Curious about the class backgrounds of individual Holla Forums posters. This is meant to be a fairly lighthearted post...

Grew up poor working class, parents were semi skilled workers, in a 90% working class town. One half of the town is a shithole the other half is decent, I grew up in the decent bit. Currently still living at home but spent time living in a shitty part student/part lumpen prole area of a big city. Being poor as a kid definitely impacted my growth into a Marxist, there was definitely a "oh so that's what the whole being poor thing was about" feeling when I started to read into left wing politics.

lmao this so much. was hard for me to realize that my aryan brethern would happily abandon me to starvation to save tax dollars

every leftist should lift and banish porky's marketing shenanigans from their diet

pretty good, I'm three steps away from triangulating which one of you is Nick Mullen

shut upcucks

Hey, it's OP. The useless major I mentioned in my post is film, which I'm trying to work in. Coincidentally I'm considering moving to Austin because it's supposedly a good for filmmakers. Just saying hello.

Hello to fellow midwesterner. I'm always surprised by how many people on here used to be Holla Forumslyps

I grew up in a basement in the suburbs we had to rent. These aren't american suburbs.
Both sides of the family have had extremely skilled workers, pilots and airplane mechs on one side and military on the other. Mother couldn't do anything with her diploma after the collapse of socialism and father was a stoner. I grew up poor and have started working at the age of 15 as a baker, and am currently one.

Working from an early age, and being so poor that for 1-2 years all I ate was only bread and potatoes.

Cockshott has the right idea. I studied Marx, Engels Lenin and Stalin, and have read Tito to better critic him, but I think that in the conditions where bourgeois parliamentarism is established people will vote their anxieties and anger away. The parliamentary system is extremely limited and slanted towards the bourgeois, but it is still an organ of political expression and the only one the proletarian have, so they use it as they would historically any other organ. This is why there are no revolutionary movements in such countries, I think that a socialist movement needs to fight on all fronts, and both act in parliament and be ready to organize the larger masses in a crisis situation. Trough parliamentary politics a system could be implemented without eliminating the parliamentary system, but it would effectively make that system obsolete and give more direct democratic administration to the workers, which would make it difficult for the bourgeois to adapt, and they couldn't attack it without attacking liberty and democracy, something you can count on the majority of people who have grown up with liberal values to defend.

What region if you don't mind me asking

Grew up in the South with a family with an incredibly unstable financial situation, most of the time we lived pretty poorly, more often than not eating dinners of beans or lentils. Not having enough money was a pretty consistent fear. Ironically I don't think that's what caused me to become a Leftist. I became an ancap as a teenager and genuinely thought it was the freest system and the free market would fix everything. Then I started coming onto Holla Forums and hearing Leftist viewpoints and arguments and made some threads arguing about it. Eventually I realized it doesn't matter if it's a boss or a politician telling you what to do, and that true freedom cannot exist under Capitalism.

My past as an ancap has given me a pretty decent knowledge of the psychology of them imo. You have the ones like me who were just ignorant and think it truly would be the optimal system for everyone, and then you have people with psychopathic tendencies who just want to be able to have supreme control and freedom to profit as much as possible.

...

I grew up in New York City, but am currently off at a state college. Both of my parents are lawyers, working in the public sector, and we had a pretty decent income but little accumulated wealth. While neither of them is a partner at a firm, and any income they receive besides their salaries is extremely negligible, my mother has started paying a woman to come and clean twice a week, so I guess petty bourgeois is the most accurate classification. The homelessness in the city has been getting steadily worse for years, to the point where I would try to split my money up into as many small denomination bills as possible, on account of all the beggars I would pass on the subway to school. Since the end of the summer, things seem to have gotten even worse. I went back home a few weeks ago, went to a museum, and walked around the upper east side with a friend for a few hours, just catching up on each others lives. In one of the wealthiest neighborhoods, there were at least a dozen homeless people. If things have gotten to the point where doormen and police officers are no longer up to the task of hiding the problem to make the lives of the rich slightly more pleasant, then it must be truly awful. I think that the annual counts of the homeless, as astounding as the figures are now, are still gross underestimates. Sending people around one night a year to count those sleeping in the rough, and adding that number to check ins at shelters completely ignores all of the homeless who might be a little wary of city employees (probably quite a few, considering harassment by the police) and make themselves hard to find. Milquetoast liberalism is a difficult position to maintain under those circumstances, and the problem of the homeless gradually pushes people to the left or the right.

Always makes me sad reading that because I've heard the same words from so very many people and I'm the same way…

Rural ass south Georgia with a town of less than 15k
We were semi-well off until my dad got laid off freshman year of highschool, he was 2 days from his 50 birthday/25 years at the job. Definitely prole
Dad always said growin up that socialism/communism wasnt as bad as everyone said, even though he wasnt one. Working at walmart for my first job caused me to take a hard fucking turn from bog standard repub to die in wool commie.

Merseyside, UK

I find a lot of us former converts bought in to reactionary politics because the puritan/idpol witch hunts were repulsive and reactionaries were present to scoop us up with a simple, cathartic narrative

At this point I'm looking for any movement that I think has a good chance at getting under porky's skin and delivering semi-regular victories

I was never a reactionary even when I was an ancap. I thought people should be able to do whatever they like as long as they're not harming anyone else. I didn't realize much later that that idea can't exist under a absolutist proprietary system.

Southern California about an hour out of LA
"Middle class" and by that we're a working class family that lives in a house
My family is all prole on my mom's side
Dad's side has porkies and proles
I grew up as a lib turned a conspiracy lolbert then a leftist I'd say just living mostly with other lower income families made me skeptical of capitalists and the rich in general although I didn't realize capitalism was the problem till I read some Lenin and che

have you seen a glimpse of any?

...

What was it like leaving home?

The active groups here in Canada are all insurrectionary anarchists/maoists that only speak french. Otherwise not really. The NDP refuses to entertain the notion of making solidly left platforms or fighting dirty. We don't really have any active extra-parliamentary groups like the D S A here. The closest thing is Socialist Action which is mostly pre-occupied with selling newspapers. All other groups are paralyzed by call-out culture infighting or bogged down in the worst kind of identity politics

A lot of libertarianism is just using contract and property law to justify despotic, authoritarian behaviour by property owners anyway

I just hadn't realized how shitty and inconvenient life is for most people. When I was super young, I literally had no idea. I remember as a child thinking that grocery store workers were either college kids or old people who wanted something to do.

When I was older I theoretically understood all that, but hadn't met or worked with people who were solidly working class. My parents are new-money, so I wasn't accustomed to too much extravagance, but I certainly had never experienced or personally witnessed economic insecurity.

Used to live in an expensive suburb. Now I live in a decaying suburb
"le middle class meme" who lost all their money in the crash, divorced, and now my mom's a factory worker while my dad's making a killing in the US running a ghost-writing business for "50 shades"-knockoffs.
I guess it had an impact, though I wasn't that politically conscious until recently. Fell down the rabbit hole when I witnessed our public school system get royally arse-fucked by our socdem government, became an anarkiddie, discovered leftypaul, read Marx, and am now a Marxist with anarcho-characteristics.
I think we should do anything that works. There's some potential in using the electoral system as a platform for basically spreading propaganda while opposing anti-worker laws and the broader political system (could have sworn there was a term for something like this but I can't remember). I think the whole Corbyn campaign especially really shows that there are a lot of people out there just waiting for someone to present an alternative.

Also, to answer the question in your OP, I don't think my upbringing and views on class struggle are incompatible. It makes sense that people with more education and free-time would be among the first layer of people to draw revolutionary conclusions and devote time to organization. Such was the case in Russia, such is the case now.

Oh, I didn't mean to imply that being educated or well-off is incompatible with being Marxist.

I just tend to dwell on the fact that so many Marxists (myself included) would definitely be considered proletariat. I think the main reason I get on that in the first place is because of a spooky right-wing tendency to point out Marxists' comfortable background and act as if it makes them a hypocrite.

I also have a funny image in my head of a worker's revolution finally coming without me having really worked a demanding job.

But yeah, hearing people talk about Corbyn cheers me up a bit. Voted for Sanders in my state's primary and was never really a fan but it's a little remarkable how fast bitter Sanders supporters shifted farther left, you know there's definitely seeds to be sown

Austin is signifigantly better than Houston, but judging by your flag I doubt we would get along.

The right does is because muh coffe shop revolutionary but it is a valid concern. I've noticed that well off socialists tend to gravitate towards ML or Trot and I think they see themselves as above the proletariat. Could be my personal bias, but a DotP run by (petit)bourgoise ironyfags and twitter tankies sounds like shit.
Well the good news is revolution doesn't hinge on any one person working a demanding job.

Houston, moving around to different ghetto apartments/roomates/living on relatives couches once a year or so.

Grew up with a single dad working various precarious minimum wage jobs while on food stamps. Lower middle class as a teen onward. Myself I've been lumpen most of my life although I plan on starting a warehouse job next year,

I was homeschooled where I was just left home alone all day, every day not allowed out. This led to me spending years reading forums all day. One of the forums I read overtime became a hotbed of Marxism.

I want to form some kind of real life theory reading group and upload the readings to YouTube. I'm worried it would just be a bunch of idpol liberals showing up though.

Grew up in a small city in Massachusetts, dirt poor, eventually moved out to the burbs but not exactly rich burbs
Currently live in upstate NY
Working class through and through. Parents are proles, most "bourgie" family member was my grandfather but he was largely a self-employeed welder I did side work for during grad school

Really hard to say, I've always had leftist tendencies in my life, the belief in community over the individual, as an example. Started researching more leftist shit because of a friend who was a gross conservative (reactionary as shit). I just like rustling his jimmies so I looked left for arguments and it resonated. Remained something of a half-shaped soc dem til the boynie sanduhs election, during/after which I started reading actual leftist theory over the disappointment I felt. Since I grew up poor I've always been rather anti-consumerist, anti-corporation, and believed wealth inequality led to a sham government.

I working on trying to join a local org of some sort

Why's that, are you not a fan of religion?

What do you see the more prole ones gravitate to?

I drink a lot, watch films with disturbing content, and am a vicious Dom.

It's more spread out to the point there's no dominant ideology. I'm not saying MLs or Trots are all porky kids, but if they grew up well off and call themselves socialist/communist they are most likely to be ML or Trot.

Lol being a Christian doesn't put me in a position to judge anybody. I live a… questionable lifestyle and watch disturbing films compulsively, my gf's pretty much a pagan

Didn't meant to come off as a moralizer, probably a poor choice of flag tbh

Northeast Pennsylvania, still live there. I feel trapped here.

Grew up middle class in the 90s, Dad always had good work in his trade and mom only had to work part-time. Now we're poor, parents are both near retirement age and will probably never retire unless forced to. We are always going to be proles.

Working since I was in high school and always being middle class. Probably the internet and going through my own Holla Forums phase and seeing the insanity of idpol, Alex Jones tier conspiracy theories.

Don't know. I'd love to go full neet and drain the state on welfare but that's probably never going to happen.

I'm gonna keep it short but basically I lived in a modest area then the 2008 market fucked us specaculary and now I'm lower middle class

Prekariat construction worker studying economics.

what happened pal

never give up, if you get rich enough you'll get all the welfare you could ever dream of

neets don't get welfare. Not in America anyway.

...

Many places. I have lived in more than 20 different houses in my childhood.
Porkies that lost their fortune so i lived in poverty all my life.
Short term contract construction worker. My profession is plumber.
From living in a rich porky family with a house with a swimming pool to total poverty in my childhood
My favorite rapper was a woke communist and i ended up in the company of hard core marxist leninist.
Do what you can. A movement is about millions of people interacting.

what's it like being black in london?

I was arguable upper middle class, or upper central middle class. I was slighter better than middle class but people in the middle class were Better than me (okay I'll stop talking about middle class).
Basically I was gonna enter High School and we had enough money to move. We moved right before the crash. So of course we bought the house for more than it was worth like retards because hey "it's a good school". Mother got fired from her job as a teacher because the school district got a sharp decline in budget and because my parents never married, my mother had to move back in with her parents. I now live alone in a shitty apartment and I got fired like a year or two ago after the company I worked for got bought out. I've been on minimum wage since while only my mother has seemed to recover in her middle class position

Sorry if this seems odd. Walking home right now so I have to look up every 3 seconds so I'm not mugged

Also alone as in not living with a boyfriend/girlfriend. I have a roommate who I barely see who is the biggest Blocky in existence

I grew up in the United States, and am going to school in a different, nearby state.

My family is technically below the poverty line, but we aren't idiots with money, and live petite bourgeois lifestyles. I could afford to spend my last summer before I started college in Europe, I grew up in a house, went to private schools, regularly went to the theatre as a kid, etc.

My parents are communists, so I've been involved in the movement for my whole life. They also encouraged me to read, think critically, and seek out new information at all times, and I have not yet came across a good enough argument to not be a communist. I'm going to read the Gulag Archipelago next time I have a break from school, as I've heard that is the best argument against communism out there.

I have connections to a lot of different groups back in my home town, but the town where I'm going to school is very apolitical. There aren't any student activism groups beyond one libertarian group which just got defunded, and the Black/Gay/etc. student unions. I might try to pull together a red guard at my school if I can find enough students who are interested.

It's alright I guess, but you'd have to ask the other 1,088,640 black Londoners how they feel bout that too.

Suburban MD, I'm in Michigan for a few years
My parents were professionals, but didn't have much spending money to live a "professional" lifestyle. Petty bourgeois.
Leftist politics really always appealed to me, but I avoided them because I fell for the depressive realism meme. I was honestly radicalized by a pop-anthropology book.
My dad gave me a copy of The Communist Manifesto when I was 13 despite his having worked as an attorney for the government for decades.There's also definitely a self-interested aspect to my politics. They let me pretend I'm not like my shithead sister who acts as though she's forgotten most of her relatives who lived or died in America where either working class or slaves
I'm following in my dad's professional footprints (a mistake), so I can't be known as a leftist. I do engage in some """""""""non-partisan""""""""" volunteering occasionally

In a poor suburb, not EXTREMELY poor, but still poor

We are poor, were always modest proles

First-hand knowledge of how barbaric capitalism can be

I dont think that many leftist really reach out to the important people, the common folk, that needs to change, nothing wrong with political and economical theory, but gaining the support of the people is essential, how that can be done depends on a variety of factors, though

Grew up in the countryside and at about the age of 5 I moved as my parents divorced. I then stayed with my mum in the countryside every week and with my dad in a council scheme area on the weekend.
Mum spent her life being a 50/50 wageslave and petis bourgiosie, spent most of her time being a NEET tho so I guess she's petit bourgiosie. Her mum was the daughter of a fairly wealthy orangeman, however he helped his village out by poaching for them during the economic depression. Her dad was a soldier from Poland who became a wealthy petit-bourgisie and was born to Polish nobility who had a lot of their land taken away by the USSR. Dad is a music teacher and came from an Engineering family, his dad having gone to Iran/Iraq to work in oil engineering.
My parents were actually quite a big influence, my mum is very green and socialist and also wants to abolish the value form and taught me a fair amount about it. The time I lived with her, she was doing pretty badly as in only having enough money for buying the cheapest food and a lot of the time not being able to use the shower (Nothing major though). She was the roots, I ended up educating myself further through literature.
Studying Philosophy, Politics and Economics at University. I hope to maybe join some class conscious peeps, perhaps a trade union and work from there.

West coast Canada, in a suburb of Vancouver. Then moved away along with my family for 7 years to Alberta, then back to a different suburb, then back to Alberta with a friend to pursue a personal goal… and then back to Vancouver again to live with my parents because of existential/emotional/financial breakdown (I'm fine now).

Proles, Dad works, mum stays home gets deals. Pretty typical I suppose. Certainly middle class, pa is a branch manager and about to retire in a few years, a good few years later than the previously established retirement age of 65.

Being typical middle class, for a time "upper" middle, I guess it's kinda the perfect economic blind spot. My outlook prior to 2008 was that life seemed basically fair, and inequalities and injustices could be ironed out with just enough social pressure.

Shitposting is the most vital revolutionary act of our time. I kid. But seriously, I think pro revolution leftists in general, regardless of particular sect or ideology, need to form a few intersect organizations that materially help working class folks and educate on leftist thought. Right now, imo, we just need more people who are dead set against capitalism, let them choose their specific tendency after they understand them. We also need a better online communication and discussion tool than either Holla Forums or reddit, bleh can provide.

I'm not from a bourg family, but I figure you can't choose your upbringing. But if your class conscious and do have bourg background, just choose not be be a bourg later in life, use your resources to further communism.

Oh yeah, and for my extended family, one side is white southafrican. But the other side, with Mennonite background, whenever I visit them even though I'm just as white as them, they seem so god damned whitebread I feel black in comparison. It's kinda funny to be honest, I only feel comfortable when I chat with one of my autistic cousins because he's by nature pretty unspooked.

Rich guy here that started working minwage and realized the hardship of poor people.

Now I'm working towards my autonomy then I'm going to pull some friends with me to that autonomy. I must become stronger, everyone should for our own sakes.

grew up in not-quite-rural Australia. what we usually call "the regions" or "regional areas". currently living in an old working class (read: poor) suburb in a major city, but in one of the slowly gentrifying patches (mcmansions springing up along my street for the past few years, replacing increasingly scarce public housing) .

pretty standard working class family in the colloquial and marxist senses, (previously from a line of peasants before/immediately after coming here from 🍀🍀🍀the isle🍀🍀🍀). was "cant even afford school uniform" poor for most of my childhood

not exactly a "red diaper baby" but pretty close. only my dad was around to raise me and he was a labourer and radical union man. big lenin fan, loads of lenin and marx on the shelves in my childhood homes. my dad no joke used to tell me stories about the bolsheviks as bed time stories. came into my teens with a pretty entrenched distaste for unearned and unquestioned authority (ended up with a reputation for, sure enough, being "a bit bolshy" with my high school teachers) and hatred for the "born to rule set" as my old man called them. had an edgy randroid/new atheist phase later on for about 6 months though. beyond that I've pretty much been vaguely "left" for as long as I can remember - but really started to feel it and understand when I got my first job and started to live the prole life, which is when I dived into the literature for myself. given my background and life i don't really see how i'd end up anything but a communist tbh, even if I have all sorts of problems with the state of the left and the organisations that make it up atm.

I agitate at my job with some success (with the help of a PRC expat who I sometimes argue with over China). But I'm not enamoured with any of the local orgs or parties - too much LARP, too much trying to attach themselves to identity-based social movements - which would be fine if it meant they could nudge those movements into a socialist direction or at least promote solidarity, but what it has done in reality is nudged those orgs away from socialist discourse into loose conglomerates of discrete identity groups that have little to do with each other and achieve nothing. I don't really feel that anything beyond clawing back some of the welfare state or public assets that we've lost can or will happen in this country unless it happens in larger, more important countries first. So I do what I can to agitate and educate among my friends and coworkers. Climate change has been a really good attack angle for me, especially recently. Since the current federal government (typical social conservative neolibs) got into power, I've found middle class greenies who previously were into "market mechanisms" and shit are now really open to the idea that climate change simply cannot be fought meaningfully under capitalism.

A middle class family in the third world. I don't think the social ascension scale works the exact same in every country. Like, I think I lived in more material comfort than most Burgers, thanks to parents that had decent but non-managerial white-collar jobs. Yet I don't think we could have owned any more private property than our home and a shop, because the credit needed to actually buy a factory or some other mean of production is much harder to get here than it is for the Burgers who lived worse off than me. In other words, as a product here has more value added, its price rises exponentially in relation to that value, whereas in more developed countries the scale seems to be more linear.

Beyond good education (which my parents paid handsomely for, since public education before college is awful), I don't think my material situation affected my opinions much. It was mostly reading a lot, straying away from mainstream culture and, to be honest, having fairly high autism level (not that it has ever done me any good). I was far from living in the luxury I saw on TV, but was even farther away from the absurd depths of misery that the third world can offer. I've felt like an outside observer inside my own society, further increasing my sense of alienation. Every day the media would """inform""" me of what happened is this country and world which, I was told but never confirmed, I'm part of.

Thoughts I might have on the subject? Sure, plenty. But everyone here has their own big plan as to how to ressurect socialism's corpse, don't we? For whatever it's worth, I think socialism should move away from a partisan nature and instead adopt a more "universalist" approach, including admission of morality as a non-spooky part of human experience and subsequently treating socialism as a moral imperative as opposed to a mere matter of material self-interest. This deliberate amorality never sat well with me, and honestly I think it was a very important factor on why the authoritarian germ, as Victor Serge might put it, triumphed over the libertarian and humanist germs way back at the start of the USSR. Partly, it's because I very much doubt socialism would increase, within my lifetime, my living standards to above the point where they are today. As far as I'm concerned, it already is a matter of improving the living standards of the vast majority of mankind but me. It's a moral duty, yet one I can do jack shit to advance, which is not a small cause of my frustration and depression.

European country (not Germay) but my family is from there

Upper-middle class both my parents are doctors (both work for the public sector though)

Well mostly family influece I could say (my family lived in the DDR my GreatGrandfather was a member of the KPD and got kiled in 1918 , and both my parents are communists they left the country shortly after the "reunification".
So as you can wonder there is a pretty left-wing vibe in my family.

Planning on apllying on a youth communist organization but the thing is here the main communist party is eurocommunist (although their youth define themselves as ML's), and the other pseudo-relevant communist party (more revolutionary) is currently divided in a sort of civil war so for now joining it does not seemk as a great idea.
Other than that studying and going next ear to Cuba ona exchange program (if this counts as doing something)

In a small, but very old medieval town on the countryside at an irelevant small EU country. Crime is non existant, everybody knows each other, there aren't homeless, there aren't any very wealthy people, there's some imigrants from former colonies and former USSR countries but they all live in the same streets and builds as natives, so pretty much is a very homogeneous place.
Middle class
Both my parents are members of the communist party and are heavily involved with campaignings and stuff like that. So yeah, i always gre up with a Lenin portrait on the living room. Besdies life is very cheap in here and my parents never done stupid things with their money like many other families who make similar wages, but decided to buy a 2nd car or go on vacation abroad every year, or go eat at the restaurant very often.
Everything else was normal family life i suppose.
Nope, at the moment there's nothing we can do. People have become very narcisistic and see everybody else as their competition and not as a brother/sister. People just are too much in love with all the bullshit, smartphones, social media, sports, going to the mall etc.
We have to wait for the bubble to burst so that people will snap. Just like on Bastille Day

South america, 3rd world.
Proletariat, family has a leftwing history.
Parents spend nearly all income to be able to pay for school, eventually mother starts teaching so cost goes down 50%, good white people private school (goverment doesnt spend on public education and that which is spent is later on laundered), having poor friends whose parents cant and wont pay for private school and seeing how they all need to quit school and start working at 16.
Hating rich entitled people, seeing how smarter but poorer people dont have any chance of having an enjoyable life.
Viva la revolucion! Also participating in leftist reading groups when I get the chance.