Hey Holla Forums what turned you into a filthy fucking commie...

Bernie was popular on all the normie social medias and got interested in leftism from that.
Went to Holla Forums and could take any of their anti semitic racial realism shit seriously so i started snooping around on leftypol. Started reading shit from here and was radicalized ever since

Found Lenin fascinating in grade school, had an lolbert phase in high school. Seven years of being a wage slave turned me into a solid libcom (leaning more towards guys like Bordiga than Kropotkin these days though)

My worldview was kind of shattered when I became an atheist. I was raised in a very religious & conservative household, like I literally could not imagine a right wing existing outside of a religious right wing. So then after that I became really curious about all the different political ideologies and started reading into them. Marxism made the most sense to me because it's easy to see how automation is eventually going to replace so many jobs that the remaining jobs can be done by people who work for fun.

I read Animal Farm when I was about 14 and was inspired by the utopian ideals that initially inspired the animal revolution, as well as its initial success before pig Stalin ruined everything.

lolbert>Holla Forumstard (though never full nazi)>gommie

I used to admire Italian Fascism and called myself a non racist fascist. Dylan Roof and the right wing response to him made me reconsider my politics, and I went from various shades of anti authoritarianism to Leninism.

1) One friend talking to me about how the welfare state (which I had defended until then) was a historical accident unlikely to be reconstructed in an age of neoliberal capitalism, and that systems like that are only possible due to an attempt by elites of coopting the masses from socialism.

If I remember correctly, it was when he showed me that Bismarck developed the first modern welfare state with this purpose in mind that set the whole thing in motion. Right there, my arguments became aggressive shit like "yeah you keep waiting for your revolution" because deep down I no longer wanted to defend my previous position (took me a while before pride allowed me to profess socialist ideals though)

and 2) an online post I read about the human nature thing where this dude explained how material reality is the main factor shaping ideas, that the human spirit is malleable, that different societies have developed completely different moral codes and so on.

I wish I could say I was a prodigious teenager reading Kautsky and Sartre when I had my conversion but no, I was this grown man in my mid 20's who had been a libertarian and a liberal, each time with total conviction in how right I was, without having ever thought about basic shit like this.

socdem>fascist>gommie

Am i the only person who wasn't a Holla Forumsack or a lolbert at one point

I was a liberal who was disappointed by Obama's foreign policy so I started to move further left.

...

I was a big-gubberment liberal who kept switching between feminism and MRM, but I took a momentary break from politics and came to realize that all that horseshoe theory bullshit people had been telling me in history class and shit was wrong.

I realized that socialists, even a lot of tankies are a lot more well-informed and pragmatic than people give them credit for.

lol no we're not

as much as I like to trash Holla Forumsaks, if it weren't for them I would have just given into whatever virtue-signaling politics was popular with my friend-group (i.e. Buzzfeed style intersectional feminism)

I had always harbored thoughts/feelings which coincided with the left, but lacked the context and vocabulary to articulate it. Mostly ignored politics, since I live in the US and the only exposure I ever had was with the right and the further right. I figured, hey, it doesn't really affect me all that much if I just stay to myself and focus on my own life. If things were bad, it was just how it was and I couldn't do anything about it.

Was harshly shaken awake from that naivete by a particular media smear campaign and became aware that, no, I will not just be "left alone". Essentially forced to politicize myself, I began searching for ideologies that matched what I myself already thought/suspected, and stumbled onto the actual left. Sure enough, just about all my woes were explained and contextualized, and it truly felt like I'd put on the glasses from They Live. Seeing others using that as a metaphor as well is always something else. I've been delving into my studies ever since. Didn't hurt that I found Holla Forums around that time too.

Chans are mostly populated by teenage to young adult males. That's the age when people start to form their self identity and when they do that they start questioning a lot of things about themselves before solidifying their views, including their political identity.

t. armchair psychologist pro

suppose it depends on who you talk to but, generally my teachers had no understanding of Marx or socialism so they would just describe all leftists as dangerously naive authoritarian liberals. Those types are certainly present, but don't make up the movement as a whole.

No. I was always and anarchist.

For most of my early 20's my worldview was influenced by "fringe" writers like Robert Anton Wilson and was into spooky conspiracy theories and esoterism in general, so I hanged around /x/ around that time.

Later on I got into a particularly gruesome job, it was such a shit job but I needed the money so badly, that got me into reading more political stuff, regardless if it could be called right wing or left wing, at the time I would be described as more of an anarchist.

Alongside this, I would still visit half and full Holla Forums alongside Holla Forums, to the point where I would start to get influenced by Holla Forums more, yet continued to try to broad my horizons by reading stuff as diverse as possible, Erich Fromm's "Escape From Freedom" and Willhelm Reich's "Mass psychology of Fascism" made me into a staunch anti-fascist, since in those writings I could identify the reactionary mode of thought that was influencing me (basically, I internalized the discipline and self-repression needed to perform my job)

It is around this time that the Trump campaign got started, this led me to reject right wing politics all the more, since I could identify in his toxic personality and chauvinism what the right wing is really all about.

How that landed me into Marx is more complicated, long story short remember how I said I was into esoterism? I came to realize a lot of what I believed was bollocks. This brought into my attention the confrontation that has always existed in philosophy between idealism and materialism, and how idealism has often been used to dupe the productive classes, I decided this is what had happened to me and how in order to not be duped again I had to embrace not just materialism, but dialectical materialism.

Been exposed to leftists ideas trough family, and been taught the value of work (inb4 spooky). Couldn't support capitalists after that. Was quite naive about left wing idpol stuff for a while but i've seen the nonsensical end results during the events of gamergate.

I got a damn job.

Not particularly interesting but there it is.

Learning, reading, self-improvement.

I have my own story, my intellectual and social background… Doesn't mean much to me anymore.

If I had to give you a one word answer, it would be: discipline.

I was a liberal till I found this place and watched some of Papa Wolffs videos. then became a market socialist

It's called SocDem. Wolff is not Marxist.

(You)

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...

I'm currently reading Wolff.

But - yeah. I'm coming to conclusion that MarkSoc are simple SocDem. You don't even want revolution, do you?

Open Gaming Automation System?

Well most of my way of thinking and ideas was already marxist before, then I found leftypol while looking at porn on Holla Forums, read a bit of marx and never looked back.

I always sympathised with communism and thought it was possible (or at least centralized socialism wherein we all take care of each other and all that)

Soviet CyberSyn

Worked a lot in my district for B████ and was my school's sole organizer aside from our dem and republican clubs. After all the shit i had to deal with, and all the shit that was in that primary i started moving more to the left.

Two years ago i was "socially loberal fiscally conservative", year later social democrat, and now I'm a marxist.

Reification of revolution is stupid.

Stop fantasizing about some singular rising moment.

Care to elaborate? Because I'm not sure I got your post right.

You don't even want worker control of the means of production do you?

I fully support co-ops in light industry and farming.
Heavy industry, however, is another thing. At least partial state involvement is necessary. Socialism exists to advance society to Communism, after all.

I can get on board with that tbh.

Good. We might make a proper Stalinist out of you yet.

Any chance you get on board with Vanguard Party idea?

Eh sort of. I'm dead against a single party state, but I would be on board with a broad coalition of anti-capitalist parties to foment revolution and organize workers. Once the government is toppled these parties could then establish a socialist constitution and then compete with each other and resolve ideological differences through representative democracy.

I was a conservative kiddie akin to alt-right today. ~6 years ago I tried LSD and tripped balls so hard I turned into a liberal. Some friends and Holla Forums gave me the final push into radicalism/communism.

If 10-15% of population are in the Party, it's not a party anymore.

Either way, I don't see practical difference from the multi-party system imo (as long as things stay civil - i.e. a bit more regulations that demand from parties to actually get together and discuss things; consensus is important - people forget that).

I've already asked you: how the hell is thing going to work, until the Socialist state is properly established? You actually need proper organization to get shit done. Especially, to wage any kind of war. At least, I never seen evidence to the contrary.

Besides, why representative democracy? It's 21st century, FFS. Direct democracy is easy.

Slowly became class conscious over time just from paying attention to the world around me. When I finally read Marx I was already like 90% there. I just didn't use the same vocabulary and hadn't made some of the leaps. My vision of the future was FALC and I thought co-ops were the only way to stop profit seeking from destroying the economy and environment.

I would have been a commie years earlier except my only exposure to communism was the bullshit they teach in American schools and the only commie I had met is a tankie and literal psychopath.

When I learned at 15 that a system exists where housing healthcare etc are guaranteed to everyon and where choosing the wrong career didn't spell financial doom. A great bonus was that it preached violently overthrowing the current order to establish such a superior society. Hard to be apathetic about something so obviously beneficial to me and many other people.

nice.

Yes, I know

Because central planning and the top heavy state and bloated bureaucracy that come with it lend themselves already to authoritarianism, and having a single political organization that dominates the state increases that risk.

The coalition of parties can still organize workers, and may have wider appeal because they could scoop up greater support and wider appeal because they wouldn't have a single ideological line apart from anti-capitalism.

No, I've seen how the Stalinists parties in my own country, and many others, function, and what their member advocate.

You're not fooling anyone.

That's a meme. Soviets had much less bureaucracy than practically any modern state. After USSR fell, bureaucracy literally increased tenfold.

It's called government.

You are delusional

Oh wow, you sure blew me the fuck out there.

I'm suicidal