Share yall’s journey over here. Here’s mine. TLDR: apolitical -> chud -> lib -> based commie :sicko-laser:
Was mostly apolitical until the culture war shit of 2016 and I got sucked into anti-SJW youtube. Naturally I developped the standard reactionary views (systemic racism isn’t real, offensive = funny, gays are weird, etc).
Then I went on 4chan after seeing a funny video about them trolling Shia LaBeouf, and being edgy I naturally hit the “politically incorrect” board. I knew they were edgy and I had experienced racism before but the shit on there was something else to say the least.
After that I started questioning my views and realized how cucked it is to be a reactionary minority. At this point I was a lib, cuz fuck rightists but Communism seems silly.
What made me swing left is:
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Learning Obama and Trump both supported the corruput authoritarian president in my home country.
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Taking econ and having cognitive dissonance between the lessons and real life. If the profit motive rewards benefiting society then what’s up with climate change? If “supply/demand = cheap price” then why does my mother have to ration her medicine every other month? Etc etc.
Then I stumbled on a Parenti video and everything clicked. Thanks Parenti :michael-rosen:
I started out vaguely egalitarian, utilitarian, and compassion-driven. Animal rights was the first moral conflict I really considered, that led to watching class politics through the same kind of “the strong should protect the weak” moral framing. The Iraq War, and especially Blair following Bush into it, made me critical of imperialism but without the historical knowledge to do anything with that so I would have been something of an idealistic social democrat. The 2008 recession really radicalised me. Normal people who had done everything they were told to do were destroyed and the system didn’t care. Liberals who said they were on the good side didn’t care about normal people at home any more than they did the normal people they were murdering overseas. I started really identifying with a Marxist critique and when I combined it with historical reading Leninism seemed like sharpest spearpoint for the times.
