Working jobs where I had to count the nightly deposit and it was 3x the biweekly pay of the whole staff despite corporate doing diddly squat in the running of the store is what radicalized me. Turns out you pick up the Labor Theory of Value real quick once you’ve lived it.

Likewise, I’m willing to disbelieve the official government position and the mainstream media because they proved themselves untrustworthy. The Iraq War dispelled any illusion I had that these people would tell the truth, and learning about things like the government’s interventions in other countries and in the country’s own social movements for racial equality in the 60s or wealth redistribution in the 2010s made me realize that their interests were directly opposed to my own. Though it wasn’t until I had a proper materialist grounding with a Marxist education that I was able to look objectively and critically at international relations.

Watching the coup in Bolivia shook me of any SuccDem liberalism I still had in me. Peaceful transition will never be allowed

As for my opinion on actually existing socialism, it was learning about their historical context. It’s easy to criticise with 2020 hindsight and the comfort of your chair. I still have criticisms and yes socialist nations should be held a higher standard. And you also have to mind who you are talking to, focusing on the criticisms makes little sense if talking to a lib who is only gonna agree on that.

Most westerners think those places are awful, despite never having set foot there. Most of the world was neutral.

There’s a link posted here recently showing the video of the guy on Tiananmen. The tank stops, they talk and he walks away unharmed. But nobody is denying that there were skirmishes in other parts of the city. What’s left out of the story is that the CIA was arming one group of protestors expecting them to perform a coup.

In the same way, nobody is denying that there was a famine in Ukraine. What we oppose is the literal nazi narrative that it was an intentional genocide targeted towards Ukrainians, when other parts of the union were worse affected.

I’ve seen a lot of posts denying white genocide, what made people go to such lengths?

What radicalized me was a protest against nazis when the police showed their true colors. I read what I thought was respectable liberal media whitewashing events I witnessed with my own eyes, and after that I couldn’t trust anything they say anymore. I’m not saying that journalists are evil, they’re just lazy and understandably cowardly. They ask the police what happened and why and then just print that without any criticism or opposing perspective.

Edit: found the video (the comments there also answer your questions)

I was a hardcore lib in the bush era because of the daily show, air america etc. I knew that something was wrong with our system but I didn’t have the words or the time to articulate it. I eventually transitioned in the Obama era and, like many trans people, the experience made me question everything around me. I got really into Bernie Sanders and volunteered on his campaign. (Critiques aside, I will say that Sanders was a fantastic Lib to Left pipeline and a majority of my friends are moving to communism, and having discussions about communism, who never would have before)

I decided to look into Karl Marx because I knew -of- communism, but I realized I didn’t know much about the ideology itself beyond red scare propaganda.

I started reading Capital (well, skimming and looking at spark notes) and the communist manifesto. Then it clicked- all the problems he was describing weren’t just the way “the world was” our problems are systemic. While things like “Air America” critiqued events and individuals, they did not get to the root of our problems. Why do we have to live in a system where people can’t get homes? Why do we have to produce piles of literal garbage for our economy to function? Why do we have to work our assess off for the benefit of corporations? What kind of a world are we, as a society, striving for? Is this really a world I want to help build?

I’ve only gotten more radical as time has gone on and I’m now a full blown tankie.

I genuinely believe that organized violence is the only outcome of Neoliberal policy at this point- not because I want to participate in it, but because capital has blocked off all other alternatives. When a system causes mass violence and death it’s only a matter of time before people will violently turn against the system itself.

But yeah, there is my disjointed ramble about radicalization.

Just seeing shit go down during covid and BLM and liberals doing nothing but making things worse. Their uncaring-while-pretending-to-care attitude disgusts me to no end. They did nothing to stop the conservatives, and will sacrifice us all on the altar of capitalism just for their meager comforts. So I looked around and saw they hated communists and the soviet union, and dedicated myself to becoming the thing they fear most: a real, unapologetic, communist.

Went to israel, they showed a military tech presentation and bragged about having a strip of landmines and facial recognition technology, which was enough cognitive dissonance alongside a 104 fever days later for some good ol ego death

Communist family doing communist things for as long as communism has been a thing. My parents raised me with Marxist philosophy in mind.

Not a particularly interesting story compared to everyone else.

Having a family member that defected to the ussr in the 80s and her stories of actually living under communism humanised the USSR to me a lot, I never really saw them as evil when I was a liberal just as a place that existed and then stopped existing. Idk, I’m too tired for a big write up rn but I think the humanisation of the ussr was what meant that I never saw them as this great evil force like many other newly “radicalised” westerners do (and, to a lesser degree did at the time)

Also seeing Corbyn hounded out of power and being coupled by the liberal elements of his own party that would rather throw away the election than risk winning with a “far left” leader

Bernie’s 2020 campaign seemed promising, and then he undermined his own aides that criticized Joe Biden’s corruption, refused to acknowledge his dementia, and actively refused to tap into the deeper energy of the movement itself. We basically watched everyone get grifted into financing his campaign, and then he turns around and humiliates all his supporters by surrendering them to Biden’s campaign, handing the DNC a decisive victory and a devastating, demoralizing defeat to all those who still believed in electoralism.

Understanding that I had no horse in this race, I abandoned electoralism, but an ever-increasing hunger for justice continued to fester. I saw that the established political, financial, judicial, educational and informational institutions were all unanimously engaging in the dirtiest tactics imaginable to undermine working class interests and harm its people.

Seeing the use of force used by the state time and time again, endlessly, just blew up the narrative that peaceful transition is possible and that force was an illegitimate means to achieve enforcement of class interests. Thus, anarchism seemed far more appealing so that was my next stop on the political pipeline. I was pissed off, and wanted physical justice for the harm that’s being done to the working class and the planet itself. Having such a limited window to reverse the trend of climate change even further cemented this inevitable radicalization because the threat of extinction calls for more radical praxis than what “democratic socialists” were willing to accept.

After the worst of the anger and venting subsided, I just thought to myself “Well, what the hell. The worst bogeymen the US ever talked about (China, DPRK, Cuba, etc etc) couldn’t possibly be any worse than the shit I have to deal with here. They lied to me about everything else, so let’s go meet the big bad bogeyman that is China”

I watched a few videos from the channel “Living in China” like this one here: CHINA… is it as SAFE as People Say? 中国… 真如人们说的这么安全吗？Unseen China 🇨🇳

My entire foundational understanding of what I believed about the world was completely shattered and turned upside down in real-time during videos like this. I had absolutely no answers and nowhere to look for a better world, and here it was in one of the countries most hated and vilified by the US.

Since I had felt infinitely betrayed by my upbringing in the US, I took the next logical step and investigated the ultimate bogeyman of them all: The Communist Manifesto Audiobook

I was basically finally handed the keys to understanding how all these millions of issues I’ve encountered in my life were connected: class and class conflict

From here, it was impossible to go back and there was nothing the US could ever do or say that would put the blinders back on. I arrived at my final political destination of being a Marxist-Leninist and fully accepted class war as fundamental and revolution as the only possible path forward (yes, that means the use of force).

The rest, is history and here I am after over a year later.

Poverty, addiction.

Mostly a lurker here and not in the mood to go into detail, esp since it gives away too much personal info, but it’s been a painful, fumbling 20+ year process to get to this point. For a tiny bit of context, I come from a different class bg (specifically, one of my parents did) than most of Hexbear, and I’m also in the upper half of the age range. Also not white.

Let me just put it this way. It starts with trivial inconsistencies that you notice in your day-to-day life. Things as simple and seemingly innocuous/“apolitical” as the way society talks about your culture vs. your actual lived experiences. One by one, these tiny hypocrisies and contradictions start piling up. Small lies or even “innocent” misconceptions from trusted authority figures, from textbooks, from people you love and care about, people you don’t want to doubt. It is madness inducing. Just an endless cycle of disbelief, disgust, confusion, undirected anger, denial.

Eventually there came a point where I just couldn’t paper over the cracks anymore. Also, the older I get, the more I realize just how damn much I don’t actually know – and how confident I was in my own ignorance at many points in my life. Once it’s obvious just how many lies you’ve been exposed to your entire fucking life, all you can think of is “what else?”

tl;dr the “radical” left was the only place offering sober, logically coherent analysis of the state of the world and honestly, after COVID any last lingering doubts I may have had were utterly demolished.

In a word: liberals

They just became so god damned insufferable during the 2020 election that I needed to find something else, then I found

this post really blew up so I think I should share my story too, I’m not exactly a full blown communist or anything but I’m left enough that most of my family and friends think I’m dumb for it. [tw suicide and family abuse]

basically when I was young I had a really good friend, one that helped me immensely and I spent a lot of time with her having fun together and doing art together and such, she was a person that was always there for me when I was feeling awful, lifted up my spirits, her strength always helped me keep going on despite all the crap that happened in our lives. She was also trans…

I never really cared but her parents were conservative catholics that hated even just gay people. mine aren’t super better either. One day she said she finally had the courage to come out, and I was ignorant and innocent at the time, didn’t think it’d be a bad idea, but when she did she got beaten and told she was going to be sent to a mental asylum. Never heard of her after that, either her life was taken away from her or she took her own life.

I remember telling my family and they all seemed to agree it was a good idea. I got so mad and they didn’t listen and just told me to shut up. To this day they don’t care about her. It was a really traumatic experience for me, because then I proceeded to look into the people I was following, both family I looked up to and youtubers I used to watch (I was an edgy atheist so you can guess which youtubers). I learned that they were all transphobic and bigoted. All of them would have defended my friend’s parents.

So I took it all down, I never heard from those assholes again. I couldn’t believe I looked up to people I thought were rational yet were lying to me about trans issues. What else were they lying to me about? Well… it turned out to be a lot.

Bernie Sanders and working a Real Job pushed me toward democratic socialism, and then I did this thing called “read theory” (actually it was history books, not abstract theory, that made me the most radical)