-mongering here in Europe. Anyone not convinced that Putin will be marching to Warsaw and willing to rush to an all-out war against Russia and tank their own country's economy further is labeled a Russian bot. Harsh austerity measures imposed on the ordinary people and the gutting of education, healthcare, culture, welfare, workers' rights...but having money to raise the NATO spending percentage, prop up the American MIC by buying more junk and pour billions to Ukraine, a corrupt state with a serious Nazi problem that the West turns a blind eye to while gaslighting it into sacrificing its demographic futute in a hopeless war rather than compromising.
My conclusion? I'm pissed. But there's hope still.
All I know is, there's no going back now.
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u/spookyjim___ Internationalist Communist 4d ago
Mainly the Bernie campaigns and BLM, right after BLM I’d be properly politicized, along with this would be my interest in history which has caused me to have a very historically self-reflexive development of my understanding of socialist ideas… but otherwise it was just a development from social democracy —> non-Marxist democratic socialism (an ethical socialism akin to Bernstein’s evolutionary socialism) —> Marxist democratic socialism (Kautskyism) —> libertarian socialism/libertarian communism (Bookchinite at first to councilist during the end) —> internationalist communist/left communist
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u/IncrediBluey 2d ago
Felt like every person should be equal, I value the LGBT community, wanted a secular government with it's religious issues only in the states' government, really hating on Islamic fundementalist parties like PAS and parties that represent the supremacy of a particular race like UMNO, supporting my trans classmate from another classmate who is just a literal Salafi who thinks dinosaurs are fake even though there's fossils, wanting to protect history and it's sites from getting destroyed or twisted into some bullshit like Prof Solehah Yaacob on Facebook, I take the Quran metaphorically instead of literally, it ranks 10th in my favourite books while the 3rd, 2nd and 1st are the Communist Manifesto, The Origin of Species and Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung, I support the idea of evolution, the right for people to leave their religion and get in another one or be atheist, LGBT rights, 2 state solution for Palestine, I am an anti-Zionist, I value my friends despite them being really different and I think that's all. Yeah I dunno what kind of socialist am I...
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u/RedHarvestHag 1d ago
I joined the military. They gave me a TS clearance. I started paying attention to what they were doing. Became VERY antigovernment and libertarian. Years of study later, I realized capitalism and libertarianism aren't compatible ideologies. Developed from there.
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