For me, two points:
(dating myself here) Minimum wage used to be $5.75 when I was in high school. I worked my ass off for an entire summer. I fuckin hated it, but we all gotta hustle. Around my last shift, I came out to the parking lot, and someone had done my car dirty with a hit’n’run. No note, no CCTV, nothing. The damage was in the neighborhood of $2k, which is exactly everything I had saved up that summer.
I worked my ass off 300 hours to break even. It might as well just have been some community service work release program. Fuck capitalism.
The other is when I was older, post-grad. I had a shitty job where I had to pony up for own health insurance plan with high deductibles. I started having random tingling in my joints, so I did the responsible thing and had it checked out. I got sent to several specialists who ran a battery of tests. I’m already in the hole, $3k out of pocket, and all I got was, “We’re not sure what’s wrong.”
The tingling lingered, and I started looking up information for myself on alternative, holistic sites. Someone had listed similar symptoms and said it was just a vitamin deficiency. That couldn’t be it, right? Well I ordered some supplements, and within a month, the tingling was gone.
$3k down the hole. Fuck capitalism.
Graduating from university and working full time under capitalism. They don’t even try to hide that you’re there to be make as much money as possible, while being paid as little as possible. They use every possible loophole to pay you less and even if they didn’t you still couldn’t afford to get by. I live in the greater vancouver area where rent is insanely high, to the point where I can only afford to live on the other side of the city from where I work. I lose a total of 2 hours a day to my commute, to go to a job that I slowly ruin and destroy my body/hearing, to make a wage so low that I will never be able to retire, so my company’s owner can make literal millions. This is all deliberate in it’s design. I hate it. I’m miserable, most of my friends are miserable, and anyone not at the top of society is miserable. I just want everyone to have a better life but some asshole born into wealth wants to own my life
2008
Banks stole my families home.
2009
Amazon fucked my dad’s business into the ground with undercutting and lawyers
2010
My first taste of minimum wage work
2012
Mental breakdown following two years of working two jobs with abusive bosses leading to me getting evicted from my apartment and them suing me for 8k in back rent
2014
Now a drunk, became radicalized at a bar and have kept those comrades close to me since.
Damn, that was like a road-to-Damascus event in a random bar or you were going there all the time and seeing rad randos?
I was never a fan and I thought capitalism had to change or we’d be wiped out ecologically by the time I was old, all the way back when I was a kid and started thinking politically.
I didnt think it was possible to overthrow capitalism when I was an older teen and reading about the Soviet Union or Vietnam, just because I was reading about them after the USSR had collapsed and Vietnam had already started some limited market reforms. Never mind what was happening in China. So for a while I was a Warren style lib that was capitalist-skeptical who thought reform and regulation was all that was achievable.
I was already working as a fully grown adult before I actually read some theory and attended a couple public lectures from an org associated with International Marxist Tendency (trots) and that’s what allowed me to go all the way to fuck capitalism, revolution is necessary and possible and we can do it.
Graduating college and entering the career market for the first time. I had worked multiple service jobs in college and assumed that things would get better when I had a degree. I believed that being paid shit wages in college was “all part of the college experience”. You know the stereotypes: Instant ramen, pirating everything, asking friends with meal tickets for free food, wearing old clothes, ect. Turns out the value of a generic 4 year degree disintegrated after the 2008 crash and never recovered.
But honestly I’m kind of grateful. If I had gone straight from college to a cushy salaried corporate job like I was told to expect all my childhood I would have never become a leftist. I think my overall empathy would still be near zero because I was raised by petite bourgeois, so I’m really glad I regained some basic fucking humanity that I was taught to ignore when I was a kid. :improve-society:
