Like ok. When I was a lib, I had a lot of communist values already. I was already socdem leaning (though an Obama supporter because I foolishly believed he stood for those values). The vast majority of times I moved left involved some sort of confrontation with a person to my left on an issue. Sometimes there was resistance on my part, but that usually involved just like, a single argument, me realizing they were right, and moving left on the issue. Other times it was just… receiving information I didnt previously know. The closer to ML I got, the harder the struggles were, as some of the current geopolticial issues and also historical issues involved in that were the hardest to deprogram and the most hard coded. But I still got there.
Even simply openly calling myself as a communist was as simple as seeing someone else on Tumblr openly do so and realizing “oh wait thats an option?”
Oddly, “lesser evilism is not actually the correct way to approach electorally” was kind of my final gate? Despite being a poster here I sort of secretly still was a lesser evilist up until the recent stuff with Gaza. So it wasnt a straight line admittedly, but what it did do was give me a certain line of thinking about what the mindset of people who vote Democrat were.
In the midst of autistic myopia, I sort of for a long time believed that most libs were “communists in waiting” too. I sort of assumed you just had to spread the word, and they’d get there. Maybe they’d struggle on some of the same points I did, like not automatically believing a protest movement is good because its a protest movement, or that “America bad” isnt actually a bad way of thinking and critically supporting anti-American forces in the world is in fact the correct thing to do, and of course as I mentioned lesser evilism. But for the most part, you just had to give them permission to be communist. You just had to normalize it.
So seeing liberals like, be presented with the option to move left and slamming the door closed violently. Even on the most basic and obvious things. It was disheartening. I really thought it would be easier than that!
Theres this recent awful trend on TikTok (one Ive mostly only just heard of, because I’m not on that platform) of people “turning in their leftist card” over real leftists not flocking to support Harris and being principled about opposing genocide. One particular one, the only one I’ve seen with my own eyes, was a guy saying he “just found out he’s not a leftist, he’s a liberal, and [he’s] turning in [his] leftist card”. Like, whats happening there is a liberal is learning for the first time that he’s a liberal. But like, my experience with that realization was to go “oh, so THATS what leftism is? OK. let me travel there” (yaknow, like I said, on average lol, it wasnt always that easy). So seeing the door slam for me is kinda weird? Still to this day despite being somewhat used to it now?
I relate to a lot of this, and I do wonder if it’s an autism thing. Because like, I see a lot of lefties complain about libs as if they know they’re thinly veiled fascists and are just pretending/virtue signaling etc, and they’re always linking roderic day’s thing about propaganda. But my experience was just nothing like that. It’s like… no, I literally just did not know lol. I always had good egalitarian-like values, and I was fed so much bullshit that I was just naively a liberal. I was a radlib for sooooo long because of all the other western ‘leftists’ being stuck in electoralism, defeatism, ‘human-nature’-ism etc. The final thing that pushed me here was:
Wait, you mean communism ISN’T when no food?
Wait, you mean communism actually DID work and wasn’t just a 1984 animal farm dictatorship ???
Wait, you mean it wasn’t us libbies on the “right side of history”, it was always the socialists, and basically every good historical ‘great man’ idol that we look up to (MLK, helen keller, einstein etc) was a socialist too??
THE COMMIES WERE RIGHT THIS WHOLE FREAKIN TIME???
Because my entire life I’ve been taught commie = evil, like, they’re just The Bad Guys. It’s drilled into your head. And then when you come up with something like “hey why don’t we provide for everybody and make things fair?” it’s always: “Nah, that doesn’t work, it’s been tried, and human beings are just too selfish to make it work.”
And that had younger me like "Oh, okay… :( "
And our entire culture, media, news, history education etc is SUCH A FUCK that it took THIS LONG for me to finally get some real facts and be like wtf are you kidding me?!?!? The “villains” were right this whole time?!?!
Maybe it is like an autistic myopia for us. Maybe most people aren’t like this…? I know it’s more accurate that people’s ideology follows their material interests, and for most of us westoids, our material interests are the empire staying an empire. And you could say that because I’m disabled, that means my material interests 100% align with the abolition of capitalism, therefore here I am. But there’s definitely an element of like, bruh I did not KNOW. I wish somebody had told me sooner. But it’s a wasteland out here in the west. I ultimately had to figure it out for myself.
And I’m glad I did, because unknowingly being a “communist waiting for permission to be one” is depressing as HELL man. I saw the BS of electoralism, reforms obviously were not working, I knew the necessity of revolution but I could NOT believe that it was ever possible, like the belief that humans are selfish and it just never works was so ingrained. So I literally felt like there was no hope. Absolutely nothing. We’re just fucked and this is it and we’re powerless to do anything about it. Total capitalist realism. The bleakest view of reality. Did you also go through this phase of utter despair like I did?
The “human nature” shit is such BS, too. Like we know a lot about how humans lived in prehistoric times. They were not, in fact, selfish assholes lol. And it turns out children are naturally prone to be empathetic and will share things almost instinctively. We just beat those instincts out of them by the time they reach kindergarten.
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Well same! I remember after first reading Marx as a teen I was like “well all this makes complete sense and this is what I want the world to be” only to be told from left and right that “sure sure sure, but all that is just UtOpiaN!” That you can sure be this utopian idealist, but none of it will work “in the real world” and nobody will take you seriously. This weird invalidation of my utopian idealist wordview just got to me for a long time, very long, but I still moved left consistently. I should have examined what this was a lot sooner tbh. But I had not read any real theory or heard real history, not really.
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Yeah I admit my past makes this very frusterating to me. And also like, the freinds I have that are still libs and I know are fairly well meaning people overall, just misguided on some points. Ive never been as much of a fan of that kind of rhetoric.
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I think the fact that my life experience makes me more empathetic to on the ground liberals and why they are the way they are is actually a useful trait that I shouldnt kill, because it gives me an angle people in your position dont have. What troubles me are people here who are themselves ex-liberals and have completely forgotten that in their rhetoric about liberals. Also, I didnt really go into this in my OP, but its not like my experience is that all liberals slam the door. Just certain types of particularly dug in very online liberals on social media. Irl experiences are usually very different, as well as experiances with people online with whom you have personal relationships.
A lot of online liberal spaces have accepted “ACAB” wholeheartedly so idk if that applies to my experience really. And the fact that like, my acutal lived situation makes that not particularly relevant to my life would seem to matter to how I approach the issue of how to interact with liberals in my life? And remember, I’m not talking about liberal politicians, I’m talking about regular people who arent in positions of power.
And my final point is. If regular liberal by default people are irredeemable, then we’ve already lost. There is no hope in that line of thinking. I fail to see how we can win if thats the case. That’s too big a percentage of the population. We don’t have to win over /r/NeoLiberal to win, but we do have to win over a lot of people who are liberals toughtlessly because thats just normal for them. We do have to win over a lot of people who were where I was once.
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So what happened with me lol.
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Well, thats a good explanation, thanks.
I think there is some hope for normal liberals but blue maga lanyard libs are way too far gone
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Depends on the subject really. The hardest bars to cross for me are also the ones I find are hardest for liberals (or baby leftists who havent totally dewormed) in my experience. That being China/Russia type geopolitics stuff that ISNT Palestine (that ones actually fairly easy for them to get in my experience, sometimes you get both sides are bad but you can only see so much suffering before you break on that one I think) because the brainworms on that one are VERY settled and sometimes the stuff you have to get through isnt super intuitive, as I’ve described before. Thats why you get so many self-described anarchists who repeat state department propaganda about those countries and Venezuela and The DPRK and such. Because the brainworms on these subjects trigger the well meaning part of their brain. “Oh China is bad because Hong Kong/The Uighers/its a police state” ect. There are similar things for other countries. Its also why they tend to support protest movements that turn out to be color revolutions, because the propaganda behind manufacturing consent for those movements is extremely effective to well meaning brains.
And then there’s lesser evilism on voting, which tbh I still think you can sorta make arguments within the realm of leftism about voting strategy I guess, but still like, that one is also hard to deworm like I said that was my final gate not even a year ago. I know people who are “there” on most subjects, but still think that Democrats are the lesser evil and you have to vote for them. And their reasons for believing that? Entirely well meaning.
You can also sometimes have trouble with other stuff, like you might not be able to convince a well meaning person that revolution is good because they may be hyperfocused on the people that will get hurt as collateral damage and not be able to look at the whole picture. Looking at institutions structuraly rather than collectivly can be tough too, with things like convincing people that cops are a blanket bad thing. Speaking of which, it can also be hard to deworm people on things that have ALWAYS been there and seem like an essential part of existance, when it comes to things like police and prison abolition.
I don’t know if it’s an autism thing because I’m basically neurotypical but I felt this way too. My experience was pretty much a mirror of what you and OP said. In fact, I think I’m going through the despair part at the moment.
I’m trying to radicalize my partner, and they do the “human nature” thing, and I think arguing against it is helping me flesh out my own thinking on it. I’m still on my journey into leftism, but I’m on solid ground knowing it’s the morally correct path.
Thank you both for sharing. It helps to know that others have walked this path before me.
It really had to happen for me at that point because
CW: suicide
I could not tolerate being alive if the truth was that a better world simply isn’t possible, and I will be forced to live in this horrible dystopia until I die. In that state, I figured why should I live in this wretched, wicked world of capitalist realism? Why not expedite my death, then? I should just simply die now and spare myself the inevitable endless suffering. It was the realization that: yes, a better world is possible, because it HAS been done before!! (USSR etc) that saved my mental state and gave me a more solid foundation for coping with life.
In marxist terminology, I could no longer tolerate the contradictions of liberalism in my mind.