I grew up in USSR, and I was generally happy with my life there during Soviet times, and I lived through some really horrible shit during the collapse. That said, I was a kid at the time, and I didn’t really think about politics all that much. All I knew was that my life in a communist country was just fine, and that things got worse after we transitioned to capitalism.

My family moved around a lot after the collapse, and I got to live in a few different western countries. I saw incredible amounts of opulence contrasted with incredible poverty. It never sat right with me that some people should live on the street while others live like royalty.

As I got older, I reflected more on these things and it became clear to me that the capitalist model was fundamentally exploitative and unjust. Reading history I realized that Marxism-Leninism was the only ideology that provided a clear and consistent path away from capitalism.

I think that the theory that Marx and Engels built is fundamentally sound, and it lucidly explains material relationships within our society. Why things are the way they are makes perfect sense when seen through the Marxist lens. Marxism is not utopian, and its application provides real and tangible improvement in the quality of life for majority of the people. This is why I’m a Marxist.

I taught high school in an impoverished neighborhood of the richest metro area in the state

I didn’t decide to be a Marxist. I became one when I learned more about the world and communism.

I used to be one of those stuck-up sinofash dudes with liberal tendencies, but in America. So I was bombarded by China bad. Then I discovered r/sino, and found genzedong through that. @JohannesAdams1212 was with me in the china evil subreddit, and he showed me here. I became a marxist a few months after joining genzedong.

There was no decision.

It’s like Bertell Ollman warned: if you read Marx and understand historical and dialectical materialism, you will become a Marxist and accept HiMat as the most advanced scientific framework known to humans.

It can take a while to understand Marxism. But anyone who reads and understands Marxism and doesn’t become a Marxist is being wilfully ignorant.

They could understand and accept Marxism and still say, ‘Fuck workers, I’m in it for myself’. That’s one thing. But to understand and refuse to accept? It’s way beyond cognitive dissonance at that point.

Of course, I really mean ‘understand’ when I say ‘understand’. Skimming the Communist Manifesto might not be enough. I resisted it for a while but the more I read the harder it became to reject Marxism.

As for why I started to read Marx? A very patient Marxist asked me, over quite a long time, questions like:

• if-X-then-Y-
• can-that-be-solved-under-capitalism or
• what-conditions-are-necessary-for-Z

This made me challenge my own liberalism. They mentioned very little Marx, nor told me that Marx/ists had a better answer or what that answer might be. No jargon or explicit frameworks, and very few sources. It was enough to get me to apply a contradiction and class analysis to my own ideas until I realised the bottom had fallen out the box. At that point I needed to look somewhere else for answers. Then I was recommended Marxists texts until I could piece the world back together again.

Yes, this does involve and require brainwashing. As Mao said in a speech to Chinese students in Soviet Moscow, the brain must be washed clean of it’s bourgeois education (quoted in Roland Boer, Socialism with Chinese Characteristics: A Guide for Foreigners).