Do you remember the things that are mostly responsible for turning you into a radical?

Do you remember the things that are mostly responsible for turning you into a radical?

I'm talking about specific things that may have opened your eyes or gave you a more militant disposition towards injustices you already knew. It's an important reflection to make if we want to "convert" others I think.

I think my transformation started with certain movies. Pic related lead me to look further into Malcolm X, which eventually lead me to the Black Panthers and the likes of Stokely Carmichael. It was actually Carmichael's speech on Zionism that gave me my first positive impression on Marxism, because he spoke about "that great man, Lenin" at some point, which actually shocked me a bit. I remember also feeling like a changed person after watching Battle of Algiers for some reason, and reading about colonialism later also affected me.

If I didn't have interest in movies there's actually a pretty big chance that I would never encountered this type of stuff. The first "radical" literature I read was Deutscher's Prophet series, but I was already leaning towards that direction when I read it.

I'm really interested in learning about what converted you guys, or maybe not necessarily converted right away but softened your heart toward leftism.

I was involved in my local Occupy Wall Street. I was in college at the time, and I remember being excited, thinking things would change for the better. I remember staying up late watching a live stream of Occupy Boston as the cops rolled in, beating unarmed protestors and smashing tents and things.

I couldn't sleep that night. I tossed and turned and felt restless. The local Occupy "organization" was already infested with idpol and all they wanted to do was stand around and hold signs on the side of the road. I felt like I had to do something more direct, so I made a sign, bought a length of chain and a lock the next morning, and chained myself to a statue on campus pledging to hunger strike. All the "occupiers" did was disparage me and my racial characteristics. It was actual leftists that came later and built a shelter over me to keep me from freezing in the rain.

In retrospect I don't know how I feel about it. I only lasted two days before I got scared and packed it in, and I don't think it was very effective. It certainly didn't change anything, but it did put me in contact with some interesting people. For the first time I met actual Marxists and leftists and I was introduced to the world of political theory outside of the narrow American mainstream. One of my professors lent me a copy of The Communist Manifesto to read and it completely changed how I looked at things.

I was born a pirate. and all my life I ran away from that fact only to realize I was living for others.

But my father was a pirate, and my mother was a pirate. Piracy is in my veins.

I read a lot of philosophy and liberal political theory as a teen and was always drawn towards left-liberals like Rousseau and Thomas Paine. Upon reading Hegel's description of Master-Slave dialectic and Foucault's analysis of the lackings of liberal societies, I knew that leftist thought was the field where my interests lied.

I was vaguely librul as a kid/teenager, then became a fascist sympathizer then the rise of the alt-right and tea party made me realize how retarded right wing politics are.

But anime Yui is antidialectical you dummy

That's such a good story m8. I'm glad you met actual leftists.

The Jungle made me rethink everything and realize that capitalism is a disgusting system that enables the top to exploit the bottom and it just went on from there

I was an economics major, and I'm too bad at math so I had to learn mostly from books and it all went downhill from there.

I used to be a philosophical, romantic anarchist type.

Then I walked down to a BLM demo that was happening in my city a couple years back just in time for the cops to kettle a few hundred of us (mostly students) and proceed to march us down the street while arresting, clubbing, and throwing teargas at what were mostly white-bread liberals.

Read Marx some months after that.

Any cop apologist here needs to get a nice dealing with at a demonstration to realize that the cops are scum.

Core of any good revolutionary is an originary hatred.

Stokely carmichaels talk with Commander George Lincoln Rockwell really opened my eyes.

Well, it started slowly in this political discussion group for young people in Norway, which is unproportionally filled with communists and anarchists relative to the rest of the population. At first I countered them with the standard "looks good on paper" blabla, etc, but sometimes they would give me statistics that I simply couldn't refute. How millions are starving, dying, how income inequality is growing, how we have more houses than homeless people, how we have more capacity than unemployed, and after a while my curiosity just pushed me to start reading Marx.

I've gotten through the Manifesto but, admittedly, Das Kapital is a tough read considering how much I have to do at school and shit as well. Getting there.

Julia McFucking Shindel?

I've seen some exciting signs, though. Some people in the Holla Forums infested facebook group />politics/ started saying they would contemplate revolution if Clinton was elected. Granted, these people don't want socialism, but I think some working class folks are going to be more acceptable towards leftist thought in a matter of years. We just have to keep educating, familios

i went on /mu/ and got more into music, then i heard crass and that was how i found out that anarchism wasn't just survival of the fittest, i also found out about the CNT because of that, doing more research into it

You sound like me.
For me it was for blocking traffic. Not as strong a gesture as yours I'll admit, but they still had a fucking issue with it. And with cursing. The racial and idpol shit, and the insularity and petty gossip and drama that was like unto an IRC circlejerk. I put up with it for months because muh suffering for the cause muh earning their trust and muh be the bigger man before I finally left after most of the other semi-decent people had been driven out and it turned into the PFJ from The Life of Brian.
For me it was winter gear.
For me that was this board and I'm still learning the ropes. We had some local socialists but they had significant idpol issues.

Thanks, me too.


'Fraid not.


Haha, you're right, our experiences do sound really similar.

I think that's a pretty strong gesture. I'd suggested doing that to the "Occupy" group but they shot it down because "we don't want to inconvenience potential supporters."

Yeah, that sounds about right. At the time I didn't know any better, so I kind of went lone-wolf on the hunger strike because I didn't want whatever might happen because of it to reflect poorly on the group. Not a single one of them came to visit me while I was out there or offer any sort of support. Instead they just kvetched about me on facebook saying stuff like "What does this white boy know about hunger?" Which at the time I thought was pretty funny because the woman in charge must have had a good thirty to forty pounds on me.

Whew, hat's off to you. I can't imagine putting up with it for that long. After my sit-in, I basically abandoned the Occupy group because by then I'd met several actual leftists that were interested in doing more than holding up signs. Ultimately nothing came of either, but in retrospect I wish I had gotten to know the leftists better and kept up with them afterward, especially the anarcho-communist that wanted to get a Kapital reading group together.

Same and same. Occupy was when I met them in the flesh, but I didn't get really immersed in it until leftypol because of various personal issues. When I was starting to explore leftism again, users on reddit directed me to a local chapter of the socialist party but that nearly turned me off too because the chapter president was deep in tumblr-tier idpol that I had little interest in. Luckily I found Holla Forums and actual leftists that spent more time talking about leftism rather than riding their spooky hobby horses.

Heuy Freeman started me on my path to tin foil acid fueled revolution

I think I've always just preferred taking the challenging route as opposed to the easy one, and I've secretly been contemptuous of people who trumpet their ability to succeed at shooting fish in a barrel as proof of their superiority. Realizing a socialist society definitely qualifies, and capitalists and their ilk who love to show off the scraps they got for renting their lives out to Porky to me are the weakest and most fragile people of all.

It has always been obvious to me since at least high school that economic disadvantage was the greatest force in people's lives. I've also always admired guys like Ralph Nader willing to go out and spread the inconvenient truth with no hope of winning. Then Gamergate happened and people starting spreading around that so obviously-phony "Cultural Marxism" idiocy and I took it upon myself to finally read up on this stuff.

Charmander for life

My family is very pro-union. I remember asking my mom why we don't go to Wal-Mart and she told me that "we don't support non-union business. unions allowed grandpop to give us a comfortable life and they still provide one for your uncles". I became really interested in the labor movement after that. At the same time I also started getting into the oi and street punk scene in my city. Both of which have strong working class undertones.

Where are you from?

The US. Why?

what made me radical was probably realizing how deeply fucked up the war in former Yugoslavia was, where my parents come from. When I think of the war I constantly have this one scene on my mind where we pass through this village which is essentially a ghost town now.
And then the internet and reading books did the rest. revleft radicalized me quite a bit as well.

things that I didn't like but still existed regardless of how I felt about them

Charmander was the hardest?

He was the hardest to start with. The first couple of gyms weren't really optimal for fire types.

roughtest for the early gyms mostly

I've always had a 'if things can't be done right, do it yourself' attitudes, mixed with the events of SOPA and TPP on the horizon, and before, I sort of always had a resentment to corporations. Going lefty was all natural. Once I realized socialism has nothing to do with Stalinsim or Sandersism, and it meant owning the means of my own production, it was pretty clear.

Pic semi-related. I had thoughts about revolting against corporations, now it's the system that create their existence, and the organization of labor which gives it it's power, or it's precieved power anyway.

Hell, I don't even know if this game is all that lefty anymore, since they don't seize the means of production after the revolt.

Where the hell were you this entire time?

Oh, did you just stop using the statue?

I'm a free spirit and I roam yo.

Praise the heavens!!!

Because of two simple things in my nation.
Firearms are quite difficult to get legally and 2d loli art is treated as child porn.

I want to own an AR-15 and physical copies of Comic-Lo without fear of prosecution ;_;

Don't fucking tell me you got into leftism so you could legally jack off to drawings of anime children.

I read Hemingway and wanted to know why he was such a big fan of communism. So I checked out the communist manifesto and the rest is history.

Yes ;^)

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