Personally, I grew up on a single parent home, where I saw my mom get destroyed by her office work. The lack of unions, no external help and general misoginy, made her get super depressed, and became an alcoholic. In my teenage years I was almost lured by the manosphere communities, but got helped by a group of close friends that were left leaning. Most of them were anarchist, so I started with that. Slowly but surely, I started to understand how sick this system is, and it made me furious, but I never found a way to show my ideas. No political party represented my ideas, and I fell deeper in the anarchist rabbit hole. Yes, I was a hardcore anarkiddie, but I bite me back. When I needed them the most, they turned their backs on me, and fell into deep depression. And in seeking psychological help, my counselor recommended me going back to my roots. So I went back to videogames, japanese culture and most importantly, read again after years The Communist Manifesto. I still don’t know how to position myself in the left, but I know that I’m a Marxist, and that I want change. Stay safe, comrades.
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 wish I had a story I could tell about how much I suffered or whatever but I really haven’t. I’ve lived a good middle class coddled life in white suburbia and for a time I fell down the alt right pipeline and saw nothing wrong with it. I broke out of that in my own way but I was still a neolib or “centrist” bent on half measure and compromise because I was scared of conflict. I also didn’t understand what socialism was and assumed as I’d be told that it was doomed to fail and somehow more exploitative that capitalism. There were two events that opened my eyes to reality. My older sisters friend is a commie or maybe anarcho-communist idk haven’t spoken with him in a long time but he explained to me socialism as he understood it and while that lit the spark in me it wasn’t until recently when I worked a server job getting paid often times under minimum wage that I questioned how anyone survives. I saw my coworkers all much older than I working that shitty fucking job + 2 extras just to survive and I could tell they were miserable and I thought. WHY THE FUCK IS IT LIKE THIS? just couldn’t wrap my head around it but I also didn’t yet know of a solution.
Then one night after spending time on my sh.itjust.worksi noticed a new instance I’d not seen before. At first I scoffed at the posts. Communism doesn’t work, idiot, and then I started reading the memes and started actually reading some of the long texts posts. They really resonating with me so I gave it a shot and made a post asking for information. I asked to be pointed towards resources about communism and leftist stuff in general. It’s been about a week and I honestly know more about both capitalism and communism than I think I ever have.
I still live well, my parents are paying for my college education and I’m much more privileged than the average person but I hate hate hate knowing that no matter what I do. My degree and the effort I am putting into studying physics, a subject I’m very passionate about, with most likely only be used to make some piece of shit richer
Sorry for the essay but I tend to ramble
