hmm…

A heaping helping of “rules I’m supposed to follow don’t seem to apply to the ‘elites’,” did it for me. Seasoned with the Dem/liberal “give us the offices and we’ll do the right thing!” and then “oh shit, sorry, turns out being in charge means we actually CAN’T do anything.”

I went from bleeding-heart radlib succdem to “we’ll just convince a majority to :vote: for socialism” demsoc to full-blown ML. It was a process that took many years. The seed was there always as my parents were leftists and I grew up learning some leftist songs and reading some communist authors which gave me a counter-narrative to the baseline liberal anti-communism you get growing up under capitalism.

What gradually eroded my faith in liberal “democracy” was seeing it fail. I saw racism accelerated and the welfare state be eroded by the very people who were supposed to be the responsible adults in the room. I saw how none of the performative liberal politics of peaceful protest and democratic debate were able to effect any change for the better. As climate change became a more and more apparent issue I saw how nobody seemed able or willing to do anything to prevent it.

Some key events along the way were:

• The 2000 US coup. Bush had clearly lost the election and nobody screamed bloody murder
• The Iraq and Afghanistan wars where thousands were killed because of a lie and disgusting atrocities were committed in the name of freedom and democracy
• The 2008 financial crash and how the banks who had ruined the economy by gambling away all the money were bailed out while the people were punished with austerity. Nobody went to jail, nothing was changed.
• The way Greek democracy was crushed by the EU when they had the audacity to vote for an end to the humanitarian crisis in the country.
• The Danish succdem government of Helle Thorning-Schmidt. A coalition of radlibs, succdems and “socialists” came into power following a long and tough period of liberal-conservative rule. Things were going to get if not better then at least less horrible. They didn’t. The succdems spent all their political capital preventing the liberals from softening the racist immigration policy. In return the liberals got to impose austerity economics on the country with the willing cooperation of the succdems who happily ran away from all campaign promises of improving the welfare state. The “socialists” were a complete joke.
• The Danish succdem government of Mette Frederiksen who took over from a liberal-conservative coalition that had collapsed under the weight of it’s own incompetence, infighting and petty corruption. The parliamentary “left” got the best result in decades. If electoralism works this was the time to show it. It didn’t work. The succdems turned into neo-Strasserites and spent a lot of energy enacting laws on whites-only housing, expanding the police state, racist culture war bullshit and pandering to the right. Promises to the left of limited anti-poverty measures are yet to materialise. Promises of real action on climate change was abandoned in favour of kicking the can down the road.

During all of this I started to learn about history from leftist sources and I was gradually dispelled of liberal propaganda. Chomsky might be a lib but his talks on the propaganda model and US imperialism were hugely influential and acted as a stepping stone to more radical thinkers like Parenti. Richerd Wolff’s explanation of the financial crisis and the workings of capitalism were also helpful to me.

TLDR: Teach liberals history and explain current affairs from a Marxist standpoint. Don’t expect them to have an heureka-moment because of your superior arguments, respect that it is a process that takes time. You are not talking to them in order to convince them you’re right, you’re doing it to sow the seeds of doubt in their minds so that they will have somewhere to go when material conditions one day pushes them out of their pampered comfort zone.

I’ve had a hypothesis for a while that America is both deliberately and accidentally organized to not generate any leftist ideology. People have to go out of their way to get to that point or something completely incidental has to happen, like a meeting with the right person or having leftist parents. Every rung of American society is taught to hate poor people, not recognize retail work as legitimate, and to believe in the examples of people who do follow every rule and get rewarded for it. It’s hard to argue against a person’s own experiences where they went to school and worked their way up for 10 years. They did the whole thing with horse blinders and completely surrounded with convenience. No matter what your income is, you’re always surrounded with a vast army of retail workers who are supposed to be your servants. You work a 12 hour shift and go yell at the teenager at Wendy’s to let off some steam, because just for a moment you can taste what it means to have people work for you. Try telling either person in that situation they should have working class solidarity.

The only general avenues for political awareness in the US turn you into a smug liberal or aggressively racist chud. You went to college and got a job, now you believe the problems are the result of people being just too stupid to listen. That’s the problem. They just need to be civilized and tamed. Or you joined the army and got an industrial job, now you believe the problem is too many immigrants.

Overlap, yeah, but that’s where the overwhelming majority of people fall if they do develop an awareness at all. Half of people develop nothing and simply don’t consider largescale social issues at all.

Leftists only get generated through random circumstance, like a lot of us probably from reading or visiting websites. I don’t think there’s necessarily a liberal to leftist pipeline, because I’m going to guess the progression from disinterested to leftist progression is equally present. I think nowadays it might be changing a bit to ironic disinterested, aesthetic leftist to leftist because of how much reach stupid memes have. Might also just be the first generation of kids who grew up without cultural inoculation against communism are now becoming adults.

I can confidently say the minute my politics fully radicalized into hard left MLM territory was the moment the coup went down in Bolivia and Morales had to go into exile. Death to America :inshallah:

Because liberalism is hegemonic, the crucial difference between leftist and lib is which form of violence you are ok with: everyday or revolutionary