For me, two points:
(dating myself here) Minimum wage used to be $5.75 when I was in high school. I worked my ass off for an entire summer. I fuckin hated it, but we all gotta hustle. Around my last shift, I came out to the parking lot, and someone had done my car dirty with a hit’n’run. No note, no CCTV, nothing. The damage was in the neighborhood of $2k, which is exactly everything I had saved up that summer.
I worked my ass off 300 hours to break even. It might as well just have been some community service work release program. Fuck capitalism.
The other is when I was older, post-grad. I had a shitty job where I had to pony up for own health insurance plan with high deductibles. I started having random tingling in my joints, so I did the responsible thing and had it checked out. I got sent to several specialists who ran a battery of tests. I’m already in the hole, $3k out of pocket, and all I got was, “We’re not sure what’s wrong.”
The tingling lingered, and I started looking up information for myself on alternative, holistic sites. Someone had listed similar symptoms and said it was just a vitamin deficiency. That couldn’t be it, right? Well I ordered some supplements, and within a month, the tingling was gone.
$3k down the hole. Fuck capitalism.
I was never a fan and I thought capitalism had to change or we’d be wiped out ecologically by the time I was old, all the way back when I was a kid and started thinking politically.
I didnt think it was possible to overthrow capitalism when I was an older teen and reading about the Soviet Union or Vietnam, just because I was reading about them after the USSR had collapsed and Vietnam had already started some limited market reforms. Never mind what was happening in China. So for a while I was a Warren style lib that was capitalist-skeptical who thought reform and regulation was all that was achievable.
I was already working as a fully grown adult before I actually read some theory and attended a couple public lectures from an org associated with International Marxist Tendency (trots) and that’s what allowed me to go all the way to fuck capitalism, revolution is necessary and possible and we can do it.
