A few things:

1. Being a child during 9/11 and the Bush years. Growing up during the financial crisis.

2. The Michael Moore documentary Capitalism: A Love Story.

• This got me thinking about the inherent contradictions in capitalism, but I never really made any concrete connections.

3. Getting involved in a political campaign back in 2016, witnessing political machines operating up close and personal in real time, and seeing the disastrous results that came from the various elections taking place in 2016.

• This made me wonder if true reform was ever possible. Seemed like the less Republican-lite the Democratic party tried to be, the more openly racist and openly fascist the Republican party became.

4. Most importantly, the Chapo Trap House interview with Marianne Williamson.

• This was the incident that allowed me to stand back and see the bigger picture. She has some (in retrospect) painfully self-unaware thoughts on economics and society that really got me thinking. She wasn’t making the connection between society’s ills and capitalism, or the solution and socialism, but I was finally making those connections. Her selfawarewolf-ness helped me make the jump.

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I mostly always had flirted with communism, because I loved the aesthetic growing up, had an unfortunate spout of liberalism however, but never hated communists. Wasn’t until I read more of my history, and learned of the massacres against my people such as Rosewood, Black Wall Street, and a couple others by U.S imperialists, and of course learning about the Black Panther Party that I started to pay more attention to Socialism and armed struggle. I’d say near the end of high school is when I truly dedicated myself to Marxism and actually began to read theory. Now im a total ML and member of the PCUSA.

there were multiple influences and things that pushed me into radicalizing. I was a Free Market Libertarian for many years. The type who excuses child slave trade, racist memes, defends capitalism even when obvious failings of the system are shockingly obvious, etc. The first thing of note was my tour of the middle east, eastern Europe, then western Europe. I, for the first time, saw the world from a different lens. I grew up in the US, being indoctrinated into the American Religion, but getting to talk to many people from many different backgrounds and learn about other countries broke down a lot of the indoctrinated ideals, most specifically was visiting my little sister’s family in Poland, where I saw for the first time unironically a P-SSR and USSR flag hanging together in their dining room, and for the first time got direct testimony from my sister’s grandmother, who was a teen during WWII and remembered Warsaw under Communist rule - which she looked back on fondly. Ancap me was shocked, to say the least, but that sowed the seed.

Second, coming home from that trip to find the elections were coming to a close. The guy for my side was Donald Trump, and this revolted me. I got rid of anyone in my life who supported him, which ended the far-right echo-chamber in my life, and inspired me to start siding with anti-fascism. For a few months, I was identifying as a Social-Democrat (anti-Bernie, pro-capitalist, pro-liberalism, anti-fascist) in opposition to my ex-ideology’s sudden love for a character we had for years demonized.

The third is most important, I was having an argument with someone online about Socialism. I was still Anti-Socialist and of the opinion that it was evil and whatnot. But, I wanted to best the person I was arguing with, so I took about a week or so to research Socialism, I read various leftist texts, I watched a lot of leftist youtube, I asked leftists questions, and through that journey I started to realize that, “oh hey, I share a lot of these views.” and “oh hey, they make a strong argument for these things”, and before I was even really aware of it, I had become an Anarcho-Communist. Later I wrote up my rebuttal to the person I was arguing with, and came to terms with my shift in politics.

Afterwards, I joined a community with pan-leftism as a key focus and started speaking to a wide variety of leftists. There was one specific person in that community who took the time to, very humanly, walk me through Marxism-Leninism. Explain why ML’s believe what they do, explain anti-communist propaganda, explain various other things, and eventually, I too became a Marxist-Leninist.

Was a centrist / lib until college, then read Zinn’s peoples history of the US, and destroyed the myth of the US ever being anything remotely worth looking up to. My fam are mostly factory workers / have menial jobs, they work constantly and are always poor and struggling, and after I started working I felt extremely alienated. Nothing I was doing was worth any value, and not solving any real problems that most needed solving in the world.

Finally got over the anti-communist hump and read everything I could from Marx, Engels, Luxemburg, Lenin, plugged into some local activism, and went on from there.

There was a DemSoc kid on the bus that radikalized me and my parents were Soviet.

I grew up in poverty in a small town in the country surrounded by rich people with swimming pools and mansions, went to state school while they went to independent/public/private schools, so I was always aware of inequality and that this system surely didn’t work.

Learnt more about communism in high school when we learnt about the USSR when I was about 15. Obviously as a British school it was very biased but I found the underlying thought made a lot of sense to me. Did a bit of vague reading but it wasn’t until this year (at 23) that I started reading more literature and taking it more seriously.

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About a decade ago I was a Christian-Socialist, after becoming more atheist I spoke online with some Marxist-Leninists and became one for like 6ish years was planning on joining the PSL in College, eventually read more Lenin and Soviet History and became a Trotskyist and that’s when i actually joined a party and got more active in doing things.

Since my youth I was always able to spot bullshit from a mile away. This undoubtedly meant that as I grew up, the flaws of the hyper-capitalist system here in America became more and more evident. In a search for answers I undoubtedly ran into Marx. I was an ancomm for a while as a result of the propaganda I’d received about the USSR, PRC, DPRK etc.

Once I discovered the truth about them however, I made a full shift into ML communism.

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