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Comradeship // Freechat @lemmygrad.ml Comrade Zoloft ☭ @lemmygrad.ml

So, just asking: what radicalized you?

Personally, I grew up on a single parent home, where I saw my mom get destroyed by her office work. The lack of unions, no external help and general misoginy, made her get super depressed, and became an alcoholic. In my teenage years I was almost lured by the manosphere communities, but got helped by a group of close friends that were left leaning. Most of them were anarchist, so I started with that. Slowly but surely, I started to understand how sick this system is, and it made me furious, but I never found a way to show my ideas. No political party represented my ideas, and I fell deeper in the anarchist rabbit hole. Yes, I was a hardcore anarkiddie, but I bite me back. When I needed them the most, they turned their backs on me, and fell into deep depression. And in seeking psychological help, my counselor recommended me going back to my roots. So I went back to videogames, japanese culture and most importantly, read again after years The Communist Manifesto. I still don't know how to position myself in the left, but I know that I'm a Marxist, and that I want change. Stay safe, comrades.

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  • Even though I'm Indian I got radicalised by chapotraphouse subreddit and Bernie Sanders getting ratfucked in primaries.

    I never fell into traps of western idealist leftism because even when I was not explicitly leftist I was vaguely anti-imperialist because rich-poor division never sat well with me.

    Ironically when I first read Communist Manifesto I did not understand it well because the writing style came off as strange to me. I became more leftist as I read news and comments on reddit that had a leftist bent. When I had marble slab of implicit understanding of the world order I started chiseling it by reading theory because it made more sense to me then.

    One thing that helped in preventing me from becoming an anti-communist leftist is witnessing the rampant and ever increasing inequality in India and reading about how USSR despite its flaws did and exponentially better job at elevating the lives of the common person even while defeating a Nazi horde. So extreme and widespread poverty is sort of a "solved problem" in that a viable framework to follow to eradicate it exists. It's just that the political will is missing. Considering this, reading tone deaf online condemnations of the USSR and China from the crackerverse which has done nothing but pillage and destroy the global south always felt wrong to me. After that as I read historical books my views pretty much were vindicated.

  • I am a history nerd tragic and as a teen I couldn’t stop reading pop-history which was mostly chauvinist and ideologically pro-western / anti-communist.

    Then I gradually progressed into more academic works which is when I discovered - to my genuine shock - how dramatically incorrect the popular account of history is and how much ideology shapes it.

    Discovering that the popular western account of the eastern front was written by Nazi generals was an actual shock to me, and then reading David Glantz made me realize how skewed our account of history is in the west.

    That opened my eyes wide open and I started reassessing everything from a perspective of “ok, what really happened?”

  • Bernie losing the 2016 primaries. I saw a candidate who wanted the policies that the people wanted. He had a record that showed historical commitment and zero corporate donors (bribes). It was clearly shown at the time that the more that voters knew about bernie the more likely that they were to vote for him. But then I saw him lose because of a media apparatus that denied him serious coverage and a party with no interest in actually making the world a better place.

    When I saw that I lost all faith in the american system and became an anarchist. I'm more of a big tent leftist now that I've learned more about AES. I went from patriotic lib to American hating lefty in a moment. Grieving my nationalism was actually a pretty painful experience.

    before bernie after punished-bernie

  • I used to be a left leaning socdem during my early years until early adulthood. My parents had been militant in communist orgs against the military dictatorship in Brazil in the 70s so I was very proud of the that story, which helped build this left leaning tendency. But most former communists had gone socdem in Brazil after the 90s.

    I took a firm liberal dive during post-grad studies and after I began working, influenced by economic literature and also by work environment ideology. That was exacerbated by the failures our socdem government. I was still kind of "left liberal" and respectful of my family's history, but I tended to be the "progressive on social issues, conservative on economics" kind of liberal.

    Until we elected an actual fascist here in Brazil.

    That started unraveling a mental process that started questioning everything. My belief in liberal institutions took a hit, than electoral bourgeois democracy, than all the bullshit in economics started unraveling. I finally realized that what bugged me about liberal economics was the complete disregard for political processes. Fetishizing the technical aspects without taking into account the political processes behind them, which completely turn the theory upside down.

    I went back to reading Marx ann Lenin again and... here I am.

  • life and good work of online propagandists.

    i was in my teen heading the incel fascist route, until i saw a left neolib documentary called Quebrando o Tabu (Breaking the Taboo), they are kinda of a joke among the radical left because of their absurd takes but I'm thankful for them for saving me, the documentary was about the drug war, where they argue that it achieved nothing besides senseless violence.

    so I'm became a progressive neolib (idk if there is such a thing) in my teenz, like inequality bad, decriminalize weed, let lgbt marry and adopt children, while i grind for success, specially when my school actually taught we had to be our own boss.

    fast foward to pandemic and the genocide carried out by the fascist president pushed me to the left, i started to watch some left people but not revolutionary, but it asserted to me i was a leftist, that is the way forward. one day i was working my butt off, and still fucking got fired, the anger and free time led to me further lefting coincidentally when i found people openly talking about marx, lenin, stalin, mao and etc, this got me and now i want to join the brazilian communist party

  • Im from a well-off family and both of my petit-bourgeois parents are hardcore liberals who who hate china and bite into every US propaganda campaign. And thats how i grew up, me and my dad used to have the same political views "china bad, russia bad, americans stupid but still better than than the rest and our succdem system is the best system blablabla". My father is a very political person and thats why i early on got interested in politics and got recommended alot of political content on my social medias. For a long time, all the politics i engaged with were senseless identity discussion with brain-dead Trumpists and i remember always getting angry when people pointed out the atrocities committed by the US empire as that would imply that the US and therefore us as a whole (US and the EU or the "west") are bad. These useless discussions sucked the life out of me and just made me tired the entire day so one day i decided to simply not care about politics anymore....i didnt really care about who are the good guys or who are the bad guys which also meant i didnt care if the US is bad which opened up a way for me to take information and history in from a other perspective. Thats how whenever i saw some history clip or documentation calling out the US for its war-crimes i simply went along with it and thought "hm maybe the US isnt that good but i dont really care" to the point where after some time i realised: "wait....the US is SHIT and not for the reasons i thought". Having realised how the big brother USA is bad, it made me question my own media i saw on national TV and Radio which all always were pretty Western-centric and pro USA and made me notice that it is nothing more than western propaganda what we are being fed. Knowing this is researched History from non-western perspectives, that eventually led me to bit by bit have more socialist-ish views until where im now, a ML

  • Thanks for sharing your story, comrade. care

    Mine is a bit complicated. For a long time I was just a liberal that considered myself right of center. I've been terminally online for a long time, but only very recently I started interacting online, before I would just lurk 99.99% of the time. Somehow I didn't become a raging ancap or some other shit, but instead I, slowly through the years, became aware of my prejudice, the inequalities in society and started questioning the world.

    I think 7 or 8 years ago I got to know the group of friends I had until earlier this year when I decided to get out, the reason being that at least 2 members are actual unironic fascists, and I mean this, they talk about it proudly, and one of them was my best friend. For a long time I was ignorant enough to tolerate them, mostly because I couldn't physically bring myself to confront them about it and because I didn't have enough knowledge to confront their ideas, I also thought for a long time they were only joking because almost anything they said was in an obvious ironic tone. The one that was my best friend knew how to stir any discussion or conversation their way, it was impossible to convince him he was wrong. After I got out of the closet to them, all I received was the usual dismissive talk you'd expect and at that point I was already a left lib. As time passed I tended more to the left and they became even more open about their bullshit ideas, to the point I couldn't take it anymore and after some confrontation and multiple plea for them to change I just left after telling them how wrong they are and that I wouldn't take this shit anymore.

    Of course this helped make me hate the right even more alongside the usual bullshit I was already seeing on the internet all the time.

    Shortly after I was playing War with my brother and his friends and we started discussing politics (I was the only leftist there), that triggered me to start searching about socialism/communism where I started watching some podcast episodes that hosted debates of Marxist-Leninists against some big liberals here in Brazil. After that I started watching ML youtubers and basically became radicalized this way. Now I'm trying to read theory and I'm watching even more ML content to learn.

  • Red Alert 1 --> Palestinian family --> BLM --> Bernie Sanders --> Breadtube --> Hakim --> Trotskyist Org --> GenZedong --> Breakthrough News

    Breadtube and to a lesser degree the Trots were very embarassing in many ways but I still feel like it was a good way to learn a lot of social issues, general political vocabulary, fascism, philosophy to politics pipeline etc. It's interesting to me how Breadtube, Trotskyism etc is just as often a stepping stone on the way to radicalization as it is a complete and total neutralization of revolutionary potential and transmutation into co-opted shitlibbery. Also interesting how a game fundamentally villifying the Soviets made me from the age of 4 always think the USSR had a cool factor, and how this predisposition might have made a bigger difference in my ability to be amicable to "USSR good" narrative than I would like to admit.

  • For socialism, it was crazy homeless people. I'm what's usually considered "crazy" and I'm a person, so we're only different in that one temporary and easily revoked material condition. Taking Christianity literally also helped out a lot to question our modern "Christian" society.

    But for communism it only took reading history in more depth and trying to form my own opinions. Even ancient Rome already has a ton of bad-faith or poorly researched shit being parroted around, so it'd take a lot of naïveté to trust the pop history narratives of things that actually matter within living memory.

    • Have you read Micheal Parenti’s Assassination of Julius Ceaser? It didn’t interest me that much, but when I read it it seemed like a pretty good telling of Roman history.

      • I recently got it and only stopped halfway through due to life circumstances, but it was a fantastic book as far as I got and echoed a lot of my own criticisms for traditional Roman historiography.

        I have no idea how one can read a single line by Cicero and somehow sympathise with that one instead of all the populares, urban Romans or the provincial non-citizens. "The Storm before the Storm" is also a neat deconstruction of the Social War that addresses the inequality in Rome.

  • Living in with left-wing family in a working class area certainly helped me understand leftism as a whole, although they are anti-ML I started believing in this ideology when I saw a video summarising stalin's constitution. I really liked the constitution, everyone has a guaranteed right to work, eat, and live. And began to think that stalin's wasn't actually this megalomaniacal, killpeopleist, totalitarian dictator, then I started questioning why this was the case.

    (Also as silly as this sounds, COD waw really made me like the soviets, since it introduced me to the fascist crimes against humanity.)

  • Living and growing up in South Africa. The extreme amount of inequality, poverty, the violence everywhere, the racism present in every level of society, the sexism and what feels like a war against women, it's just everywhere. You can't escape it or turn it off. It will radicalise you or make you just want to give up on everything.

  • Living in a south global country and having empathy.

  • was a Bernie supporter during the 2020 primaries, it was the first year I could vote. At the time I considered myself a centrist, took few hard stances, but thought the Nordic Model was ideal. Police violence coverage had me questioning my worldview. Came across many leftist tiktoks but saw Michael Parenti saying 3rd world countries aren't underdeveloped, they're over-exploited and it clicked for me.

    I'm a 2nd gen American and have great sympathy for folks in my parents' home countries. I realized Nordic Model wasnt the bastion of progress people claim it is, we have to go past that.

    • way, way past it. they didn't get to be the liberal bastions of prosperity on their own. colonialism got them ahead just like it did for all the other "Western developed first world free democracy role model" countries that enslaved populations and stole all their resources while also preventing them from every having a chance to get out of that impoverished position

  • I used to be a part of the "skeptic/atheist" crowd back before gamergate. Then when that sort of stuff hit, suddenly all of these "skeptics" and "rationalists" started actively raging against feminism instead of religious fundamentalists. I found this very strange at the time, as these so called "skeptics" were spouting the exact same sort of vitriol against feminists that the religious fundamentalists would. So I ended up no longer associating with that group, becoming a sort of socdem type, interacting with, though never joining a local socdem sort of party, my local representative of the party even went to the US to assist with the Bernie Sanders campaign. I was pretty comfortable in a western chauvinist faux-leftist "Free Hong Kong" kind of mindset for an embarrassingly long time, full breadtube type, thinking that the "tankies" were just authoritarian apologists who liked the aesthetic of these evil regimes. Then I actually spoke with a "tankie" and they called me out on literally every generic "million billion dead" point people make about socialist states, I listened to what they had to say, as I had never heard any of this before, I had only ever heard that Mao and Stalin were horrible and did horrible things, the idea that life expectancy increased for Chinese peasants during a civil war was a major shock to my worldview. As a fan of learning about history, I realised I had never actually examined the history of any socialist states properly, only accepting the western worldview on them, so I learned more about them, and began to actually read theory and became an ML, even tried joining local orgs, but their stance on AES is identical to the one I held before becoming an ML, so they're just ultras unfortunately. Now I spend too much time online talking about Marxist stuff because I don't really know anyone irl who I can discuss things with. People open to education, sure, but I don't want to be the one doing the educating all the time, I like to learn too.

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      • Yeah, I thought I had found a like-minded group of people who just wanted to understand the world better and educate people out of ignorance. Turns out they were far more interested in using their atheism as a way to be superior to everyone else.

      • "Elevatorgate" and especially Dawkins' "Dear Muslima" letter made me step away from atheism as any organized movement.

        the idea of standing with that bunch of euphoric reactionaries was unbearable by that point.

        Exactly the same for me. Well, I would say I stuck with the movement a little longer, but only as part of the sliver that had no choice but to shift the focus of criticism towards our former atheist "allies," the reactionaries and sex pests, which in turn made us the evil enemy SJWs, the fanatic feminists, the beta cucks, and the cringe white knights. While it was shocking how elevatorgate suddenly revealed this giant gaping rift in the community, and how full the entire atheist movement had been with the most disgusting of reactionaries, it was one of those things where in hindsight, all the misogyny, racism, white supremacy, etc. had been visible just beneath the surface all along, but had been easy to overlook as just a nasty patina sticking to the broader movement. Nah, turns out it was actually deeply intertwined with it.

        I still think Rebecca Watson is cool (for anyone who doesn't know but is interested, "elevatorgate" centered on her because she dared to say "guys, don't do that" when referencing being hit on by a stranger very creepily when alone in an elevator at a convention, and was subsequently hounded, harassed, ridiculed, and derided even by the famous Dickie Dawkins). She still to this day puts out some banger videos sometimes. I will always have a soft spot for PZ Myers and his Pharyngula blog that I spent so much time on, finding community there because even then it was clear how ugly and toxic so much of reddit was. Pharyngula was like the last bastion where social justice was recognized as good and necessary, rather than demonized as something that needed to be snuffed out.

        I'm also still an atheist. But that movement is dead, just as it fucking should be. Amusingly, but also sickeningly, the larger fascist-adjacent majority of it kind of morphed over time into things like Jordan Peterson's cult, at least the parts that didn't just fizzle out into the background noise islamaphobia and generic chuddery.

        I should confess too, reading Christopher Hitchens (one of the "four horsemen") was definitely a big stepping stone on the path towards my own radicalization. Though I wince to say it now, I did admire him back then and he wrote about being, or having been a Trotskyist, which was one of those little epiphanies that showed there were actually political positions to the left of "as left as it gets" liberal. Wanting to find out more about that is eventually what lead me to Lenin.

        To be clear, I'm not saying that's what radicalized me, though it was a small part of it. I'm mostly just commenting to respond to the New Atheist part of the discussion.

  • I wish I had a story I could tell about how much I suffered or whatever but I really haven't. I've lived a good middle class coddled life in white suburbia and for a time I fell down the alt right pipeline and saw nothing wrong with it. I broke out of that in my own way but I was still a neolib or "centrist" bent on half measure and compromise because I was scared of conflict. I also didn't understand what socialism was and assumed as I'd be told that it was doomed to fail and somehow more exploitative that capitalism. There were two events that opened my eyes to reality. My older sisters friend is a commie or maybe anarcho-communist idk haven't spoken with him in a long time but he explained to me socialism as he understood it and while that lit the spark in me it wasn't until recently when I worked a server job getting paid often times under minimum wage that I questioned how anyone survives. I saw my coworkers all much older than I working that shitty fucking job + 2 extras just to survive and I could tell they were miserable and I thought. WHY THE FUCK IS IT LIKE THIS? just couldn't wrap my head around it but I also didn't yet know of a solution.

    Then one night after spending time on my sh.itjust.worksi noticed a new instance I'd not seen before. At first I scoffed at the posts. Communism doesn't work, idiot, and then I started reading the memes and started actually reading some of the long texts posts. They really resonating with me so I gave it a shot and made a post asking for information. I asked to be pointed towards resources about communism and leftist stuff in general. It's been about a week and I honestly know more about both capitalism and communism than I think I ever have.

    I still live well, my parents are paying for my college education and I'm much more privileged than the average person but I hate hate hate knowing that no matter what I do. My degree and the effort I am putting into studying physics, a subject I'm very passionate about, with most likely only be used to make some piece of shit richer

    Sorry for the essay but I tend to ramble

  • I guess mostly just from searching for solutions to problems in the world. I grew up in an poor urban area and am extremely working class so I’ve seen a lot of suffering. I feel like I’ve also always been inclined to think of things in a dialectical manner even before I knew what that was, so Marxism-Leninism just naturally made the most sense to explain things.

    I’d also specifically highlight the NATO invasion of Libya as rocking my world view, as it quickly became so incredibly obvious what the true nature of the “intervention” was and anyone paying attention would have to be blind not to have seen the contradictions as they unfolded.

  • The notion of doing the same fucking repetitive thing every day, that I don't care an iota about, on behalf of people that don't even like me, until I die, with nothing to show for it at the end.

  • It was a slow process. It started when I worked as a server and was first exposed to the desperation of working people. I met people who had to work a dinner shift after spending the first 8 hours of the day sweltering at a brutal roofing job to make ends meet. People fighting over shifts because otherwise they couldn't feed their families. Outside the restaurant I'd regularly see undocumented landscapers get chewed out and let go on the spot because the boss wasn't happy with how the flowers looked that day. The icing on the cake was when the "owner" of the entire shopping complex showed up one day, fat and happy, worth 9 figures. It hadn't dawned on me until that day that someone actually owned the property I worked in. After that experience I got a corporate job and was completely dumbfounded how different the working environment was. It started to sink in that something was deeply wrong.

    My politics have always been heavily focused on the environment though. The real nail in the coffin has been waking up to the fact that capitalism will have us go extinct if it's profitable to do so. I bought into the neoliberal ideal of trying to "shop green," and that's when the cracks started showing. I finally came to my sense and realized that I am at the mercy of whatever the markets want to produce, and most of the "green" companies are just trying to juice profits, further feeding the beast. I started reading up on energy company investment plans only to realize the energy transition under capitalism is a ruse because they will pump oil as long as it is most profitable to do so and neoliberal governments are incapable of putting forward the level of investment and market controls necessary to change that. As Luxemburg famously said: it's "socialism or barbarism."

  • I describe it as a gradual slow leftist shuffle. Which also sounds like a snazzy dance number.

    I lived in the US as a young child, and when I first became politically aware I was your stock standard social-issues Democrat that thought the Democratic party really cared about the worker. The more politics I consumed the more I shifted left, but still within the framework of the Democratic party.

    By the time I hit uni I was pretty disenfranchised with the Democrats, but still fell for all the "lesser of two evils" bullshit since I obviously didn't identify with the Republicans. If nothing else, I thought they were at least the anti-war party. Which obviously couldn't be further from the truth.

    I left the country before the end of my university years, which was very instrumental in shaping my future politics. At this point I was probably Sanders-style soc-dem. I went to graduate school and studied international relations and security, which led me to quickly realise what a destabilizing force the US was on world security. I didn't quite consider myself a full marxist-leninist yet, but I had started to read theory that I was very sympathetic towards.

    One of the biggest events was probably the research I did during grad school in the DPRK. It's probably obvious to everyone here, but realizing just how much EVERYTHING I had been told about the DPRK was wrong was pretty eye-opening.

    From there, it was a pretty direct line. I think I had a moment or two early on where the indoctrinated stigma against communism still plagued me, but I got over that fast. I actually work in an industry that caters towards the ridiciously wealthy now, which only makes me hate capitalists even more. I could probably go on for days about the excesses of some of our customers.

  • Lemmygrad

    • OG GenZedong circa Ukraine war('s new phase) first starting pushed me that last crucial step from the vaguely Trot/Maoist area with some secret repressed guilty pleasure tankie opinions to an unapologetic ML.

  • I grew up around nature and liberation theology. Environmentalism and anti-trumpism moved me left. A decent (still lib) teacher made me think about the USSR and philosophy. Ultra-leftist quora, Genzedong, and leftist podcasts got me where I am now.

  • I came of age at the tail end of the Great Recession. I like to refer to my trajectory as the "Yes We Can --> Fuck Obama" pathway.

    I was always a "socialist" since the beginning of becoming politically conscious. And by that, I mean a progressive liberal who still thought the system was reformable. Even canvassed and volunteered for Bernie Sanders a few times.

    Worked shit jobs my whole life. Finally worked my way into some good opportunities but lost all of them from the 2020 COVID shutdown (and thus my hopes of ever purchasing a house). Also, participating heavily in BLM actions the same year, and witnessing both parties scapegoat minorities and leftists for the US's economic woes pushed me to be more disciplined in reading theory and developing a material analysis of politics.

  • At first I thought there was hope and democracy could fix it. It was 2012 when the left party in France betrayed. We had a lot of hope after 5 years of radical liberal right, fascism being on the rise and much to do for climate already. But they betrayed : the main left party was actually a liberal right party. After that was Macron who is a liberal fanatic with fascist tendencies.

    In the end I had nothing to do, the government is considering moderate, democrat left to be extremist as bad as extreme right, yet they are themselves going full fascists because they need them to vote laws.

    Now I consider myself radicalised. I cannot tolerate liberalism or fascism anymore. I feel like our democracy is already dead.

    Unfortunately I don't know of a party or even a doctrine that would fit my beliefs. I don't believe in anarchy, liberalism and capitalism must die, ecologists are bourgeois who want to feel better but don't understand science or politics, Marxism is outdated in my opinion (too focused on work as the central part of society).

    So here I am, both radicalised but without a political family.

  • I lived in Italy when the great recession hit. The blatant imperialism by Germany, the heavy handed approach to SYRIZA's mild attempt to rebel from the Troika, my mom being unable to find a job for like 5 years and moving to Germany during the Syrian Refugee Crisis + still having parents being subject to exploitative work practices.

    I read the Communist Manifesto once when I was bored and forced to go with mom to her job while I sat around, and became an anarchist despite opinions on Socialist Poland being fairly neutral in my family. Eventually, I got organized in a demsoc party and drifted further left.

    It's not exactly going great, but then again what is?

  • Two words: Great Recession.

  • Short answer: entire year unemployed, then working in healthcare delivering things to folks that had even less than I have.

  • poverty and leftist parents

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  • Bernie radicalized me.

  • Getting un-libbed after moving back to South Africa from the US at the end of 2013. Also finding out just how much of a piece of shit Obomba was (and still is) after just watching the telly for an hour, all caught in 1080p.

  • Looking around and seeing no matter how many political concessions we get, nothing is getting better economically for the working class.

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  • The church.

  • The Internet

  • Iowa caucus made me intellectually realize, blm/ covid helped me actually see

    These aren't the right words, but its close to what I mean idk

  • i always was kinda leftist and kinda anti-capitalist, but actually reading marx was the push i needed

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  • there was a slow process starting in college that progressively dragged me left. but the truly radicalizing experience was 1. realizing while on a lot of lsd that I was lying to myself about my gender identity; 2. realizing at the same time that a truly safe world for me didn't exist, that it needed to be fought for and built, and that it was incompatible with liberalism; and 3. reading the Dispossessed a few weeks later which undid what remained of my liberalism by giving me hope. my heart will always be an anarchist even if my brain tells me the only path there is Marxism. and community defense will always be at the center of all of my projects.

    this all happened following the battle in Charlottesville. it completely didn't make sense within the liberal framework I'd been taught. so I went seeking explanations. took about 6 months for the above realizations to hit.

  • I've always been pretty big on reading, and I happened upon some cool political theory. My parents were also, to put it lightly, politically active, but I really had to learn it myself to get into it.

  • John pilger documentaries and also not originally being from America or western imperialist country also helped.

    Oh and seeing the Iraq war play out and abu ghraib in particular.

  • Jon Stewart

  • Radicalization was a gradual process but primarily being on tumblr during the Mike Brown wave of BLM.

  • 2pac, Central American history, and Imperialist history

  • Big nerd. Read Capital like a nerd when I was pretty young. Went down the Socdem -> Demsoc -> commie pipeline by reading more for a few years, watching two-faced capitalist politicians hurt my neighbors (homeless people, renters, low wage workers), and recognizing how easy it is to propagandize Americans into supporting war, especially if it's against a dehumanized ethnicity.

  • Probably pension reform

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