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?”
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.
I’ve always had left tendencies i guess but ussr/communism meme culture somehow led me from me_irl to latestagecapitalism, which I originally saw as a funny meme thing about how everything sucks. But like a year or 2 later, a few months after Bernie announced he was running, I found chapo. and the rest is history. I wish I still knew what post originally led me to chapo
Watching Michael Parenti lectures ~5 years ago.
