I was more leaning towards socdem in high school, though didn’t fully know the name of such; just knew that we have millions of homeless folks and even more empty homes, thought healthcare should be free, thought college should be free, all that jazz. It wasn’t until right after I graduated that I called myself an Anarchist. It was a vague understanding of no rulers, no fascism, etc. etc. Very radical queer shit without fully understanding the concept.

I started slowly creeping more towards communist colors around 2016 (kind of a giveaway as to why, I live in the US) and called myself anarcho-communist. It started getting irritating; so many communists and an-coms were calling for left unity but I often times found myself in conversations with these absolutely hard lined Anarchists that would just go red in the damn face talking how anyone aligning themselves with ML/communists/An-Coms were red fascists and how their revolutions failed, etc. etc. (a recent interaction with the mods of r/antiwork pretty much solidified my position as a Communist lmao) and whenever I talked to Communists they’re…painfully patient lol. Like, whenever I interact with these dudes I can tell they’ve got that Ben Aflek smoking on the balcony look on their face, but most of the time, they’re gracious. It was definitely helpful in their patience, theory isn’t my strong suit as I have cognitive disorders that make it very difficult to process information like that. I’m slowly getting at it; accessible options are becoming more available and they’re helpful as hell.

Those political tests that go around in heaps have helped me tldr my views; VanguardValues (not tooting my own horn here but I reclaimed it if you wanna take it lol because the dude who made it is a Canadian nationalist whose Atheism veers into Islamaphobic territory, and his creative commons license says it’s okay to distribute and modify as long as I’m not selling it) labels me a Guevarist, and I’ve seen some documentaries on Cuba and its revolution. I don’t agree with Che’s obvious complete disregard and bigotry towards black people and queer people when he was alive. As a queer person and someone who views the movement for black liberation in the highest regard, I agree with his views and utilization of guerilla warfare against the US-backed Imperialist dictator, Batista. While I want to believe that, since even Castro himself agreed much later that his misaligned views towards POC and queer people were unacceptable, he too would change his views, we’ll never truly know because he died suddenly and before a time where he could, in fact, renounce his views. I’m currently exploring the territory of Mao, and thus far I’m starting to see some correlation between my views and his theories.

Also just to note; why the fuck are so many hard lined Anarchists so against the idea of Anarcho-Communist? I see them very often fling spittle about them then somehow also preach to high heaven about the IWW. Have they seen the Sabo Cat flag they sell on their own website? Dawg.

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.

i was an anarchist for two years. ive read marxist theory while being an anarchist, and I wasn’t really against marxist principles or the idea of a party and state during revolution

what made me go from anarchism to marxist-leninism was maoism, chairman mao and chairman gonzalo had formalized ML theory in a way that made me understand it better. I had a few disagreements before, but I slowly got more and more tankie as I understood more. my values are still the same, but I am now active in a communist party and work as a socialist in several movements