When I first found out that there was a polarized version of Holla Forums, i came here thinking I was gonna point and laugh at you all for being a bunch of liberal circle jerks.
But i was wrong, some of you are actually pretty insightful and not immediatly appaling.
Anyways, my question is what turned you into Communists, Anarchists, AnCaps and Egoists?
Was it the same process that turns us on Holla Forums into Nazi and Fascists or were you just always like this?
After reading about the cold war, among other things before hand, that it came to me the United States as a beacon of hope, freedom, justice, liberty for all etc
Was a massive fucking sham and all these words hold empty rhetoric
I quickly realized that history reflects that this nation was supposidly founded on freedom of political expression, but some politics you cannot freely express, when all told this nation and the west promotes the idea that all nations who don't allow all ideas to permeate are dangerous
Making all our states hypocrites
The more explored, the deeper and sooner I realized all that is right promoted by the state and those who benefit from current state and economic power are wrong
And in the longer scale, do not reflect what science suggests is possible or a good idea to emulate. Making me quite repulsed by nationalists who do not even consider any details, and declare them all fraudulent.
The opposite is true.
I'll bite
It's pretty boring though. Both of my parents were members of the Danish Communist Party
I used to fetishize the soviet union a lot in video games like hearts of iron and still keep an old lenin poster on my wall, but ideologically I've realized that I've always been anarchist
I find the Marxist critique of Capitalism appealing, and was always center left (besides my brief Holla Forums stage).
I'm only asking because I want to know what drives so many people to believe the promise Communism.
Also that's interesting enough, however my family actually LIVED in the Soviet Union which ironically pushed us like Fascism more.
Always like this i just didn't know what is was called or that other people thought this way too because of "ebil gommunism killed 100 gorrilion peoplezz"
I suppose however being opened up to an inconvenient truth can push us to extremes.
I don't agree with Capitalism or Corporatism either, but Karl Marx was very deluded on the nature of man and thinking that a classes, stateless society could ever survive
Yeah, when I grew up I realized there wasn't much socialist about the USSR, and definitely wasn't something to strive for
I grew up as the son of a single mother. Growing up I was surrounded by proles and the Lumpenproletariat. However, I made my way to university since my mother could partially support me throughout school and got quickly confronted with another world. I studied math/philosophy and inevitably encountered the very liberal and extremely muh muh privileged student crowd. The stuff they were talking about went mostly over my head and I could not identify with it at all. I actually got quite defensive and disgusted. Most of them were deep into postmodern thought, which I studied and stumbled upon many disagreements. I wanted to find out why, which led me to Zizek, critical theory… and so on and so on.
This happened early on. We all to some degree as children latch onto what we hoped was true.
To a larger extent, people who oppose collectivism do to. And calling it a political extreme works to give legitimacy to the actions of the ways and methods we currently organize with. The truth is "political extreme" or "extreme", is really just the opposite and the whole western world works to undermine it while giving supposed rebels a free chance at things and labels them extreme.
Holla Forums is "always right" because it is structured so they are, because of the very forces they hope to fight.
I'm currently going through that situation now too, except for the Marx part.
No such thing.
I've always been an anarchist. When I first read anarchist literature it was like meeting an old friend.
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sorry, deleted my reply since I accidentally saged
it was
That is true as well, it took a bit of force for me to let go of my hopes that the United States was a model society of liberty and prosperity.
I wouldn't go that far. Nature of humans exists, and in long term is broadly parallel to primates. But the evidence shows a picture people who often cite human nature as a prevention of collectivism might not like. That what they believe, or similarly, often is short term and rips apart rapidly.
I saw it, it's fine
Round about age 9 with the whole aftermath of 9/11 was when it started. I grew up in a world where we were at war in a seemingly arbitrary country, by the time I was 17 the economy had crashed financing all that war profiteering and deregulating and gambling on derivaties so that champagne drinking hooker killers can get even richer. At this point, instead of balancing the books, billions of dollars were stolen through chain of violence from the taxpayer into the hands of bankers so that they might not pay for their own mistakes while the houses of the common people were repossessed.
Since that point the super rich have proceeded to get even richer. The since the 1970's productivity in the workforce has gone way way up but wages have stayed almost the same. In effect this means that even though we now have computers we somehow do MORE work not less, for the same amount of money or less in many cases.
I went into university being told my loan had a cap until I was earning a certain amount, that cap was then erased. I was not consulted or even informed until the decision was already made.
The history of the cold war as I was taught it in school is a lie. The US/West funded horrific terrorism, often against democratic or popular governments, all around the world in order to protect business interests, in central/south america, the middle east and south east Asia in particular. By this stage I learn that the 'random and pointless' war of my youth is actually round three in an ongoing campaign of capitalist imperialism that has raged for a century.
Israel. Fucking Israel.
The environment. Not even global warming, the world is covered in fucking trash. Everything is disposable and shitty. Food is fucking terrible, it is literally full of shit.
The USA doesn't even provide clean water for all its citizens
Their is a DEEP surveillance state and whistle-blowers are killed.
Bolshevik pls
Get spooked
I think I've been a Communalist for most of my life but never realized it. I was raised to have a humanist ethic, and Communalism appeals to that very well.
Amen to that my friend, I just wish you could see a different alternative, but oh well.
Well, I was a berniecrat. I knew there was corruption and shit and it was a problem. His appropriation of the term "socialism" is what got me looking into legitimate socialist movements, aswell as watching opinionstubers.
I started to see all the problems with poverty not being a failure of capitalism, but actually evidence that capitalism is working just the way it's intended, and basically my fate was sealed.
I was also raised the same, however that started to change for me as I lived in one of the most backwards cities in the entire United States.
Where they preached to us to be generous, tolerant of others and always question everything we hear while behind closed doors they were robbing us of everything, and putting down the people who questioned them and put everything they had at their disposal to cause social disorder and clashes between people
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And getting your ass beaten at Cable Street
Stop bullying my dad, and you got a proper chinning from us and the police too
being from a poor and working class background + reading Sartre + discovering Marx's theory of alienation
That's how it all clicked into action for me at the start. Snowballed from there. I connected with communism from an existentialist angle, might be kinda weird idk
My family allways was fairly leftwing and cared about freedom, but also suffered under the GDR so I understood early why M-L and other totalitarians are retarded.
After a while I understood that all the things I hold dear are activly undermined by the capitalist system and stopped being a socdem.
Mosley was probably the biggest failure of fascism in that era. How can anyone look up to him?
Disillusionment. I was a proto-socdem before I even knew the term who bought the small business meme. I just wanted to make films without bothering with blockbuster trash so thought I'd go for business to learn how to operate an indie film studio. First year of basics in college were fine, but business classes did nothing but train you how to be a good stooge. I got really depressed and started doing more drugs to cope, and I ended up crashing my social life and almost burying myself. While I was getting clean I started reading and ended up reading some Kroptokin and Marx. It was mindblowing and I felt like such a fool for buying the bullshit and wasting so much time working on a useless degree.
well, experience
there's an obvious antagonism between employers and wageslaves
that was a real first call for me
whenever Lieutenant of the Owner was telling me that we are in this together, that we need each other, I could literally *feel* the bullshit
on the other hand I was really into Roman history, especially its downfall
Marxist explanation of the Fall was the most satisfying
from there it was a pretty straight road to Marxist critique of capitalism
I always felt there was a great amount of injustice and unnecessary suffering in this world and i had a big aversion to the suffering of others so i wondered what could be behind it. It did not take me long to see that the answer was what holds such a fucked up societal system in place, capitalism.
Funny that you post the ideology that was held up by the most primitive human beliefs like a strong leader with superhuman qualities that will lead us to greatness. But even that had a material explanation Leadership roles needed to be justified and tribal coordination maintained for the sake of survival.
Yeah natural tendencies exist but they are not immutable and can't be held up to argue against collectivism, it doesn't work like that.
Sasuga.
To be perfectly honest I also was Communist for a brief period, coming from a pretty poor family with little opprotunities myself.
It's just eventually as I researched indepth about him and saw how his idea broke into Leninism, Stalinism, Maoism and other authoritarian governments, I realized his dreams can never work because it's simply that, a dream.
I also never really did like the idea of destroying social order and the economic classes, but rather that we all work together to help build each other up because we see each other as family and dont let family suffer.
That's eventually how I started looking into Not Socialism, British Unionism and Fascism
Preach it.
What alternative do you propose. All of the above is done in the name of the parasitical owning class. The state only exists to defend them and their hoard. We must destroy the arms of their power, the state and private property.
The only way to stop these elites arises is to turn all over all land to the control of the people. If anybody gains power or private property, there a parasitical elite has risen.
You already know what I would propose, and we both know you aren't going to willingly agree to it.
Read Marx. Agreed with most of his capitalist critiques. Wasn't really sure if I could hold myself to ideological bent that most posters had. Picked the pirate flag since I'm more an anarchist sympathizer than an actual anarchist, but didn't think I could call myself a full-on state communist supporter either.
explain this picture to me because I see nothing beautiful here
Just like the American Dream or the invisible hand.
Read Kropotkin. Mutual Aid: A Factor In Evolution. Capitalism and hierarchical systems destroy this tendency in humans. We have been driven off the land and our relationships have been broken and atomised.
Did you know George Orwell fought for anarchists?
Yes, Anarcho-Syndaclist if I am correct.
These elite groups feed off nationalism. "Defending the nation" or "national security" is the reason they create for their own existence.
How can you suggest radical nationalism and say 'amen' to a post that decries the police state which is the inevitable consequence of dogmatic 'homeland security' ?
Because I am not for Capitalists either, but they are not the producers of a Nationalists, Nationalism is the result of the Elite Cabal that doesn't cease to meddle in the affairs of a country and continue to subject them to the slavery of consumerism, debt and poverty while pushing for the mass influx of cheap sources of labour to further drive down the stability and economuc prosperity of a nation.
Nationalism isn't the virus, it's the cure.
Considering that most anarchist groups have also been patriotic, in the sense that, they had great love for their country and comrades, Machnovists, Catalonian Anarchists, Rojava, can you see that it is very possible for peoples to come together as families without the state or capitalism?
This is what I am saying? What?
I'm finding it very hard to discern your post I think maybe you mixed some words up
I just have different ideas on what turns someone into a Nationalist
How can you dismiss communism as a "dream" when your fabled nationalism has never delivered the cures that you want, it always had a purpose for the elites and the ruling class.
Well, I mean it's okay to have wrong opinions.
Because Nationalism has never been subverted by inert greed and lead to the starvation of millions, followed by mass genocides of the educated and proxy wars.
The world pushed him into war and no one outside Germany could be trusted anymore
Wrong, the nazis were backed by extremely conservative elites like the bankers and industrialists.
To give you one example guess who benefited from the aryanization of business? Big banks who could buy them up. The working classes and the average man got duped hard by Nazism.
Tsarist russia never had food security while the Soviets were able to eventually provide it to nation that was wrecked by huge wars and social unrest.
If you are talking about Pol Pot he was not even a leftist, he was barely educated himself and had the backing of the fucking CIA.
counterpunch.org
Sure thing m8.
I was born in the former eastern block, people generally were anti-russian but still missed soviet union and the stable welfare state the people's democracies provided.
Become fascist/civic nationalist but develop a hardon for Jacobinism. Understand that they didn't go far enough and were subverted by reactionaries.
I realised the ussr had been a target of a successful campaign to tarnish it and communism by association. Also realised that the bourgeois nations have tried to destroy socialism wherever it emerged. Started reading Bolshevik literature and Marx leading to becoming class conscious and finally seeing history through the lens of class struggle.
Initially an increasingly fervent ML and defender of the USSR but eventually read more anarchist literature and also get into western philosophy in general. End up as a trot.
Hitler was planning to invade and colonize the Soviet Union from the very beginning, what nonsense you spew. Hitler also abandoned his socialist ideals to pursue greedy businesses, that profited handsomely off their relationship with Hitler. See this piece on Nazi political economy: pseudoerasmus.com
The fact that you want to absolve Hitler of his crimes, while denying the role of nationalism in world war 1 as well as two, and taking anti-communist propaganda at face value baffles me. Anti-communist historians use popuation deficits to calculate death tolls, i.e. they count people who should've been born but weren't as dead people in the street. This is why death tolls for "communist famines" get so high, like 40 million people. 18 million died during Mao's Great Leap forward, to put this in perspective there was a famine that killed 27 million in China prior to Communist taking power in 1927.
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I'll make mine simple:
How do you propose to get rid of the capitalists?
You see if they work for the same cause as the common man then there is no problem
:^)
I got a job
They have never done this ever in history
Although this is bait I think.
Yeah, fuck you too, buddy.
When I was a kid I always hated school and was major involved in the youth rights movement (back when I believed in rights), I campaigned for lower voting age and non-compulsory schooling and runaway rights, etc. my dad abused me pretty hard, schoolteachers were all evil bastards, and cops were assholes. I realized from a young age that authority was based upon ideals that didn't have a foundation (were spooks) I also hated going to church, it made me feel depressed. I started getting very interested in rebels, and criminology, explosives, etc. Then I found a copy online of The Anarchist's Cookbook, which is when I first saw the word Anarchist, I did some research online and realized these views were aligned with my own. Sometime later I got caught up with GamerGate and that's how I found Holla Forums. I fell out with GG after they all acted like PR faggots; and I accidentally clicked on Holla Forums one day when going to another board but decided to stick around for a bit. Then I found /anarcho/. I finally gave into the memes and read Stirner, and I realized everything he said was right. Now I'm an egoist anarchist.
I've always been what I guess could be described as progressive - as a kid I never understood bigotry although I didn't have well developed ideas about it.
In university I became a full on liberal. Sometimes the anti-idpol here goes too far and seems like an excuse to call yourself left wing while still being a bigot.
I was a liberal because I can appreciate systems of power and oppression and how they work. The thing is, sometimes people threw theory put the window in favour of who-can-out-liberal-who
Best example is feminism. Yeah, there are societal disadvantages for women, of course - but the way feminists around me acted as though they were experiencing oppression akin to that of blacks in 1950s America was fucking surreal.
The thing is, as someone from a working class background, these idpol concepts didn't make sense to me. My mother has been a worker her whole life and she has very few stories of gender being a barrier - it was always systematic in regards to her being working class.
Additionally, I used to be a big government liberal (I'm not American by the way) and always thought progressive parties could make positive change. Sometimes they make little things better - but they never went all the way. Sometimes thet faced extreme backlash from big corporations (you have to be pragmatic! This is a democracy) or they would outright makes things worse (but not as bad as the conservatives!)
The more I came to understand how the system worked the more I understood where the fault lies in regards to oppressive power structures.
Fuck liberals and their divisive bullshit - they have no right to call themselves leftists when they reinforce the power of those in charge.
This has to be bait.
Reading
"What is property' by proudhon for me.
It's not. I'm not edgy like I was in middle school, I actually read books now.
Good choice, consider reading Kropotkin's "The Conquest of Bread" when you're done.
This is why no one likes you Stirner-fags.
I came from a strong union middle class family and my dad always voted Democrat but simultaneously stressed a decent amount of hatred for rich cunts that do nothing to give back to the society that granted them their wealth in the first place.
I think him being a union man honestly makes him more class conscious than, say, the people in white collar jobs or those without unions. There's a certain camaraderie there that doesn't exist in other jobs that I find myself envious of now having started my own career. Growing up, I had friends with republican dads and always felt like they were being raised by retards, since they often sounded like they were defending corporations as opposed to workers when they bitched about immigrants taking their jobs and stuff. I wish unions were more powerful and less bourgeois, but when I was a kid I saw them as pretty based. Not so much anymore after growing up a bit.
Anyway, my dad had a big influence on me, and so did some teachers in high school. One of them knew very good Spanish and frequently spoke out about US militarism/imperialism and would actively debate kids who chose to spout right wing talking points fed to them by their parents. He was very well read and it was again another moment where it had a real effect on me.
In my own life, I've had bosses hit me in the face, I've been paid less than my coworkers with them admitting it to my face. That was in high school. On the other side of it all I managed to come out with an engineering degree from college, work an IT job now in a company that is a hot bed of right wing ideology.
I see myself as a bit of a maverick. My brothers and sisters all voted for Trump but I've never fallen for the "trickle down" argument so that pushed me to do more research. I've always known in the back of my head that our western living standards are predicated on third world exploitation. This for me is the bedrock of it all – there is no god damn way the rich could enjoy such lavish lives without hiring death squads to assassinate labor leaders in these other countries, and overthrow popularly elected leaders.
For a while when I was a teenager, I really bought into the Dems and even was willing to entertain gun control arguments. I was very much a "fuck republicans and the horse they rode in on" type that bought the party line hook and sinker.
When Ron Paul came on the scene (around 18), he opened my eyes to US imperialism and showed me that the government is way out of control in more ways than I could ever imagine. This caused a lot of self reflection on my views toward the Dems. No longer were they a party of peace and love to me, but I saw their ugly face that was pro-war and tacitly pro-imperialism.
After a while, though, I realized libertarians are full of shit and aren't interested in fighting real tyrants either and I was getting played. This brought me to criticize their relentless defenses of private property.
This eventually brought me to sympathize with social democracy, which eventually brought me to being a straight Red after deciding that all these people who talked shit about Marxism really had never read him, or understood the arguments and critiques he put forth. I stopped feeling embarrassed about my socialist sympathies, and instead decided that criticizing capitalists doesn't make me anti-American, it makes me the opposite. It makes me someone who cares about the state of the nation so much that I'd rather not have it gutted out from the inside by rich cocksuckers. It also woke me up and made me immune to the jackasses that spend all day stoking immigrant hatred and endless racial conflict. When I talk to whites, blacks, etc., I try to see them as people with their own pile of shit to deal with, and try my best to let them know I'm not their enemy, we have things in common, and we should have each other's backs.
At this point, I'd probably call myself a standard commie. I don't buy into the idpol bullshit either, I fucking hate it. I came here from Reddit after discovering this place and finally feel "at home," like I'm no longer the odd one out, its these Reddit cunts that try to morph leftism into something it cannot (and frankly, should not) be.
Also just wanna add to this final bit about embracing Marxism and anti-capitalism – it was this that finally made me realize liberal gun control tactics are horse shit and I started to embrace gun rights in full for oppressed people world wide. This was kind of the "final nail in the coffin" per se, on supporting the Dems. They began to become class enemies in my view, and not people who were "allies" in any sense of the word.
Art is beautiful for what it is, not what it represents. Compare a painting of a battle by one of the Dutch masters to Guernica, for instance. They represent the same thing, yet the reactions of the viewer to each are different.
Ultimately those on the radical right and left have a good amount of common goals.
Speed-fast victory comrade Mosley!
Not at all. They agree that the current establishment needs to die, but disagree on virtually every aspect of what society should replace it.
Not even close. NS is just one ridiculous contradiction after another and it's always been that way for me. This is a talking point always brought up by fascists but imho it is totally wrong. They always think *they're* the ones that are "bridging" the "left right divide" and are embracing some kind of turd position that is outside of capitalism and is pro-national unity. However, Nazi Germany, the example always pointed to by fascists is a fine example of a state completely ran with corporate interests placed at the front and center.
It is weird how they always talk about "securing a future for us and our white children" and then go on to basically ignore the fact that white people have been exploiting other white people for ages. The way they look at preserving the current economic system and restructuring it to be "pro white" and more or less continue plodding on as if the environment can handle another industrial revolution is laughable too. All the right wingers in my family still think climate change and pollution aren't serious issues. It's… pathetic, even by conservative standards, since 100 years ago you'd at least hear conservatives saying shit like "we should protect nature" and other shit, but they don't even do that.
I basically started liking socialism the moment I saw the internet being bought up like mad, and the attempts at turning it into a toll booth and a luxury that the average person couldn't afford, as well as that SOPA, and eventually TPP shit. I kept wondering why it keeps happening, and wondered what would lead to a system being so monopolizing. Eventually stumbled onto here and discovered the contradictions of capitalism, and the other definitions of socialism, and eventually realized the system is fucked. I also learned that markets are almost obsolete on the net, as far as distribution and production is concerned, otherwise it's artificially made scarce.
It basically means economic systems aren't tied to our DNA like, say, ants.
When i was 15/16 i was a little fascist faggot, don't actually know why, maybe i just liked the italian fascist's aestethic and i think fascism was somehow revolutionary.
At 17/18 i started reading a lot of literature and philosophy becoming "apolitical".
At 19 i discovered Gramsci and thanks to him I slowly embraced Marxism.
That's it.
Kill yourself faggot
Ibecame a communist when I learned about all the vast unused resources and potential and also because of all the optimistic sci fi I exposed myself to, but now I'm moderated a bit into a demsoc