I honestly think I was almost destined to be a communist. I’ve always had a strong dislike for the rich, a progressive worldview, and a general feeling that society is changeable and that sometimes extreme measures are acceptable to achieve that. Plus my dad drilled historical materialism into me from a young age because his dad was a communist historian.

I just had all these barriers to taking my thoughts to their logical conclusions. Gradually, after prolonged exposure to online left spaces, those little bits of propaganda were dismantled one by one. It’s not as though someone posted a big argument and I was instantly convinced, it’s just that once I harbored enough doubt to stop viewing “Muh human nature” and the like as good excuses to completely dismiss the ideology, and once I understood that there were different tendencies and more nuance to the ideology than a simple caricatured Stalinism, I became able to view it clearly and to consider its arguments seriously.

I think there are a lot of people like that, who would be very receptive to our ideas if only they were able to allow themselves to seriously consider them. This why I think it’s important to challenge those little anti-communist tropes wherever you see them.