What made you become a leftist? Was it exposure to a certain person, a gradual realisation...

What made you become a leftist? Was it exposure to a certain person, a gradual realisation, something passed on through the family etc.? Talk about your leftist origin story here.

local hibernian brainwashed me into loving the negro penis

I used to be a socdem because of my family. Then I started realizing that shit doesnt work, based on reality. ThenI reconsidered marxism and started to study theory.

When I first learned about politics when I was a kid I became a conservative. I think this is due to the right appealing to the child-psychology of needing/wanting a paternalistic state/political strongman. I also disliked immigrants just because I didn't fuck with the dumb kids from the projects, even though basically all of my friends were 2nd generation immigrants/different ancestry and myself being a 1st generation immigrant and a foreign mother.

I became more liberal a few years later, and in the 8-9th grade when my teacher woke up a discussion in class about personal liberty ("Would it hurt anyone or thing if I smoked weed in the weekend?") it kinda cemented my view on personal liberty and introduced me to self-autonomy. I think I was introduced to leftism because of Dead Prez and Immortal Technique, I then became a staunt social-democrat, anti-imperialist. Years later I saw social-democracy as not being leftist enough and got increasing anti-capitalist sentiments. Fast foward to a few months ago I was introduced to anarchism when I saw Street Politics 101. I became more cemented in my views that progressivism is the way to go and the right is ultimately regressive and oppressive. I just recently started reading political lit.

Used to be apolitical military history/science enthusiast (I work on radars, used to briefly work with a defence company, now purely automotive). I started learning about second world war and spanish civil war. Then read some Kropotkin and Marx. And now here I am.

Literature.

I just don't want to get a job

During university a man who lived in a condo next to me killed himself. His dad brought over all of his books. One of those books was Capital, Vol. I.
But I probably wouldn't have been open to, or even capable of, considering anti-capitalism/Marxism if I hadn't taken so many psychedelic drugs in the months prior.

I started as an ironic commie, just for some shits and giggles really. Then I started reading into politics and becoming politically literate about two years ago.

I had always held leftist views but I never realised they were leftist, I have also held very libertarian views too. I always called myself a democratic socialist as because all I knew about communism was what we're taught about the USSR, China and North Korea.

One day I decided to actually learn about communism, particularly Marxism, Trotskyism, De Leonism, Luxemburgism and Anarcho-Communism, it was at his point (about 10 months ago) I realised that I was a full leftist.

It's also pretty funny 'cos my father's a conservative and my mother's a liberal so my father and I particularly have some very blazing disagreements. What makes it even funnier is that my father's part of union too kek

Nice what drugs?
I've only done 2cb, lsd, mdma
4-aco-dmt is legal where I am at
I've done some stims and opis but that's not some i usually fuck with
Now i only smoke weed

LSD and psilocybin mushrooms. Psilocybin mushrooms are the best psychedelic, though. All mentally fit people should take them at least once.

I want to help my folk and my race.

I was poor my whole life

Why?

I remember I was reading a childrens encyclopedia that didn't hold back about the third world, I thought it was terrible, since then I was like a socdem and became a marxist as I got older.

Why what

...

Everything I read in the papers was degradation and violence. I decided to discover the history of this system and how it came to be that we live in a world of insanity. Turns out it was drilled into us with M16's and cover coups for the last 80 years.

Well, speaking from my own experience, they helped me sort out a lot of issues with mental health, intimacy, relationships, self-perception, etc. Do the drugs make you a kinder, gentler person? No, not necessarily. But a psychedelic trip is the most exotic mental experience a person can have, and that is good in itself. The experience shows you the malleability/delicacy of your psyche, and this allows you to break negative habits and make your mind more receptive to novel ideas. No spiritual spiritual hokey stuff required.

I grew up poor and didn't really get relatively comfortable till my dad started a pool repair business(which was pretty much just him in a truck) when I was in high school. I bought the small business meme and became a sort of socdem like the average bernie supporter with aspirations of muh small bizness. When I graduated high school I started cleaning and fixing pools as a self-employed guy and going to college part time. The business classes I took did not teach me how an economy works (I learned mlre reading a textbook than in hours of those classes) and I got barely anything out of them other than how to be a stooge. I got really depressed, got fat, stopped having sex or trying to get a gf, and started doing a lot more drugs. I pretty much broke down and while I was getting back on my feet I read some Kropotkin and Marx and everything started to make sense. I knew the days of the independent laborer owned business were numbered having seen other pool guys get swallowed up but did not understand it was capitalism itself that caused this. Now I'm reading more and hoping to start a co-op or find a way to make films without sucking porky cock. I also got fit but the downside of being classconsious is a lot of people seem fucking stupid and most girls I meet I'm not interested in doing more than fucking because they're liberals and too vanilla.


I did shrooms with some friends once and it didn't do shit for me but those niggas were talking to trees and shit.

People started that cultural marxism meme during GG and it was really stupid so I decided to finally learn more.

Homosexuality and conservatism don't mix. I kept in the closet, though, and even joined the Tea Party (because my parents did and I was a kid at the time). They quickly got bought out by the republicans, and so we left. But in that time I'd gotten a big taste of hardcore conservatism, and I hated it. It was so antithetical to everything they claimed to uphold.
SO I BECAME A LIBERAL!
No, really, I did. Communism was super scary, so I didn't want to go far left, so I stayed in the comfy moderate zone.
And then despite getting a negative score on the muh muh privilege test, I was suddenly word policed about everything, and it was conservatism all of again.
At that point finding a free society that let me live in peace seemed impossible, and since the right was becoming a bunch of nazi fascists, I went full tankie in a reactionary response.
I posted about the glories of Stalinism over on Holla Forums, comparing body counts and laughing at their pathetic excuse of a holocaust. If the world was going to go to shit I was determined to be on the side that only cared about how much effort I put in.
And then, somebody on Holla Forums told me to fuck back off to Holla Forums, and since they were all idpol, I figured you guys would be too.
So without lurking I made a thread asking if you guys liked the LGBT community, and I got a bunch of responses saying you didn't give a shit either way, but that if I was determined to promote my faggotry more than the rights of the working class, I had a cell in gulag with my name on it.
And so I decided to keep my tankie mode on and embrace full Stalinism.
That didn't go over too well with you either. And it was then that I understood what communism truly was - a stateless society with no central government where everyone is a free man, and choosing to cooperate rather than compete would lead to pretty much the complete disintegration of all identity politics.
And that's when I became a true leftist. I wasn't ironically embracing the mass murdering statism that was faux leftism out of a reactionary response to the right, I found something to genuinely hold on to and believe in.

Anarchist since I was 13. r8 my edge m8.

Really though, I guess I was kinda lucky. I was listening old school punk a lot those days. I think I first heard about "anarchy" in a sex pistols song, "anarchy in the u.k" Later that year, I went to my first book festival in my city, I saw a publishing stand with anarchy signs. I hyped and started talking with the couple who publish books on anarchism, they were really sweet to me. I thought anarchists would be scary or some shit. They gave me Kropotkin's Mutual Aid, Anarchism by George Woodcock, Industrial Revolution and It's Future by Kaczynski, The Spanish civil war by Abel Paz and Against His-story, Against Leviathan by Fredy Perlman. I guess they didn't want to direct me to a specific anarchist branch and wanted me to understand and choose it myself. They gave me %70 off for all books and told me not to worry if I can't read and understand all these books. I started with the Kaczynski's manifest since it was the shortest. Imagine my surprise…lol. I really got into it. And studied the book pretty damn hard. I was taking notes, writing about it. I remember I asked some questions to my dad about the book, he was like "what the fuck are you reading son?" I showed him the book. He read it too and he found it interesting. One day my older sister came back to home from her university for a holiday visit. She knocked on my door and came in. " Why don't you come outside and say hello to your sister we haven't seeing each other for months" I was copying the parts of the book to my notebook for further thinking in school. She was shitting herself when she saw what I was working on. She took the book and ran to my dad. "Do you know what the fuck he is reading?" My dad said "yeah chill". Then she said "we studied him in a elective course, most of the class didn't even understand shit, why do you let him read this shit, he is going to be psycho before he turn 16" lol anyways story goes on like this. I was really influenced by primitives for maybe another 3-4 years. till I was 17 now after 10 years I only say, I am an anarchist. The more you know the more unsure you are. I don't know the solution. I still think anarcho-primitives have really solid arguments against civilization you can't simply ignore them with memes but I don't share their future society ideal. And Against His-story, Against Leviathan is still the one of the best book I have ever read. I strongly recommend it.

Moral of the story. Be kind to newcomrades, suppress your salty instincts, you can change their lives.

Used to be socdem. Studied sociology. Realized literally all social issues are rooted in capitalism.

bait harder.

Great bait.

I found /r/socialism. I left when I got sick of the idpol cancer.

I was a Holla Forumsfag before all this current alt-right meme magic stuff. Everything I knew about politics was shitposting, the first 20 minutes of that one 9 hour long WMM Hitler propaganda video, and Varg Vikernes. I got bored of that and became more interested in music, where I discovered anarchist bands and started to realise that it was something that people actually supported and not just chaos in the streets or whatever. I also read about the Spanish Civil War. I started reading anarchist books. So I became an anarchist and still am to this day.

Came from a family of socialists and a country which used to be socialist..Always heard from older people how it was better than roday.Of course this could be applied to any country and any ideology,but I do think it had played a little part to what made me a Marxist.
At the start I was a socdem because I thought that the other forms of socialism was literally bug gubment.
From some time i oscillated from gloryfying the USSR to thinking it was shit and that Kruschev was thw best leader they had.(Lenin was and still is someone i ideologise to this day).
After that I kinda decided to actually acquire some knowledge into what socialism and communism was.To me there must have been a reason why there were so many poor people,not just in my country bu the planet,and that "they are just lazy muh bootstraps" was a terrible excuse to me since I was a child.I knew that that wasn't the case because I knew tons of people from poor backgrounds whose both parents and them worked hard ,but still got shafted.
After I started going to College and studied Austrian """economics""" I figured out how much bollocks all this was.
Now I am just anothet orthodox Marxist and from time to time I try and help show the people I know what a shitty system we have.It helps that they have a similar resentment to the system,but a lot of the people I know are spooked.

I read the Constitution that was in my grandfather's SUBNOR booklet and agreed with all of the principles.

Economics.

Debs took the words right out of my mouth

...

And thats how I became a marxist. Well, after I my edgy teenage anarchist phase, when i read marx, that is.

I was born an anarchist. When I first started reading AFAQ it was like reading my own mind.

Got really bored, picked up a book and here I am drifting further and further down the whole that is leftist theory.

*hole

Working a shitty minimum wage service job for hours on end every day. Being exposed to the corporatist ideology of being part of a 'family' and the importance of being a dutiful worker. Noticing that the outward happiness and relative success of my coworkers depended upon their ability to bend to every whim of this ideology. Seeing that the one thing that I and my coworkers universally had in common wasn't any kind of sense of community but that we were all varyingly dissatisfied and atomized individuals who related to one another through our mutual drug and/or alcohol abuse.

They mix just fine, your blog post is incorrect.

Free stuff, really that is all. I don't want a job, life's too short for that.

My material conditions were ripe for leftism. I grew up in a very working class area, saw a lot of crime, poverty and drug related business. Family never had much money. Was homeless once because my house got petrol bombed.

The two people who are really responsible for my leftist politics are Jean Paul Sartre and M.I.A. Kind of a weird combo I know. They laid the groundwork for me though and really opened my mind. Once I came across Marx's theory of alienation, that was a big holy shit moment. I could never connect with the dry economics, but that was relatable and so fucking accurate. From their on in being a commie was my logical conclusion.

One day i realized that the government uses force to take money for taxes, because you earned it why should the gov take it,if capitalisum is so fair and voluntary why should i be forced to pay taxes?.
Became ancap.
Realize that private property is also authoritarian. Boom anarchist

...

I hate damn near everyone for using me and abusing me. The only people who have ever been nice to me are working class/homeless.

So I want to make things better for them so I can kill myself without guilt.

I'm somewhat similar to this user

My parents lean left and my dad hates greed so I have some basis in it from my upbringing. Solidly working class family.

I did flirt with right wing ideologies for a time but I always knew it was bullshit. I went to school with richer middle class kids, deeply insular and low-key racist people. Hated them and I hated how my lack of wealth made me feel around some of them.

Not sure what my ideology is exactly but I've read and admire Luxemburg, Bakunin, Kropotkin, Morris and Pannekoek.

My parents were kibbutzniks, my grandfather on mothers side is a socialist, fathers parents were from USSR before they moved to Israel. Father's parents' ancestors were in 1917 revolution war. Basically I'm a mind controlling Jew come here to spread cultural Marxism and anuddah shoah.

I don't understand, fellow comrade.

reeeee

Off yourself Holla Forumstard

That is pretty much what spiraled me on the road to Socialism.

I grew on a pretty leftist part of my country, and the right-wing president at the time was a living joke, so I was kinda left-leaning as a kid.
Many years later on I went on a sort of ancap phase, I still had my doubts, but I had the typical lies about communism on my head and couldn't find of anything better.
Then I discovered about anarchist catalonia, and how socialism is't muh gubmint or sharing toothbrushes, and then the TPP crushed any notion of "but capitalism is good" from me.
This was also the time where Holla Forums started derailing threads on Holla Forums and assuming complete control on GG, while answering anyone who was against them with "shill" "cuck" and ">>>Holla Forums", That's how I discovered this board.

Listened to a lot of punk as a kid and was politically literate at a young age because my dad was a conservatard policy wonk. Became more and more of an anarchist as I listened to a lot of Pat the Bunny stuff then realized that Marxism beats Anarchism after reading The State and Revolution. Now I'm a Marxist Transhumaninist edge lord.

being around wealthy conservatives my whole life

I started out an average political leftist in my teen years and kind of sampled a bit of everything it had to offer before becoming a minarchist/ancap for the first five years of my twenties. I remember the turning point for that being a rereading of the constitution and a general lack of liberal reaction to George Bush's horrible policies on a federal level. I got pretty deep into that read all the theory and stuff behind it but there was aspects of it that that always were a put off for me.

When I started down that route Bush was in office and the general climate of that wing of libertarian thought generally shifts to be anti whatever the country is at the time. So social issues were touted more than economic issues and their solution of states rights while short sighted has had some measure of success even in the dismal election that just happened. It was also emphasized how anti war the stance was and it seemed a good contrast to neoconservatives which was/is always the most deplorable contemporary political stance no matter where I am on the political spectrum throughout my life. I wont soften it I was also fairly invested in their economic thought I still think Hayek is a pretty good writer even if his ideas are a tragedy of the human spirit. I think the real appeal of right wing libertarianism in an economic sense is how simple it all seems in comparison to most other ideologies. You can do complex analysis with it, but the majority of economic problems and situations end up coming back down to the same couple of problems and principles.

The Dubya years ended and the Obama years started. I think it's hard for people who were outside that movement to understand the shift, but I saw the general underpinnings of alt-rightish movements and thoughts occur overnight in the thought of most of these people. Like I said when the country shifts the right libertarians generally shift to be more anti whatever is perceived to be the most in power. So hardline conservative policies became the order of the day for most of them. This was the first thing that kind of put me off about them. I know Idpol stuff is frowned on here but the level of racism and outright hatred of women was starting to become rampant in the movement when I didn't really see that much before. I mean Rothbard had written some deplorable stuff but most ancaps and people I had met before generally agreed his social views were old fashioned and embarrassing. Long story short we started seeing a lot less Kevin Carsons and a lot more Ryan Faulks in those circles.

I think the recession killed a lot of my enthusiasm for their economic thought. I mean ancaps can rightly say they believe they have an answer for this but I just started to find it less and less convincing as time went on. The recession didn't really hit me personally but the occupy movements and a growing awareness of the extent of corporate butt fuckery started to turn me away from ancap thought. I remember before Current TV got cancelled they aired a broadcast about the occupy movement and showed a video of police beating up a homeless black woman who was a few blocks away from the protest. The video alone was not enough to convince me the ideas were wrong but in a strange coincidence an ancap group I had been a part of uploaded the same video and most of the people there were laughing about it. Yeah like cartoon villains they were laughing about a black woman they didn't know getting beat up for no reason by a state and corporate apparatus they supposedly hated. The same site listed an article about the virtues of child labor the same day and I was officially done with calling myself anything related to those people.

I have been a nebulous leftist ever since. I'm more extreme than the average person, but probably just barely enough for leftypol. I have read a lot of leftist authors etc. I like the general bent of economic thought it seems far more realistic and broad in it's criticisms of the established order of things than my previous stance and doesn't have quite as many terrible people to be lumped with.

I never liked assholes, and turns out those assholes were all gulag materials.

Holy shit, are you me?

More seriously, one year I took a typically middle-class vacation, a cruise, to the Bahamas. I was at that time just an ordinary liberal, though living in a fairly conservative area, and the child of two Cold War-era soldiers no less. A cruise ship is really something of a microcosm of society, but one where some portion of the working class gets to play bourgeoisie for a week, while a crew composed largely of third-worlders labors to keep the operation running smoothly.

While we were taking a tour of Nassau, we were set upon by a crowd of local vendors, trying to convince us to part with some small portion of our money in exchange for various trinkets, almost like dogs begging for food.

With that sad event still in my mind, my family and I later went on another shore excursion to see the marine life. On the way to the reef, the local boat captain pointed out on one side of Nassau Harbor the row of mansions, including one owned by Tom Cruise, and two owned by Oprah Winfrey.

On the other side of that harbor, on the hill, stood the slums, where as the captain explained, much of the population lived without electricity or running water, subsisting off the crumbs left from the banquet of the rich foreign tourists.

It was at that moment that I realized there was something fundamentally wrong with our world. That people could be living in absolute squalor not even ten miles from extravagant luxury struck me as undeniable proof that our society was rotten at its very core.

Returning to school that fall, I took on a persona in order to deal with the bullies that perpetually harassed me: that of a ruthless KGB officer. I forget the exact details on how I settled on this getup, but I think it involved Uncyclopedia and Russian Reversal. It was essentially a joke. But to keep the joke going, I started to search for Marx quotes, which intrigued me quite a bit more than I expected. Eventually, I decided in order to build upon the joke even more, and also to better understand the Cold War which my parents had been involved in, to read the foundational tome of communist theory: Capital.

What started as a joke though soon came to life. As I read through the pages on the MIA, all the lingering questions that had stuck with me from that epiphany in Nassau suddenly started coming together, like the pieces of a puzzle. All the things I couldn't understand about politics, economics, history, and society, were all explained to me in the pages of that book. Now, at last, I could see the awful truths of our epoch, and I emerged from reading that book with the resolve to, like Neo in The Matrix, to liberate the whole world from the invisible chains which shackled it. That moment, I truly became a revolutionary socialist.

I have no idea, my family is pretty wealthy probably domestic violence or something, I absolutely despise hierarchies

*tips*

I'm not sure really, I wonder that myself sometimes.
Maybe it was when my mom told me socialism was actually pretty good, or maybe for the fact that my dad and part of his family has always been
socialist, one of his cousins actually fought with the FMLN in the salvadorian civil war.

I was a generic conservative because of family coming out of highschool worked at walmart for a year as a truck unloader and then in electronics and came out of it a commie wishing I could hang up the waltons by their toes.

I was born into a pretty typical black middle class family, liberal, still a little spooked about the gays etc.

Pretty much turned hard left as a result of this election. Hard not to see the spectacle for what it is after this shitfest.

Reading the communist manifesto in order to educate myself on communism didn't convince me about socialism, but it blew me away how few people had actually read marx. So much stuff that gets parroted in mainstream media about how marx didnt' address this or didn't know that was clearly addressed in this tiny little 50 something page book.

No wonder you guize memes suck so fucking bad

I grew up very poor in a small city in the western United States, notorious as a hotbed of anarchists. Bush was elected President when I was nine years old, when I had just started to read the newspapers and think about world events. His presidency was such a giant clusterfuck from beginning to end that it made it easy to hate the right wing. I became a liberal because American media, culture, and politics taught me that you're either a liberal and vote Democrat or a conservative and vote Republican. I didn't really know at the time what liberalism meant, or that our congressional representatives were considered far-left by the establishment, and didn't actually reflect the positions or interests of the Democratic party.

Under the Obama administration, I slowly became disillusioned with the Democratic party. I had been promised change, that the abuses of the Bush Administration would be reversed, but Guantanamo stayed open, the PATRIOT Act stayed on the books, even more whistleblowers were prosecuted, the bank bailout happened, and no bankers went to jail.

During the whole gamergate shitstorm, I saw first-hand how easily the media was manipulated and false narratives established, how identity politics was used to emotionally manipulate people into hatred and willful ignorance, and how easily coordinated character assassination and smear campaigns could be carried out and turn a victim into a villain despite a preponderance of easily discovered evidence to the contrary. It really awakened me to the laziness and deceit of corporate media, and to the ignorance and irrationality of so many fellow liberals who smugly believed in their superiority over… well, everyone, really. The exposure to right-wing ideology, which I still found distasteful, combined with my disillusionment with liberal idpol and helped me figure out what my real principles were, and how they were different from other liberals. I was becoming a leftist, even though I didn't yet have the vocabulary to identify my beliefs as such.

It wasn't until the Sanders campaign that I started to compare his policies to Obama and Clinton. I learned about the Clinton presidency and discovered that (shock and horror) it was a Democrat who gutted welfare, deregulated the banks, and started the torture and surveillance programs that would later use 9/11 as a post-hoc justification. I read A People's History of The World on recommendation of a friend, and with the help of wiki-leaks and the incompetence of the DNC, the last shreds of faith I had in the Democratic Party were destroyed. Between Sanders and A People's History of The World suddenly Socialist didn't seem like a dirty word anymore, and I dove right in.

As for what brought me to leftypol in particular, it's the only place I know where you can talk about leftist politics without fighting off the swarms of smug liberals and idpol-first faux-leftists of leddit, or being called a niggerloving cuck by Holla Forums (when I'm really a kike-loving beta, anyhow).

I decided I actually care when someone besides myself is suffering.

I used to be a Holla Forums super Nazi dumbass, even racist but then I was exposed to "The Ego & It's Own" by Max Stirner.

Also worth noting, as part of my journey leftwards, that I failed out of college and am over ten thousand dollars in debt because I lost access to psychiatric medication, at the fault of a corrupt insurance company which wrongfully denied me coverage, and had also outsourced and then drastically cut all of their customer service staff, to the point where I ran out of pills (and with them, my ability to function as a normal member of society), before I could resolve their error.

The fact that a significant portion of the paycheck to any job I can get is automatically deposited in the accounts of crooked banks who conspire with the government and Universities to extract disgusting profits from the hopes and dreams of impressionable children and their naive parents probably doesn't help my outlook on our current economic system.

Born in 93
Always had reasonably open minded political views. Media always made fun of Bush, probably rubbed off on me I guess.
By late high school I was a liberal.
In my final year of university I did a lot of reading, once I was away from the liberal bubble in classes and was actually exposed to theory I realised I was a Marxist - evidence is too damning to ignore.

Nice

Fucking hell

If you resign to your American citizenship or go work abroad do banks still get to exploit you?

Chapo Trap House and PissPigGrandad

If your money is direct deposited into an account managed by them, and they probably have more power outside of the US

I read Carlyle's "The French Revolution", then Marx's "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte" and Kropotkin's "The Conquest of Bread" MILL BTFO

Then, out of nowhere, I started reading everything I could find by Zizek, Harvey, Kalecki.

And here I am.

And I still love my boy Plato. Fuck you Aristotle. t. Badiou

Plato is shit, man.

Shrooms are definitely not the best psychedelic. They're okay but the best? Really? Don't you have a tree to have sex with or something?

You'll experience shit in the gulag

Poverty and inequality

Just looking at certain figures was enough. The GDP per capita of the US is $50k. A normal family size is 2-5. Any family of that range having even $35k/capita is considered to be doing pretty well for itself. And yet we have the capability even more for everyone

Shit taste my man.

I'm not sure. I think wage garnishments are administered by the government, using the same system they use to collect child support, Social Security deposits, and income tax. On the other hand, I know there are ways garnish from bank accounts as well. Theoretically I could evade repayment forever by never working anywhere that doesn't pay in cash, and never depositing money bank account in my name, but it's a pretty shitty life

As for leaving the country, I've thought about it, but I'm not sure what sort of visas or jobs I could get as a deadbeat dropout deep in debt, and I don't know how or if my debts would follow me.

I had a brief alt phrase early last year. I cringe looking back.

I was demo-catholic, but a teacher taught us the plusvalue theory (without telling us the name) and then I became a tecnocratic communist. Now I am anarchist.

...

Lifelong progressive who has always been able to recognize that economic muh privilege trumps everything. Now I realize it's class.

Read this book next, it'll blow your mind.

I was poor as fuck as a kid so I always valued liberty over anything else.
Used to be a nazi when I thought jews were restricting our liberties, and a libertarian when I thought it was the gub'mint, realized it was the bourgueoisie at last year's dawn honestly.

I think it was because I didn't understand what the left found wrong about capitalism until I read Marcuse, I thought it was just a matter of having a greater GDP (for example I used to think the word 'alienation' was a meme).

exposure to marxist anthropological theory will make captialism really transparently shitty to anyone who's not an idiot.

people who like that kind of stuff should read micheal taussig's "The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America," it's a phenomenal anthropological essay that was my first encounter with genuine marxist theory.

...

what will the future hold

Thanks for the recommendation. I don't have time for serious sit-down reading at the moment, but I downloaded a copy of the audiobook.

I gained sympathy for the left mainly because I wanted a fair (or fairer) world than the one we currently have now.
Still wouldn't consider myself a hardcore lefty by any standard, but I do feel a strong attraction towards Mutualism, mainly because of my extreme distrust and disdain for authority.
I do have some family history relating to leftism, my great uncle (who was fairly famous in his time) was blacklisted by HUAC on some trumped up bullshit, even though he was never a member of a communist party (though he was a socialist.
So, there is that.

This thread seems valuable to me. I feel that there must be something we can learn from it about how to attract people to the cause.

emotion is important. no matter how much autists try to claim it's irrelevant

I agree. It's nice to share stories, reflect, and see our common experiences, and where they diverge. It's oddly relaxing, comfy even. Reading and sharing the stories helps me feel closer to my brothers and sisters, something even stronger than solidarity.

Mother was a marxist-feminist radical. Both parents post-grad at UC Berkeley. She was so much more a feminist than any of these goddamn pretenders in this generation. She went to her grave seeing the movement she helped build torn to shreds by idiocy.

I got a job

You guys are pretty retarded, but Holla Forums is more retarded, so I lurk here.

No comrade, that feeling is true solidarity. The solidarity which is inherent to being human, and which the bourgeoisie have for so long sought to strip from us.

I learned what capitalism was and how it worked. From that moment on I could not un-see it.

My mom was a feminist and I gradually started reading Marx around 8th grade.

I was a lolbertarian at first but then I started reading into socialism and the labour theory of value, found some leftists who aren't drunk off the IdPol kool-aid (like Holla Forumsyps), which made me start doubting capitalism, especially in terms of its potential (or lack thereof) in the future to combat issues like climate change.

What really made me abandon the right was when normal right wingers (not even alt right fascist crazies) started defending and championing actual scum like martin schreli.

Damn, so you were basically born to be a cuck.