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?”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 after

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.)

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.

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.

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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.

Lemmygrad

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.