askchapo

Getting a job

Getting pepper sprayed back in '99 got me most of the way there. I think a lot of "Extinction Rebellion" kids were similarly idealistic and hopefully some of them had a similar experience to push them left after those faith-in-cops blunder years.

I was always left-of-liberal but someone on r/politics mentioned r/chapotraphouse and here I am. I was like…you can hate liberals from the left? This is amazing!

I lost my faith in electoralism after watching democrats in the same room steal Bernie’s delegates right in front of me. I also ran in elections and even won some…and then thought my life was in danger (and that I needed at least a few bodyguards 24/7 for myself and my family because the sheriff screamed right in my face once when I voted to defund his ass). I quit after that and realized that nothing would change this shithole except a violent revolution.

I think for me it was just generally being raised by my parents (well-meaning socdem/lefty lib types), but one thing that I think planted the seeds of communism in my mind was my dad quoting Marx to get me to do my chores lol, specifically "from each according to their ability, to each according to their need". Of course when he said it he just wanted me to mow the lawn or wash the dishes since he worked all day, but I really took it to heart

Remarking over a coffee that there were far fewer homeless people than a couple of years previously, suddenly realizing that they had all died

"I aimed at the public's heart and by accident I hit it in the stomach"

Being really shouted at for being a sneering imperialist one time and a rabid homophobe another time. That and learning details about the colonial wars the u.s marines waged in the Phillipines.

That shifted me on a slow course correction towards being a marxist-leninist.

Bernie getting nerfed pushed me to read the communist manifesto lol

Probably my mother being a type 1 diabetic and seeing the financial strain it put on us just because she was born with it.

The American medical system is a case study in the horrors of capitalism.

Probably when I stopped regarding the bible as the literal word of god, but as stories by men about god. Suddenly a lot of stuff made more sense, granted this was more due to the contradictions becoming insurmountable, but this approach of thinking, where you find the position that marries the most contradictions helped me a lot. Also is very satisfying.

TPAB led to my interest in conscious hip hop. Also, getting told to "negotiate" with a very poor, sick old man who was selling a riding lawn mower made me question the moral neutrality of market exchanges

Two things actually. My first grade teacher explained (in gentlest terms possible) that some people opposed Columbus Day because he was an enslaver and initiated the genocide of the native americans. She also talked about why people took issue with thanksgiving and why doing that thing where you ululate while putting your hand over your mouth was deeply racist. "Huh, it seems like something fucky is going on" is the impression she left on me.

The other thing was that at some point in time when I was a kid I started to question the purpose of money and why there were rich and poor people, my mother cautioned me to not think or talk like that because "that's called communism, it's bad, and you'll get beat up at bars if you say that to people." This struck me as rather odd at the time but I did ultimately drop that vision of a better, more just world for a good long while.

The path to leftist thought is similar to my gender journey, where after many misdirections and much confusion I have come back to the place I started from. That initial "this seems strange, but this feels right" was the truth all along.

Counterintuitively: falling down the alt-right pipeline. I could never bring myself to fully agree with it and was "deprogrammed" by (and I really hate to say it) . I was a ite for awhile and even (also to my current regret) voted for Jim Crowe Joe in the 2020 election. However, my ism also led me to finding out tankies existed. Like many ites, I mocked and sneered and resisted them at first. However, I like to think of myself as somewhat intellectually honest, and my confrontations with them led me to reading and finding out they were right.

Before long I was a frequenter of r/genzedong (I didn't use reddit at the time chapo was the specter haunting reddit and only heard of the sub from genzedongers after it had been banned for awhile). I migrated to Lemmy when genzedong got quarantined for fighting against liberal disinformation regarding Russia's liberation of Ukraine in early 2022.

Laugh all you want but I genuinely think Disney's The Hunchback of Notre Dame planted some seeds in my young mind. Like, the bad guy is a religious conservative who is obsessed with hunting down immigrants and minorities, and burns shit down and violates civil rights to do satisfy his obsession (which is driven by sexual pathology). Generic Hero Guy defects from the military over it and leads a popular uprising, and the bad guy is dragged down to hell. I'm not saying it's good, but I am saying that you couldn't make that movie post-9/11 because it would have been a call to action to overthrow the US government.

Hearing Renegades of Funk on the radio as a knee-high and struggling to parse the lyrics.

Working at a fast food franchise and the owner coming in driving a $300,000+ car when I made $8.25. And then all he’d do was make my job more annoying and shout at people.

Working in the US Healthcare system. Nursing homes specifically. Seeing vast fortunes spent on keeping as many people as miserable as possible for as long as possible really did some psychic damage to me.

Also, one of the worst libertarian Harry potter fanfictions where he is an insuffersble liberal and uses magic to create free helthcare for everyone and puts voldemort into therepy.

Watching an outdoor drama about Tecumseh as a kid.

Can't really pin it on one thing specifically..but seeing chuds claim the "left" (they mean liberals) is the real fascists, while both them and libs defend fascists (the whole "both sides" thing) was a real eye opener.

My stepfather used several free software programs, which meant I used them too, and refused to use paid programs

Interacting with CPS as a child

someone on r/cth really pushed me into a veil-piercing moment when they pushed back on my probably NYT-derived perspective on Maduro in venezuela. I did just the tiniest bit of fact checking and realized I'd been straight up lied to. from then on I searched for counter narratives regularly and often found them similarly or better supported by the evidence

Plus sexuality/gender stuff has made me a lot more commie tbh. Trans people largely being so desperately poor and liberals basically just sneering at them or at best pitying them, and the rise of assimilationist trans media figures, and then learning a better history of the lbgtq rights movement(s) made me realize none of this was new and that assimilationist gays did the same shit 20+ years ago. It really reinforces the fact that it's one struggle and our solidarity has to be absolute.

Bernie getting ratfucked helped too I guess but honestly I wasn't quite as invested in that campaign as some. It was just like "yeah duh, this is the bare minimum and it would still improve countless lives"

Plus a long time interest in open source/free software helped a bit

In I think 10th grade we had an assignment to create a fictional country. I had this weird interest in Fidel Castro at the time because it seemed edgy or something maybe? Idk I grew up in the rural South and went to a private Christian school.

So anyway, I ended up researching the fuck out of Cuba (this was like 1999) and while I still didn't take the project very seriously, it turned me on to the idea that there could be other approaches to society. So my fake country was essentially Cuba with different names. I didn't really figure it out at that point, I joined the fucking army like 2 years later.

I guess being really into FOSS and getting increasingly curious about the devs of Lemmy being Marxist, despite a lot of the FOSS community clutching their pearls over it. I read the manifesto just to see what it's about during vacation and after that everything just continued in the same direction and the world made much more sense

Honestly, I can't really name any single one in particular but there are a few things I can point to:

1. Seems contradictory but being raised by a quasi-Catholic family. I've mentioned it before but my family is a stereotypical American family that larps its ness...just set in the midwest because according to my grandpa they were all priced out of NYC even in the 40's and Ohio just so happened to be where they found jobs. So I adopted a couple stereotypically Catholic mannerisms: a sense of guilt about things so I never really enjoyed getting presents for my birthday/christmas as much as I should have because other than a few video games, what are the odds that any trinket I'd get I'll just get bored of and forget I ever had within a week? This planted a seed of anti-consumerism within me so while I like nice quality things, I just feel dirty when I waste money and damage the environment.

1.5ish: When I was around my early teenage years I was doing some social studies homework with my grandpa who was watching me and it started about the cold war but he started telling some family lore...but the important part is at some point we were discussing American history in general and he told me to never think of us s as permanent members of the white people club, the KKK despised us and Irish immigrants too, and how us and said Irish immigrants quarreled a lot together when we both ironically had so much in common. So why be bigoted and do the bidding of the very WASPs that hated us? The real kicker is he's a conservative but he inadvertently taught me about intersectionality and how non-antagonistic contradictions are heightened on purpose by the ruling class.

2. Another counterintuitive thing, but being a weeb. I got into anime at an early age of 4 when my cousin who was 11 sat me down and showed me both Dragon Ball and Pokemon. I was hooked immediately, and it made me really fascinated in other cultures. I also think there are some decent morals to be found in some of the anime I watched. Pokemon actually opened my eyes to a better world than the one I currently live where people are friendlier, and there is much less scarcity in the world.

3. Learning about MLK. I was immediately outraged that this country let that happen, and then probably the first spark of tankie-ism happened when I learned about the nazis and made some connections between them and the US' treatment of minorities in middle school. Not to mention that even in elementary school I was a little spooked by all the forced patriotism we did, like I remember rolling my eyes over this school sing-a-long where we just sang (and I quote) "Patriotic songs" to our parents.

4. One of my favorite western cartoons is Avatar: The Last Airbender. English class did teach me how to think critically so I really started to examine it and realized that I too can call out the atrocities of my own nation, in fact I'm probably betraying leftism in some weird way because I'm calling out these atrocities almost for the US' own good. Now that I'm an adult and read gramsci, I've made it a habit to overanalyze entertainment almost more than how I analyze news.

I'm sure there's others, but those are four things I can think of off the top of my head.

Probably my rich white kid high school english class doing a unit on rodney king. Bernie losing the primary lit the fuse of my leftist powder keg, but all the experiences before that which made me mistrustful of the police and the army really packed the powder in.

The Iraq years set a foundation but I truly got into Marxist theory once I realized I did everything the liberal zeitgeist of meritocracy told me to do, getting into a mountain of debt to study engineering at a ‘top’ school only to be broke at fucking 33 and constantly being paid min wage to the point where it feels like I was preferrentially fucked over for following the conventional wisdom of seemingly everyone

If I had just done heroin , not gone to college and just tried to fuck around and have fun I genuinely think I would have been better off.

Going for over a week without food because I was sick for a day and missed work, obviously no sick leave because and the propensity of to have among the worst labour rights in the world outside of war zones.

Obomba also started drone-bombing the Middle East while I was in high school and couldn't wash my hands with warm water after taking a shit since the money to fix the plumbing went to Predator drones. Then Nelson Mandela passed away and there were constant protests against Obomba. I then moved back to South Africa at the end of 2013 with what little money I had left and all of rap sheet of crimes against humanity were visible live, in (at the time) now-affordable 1080p.

I also literally did not hear about Operation Cast Lead until like the start of 2014.

Death to AmeriKKKa

Listening to the father of a candidate I was ostensibly helping campaign talk his rich buddy about when they were putting their boat in the water.

My high school teacher made me do a biography on Lenin. I forgot the October revolution. He made sure I didn't forget it.

Watching All Quiet on the Western Front (1979) in history class. Since Vietnam, war coverage in the US has been heavily censored, often to the point where we're just given casualty figures. I don't know how other people process those figures, but their reactions seem to me like they aren't processing them at all. The words are spoken, the number displayed on the screen and the audience waits for sports and the weather. To me, it's that number times some nightmare-fuel death from that movie.

After school came 9/11, then the Iraq invasion, then the '04 election where the democrats put up Kerry, who had voted for the war. I could vote for an instigator of that unfathomable amount of suffering or for an enabler. I wish I had just written off democrats then instead of falling for Bernie years later.

Red Alert 2

Watching minecraft youtubers in 2020. Unironically. And a lot of them have turned out to be disgusting people and I want nothing to do with them anymore.

When I was 5 my mom took me to a Russian-Jewish family's apartment (right off the boat, refugees of rising antisemitism in the collapsing USSR) so they could start teaching me Russian. My mom doesn't speak it, but at that time she wasnt thoroughly alienated and wasn't ready to fully abandon our ancestors (I guess), thank god. Years later this family started talking to me about how Gorbachev fucked everything up and they hate him.

Being close with some of the cold war's victims made me highly skeptical of American hegemony, even if I didn't have a coherent critique. Fortunately, I did find the Communist Manifesto in my school library and was willing to read it because I knew Soviets. Still, it's taken decades to understand the world around me. I'm still working on it.

I bought Capital today.