At what point did the final straw finally break?
My radicalization was as unremarkable as my lived experience, or lack thereof. I and my family all work for a living but we have been lucky to be reasonably comfortable. Gradually went down the leftist pipeline, first as a left-liberal, then demsoc, before I read Marx and realized that the obvious problems with society are not due to campaign finance or electoralism or individual bad actors.
So I’m in the awkward, probably common, position of being a leftist without any immediate “need” to be, outside of an awareness of the fragility of my own position. While I’m comfortable now, it would not take much to put me on the streets. This is further strengthened in interacting with leftists, befriending people who are genuinely screwed by capitalism, and hearing perspectives I have not lived.
I try hard to listen to others experiences, not to prioritize my experience above theirs which is common for Western leftists. It has been a process to hold my tongue, to realize that my initial idea of how things work is from a middle class perspective. The last few years especially have opened my eyes to significance of imperialism in propping up my Western standard of living, whereas before I was focused more exclusively on domestic exploitation.
One memory that sticks out to me is, I was reading some comment thread about like unemployment or something, and somebody wrote a comment that was something like the following:
“Republicans dream of a country where everyone is their own small business owner, but that’s literally impossible to achieve because then there wouldn’t be any workers. Capitalism needs workers.”
Suddenly a lot of things about the economy started to make more sense. I became a socialist not long after that.
I think it was an r/politics thread, strangely enough
Realizing capitalism is fundamentally incapable of even mitigating climate change. I’d rather we not all die in the water wars.
When I discovered that communism has and does work (i.e. learning about the achievements of USSR, China, Cuba, DPRK. Never hated any of these countries, I just knew nothing about them)
Pretty much always had the same values as I do now but I was extremely captured by capitalist realism and believed only through that system could anybody escape wage slavery
That was always the fairy tale expounded, that whatever the flaws of Capitalism, that it ultimately created so much growth in the economy that it would eventually eclipse any of the accomplishments of a Communist system. But in order to make that lie work, they needed to either just lie about the accomplishments under communism from the 20’s to 80’s… or just straight-up take credit for communist accomplishments from the 80’s to the present.
The overall feeling I had as a kid that our society is inherently unfair came to an explosion when I was 13 and became friends with someone from Gaza and learned about Palestinian oppression.
