How did you become a communist?

Long story short, I used to be a fascist, got into a debate with I friend. I lost, he gave me a lot of guidance, dispelled a lot of misinformation I've heard about socialism, gave me book recommendations, links to this website. After hearing all the arguments, like surplus value or falling rate of profit, something in my head just struck me. Like all of this made sense, so I switched over and started lurking, reading, and still learning.
Picture somewhat related.

I didn't. I can't in good conscience attribute the tag to myself, given what the ideology came to be and that many of its proponents had no problem with that.

By going to >>>/liberty/

After I migrated from Holla Forums to here. No bulli pls.

what did he mean by this

Are you aware that lenin was pretty conservative right?

Sometimes I feel like lots of Holla Forums is lifestylists. A lot of you seem In it just for the leftist community and the lifestyle.

Natural development from childhood socdemism I guess

Didn't he legalize taking it in the pooper?

Yes, but by conservatism I meant both social conservatism and the economic policies of american conservatives. I'm not interested in another one of your autistic anti-porn rants, sorry.

not by the standards of the time

You know what I mean, user. These words carry an immense memetic payload.

The far left would have an upsurge simply by adopting new terminology, symbols, aesthetics etc. while keeping the ideas intact.

Is that your shitposting flag?
To be serious I was also on >>>Holla Forums too before I came to this place. Got pissed off by Holla Forums raiding the board for the most petty of bullshit. Was a anarcho-mutualist before going ancom for pretty much the same reasons.
Never stop installing gentoo my friend.

I accidentally clicked on Holla Forums while trying to navigate to /furry/. No really, that's it.

Lol I was on /furry/ first too though it wasn't an accident to go to leftypol for me.

*hardened gentoo
Otherwise it's non-free, sorry for the mishap.

Yup. Even back then I thought they said so much outlandish shit but I believed the 'all leftists are just retards who can't into economy' story. Funny since they don't even understand the absolute basics of socialism

This is true… the word 'communism' just evokes scenes of famine, war and tyrrany in people's minds. Not in the least due to red scare propaganda but it scares normies

might have fucked up that idiom lol

I always was a leftist, I've read lenin, stalin and marx before coming here and long time before the chans. I always stayed on /his/ and after the 10000th Holla Forumsyp told me to go to my sjw safe space om Holla Forums I came here. I've never been here before because I always thought this was really a sjw safe space

Most people agree with socialism tbh. They just don't know it because of skewed political definitions like how everyone thinks socialism means free shit, and communism means A LOT of free shit.

I've been a Communist since I was 6. My dad works in the meatworks (he's thinking of quitting next year) and he'd always complain about how hard it was. So the way I saw it, the workers were always being fucked over by their bosses. I was also raised Catholic and always liked the idea that Jesus hated rich people. Mum's got Yugoslavian heritage and would tell me stories about Tito. I also used to play a lot of Red Alert.

I worked for the dems leading up to the failed 2010 midterms in Sacramento. This was all during the Oscar Grant III murder and subsequent sham trial. Realized liberalism was part of the problem (but didn't know of a solution), got insanely angry, took a train ride south, became a smashie. Turned into a commie slowly over the years.

I used to read the a old political debate forum that was mostly filled with liberals and libertarians. After seeing the libertarians get their asses handed to them over and over most of us became socdems. After awhile we were teaching each other Marx. Once Obama came around we had pretty much taken over the forum and got moved into a containment forum that was basically a early version of leftypol.

I realized that the values of liberalism (freedom and equality) that I had been taught since I was a kid could only really be realized by communism and that modern liberal democracy and capitalism is the root of so many if the worlds problems and is inherently unstable and chaotic.
Always gravitated towards the left, but for the longest time I just didn't know a real alternative to liberalism existed.

I think Orwell said something along the lines of people being Socialists without knowing it.

I realized the system doesn't allocate resources properly, and that people get fucked over when they rally against it. I didn't think it was capitalism at first, then I started browsing leftypol, and realized how much shit was fucked. Then I read Marx, and knew there was no going back

I didn't. The ideas behind socialism have always been attractive to me, though the amount of authority exercised has changed with age. It is perfectly possible to have a leader with the moral fortitude to lead a nation out of the wreckage and into the light, the difficulty is that this doesn't away stay in line with economic interests of the powers that be. Hitler was definitely a step in the right direction, but I don't think we can have another leader like him anymore; someone new and charismatic needs to step up to the stage with similar values.

no, not really

and leftypol takes the bait eternally any minute now

I don't even know where to start with you

If you mean that direction is backward, then yes.

I always leaned left and had an affection for leftist figures, but still was all like "well marx made some good points but ultimately he was wrong". Then I actually started reading and thinking about how the world was and realized he was pretty fucking right. Honestly it sucks that the Manifesto is the go to book for schools to use to teach Marxism, as its revolutionary urgency comes off as very impotent and discredits the rest of Marx's arguements, which at their base core are true.

I was an unironic anprim first (though I didn't know the term at the time) and I hated all people and capitalist civilizations, but it had never occurred to me that there were civilizations possible other than capitalist ones and that all the problems with civilization were specific and intrinsic to capitalism until I read Marx. I'm a Leninist now, but a part of me still longs for primitive communism.

I read "the jungle" when I was in high school and the absolutely disgusting abuse of the workers presented in the book sold me on leftist politics immediately

I was raised a communist, but I had little idea of what it meant to be one, and doubted my ideology, until I started watching videos and then, actually reading. Schools do a great job of suggesting the worst introductory text to Marxist thought by talking for ages about the Manicom, but once I read past that I was completely sure of myself.

but the feeling of being awakened to what it is in actuality, and to that you had been lied to all your life and now you see through the lies is too good to pass up. There's a reason they call it class consciousness, it feels like you've woken up. It's a really cool feel and I personally wouldn't want to rob it from normies on the verge of discovering communism just so we can appeal to edgy teens.

thought liberalism was a fucken sham
'there is literally nothing wrong with totalitarianism'
not into racism or magic so nazis were not an option
was edgy atheist kid so materialist analysis of religion appealed to me
became a materialist while learning more about philosophy and there really is only one materialist political ideology
then I thought socialism seems to make too much sense to be so unpopular so there must be some reason why it is rejected out of hand
read marx and bourg econ, learned more about society and history
and out came a commie

ex-poltard

Yeah, Bolsheviks decriminalized it.

I had a boss while landscaping that fucking destroyed the wills of everyone there. Smug petit-bouj arrogance personified, it wouldn't have been so bad if he could actually manage a schedule and understood why labor laws exist. He literally says we should have employer's rights laws so that they're equal with labor rights. It was when he said that I immediately became a communist, the economy cannot be allowed to people who feel entitled to extracting value from people they hate anyway.

From then on I was anti-capitalist… but I still thought anarchism was just people running around killing each other and that communism would magically starve everyone. Eventually I got smarter.

I'm not a communist.
It varies depending on the people I'm surrounded with.
I'm a communist with friends, with people I trust & vice versa. For everything else I'm a mutualist.
I'm an individualist when I'm alone. etc.

What I never am is a Capitalist or any kind of heriarchist. I'm Anarch not Monarch.

kill him

He was arrogant and bad enough at running schedules his business is probably gone by now, there'd be no more a poetic justice than a free market fucker being selected against by the system he loves

but the dumbass probably didn't got the memo, didn't learned the lesson. I'm sure.
would love to beat him the fuck out senseless. Personally.

I'm the poster you're quoting, and I was one of the most dedicated fascist ideologue out there; rabid anti-semitism and ultranationalism. However, as time went on I began to see cracks in my ideology that were the result of it not holding up in reality, which caused me to reevaluate my beliefs with great frustration, and after a period of searching, I finally gave in and brushed up on communism only for it click together for me, and thus a part of my soul was restored.

Also, Wittgenstein bullying Hitler is fucking hilarious.

Knowing his arrogance, the misery of actually selling his labor instead in contrast to being his own boss would be much worse than any death

I just really really want free stuff

I didn't I'm an anarchist.

This is a safe and wholesome space for converts.

For some reasons my autism made me class-conscious as fuck when I was young and I started being interested in materialist analysis very soon.

when i hit my head in the wall so hard i lost half my Autism Level

my sides

Working construction in a right to work state started my movement away from being a teenage libertarian. I've been moving left since

sup breh

I was a lolbert at first, and I met a friend in highschool who was a market socialist. He told me some things and I realized I wasn't as right wing as I thought I was. I then gradually shifted left in my views, now I'm a libsoc, but associate the most with libertarian marxism/classical marxism like Rosa Luxemburg.

I disagree. Reclaiming what used to be dirty words in the west is important or else someone will just accuse us of being communists as if that's an insult and our house of cards falls in on itself when we can't deny it. Granted, I would still rather call myself a Marxist because of the reasons you laid out so I guess I'm a hypocrite.

I post under the GOP flag because I really like the idea of "republic" or "commonwealth", which IMO requires communism, and I don't exactly know enough about all the branches of communism to know what exactly my idea of "republican communism" falls closest to.

Until Stalin had to go and fuck everything up yet again by recriminalizing it.

Incidentally, I recall an old internet essay talking about how the Bolsheviks did have sexually liberated elements earlier on, and it mentioned how someone, the city secretary of health of Moscow of somesuch, flat-out saying that whatever happens in the vedroom is of no concern to the State. Does this ring a bell?

I see your point. When one reads up on Marx for the first time he's asaulted by so many insights and genius observations it's hard not to feel somewhat "awakened" by knowledge. The problem is that due both to porky lies and some sad truths, leftist theory in general and Marxist especially has this aura of "evil knowledge" that corrupts people.

What I said about ditching the old symbolism, terminology etc. is part of what Zizek said about abandoning ideology: to consciously study it, learn everything you can from the Marxes and Lenins and even the Gorbachevs of the world, and use it all to do something different, something new, instead of repeating the same mistakes, even if you might repeat a success sometimes. You no doubt have noticed how people in any ideology seem to fit at least one stereotype; in the case of the left, we have black-clad smashies, leather-elbowed intellectuals, and lately the dreaded SJW implying they're left at all, among others. Abandoning ideology involves becoming aware of these ecological niches we come to fill without even noticing them, of realizing that we have unconsciously been infected by a memetic possession, a parapersonality, that get us to try to carry pre-determined actions which, in our case, haven't quite worked out as intended and demand a lot of review. In other words, this is about stopping mistaking the model for the system, e.g. the map for the terrain or the menu for the meal. Ditching the old symbolism, aesthetics etc. is a conscious decision (notice here again the notion of an awakening) to leave an old model and craft a (hopefully) better one, which better represents the system (which remains the same but it's what we actually want to change in the end), at least at this point in time. Part of the function of this new socialist model, I admit, would be simply PR; to get rid of the memetic payload I mentioned, and the baggage the terms invoke.

Nicely put.

Surplus value as well as the labor theory of value in general is a joke. You're seriously unintelligent if someone was able to lead you that far wrong.

...

I don't actually care about equality, I care about the common good. That said, any inequality that's solidified through violence into law such as a legal notion of "aristocracy" or "nobility" or the modern notion of "property" is a system that increases violence and moreover ignores actual virtue, and therefore isn't republican.

I'm kind of commie by default because I don't fit into the system I grew up in, and didn't like what I've seen happen to members of my family and myself. Unlike many though I don't believe everything is about the economics or the mode of production, and that once we have socialism everything will be better. I never had any truck with anarchism and think it's infantile. I'll freely admit I'm an opportunist with his own axe to grind, rather than a fervent believer in communism as the greater good (though I believe it will be better than this capitalist horseshit and that Marx was totes right to pursue scientific socialism).

I'm not a commie, I'm a socialist. I've wandered through lots of ideologies tbh (from traditionalism to anarcho-individualism but didn't read any books about them, only some articles and discussions), but I guess I was actually somewhere in between social liberalism and social democracy. Anyway, seeing the state of the world in the last years and the appaling nature of the Right in general moved me further left. Now I'm reading more Marx and other lefties.

youtu.be/zirMIbY_ekA

This may sound ridiculous, but as a kid that really, really loved history, World at War made me hugely interested in the Red Army, as I grew up I learned more about the Soviet Union, and eventually about Marxism-Leninism

Have you read Jünger or are you just trying to be edgy?

This system is unsustainable, and we must push forward for a new one, 🅱️ucko.

Im still sort of phasing from "ironic shitposter who's disillusioned with Holla Forums and its stale memes" to "unironic prolet"

Read a lot of theory, debate it with others to make your theory better.

I grew a brain, a dick, and a heart.

Shared Holla Forumss contrarianism towards the current order, sjws, corps(remember, its not REAL capitalism), etc, but could never buy the dumb nazi shit. Though I was still amused by their embracing of it on grounds of how shocking and inconceivable it seemed to liberals/sjws, who think such things are some ungodly evil sent by the devil from hell to sow darkness on earth, rather than just retarded and incorrect beliefs.
Almost became a sargonite centrist cuck, but while I en joyed him shitting on tumblr, it was starting to get tired by the time the narrative that the problem with sjws is that they're commies reall ystarted getting pushed hard.
Eventually, confused and cornered by all the baggage and retardation associated with many isolated, i ndividual points and sentiments I ultimately agreed with, I decided I would completely ignore and not give a shit about whatever some idea or belief was typically associated with in culture. I would not adopt retarded bullshit because people who hold a belief I also do embrace it, I wont accept association with retards because I'm su pposedly part of one group or another because of a belief I hold, I wont reject a belief out of some idea that a group of retards "owns" it.
Once I cleared my mind like this, I very very quickly went very far to the left, in economics and politics.
I'm progressive-leaning but centre in cultural/social matters. Really, the meaningless, autistic "culture war" crap needs to die.

I've realised that my country was much better during Soviet era despite even 10 trillion of dead kulaks. Now it's just failing almost at anythyng and power is held by a bunch of oligarchs. And there are a lot of fash assholes which I hate too

Which country fam?

Ukraine

sorry about the whole "kulak" thing bro

It was never really decriminalized, which doesn't excuse it. However, it was seen as mostly a psychiatric problem and they generally only prosecuted in cases of pedophilia. So shitty, but better than any other capitalist country at the time. Read more here: stalinsociety.org/2015/04/08/homosexuality-in-the-ussr/

t. 6yr old me

i wandered into leftypol and got brainwashed by marxist propaganda, please kill me to save western civilisation

Listened to a fuck load of Leftover Crack
Saw that clip from Narcos about the coup in Chile against Allende
Then I went on wikipedia and saw how the most fucked up Latin American countries had CIA sponsored coups against lefty governments
Learned that the best nations had strong socialist parties
Watched some Parenti, Hitchens and Zizek on youtube
So here I am, not full blown commie tho

started reading the manifesto ironically, finished reading it unironically

I was a Libertarian.
Fell off a building and fucked my leg up real bad.
Spent 3 months in bed.

Decided to finally get around to reading some of the leftist books so I could at least debate effectively against my perceived enemy.

By the end of it I was an anarchist.

That And I had watched all of that 70s show on netflix twice

Please elaborate

I read Marx

Oh geez. this is one hell of a story.
One of my go to ice breakers when I meet new people..

There was an abandoned super market near where I used to live near. Commercial buildings have flat roofs.

So I got the bright idea to leave some lawn chairs and a couple of milk crates up there.

Used to invite friends up. We'd smoke a bowl. Chill.
This was also back before everyone wised up and secured their wifi so we had that too.

One night I decided to go for it. Kicked in an air conditioner.
Explored the building a bit.

Then I spotted a motion sensor and wasn't sure if I set it off or not. So I got the fuck out of there.

I had a lot of stuff on that roof. I didn't want to lose.
So put the AC back in its place sat down and waited for the cops to arrive.

(1/2)

So I sit there on the roof With a rational plan. I wait for the police to do their drive by. See theres been no break in and assume it was a bird that got inside or some shit.

Then I hear sirens. A block over. Not one or two cop cars. At least 4. And I panic and run for it.

I hop on the fire escape.
1 rung
2 rung

"This is taking too long" - And I let go.

Drop onto the pavement below and now my toes are touching my knee on my right leg.

I shouted out loud "Okay thats definitely broken"
Then I limp about a city block leaning on parked cars.

Some guy walks past and asked me if im okay
"Yeah"
"Do you need an ambulance?"
"…Yeah"

Turns out the police cars weren't for me.
Someone had pulled a gun on their spouse about a block away.

I still go up on that roof once in awhile.
People say "Didn't you learn your lesson?"

Sure did. Don't panic

I read something about UBI as a teen. It resonated with me, but I didn't really get into politics. I was a christian back then and was debating "christianity vs. atheism" with other insufferable dipshits on the internet. This got me interested in theology and philosophy. I became aware of the social justice dimension of Jesus' teachings. Started leaning toward christian anarchism. Meanwhile I finished school and worked for a year. It was boring and monotonous as hell. However I was able to listen to music over headphones. I quickly discovered lectures and audiobooks. My faith mutated into some kind of radical christian atheism. I discovered Zizek. After one year of working I started at university and chose philosophy. This is were I met Marx. I've been in love ever since.

absolutely based