apolitical -> Marxist -> Mostly Marxist-Leninist

I was pretty much apolitical and mostly focused on gamedev and video games in general rather than politics. I did however have some liberal tendencies due to both the gamedev scene and me being queer.

A lot of things changed me and for me after the 12 day war. I decided to understand the world and be more knowledgeable on politics, in short why do the things currently happening happen. Seeing that a lot of my countrymen didn’t show much concern about our country being bombed by the countries they ovulate for, I decided to question whatever they hate. One of those was and is “the left”, as they put it. Throughout all my life I always heard about how everyone hates “the left”. No one would say what “the left” in question actually believed in. The only thing everybody would repeat was that “they caused the revolution and took the freedom we had under Pahlavi”, “they were islamists”, “our lives suck because the Islamic republic is leftist”(!!!), ignoring how, in 1988, thousands of the same leftists were executed by the IR, and the rest had to escape, leaving the Iranian workers’ movement paralyzed (besides like a hundred more reasons). In short, they didn’t make sense, so I decided to find out the truth on my own. The communist manifesto, being as famous as it is no matter the amount of anti-communist propaganda, was my first choice. With reading it I started the journey that would make me a Marxist.

After I became a Marxist, I came to despise most pro-capitalist social media. Also since I had a little experience with lemmy after the reddit blackout (I’m not a redditor anymore) before moving to tumblr, I decided to take a look again to see if it has become more populated or not as I actually did like the idea behind it. This brought me into lemmygrad and eventually into the ProleWiki project which has since made me a more mature Marxist and a helped me become a Marxist-Leninist.

From the US so with that in mind:

Progressive-ish(anti war/pro Palestine) hardcore Democrat as a teen who voted for Obama in 2008 -> protest vote in 2012 -> organized for Bernie in 2015/2016 -> watched the US descend more -> 2019 firmly in Marxist territory

ML here, I was lucky enough to grow up in USSR, so I never went through a lib phase.

Initially my political views were an amalgamation of anti-imperialist (my mum is very anti-imperialist) vaguely demsoc-leaning ideas. I was a young child at this point so I didn’t really know all that much about politics in general.

Then things kind of just accelerated, and I shifted from being an anarchist, a Trot (when I realised that there should be a proper transition to a classless and stateless society, I had realised this when I was an anarchist but didn’t have a word for it. For obvious reasons I wasn’t quite there yet though) and an ML, all within roughly the span of a year or so.

Different flavors of liberal until I actually critically engaged with Marxist-Leninist theory.

Growing up in the USA, basically the beating heart of the imperial core, you’re propagandized in a really clever way. As long as you have been convinced that electoralism is the only acceptable mode of political action and that ML socialism is bad and authoritarian, that’s really all that matters.

Gives you the illusion that you live in a free society and that reforming it is the only moral way to change it. Looking back there’s very little difference between ancaps, centrist liberals, social Democrats and yes, straight up MAGA fascists. Because at the end of the day all of those people will choose compromise, preserving the status quo and ganging up on any movement that actually want to move beyond private ownership and imperialism

Right Libertarian -> Socdem -> Demsoc -> ML

In my early days (late teens-early twenties) I’d say there were even times I flirted with fascist ideology, but in retrospect, I was a deeply unhappy and insecure person and that was manifesting in my politics in very unhealthy ways.

confused > anarchist > ML

When i was younger i had what could broadly be called liberal views, because that is the default growing up in a capitalist society. Now i just call myself a communist. It was a gradual process catalyzed by learning history and reading the works of Lenin and other communists.

I don’t like when communists split themselves into dozens of different tendencies with increasingly complex labels. I think that’s bad for the revolutionary movement and to some degree probably a bourgeois psyop. Labels, especially when overly elaborate, are divisive and generally not that useful. It is better to just explicitly say what you believe in, how you see the world and what kind of world you are fighting for.

If you disagree with someone on certain things, identify whether that disagreement constitutes a primary contradiction or secondary. If it directly hinders your ability to implement your primary goal, then it is a contradiction that cannot be temporarily set aside. If it is not something that fatally contradicts your main objective, you can still work with them toward the shared common goal, and later, once that is achieved, you can address the differences you still have.

If someone is anti-imperialist (without exceptions – no “but China is revisionist!”, “but Iran is a theocracy!”, or “but Russia is capitalist!” excuses), anti-fascist and anti-capitalist, that is enough to consider them a comrade. I might strongly disagree with them on other issues but it is important to recognize that people will have diverse views on a lot of issues and that letting secondary disagreements divide us only serves the class enemy.

Presently a Marxist-Leninist, fan of MZT/XJT and researching juche, not really as a way to change my views but more expand my understanding. I started off as a true liberal, then socdem, then anarchist, then ML, and have been an ML for the longest time out of those.

Like a lot of us living in the imperial core, grew up a lib, mostly unaware of the details surrounding politics up until I got out of high school and wondered why I had to pay so much money (if at all) to go to school and housing. Then Black Lives Matter happened and I started to become aware of my position as a Black person in Amerika (we used to call it woke back then when it was actually cool), and gradually became more radical over time.

The 2016 election with Bernie and everything was my turning point. After he got screwed I sought out the next best thing which was the Green Party, who at least recognized the need for reparations for Black people. I found myself on Leftbook (yes you read that right, on Facebook lmao) after coming into contact with “watermelon” groups (supported the Green Party but were actually communists) that led me into a ton of leftist tendencies. Flirted with anarcho-communism for a while until I realize that anarchism would not nor ever be able to systemically dismantle racism, and officially became an ML. The BPP had the answers the whole time.

Social Democrat -> commie

It seemed that everything capitalists were saying, kept sounding like bullshit and/or were self-contradictory. Also, reading.

Lastly, “The game was rigged from the start” - Benny (Fallout: New Vegas)

Mine was gradual until it wasn’t (quantitative change into qualitative change hehehe). At a young age I was exposed to the right wing culture war in the form of SJW cringe compilation #832 among other forms of youtube reactionaries. It resonated with me for a bit but eventually lost interest and mostly became a bog standard white suburban liberal. Around midway through high school I discovered the nordic model and thought hmm yeah that’s pretty good I think. Sounds nice. Didn’t really think about politics other than the horse race of it all until I discovered hexbear shortly before october 7th 2023. I made a post asking what this communism shtick is all about and got a ton of recommendations for reading and watching. In just a few weeks I watched yellow parenti, read blackshirts and reds, and read the state and revolution. By the time october seventh happened I would have called myself a marxist but the western reaction to october seventh solidified it. Within 3 or so weeks I went from effectively apolitical beyond the mild discontent of a comfortable person witnessing the shitshow of American politics with the crazy belief that the state should provide basic levels of prosperity, to being a marxist leninist. For people close to me it was whiplash inducing, saying yes I support Hamas a week after october seventh was absurd to everyone I knew.

I know a lot of people who travelled through levels of radicalism before ending up where they are now but that hasn’t been my experience. Marxism-Leninism was the first political ideology that made sense to me. It made the world make sense after it seeming so nonsensical for so long.

Conservative (child) -> libertarian (young teen) -> liberal (teen) -> radlib -> ancom -> ML

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Oops, this was a lot longer than I thought it was going to be!

From a kid all the way up to 2022 I would probably say I was either apolitical or Republican. However, even then I never supported Trump. I didn’t think he had the experience being a politician as all I knew at the time was that he was a businessman and was known for firing people. Then I became more and more politically active and started the evaluating where I stood on issues. Then two things happened over the next two years: one, I left a cult that pretty much my entire extended family had been involved with for 150 years and became an atheist and two, I became an environmentalist. I had always wanted to stop pollution, but I had always until that point denied climate change. But now I was convinced that we are causing it. Then I started challenging my ideology and became pro-lgbt. I probably considered myself a democrat for a brief period, but then I started looking into third parties and I found myself mostly aligning with the Green party (the biggest point of disagreement was nuclear energy), but I didn’t vote for Stein because I was playing the game of “if you vote for third party, you’re effectively giving your vote to Trump”.

This part bothers me to this day, because despite how recent it was, I cannot for the life of me remember what gave me the final push to socialism. Maybe it was an interest in China as they are developing their space technology (I wanted to go to the space industry). Maybe it was having a bad experience with a landlord at the time and finding a Paul Murphy clip about how no value comes from landlords. Maybe it was finding r/antiwork. Maybe it was the election results. Maybe it was all of those or something else. But I distinctly remember that on January 1 2025, I declared myself a socialist. As for my current label, I call myself an eco-socialist. Maybe once I read enough theory it will change, who knows?