I searched and havent found anyone asking this. what is your personal story of becoming a communist? I will share mine. but im going to try not to reveal any personal info and id suggest anyone else do that too. I want to keep this short but…
I became a leftist in late 2019 early 2020. before this i would say i was a “centrist” or just non political, it just seemed like a way to argue with people. In short, the corona virus was what lead me to being radicalized. since we weren’t allowed to leave our homes, i spent time on obscure apps meeting many people around the globe, most of which were from the third and second world, a surprising many of which were communists. one asked if im a marxist, and so we talked about it. they ended up telling me the basic concepts of surplus value and how businesses must care only about profit, how universities and hospitals are run as businesses in places like america, and how workers are screwed over by the bosses despite doing all the work, and that all of this is what socialism is trying to fix. after some internet research I found the marxist internet archive, and i read lots of short readings, a few books, and watched lots of youtube videos by people such as non compete and Hakim, and now here I am today cursed with knowledge that I am exploited by my boss. sadly i’ve yet to do any real organizing. but I might get there some day.
just to be clear, i’ve left out many details of stuff that helped me become a marxist to keep it short. it was a long process that is still happening too
A culmination of things. I never had a real set moment when I became a communist. I grew up in the south, so the anti-government sentiment was always there. I was a very empathetic kid and I always wanted to help people, but due to severe continuous trauma I lost that for awhile and became one of those edgy Instagram meme page kids. Since I was young and easily influenced I was influenced by the other edgy kids and my conservative father. I always felt terrible about it though and I felt trapped as I had little to no outside influence. Everything around me was just the same and I had no good role models in my life. My mother is completely apolitical. There was a time where the soviets were popular amongst that edgy meme culture and i latched onto it as well, often defending the gulags and shit without even knowing what they were. I ironically knew the correct definition of what communism and socialism were (the dictatorship of the proletariat) and I was in support of it without knowing much of it. But before long that faded out and I was pretty much a standard lib before becoming more radical gradually. It was purely individualist though, and I only really started to understand the true complexities of communism in 2019. But if I were to say that there was a time when I was a set communist, it was right after I read Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. Disowning that book doesn’t make you a communist, no matter how much you think you are one. Socialism is scientific, the study of dialectics, and materialism. Everything else is just you having “communist vibes.”