ive always been a communist

try having a commie grandma sometime, esp when youre trans

To keep my answer overly simplistic: being intersectional.

Being Black and being confronted by the open fascism from the right made me look for anything and anyone who would oppose them. In a way, my leftism is a counter-reaction to the rise of the alt-right and right-wing movements across the West.

It’s kind of funny when you think about it. Fewer people would turn towards leftism if white people could just be chill.

Normalizing Marxist theory as an approachable thing to read is important for onboarding a certain kind of person.

Many people never even read the Manifesto because they think it’s akin to reading Mein Kampf. It doesn’t help that many associate the word “manifesto” with unhinged ravings a la Ted Kaczynski.

Literally just reading Marx with an open mind is what it took for me. I’m sure I could psychoanalyze some more from my past, but ultimately, Marxist theory stands on its own and is proven to connect with many types of people around the world.

In order for something to be normal, it has to be casual. So my suggestion is don’t be afraid to talk about communist ideas, but also don’t be weird or aggressive about it.

Some things that moved me from squishy western “leftism” into actual leftism:

• The financial crash of 2008. All the adults in the room were showing their entire ass and the only people giving an explanation of what was happening that actually made sense were self-declared Marxists like Richard Wolff
• Local political developments made me realise the futility of the soft squishy boyscouts passing for acceptable leftism around here. For the past 30 years we have had increasing racism, greater divide between rich and poor and an expansion of the police state. The “left” around here has shown itself to be completely unable to do anything to stop or delay these developments. At festive occasions they stand up and say “how dare you!” and then they go on to be nice and friendly to the ghouls responsible.
• Experiencing actually existing social democracy in action. If you believe the fairy tales they tell you in social studies class, getting a succdem-controlled government should be an improvement over a liberal/conservative one. They might not exactly create a worker’s utopia but at least they might make some improvements here and there and be a little less evil. After all they depend on the “left” for parliamentary support, right? Nope. The Iron Law of Late Capitalist Electoralism is true, every administration, regardless of party affiliation or electoral primises, is going to be worse than the preceding one. The succdems are just as nasty as anyone else and the left will do nothing to rein them in.
• Becoming aware of climate change, the monumental scale of the task ahead and seeing how ridiculously small and insufficient policies are being touted as the solution by the establishment.
• Learning about history, especially the history of the USSR, WWII and western imperialism. There are so many omissions, distortions and outright lies in what you pick up from the western education system and popular culture that you begin questioning all of what you’ve learned once you start learning from more nuanced sources.

Some sources that opened my eyes along the way.

• My mom. I know it is cheesy and not applicable on a large scale but she deserves a lot of credit for laying the groundwork for my political development. She used to be a member of the communist party in her youth and although I never felt her trying to force any beliefs on me, but she presented me for an openness to communism and anti-capitalist ideas and introduced me to communist culture like the collages of John Heartfield and the novels of Hans Scherfig.
• My dad. Again a cheesy choice. Today the man is a deranged tradcath nerd-chud but credit where credit is due, although insane he is an intelligent and educated guy and his intellectual snobbery meant that I learned about stuff like formal logic and critical thinking from an early age which later on made it easier for me to break out of the liberal mind-prison.
• Chomsky. The guy is problematic but his propaganda theory and his work on US imperialism did a lot to move me left back in the day.
• Richard Wolff. He might be a bit too preoccupied with forming cooperatives under capitalism but he did a lot to explain how the capitalist economy works.
• Parenti. The guy is a legend. You might not be receptive to him if you are still full of anticommunist brainworms but once cracks have formed in that mindset he can expand those cracks quickly.
• Graeber. His intellectual originality really helped to question a lot of the preconceived notions about debt and money that supports capitalism.
• On a more local level I want to point out two people who helped me understand Danish history: The first one is Carl Heinrich Petersen who was an anarchist historian who wrote about the labour movement to the left of the succdems. I credit him with puncturing some of the common rose-tinted myths about inter-war succdem leader Thorvald Stauning. Then there is the before-mentioned author Hans Scherfig whose novels Idealister set in the inter-war period and Frydenholm set during Nazi occupation gives a good understanding of the mindset of nazi collaboration, the fecklessness of non-materialism and liberalism and the memory-holing of communist resistance ans well as bourgeois collaboration after the war. Another Danish author of note is Carl Madsen, a communist lawyer who wrote about the class nature of the legal system, official collaboration with Nazi Germany before and during WWII and pre-war refugee policy. He also wrote some pieces explaining the Democratic German and Soviet legal system from a positive standpoint.

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I came out of the womb crying what sounded like the melody of the internationale, i learned to read at three by trying to digest all of the volumes of capital. I was bullied in school because I told my classmates that were all going to be wage slaves. I am better than all of them and its true because i am so much smarter and built different than them for knowing the truth.

read The Jungle for a book report 20 years ago

that planted the first seeds with the whole funny trivia about “this is a story about the misery capitalism visits upon the working class” “ew yucky sausage”

was just kind of a dipshit “lib by default” until a bunch of things coincided to push me left: chuds pointing out that trump was just doing shit obama already did (“oh ok well that doesn’t make me like trump it just makes me hate obama too”), dems making me sick of them by sucking off mccain’s fresh corpse right as I’m in the middle of re-evaluating everything I thought I knew about both parties, and cth existing at the right time and place to catch my frustration with civility theater

then several years of the sub and now you folks deworming my brain

Honestly for me it was a lot of small things over time but what pushed me to actually learn about socialism was the memes on lemmy.

Was browising r/redditalternative and found out about some tankie instance called lemmygrad.ml then my whole worldview came crashing down

ShitRedditSays

Also a side of Philosophy Tube’s Mad Marx series.

I was an edgy 13-year old who discovered the meaning of “left wing” and “right wing”, repeated Ben Shapiro talking points for six months, then became a lib when I developed empathy. Started going to climate change student protests and I felt amazing, powerful, like I was changing the world. Nothing came of it and I questioned why people would burn our world for profit, which lead to me reading Marx when I was 16.

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Grew up in a very liberal area/family, had an instinctive revulsion against inequality and the wealthy from a young age. In high school I read Zinn, Chomsky, and a bunch of Crimethinc type stuff, lived through the reactionary hysteria of 9/11, and became an “anarchist.” Anarchist in quotes, because it was a very surface level, lifestylist understanding of anarchism (no shade to any comrades reading).

Without any real theoretical grounding, during college and after I drifted into a sort of standard issue succdem position, feeling like there was no viable alternative to capitalism, but also no path but slow reform. The brief excitement of getting Bush out and Obama in quickly turned to disillusionment when he failed to hold the previous administration accountable for any of its crimes and continued all its worst foreign policy. By the time 2008 rolled around, I was not surprised by the failures of the state.

After Trump was elected. I managed to avoid the worst of the liberal panic, but I also felt that any system that would elect Trump was not one that was salvageable. I knew something had to give. I had been identifying as a socialist for a few years at that point, but hadn’t been politically active and nor yet politically conscious. I joined DSA and started trying to learn what socialism was really all about, which led me to the chapotraphouse subreddit and eventually here.

Looking over this whole story, the thing that strikes me the most is that Marxist theory had been so completely excluded from the range of acceptable thought that it didn’t even occur to me to seek it out until quite late in my political journey. Even as an adult, cracking open a book by Lenin felt a bit dangerous and forbidden in a way that anarchism never did. I know “read theory” is a bit of meme on here and people whine and complain about it, but honestly I do think it’s the most important thing. Your life experience can help radicalize you (the shitty jobs I worked certainly did), getting out in the world and doing praxis is great and necessary, and so on. But without a framework to understand these things within and relate to a larger struggle, you are far more likely to fall into error or disillusionment or to lack solidarity with others.