As a recently radicalized baby-lefty I’ve been thinking about this a lot

“the idea of a “moment” of radicalization is liberalism and connotes that people need this singular moment of experience or persuasion whereby they enter the class conscious state.”

fair point, just goes to show that my perspective was influenced by my own experience, thanks for pointing it out because now I’m aware :D

So I guess the real question would be “What’s your personal history with leftism?”

25 points
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10 points

Mad props to you for at least trying, man. I wish I could unionize my workplace but there is only 10 of us and all of them minus the 2 managers watch Fox News on the daily… and they aren’t even old. Shit’s sad. And don’t fret about labels, we’re all leftists in some sense. I think I’m an anarcho-communist.

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9 points
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5 points
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6 points

Other than The Conquest of Bread , I have not delved into much AnCom theory. I have been suggested Now and After: The ABC of Communist Anarchism but I haven’t gotten around to it yet.

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20 points
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My parents were yuppie-ish radlibs. They were devout protestants strongly concerned with social justice. Above all, they were anti-war and anti-racist, so that was a decent foundation.

Formative anti-imperialism:

  • the lead-up to the Iraq war protests in 03/04, seeing HUGE numbers turn out. seeing cops kettle people. also got me connected to Palestinian solidarity.

  • a protest against Bush at one of his town halls. it was crazy to see his security detail he needed to keep up the straight-talkin folksy schtick. I vividly remember being shocked at seeing how big sniper rifles were in real life, and odds were they were there to be used against Americans if need be

On Communism:

  • my younger brother studied geography in college. he was introduced to David Harvey and subsequently Marx. my brother and I had/have a great relationship, and as a left-libertarian at the time, I was very easy to convert

Other galvanizing experiences:

  • working retail

  • having medical debt go into collections

  • having a hilarious amount of student loans that I will never be able to pay off if I want to enjoy a normal quality of life

  • serving on a jury for the first and only time at 19. I failed to cause a mistrial/nullification, and let myself be bullied into rendering a guilty verdict for crack possession against two middle-aged black women who were arrested as part of a sting against a drug dealer. watching cops lie on the stand was wild. I consider this the greatest moral failing of my life

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7 points

This is a good ass post, thanks comrade!

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7 points

This is a good question you’ve asked, which has generated a lot of great dialogue. o7

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5 points

Aww thanks comrade! That’s high praise indeed :)

o7

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4 points

Great answer, however I wanna know how geography relates to marx

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9 points
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Thanks! Geography asks: “what is happening where, and why is it happening there?”

The field can roughly be divided into physical geography and human geography, the latter of which is a social science.

David Harvey is a human geographer at the CUNY Grad Center, and a foremost expert on Kapital. His lectures on Marx’s Kapital are all freely available on YouTube and worth checking out. He’s also written extensively on Neoliberalism and late capitalism.

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6 points

That’s so cool, always liked physical geography but human geography sounds interesting, I’ll look it up

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19 points

it stopped being a game or a thing that happened far away with Charlottesville, for me. I kind of held onto my radlib-ness for another 6 months or so but started reading and thinking about politics much more after that. what was left of my worldview shattered when I read the Dispossessed and realized that quite literally the only thing still holding my liberalism together was capitalist realism. once that was gone, I dove head-first into communism and haven’t looked back.

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14 points

the only thing still holding my liberalism together was capitalist realism. once that was gone, I dove head-first into communism and haven’t looked back.

Yeah this is a big mood

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2 points

Good fucking book, if you havnt and are interested Le Guin’s translation of the Tao Te Ching is really good.

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17 points

Going to let you in on a secret: There’s many radicalizations to come. Not just one. Each one is a transcendent moment in the mind. Each one is transcendent because it is the foundation of the new identity, the new self. The hologram.

There’s a transcendent moment where you’re willing to sacrifice yourself for the masses: when you reach that point, where no real doubt remains, it’s time to join a properly radical organization and be around amazing comrades who will completely and utterly understand why you’re there, where you came from, and they’ll forgive all of it and truly love you.

That’s the point where you get your truly revolutionary nom du guerre. That’s where the radicalization path leads, to the real thing.

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2 points

that’s beautifully said and gives me hope for the future and myself. thanks comrade.

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17 points

I had worked a lot of shitty McJobs that definitely helped but the moment I really put it all together was when I saw a montage of all the posts of 4chan doxxing Bike Lock Antifa and I was like “wait a second, why isn’t everyone hitting Nazis with bike locks? They must be right about other shit too” so I looked up PhilosophyTube’s video about antifascism

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14 points
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This is why self-reflection is important and why libs (and even moreso chuds) are trained to be afraid of thinking about stuff

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9 points

It’s always funny when you say stuff like “critical thinking is vital and we need to emphasize it more in schools” and libs nod along sagely

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