I don’t know about other people, but pretty much the only reason that I didn’t become a socialist earlier than I did is because I just didn’t know what socialism really is. Someone has to be straight up evil in order to understand socialism and still oppose it.
I know this is probably pretty obvious for most people but I only became conscious of it recently.
Let alone communism. Hell I loved the concept of communism and didn’t even know wtf it was until I read Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Programme. I read that and was like wait a second, so this is what communism was? The manifesto and principles of communism didn’t even really go as far in depth and I had already read both of those. I can’t stress enough how important the Critique of the Gotha Programme is.