There was no decision.
It’s like Bertell Ollman warned: if you read Marx and understand historical and dialectical materialism, you will become a Marxist and accept HiMat as the most advanced scientific framework known to humans.
It can take a while to understand Marxism. But anyone who reads and understands Marxism and doesn’t become a Marxist is being wilfully ignorant.
They could understand and accept Marxism and still say, ‘Fuck workers, I’m in it for myself’. That’s one thing. But to understand and refuse to accept? It’s way beyond cognitive dissonance at that point.
Of course, I really mean ‘understand’ when I say ‘understand’. Skimming the Communist Manifesto might not be enough. I resisted it for a while but the more I read the harder it became to reject Marxism.
As for why I started to read Marx? A very patient Marxist asked me, over quite a long time, questions like:
- if-X-then-Y-
- can-that-be-solved-under-capitalism or
- what-conditions-are-necessary-for-Z
This made me challenge my own liberalism. They mentioned very little Marx, nor told me that Marx/ists had a better answer or what that answer might be. No jargon or explicit frameworks, and very few sources. It was enough to get me to apply a contradiction and class analysis to my own ideas until I realised the bottom had fallen out the box. At that point I needed to look somewhere else for answers. Then I was recommended Marxists texts until I could piece the world back together again.
Yes, this does involve and require brainwashing. As Mao said in a speech to Chinese students in Soviet Moscow, the brain must be washed clean of it’s bourgeois education (quoted in Roland Boer, Socialism with Chinese Characteristics: A Guide for Foreigners).
I always think about the CIA operatives who had to learn Marxism-Leninism and apply its principles in a counter-revolutionary way, to defeat Marxist movements.
We have to assume that these are intelligent people, that deep down they understand how brilliant Marxist thought is, understand class struggle, and still do everything they can to serve their capitalist masters. It’s deeply disturbing that they know the right path in a way that others aren’t, and still do the opposite for the money. Extremely soulless behavior.
A philosophy YouTuber I really liked at the time (that I now consider worse than trash, read below) made a video and then a stream about Marx, he taught me about the falling rate of profit, inevitability of socialism etc, unfortunately he is very flawed, he is some flavor of leftcom and refutes completely Stalin, considering brezhnev better than him (💀)
Then I discovered hakim and genzedong (on reddit, back then) and leninism made a lot of sense to me, the necessity of a strong state during siege socialism, the necessity for radical measures ettc, in the end, all is good what ends good.
That YouTuber is really bad, like he praises the EU and the Euro (that subjugated and empoverished Italy) and he is pro Ukraine, glad I distanced myself about 2 years ago.
I still need to read my theory, so far I’ve read:
ABC of communism (💀)
Chunks of the manifesto
Wage labor and capital
Some of Lenin’s works
Some Mao
And a plethora of articles and essays
Edit: per i miei compagni Italiani, provate a indovinare di chi sto parlando nel primo paragrafo
Because propaganda about AES kept being debunked to me and it led me to realize that AES states are way better than I was led to believe
My family got hit very badly by the great recession. Everyone simply named “the crisis” as the responsible of the sudden increase of poverty around me, and being the curious person that I was at the time, I began to wonder: what exactly is that, and how did it happen?
That is how I stumbled upon the texts of a white-bearded German man, and the rest is history.
My grandma from Belarus dispelled a lot of anti-comm myths for me at a young age. That being said, I was still a lib/democrat for a while bc my parents were. My dad was against the Iraq war since it started and that shaped my politics for sure. The weird book that changed my opinion on modern-day China and got me interested in socialism was Thomas Pikkety’s Capital in the 21st century. I read about how he spoke positively about some of China’s economic policies and how they are generally helpful. I told this to a brother, surprised by the info. He didn’t respond to it well AT ALL. We were mad at each other for a while and he thought I was a Maoist(I was still a lib, just had a few good thoughts about China’s economic policies, I was still dumb about the Taiwan issue and some of their other policies) and I had to confide in my much more liberal brother to let bro 1 understand that China is complex and not just bad. Over time I eventually read Anarchism or Socialism by Stalin and I was beyond impressed and knew I would never be a liberal again by that point. Now, a year and a half since reading Capital in the 21st century, now the roles are reversed and Brother 1 is overall vaguely pro-China and bro 2 is red-baiting China. Moral of the story: Take your wins wherever they may lie. I could go on and on about how Bro 2 red-baits and believes everything about North Korea or Vuvuzela
