I’m interested in hearing your stories.
I was a “Free Market Libertarian” for most of my adolescence. Mainly because the selling point of individualism to a outcasted socially awkward autistic queer kid was a massive power fantasy. What happened was two things.
- real life and experience with real people who didn’t hate my guts (no pun intended).
- My vaguely socialist/social democratic irish republican father. I came from a pretty well off family of teachers and other academics so money wasn’t a major issue (until recently at least) and i was pretty sheltered as a result. Combine that with plagues like r/PCM and other internet personalities and you have a dumb kid who thinks he’s smart but unable to see through the bullshit because the height of her struggles was people at school thought they were weird and a couple of mental health incidents related to being outcasted or treated poorly. I had no real lived experience and as such just spouted bs because the internet forum guys made a half assed argument and i bought into it.
But then, real life happened. My friends start being directly affected by capitalism, as i got out more i started to directly see people struggling, as i got more involved with other queer youth and pride and the like it only became even more apparent and then, a mentor i looked up to and helped me so much through rekindling my love for reading and my love for the world takes her own life over the stress of keeping a stable living. That was the breaking point where i couldn’t lie to myself any longer. This is where my da comes in. I was ranting away about how abhorrent it was that a society could just let someone down that hard and how her death was completely avoidable and unnecessary it was. This lead to a long conversation of him telling stories of his involvement in left leaning movements and irish republican movements in his life. I was always pretty patriotic and that seed of an idea of “end all unnecessary suffering in Ireland” being a serious, attainable goal rather than just a naive fantasy really broke a lot of mental boundaries that liberal ideology had instilled within me. This lead to me to getting into different leftist spaces eventually reading lenin’s state and rev and joining r/genzedong.
I’ve come along way since then and I’d just like to thank you guys for being unfathomably based and stuff like book recommendations over the past 2 years of shitposting, it’s been a real inspiration to go out and make real change in the world.
Watching Marxist content creators & r/GenZedong
Only thing I miss more than the height of the genZ sub was the old Chapo sub. That was the main one for me. The memes there were too damn good. My lib brain was overwhelmed and I just got pushed more and more to the left. Then reddit banned them because fucking shit libs and cia run that fucking shit hole.
I just want to say I have personally radicalized at least 3 or 4 other people now in a discord group. I still have more work to do but it’s getting there. Today I had to review and link stuff to debunk the wests Tiananmen square propaganda. The other day I had to work though the NK stuff and am still picking away at that a bit but in general I have them agreeing communism is pretty rad and capitalism has no redeeming qualities. They are all actually way further than me into the deprogram podcast but theu also need it more than me.
If feels good. I know these people locally which will be the first in person comrades I’ll have ever had.
