When and why did you become a leftist?

When and why did you become a leftist?

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i used to be a super-liberal sucdem, but i slowly realised that liberalism is not actually doing anything good. i hated fascism (and still do), so i looked to socialism and now i am an anarcho-syndicalist.

father losing job in great recession, joining the military, occupy wall street, reading theory, learning history, shitposting on 4chan

Obama disappointed the hell out of me and this pushed me further left. Then Occupy happened and I got more interested in looking at socialism as something other than big govt.
Also there was this one Ukranian immigrant kid i knew who pissed me the fuck off so I started bullying him by defending the USSR in class.

This is good praxis. Ukies need to be bullied more.
he was probably a kulak anyway

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he once claimed that Stalin came to his grandfathers village and personally ordered the execution of their farm animals.
The crazy thing is I think he believes it.

I'm a depressed NEET alienated by capitalism. I'm not opposed to working it's just I can't function under someones foot. I'm pretty tired of how I can't just move to another country without being pretty well off. I want to own my own soul not be controlled by society driven by profit. I want to be judged by my character not wallet size. I want people to stop having to unnecessarily suffer

If you consider NazBol to be leftist then in 2014ish. I had already been a Holla Forumsyp and around then I realized that fascist ideals are incompatible with capitalism. I figured out that if private interests are allowed to control the economy it is inevitable that the rest of society and government will be basically controlled by them as wealth inevitably concentrates upwards in a market society and in any market economy wealth is power. It was my thinking that things like tradition, racial purity, meritocracy were all obstacles to capital accumulation whereas things like immigration and degenerate art were all immensely profitable. It also made me decide that the greatest enemy to the white race was not Jews or communists but the United States of America, as it seemed to me that cultural degeneration was not a cultural Marxist conspiracy at all but just American culture imperialistically exported abroad and that mass immigration is an attempt to copy America's economic model. I also noticed that Eastern Bloc countries basically already had everything that Holla Forums said they wanted and it was only after 1991 that this started to change and instead of being homogeneous white nations they started to become capitals of drug abuse, pornography and prostitution. It also made me start to like states like Rhodesia and South Africa less and made me appreciate figures like Robert Mugabe and Ho Chi Minh as I felt anti-imperialist socialist uprising was what Europe needed to overthrow American imperialism and capitalism. I also absolutely adored Yugoslavia and Tito during this period because a) market socialism seemed like the optimal economy because I didn't really understand socialism very much, b) it didn't dissolve along with the other Eastern European states, it dissolved when NATO attacked it and c) it was federation of different nationalities and I thought a pan-European NazBol federation is what was necessary to resist the US.

Then in 2015 I started reading actual history an theory and started to drift from NazBol to left-wing nationalism with Holla Forums characteristics because fascism or any connection to fascism just didn't seem necessary. I also became CataloniaPilled when I realized Franco conquered Spain with African Muslims while Catalonia was literally a white workers country.

Then in 2016 I read The Ego and its Own and realized nationalism was kinda silly and just started being a regular communist, I also left high-school and got a full-time job which vindicated all my thoughts on capitalism. I still had (and to an extent still kind of do) have some vestigial Holla Forums ideas.

fuck thats a hilarious mental image

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Always loved myself and never liked the state as laws prevent opportunities. Always thought nationalism was ridiculous. I despised property rights, religion, morals and other spooks. Didn't come across Max Stirner until 2016 though.

This is the most noble reason.

I was born an anarchist. When I first learned about it, it was like meeting a lost twin, I immediately recognized myself in it. Anarchist theory has greatly clarified and amplified my beliefs but I never did this ideology-hopping people tend to do and I doubt I ever will.

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The gentrification here where I live made me reevaluate all I knew about property rights and property relations

I read Emma Goldman as a nerdy high school kid. Then I later got into Marxism.

9/11>Iraq War/Afghanistan (read about Torture, gitmo etc, knew right off the bat there were no nukes that could reach us "in 45 minutes" David Kelly obviously bumped off for revealing the sexed up doisser, this made me a mostly anti imperial liberal, then in school I learned about prisons in philosophy class which solidified the liberalism, got into weed, so, legalize it bro, by this point I'm a "libertarian" do not consider myself at all right wing, think we need "some socialism and some capitlaism but more freedom" 2007 hits, then all the crisis, slowly shift more left economically, still vote for Nick Clegg in 2010 because fuck new labour, he upped tuition fees and got in bed with the Tories, this was probably the death of being a "classical" liberal for me, still couldn't trust labour so got interested and joined in the green party around my last year of uni, around this time also I had got interested in debt through history so had looked up Debt The First 5000 Years by David Graeber not really knowing who he was other than the Occupy guy, around the same time I took a "radical theory" course at university which had a load of feminist and post modern stuff, but among it was Foucault and Debord and I ended up reading some Marx for a Sci Fi course I took. I read society of the spectacle and thought meh, then I did an assignment on it and studied it suddenly all these rockets started going off in my head like woooow I've fucking tapped into the secret, at this point something bad had happened to me so I spent a load of time alone in my room online, spent alot of time on the website imgur making bad image macros about my increasingly radical political views, the level of discussion was shit tier though, at the same time watching documentaries mostly about imperialism, it was here that I discovered the world of the alt right, and started arguing with them everywhere, found out about the existence of 4chan, then Holla Forums, then I happened to see this "leftypol" (with like 300 active ips) and found out there were others on roughly the same wave length as me, hung on as a socdem here for about a month or 2 before I read Proudhon, got interested in mutualism, then saw the Rojava thing and got interested in Communalism, decided i needed to "read up" to bookchin so read Kropotkin, Bakunin and some more Marx, consider myself ancom although since then I've been getting tankier and tankier, although weirdly at the same time as having a love/hate relationship with left wing market anarchism and marksuccs, I'd still say I mostly sympathise with anarchist organisation and tactics but I have come to realise the USSR etc weren't the horrible megaoppressors they are made out to be and it has made me seriously question how I look at the world

oh and also now im part of a bunch of leftist orgs and trying to make new ones

Should have stayed with red Emma

around 15 when I first started working in manual labor, also at about the same time I was seriously considering window shopping with a brick since the government was coming to take away all of our shit since we couldn't pay the bills and feed ourselves on the minimum wage my mother earned. Then we ate potatoes and bread for about two years because we were so fucking poor. It just sort of clicked, and my country used to be in the socialist bloc so I sought out a party on my own initiative and the first time I came to see them they handed me like 5 books and told me only to come to discussions and that I will only get party work once I've read and understood them. I haven't looked back since.

Your mom ever talk about the socialist bloc days?

Shut the fuck up.

a lot, my whole family have a 'tradition' of socialism, all of my ancestors fought in the partisans against the nazis. She wasn't 100% positive speaking about it however, she holds a lot of liberal views and she complains how you were more restricted socially back then, but at the same time she says how now we can't afford the things that were a given, and the things people were ogling from the west we mostly can't afford. There was shit like books costing the equivalent of today's 4 dollars, all social expenses were covered as long as you worked or studied, free and guaranteed vacations, etc. I don't know what 'freedom' I can enjoy in this society, considering that I either do not have the time for it due to my hard job or I can't afford it, and what I do enjoy I could've just as well enjoyed under the 'oppressive' regime.

It's true though.

I always was, despite a brief flirt with RA Wilson-style libertarian wankery during college.

I feel exactly the same way.

Worked at a gas station. Got treated like shit and looked down on. Grew bitter when I realized all that talk about hard work as something to be proud of is just a way of tricking people of low station into keeping quiet.

Family were all party members in the Soviet Union, my branch of the family came before the revolution and became generic American immigrants. Was raised into a liberal household, and found leftist literature on my own. I wasn't partial to any particular point of view, so I just began reading as much as time allowed. Now I shill continental philosophy, Hegel, Lacan, Zizek, and Badiou. Fun life thus far, looking forward to more reading

I always have been, I just didn't realize it until after Trump "won". I was a Berniebro up until a couple months ago when I got fed up with him being too buddy-buddy with the Democrats. I'm fully convinced capitalism must be destroyed.

Gamergate, my fellow vidya enthusiasts took that obviously-retarded "cultural Marxism" shit too far and it made me finally look up what actual Marxism is.

good luck in a decade

why is everyone of these people so cliche

Have always been some form of leftist.
For most of my life I was an official, unwoke socdem. Bernie Sanduhs came along and was preaching to the choir, which was amazing to me for awhile. When I saw him squashed by the very mechanisms he claimed to espouse (representative democracy, liberalism, ect.) I started to question that. Since about April of his campaign I have been reading into leftist theory and only fell deeper into the rabbit hole.
On top of that I found out not that long ago my grandmother's stepmother was a communist in hiding in Nazi Germany. Grandmother was a teen during the Nazi party's rule in Germany, and had cousins in the SS. When I found out she had a communist upbrining things sort of clicked with me.

Converted by this ML redhead i dated when i was 19.

Was already interested in socialism when I was studying World War 2 for the first time back during school, years ago
I will get flak for this, but It melted with my nationalist views, and my hate for the ruling class, and the realization of the sad reality of capitalism for me and my people

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bump

Stirner actually helped me stop caring about a lot of things that worried me in my life. This was at the beginning of this year that I started moving left as I got interested in this board since nothing else seemed to catch my liking anymore on 8ch. I read through some thread, found this guy posted and liked his smug face and decided to look into him.

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I became a communist because I hate women and minorities

Thanks babe

This place is nice tbh

Asked a lot of questions as a kid. When adults couldn't answer why communism was bad I started looking for myself. It all seemed lile the moral thing to do. I was also moulded by my fathers endless pursuit of profit left. He basically abandoned my family to run his buisness and that left a strong impression. I didn't understand why money was so important when we already had everything we needed. The more I have seen the destruction of capitalism, the farther left I have moved. I think it's the natural position of anyone who can avoid the the trap of hypernormlism and see the fucked up ness for what it is.

I misclicked when trying to go to 8/b/.

I used to be an anprim who hated human civilization, although I didn't know what anarcho-criticism was. I hated capitalism, of course, but I bought into the human nature meme and thought that capitalism was an integral part of civilization. Then I read Marx's critiques of Malthus and learned that non-capitalist civilization is possible. I still want to get rid of cities, the nuclear family, and cut back on technology and all that, but I don't want to kill all humans anymore.

Started getting interested in politics after we invaded Iraq for the second time. I was in high school at the time and read Marx, Engels, and Lenin out of interest. Didn't understand a lot of it because I was a kid reading it on my own. Was a milquetoast liberal through HS and college, voted for Obama the first time idealistically, then again the second time vastly disillusioned but buying into the lesser of two evils narrative. Studied Marx etc more seriously in college but that all didn't really take until I had to enter into the workforce to fully support myself. Wage labor is what drove me fully into the socialist camp.

Damn. I implore you to read Capitalist realism, it's a perfect fit for you.
Link: libcom.org/files/Capitalist Realism_ Is There No Alternat - Mark Fisher.pdf

I was a republican and my pinochet-loving "an"-cap friend who I always argued with convinced me to read Max Stirner (which he probably never read himself) and I did.
yes, this is a true story.

based

I was a leftist the moment I found myself outside my country's so-called universal health care system. Mental health and dental care is a joke if you can't pay out the nose for health insurance.

The rub is that if I could just have walked into a dentist's office and have this impacted shut hauled out early on, I wouldn't be in the trouble I am in now and could, you know, contribute to society instead of being constantly laid up at home with periodic spasms of pain.

Of course spending lots of time in bed or on a couch gives you time to read.

When I realized that abolishing the sexual free market is the only way to to achieve a successful civilization. Femoid hypergamy is the source of all inequality in our society.

well, now I'm fully socialist and an idealist, disillusioned by capitalism etc.
However, the reason I started reading marx and getting into it was because some qt was talking about it and asked me if I had 'read the good word of karl marx' so I went and read

I discovered that Emma Goldman wasn't a liberal after looking her up

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This is by far the best one

I was a Clintonite centrist and mostly supported her because I hated Trump and thought Bernie couldn't win. After she lost, I was pretty mad about the whole thing but I eventually calmed down. I started listening to old union songs for the folk feel and I took up an interest in revolutions in my last few years of college. Some user on 4chan told me to fuck off to leftypol. So I came here to see what all the hubbub was about. Turns out I agree more with commies than I do fascists and liberals. Fast forward a few months and now I'm a filthy red who is trying to start his own party/book club here in Texas.

this

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Grew up listening to rush limbaugh, so as a young kid I naturally assumed that I was a Republican. Discovered libertarianism during the bush era when it was a trendy way to identify as a conservative without any of the baggage of shitty republican policy. During the obama's first term I was pushed further right after becoming active in the firearms community and discovering that my rights were under constant assault, and that the 2a had been getting dismantled piece by piece since 1934. I officially went fash after the bombardment of anti-white propaganda reached a fever pitch during obama's second term. I saw europe throwing open the gates to the barbarians who repaid them by raping their children and brutalizing them, while white women held up signs saying will trade racists for rapists. I'd see article after article written by jews blaming white men for all the ills of the world. I hated them, and wish we could purge all non-whites from the west.

I stopped by Holla Forums in 2015 this was back when you could come here as an unironic nazi, and leftanons would hit you with good arguments, instead of mockery or just banning you outright, and the missing pieces started clicking into place. I realized that "socialism" didn't just mean "free shit from the government" that may sound like a retarded perception, but that is absolutely how most burgers perceive it, and retarded liberals play along. I realized that true "communism" would be beautiful, and wasn't this bogeyman that everyone on the right invoked. I realized that it wasn't the jews flooding the west with non-white migrants to genocide us, regardless of what some neoliberal fucksticks wrote on sites like salon or jezebel, it was capitalists flooding the west with cheap workers to depress wages and expand the dependent underclass that can be effectively manipulated and milked for votes. That abstract kinship I felt for "white people" as a whole began to dissolve, and my hatred for other races turned to sympathy for the worker, regardless of phenotype or intellect.

And that's where I've been ever since.

I've been lurking and posting here for more than a year and I would not consider myself a leftist.
I have however, become staunchly anti-free trade and anti-consumerist.

Being really fucking fed up with idpol and artificial scarcity, more or less. I started as a right-liberal as you're basically destined to be as a midwestern white American dude, then when 2016 came about, three things happened: I had a traditionalist Native American professor for a college class which caused me to start believing universalism and rationality were hooey, I "both-sidesed" my way into believing non-liberals had valid arguments, and I finally realized how the artificial scarcity shit is baked into capitalism. I went through a "fascist" phase for a while (didn't ever believe in conspiracy/"superiority" shit, just thought tribalism was rational) but I really hated being associated with deluded right-wingers so when I heard of this place I decided I'd give Marxism a fair shake and I actually really love it.

I've come around to realizing that professor was actually being silly after all, though.

I was indoctrinated by cultural marxists during my first year in college.

I've been calling myself a communist since I was in the 6th grade (11 years old).

Back then I bought into the "socialism is when the government does stuff and the more stuff it does the more socialistier it is." Meme.

I basically just wanted everything nationalized.

Then I read some books and became. A Trotskyist at 14 because I didn't like Stalin or the Soviet union.

Then i read even more books and now I'm so jaded and hopeless that I'm basically willing to support anything further to the left than demsoc just because we need capitalism to end before earth turns into Venus 2 electric bugaloo and i don't really care who does it or why I kinda just need the planet to not die and then we can argue about tendencies.

My father was part of the IRA and he basically indoctrinated me

I've always had leftist values; I was greatly affected by a RFK biography I read when I was very young (I still hold that he would've gone full socdem had he not been killed). I only recently realized that Neoliberalism is in fact preventing my values from being realized, and I only got into Socialism after watching a couple Zizek lectures following the Paris attacks.

I've always been a lazy fuck that wanted other people to pay for my shit, yea pretty much

Read research on social issues. Literally (almost) all research on social issues Xirils down to material conditions.

My first pretty left leaning thought was after 2008 when I saw the world was getting fucked and thought "maybe we should have a maximum wage, balance income prices and taxes for maximum benefit to the most people, and jail the bankers." Not exactly politically nuanced, but without any marxist inspiration and growing up thinking capitalism was just how the world works and worshiping entrepreneurship, it was a pretty big step, and somewhat leftist in spirit at least. I never really thought about socialism specifically until I looked to Holla Forums as a place to shitpost away from the right wing garbage dumpster that is any other board.

Used to be more of a centrist, but slowly grew to reject the idea that capitalism can be 'cured' of its ills. I became more and more disillusioned with the more centrist ideas plaguing modern social democracy. I gradually shifted further left economically as I began to see the contradictions in a lot of right wing movements in my country, the majority foolishly believe that globalisation is some random social phenomenon that can be remedied by restricting immigration a d promoting 'traditional values' whilst still trusting free market capitalism and hoping that big business interest's won't start getting uppity when there's no cheap labour and export tariffs are through the roof. I eventually started reading Lenin, Marx and Miliband. Zizek's 'capitalism with a human face' idea struck a chord with me as well, I began to realise that shit was everywhere. Its obvious really, capitalists pretend to give a shit about social issues so they can rake on more money.

fucking stop

I was always kind of a loser all my life. All did in high school was shoot the shit with my buddies. We'd smoke in the bathroom and attend class blazed af. I never had any ambition or drive, I was always satisfied with mediocrity. My father is the same way

After I graduated I had to start working. Worked a bunch of shit jobs and hated every one. I was just like man all this shit I'm doing is a waste of time and doesn't really help anyone there's gotta be a better way. One of my co-workers was a socialist and he showed me anti work literature, that's when I started getting interested in socialism

I know I play into the loser low energy leftist stereotype, but I am who I am alright

My friend used to be friends with an estonian girl who was related to kulaks. While we had a discussion she interupted our discussion over how ebil and awful communism is.
We explained that whatever punishment oppressors got, they deserved it. Kulaks destroyed millions of tons of food just because they're cunts and deserved it.
My friend and I, both in unison

Fucking love that nigger

Moral of the story, get yourself a commie bro to shit on kulaks with

Was already left, never agreed with anything the right ever said, had communist friends who explained communism to me, find out I agreed with a lot of anarchist shit, also go out in free parties (mostly anarchist communities).

My transition politically has more or less been Apolitical -> Idpol Dem Liberal -> Green -> Rep Liberal -> "Socially liberal, Fiscally conservative" Libertarian -> "Minarchist" -> Rapidly approaching ancap -> Minarchist again -> Georgist -> General "marketplace of ideas is only fit for looting" leftist. When I was younger I became obsessed with this idea of "freedom" and ended up swallowing the "free" market pill. After that I continued "questioning" things in the form of apologetics for capitalism, but found myself becoming more and more cynical about the situation of things as time went on. As I progressed politically I actually started to question things I never really did before, and eventually I had a crisis which compelled me to learn everything I could about capitalism so I could formulate a compelling argument to myself in its defense. Ironically enough my desire to understand and defend capitalism propelled my into socialism.

I went to an alt-right rally with my local ANCAP group and realized how retarded right wingers actually were. Started reading books and looked into Marxism. This was about 7 months ago. I'm a reformed Holla Forumstard basically

Stupid fcking Xir listen to this guy let us fight with the Nazis in the open

Liberal –→ AnCap –→ Nazi —→ Asserist –→ NazBol –→ Marxist-Leninist

When I was 13, I started watching WW2 movies and became really obsessed with the Soviet Union - I really hated the Nazis. When I was 15, I read the Manifesto, some texts off the German Ideology, and some of Lenin's speeches, and became a ML. I read some more over the following years and remained an ML until I met some friends who introduced me to the Permanent Revolution.

So I became a Trot and joined a Trot party. I started dating an anarchist, but became really involved in the party until a professor of mine in college convinced me to read the Bread Book.

Then I became an ancom. My gf's more of an anprim, tho.

LONG STORY SHORT

USSR larper (13) > ML (15) > Trot (17) > AnCom (since 21)

state capitalism with pretend democracy to state capitalism without pretend democracy, interesting

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Don't pretend like you know what either of those words mean.

libretarian -> liberal -> SJW -> SocDem -> Nationalist SocDem -> Nazbol -> Communalist

Started pretty centrist, 3 main things pushed me to communism:

A) getting into Linux. The free software community and things like software repositories are basically a gift economy, although obviously they don't have to deal with scarcity. I really liked that way of doing things, but couldn't really explain why until I turned commie.

B) watching automation continue to take jobs. The two biggest ones I've noticed so far in my lifetime are self-checkout lanes at supermarkets, and the steady encroachment of self-driving cars. Once you give even a little thought to the automation problem, it becomes pretty obvious that capitalism + automation will bring about techno-feudalism.

C) somehow I ended up watching Richard Wolff's Introduction to Marxism lecture on YouTube. I don't remember what linked me to it or why I was watching it. I rarely watch youtube videos over 20-30 minutes long. But I watched it, and it was probably the most profound and life-changing experience I've ever had. He took a whole bunch of terrible stuff about capitalism I was half aware of, connected the dots for me, and then pointed out how that was capitalism. I've listened to this lecture more than like 10 times. Its not perfect, but for the dissatisfied liberal, its really good.

There's nothing wrong with mediocrity

Thanks user.

I totally understand why someone would want them banned from posting here, because if you post articulate leftist arguments on 8/pol/, you will be mass reported and banned every single time ask me how I know, so I get why it seems fair to do the same to them. The thing is, this is the only place that they'll willingly go to even if they're only coming here to shitpost, or to try and redpill us, or to better understand their perceived enemy where they'll be exposed to anons willing to sit down with them and propose rational arguments for leftism. The amount of ex-Holla Forumsacks and ex-r/soc liberals here, myself included as one of the former, shows that these anons can be convinced.

If someone is coming here and really shitting up the place, give them a month's vacation. But if they're being polite, just politically wrong; and especially if they're coming here in good faith and wanting to debate or learn more, please don't ban them, even if they're saying really terrible things. Even when it feels like what you're saying is falling on deaf ears, I can almost guarantee you that there's a Holla Forumsack lurking and reading what you're saying, and some of that is going to sink in.

Leftism in one post.

i studied economics

I worked at Walmart unloading semi's full of freight everyday, even unloading all the Christmas and black Friday shit and somehow managed to get transferred in time to work the electronics area on black Friday.

So working turned me into a leftist

youtube.com/watch?v=6P97r9Ci5Kg
is this it? or this one?
youtube.com/watch?v=T9Whccunka4

bump

I love myself and all of my property.

the self is the greatest spook of all

Was libertarian, simultaneously found out the NAP was full of shit by reading Nietzsche and that the free market isn't a miracle for economic growth by reading Ha-Joon Chang and this Marxist guy Chris Bramall who specializes in Chinese economic growth. From there I just kept reading increasingly leftist stuff.

I'm first and foremost a /lit/ addict, and when Holla Forums invaded that board I went from apolitical to semi-fascist but in essence it was to counter commercialism, then I became a socialist when I realized Marx was the real "red pill" and that was a far more preferable alternative

HOWEVER I can't stand almost all commie writers-the best ones tend to be fascists or apolitical (excepting Bolano)

I never did, just reading leftypol for fun.