For the sake of argument, I’ll include my AnCap days in with my Anarchist and Anarcho-Communist days, since it was pretty much one long line of gradual changes, where the only major shift was on economic values - rather than social ones.
In my teens, I think I was about 16 or so (around 2012), I started to feel very disillusioned with politics in general. I grew up watching the war on terror, and watching my government slowly wither. By the time my friends and I were teens, the ones who weren’t propagandized to hell by conservative media held a lot of mistrust for the American state - regardless of who was at the helm. One of my closest friends said to me once, in an honest latenight conversation “I’m a patriot for Americans, but I just can’t see how anyone could be a patriot for America”, that’s something that clicked in me and led me down the path to becoming an Anarcho-Capitalist. I found communities on Reddit and Facebook to follow that gave me AnCap “”“theory”“” in bitesized chunks, I started listening to Infowars and Joe Rogan’s podcast, but the most important thing for that path was making friends with self-proclaimed AnCaps who bullied me into watching AnCap media, and into blindly trusting their bullshit.
During the 2016 elections, early on in them - so still in 2015 - I started to drift away from Anarcho-Capitalism. My AnCap friends had been telling me for years that they’d never trust a Republican candidate. They told me the Republicans were just Fascists, and boy howdy did we “”“hate”“” Fascism. But, they all practically worshipped Trump. And as he kept somehow winning, something that in the past we would have blamed the “deep state” for, they kept getting more and more excited to vote for him. Before the campaigns started, but we knew who was running, all of my political friends went out to lunch together and talked about politics. We all agreed that if we were going to vote, it would be for the Libertarian candidate, even if they sucked. But now, pretty much everyone who was at that lunch was posting on Facebook about how excited they were to “make America great again”. So, I started to stop considering myself AnCap, and started to go more towards either centrism or “Classical Liberalism”. Until I had an argument with someone who called themself a Socialist online. I wanted to “own” them so hard in that argument that I went to read Marxist theory and research the histories of Communist countries, and after reading the communist manifesto I started to realize that, you know, maybe the left had been right all along. I came back to that argument with one hell of a right hook, but I also stopped seeing politics under the same light, and I started to do a lot more research on leftist politics. This is when I became an Anarcho-Communist.
Trump won the presidency, and while watching the world burn I was filled with a need to unlearn all of the lies I had been told. My ex-friends were all radicalizing rapidly into Fascism (many of them applauded the Jan. 6th bullshit, so they’re still on that shit) and I felt so alone in the world. This coincided with going homeless, and realizing I never really had anyone who cared about me, which only reinforced the truth, the rightwing doesn’t care about you as a person, they care about you as someone who can help them reach their goals. Tell them you don’t agree with them, and they’ll dehumanize you in an instant. I digress, I spent a lot of time in the public library scrolling through subreddits and discord servers, just trying to learn all I could, I eventually started referring to myself as an Anarchist, and started to get more involved in local politics. I told some guys who had a vaguely anarcho-communist “left unity” book club that I had a military background, and they took me in in a heartbeat, making me one of the leaders of the party they were trying to put together. That party lasted about a year and a half until tempers killed it. But having hands-on experience with party leadership (the biggest we got was around 300 people) and dealing with sectarianism as it pertained to people’s actual lives, I really started to see patterns start to form. So for a hypothetical, let’s say we were trying to put together a fundraiser to donate to the local homeless shelter. The first people to volunteer would always be the Marxists, followed by the Liberals who joined the party because it was the only one in the area that actually tried to help. Last would be the Anarchists. The Anarchists always needed a lil talking to, either because they didn’t care enough about the project, or because they were too sectarian to want to even be seen working with so-called “red fascists”. Any time we had an open discussion about, frankly, anything. The Anarchists would always sway the discussion towards anti-authoritarian sectarianism. I learned from the horse’s mouth that left-unity was a fallacy that doesn’t exist, and started to have resentment for Anarchists - despite calling myself one. But I wasn’t yet ready to accept that MLs were objectively better in nearly every regard.
I spent a little while, wondering where I stood on politics. I was too radical to go back to the right, but I was too disgusted by what I saw from Anarchists and too propagandized against Communism to want to be on the left. So I spent a few months in an apolitical void. I still called myself an Anarchist, because it was the closest to what I believed at the time, but my soul was crushed. Until I joined a community that had a bunch of very patient Marxist-Leninists who took the time to explain theory to me, and walk me through non-propagandised history. I finally got what I wanted in 2016, but 2 years later. In 2018 I started to call myself Marxist-Leninist, and just grew from there.
For the sake of argument, I’ll include my AnCap days in with my Anarchist and Anarcho-Communist days, since it was pretty much one long line of gradual changes, where the only major shift was on economic values - rather than social ones.
In my teens, I think I was about 16 or so (around 2012), I started to feel very disillusioned with politics in general. I grew up watching the war on terror, and watching my government slowly wither. By the time my friends and I were teens, the ones who weren’t propagandized to hell by conservative media held a lot of mistrust for the American state - regardless of who was at the helm. One of my closest friends said to me once, in an honest latenight conversation “I’m a patriot for Americans, but I just can’t see how anyone could be a patriot for America”, that’s something that clicked in me and led me down the path to becoming an Anarcho-Capitalist. I found communities on Reddit and Facebook to follow that gave me AnCap “”“theory”“” in bitesized chunks, I started listening to Infowars and Joe Rogan’s podcast, but the most important thing for that path was making friends with self-proclaimed AnCaps who bullied me into watching AnCap media, and into blindly trusting their bullshit.
During the 2016 elections, early on in them - so still in 2015 - I started to drift away from Anarcho-Capitalism. My AnCap friends had been telling me for years that they’d never trust a Republican candidate. They told me the Republicans were just Fascists, and boy howdy did we “”“hate”“” Fascism. But, they all practically worshipped Trump. And as he kept somehow winning, something that in the past we would have blamed the “deep state” for, they kept getting more and more excited to vote for him. Before the campaigns started, but we knew who was running, all of my political friends went out to lunch together and talked about politics. We all agreed that if we were going to vote, it would be for the Libertarian candidate, even if they sucked. But now, pretty much everyone who was at that lunch was posting on Facebook about how excited they were to “make America great again”. So, I started to stop considering myself AnCap, and started to go more towards either centrism or “Classical Liberalism”. Until I had an argument with someone who called themself a Socialist online. I wanted to “own” them so hard in that argument that I went to read Marxist theory and research the histories of Communist countries, and after reading the communist manifesto I started to realize that, you know, maybe the left had been right all along. I came back to that argument with one hell of a right hook, but I also stopped seeing politics under the same light, and I started to do a lot more research on leftist politics. This is when I became an Anarcho-Communist.
Trump won the presidency, and while watching the world burn I was filled with a need to unlearn all of the lies I had been told. My ex-friends were all radicalizing rapidly into Fascism (many of them applauded the Jan. 6th bullshit, so they’re still on that shit) and I felt so alone in the world. This coincided with going homeless, and realizing I never really had anyone who cared about me, which only reinforced the truth, the rightwing doesn’t care about you as a person, they care about you as someone who can help them reach their goals. Tell them you don’t agree with them, and they’ll dehumanize you in an instant. I digress, I spent a lot of time in the public library scrolling through subreddits and discord servers, just trying to learn all I could, I eventually started referring to myself as an Anarchist, and started to get more involved in local politics. I told some guys who had a vaguely anarcho-communist “left unity” book club that I had a military background, and they took me in in a heartbeat, making me one of the leaders of the party they were trying to put together. That party lasted about a year and a half until tempers killed it. But having hands-on experience with party leadership (the biggest we got was around 300 people) and dealing with sectarianism as it pertained to people’s actual lives, I really started to see patterns start to form. So for a hypothetical, let’s say we were trying to put together a fundraiser to donate to the local homeless shelter. The first people to volunteer would always be the Marxists, followed by the Liberals who joined the party because it was the only one in the area that actually tried to help. Last would be the Anarchists. The Anarchists always needed a lil talking to, either because they didn’t care enough about the project, or because they were too sectarian to want to even be seen working with so-called “red fascists”. Any time we had an open discussion about, frankly, anything. The Anarchists would always sway the discussion towards anti-authoritarian sectarianism. I learned from the horse’s mouth that left-unity was a fallacy that doesn’t exist, and started to have resentment for Anarchists - despite calling myself one. But I wasn’t yet ready to accept that MLs were objectively better in nearly every regard.
I spent a little while, wondering where I stood on politics. I was too radical to go back to the right, but I was too disgusted by what I saw from Anarchists and too propagandized against Communism to want to be on the left. So I spent a few months in an apolitical void. I still called myself an Anarchist, because it was the closest to what I believed at the time, but my soul was crushed. Until I joined a community that had a bunch of very patient Marxist-Leninists who took the time to explain theory to me, and walk me through non-propagandised history. I finally got what I wanted in 2016, but 2 years later. In 2018 I started to call myself Marxist-Leninist, and just grew from there.