How did you guys find your way to the left side?

I was a "non-political" neo-liberal (think Blair Nu-Labour). Then I read some mainstream econ books
>When you produce more, your costs per unit go up, because otherwise that would lead to monopolies and we don't want that to happen so it doesn't happen :^)
and I was like THIS IF FUCKING RETARDED.

Adolf Hitler

Hmm….

started out as a socdem, then anarchist. then i started to shitpost as a tankie online and sort of got more authoritarian

I was a poorfag all my life and after finally getting my shit together and getting a job with career prospects 2008 just cucks my shit up, then I slowly leftpill my self through wikipedia and youtube over the next 2-3 years.

Did you come from the video we sponsored?

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Start looking up socialist concepts when I was like 15 or so. Existed as an unconscious SocDem for a decade until I for some reason took the plunge and read Leftist theory.

Not really sure why exactly, I think maybe seeing Bernie Sanders get rekt by the establishment made me realize it would be impossible to reform our system through democratic means, utilizing the tools of a government as corrupt as ours. Government exists as a flood-gate against radical change, specifically designed by our Bourgeois "founding fathers" for this very reason. So I looked up revolutionary leftism.

This will sound very reddit but it was logic and reason.

Socialists online convinced me that capitalism is unsustainable due to its instability, need for constant growth, and environmental ramifications. Richard Wolff helped me realize that a decent alternative already exists.

Was on a bougie af track in life, in a major US city working with execs/board members/etc.

Nothing will make you a socialist faster than waking up to realize that 99% of the people you've worked with over the past few years are complete sociopaths and society would legitimately be better with them hanging from a rope

I was a fucking awful Obama lib who realized around 2011 that Democrats can do wrong. When I was 17/18 I took up an interest in the Soviet Union but still fell for the "socialism is always authoritarian misery" meme.

I thought Scandinavian social democracy was the coolest shit ever and hoped the Democratic Party would take us there. Then I spoke to a pair of really sharp kids at my high school from Thailand and Haiti who helped me realize that first world prosperity was basically predicated on third world oppression.

I was into Bernie since 2013-ish and thought his policies were socialism. Then I learned they were not, and took a 3-year journey toward being a committed socialist and vaguely a Marxist.

Right now I'm trying to figure out why the leap from state socialism to anarchic communism is worth it. MLism has never appealed to me due its repressive character and I still hold that the USSR was a generally shitty society that we shouldn't try to emulate.

We live in an infinite universe, constant growth is very sustainable and capitalism is the only thing that will reach for the stars.

Literally nothing you said is true.

A few porkies and their child sex slaves, you mean. You'll be stuck on earth processing asteroid ore in the company town.

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A) The universe isn't infinite
B) Even if it was the distances involved for meaningful space travel are so monumentally huge that it may well be impossible to overcome them
C) The Soviets got to space before the Americans

I wanted to make films when I was in highschool, so I thought running a studio would be the way to do it. Went to uni, saw all business classes taught was how to be a stooge, ended up breaking down because heavy drug use. All my friends abandoned me and in the process of rebuilding my life I read some Marx and suddenly everything made sense. The more I read the more I hated myself for being so stupid and so fooled by liberalism.

Now I don't know what I can do. I suppose I can do a double major in economics and start a media co-op to push out red propoganda, but I'm just trudging along right now.

grew up in the aftermath of 9/11 and the crash of 2007 after the bankers profited from our loss.

I have always been anarchist

Oh and before any porky lovers shit on me: I do in fact have a job now since I do need to eat (and I also actually like engineering), but my views on socialism haven't changed. So fuck the whole "entitled millenials with liberal arts degrees who don't want to work" complaint. It's garbage and lies.

I got to work and the conditions are shit.
I tried to fix them and everyone started to call me a socialist.
So since I am already one, I started to read some literature and realised they have a point.

Kinda funny, because when I was in college, I couldn't give a damn about politics. Sure I participated in some slacktivism, but that was meh. You know not real politics, despite what right-winger claim.

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feels good to be back comrades

there are ancoms on the minecraft forum?

There were at least back in 2010. They were the biggest political affiliation on the forum and even had their own servers. Dunno about now.

I was born an anarchist tbh

what a journey, you don't seem really firm on your education

Last part was now 10 years ago.
Never had any doubts ever since.

Makes sense, since the vanilla game offers no mechanism for private property, money or structured hierarchies (besides admin vs. user).

Yes and no.

I'm so oldfag on 4/pol/, and was visiting 8/pol/ lately.

I saw Holla Forums mentioned in the doxxing days and visited it so fast, and took the impression that maybe it's some liberal lefty board fighting Holla Forums…

When I saw in on Wolfe's video I gave it a second change and was like maybe those guy aren't the liberal left.

I'm a Muslim, partly Jew… so I felt here like I'm in home… in Holla Forumss I was there just triggering them and such…

I'm only somewhat socialist not full socialist , since I don't see a really flawless form of socialism yet…

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Honestly I think I've always been a leftist, I just didn't know it yet. Even in middle school I wanted to argue with adults on why things weren't fair to people who were less fortunate, etc. I would write long winded letters to teachers about how adults were abusing their authority, etc. My mom always told me I should draw political cartoons, but politics didn't interest me until 23 or so.
I didn't really wake up until I read "The Century Trilogy" by Ken Follett, where I saw that everything they taught us about communism in school was an outright lie, thus began a mild obsession with Lenin. Then I read some Marx & Chomsky, and here I am.

Friend, I am a degree'd engineer who now develops software. Let me tell you, you might escape the "entitled millenial" stereotype only to fall into the cross hairs of the "muh muh privilege" crowd immediately after. Prepare to be hated for trying to not make minimum wage for the rest of your life and having (if only temporarily, since engineers aren't immune to layoffs and long term joblessness and the regular boom and bust cycles of capitalism) successfully done so.

I say this as someone who was born lower middle class and spent years trying to graduate college. Many years dealing with depression, anxiety, and working for minimum wage. I was one of those kids told to go to college and get a job, and everything would be A-OK.

Seriously, ever since I graduated and got a decent job I haven't heard the end of how "privileged" I am from my friends, even though we all had the same upbringing.

I think it's fucked up how much people "punch up" in america, but the most they "punch up" is maybe to someone who makes 50-70K and still has to work for all their income. I know being white has its muh privileges, being male does, but damn if these people don't piss me the fuck off. My friends had the same opportunities that I did, so its pretty overwhelming when they talk about being oppressed like they didn't have the same shot at going to college i did. They're just lazy middle class born assholes that refuse good advice when its put in front of their eyes. It's annoying as fuck bc they trivialize actual poverty and oppression.

Just to clarify there's nothing wrong with "punching up" when its actually targeting the ruling class. I am just saying my friends act like I'm 100% bourgeois now even though everything I have to my name is hte result of luck and busting my ass for Porky.

I just hate these people that shit on people for trying to have a decent living standard and act like being a leftist requires you to be an ascetic monk that rejects all worldly desires or some shit.

I got a job as a Call centre worker

Don't do it basil!!! We need you!!!!!!11111One!11

Nobody on /"lefty"pol/ has yet.

In high school I was an SJW who fell from the New Deal Keynesian meme

Then I realized that capitalism itself was excellent and destructive, not just "corporate greed".

Ive always been a lefty.

Anti-semitism which then led me to develop class consciousness. I like jews now though.

Well that's just downright fucking stupid.

Holla Forumsfag turnt lolbert turnt some sort of leftist

Working class Jewish people are our friends
Porkies that happen to be Jewish are not

The leftist thought process has always appealed to me, and my family was always just angry, contradictory right-wing sheep who just believed everything they see on television in my eyes.

I didn't really get into it until the internet wouldn't shut the fuck up about left-right identity politics.

I feel you my man. I've never had such job but I know sometimes you're just there to take the punches for whatever anti-consumer shit the company does. Sometimes people are just rude idiots too.

This is why muh privilege is such a useless concept. You may have higher than average labor power, but you're still a prole like the most of us.

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I was always interested in economics, started with the Austrian School, then Keynesianism thanks to a book by Krugman and then Marx

getting into more detail in 2014 I was a libertarian and got into the whole gamergate thing "thanks" to Holla Forums (Holla Forums culture mostly because I was never a regular there), soon realized how shit it was and became sort of a contrarian defending sjws from a libertarian standpoint, soon I discovered most so called libertarians only were egalitarian theoretically, and that "commies" were right in that a lot of them are covert fascists, this got me into a huge crisis which a tankie friend took advantage of, heended up convincing me that things weren't really that bad in the USSR and finally that book by Krugman convinced me that the free market doesn't work

from that short experience as a libertarian I can tell you most are as completely ignorant about basic Keynesian arguments as I was, the only thing I ever read in those days was libertarian books and articles, it's a movement based on ignorance and circlejerking, that's why most of their arguments are based on anti-intellectualism, the AKSHUALLY meme for example
like for real, I had some libertarian friends that read everything Rothbard, Rand, Mises, Hayek, Sowell, etc. wrote and knew hundreds of comebacks from mises.org but didn't even know what "labour power" is, I'm still in contact with some of them and they seem to be unable to overcome that stage, I feel bad for them

I don't remember exactly when did I become a Marxist honestly but my Keynesian stage didn't last much, in 2015 I was already defending North Korea and in the last year I left that tankie shit and became sort of a leftcom
I actually read Marx very recently, like a month ago tbqh

Feels good, man.

It started slowly, with me getting onto the linux and free software bandwagons. The breaking point was actually Tesla announcing their self-driving cars.

After hearing about how self-driving cars would be here within a decade, I went on a rollercoaster of opinions over the course of like 3 months, between opinions like "whoa sweet" to like "muh privacy" and then "man people are gonna be put out of work".

That last opinion stuck, and I couldn't figure out a decent way to fix the unemployment problem this technology will probably create. I did a lot of thinking, but couldn't come up with a good answer, and my faith in the current system was shaken. I brought it up around friends and family, but all they would ever say was "yeah that sucks" or the obviously bs "don't worry, it'll create more jobs than it eliminates" malarkey.

A few months later, I ended up googling "what is communism" after joking with a friend about how Fox News pundits would call Obama a commie, and somehow stumbled on RDW's Introduction To Marxism lecture on youtube.

It blew my mind. I'm not the smartest guy ever, but for the first time, I could connect why I liked the idea of the self-driving car, but not the consequences, as well as a bunch of other stuff like why I liked the idea of obamacare but hated the implementation, or why I enjoyed the philosophies behind linux in the first place.

hating Jews is like hating ice cream

which is to say I guess it's okay if it's your autistic personal preference

but if you start yelling in public about killing all ice cream and how a secret ice cream cabal is plotting to sabotage the white race, most people will start identifying you as that weird ice cream hating guy, and people who like ice cream are gonna get up in your face

Was a normie tier right-winger until I worked for Walmart as a truck unloader for minimum wage. That shit turned me real fucking quick

This was very vindicating for me to read. Thanks. I know that as you get to doctors and engineers, a lot of them are brainwashed beyond hope, but we're not all dipshits and I think this is the first time someone acknowledged that yes, we're not a bunch of rich cocksuckers with massive political power like so many have been led to believe.

I don't quality as tankie by any stretch of the imagination but I definitely have a certain level of respect for past revolutionaries, even if there was quite a few fuck ups along the way. I do this only to ward off asshole anti-communists and more so, to serve as a litmus test against those who claim to be leftist. A lot of the time it's a great way to determine whether or not someone is just full of shit when they say they're a socialist or not, and its a great way to gauge their knowledge.

Anarchists (IME) often shit on people like Lenin and Che and I simply don't agree with their dogmatic approval of bourgeois history.

With that said, I think its interesting how many people have come to communism or general anti-capitalism after hitting a strong libertarian phase. I was the same way for so long – I was deep into Ron Paul and read everything about the guy, so much that it caused me to see faults in things like private property and the "NAP." This put me through a long phase of being a "Big Government" liberal, but at the same time realizing how fucked they were on war/foreign policy from the libertarian streak. This pushed me to the Greens and eventually into an anarchist phase where I shat on anything pro-state, but finally, I'm at a point where I would say I have libertarian leanings but for the most part am okay with a state so long as its accountable to the people. The whole "authoritarianism" thing bent me out of shape for quite a while but now I just look at how fucked society is and have realized you need some hierarchy and bosses to have a functioning workers state that can feed, clothe, care, and generally meet the needs of billions of people.

Basically I started as a typical liberal. I was raised by two moms, so I supported whoever would allow my moms equal treatment. That meant I was a democrat. I spent my teenage years under Obama and for the most part supported him. I considered myself to be more politically aware than my peers(although in reality all I did was watch the Daily Show and Colbert). Then 2016 happened, I did some research and it turns out Hilary Clinton wasn't all that great of a person. Then I found out about this guy named Bernie Sanders and turns out I agreed with a lot of what he said. Throughout the democratic primary I became more politically involved, and consequently saw the inherent corruption of the the democratic elite. During this time I heard Bernie describe himself as a socialist. I went to school in America so I knew socialism was bad, but Bernie was a democratic socialist so it was fine. I became sick of the Trump posting on Holla Forums and looked for an alternative, which lead me to Holla Forums. At first I was turned off by the Stalin apologists, but as I started reading more about socialism and Marx from unbiased sources, I found myself growing further and further left. I eventually couldn't bring myself to vote for Clinton, so I voted Stein instead(I know she has her flaws, but the Green party is the closest thing to a left wing party we have in America). So here I am, drunk at 1 am posting on Holla Forums, hoping the Trump presidency leads to some sort of worker's revolution.
Thanks Holla Forums, it's been a hell of a ride.

How would you feel about something like Yugoslavia(slightly less authoritarian while also market socialist) or the theories of Rosa Luxemburg(Closer to orthodox Marxism with a focus on democracy and grassroots activism)?

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You read the Manifesto at 15? Jesus Christ I didn't even hear the word communism in school until I was a senior and that was just talking about how terrible Mao was

Salam Alaykum comrade

it kind of disgusts me how many polfags post these fucking threads about how le lefty meme magic made them like communism but yet they give no indication of abandoning muh jews muh white women muh nationalism.

Years ago I was a kid angry about society. Originally I was attracted to fascism but since my family are african immigrants I didn't get very far.

Once I happened to have a conversation with this lady at this charity event sponsored by our mosque and she told me about leftism and gave me some easy readings, and I was sold.

Used to be part of a trot org but I quit. Now i'm part of [email protected]/* */ and I found this group through the monthly economic update. Seems a bit crass you all but I can dig it

I hear ya, man. But in a way I am still priveleged and recognize that (not saying that about you, only me). That's why I support socialism. I know where I come from and I know what it's like to be in a really shitty place economically.

No one should go through what I had to.

Correction: I have to recognize that and I'm not saying you are priveleged or it has to matter where you came from. That's what I mean.

My judgment on that is solely for myself.

Canadafag here. A couple years ago I read Pierre Berton's book about the great depression in Canada. It blew my mind how fucked things were and how both the liberal and conservative governments refused to help the common person. The only people were making sense were the communists and democratic socialists in the CCF.

I decided to read the CCF's founding document, The Regina Manifesto and everything clicked. After that its been down the rabbit hole of marx.

I feel your pain, that is possibly the worst job in the world.

growing up in utopia known as Yugoslavia and then forced to flee to corporatist fascist globalized shithole

Idpol probably made me move further left and left until I just don't give a shit anymore. I was always a labour or just moderate left guy but when people wouldn't shut up about it I did some research and realised how shit it is.

Grew up in a conservative family so I was conservative as my political thoughts developed. Family was post-Cold War military so I grew up with a strong anti-Communist sentiment.

Became a lobert in high school because 'dude weed lmao'. I wanted to rebel against the social structure set forth by my family, but I didn't see many problems with the economic system. Still associated Socialism with the USSR and fuck that.

Later in High School, I became an AnCap because 'dude bitcoin lmao'. I actually read some Chomsky and he helped me see that the State was fucking retarded, but I ignored his economic views because "how can u hav socialism without a state u retard", and I still had dreams of becoming a millionaire and owning a bunch of shit. Around this time I found Holla Forums and started flirting with both the Far Left and Right.

As I graduated, I became one of those AnCaps that conflated the word 'capitalism' with 'markets' but I found c4ss.org and started to think differently. "Maybe under 'real capitalism' we'd have co-ops and shit (pic related). I called myself an Agorist, and didn't mind socialists now, but still used the term capitalism. I looked into other schools of real anarchism, but I never could see through my ideology at the time.

Mid-college, I started to notice the increasing number of fascists in AnCap forums, and decided to distance myself from them. I think around here is where I started becoming an Anti-Fascist, also. Bernie shows up and all my friends start to go fucking nuts for him, never saw the allure of Social Democracy. I ended up taking another long look at other schools of real anarchism, and found Mutualism was more or less advocating for what I wanted as a "dude co-ops lmao" AnCap, and started calling myself that. Really embraced the term Socialist at this point and began to see the real unsustainability of capitalism.

A little bit ago, I discovered Stirner memes, and then Stirner's writings, and realized the NAP and all sorts of 'natural rights' positions were bullshit, and dragging metaphysics into political philosophy just muddies it all up. I still liked the general idea of Mutualism, and thought that's one of many ways unique ones could organize themselves, but also began embracing other models like communism and communalism as possibilities.

Now, I've joined the IWW, actually started going to protests and shit and call myself an Individualist Anarchist (with a preference for Mutualism as an economic system). Thinking about going to Rojava if I don't do anything worthwhile by the time I graduate with a CS degree from college.

Stirner and Zizek memes got me interested in their actual philosophies. When I read The Ego and Its Own it articulated a lot of things I had previously been thinking. I'd call myself an egoist anarchist if aligning oneself to an ideology wasn't a spook

Leftist recipe:

And there you go!

Grew up around people who hated cops. They always got in the way of everything and did no good for any of us. Then I listened to punk rock. Then I read books.

similar to me

I had a Holla Forums phase in 2015, but I've snapped out of it

Right wing recipe
2oz hypocrisy
1oz butthurt
Do not contaminate with theory.

Grew up with my parents telling me how I shouldn't take my material conditions for granted. This made me see how unjust capitalism was, but never bothered to look to communism for a solution because muh gorrillions.
Then memes brought me here

Are you the Marxposter in the /econ general/ thread?

Nope. I was literally a halfchan polfag and didn't browse anything other than r9k and Holla Forums

Dad had anarchist and collectivist tendencies.
Since I didn't want to do a revolution in the first place, I was a hard socdem for a time. You could even say I was market socialist.

But my ideals are close to green anarchism and ancom.

At the end of 2016 I wanted to find a platform where I could communicate with fellow lefties, and I had known about leftypol since 2015. Then I started lurking and attuning to the atmosphere.

I downloaded some ebooks and I'm currently reading them. (Marx, Bookchin, Wolff, Varoufakis, Bakunin, etc.)